All the King's horses and all the King's men, Part One
Johnny Silver Bear

Clowns: the good, the bad, and the evil

The more things change, the more they stay the same. For those of us who have developed the bad habit of prognostication, the more they stay the same.

I have come to the conclusion, after having attempted to absorb the thoughts and prognostications of many highly intelligent people, that there are basically four groups that are involved in determining the future of the US Economy. Some of that determination is a result of either pushing or pulling, although most of it is a result of doing nothing, which is the collective contribution of the largest group. The largest group is made up of the sheeple, with the occasional good and bad clown popping up every now and then.

The next biggest group is made up of politicians and bureaucrats, as well as a mishmash of all other government employees including alphabet soup agencies, some of which have deemed themselves special agencies which allow them to provide us with special agents. This overall group also has its fair share of good and bad clowns. It also has an inordinate number of evil ones.

The third largest group is made up of financiers; bankers, corporate management, muggers, thugs and thieves (an obscure reference to the banks of the River Charles). Consequently, here again, the group includes a number of good clowns but also bad clowns, and regretfully, a rather large contingent of evil clowns.

The fourth and smallest group is made up of us! The conspiracy theorist, libertarian, constitutional backing, patriot freedom fighter, tin foil hat bunch who also have our share of clowns, but, for the most part, we call them bloggers.

The way that these four groups interact has an all determining effect on the economy. The sheeple mindlessly provide the politicians with an unserved constituency so that they, the politicians, can covertly serve their donors while pretending to be dutifully serving the people. All this, they do, while clumsily providing their moronic best to keep the party going. Consequently, the party has become a big problem. Keeping the party going any longer will prove to be extremely detrimental to the short term well being of the whole country.

An explanation of how the groups interact in a perverse concert is something that has recently occurred to me, and is something I have chosen to explore. The contributions of the clowns, both good and bad, has inextricably linked our social climate with the economy.

The Evolution of Socio/Political Clowns

In ancient times, courts employed fools and by the Middle Ages the jester was a familiar figure.

In Renaissance times, aristocratic households in Britain employed licensed fools or jesters. Regarded as pets or mascots, they served not simply to amuse but to criticise their master or mistress and their guests.

Our present day jesters are made up of stand up comedians, talkshow hosts, financial/political commentators. I have arrived at the point where I recognise that there are different types of clowns employed for very different purposes.

I consider the good clowns the ones of us that poke fun at, and criticize, the nature of our system and its participants. Generally, "the truth" is the sword that we wield in our attempts to bring attention to the flaws in the fabric of our society.

There has come about, however, over the years, a new and different category of clowns. These are the ones I consider "bad clowns" and they can be identified by the weapons they wield. Rather than being concerned with "the truth", their weapons of choice utilize the power of propaganda, deceit and lies. Some obvious examples of these "bad clowns" might include all the anchors of CNBC who constantly purvey erroneous financial data provided by their supervisors as a ploy to herd the sheeple. Rachel Madow (liberal slant) and Rush Limbaugh (faux conservative/neocon slant) are both scripted political bad clowns, attempting to deliver seeming conflicting reports that end up passing on the same message. These afore mentioned luminaries make up a scant fraction of the bad clowns in our country that are spreading misinformation for a living. There are thousands of them, plying their trade in print, on the air and all over the Internet.

Joseph Goebbels was appointed Propaganda Minister by Hitler during the reign of the Third Reich. He helped perfect a facet of population control that has been continually refined over the last seventy years. It has been successfully employed to dumb down an entire country (this one). Those that embrace and employ these refined techniques can certainly not be considered "good clowns" but must, at the very least, be considered "bad ones". Unfortunately Goebbels was so twisted that another, more extreme catagory had to be defined,

And, yes Virginia, there exists yet another, even more iniquitous group, which I have chosen to refer to as "evil clowns". Examples of evil clowns might include Barrack Obama, Joe Biden, and their entire administration. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their entire administration. Other examples are Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Al Sharpton, Al Gore, Timothy Geitner, Hank Paulson, Jon Corzine, Ben Bernanke, Lloyd Blankfein, and Jamie Dimon, just to name a few.

These folks and other darkside shills are involved in a conspiracy for world domination which has been set to metastasize in to a full blown traumatic threat to the freedom, liberty and well being of humanity world wide. The criminal trusts which own the banks reflect the flaws in the regulation of the system and the disintegrating nature of the American Dream. We must, as a nation, know who our enemies are. The Fabians, Pilgrims, Bilderbergers, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations and the Illuminati are all working to assume the status of royalty and rule the world. Groups like The Brookings Institution, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the American Enterprise Institute and many others play ancillary roles and are all part of an evil conspiracy that maintains, as an agenda, the massive depopulation of the planet, as well as a one world government. All these people and the groups they belong to are working hard, in concert, to destroy the United States of America. Only through the economic destruction of our country, can their one world government be realized.

A Bit of Recent History...

During the first half of the 20th century, each of four world leaders did the exact same thing within ninety days of their ascension to power. Each made it illegal for the citizens of their respective countries to own gold. Those leaders were: Mao, Stalin, Hitler, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. All four leaders occupy a position among some of the World's most evil clowns. Each was acutely aware of the restrictions that a gold standard imposed on their abilities to wage war. Each was, IMHO, a despicable despot. Each instigated wide spread suffering and each did much damage, not only to their own countries (FDR invented the welfare state and allowed the central bankers to take over the country, which is how we got into the rosy economic situation we find ourselves in today) but, did much damage to other countries as well. Roosevelt was the first politician to figure out how to buy votes with the people's money, rather than having to spend his own. Clever Frankie. His "New Deal" will be viewed by future historians as the beginning of the end of our great republic. I must point out that, even though FDR moronically laid the seeds of our eventual destruction, everything did get better before it got worse.

I am a Budding Baby Boomer, soon to turn sixty-six. When I was growing up, during the fifties and sixties, things were a lot different. Interestingly, having just participated in the Second World War, we, as a nation, had become a powerhouse of manufacturing and industry. When you consider that all other industrialized nations on earth had experienced the decimation of their manufacturing base during the war, our edge was evident. Pre-war, the industrial giants had consisted of Germany, and Great Britain along with the rest of Europe, to a smaller degree, and Japan. Each of those country's manufacturing base had been bombed out of existence. That just left us (America) as the "last man standing, so to speak. which provided us an incredible competitive advantage. We started producing steel for the whole world, along with ships, and trains, and planes, machinery and tools. With all that industry and technology, we started producing farm equipment that allowed us the opportunity to become the world's grocery. But there was something else that came out of WWII that bolstered our advantage by a factor of ten. That monster advantage was provided by something called the Bretton Woods agreement.

Bretton Woods

All the countries that had experienced widespread destruction during the war were anxious, even desperate to attain a source of credit that could be applied to reparations. 730 delegates representing 44 allied nations met in July, 1944 in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire in an attempt to agree to a solution. As a nation, the U.S. was holding all the cards and put forth a plan that called for the creation of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) which became operational in 1945. The chief features of the Bretton Woods system were an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate by tying its currency to the U.S. dollar and additionally provided the newly formed IMF the ability to extend almost unlimited credit to each country in the system. All delegates agreed. This enabled Europe the ability pay U.S. companies (we were the "only game in town") for the trappings of reparation. We made it, they bought it. We became wealthy on the back of the largest industrial surge that America had ever experienced. With it came a standard of living that had never been attained during any time in history. This was the initial occurrence that brought on the boom of the fifties, and would eventually lead to the U.S. Dollar's becoming the World's Reserve Currency. The fact that we have maintained the position as the World's Reserve Currency, as it turns out, is about to be exposed as a mixed blessing.

The Roaring Fifties

The fifties and early sixties provided an amazing time to be an American. Of course, the good times can't last forever. Someone or something always comes along and screws everything up. Enter LBJ. Johnson engineered, and then exploited, the escalation of the Viet Nam war. He did this in order to line his pockets, and those of the owners of his political war chest, Kellog, Brown and Root (now Haliburton). As a result of the never-ending non-competitive contracts awarded KB&R, the cost of the war soared. In 1968, the last year of the Johnson presidency, the cost of the war was approaching 100 billion dollars (which would equate to way over $1 trillion today) and was exacerbated by the bloating programs of Johnson's Great Society. It was clear that the United States was spending more money than there could possibly be in gold reserves. Johnson had, successfully, through theft and corruption, drained the coffers dry.

In August, 1971, Richard Nixon unconstitutionally and criminally terminated any further convertibility of the U.S. Dollar into gold, which eliminated the last vestiges of a gold standard and ushered in a "destined to fail" fiat debt based currency system. Please note that the debasement of the currency is, and has been, a crime punishable by death since just after the Revolutionary War, and had all those involved in debasing the currency, from then to now, been prosecuted, convicted and executed, we would have gotten rid of, at least six presidents, as well as Alexander Hamilton, and there would be a lot more available parking spaces in Washington DC. We would also enjoy a situation where every man, woman and child in America would be considerably wealthier. Through the debasement, accomplished almost exclusively by the Federal Reserve, the value of the dollar has had its purchasing power reduced by 97% since 1913. That was accomplished through the theft of inflation.

The Petrodollar

Did you know that OPEC exclusively quotes their Oil prices in US dollars? In 1973 Henry Kissinger, another evil clown, came up with a plan which would allow the American Government to hegemonically grab the entire world by the short hairs. Saudi Arabia, constantly wary of the militant régimes that surrounded it, needed their oil reserves protected and defended. Meanwhile, America needed to insure the maintenance of its Global Reserve Currency status. Kissinger came up with a deal whereby the Saudis would only sell their oil in US dollars, and would then use a portion of the proceeds to buy U.S. Treasuries. This is how the Petrodollar was born.

Gold Dinars

So what does the petrodollar mean for the US economy? As of 1973, the demand for the US dollar became directly tied to the demand for oil. So, when demand for oil increased, the demand for dollars increased as well. This allowed the Federal Reserve to constantly increase the supply of dollars to keep up with demand. Please consider that If / when this arrangement ever stops, the dollar will collapse. It will lead to hyperinflation, the price of oil in the U.S. will skyrocket, and America will become a third world nation, overnight. To keep the arrangement going, the U.S. Government will seemingly, stop at nothing.

When Saddam Hussein threatened to pay for oil with Euros, the Twin Towers were mysteriously brought down and parlayed into an excuse to invade Iraq (which was always a preposterous stretch). When Moammar Gadhafi of Libya threatened to pay for oil with gold dinars, he was promptly assassinated along with John Christopher Stevens, the U.S Ambassador to Libya, who was killed when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked in September, 2012. All three of the afore mentioned persons were killed by agents working for the U.S. Government. Syria had switched to the Euro for their oil sales in 2006. Now, coincidentally, their country is in the midst of a civil war, like Libya previously, and is the most destabilized and dangerous place in the world. The U.S Government is backing Al Qaeda rebels by the provision of weapons in Syria while concurrently killing Al Qaeda rebels with drone strikes in Yemen.

Another country to buck the petrodollar system is Iran. Is it any coincidence that Western media bad and evil clowns are employing lies and propaganda in an attempt to turn the sheeple against the country and its leadership? The political and military elite know that it might take an all out war with Iran to protect the petrodollar, and they have been preparing the citizenry via propaganda for more than a decade.

The United States currently has special forces are currently covertly operating in 75 countries around the world, many of them oil rich countries in Africa, presumably to protect the leadership that continues the use of the petrodollar.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts posed a thought worthy question in a recent commentary:

Shouldn't Washington and the military/security complex be reined in before Washington's aggression triggers a nuclear war?

Keeping the Party Going

The western elites are aware that their actions have been ineffectual folly and are terrified, but they haven't known what else to do. This is why the proliferation of military bases in the middle east has been continuous, why it has declared unjustified war against countries such as Iraq, and why it maintains its policy of deliberate destabilization such as the continuous support of terrorists in Syria.

Middle Class Americans have benefited greatly, over the years, first from Bretton Woods and then from the the pertrodollar system. We have been provided fuel and energy for substantially less than most folks in other parts of the world have had to pay. These benefits were incidental, however. The petrodollar system was designed to transfer massive quantities of wealth from the many to the few. So, what else is new? Our standard of living is attached to the price of oil "at the hip". If the petrodollar goes away, the price of oil and gasoline in the U.S. will "head for the moon". This, I believe, is one of the main reasons that the America Government maintains such an overbearing presence in the Middle East. Unfortunately, our last four administrations have managed to moronically exacerbate an already tenuous situation. They now have skewed, screwed and tattooed our present oil supply dilemma to the point that we can expect no more than an eminent, catastrophic failure and they are presently just trying to cover their own butts, and those of their corporate cohorts. They have, essentially, thrown the citizens of the U.S. under the bus.

It is high time We the People see the military and economic hegemony in the Middle East for the farce that it is, and start developing alternative solutions to the unsustainable system of the Petrodollar, and we had better do it soon.

Next: All the King's Horses and All the King's Men, Part Two: Coming Out from Under the Bus.