EZ READING MONEY MATTERS: Steve Forbes Foolery

March 24, 2008

Elaine Meinel Supkis

Steve Forbes sent me a contract. They want to be hooked to my blog in some fashion. Heh. Well, Steve wrote an interesting editorial. It is filled with the nuttiest examination of our present financial and political situation. He wants a stronger dollar but no controls on trade. He wants the status quo back no matter what. And he wants a stronger, more expensive military. And wants us to invade more lands, make more alliances we can't afford. And he wants to talk about the steroid scandal which, in his pea brain, is a major story that he needs to vent about. Even as our banking system burns down, this is his top topic? HAHAHA.

Here's How to End the Panic
Steve Forbes

The Bush administration must take two steps immediately to quickly halt the unending, enervating credit crisis: shore up the anemic dollar and, for the time being, suspend "marking to market" those new financial instruments, such as packages of subprime mortgages.

The weak dollar is pummeling equities, disrupting the economy, distorting global trade and giving hundreds of billions of dollars in windfall revenues--through skyrocketing commodity prices--to our adversaries such as Iran and Venezuela. Not since Jimmy Carter has the U.S. had a President so oblivious to the damage done by an increasingly feeble greenback.

The Federal Reserve can rally the markets for a day or two by finding some new mechanism through which to lend more money to banks and other financial institutions. But this is the proverbial Band-Aid for a patient who is beginning to hemorrhage.

The Administration acts as if the dollar were like the sun, its rising and falling beyond any control. Countless times experience has shown that notion to be false. The U.S. Treasury Department could buy dollars in the currency exchange markets. Our allies would gladly cooperate with such an operation; their exports are being hurt more and more. The Fed could mop up some of the excess liquidity it has created since 2004, even as it makes targeted loans to beleaguered banks and financial houses.

This hysterical editorial by one of our nation's sharks shows clearly how treason works: he wants to restart a very dangerous status quo that is killing our nation by drowning us in debts. Note the highlighted sentence about how very happy all our trade RIVALS will be if we cease using monetary policies to weaken the dollar! He and they will pocket tremendous profits if we cease struggling against the forces that are bankrupting us.

This man, like the pirate who governs Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, makes his money by undermining the US tax system and refusing to do his share in protecting our nation. Both men ran for President hoping to cement their financial powers in the White House. We may as well change our flag to the Jolly Roger, eh? Only the pirates aren't sailing the Seven Seas collecting loot for America. They are collecting loot for themselves. Then, they can live in castles here and be protected from the populace the same way all despotic rulers protect themselves from raging mobs. Note the number of dictatorships in the world. All of them keep offshore bank accounts and squirrel away the loot there. Note how this is true with America. Our rich are offshoring everything they can as fast as possible. Even as money pours into the US, this is tax-free money, the money that can be taxed is flowing OUTWARDS even faster which is why we are in the red on every possible level.

Note Mr. Forbe's rage that wealth is now flowing to commodity-selling nations. Iran, for example. Note also that he considers the nations flooding us with value-added goods are 'allies.' And who floods us with the most of these goods?

China! This man, who spent millions to try to be our ruler and who bankrolls Bush and Cheney, wants this! And this is the secret behind all the rhetoric: the real rulers are anxious to cut deals with China and the Chinese know this. They talk tough in America but come slithering on their bellies to the Chinese. I even told the Chinese, this is how they operate. This is why, after Tiananmen Square when Americans were very outraged, Bush sent a secret delegation to Beijing to reassure the rulers that he stood behind them, not the students. They, in turn, demanded he turn over the students I was sheltering. I refused and told Bush Sr, I would have to be killed if they wanted to deport these students!

I won that fight thanks to CNN and Ted Turner's pledge to back me 100%. This was before CNN was sold to right wingers. Back to Forbes: he is also a supporter and promoter of PNAC, an organization that was killed by the failures of the Iraq invasion which they pushed hard to launch: Project for the New American Century

An initiative of the New Citizenship Project, a 501(c)(3) organization headed by William Kristol (Chairman) and Gary Schmitt (President),[1] the Project for the New American Century is funded in part by such organizations as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Bradley Foundation.[6]

Gary Schmitt: "When the project started, it was not intended to go forever. That is why we are shutting it down. We would have had to spend too much time raising money for it and it has already done its job. We felt at the time that there were flaws in American foreign policy, that it was neo-isolationist. We tried to resurrect a Reaganite policy. Our view has been adopted. Even during the Clinton administration we had an effect, with Madeleine Albright [then secretary of state] saying that the United States was 'the indispensable nation'. But our ideas have not necessarily dominated. We did not have anyone sitting on Bush's shoulder. So the work now is to see how they are implemented."

This man and his friends all park their funds offshore at tax havens as much as possible while pushing for a 'flat tax' which means they pay very little in taxes here. Then they can park their funds here again so long as no one interferes with their accumulation of wealth. On top of all this, they want our military to be very strong so they can use it not to protect America but rule the planet! Talk about cheek.

Today, thanks to the war in Iraq rising again the minute the 'surge' falls, the attacks of the natives seeking to destroy us, rise. The US doesn't understand this dynamic any more than the rulers here understand trade. In this case, the Muslims have a program and a goal: the bankruptcy of America. They apply enough pressure to keep us losing money and they track the amounts we lose. They know that pin pricks are the best way to keep our misspending of funds going. The 'street' in Muslim countries know very well how to defeat a great empire. They did this to Russia. They hope to do this to the US. Then, with the foreign invaders defeated, they can deal with their own rulers. They can see how this works in Pakistan, for example.

Back to Steve Forbes and his bizarre beliefs about the situation we are in: he wants it fixed! Fast! Now! He and his gangmembers are all losing money! They want the money to flow into their pockets again no matter what. Like all traitors, he cannot see how, from day one, his plots and schemes are directly responsible for our present banking/financial collapse! He thinks, if we have more foreign adventures, if we have a 'strong' dollar and use monetarism as our main trade tool, we will win! But the problem here is exactly the issue of 'monetarism': I have gone to great lengths to show how, when Europe continued on its imperialist rule of the planet and refused to back down after the disaster of WWI, they tried to flood the world with exports.

And the US protected us from this tsunami of goods by putting up barriers to trade. This meant they had to choose between empire and trade. And guess what they all chose?

Empire! The Brits were forced to retreat from half of Ireland but they invaded Iraq! They had an uprising in India and crushed it and eventually put Gandhi in prison. They suppressed Africans using military force. The French and British were fighting in China and Indochina. And the Japanese decided to expand their imperialism. So Germany itched to do the same. Italy was already planning expansionist wars before 1929. So we had a nest of vipers in Europe still seeking global domination as well as Japan, itching for more wars and ALL of them wanted US to BANKROLL THIS!!!!

Our refusal didn't stop them from their joint follies, of course. When WWII finally rolled around, the British had to have us bankroll them. Thanks to the policy of bombing from the air and destroying enemy industries, all of Europe and Asia lay in ruins after WWII. We then bankrolled the former enemy empires as well as our allied empires and this began a great time for the US. We could export to them and they couldn't flood us with imports. During all this, the British and French fought vicious wars to try to keep their bankrupt empires going. Bit by bloody bit, the natives threw them out. The US decided to not allow the people of Vietnam the right of self-rule and took over from the French. This involved us in the disaster called 'the Vietnam War'. This war bankrupted the US in that it cost us too much in manpower and money and it forced us to drop the defense of our home industries as we struggled to contain communism.

The Cold War was a total disaster for the US. We ceased to understand the difference between 'allies' and 'enemies'. We rushed to strengthen Germany and Japan and in turn, we devised a system whereby both could flood the US with imports. This policy was chosen due to everyone believing the Great Depression was caused by the US defending itself from imports, not from out of control empires seeking funds for wars! So we decided it would make America safer and stronger if we strengthened the empires that sought to destroy us a few years earlier.

Using the fear of communism as a tool, the European empires and the Japanese empire were reborn in an even stronger fashion. Using international organizations, the G7 used the US as their military arm of world domination while at the same time, flooding us with exports. The philosophy backing this is to this very day, supported and promoted by all our major media as well as many universities. Anyone calling for these policies to be reexamined from a new point of view are stifled and smothered.

The propaganda about the US causing the Great Depression continues and this infuriates me a great deal. All stories about it begin with the US stock market collapse. But the fact that the US was supporting the planet as the planetary creditor nation is ignored. And we were the creditor nation because we kept our trade balanced. Not one way in our favor, just BALANCED!

I am a Libra. Her nature is to seek not victory but equality, balance and steady states. She is not Pluto, the god of death and wealth. I am not seeking wealth for America. I am seeking internal stability. And with this, we will help the rest of the planet. The one-way money flow whereby all funds MUST flow through America is not good for us or the world. Like when England wanted US funds and flooding us with trade from them at their profit, the US is an empire that is even worse: we don't even want to bother with flooding anyone with trade OR money! We just want to soak up all the world's monetary profits AND goods and in return, hand out money. Which is just a fancy form of 'IOU' as the dollar says itself. It is for paying debts.

Steve Forbes is a coward and no one in his family is fighting in foreign lands:

The White House has announced that it will be withdrawing troops from Iraq in coming months, a consequence, it says, of the surge's success. The outgoing President, however, is making a mistake that could undermine what the new strategy has achieved--growing stability and an enormous setback to Islamic terrorism.

The withdrawals may have political appeal, but the danger is that they will put even more strain on our overstretched military in Iraq. The new strategy of cleaning out neighborhoods of insurgents and then leaving sufficient forces--ours and the increasingly better-trained Iraqis--behind to prevent the bad guys from coming back has been extraordinarily successful. But the insurgents, though badly squeezed, are still a force to be reckoned with.

Why take a chance by pulling out some of the troops? In fact, we should be increasing the size of our Army and the Marine Corps. We need more troops in Afghanistan, and we need more in Iraq to make sure the job gets done thoroughly. And who knows what new crisis in another part of the world may require U.S. forces?

Note how this fool wishes to stop the economic wheels from grinding. He wants to have the government save the banks from their own follies. Meanwhile, he wants us to march all over the planet, suppressing Tibetan-style uprisings. He doesn't want to pay high taxes but he wants military adventures that bankrupt us. He doesn't mention the huge military hunk of our national budget just like he won't mention our trade deficits. This fool is very rich as well as very smart and had the best education money could buy. But he can't add 2+2. The Forbes people sent me a contract, by the way, they want to be hooked into my blog.

HAHAHA. I wonder if they still want to after this article. I will bite the hand that feeds me if it feeds me BS.

Forbes is not only a fool, he is totally insane:

One of the enduring mysteries of the Bush Administration is why after 9/11 it never truly beefed up the U.S. military, why it tried to fight the war against Islamic fanaticism on the cheap.

I don't find $1 trillion cheap. Not even slightly. Perhaps, in Steve's universe where the Derivative Beast has grown to a massive $500 trillion, this is peanuts. What this monster wants is for the US to not recruit foreign legions to fight our foreign adventures. He wants the draft. This means they can pour millions of men into a deadly war and not even worry about costs. Their own sons won't serve. World War I was an example of powerful people pouring other people's sons into a failing war, endlessly. The Russians rose up and throttled their own rulers. The German army turned on its own officers in the bitter end. But in WWII, no one surrendered and no populations overthrew their governments. Only after the war ended, did the revolutions soar.

Another funny thing here is how Forbes points to Albania as an example for his world view. It has almost no taxes. It is going to join NATO and the EU. And what is our problem with the EU, anyway?

Ah! We are paying the vast majority of the costs for NATO and the Europeans can spend money on industry and trade while we are spending money trying to fight the natives of many Muslim lands! Forbes cannot talk about the US because he hates our nation and what it stands for. His eyes are on foreign lands because he is an imperialist who wishes to rule the planet even if it kills us. So he wants us to die for various adventures he and his ilk hatch. And then we celebrate when a nation figures out how to get rich: one way trade with the US!

Great going, guy. Albania is getting rich, Forbes claims, due to selling COMMODITIES. This nut, earlier in his own editorial, attacks COMMODITY SELLING nations! He claims they are evil! But not Albania! Albania is good. This sort of childish slicing and dicing is a feature of all neo cons. They can't focus on the entire picture. They nit pick while picking nutty notions and hammering them. Albania, by the way, does a great deal of trade with a certain nation: China. As well as Japan. We patrol the seas for these two nations who use our navy to protect their ships as they sail around the world. The US has virtually no native shipping industry anymore. Theirs are the biggest on earth. And Albania knows who is really their customers and it is NOT the US. The US is seeking oil because we consume it. But China and Japan want the raw materials for industry. We need this, too, for our military industries. But even that is being grabbed up by Europe and Asia. The gigantic $35 billion air refueling contract went to nations running huge trade surpluses with us!

Talk about insane. Forbes ends his stroll around the planet with a long screed about the baseball steroids investigations. He is angry about this whole thing. One thing about the Roman Empire: as it collapsed due to out of whack trade, debasing the currency, poor rulers who were demented as well as venal, a public that gave up on dealing with reality, the last things built by the Romans were not walls to stop barbarians, no, they built the biggest stadiums and baths, ever, in 400 AD. And then the entire enterprise collapsed into this long depression we call 'The Dark Ages' where money disappeared and peace turned to bloodshed. The population of Europe collapsed. And the knowledge of science and even reading, itself, nearly vanished.

The foolish fopperies of empire can be a giggle. But not while it is going bankrupt and bleeding to death. This isn't a tragedy, it is an annoyance. The Romans had precious little history to use to understand their own collapse. The previous collapses of Pharaonic Egypt were shrouded in mystery, the pyramids and other giant statues a mute testimony to that imperial power, the collapse of the Minoan Empire was preserved only as a tiny corner of a single siege of Troy, shrouded in mythology. All previous empires collapsed and nothing was left behind. The Greeks did create the Rosetta Stone which they used as a translation device. But even this was lost for 2,000 years!

But now, thanks to scholarship and archeology as well as written history by the Romans themselves as well as one historian from ancient Greece, we have a dim idea how empires collapse. And Steve Forbes illustrates perfectly how empires die: it is mental. The ruling elites go mad. They can't focus on reality. They are easily distracted and they can't add or subtract anymore. And they have hubris. Tons of hubris.

Steve Forbes is stupidity on steroids. Maybe Congress can investigate him.

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