Dangerous Economic Misconceptions:

http://stockmarketchartanalyst.blogspot.com/

I won't be posting my usual fundamental and technical analysis of the S&P 500's daily and weekly charts this weekend for a couple of reasons...The first is, we have family visiting from far away, and creating and posting my charts takes many hours...And secondly, what's the point?...

If you've been following my blog lately, I've been harping on how corrupt the market has become lately, and how much more difficult it is to predict near terms movements because of this...The mainstream media/propaganda machine and bogus government economic reports were in full force again this week...So it's no surprise that the market went UP!...Here is just one example of a bogus economic report put out by the gubbermint this week...The weekly jobless claims numbers were "estimated" because numerous states didn't report their numbers to the BLM because of the Labor Day holiday!...So what did the gubbermint do?...They LIED/FUDGED the numbers as usual:

Nine States Did Not File Initial Claims Data Due To Labor Day, Hundreds Of Thousands Of Estimates In Data "Beat"

http://www.zerohedge.com/article/nine-states-did-not-file-initial-claims-data-due-labor-day-hundreds-thousands-estimates-data

So you can see that the powers that be are doing all they can to make the market rally again, even though there is no real reason for it to do so...IMO

And this article backs up everything I've been saying for months now...It took me a number of hours to read the entire story yesterday...And by that, I mean also reading every story included in it, because there are numerous links in this article that verify the paragraph written above it...These are the kinds of TRUTHS you will NOT hear from the mainstream media/gubbermint propaganda machine!...

In my humble opinion, this has to be one of the top ten articles I've read so far this YEAR!...And I highly encourage you to take the time and read the whole article, and also follow every link below every paragraph so you can verify that what the author has written is the TRUTH...

http://neithercorp.us/npress/?p=748

Please! SHARE this to all you Friends on numerous Social Media sites, using the "Bookmark" button below...

And also...Take a few moments out of your day to remember the thousands of lives lost in the attack on the World Trade Center that happened nine years ago today...September 11, 2001

H.R. 5741 Slave Bill Now in Committee:

Slavery has a new name: “Mandatory Service” - Introduced July 15th 2010 by Rep. Charles Rangle (D).

(If Americans sit still for this, then they deserve to be slaves...)

Rob Dew - July 26, 2010

http://www.prisonplanet.com/h-r-5741-slave-bill-now-in-committee.html

H.R. 5741 will give the president the authority “To require all persons in the United States between the ages of 18 and 42 to perform national service, either as a member of the uniformed services or in civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, to authorize the induction of persons in the uniformed services during wartime to meet end-strength requirements of the uniformed services, and for other purposes.”

Barely a year after introducing H.R. 1444, which was supposed to form a “Congressional Commission on Civic Service to study methods of improving and promoting volunteerism and national service, and for other purposes”, Congress has upped the ante.

Anyone between 18 and 42 will be eligible for a two year commitment of civilian or military service.

With more college graduates working for the fast food industry, a depression era unemployment rate and less people retiring; the government will have plenty of eligible able bodies to move into the slave ranks.

This echos the sentiment of President Obama who asked Congress in Febuary 2009 to send him a bipartisan bill in the spirit of national service. His Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel outlined a similar plan in his book The Plan.

But even Emanuel aims low looking at only 18 to 25 year olds for three months of compulsory service. Under this new legislation nearly all, able bodied Americans will be sentenced to two years of forced labor.

The infrastructure is already in place for those unwilling to participate in mandatory service and now the army is looking to fill it’s ranks with Interment/Resettlement Specialists.

There are very few loopholes to opt of out national service, even CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTORS (SEC. 109) will be forced to choose the mandatory option of A. noncombatant service (as defined by the President) or B. national civilian service. It seems the congressional commission on civic service will no longer be needed thanks to the hard work of a suspected Congressional tax cheat from New York.

The slavery bill is currently in debate in the House Committee on Armed Services chaired by Rep Ike Skelton a democrat from Missouri. Those who oppose mandatory slavery should contact Rep. Skelton. Many bills die in committee and this bill should meet the same fate.

Nothing Was Sacred: The Theft of the American Dream...

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/07/phil-it-is-end-of-world-as-we-know-it.html

Posted by Jesse at 1:07 PM - July 17, 2010

America must decide what type of country it wishes to be, and then conform public and foreign policy to those ends, and not the other way around. Politicians have no right to subjugate the constitutional process of government to any foreign organization.

Secrecy, except in very select military matters, is repugnant to the health of a democratic government, and is almost always a means to conceal a fraud. Corporations are not people, and do not have the rights of individuals as such.

Banks are utilities for the rational allocation of capital created by savings, and as utilities deserve special protections. All else is speculation and gambling. In banking, simpler and more stable is better. Low cost rules, as excessive financialisation is a pernicious tax on the real economy.

Financial speculation, as opposed to entrepreneurial investment, creates little value, serving largely to transfer wealth from the many to the few, often by exploiting the weak, and corrupting the law. It does serve to identify and correct market inefficiencies, but this benefit is vastly overrated, because those are quickly eliminated. As such it should be allowed, but tightly regulated and highly taxed as a form of gambling.

When the oligarchy's enablers, hired help is the politer word, and assorted useful idiots ask, "But how then will we do this or that?" ask them back, "How did we do it twenty years ago?" Before the financial revolution and the descent into a bubble economy and a secretive and largely corrupted government with a GDP whose primary product is fraud.

Other nations, such as China, are surely acting for their own interests, and in many cases the interests of their people, much more diligently and effectively than the kleptocrats who are in power in Washington and New York these days. How then could we possibly subvert the Constitution and the welfare of the people to unelected foreign organizations? If this requires a greater reliance on self-sufficiency, then so be it. America is large enough to see to its own, as the others see to theirs.

Economics will not provide any answers in and of itself. Economics without an a priori policy and morality, without a guiding principle like the Constitution, is a heartless monster easily manipulated to say whatever one wishes it to say, if they are willing to pay enough economists to say it. Its reputation as a science is greatly exaggerated.

"Eliminating government" is a trap put forward by the plutocrats for those unable to reason except by prejudice, as they desire to exercise their power unimpeded by the rule of law. Once you knock down the protections and the safeguards in the name of reform, the wolves will turn on the public in an orgy of looting and exploitation. This is an old story, and sadly it often works.

Efficient markets hypothesis is almost as great a hoax as the benefits of globalization and 'free trade' have been to the American people as a whole. These things are promoted by the few, at the expense of the gullible many, for their own personal benefit.

Hatred, mean spiritedness, and resentment of the weak, the old, the different, is a trick played on the masses by oligarchs and would be dictators from time immemorial. They play to the darker side of the crowd. It is a trap, and the means to the demise of freedom. And these tricksters play it well, because deceit is their specialty, their stock in trade.

"First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win." - Mohandas K. Gandhi

So it will not be easy, and it is a mistake to think that it will be. But what greater task can we set ourselves to, other than justice and freedom for ourselves and children?


It’s the End of the World As We Know It:

By Phil of Phil’s Stock World

What are 308,367,109 Americans supposed to do?



First of all, despite clamping down on immigration, our population grew by 2.6M people last year. Unfortunately, not only did we not create jobs for those 2.6M new people but we lost about 4M jobs so what are these new people going to do? Not only that, but nobody is talking about the another major job issue: People aren’t retiring! They can’t afford to because the economy is bad – that means there are even less job openings… The pimply faced kid can’t get a job delivering pizza because his grandpa’s doing it.

There are some brilliant pundits who believe cutting retirement benefits will fix our economy. How will that work exactly? Pay old people less money, don’t cover their medical care and what happens? Then they need money. If they need money, they need to work and if they need to work they increase the supply of labor, which reduces wages and leaves all 308,367,109 of us with less money. Oh sorry, not ALL 308,367,109 – just 308,337,109 – the top 30,000 (0.01%) own the business the other 308,337,109 work at and they will be raking it in because labor is roughly 1/3 of the cost of doing business in America and our great and powerful capitalists have already cut their manufacturing costs by shipping all those jobs overseas, where they pay as little as $1 a day for a human life so now, in order to increase their profits (because profits MUST be increased) they have now turned inward to see what they can shave off in America.



How does one decrease the cost of labor in America?

Well first, you have to bust the unions. Check. Then you have to create a pressing need for people to work – perhaps give them easy access to credit and then get them to go so deeply into debt that they will have to work until they die to pay them off. Check. It also helps if you push up the cost of living by manipulating commodity prices. Check. Then, take away people’s retirement savings. Check. Lower interest rates to make savings futile and interest income inadequate. Check. And finally, threaten to take away the 12% a year that people have been saving for retirement by labeling Social Security an “entitlement” program – as if it wasn’t money Americans worked their whole lives to save and gave to the government in good faith. Check.

As Allen Smith says:

“Ronald Reagan and Alan Greenspan pulled off one of the greatest frauds ever perpetrated against the American people in the history of this great nation, and the underlying scam is still alive and well, more than a quarter century later. It represents the very foundation upon which the economic malpractice that led the nation to the great economic collapse of 2008 was built. Essentially, Reagan switched the federal government from what he critically called, a “tax and spend” policy, to a “borrow and spend” policy, where the government continued its heavy spending, but used borrowed money instead of tax revenue to pay the bills. The results were catastrophic. Although it had taken the United States more than 200 years to accumulate the first $1 trillion of national debt, it took only five years under Reagan to add the second one trillion dollars to the debt. By the end of the 12 years of the Reagan-Bush administrations, the national debt had quadrupled to $4 trillion!“

Both Reagan and Greenspan saw big government as an evil, and they saw big business as a virtue. They both had despised the progressive policies of Roosevelt, Kennedy and Johnson, and they wanted to turn back the pages of time. They came up with the perfect strategy for the redistribution of income and wealth from the working class to the rich. If Reagan had campaigned for the presidency by promising big tax cuts for the rich and pledging to make up for the lost revenue by imposing substantial tax increases on the working class, he would probably not have been elected. But that is exactly what Reagan did, with the help of Alan Greenspan. Consider the following sequence of events:

1) President Reagan appointed Greenspan as chairman of the 1982 National Commission on Social Security Reform (aka The Greenspan Commission)

2) The Greenspan Commission recommended a major payroll tax hike to generate Social Security surpluses for the next 30 years, in order to build up a large reserve in the trust fund that could be drawn down during the years after Social Security began running deficits.

3) The 1983 Social Security amendments enacted hefty increases in the payroll tax in order to generate large future surpluses.

4) As soon as the first surpluses began to role in, in 1985, the money was put into the general revenue fund and spent on other government programs. None of the surplus was saved or invested in anything. The surplus Social Security revenue, that was paid by working Americans, was used to replace the lost revenue from Reagan’s big income tax cuts that went primarily to the rich.

5) In 1987, President Reagan nominated Greenspan as the successor to Paul Volcker as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Greenspan continued as Fed Chairman until January 31, 2006. (One can only speculate on whether the coveted Fed Chairmanship represented, at least in part, a payback for Greenspan’s role in initiating the Social Security surplus revenue.)

6) In 1990, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, a member of the Greenspan Commission, and one of the strongest advocates the 1983 legislation, became outraged when he learned that first Reagan, and then President George H.W. Bush used the surplus Social Security revenue to pay for other government programs instead of saving and investing it for the baby boomers. Moynihan locked horns with President Bush and proposed repealing the 1983 payroll tax hike. Moynihan’s view was that if the government could not keep its hands out of the Social Security cookie jar, the cookie jar should be emptied, so there would be no surplus Social Security revenue for the government to loot. President Bush would have no part of repealing the payroll tax hike. The “read-my-lips-no-new-taxes” president was not about to give up his huge slush fund.

The practice of using every dollar of the surplus Social Security revenue for general government spending continues to this day. The 1983 payroll tax hike has generated approximately $2.5 trillion in surplus Social Security revenue which is supposed to be in the trust fund for use in paying for the retirement benefits of the baby boomers. But the trust fund is empty! It contains no real assets. As a result, the government will soon be unable to pay full benefits without a tax increase. Money can be spent or it can be saved. But you can’t do both. Absolutely none of the $2.5 trillion was saved or invested in anything.

That is how the largest theft in the history of the world was carried out.

300M people worked and saved their whole lives to set aside $2.5Tn into a retirement system that, if it were paying a fair compounding rate of 5% interest over 40 years of labor (assuming an even $62Bn a year was contributed), would be worth $8.4Tn today – enough money to give 100M workers $84,000 each in cash!

The looting of FICA hid the massive deficits of the last 30 years in the Unified Budget. Presidents and Congresses were able to reduce taxes on the wealthiest Americans without complaint from the deficit hawks, because they benefited. The money went directly from the pockets of average Americans into the pockets of the rich.



Now that it is time to repay those special bonds in the Trust Fund, we are inundated in opinion pieces in the leading newspapers and magazines complaining about Social Security and its horrible impact on the budget. Government finances have been trashed by foolish tax cuts, unpaid wars, tax loopholes for corporations and the very wealthy, the failures of economists, the greedy search for greater returns in financial markets and the collapse of moral values in giant businesses, but Social Security is supposed to be the problem that needs fixing…

Social Security is not “broken“–the money is in the Trust Fund. But the people who manage the finances of the United States don’t want to repay the bonds held by the Trust Fund. They want to default selectively against average people, their fellow citizens, who paid their taxes expecting to be protected in their retirement. Refusing to repay the $2.54 trillion dollars in bonds held by the Social Security Trust makes the US look like Greece, just another nation unable to govern itself coherently. The people who manage US finances come from the financial elites, the best that Wall Street and enormous corporations have to offer. Selective default exposes them as charlatans. The claims of the economics profession to expertise are puffery. Their theories about the benefits of tax cuts are proven false. Their mathematical proofs about free markets collapse in the real world.



So, what is this all about? It’s about forcing 5M people a year who reach the age 65 to remain in the work-force. The top 0.01% have already taken your money, they have already put you in debt, they have already bankrupted the government as well so it has no choice but to do their bidding. Now the top 0.01% want to make even MORE profits by paying American workers even LESS money. If they raise the retirement age to 70 to “balance” Social Security – that will guarantee that another 25M people remain in the workforce (less the ones that drop dead on the job – saving the bother of paying them severance).

What’s next? Is it fair to say that children can’t work in a struggling family business? Isn’t it to everybody’s benefit that kids should be allowed to help out at the family store? That will be the next step towards turning America into a 3rd World country. The seemingly innocent concept of “letting” kids work will deprive another 5M people of paying jobs – throwing them out into the labor force as well and driving labor costs down even further.

There’s an expression that goes “give them an inch and they’ll take a yard.” The top 0.01% of this country have taken their inches and they are foreclosing on the yards and they will come for the rest of your stuff next. If you think you are “safe” from the looting of America, it is only because they haven’t gotten around to you yet. As I explained in “America is 234 Years Old Today – Is It Finished?” – the game is rigged very much like a poker tournament. The people at the top table don’t care how well you do wiping out your fellow players at the lower tables, they know they will get you eventually and your efforts to scoop up a pile of cash for yourself simply makes their job easier when they are ready to take it from you.



The average American is $634,000 in debt thanks to the efforts that Reagan and Greenspan put in motion 30 years ago and the richer you are, the more of that money is going to come out of your hide eventually and the more you lobby to make sure that the “rich” are not taxed unfairly, the less fair it will be to you because, no matter how rich you THINK you are, unless your income is measured in MILLIONS PER MONTH, you aren’t even close to the top 30,000.

No progressive tax? That means that people and corporations who make $1M PER DAY should pay no more tax than a person making $1M per year, right? Well that means that the $2.5M debt that your family of four owes will be paid by you over 2.5 years of labor while the $2.5M owed by your Billionaire competitor will be paid over a long weekend, after which he can turn his attention back to crushing your business by creating cheaper goods – maintaining profit margins by driving down local labor costs and outsourcing the rest.

It’s a new world, America, and you’d better get used to it – we were sold down the river on a slow boat to China long ago and we’re only just beginning to feel the first effects of waves that wash back to our own shores. The people who own the media don’t want CHANGE. That’s why you never hear this stuff in the MSM – things are going exactly according to plan and the old money crowd is playing a long, patient game and they already have most of the chips – the last thing they want is people questioning the system…

http://www.philstockworld.com/2010/07/17/its-the-end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it/

Fix America? = Fix the Politicians!...

By Dylan Ratigan - July 4th, 2010, 2:00PM

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/07/fix-america-fix-the-politicians/

Today we end Fix It week on my show, although we hope to keep this recurring theme. But the largest hindrance to solutions for all of the problems we’ve discussed – be it the Deficit, Energy, Education or the Wars – goes back to one place: the current Political Process in our country.

We practically all share the same list of problems, regardless of ideology: The undue influence of moneyed interest, the focus on inane Culture Wars instead of proper governance, the low quality of our politicians coupled with their high incumbency rates, the lack of ethics, disclosure etc. The only question left is how to fix them and then, how do we muster the will?

These are the questions we will address for my entire show today – and just to get the ball rolling, here are four of my favorite solutions:

1. ONE FOR ME, ONE FOR YOU:

I don’t have to explain to anyone why we need to fix the campaign finance system. The question is how do we do it fairly. Publicly financed campaigns are one solution, but they seem to go against our very nature as Americans. After all, who wants to be forced into having their tax money going to politicians they don’t like? Meanwhile, infringing on the amounts people can donate gives an advantage to wealthy candidates. But I think there is pretty easy solution to this:

I propose that we make a law that charges 100% fee on all political spending, with the that fee going into a public campaign financing fund that given solely to candidates with low campaign coffers on a per petition signature basis. This means that if a well-moneyed candidate like Barack Obama wants to spend $740 million of campaign donations, $370 million of that can go to his campaign and the other half to public campaign fund.

Even better, if a wealthy person like Michael Bloomberg wants to spend $108 million of his fortune trying to get elected, half goes to other, less-moneyed candidates. As far as those “poorer” candidates go, the more valid petition signatures they have, the more money they should get from the fund.

In addition to curtailing the power of the dollar in elections, this would especially help new candidates take advantage of modern marvels like social networking etc. to jumpstart a serious challenge to more-moneyed opponents.

And if you don’t want your money going to candidates you don’t like, then don’t get in to the game in the first place.

2. DISCLOSE EVERYTHING TO ALL:

It is a sad state of affairs when corporations, who clearly don’t work for us, are forced to disclose more to than Politicians who do (or at least are paid by us). We need to put the legal onus on Politicians to disclose every single potential conflict of interest, be it an invite to a BBQ or getting their nephew a job with a contractor. This means that if it could in any conceivable way be considered a conflict, it’s on them to disclose it even if there is no specific rule against it. Then, if they are found being negligent of material disclosure, they need to be fired, fined and possibly jailed.

Finally, this information MUST be updated weekly into open-source searchable databases. There is no shortage of smart, patriotic Americans who can take it from there.

3. COOL YOUR HEELS FOR SEVEN YEARS:

The revolving door from Politics to corresponding positions of undue influence in the private sector has to be stopped. There needs to be a seven year cooling off period for all Politicians, staffers and regulators from working in any related industry or lobbying their former colleagues.

While this might sound draconian, ask yourself, do you really think we are getting high quality public servants with the current incentive structure? I am betting we will get much more capable public servants once we hinder their ability to get rich off of their service.

4. END THE LEFTY-RIGHTY FACADE:

As far as I can tell, at this point the major differences in the traditional Political Parties has basically become their stance on gay marriage – and even that looks pretty similar once they are in power. Both like to give away money they don’t have and are unwilling to stand up to the special interests that fund them.

Furthermore, the false choice of “Republican” or “Democrat” is keeping some of the best candidates from making it to the general election. If politicians want to align themselves into two Political Parties, that is their right. But the government shouldn’t allow them to hold separate primaries. Hopefully this recent move to open primaries in California will take off across the country.

The question now is how do we get these same complicit politicians to make the fundamental changes that we need to the system. My hope is that in the coming years, we will see more and more people deciding that they have had enough and will enter into the political spectrum or push their neighbors and friends to do so.

Also, I am waiting patiently for serious candidates in the United States to sign a legally binding contract guaranteeing that they will support initiatives like the ones outlined above. Don’t laugh, it’s already on its way across the pond.

Politicians held personally liable for breaking their promises to the voter? That’s change we all could believe in.

Follow Dylan Ratigan on Twitter: www.twitter.com/DylanRatigan

Are We Going the Way of Rome?...

http://stockmarketchartanalyst.blogspot.com/2010/06/are-we-going-way-of-rome.html

By Lawrence W. Reed

There's an old story worth retelling about a band of wild hogs which lived along a river in a secluded area of Georgia. These hogs were a stubborn, ornery, independent bunch. They had survived floods, fires, freezes, droughts, hunters, dogs, and everything else. No one thought they could ever be captured.

One day a stranger came into town not far from where the hogs lived and went into the general store. He asked the storekeeper, "Where can I find the hogs? I want to capture them." The storekeeper laughed at such a claim but pointed in the general direction. The stranger left with his one-horse wagon, an ax, and a few sacks of corn.

Two months later he returned, went back to the store, and asked for help to bring the hogs out. He said he had them all penned up in the woods. People were amazed and came from miles around to hear him tell the story of how he did it.

"The first thing I did," the stranger said, "was to clear a small area of the woods with my ax. Then I put some corn in the center of the clearing. At first, none of the hogs would take the corn. Then after a few days, some of the young ones would come out, snatch some corn, and then scamper back into the underbrush. Then the older ones began taking the corn, probably figuring that if they didn't get it, some of the other ones would. Soon they were all eating the corn. They stopped grubbing for acorns and roots on their own.

"About that time, I started building a fence around the clearing, a little higher each day. At the right moment, I built a trap door and sprung it. Naturally, they squealed and hollered when they knew I had them, but I can pen any animal on the face of the earth if I can first get him to depend on me for a free handout!"

The moral to that story happens to be the connecting link between the course of ancient Rome and the path which America has been taking for much of the last century.

Roman civilization began many centuries ago. In those early days, Roman society was basically agricultural, made up of small farmers and shepherds. By the second century bc, large-scale businesses made their appearance. Italy became urbanized. Immigration soared as people from many lands were attracted by the vibrant growth and great opportunities the Roman economy offered. This growing prosperity was made possible by a general climate of free enterprise, limited government, and respect for private property. Merchants and entrepreneurs were admired and emulated. Commerce and trade flourished and large investments were commonplace.

It is certainly true that slavery existed within Rome's sphere of influence. That's deplorable from any standpoint, of course. But to be fair to the Romans, it must be said that slavery was far more common and far more brutal in the rest of the world in those days.

Remarkable Achievements:

Historians still talk today about the remarkable achievements Rome made in sanitation, transportation, the arts, public parks, banking, architecture, education, and administration. The city even had mass production of some consumer items and a stock market. With low taxes and low tariffs, free trade and private property, Rome became the center of the world's wealth.

At one time, the political and military power of Rome dominated Europe and the Mediterranean. Roman roads facilitated speed of travel and communication to a degree that would not be surpassed until the development of the railroad, the steamship, and the telegraph in the 19th century. Roman law and justice enabled the traveler to journey throughout the empire with a considerable degree of safety. "The benefits of the Pax Romana [the peace of Rome]", says Arther Ferrill in "The Fall of the Roman Empire," "included the development of one of man's most impressive codes of law and an administrative system that met the needs of men of varied languages, ethnic backgrounds and cultural traditions. The poet Virgil was not far wrong in claiming that his nation ruled the world in peace and justice."

All this disappeared, however, by the fifth century ad, and when it was gone, Europe was plunged into darkness and despair, slavery and poverty. In the space of 700 years, explains Max Shapiro in his book, "The Penniless Billionaires," "the Appian Way, where Roman legions had frequently paraded in celebration of victory, was clogged with rubble and weeds. Wild dogs roamed through the ruins of the Forum, in search of food. And the 60,000 souls who inhabited the desolate place which had once been called the Eternal City now referred to it as `the great cow pasture.'"

Why did Rome decline and fall? The record is abundantly clear on this point. Rome fell because of a fundamental change in ideas on the part of the Roman people-ideas that relate primarily to personal responsibility and the source of personal income. In the early days of greatness, to a considerable degree, each Roman regarded himself as the chief source of income. Each individual looked to himself-what he could acquire voluntarily in the marketplace-as the source of his livelihood. Rome's decline began when large numbers of citizens discovered another source of income: the political process or, the state.

When Romans abandoned self-responsibility and self-reliance and began to vote themselves benefits, to use government to rob Peter to pay Paul, to put their hands into other people's pockets, and to envy and covet the productive and their wealth, they set into motion Kershner's First Law: "When a self-governing people confer upon their government the power to take from some and give to others, the process will not stop until the last bone of the last taxpayer is picked bare."

The legalized plunder of the Roman welfare state was undoubtedly sanctioned by people who wished to do good. As Henry David Thoreau once said, "If I knew for certain that a man was coming to my house to do me good, I would run for my life." Another person coined the phrase, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Nothing but evil can come from a society bent upon coercion, the confiscation of property, and the degradation of the productive.

Early in the process, a politician named Clodius ran for the office of tribune on a "free wheat for the masses" platform and won. Candidates for office began spending huge sums to win public favor and then plundered the population afterwards to pay their campaign debts.

When Julius Caesar came to power in 48 bc, he found 320,000 persons on government grain relief. Temporarily slowing the welfare state bandwagon, he ordered the welfare rolls cut to 200,000. Within a half-century, the rolls were back up to well over 300,000.

Government Bread:

A real landmark in the course of events came in the year 274 ad. Emperor Aurelian, wishing to provide cradle-to-grave care for the citizenry, declared the right to relief to be hereditary. Those whose parents received government benefits were entitled as a matter of right to benefits as well. Aurelian gave welfare recipients government-baked bread (instead of the old practice of giving them wheat and letting them bake their own bread) and added free salt, pork, and olive oil. Not surprisingly, the ranks of the unproductive grew fatter, and the ranks of the productive grew thinner.

Surely, many Romans opposed the welfare state and held fast to the old virtues of work, thrift, and self-reliance. Just as surely, some of these sturdy people gave in and began to feed at the public trough in the belief that if they didn't get it, somebody else would. That attitude only hastened the slide into bankruptcy.

The central government also assumed the responsibility of providing the people with entertainment. Elaborate circuses and gladiator duels were staged to keep the people happy. The equivalent of a hundred million dollars per year in the city of Rome alone is one modern historian's estimate of what was poured out on the games. These days, many Americans think that by virtue of being artists they are entitled to grants from the federal government at other people's expense. If handouts for the arts constitute a legitimate function of government, by what possible rationale can just about any other handout be resisted?

In Rome, the emperors were buying support with the people's money. After all, government can give only what it first takes. The emperors, in dishing out all these goodies, were in a position to manipulate public opinion. As Alexander Hamilton observed, "Control of a man's subsistence is control of a man's will."

By the second century ad, many cities had spent themselves deeply into debt. Beginning with the emperor Hadrian, municipalities which got themselves into financial difficulties lost their independence as the central government placed them under the authority of imperial curators. Local authority was increasingly replaced by the power of the central government.

Taxes & Regulations:

Civil wars and conflict of all sorts increased as faction fought against faction to seize control of the huge state apparatus and all its public loot. Of 27 emperors or would-be emperors between 180 and 285 ad, all but two met violent deaths.

High taxes and burdensome regulations were the order of the day. Business enterprise was called upon to support the growing body of public parasites.

By the time of Emperor Antoninus Pius, who ruled from 138 to 161 ad, the Roman bureaucracy was as all-embracing as that of modern times. The historian Trever wrote that by the third century, "the relentless system of taxation, requisition, and compulsory labor was administered by an army of military bureaucrats . . . . Everywhere were the ubiquitous personal agents of the emperors to spy out any remotest case of attempted strikes or evasion of taxes."

Another writer, W. G. Hardy, said several years ago that in later Rome, "what the soldiers or the barbarians spared, the emperors took in taxes." The crushing cost of the military, the top-heavy bureaucracy, and the public programs taxed the middle class out of existence.

Clearly, the state gradually became the prime source of income for an increasing number of Romans. The high taxes needed to finance this drove business into bankruptcy and then nationalization. Whole sectors of the economy came under government domination in this manner. The first industry in Rome to be taken over was transportation-shipping in particular. Interestingly, the first industry in America to suffer comprehensive control was also transportation-specifically, railroads.

Emperor Nero may have been the original architect of urban renewal legislation. In the 10th year of his reign (64 ad), a great fire left more than half of Rome in ashes. It was rumored then, and many historians now believe, that Nero had ordered the conflagration to be lighted to clear the ground for a rebuilding of the city.

Nero is said by Gaius Suetonius in "De Vitae Caesarum" to have once rubbed his hands together and declared, "Let us tax and tax again! Let us see to it that no one owns anything!" That reminds this author of Harry Hopkins' famous allusion to the welfare state during the Roosevelt years: "tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect."

In 91 ad, the government became deeply involved in the business of agriculture. Emperor Domitian, to reduce the production and raise the price of wine, ordered the destruction of half the provincial vineyards.

As the old virtue of self-reliance gave way to political redistribution of income, priests, teachers, and intellectuals extolled the virtues of the almighty emperor, the provider of all things. The interests of the individual were considered a distant second to the interests of the emperor and his legions. A spiritual vacuum ensued, which was filled partly by the rise of cults and partly by worship of the emperor. The latter reached its zenith under Emperor Diocletian in 285 ad. No one could approach him without prostrating himself on the ground and kissing the hem of his garment. Formerly, the proud, free citizens of Rome had refused to render such servile adoration to any of their magistrates and rulers.

Natural Disasters:

The Roman Empire, amid this sickening spectacle of moral decay, fell victim to an unfortunate series of natural disasters and plagues. Earthquakes, volcanoes, and harsh storms caused great damage. By 200 ad at least one-fourth of the population of the whole empire, both civilian and military, had perished by a plague brought from the East. A later one, from 252 to 267, was nearly as bad. A morally righteous and strong people might have recovered and rebuilt, but these disasters only reinforced the growing despair of a desperate people. The fabric of Roman society was rotting away under the influence of government paternalism, bureaucracy, and spiritual malaise.

Cheapened Money:

Rome also suffered from the bane of all welfare states-inflation. The massive demands on the government to spend for everything created pressures for the multiplication of money. The Roman coin, the denarius, was cheapened and debased by one emperor after another to help pay for the expensive programs. Once almost pure silver, the denarius by 268 ad was little more than a piece of junk containing only .02 percent silver. American dimes, quarters, and half dollars, incidentally, contained 90 percent silver as recently as 1964; today, they contain no silver at all.

Flooding the economy with all this new and cheapened money had predictable results: prices skyrocketed; savings were eroded, and the people became angry and frustrated. Businessmen were often blamed for the rising prices even as government continued its spendthrift ways.

The easy money policies produced periodic crises in the economy. The panic of 86 ad and a severe economic contraction of a few years later are examples. The government responded by imposing penalties for trading in gold, especially for exporting it, much as Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933.

Demanding relief from economic disorder, the people of Rome cried out for a strongman. He arrived in the person of Diocletian who, in the year 301, imposed his famous "Edict of 301." This law established a system of comprehensive wage and price controls, to be enforced by a penalty of death. The chaos that followed inspired the contemporary historian Lactantius to write in 314: "After the many oppressions which he put into practice had brought a general dearth upon the empire, he then set himself to regulate the prices of all vendible things. There was much bloodshed upon very slight and trifling accounts, and the people brought provisions no more to market, since they could not get a reasonable price for them; and this increased the dearth so much that at last after many had died by it, the law itself was laid aside."

From Welfarism to Despotism:

Diocletian also ordered that all offices, trades, and professions, in so far as possible, were to be made hereditary. Young men were forced to carry on in the trade of their fathers. There was no escape from this regimentation. The welfare state had become a despotism.

This tyrant left his mark on history in other ways, too. It was during his reign that fully half the men of the Empire were on the government payroll. Not only did he impose across-the-board wage and price controls in relative peacetime, but he also resigned from office, in the year 305. Nearly 17 centuries later, Richard Nixon would become the first American president to impose peacetime wage and price controls and also our first chief executive to resign from office.

All this robbery and tyranny by the state was a reflection of the breakdown of moral law in Roman society. The people had lost all respect for the sanctity of private property. This author is reminded of the New York City blackout of 1977, when all it took was for the lights to go out for hundreds to go on a looting spree.

The Christians were the last to resist the tyranny of the Roman welfare state. Until 313 ad, they had been persecuted because of their faith and their unwillingness to worship the emperor. Under Diocletian, Christians were cast into dungeons, thrown to the wild beasts in the amphitheater, and put to early death by every other mode of torture that ingenious cruelty could devise. In this year, Emperor Constantine granted them toleration in exchange for their acquiescence to his authority.

Constantine himself professed Christianity but his personal morality belied his word. Within three years of his announced conversion, he put a nephew to death, drowned his wife in a bath, and murdered his son.

Meanwhile, Constantine showered the Church with land, gifts, and patronage at taxpayer expense. Thus corrupted, the Church lost its old simplicity and high moral standards. It, too, had jumped aboard the gravy train.

In the year 380, a sadly perverted Christianity became the official state religion under Emperor Theodosius. Rome's decline was like a falling rock from this point on.

Foreign Policy:

In another arena, the foreign policy of Rome in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries had become one of weakness and appeasement. Politicians, too busy buying votes at home with pie-in-the-sky programs, ignored the Empire's defense. Barbarian "converts," whose loyalty was still suspect, were even permitted to hold important posts in the Roman military establishment.

In 410, Alaric the Goth and his primitive Germanic tribesmen assaulted the city and sacked its treasures. For three days, Rome was plundered. Palaces and temples were stripped and Roman citizens were raped and killed by the thousands. The once-proud Roman army, which had always repelled the barbarians before, now wilted in the face of opposition. Why risk life and limb to defend a corrupt and decaying society?

The end came rather anti-climactically in 476, when the German chieftain Odoacer pushed aside the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and installed himself as the new authority.

Some might say that Rome fell because of the attack by these foreigners. Such a claim overlooks what the Romans had done to themselves. When the Vandals, Goths, Huns, and others reached Rome, many citizens actually welcomed them in the belief that anything was better than their own tax collectors and regulators. It is more accurate to say that Rome committed suicide. Like the wild hogs, Romans first lost their freedom, and then they lost their lives.

History does seem to have an uncanny knack of repeating itself now and then. America, by elevating government power at the expense of individual responsibility, has made some of the same mistakes that Rome made centuries ago. In a famous statement, philosopher George Santayana warned that those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it.

No one reading this, however, should despair for the future. The growing intrusiveness of government in America is not inevitable; it is not something beyond the control of the American people. It is, rather, the consequence of faulty ideas, which can change if only this message is carried forth by those who cherish liberty. Indeed, there are very promising indications that the intellectual battles these days are being won-often decisively won-by the friends of freedom and limited government, not by those who foolishly seek to put government in the driver's seat.

Most people who cherish freedom oppose the welfare state for moral, philosophical, spiritual, and economic reasons. We would do well to add another reason: the lessons of history!

As we work to restore and preserve those ideas and institutions which made our nation both free and great,

let's keep these words in mind:

The penalty men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men. -Plato

All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. -Edmund Burke

The hottest places in Hell are reserved for those who-in a period of moral crisis-maintain neutrality. -Dante

http://www.citizensforaconstitutionalrepublic.com/reed9-1-01.html

Slouching Toward Despotism:

http://jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com/2010/05/guest-post-slouching-towards-despotism.html

by Keith Hazelton May 27, 2010

Benjamin Franklin, when asked at the conclusion of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 what that assembly had created, purportedly responded, “A republic, if you can keep it,” which seems likely given his remarks to Convention members on that September day immediately prior to their vote on the proposed Constitution in its original form.

Often, but on far more occasions in the last three years, we are reminded of a portion of those remarks. Dr. Franklin, given his age (81) and health, asked to have his commentary read to delegates preceding what he hoped would be a unanimous vote in favor of a nonetheless flawed agreement.

“In these sentiments, Sir, I agree to this Constitution with all its faults, if they are such; because I think a general Government necessary for us, and there is no form of Government but what may be a blessing to the people if well administered, and believe farther that this is likely to be well administered for a course of years, (but) can only end in Despotism, as other forms have done before it, when the people shall become so corrupted as to need despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

And the question we keep pondering is, “Are we there yet?” Are we merely slouching toward despotism, or have we arrived? Are we already so corrupt so as to need despotic government, what with Vampire Squids and corporate/union-bought elections and Congressional bystanders and regulatory capture and Systemically Important Too Big To Fail and Gulf of Mexico oil well disasters?

(Despotism, by the way, describes a form of government by which a single entity rules with absolute and unlimited power, and may be expressed by an individual as an autocracy or through a group as an oligarchy according to Wikipedia, the world's leading source of made-up information, which is good enough for us.)

In previous posts we have observed the growing and discernible disconnect between several types of government-reported economic data such as Retail Sales and actual state sales tax collections, and the Employment Situation and withholding tax collections. Others also have made solid cases for these disconnects between statistical theory and economic reality and it occurs to me that, far from being isolated or random events, they are evidence of much more disconcerting forces at work.

Fudging on unemployment numbers or "rounding up" retail sales reports may seem like minor infractions, and many of these government data reports have been manipulated for years, maybe half a century, but they represent a pattern of conscious, calculated design of "don't worry, be happy, the government's in charge, nothing to see here, so move along."

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), for example, estimates who is working and who is not, but conveniently excludes millions of people from its composition of the unemployment rate who are not working but neither deeming them “unemployed” because they are “marginally attached” to the workforce or are “discouraged” by a lack of job prospects and no longer are looking for employment (2.3 million as of March 2010 plus another 3.4 million “persons who currently want a job,” who also aren’t counted as unemployed).

Side note: You are well aware, of course, the Social Security Administration probably could tell us monthly almost exactly how many people really are working, not working, working part time, self-employed, and so on based on its receipts of tax withholdings from employers. It is beyond the pale to imagine SSA could not furnish a version of the monthly Employment Situation that would be far more reliable by orders of magnitude than the guesses of the BLS.

As to why government statistical agencies may be reporting "happy" numbers, well, you know the answer to that...government statistics are lying's fifth circle of hell, just a shade better than Campaign Promises.

How about the major changes to the Producer Price Index and the Consumer Price Index which were made in the 1980s and 1990s to greatly reduce reported inflation numbers as a means of containing the cost of living adjustments (COLAs) for Social Security recipients, as John Williams at ShadowStats extensively has reported for years?

Or the March 2010 Monthly Treasury Statement, which understated the true government deficit last month by including a $117 billion collection described as “proprietary receipts from the public” by the Treasury, likely TARP repayments but not defined as such. Or the December 2009 Monthly Treasury Statement in which $45 billion extracted from the nation’s banks as a 13-quarter advance FDIC premium also was shown as a “negative outlay” which creates a significant understatement of the true FY2010 deficit picture (so far, $162 billion this fiscal year, which will understate our true deficit by about 10 percent).

Or the “New” General Motors wasting millions of (tax) dollars for print and television ads to promote a fictitious narrative that it has “repaid” government loans of $8.1 billion (to the U.S and Canada) “plus interest” five years early when in fact SIGTARP, the Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Plan Neil Barofsky, told Congress and Fox News that GM did no such thing, that the loan “repayment” did not come the old fashioned way from sales and earnings but from a "cash advance" on another TARP facility which both governments will count as additions to their already significant equity positions. Nothing in those ads mentions the many tens of billions of taxpayer dollars borrowed from China which flowed into General Motors and Chrysler pre-bankruptcy which never will be repaid.

And now the New GM wants to create another automobile financing company, or buy back its former GMAC/Ally unit which itself has received nearly $20 billion of government Too Big To Fail largesse, so it may become even more profitable by returning to sub-prime auto and everything-else lending and have a happy IPO later this year, because as everyone knows, including the New GM's management, there's precious little profit in building cars no one wants and few can afford. "As a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool repeats his folly," (Proverbs 26:11) as Jesse's Cafe Americain recently observed.

How about the seeming inability to legislate any significant financial reform in the wake of the worst economic crisis in 80 years, a crisis which, mind you, needed fewer than eight years to erupt once the last shred of restraint – Glass-Steagall – was forcibly removed at the end of 1999 by those who, coincidentally (paging Messrs. Rubin and Summers), have profited so handsomely from its demise.

The Banking Act of 1933 – Glass-Steagall – was a wonder of simplicity in a simpler era. It set forth in a mere 37 pages of text the safeguards necessary to separate commercial banking from everything else and to ably prevent for 66 years – two full generations – any meaningful implosion of the nation’s financial system. Any search for cause and effect of The Great Recession must begin here. The useless financial reform act – the Dodd act – weighs in at a lobbyist-induced 1,500+ pages, and will do nothing to prevent another financial crisis, nothing to dismantle Too Big Too Fail, nothing to contain derivatives, nothing to audit the Federal Reserve and nothing to curtail abuses in consumer financial practices.

Yet where are the criminal investigations? Where is the FBI? Where are the Congressional inquiries and panels and special prosecutors? Where are the indictments? Where are the perp walks and the jail sentences? Where is the justice, Mr. Holder and your 50 friends among the states? Aside from two former Bears Stearns hedge fund managers in 2007, and a pretend hedge fund manager - Mr. Madoff - in 2009, a weak SEC civil show-case against Goldman Sachs in 2010 and the mostly voluntary, golden-parachute-enabled "retirements" of a handful of TBTF C-level executives, a number of which, John-Thain-like, merely have revolved around the door a couple of times and landed at another lucrative looting opportunity, nothing has happened. Nothing, nada, zero, zip, dick. Nothing. It's breathtaking in its design and execution.

We now are reliably told the TARP program will cost less than $100 billion when all is said and done. Huh? What about the $2 trillion-plus of added government debt which itself adds tens of billions to the annual interest servicing burden, or the $1.5 trillion-plus willed into existence by the Federal Reserve? Who are they kidding?

Or a Health Care Act which, in 2,500 pages manages to spend about another trillion dollars or so and leaves no health insurance company behind, effectively criminalizing, albeit with monetary penalties far less than the cost of individually paid health insurance plans, anyone not otherwise exempted who fails to purchase health care coverage.

It seems to us, after thinking about this topic for some time now, that we have arrived. We have arrived at that point in our civilization in which our government deems it acceptable to obfuscate about things both small and large on the basis that, Jack-Nicholson/Colonel-Jessup-like, we (the rest of us who aren’t lodged in the political/oligarchical castes) “can’t handle the truth.”

And most of the time it would appear they are right, that we – the rest of us – can’t be bothered with such discrepancies and inconsistencies, falsehoods and half-truths. We're too busy trying to keep the house, make the mortgage and auto loan and credit card and student loan payments. We're too focused on our own financial survival to be concerned with what goes on at a national leadership and direction level. And doesn't it just seem a little too convenient for those who wish to plunder the wealth of the nation to keep the other 90 percent of us so strapped with indebtedness and an outdated personal moral conviction that debts should be repaid regardless of their potential to physically and mentally harm one's well being or, heaven forbid, harm one's all-important credit score, when walking away from debt has been an accepted business practice for centuries?

It only seems to matter on those rare occasions when things blow up, and the average, non-voting, non-taxpaying citizen awakens from his or her media-induced stupor to ponder that when the curtain is drawn away, it reveals only humans and not wizards, or that the outgoing tide reveals who has been swimming naked or when the emperor is shown to be undressed. But interest in such matters wanes quickly, and the thirst for change recedes silently into renewed acceptance of the status quo, as we now discover.

Soon, no doubt, when markets resume their upward trajectory and the Dow returns to and surpasses 14,250 (probably by this summer) and oh-don't-worry-about-those-6.5-million-log-term-unemployed-because-they're-just-lazy, much of this unpleasantness of the last three years will be forgotten by those more interested in only good news and Dancing With the Stars and American Idol, and the continued warnings of the Cassandras will be deemed evidence that these are, once again, merely the musings of disaffected social misfits or bad-news-opportunists who deep down must hate America (right up until the point at which the next crisis erupts, and erupt it will).

In fact, our short attention spans are relied upon by the political class of both parties and by the oligarchical class which controls it, as magnificent wealth transfer schemes blossom anew (talk about green shoots...) and the all-so-brief period which has elapsed between the “days away from financial Armageddon” of September 2008 and the "all clear, business as usual" of May 2010 insures, like the watered-down, useless "financial reform" legislation written by financial industry lobbyists which certainly will pass soon, that the laudable goal of making safe our financial system and returning it to the status of handmaiden to legitimate capital-producing and jobs-creating enterprise, will be discarded in exchange for the pretense of life as we knew it, circa 2006.

Only this time, effectively having destroyed the middle class of Boomers, Gen X-ers, Gen Y-ers, Millennials and Echo Boomers, and having bought the complicit silence of the of a near-majority (47% of Americans paid no income tax whatsoever in 2008) in exchange for bread and circuses, and having largely destroyed the previous primary mechanism by which wealth has been stolen and transferred (credit creation and personal indebtedness), the masters of the universe will have to find a new scam, which, at this writing, appears to be sovereign government debt, currencies and commodities, because turning back the calendar to 2006 alone will never recreate the consumer spending/debt orgy of 1982-2006.

In fact we think the oligarchs realize this, and they are redoubling their efforts to pillage as much as possible before the real collapse occurs, even as its seeds already have been sown in this crisis which now appears, by design and deception, to be ending. That collapse draws nigh, and Roubini and Taleb and Ritholtz and Panzer and Jesse and Tyler and Mish and Yves and Charles Hugh Smith and Joe Bageant and many, many others already see it, yet all are being dismissed - again - as those nattering nabobs of negativism who, broken-clock-being-right-twice-a-day-like, were merely “lucky” in guessing about the immediate past crisis as former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan suggested in a recent television interview.

Tell us Greece is not the "sub-prime" of early 2007; that the US$150 billion "cure" to be soon applied by the EU and IMF is only can-kicking but will allow one and all to congratulate themselves on "containing" an isolated problem and to quickly return to the never-ending cocktail party, that is until the next Greece Fire which spreads to one after another country, including, ultimately, the possibility of the conflagration reaching bond markets in the U.S.

Or that a mere US$1 trillion of bailout/rescue/currency support recently proposed by the Eurozone and the IMF to "shock and awe" financial markets dominated by the recently rescued TBTFs who busily apace bet against the very governments which saved them (except now in Germany), is not merely another stealth rescue of these giant financial institutions which, having been caught with a bit too much Club Med sovereign debt on their books while their own prop traders work hard to destroy its value, now cry out - again - that the risk of their insolvency - again - threatens the global financial and economic systems.

Or that the battling machines of high-frequency trading, which briefly wiped out and then restored a trillion dollars worth of fictitious (paper) wealth in fewer than 15 minutes mid-afternoon May 6th in a dry-run rehearsal of things to come, won't now become even more emboldened and empowered to manipulate financial markets in any manner necessary to insure continued quarters of perfectly profitable trading days.

(May 6th should have been a non-event. We were expressly warned by the Manhattan Assistant US Attorney in a July 2009 court filing, in which it was alleged that a former Goldman Sachs quant trading programmer stole Goldman's "secret proprietary trading code," that "there is a danger that somebody who knew how to use this program could use it to manipulate markets in unfair ways." Well, duh. Doesn't it just seem like someone took this code, or a similar one, out for a test drive earlier this month?)

Soon, perhaps if not already, the wealth transfer will be complete, and a newly impoverished, former middle class will wake up from their recliners to find not only is Dancing With the Stars over, but also is their former debt-fueled way of life as the economy staggers, unemployment escalates, more good jobs are exported and living standards rapidly erode. (Irony alert: Their former U.S. employers, who effectively have downsized and off-shored their way to record profits, will find they have destroyed their own customer base - the former middle class - who no longer can afford their products.)

When 40 million people are receiving food stamps at one end of the economic spectrum (and probably another 20 million eligible according to the Department of Agriculture), and the bulk of financial and real assets have been concentrated into the top 10 percent of the other end of the economic spectrum, nothing good can come of it. So the well-off cohort will remain well-off and will conspire to direct through their agents in government only enough resources to buy the complicity and silence of the bottom 40 percent, like tax breaks, food stamps, health care subsidies and so on, and the soon-to-be-former middle class will be ground into yet lower levels of the economic ladder, such, that when the looting has concluded, we will see a top 10 percent and a bottom 90 percent, much as feudalistic Europe in the centuries of the Dark Ages.

(We strongly recommend two books on the subject, both of which in far more detail and eloquence lay out the symptoms, causes and effects of our slouch toward despotism: Survival +, by Charles Hugh Smith at Of Two Minds, and Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches From America's Class War, by Joe Bageant at Joe Bageant (and whose recent post about the American Hologram Lost on the Fearless Plain also is required reading).

“All lies and jest… Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest,” so said Paul Simon, which rings so true more than four decades later. We hear what we want to hear, and, apparently, what we want to hear is that all is back to normal, that all is good, that the wizards have everything under control, and that nothing bad can ever happen again.

So, are we there yet? Have we not already abdicated our responsibilities as citizens and tacitly embraced the despotism of which Franklin predicted 222 years ago, having become so corrupted (contaminated) as to require the despotic government of an oligarchy dedicated to insuring the truth never gets in the way of a good narrative, an enormous disparate accumulation of wealth and a firm grip on the levers of power to ensure the preservation of that wealth?

A few Tea Party primary victories and incumbent "mandatory retirements" aside, nothing will change in Washington as long as the strings of campaign cash and lobbyist perks are being pulled elsewhere. The "outs" who soon will replace some of the "ins" promptly will forget about their mandates from the voters the day they move into their new D.C. offices and townhomes and realize from moment one their only responsibility is to their own rational self-interest of being re-elected in 2012 and 2014 and 2016. Et tu, Barack?

And if Benjamin Franklin is not prescient enough for you, how about the Teacher, in Ecclesiastes, Chapter 1, v.13-18, from about 2,300 years ago:

What a heavy burden God has laid on men! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind. What is twisted cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted. I thought to myself, "Look, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge." Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind. For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.

Indeed, with wisdom comes sorrow, and from more knowledge, more grief. Would, sometimes, that we could empty so much of it from the mush of our remaining gray matter and then we wouldn't have to pretend it's all good, when, in fact, it’s anything but good, as soon, perhaps in a matter of a few short years, we shall see.

We first wrote the following paragraphs in June 2006, long before sub-prime lending, a bursted housing bubble, Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, CitiGroup, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, GM, Chrysler, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department and The Great Recession began to dominate our lives, when Franklin’s predictions and our inexorable slouch toward despotism first appeared on our radar screen:
The transition from unitary executive to dictator – conservative, benevolent or otherwise – will not happen in the waning months of the current administration, so uniquely manifested by America's First Triumvirate of George Bush, Dick Cheney and, until recently, Karl Rove, but succeeding chief executives may choose overtly to expand further the envelope-pushing and Constitution-trampling of the 43rd President and his neo-conservative command-and-control cabal as the American oligarchy, and the nation, slouches slowly toward despotism.

As such, we will one day awake from our debt-financed, pleasure-induced stupors to find one person or group firmly in charge, answering to no one, especially not Congress, and in complete grasp of the military, the intelligence agencies, the treasury, the Federal Reserve and the financial and judicial systems. It will happen – it is happening – an inch at a time, until the day comes when not only will we, the fun-loving, celebrity-worshipping, civic-duty-abhoring citizens of America, so embrace the notion of despotism, we will think it entirely our own idea.

Are we there yet?...

(Keith Hazelton is an Adjunct Professor of Finance at Oklahoma City University's Meinders School of Business and an Economic Adviser to the Oklahoma Bankers Association. His opinions are his own.)