Check out Engdahl's take on what is really going on with the Citigroup "bail out", which is really a nationalization of the country's biggest bank:
http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/engdahl/2008/1126.html
Keep your eyes and mind open,
Michael Childress
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Thursday, November 27, 2008
Collapse of COMEX Futures Market? Jim Willie Commentary
Jim Willie and others are anticipating a collapse in the COMEX commodities future exchange in December. This will be caused by a failure to deliver on gold and silver contracts - revealing price fixing shenanigans by COMEX, NYMEX, Big Banks, and Federal Government. Here's the latest commentary:
http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_08/willie112508.html
According to Jim Willie, first notices to COMEX on taking delivery will appear on 28 November, the day after Thanksgiving. There MAY be some reporting on this in your local paper, but it is more likely that the US propaganda machine will suppress all mention of it. If I can find anything on this, I will provide links.
Keep your eyes and mind open,
Michael Childress
http://www.gold-eagle.com/editorials_08/willie112508.html
According to Jim Willie, first notices to COMEX on taking delivery will appear on 28 November, the day after Thanksgiving. There MAY be some reporting on this in your local paper, but it is more likely that the US propaganda machine will suppress all mention of it. If I can find anything on this, I will provide links.
Keep your eyes and mind open,
Michael Childress
Monday, November 17, 2008
The Crack Up Boom - Ty Andros at Financial Sense.com
For a quick overview of what's going on lately, and where it is going, read this remarkable summary by Ty Andros, posted at financialsense.com
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/andros/2008/1114.html
Keep your eyes and mind open,
Michael Childress
http://www.financialsense.com/fsu/editorials/andros/2008/1114.html
Keep your eyes and mind open,
Michael Childress
Friday, November 7, 2008
Ten "Cannots" by W.J.H. Boetcker
TEN CANNOTS
Reverend William John Henry Boetcker (1873-1962)
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.
Reverend William John Henry Boetcker (1873-1962)
You cannot keep out of trouble by spending more than your income.
You cannot establish sound security on borrowed money.
You cannot help little men by tearing down big men.
You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling down the wage payer.
You cannot further the brotherhood of man by inciting class hatred.
You cannot build character and courage by taking away men's initiative and independence.
You cannot help men permanently by doing for them, what they could and should do for themselves.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Get Ready for Banking Holiday
I don't know how many readers I have out there now, but for those of you who occasionally check out this blog, here is some of the best advice I can give you for these troubled times:
One of the first acts of Mr. Roosevelt after his inauguration in 1933 (of which 2009 looks to be a replay) was to declare a week long banking holiday. This allowed the bean counters to freeze all banking assets for inventories and bargaining and negotiations. Then after the holiday, about half of the banks in the country did not open their doors, and it was a while before folks could get ANY cash out of their accounts from those banks.
Because the 2008 election is so eerily similar to that of 1932, it is pretty safe to assume that 2009 will also strongly rhyme with 1933, and that banking holiday and other unexpected government measures will be forthcoming.
If you are not ready to have NO access at all to your bank accounts for a week, I strongly suggest that you build up a stock of cash in your home before the inauguration in the latter half of January. In fact, it would be a good idea to start building up some cash at home NOW, in case the stresses of poor spending during the upcoming holiday shopping season precipitates things even faster.
How much will you need? Well, if the holiday is for a week, then you need a week's worth of total spending. This includes groceries, gasoline, and anything else for which you might ordinarily write a check or use a debit card. It is also likely that if the banks are locked down, then they wouldn't be able to process any credit card transactions, either. This means you will need cash to cover typical credit card purchases as well. And keep in mind that the 1933 holiday was a week. It could be longer this time around. AND you may find that your particular bank may not re-open again, meaning you will have to wait until the FDIC gets around to your account insurance before you will get your assets out, and no telling how long that will take. So stash appropriately for this contingency, too, if you can afford it.
And, of course, all this assumes that retail outlets like grocery stores and gas stations will still be open during the holiday, which may NOT be the case. If so, then you will need to have some food stashed as well for the duration. Dry goods like beans and rice, canned veggies and meats, and even packaged goods like potato chips and popcorn are good to stock up on now. Frozen foods are also a good idea, if you have the freezer space. Remember, your neighborhood McDonald's and Starbucks may not be open for business after a couple of days of frozen assets.
Am I fear-mongering here? Not at all, just being prudent, just in case 2009 really does come off like 1933. And if it does, then you will have a historical road map to follow to survive the next 10-20 years. If it doesn't, then you won't have lost much interest on the cash you pulled out, and you can just re-deposit it when you feel comfortable.
Keep your eyes and mind open,
Michael Childress
One of the first acts of Mr. Roosevelt after his inauguration in 1933 (of which 2009 looks to be a replay) was to declare a week long banking holiday. This allowed the bean counters to freeze all banking assets for inventories and bargaining and negotiations. Then after the holiday, about half of the banks in the country did not open their doors, and it was a while before folks could get ANY cash out of their accounts from those banks.
Because the 2008 election is so eerily similar to that of 1932, it is pretty safe to assume that 2009 will also strongly rhyme with 1933, and that banking holiday and other unexpected government measures will be forthcoming.
If you are not ready to have NO access at all to your bank accounts for a week, I strongly suggest that you build up a stock of cash in your home before the inauguration in the latter half of January. In fact, it would be a good idea to start building up some cash at home NOW, in case the stresses of poor spending during the upcoming holiday shopping season precipitates things even faster.
How much will you need? Well, if the holiday is for a week, then you need a week's worth of total spending. This includes groceries, gasoline, and anything else for which you might ordinarily write a check or use a debit card. It is also likely that if the banks are locked down, then they wouldn't be able to process any credit card transactions, either. This means you will need cash to cover typical credit card purchases as well. And keep in mind that the 1933 holiday was a week. It could be longer this time around. AND you may find that your particular bank may not re-open again, meaning you will have to wait until the FDIC gets around to your account insurance before you will get your assets out, and no telling how long that will take. So stash appropriately for this contingency, too, if you can afford it.
And, of course, all this assumes that retail outlets like grocery stores and gas stations will still be open during the holiday, which may NOT be the case. If so, then you will need to have some food stashed as well for the duration. Dry goods like beans and rice, canned veggies and meats, and even packaged goods like potato chips and popcorn are good to stock up on now. Frozen foods are also a good idea, if you have the freezer space. Remember, your neighborhood McDonald's and Starbucks may not be open for business after a couple of days of frozen assets.
Am I fear-mongering here? Not at all, just being prudent, just in case 2009 really does come off like 1933. And if it does, then you will have a historical road map to follow to survive the next 10-20 years. If it doesn't, then you won't have lost much interest on the cash you pulled out, and you can just re-deposit it when you feel comfortable.
Keep your eyes and mind open,
Michael Childress
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Conquer the Crash by Robert Prechter - Excerpts
Conquer the Crash: You can SURVIVE and PROSPER in a Deflationary Depression. Robert R. Prechter, Jr. 2002. ISBN 0-470-84982-7
EXCERPTS
If you follow the advice in this book and no financial crisis occurs, you cannot get hurt. In fact, you should profit nicely form most of these suggestions. Even if my outlook proves incorrect, the worst case is that your money will earn less than it otherwise may have.
… the largest stock-market collapses appear not after lengthy periods of market deterioration indicating a slow process of long-term change but quite suddenly after long periods of rising stock prices and economic expansion. A depression begins, then, with the seemingly unpredictable reversal of a persistently, indeed often rapidly, rising stock market. The abrupt change from increasing optimism to increasing pessimism initiates the economic contraction.
A bull market that has endured since the time of the Great Depression is definitely ending, and its termination could well mark the end of an uptrend of one degree larger, which has endured since the founding of the Republic.
… stock market advances and economic cycles must get weaker before they reverse. The final rise is where that weakness must be evident. Advances come in five waves, so the fifth wave is where the relative weakness manifests. The mechanism of that difference, I believe, is the immense optimism of major fifth waves, which encourages the populace to engage in financial speculation. Third waves are built upon muscle and brains. Fifth waves are built upon cleverness and dreams. During third waves, people focus on production to get rich. During fifth waves, they focus on finance to get rich.
A prime symbol of the deterioration … is the Federal Reserve System. Its manipulation of money and credit for the past 89 years … has been so destabilizing that it has transformed America from a production powerhouse into a society obsessed with dodging inflation and manipulating money and credit. A prime symbol of the deterioration in wave V … is General Electric, the oldest name in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Through wave III ending in 1966, GE was one of the finest engineering and manufacturing concerns in the world. Its goods lasted for decades. In wave V, accountants took over the company and transformed it from a manufacturing concern into a financial concern. Today, its manufactured goods are mediocre and its vaunted company a cardboard edifice of credit services. It is the United States in microcosm.
If no dividend is ever paid, of what value is a share of stock? Do you really want to own a share of a super-successful enterprise that handsomely pays everyone involved in it except you, an owner?
Corporate earnings cycle with the stock market but with a 2-month to 2-year lag. Earnings do not begin to rise until well after stock prices have turned up from a bottom, and they do not begin to fall until well after stock prices turn down from a top. For this reason, the two trends often oppose each other. In contrast, book values and dividend payouts tend to be much steadier, cycling only on a very long-term basis with the largest economic trends, therefore providing a steady benchmark against which to compare stock prices to obtain a reliable relative valuation measure.
As I write this chapter, the “watchdog” of earnings, Standard & Poor’s, has just bowed to pressure to change the basis of its earnings reports to “operating earnings” rather than total company earnings so that the reported P/E ratio will henceforth be about half of what it really is.
The engine of high stock market valuation is widely shared optimism. The greater the degree of the advance that is to ending, the greater the optimism at its peak. Optimism also tends to remain strong in the early stages of a bear market … Bull markets, they say, climb a “Wall of Worry.” I like to add, “and bear markets slide down a Slope of Hope.”
To summarize, though my outlook may sound impossible, I am quite comfortable saying that the DJIA will fall from quintuple digits, where it is today, to triple digits, an unprecedented amount.
A pertinent observation with respect to our current concern is that a mania is always followed by a collapse so severe that it brings values to below where they were when the mania began.
Deflation requires a precondition: a major societal buildup in the extension of credit (and its flip side, the assumption of debt).
Self-liquidating credit is a loan that is paid back, with interest, in a moderately short time from production. Production facilitated by the loan generates the financial return that makes repayment possible. The full transaction adds value to the economy.
Near the end of a major expansion, few creditors expect default, which why they lend freely to weak borrowers. Few borrowers expect their fortunes to change, which is why they borrow freely. Deflation involves a substantial amount of involuntary debt liquidation because almost no one expects deflation before it starts.
A high-debt situation becomes unsustainable when the rate of economic growth falls beneath the prevailing rate of interest on money owed and creditors refuse to underwrite the interest payments with more credit.
A deflationary crash is characterized in part by a persistent, sustained, deep, general decline in people’s desire and ability to lend and borrow. A depression is characterized in part by a persistent, sustained, deep, general decline in production.
Governments have often outlawed free-market determinations of what constitutes money and imposed their own versions upon society by law, but earlier schemes usually involved coinage. Under central banking, a government forces its citizens to accept its debt as the only form of legal tender. The Federal Reserve System assumed this monopoly role in the United States in 1913.
In 1933, President Roosevelt and Congress outlawed U.S. gold ownership and nullified and prohibited all domestic contracts denoted in gold, making Federal Reserve notes the legal tender of the land. In 1971, President Nixon halted gold payments from the U.S. Treasury to foreigners in exchange for dollars. Today, the Treasury will not give anyone anything tangible in exchange for a dollar. Even though Federal Reserve notes are defined as “obligations of the United States,” they are no obligations to do anything. Although a dollar is labeled as a “note,” which means a debt contract, it is not a note for anything.
The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and similar institutions, funded mostly by the U.S. taxpayer, have extended immense credit around the globe. Their policies have supported nearly continuous worldwide inflation, particularly over the past thirty years. As a result, the global financial system is gorged with non-self-liquidating credit.
If the duration of recent past cycles is to repeat, then the falling portion of the current economic cycle would last another two years, and the depression would reach bottom in 2004.
The primary basis for today’s belief in perpetual prosperity and inflation with perhaps an occasional recession is what I call the “potent directors” fallacy. It is nearly impossible to find a treatise on macroeconomics today that does not assert or assume that the Federal Reserve Board has learned to control both our money and our economy. Many believe that it also possesses immense power to manipulate the stock market.
For many people, the single biggest financial shock and surprise over the next decade will be the revelation that the Fed has never really known what on earth it was doing. The spectacle of U.S. officials in recent weeks lecturing Japan on how to contain deflation will be revealed as the grossest hubris.
If people and corporations are unwilling to borrow or unable to finance debt, and if banks and investors are disinclined to lend, central banks cannot force them to do so. During deflation, they cannot even induce them to do so with a zero interest rate.
One example of action impelled by defensive psychology is governments’ recurring drive toward protectionism during deflationary periods. Protection is correctly recognized among economists of all stripes as destructive, yet there is always a call for it when people’s mental state changes to a defensive psychology.
The ultimate effect of deflation is to reduce the supply of money and credit. Your goal is to make sure that it doesn’t reduce the supply of your money and credit.
The ultimate effect of depression is financial ruin. Your goal is to make sure that it doesn’t ruin you.
The main goal of investing in a crash environment is safety. When deflation looms, almost every investment category is associated with immense risks. Most investors have no idea of these risks and will think you are a fool for taking precautions.
An added problem with owning government bonds is the political risk. Governments have a long record of stiffing their creditors in a crisis, and no government is immune from adopting that solution to its financial problems. A new regime especially may have little regard for previously squandered credit.
In the initial stages of a depression, sellers remain under an illusion about what their property is really worth. They keep a high list price on their house, reflecting what it was worth last year. I know people who are doing that now. This stubbornness leads to a drop in sales volume. At some point, a few owners cave in and sell at much lower prices. Then others are forced to drop their prices, too. What is the potential buyer’s psychology at that point? “Well, gee, property prices have been coming down. Why should I rush? I’ll wait till they come down further.” The further they come down, the more the buyer wants to wait. It’s a downward spiral.
Taking out a home equity loan is nothing but turning ownership of your home over to your bank in exchange for whatever other items you would like to own. It’s a reckless course, and it stems from the extreme confidence that accompanies a major top in social mood.
Owning an array of investments is financial suicide during deflation. They all go down, and the logistics of getting out of them can be a nightmare. There can be weird exceptions to this rule, such as gold in the early 1930s when the government fixed the price, or perhaps some commodity that is crucial in a war, but otherwise, all assets go down in price during deflation except one: cash.
Why do banks fail? For nearly 200 years, the courts have sanctioned an interpretation of the term “deposits” to mean not funds that you deliver for safekeeping but a loan to your bank. Your bank balance, then, is an IOU from the bank to you, even though there is no loan contract and no required interest payment. Thus, legally speaking, you have a claim on your money deposited in a bank, but practically speaking, you have a claim only on the loans that the bank makes with your money.
Some states in the U.S., in a fit of deadly “compassion,” have made it illegal for a bank to seize the home of someone who has declared bankruptcy. In such situations, the bank and its depositors are on the hook indefinitely for a borrower’s unthrift.
The estimated representative value of all derivatives in the world today is $90 trillion, over half of which is held by U.S. banks. Many banks use derivatives to hedge against investment exposure, but that strategy works only if the speculator on the other side of the trade can pay off if he’s wrong.
If the authorities in your country decide to disallow short selling, the bad news is that this option will be closed to you. The good news is that they usually take such actions near the major bottoms, so it will probably be about the proper time to cover shorts and start composing your “buy” list anyway.
If your government decides to confiscate gold, your country’s banks will be recruited in the operation. If it happens sometime in the coming crash, the reason will probably be “fighting terrorism.”
With the retirement setup in the U.S., the government need not be as direct as Argentina’s. It need merely assert, after a stock market fall decimates many people’s savings, that stocks are too risky to hold for retirement purposes. Under the guise of protecting you, it could ban stocks and perhaps other investments in tax-exempt pension plans and restrict assets to one category: “safe” long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. Then it could raise the penalty of early withdrawal to 100 percent. Bingo. The government will have seized the entire $2 trillion held in government-sponsored, tax-deferred 401K private pension plans. I’m not saying it will happen, but it could, and wouldn’t you rather have your money safely under your own discretion?
Bear markets engender labor strikes, racial conflict, religious persecution, political unrest, trade protectionism, coups and wars. In the area of personal behavior, part of the population gets more conservative, and part gets more hedonistic, and each side describes the other as something that needs reform. One reason that conflicts gain such scope in depressions is that much of the middle class gets wiped out by the financial debacle, increasing the number of people with little or nothing to lose and anger to spare.
Usually in a major bear market, you are less likely to encounter a mob, a criminal or a terrorist than to face state-sponsored controls within your own country or military attack from without, and there may be little that a retreat or karate can do for you in those situations.
You cannot anticipate every possible law, regulation or political event that will be implemented to thwart your attempt at safety, liquidity and solvency. This is why you must plan ahead and pay attention. As you do, think about these issues so that when political forces troll for victims, you are legally outside the scope of the danger.
Far more people in the past century had their lives wrecked or terminated by domestic implosions that by war. Whether you lived in Russia in the 1920s, Germany in the 1930s, Europe in the 1940s, China in the late 1940s, Cuba in 1959 or Cambodia in the 1970s, the smart thing to do early was to get out of Dodge.
People and institutions that best weather the system-wide debt liquidation of a deflationary crash and depression are those that take on no debt and extend no risky credit. This is the ideal situation for most people most of the time, anyway.
If you are entrepreneurial, start thinking of ways to serve people in a depression so that you will prosper in it. For example, I am writing this book. Think about what people will need when times get hard.
Don’t rely on government programs for your old age. Retirement programs such as Social Security in the U.S. are wealth-transfer schemes, not funded insurance, so they rely upon the government’s tax receipts.
Government surpluses generated by something other than a permanent policy of thrift are the product of exceptionally high tax receipts during boom times and therefore signal major tops. They’re not bullish; they’re bearish and ironically portend huge deficits directly around the corner.
Don’t expect government services to remain at their current levels. The ocean of money required to run the union-bloated, administration-stultified public school systems will be unavailable in a depression. School districts will have to adopt cost-cutting measures, and most of them will result in even worse service. Encourage low-cost free-market solutions, which will benefit both children and teachers.
EXCERPTS
If you follow the advice in this book and no financial crisis occurs, you cannot get hurt. In fact, you should profit nicely form most of these suggestions. Even if my outlook proves incorrect, the worst case is that your money will earn less than it otherwise may have.
… the largest stock-market collapses appear not after lengthy periods of market deterioration indicating a slow process of long-term change but quite suddenly after long periods of rising stock prices and economic expansion. A depression begins, then, with the seemingly unpredictable reversal of a persistently, indeed often rapidly, rising stock market. The abrupt change from increasing optimism to increasing pessimism initiates the economic contraction.
A bull market that has endured since the time of the Great Depression is definitely ending, and its termination could well mark the end of an uptrend of one degree larger, which has endured since the founding of the Republic.
… stock market advances and economic cycles must get weaker before they reverse. The final rise is where that weakness must be evident. Advances come in five waves, so the fifth wave is where the relative weakness manifests. The mechanism of that difference, I believe, is the immense optimism of major fifth waves, which encourages the populace to engage in financial speculation. Third waves are built upon muscle and brains. Fifth waves are built upon cleverness and dreams. During third waves, people focus on production to get rich. During fifth waves, they focus on finance to get rich.
A prime symbol of the deterioration … is the Federal Reserve System. Its manipulation of money and credit for the past 89 years … has been so destabilizing that it has transformed America from a production powerhouse into a society obsessed with dodging inflation and manipulating money and credit. A prime symbol of the deterioration in wave V … is General Electric, the oldest name in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Through wave III ending in 1966, GE was one of the finest engineering and manufacturing concerns in the world. Its goods lasted for decades. In wave V, accountants took over the company and transformed it from a manufacturing concern into a financial concern. Today, its manufactured goods are mediocre and its vaunted company a cardboard edifice of credit services. It is the United States in microcosm.
If no dividend is ever paid, of what value is a share of stock? Do you really want to own a share of a super-successful enterprise that handsomely pays everyone involved in it except you, an owner?
Corporate earnings cycle with the stock market but with a 2-month to 2-year lag. Earnings do not begin to rise until well after stock prices have turned up from a bottom, and they do not begin to fall until well after stock prices turn down from a top. For this reason, the two trends often oppose each other. In contrast, book values and dividend payouts tend to be much steadier, cycling only on a very long-term basis with the largest economic trends, therefore providing a steady benchmark against which to compare stock prices to obtain a reliable relative valuation measure.
As I write this chapter, the “watchdog” of earnings, Standard & Poor’s, has just bowed to pressure to change the basis of its earnings reports to “operating earnings” rather than total company earnings so that the reported P/E ratio will henceforth be about half of what it really is.
The engine of high stock market valuation is widely shared optimism. The greater the degree of the advance that is to ending, the greater the optimism at its peak. Optimism also tends to remain strong in the early stages of a bear market … Bull markets, they say, climb a “Wall of Worry.” I like to add, “and bear markets slide down a Slope of Hope.”
To summarize, though my outlook may sound impossible, I am quite comfortable saying that the DJIA will fall from quintuple digits, where it is today, to triple digits, an unprecedented amount.
A pertinent observation with respect to our current concern is that a mania is always followed by a collapse so severe that it brings values to below where they were when the mania began.
Deflation requires a precondition: a major societal buildup in the extension of credit (and its flip side, the assumption of debt).
Self-liquidating credit is a loan that is paid back, with interest, in a moderately short time from production. Production facilitated by the loan generates the financial return that makes repayment possible. The full transaction adds value to the economy.
Near the end of a major expansion, few creditors expect default, which why they lend freely to weak borrowers. Few borrowers expect their fortunes to change, which is why they borrow freely. Deflation involves a substantial amount of involuntary debt liquidation because almost no one expects deflation before it starts.
A high-debt situation becomes unsustainable when the rate of economic growth falls beneath the prevailing rate of interest on money owed and creditors refuse to underwrite the interest payments with more credit.
A deflationary crash is characterized in part by a persistent, sustained, deep, general decline in people’s desire and ability to lend and borrow. A depression is characterized in part by a persistent, sustained, deep, general decline in production.
Governments have often outlawed free-market determinations of what constitutes money and imposed their own versions upon society by law, but earlier schemes usually involved coinage. Under central banking, a government forces its citizens to accept its debt as the only form of legal tender. The Federal Reserve System assumed this monopoly role in the United States in 1913.
In 1933, President Roosevelt and Congress outlawed U.S. gold ownership and nullified and prohibited all domestic contracts denoted in gold, making Federal Reserve notes the legal tender of the land. In 1971, President Nixon halted gold payments from the U.S. Treasury to foreigners in exchange for dollars. Today, the Treasury will not give anyone anything tangible in exchange for a dollar. Even though Federal Reserve notes are defined as “obligations of the United States,” they are no obligations to do anything. Although a dollar is labeled as a “note,” which means a debt contract, it is not a note for anything.
The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and similar institutions, funded mostly by the U.S. taxpayer, have extended immense credit around the globe. Their policies have supported nearly continuous worldwide inflation, particularly over the past thirty years. As a result, the global financial system is gorged with non-self-liquidating credit.
If the duration of recent past cycles is to repeat, then the falling portion of the current economic cycle would last another two years, and the depression would reach bottom in 2004.
The primary basis for today’s belief in perpetual prosperity and inflation with perhaps an occasional recession is what I call the “potent directors” fallacy. It is nearly impossible to find a treatise on macroeconomics today that does not assert or assume that the Federal Reserve Board has learned to control both our money and our economy. Many believe that it also possesses immense power to manipulate the stock market.
For many people, the single biggest financial shock and surprise over the next decade will be the revelation that the Fed has never really known what on earth it was doing. The spectacle of U.S. officials in recent weeks lecturing Japan on how to contain deflation will be revealed as the grossest hubris.
If people and corporations are unwilling to borrow or unable to finance debt, and if banks and investors are disinclined to lend, central banks cannot force them to do so. During deflation, they cannot even induce them to do so with a zero interest rate.
One example of action impelled by defensive psychology is governments’ recurring drive toward protectionism during deflationary periods. Protection is correctly recognized among economists of all stripes as destructive, yet there is always a call for it when people’s mental state changes to a defensive psychology.
The ultimate effect of deflation is to reduce the supply of money and credit. Your goal is to make sure that it doesn’t reduce the supply of your money and credit.
The ultimate effect of depression is financial ruin. Your goal is to make sure that it doesn’t ruin you.
The main goal of investing in a crash environment is safety. When deflation looms, almost every investment category is associated with immense risks. Most investors have no idea of these risks and will think you are a fool for taking precautions.
An added problem with owning government bonds is the political risk. Governments have a long record of stiffing their creditors in a crisis, and no government is immune from adopting that solution to its financial problems. A new regime especially may have little regard for previously squandered credit.
In the initial stages of a depression, sellers remain under an illusion about what their property is really worth. They keep a high list price on their house, reflecting what it was worth last year. I know people who are doing that now. This stubbornness leads to a drop in sales volume. At some point, a few owners cave in and sell at much lower prices. Then others are forced to drop their prices, too. What is the potential buyer’s psychology at that point? “Well, gee, property prices have been coming down. Why should I rush? I’ll wait till they come down further.” The further they come down, the more the buyer wants to wait. It’s a downward spiral.
Taking out a home equity loan is nothing but turning ownership of your home over to your bank in exchange for whatever other items you would like to own. It’s a reckless course, and it stems from the extreme confidence that accompanies a major top in social mood.
Owning an array of investments is financial suicide during deflation. They all go down, and the logistics of getting out of them can be a nightmare. There can be weird exceptions to this rule, such as gold in the early 1930s when the government fixed the price, or perhaps some commodity that is crucial in a war, but otherwise, all assets go down in price during deflation except one: cash.
Why do banks fail? For nearly 200 years, the courts have sanctioned an interpretation of the term “deposits” to mean not funds that you deliver for safekeeping but a loan to your bank. Your bank balance, then, is an IOU from the bank to you, even though there is no loan contract and no required interest payment. Thus, legally speaking, you have a claim on your money deposited in a bank, but practically speaking, you have a claim only on the loans that the bank makes with your money.
Some states in the U.S., in a fit of deadly “compassion,” have made it illegal for a bank to seize the home of someone who has declared bankruptcy. In such situations, the bank and its depositors are on the hook indefinitely for a borrower’s unthrift.
The estimated representative value of all derivatives in the world today is $90 trillion, over half of which is held by U.S. banks. Many banks use derivatives to hedge against investment exposure, but that strategy works only if the speculator on the other side of the trade can pay off if he’s wrong.
If the authorities in your country decide to disallow short selling, the bad news is that this option will be closed to you. The good news is that they usually take such actions near the major bottoms, so it will probably be about the proper time to cover shorts and start composing your “buy” list anyway.
If your government decides to confiscate gold, your country’s banks will be recruited in the operation. If it happens sometime in the coming crash, the reason will probably be “fighting terrorism.”
With the retirement setup in the U.S., the government need not be as direct as Argentina’s. It need merely assert, after a stock market fall decimates many people’s savings, that stocks are too risky to hold for retirement purposes. Under the guise of protecting you, it could ban stocks and perhaps other investments in tax-exempt pension plans and restrict assets to one category: “safe” long-term U.S. Treasury bonds. Then it could raise the penalty of early withdrawal to 100 percent. Bingo. The government will have seized the entire $2 trillion held in government-sponsored, tax-deferred 401K private pension plans. I’m not saying it will happen, but it could, and wouldn’t you rather have your money safely under your own discretion?
Bear markets engender labor strikes, racial conflict, religious persecution, political unrest, trade protectionism, coups and wars. In the area of personal behavior, part of the population gets more conservative, and part gets more hedonistic, and each side describes the other as something that needs reform. One reason that conflicts gain such scope in depressions is that much of the middle class gets wiped out by the financial debacle, increasing the number of people with little or nothing to lose and anger to spare.
Usually in a major bear market, you are less likely to encounter a mob, a criminal or a terrorist than to face state-sponsored controls within your own country or military attack from without, and there may be little that a retreat or karate can do for you in those situations.
You cannot anticipate every possible law, regulation or political event that will be implemented to thwart your attempt at safety, liquidity and solvency. This is why you must plan ahead and pay attention. As you do, think about these issues so that when political forces troll for victims, you are legally outside the scope of the danger.
Far more people in the past century had their lives wrecked or terminated by domestic implosions that by war. Whether you lived in Russia in the 1920s, Germany in the 1930s, Europe in the 1940s, China in the late 1940s, Cuba in 1959 or Cambodia in the 1970s, the smart thing to do early was to get out of Dodge.
People and institutions that best weather the system-wide debt liquidation of a deflationary crash and depression are those that take on no debt and extend no risky credit. This is the ideal situation for most people most of the time, anyway.
If you are entrepreneurial, start thinking of ways to serve people in a depression so that you will prosper in it. For example, I am writing this book. Think about what people will need when times get hard.
Don’t rely on government programs for your old age. Retirement programs such as Social Security in the U.S. are wealth-transfer schemes, not funded insurance, so they rely upon the government’s tax receipts.
Government surpluses generated by something other than a permanent policy of thrift are the product of exceptionally high tax receipts during boom times and therefore signal major tops. They’re not bullish; they’re bearish and ironically portend huge deficits directly around the corner.
Don’t expect government services to remain at their current levels. The ocean of money required to run the union-bloated, administration-stultified public school systems will be unavailable in a depression. School districts will have to adopt cost-cutting measures, and most of them will result in even worse service. Encourage low-cost free-market solutions, which will benefit both children and teachers.
Sunday, October 19, 2008
The Freedom Outlaw's Handbook by Claire Wolfe - EXCERPTS
The Freedom Outlaw’s Handbook: 179 Things to Do ‘Til the Revolution. Claire Wolfe. 2007 ISBN 978-1581605785
EXCERPTS
When freedom is illegal, criminals make laws and Outlaws make freedom.
America is at that awkward stage: It’s too late to work within the system but too early to shoot the bastards.
Don’t vote; it only encourages them.
Get your private information out of the public eye
· Get a PO box or private mail box (Mail Boxes, Etc. or some such)
· Never put your home address on applications or order forms
· Don’t use credit cards if you can avoid it.
· Be self-employed or work underground
Don’t pay more taxes than you must
When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, Dave Gross went on strike. He quit his job, lowered his income to a level at which he shouldn’t have to pay any income taxes – and began detailing the entire experiment on his Web site (http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/) as a guide for others. His is a safe but adamant form of tax resistance- and he’s discovered that not only are there fewer problems than he anticipated, there are surprising lifestyle blessings, as well.
NEVER talk with the feds.
Title 18 USC 1001 makes it a federal crime to lie to any federal investigator. As former Domestic Diva and federal prisoner Martha Stewart found out so painfully in 2004 – the smallest lie you utter in talking with a fed can put you behind bars. Ooops – poor Martha never got charged for the “crime” they were allegedly investigating her for (insider trading). She mainly got charged for being foolish enough to talk with them at all.
Don’t let the government control your kids
As of this writing, one state, Michigan, has even announced that every parent of a newborn (that is, every parent it knows of) will be automatically subjected to a criminal background check from now on. This is supposed to identify child abusers who’ve lost their parental rights. As with state schooling, SSNs, compulsory vaccines for minor childhood illnesses, and DNA collection, everything done to your children is done in the name of being for the children.
Get started with PGP
If you’re not already encrypting your e-mail: TIME TO START.
Surf anonymously
Both marketers and gov-o-snoops just love to track your movements around the Internet.
Shunning
Shunning does work better in small communities than in big cities where the target of the shunning has many other options. But make no mistake; it does work. Citizens of northern California’s cannabis-growing counties have used it for years to make drug-prohibition agents unwelcome. And U.S. Forest Service bureaucrat Gloria Flora resigned during a long, heated dispute over public access to land in Elko County, Nevada – driven out by local residents who refused Forest Service employees service in restaurants and otherwise shunned them.
Check your computer for keystroke loggers
Most loggers are made for windows.
General information and help: http://security.resist.ca/keylog.shtml
Extra help for Mac users: http://macscan.securemac.com
Use Linux
SuSE Linux from Novell http://www.suse.com/us/
Mandrake Linux http://www.mandrakesoft.com
Getting a drivers license without a Social Security number
Since there’s still no legal requirement that any American actually have a Social Security number … and since a variety of religious denominations vehemently oppose the SSN (usually on the basis of it being the Mark of the Beast described in Revelation 13:15-18) … most states will still issue you a drivers license if you submit an affidavit stating that you have no SSN.
Follow your bliss
You “know” you couldn’t make a living as an artist, hitchhike around the world, build a better mousetrap, live off the land, build a cabin in the woods, invent cold fusion, write the Great American Novel, raise sheep for a living, move to a mountaintop, be self-employed, live in a hamlet in Vermont, join a monastery, lead an insurgency movement, or build wooden clocks for a living. But you only “know” because other people told you so.
Maybe you’re already a “terrorist”
Remember, this is not the America we learned about in school. The federal government can declare any organization to be “terrorist”, for any reason – and can thereafter confiscate its resources and persecute its contributors.
Cultivate some Mormon friends
There is a really bad joke that goes like this:
“Do you know what’s in the most basic disaster survival kit?”
“A rifle and a directory of the local Mormon ward” …
Whether you agree with their teachings or not, the Saints have other valuable lessons to teach us all. They are one of the most cohesive social groups in the world. Their church-run welfare system – based on the dignity of work, voluntary contributions and mutual aid – is more effective and more truly humane than any government system ever devised.
End the Drug War
The government doesn’t need the Drug War anymore. It’s now got the War on Terrorism as an excuse to spy on, arrest, terrorize, detain, and cow us. Not to mention all those other wars on everything from poverty to “obesity”. Not to mention “wars” on half the oil-producing nations of the globe. So what the heck, surely the gummint should be willing to give up one little tiny war, right? The Drug War, as we know from decades of bitter experience and thousands of analytical books and articles, has done absolutely nada, zip, zero, nothing to “get drugs off the street.”
The Free State Project (and its wild west cousins)
The Free State Project is a plan to get 20,000 freedom-loving activists to move to New Hampshire and work to deeply reduce the size, scope and coercive power of government. The idea is that, in a state with a small population, 20,000 activists (as opposed to 20,000 couch potatoes) can have a disproportionate voice in both government and culture.
Government supremacist: the power of words
It’s not “public schools”. It’s government schools.
The government isn’t “us”. It’s them.
They aren’t our “representatives”. They are “politicians” – which everyone knows is a dirty word.
We don’t obey laws. We’re subject to edicts.
They aren’t peace officers any more. They’re enforcers or law enforcers.
It’s not “taxation”. It’s confiscation.
It’s not an entitlement. It’s a giveaway.
Demilitarize the cops
If there’s one trend that’s become dangerously pervasive across the police departments of America, it’s militarization. Tempted by free or cheap military equipment and federal training, besotted with the “glamour” of Hollywood cops kicking down doors and roughing up suspects, cops from New York City to Mayberry have gotten into machine guns, midnight raids, camo outfits, black facemasks, and other accoutrements of terrorist death squads.
There’s a difference between police and soldiers, and it’s an important one. Police are supposed to protect the public against a minority of violent or thieving people. Soldiers are supposed to kill the enemy. You don’t want that latter mentality distorting your local “thin blue line”.
Fly the Gadsden flag
You’ve seen it – the bright yellow flag with its coiled rattlesnake and the words, “Don’t Tread On Me.” That’s the Gadsden flag, designed during the American Revolution and once a candidate for the role now played by the Stars & Stripes.
Know your rights as a juror – and promote everybody’s rights
FIJA, the Fully Informed Jury Association, needs everybody’s support. It has one, clear, simple, beautiful purpose: to tell jurors and prospective jurors what modern judges will not – that they have the right to judge the laws as well as the facts. If you’re on a jury and you think a law is stupid or unfair, you have every right to find the defendant not guilt on that basis. It’s an ancient right, and it’s one juries have often exercised by default anyway. (One reason prohibition ended was that juries were refusing to convict people who violated it. But judges – with no basis in law or tradition – usually tell jurors the exact opposite.)
Put some teeth into the Bill of Rights
The Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution as a condition of ratification. Its aim: to ensure that a strong central government would never overrun the powers of the states and the rights of the individual.
Another worthy organization, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (http://bordc.org/) is dedicated to getting cities and states to pass resolutions declaring that they won’t enforce those aspects of the Patriot Act that violate the Bill of Rights.
Create a one-person “organization”
How many big-government-promoting organizations, widely quoted and taken extremely seriously by the media, are not much more than one or two people with a good sense of PR and the sympathies of the press? It’s harder to be taken seriously if you are libertarian or “right-wing”, but not impossible if you are persistent and professional in your approach, or if you live in an area small enough for the media to be desperate for stories.
Learn to disappear in a crowd
Here’s something fun to try that could also save your life. Practice invisibility. That is, practice being in various kinds of crowds and public settings and blending in so perfectly that no one really sees you. Try being the perfect fan at a football game, even if you detest the sport. Try being the tweedy professor on a college campus, even if you didn’t make it past high school. Be the tired mother at the grocery store, the sharp reporter at the crime scene, the business executive at the airport, the street person in the plaza.
Guerrilla gun tactics
Until recently, the “moderates” in the gun-rights movement argued that confiscation would never happen in the U.S. Even after Australians and Britons lined up like sheep in 1997 to turn in their firearms, some said it couldn’t happen here. Then California Attorney General Dan Lundgren announced a confiscation of SKS rifles with detachable magazines. That was a fiat decision, later fortunately overturned. However, in 1998, Massachusetts passed a draconian gun law that required – among other monstrosities – confiscation of many types of firearms from anyone failing to get a state license to own their own existing, legally possessed property.
Cellphones and checkpoints
It’s a good idea to carry a cellphone in your vehicle. You already know that. But here’s another good use for it. If you’re stopped at a checkpoint, you can call a friend, relative, or prearranged contact … and report on your location, what agencies are conducting the checkpoint, and what exactly is being done to the stopped motorists.
Don’t be a terrorist
Terrorism is properly defined as organized, systematic violence carried out against non-government targets for the purpose of producing fear and submission. Despite all the blather in the media and on the floor of Congress, an act has to have all those elements to be true terrorism. Therefore, people who attach only government agents and property aren’t terrorists. They’re guerilla fighters. Whether they are fighting in a good cause or not is up to history – and each of us individuals – to judge. But terrorists they ain’t.
Someday, it will be time
Few things are more painful and depressing than watching freedom be legislated, regulated, and decreed away. It’s even harder when Our Glorious Leaders assure us they’re destroying freedom for the sole purpose of saving freedom, and it’s worse yet when the vast majority of our fellow citizens merely not their heads in response like dashboard doggies.
QUOTATIONS
Edward Abbey
Let us hope our weapons are never needed – but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government – and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.
Samuel Adams
If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
General Elias Alias
Whoever owns one’s debt owns one’s ass.
Anonymous
Truth is stranger than fiction and also harder to make up.
Charles Bradlaugh
If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.
Charles Bukowski
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship don’t have to waste your time voting.
Albert Camus
Integrity has no need of rules.
Albert Camus
The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to slaves.
Douglas Casey
Inventions like gunpowder, the printing press, and the computer have done far more to overpower oppression than every volume of political thought ever written.
Benjamin Disraeli
Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
Max DePree
We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
Alan Dershowitz
Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.
Albert Einstein
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
Padraig Flynn
Fate is an open road, and all you can do is put your foot on the gas and Drive, Baby, Drive.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
The first principle of non-violence is the non-compliance with everything that is humiliating.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Robert D. Graham
Once you stop fearing government, the government fears you.
General Alexander Haig
Let them march all they want, so long as they continue to pay their taxes.
Robert A. Heinlein
Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy … censorship. When any government, or any church, for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
W.G. Hill
The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians, and social workers as ominous and dangerous.
Adolph Hitler
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.
Mary McCarthy
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Kinsey Millhone
Once people think you’re bad, you might as well be bad. It’s more fun than being good.
Benito Mussolini
Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power.
P.J. O’Rourke
This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.
William Pitt the Younger
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Terry Pratchett
“But look,” said Ponder, “The graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely.”
“Ook.” [said the orangutan]
“What’d he say?” said the Bursar …
“I think he said, ‘Sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody,” said Ponder. “Oh blast. Come on.”
Ayn Rand
The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
George Bernard Shaw
The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
Henry David Thoreau
How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
Henry David Thoreau
The authority of government … can have no pure right over my person and my property but what I concede to it.
Alan Watts
But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become self-serving busybodies.
Walt Whitman
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
EXCERPTS
When freedom is illegal, criminals make laws and Outlaws make freedom.
America is at that awkward stage: It’s too late to work within the system but too early to shoot the bastards.
Don’t vote; it only encourages them.
Get your private information out of the public eye
· Get a PO box or private mail box (Mail Boxes, Etc. or some such)
· Never put your home address on applications or order forms
· Don’t use credit cards if you can avoid it.
· Be self-employed or work underground
Don’t pay more taxes than you must
When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, Dave Gross went on strike. He quit his job, lowered his income to a level at which he shouldn’t have to pay any income taxes – and began detailing the entire experiment on his Web site (http://www.sniggle.net/Experiment/) as a guide for others. His is a safe but adamant form of tax resistance- and he’s discovered that not only are there fewer problems than he anticipated, there are surprising lifestyle blessings, as well.
NEVER talk with the feds.
Title 18 USC 1001 makes it a federal crime to lie to any federal investigator. As former Domestic Diva and federal prisoner Martha Stewart found out so painfully in 2004 – the smallest lie you utter in talking with a fed can put you behind bars. Ooops – poor Martha never got charged for the “crime” they were allegedly investigating her for (insider trading). She mainly got charged for being foolish enough to talk with them at all.
Don’t let the government control your kids
As of this writing, one state, Michigan, has even announced that every parent of a newborn (that is, every parent it knows of) will be automatically subjected to a criminal background check from now on. This is supposed to identify child abusers who’ve lost their parental rights. As with state schooling, SSNs, compulsory vaccines for minor childhood illnesses, and DNA collection, everything done to your children is done in the name of being for the children.
Get started with PGP
If you’re not already encrypting your e-mail: TIME TO START.
Surf anonymously
Both marketers and gov-o-snoops just love to track your movements around the Internet.
Shunning
Shunning does work better in small communities than in big cities where the target of the shunning has many other options. But make no mistake; it does work. Citizens of northern California’s cannabis-growing counties have used it for years to make drug-prohibition agents unwelcome. And U.S. Forest Service bureaucrat Gloria Flora resigned during a long, heated dispute over public access to land in Elko County, Nevada – driven out by local residents who refused Forest Service employees service in restaurants and otherwise shunned them.
Check your computer for keystroke loggers
Most loggers are made for windows.
General information and help: http://security.resist.ca/keylog.shtml
Extra help for Mac users: http://macscan.securemac.com
Use Linux
SuSE Linux from Novell http://www.suse.com/us/
Mandrake Linux http://www.mandrakesoft.com
Getting a drivers license without a Social Security number
Since there’s still no legal requirement that any American actually have a Social Security number … and since a variety of religious denominations vehemently oppose the SSN (usually on the basis of it being the Mark of the Beast described in Revelation 13:15-18) … most states will still issue you a drivers license if you submit an affidavit stating that you have no SSN.
Follow your bliss
You “know” you couldn’t make a living as an artist, hitchhike around the world, build a better mousetrap, live off the land, build a cabin in the woods, invent cold fusion, write the Great American Novel, raise sheep for a living, move to a mountaintop, be self-employed, live in a hamlet in Vermont, join a monastery, lead an insurgency movement, or build wooden clocks for a living. But you only “know” because other people told you so.
Maybe you’re already a “terrorist”
Remember, this is not the America we learned about in school. The federal government can declare any organization to be “terrorist”, for any reason – and can thereafter confiscate its resources and persecute its contributors.
Cultivate some Mormon friends
There is a really bad joke that goes like this:
“Do you know what’s in the most basic disaster survival kit?”
“A rifle and a directory of the local Mormon ward” …
Whether you agree with their teachings or not, the Saints have other valuable lessons to teach us all. They are one of the most cohesive social groups in the world. Their church-run welfare system – based on the dignity of work, voluntary contributions and mutual aid – is more effective and more truly humane than any government system ever devised.
End the Drug War
The government doesn’t need the Drug War anymore. It’s now got the War on Terrorism as an excuse to spy on, arrest, terrorize, detain, and cow us. Not to mention all those other wars on everything from poverty to “obesity”. Not to mention “wars” on half the oil-producing nations of the globe. So what the heck, surely the gummint should be willing to give up one little tiny war, right? The Drug War, as we know from decades of bitter experience and thousands of analytical books and articles, has done absolutely nada, zip, zero, nothing to “get drugs off the street.”
The Free State Project (and its wild west cousins)
The Free State Project is a plan to get 20,000 freedom-loving activists to move to New Hampshire and work to deeply reduce the size, scope and coercive power of government. The idea is that, in a state with a small population, 20,000 activists (as opposed to 20,000 couch potatoes) can have a disproportionate voice in both government and culture.
Government supremacist: the power of words
It’s not “public schools”. It’s government schools.
The government isn’t “us”. It’s them.
They aren’t our “representatives”. They are “politicians” – which everyone knows is a dirty word.
We don’t obey laws. We’re subject to edicts.
They aren’t peace officers any more. They’re enforcers or law enforcers.
It’s not “taxation”. It’s confiscation.
It’s not an entitlement. It’s a giveaway.
Demilitarize the cops
If there’s one trend that’s become dangerously pervasive across the police departments of America, it’s militarization. Tempted by free or cheap military equipment and federal training, besotted with the “glamour” of Hollywood cops kicking down doors and roughing up suspects, cops from New York City to Mayberry have gotten into machine guns, midnight raids, camo outfits, black facemasks, and other accoutrements of terrorist death squads.
There’s a difference between police and soldiers, and it’s an important one. Police are supposed to protect the public against a minority of violent or thieving people. Soldiers are supposed to kill the enemy. You don’t want that latter mentality distorting your local “thin blue line”.
Fly the Gadsden flag
You’ve seen it – the bright yellow flag with its coiled rattlesnake and the words, “Don’t Tread On Me.” That’s the Gadsden flag, designed during the American Revolution and once a candidate for the role now played by the Stars & Stripes.
Know your rights as a juror – and promote everybody’s rights
FIJA, the Fully Informed Jury Association, needs everybody’s support. It has one, clear, simple, beautiful purpose: to tell jurors and prospective jurors what modern judges will not – that they have the right to judge the laws as well as the facts. If you’re on a jury and you think a law is stupid or unfair, you have every right to find the defendant not guilt on that basis. It’s an ancient right, and it’s one juries have often exercised by default anyway. (One reason prohibition ended was that juries were refusing to convict people who violated it. But judges – with no basis in law or tradition – usually tell jurors the exact opposite.)
Put some teeth into the Bill of Rights
The Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution as a condition of ratification. Its aim: to ensure that a strong central government would never overrun the powers of the states and the rights of the individual.
Another worthy organization, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (http://bordc.org/) is dedicated to getting cities and states to pass resolutions declaring that they won’t enforce those aspects of the Patriot Act that violate the Bill of Rights.
Create a one-person “organization”
How many big-government-promoting organizations, widely quoted and taken extremely seriously by the media, are not much more than one or two people with a good sense of PR and the sympathies of the press? It’s harder to be taken seriously if you are libertarian or “right-wing”, but not impossible if you are persistent and professional in your approach, or if you live in an area small enough for the media to be desperate for stories.
Learn to disappear in a crowd
Here’s something fun to try that could also save your life. Practice invisibility. That is, practice being in various kinds of crowds and public settings and blending in so perfectly that no one really sees you. Try being the perfect fan at a football game, even if you detest the sport. Try being the tweedy professor on a college campus, even if you didn’t make it past high school. Be the tired mother at the grocery store, the sharp reporter at the crime scene, the business executive at the airport, the street person in the plaza.
Guerrilla gun tactics
Until recently, the “moderates” in the gun-rights movement argued that confiscation would never happen in the U.S. Even after Australians and Britons lined up like sheep in 1997 to turn in their firearms, some said it couldn’t happen here. Then California Attorney General Dan Lundgren announced a confiscation of SKS rifles with detachable magazines. That was a fiat decision, later fortunately overturned. However, in 1998, Massachusetts passed a draconian gun law that required – among other monstrosities – confiscation of many types of firearms from anyone failing to get a state license to own their own existing, legally possessed property.
Cellphones and checkpoints
It’s a good idea to carry a cellphone in your vehicle. You already know that. But here’s another good use for it. If you’re stopped at a checkpoint, you can call a friend, relative, or prearranged contact … and report on your location, what agencies are conducting the checkpoint, and what exactly is being done to the stopped motorists.
Don’t be a terrorist
Terrorism is properly defined as organized, systematic violence carried out against non-government targets for the purpose of producing fear and submission. Despite all the blather in the media and on the floor of Congress, an act has to have all those elements to be true terrorism. Therefore, people who attach only government agents and property aren’t terrorists. They’re guerilla fighters. Whether they are fighting in a good cause or not is up to history – and each of us individuals – to judge. But terrorists they ain’t.
Someday, it will be time
Few things are more painful and depressing than watching freedom be legislated, regulated, and decreed away. It’s even harder when Our Glorious Leaders assure us they’re destroying freedom for the sole purpose of saving freedom, and it’s worse yet when the vast majority of our fellow citizens merely not their heads in response like dashboard doggies.
QUOTATIONS
Edward Abbey
Let us hope our weapons are never needed – but do not forget what the common people knew when they demanded the Bill of Rights: An armed citizenry is the first defense, the best defense, and the final defense against tyranny. If guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns. Only the police, the secret police, the military, the hired servants of our rulers. Only the government – and a few outlaws. I intend to be among the outlaws.
Samuel Adams
If you love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude greater than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you. May your chains set lightly upon you; and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen.
General Elias Alias
Whoever owns one’s debt owns one’s ass.
Anonymous
Truth is stranger than fiction and also harder to make up.
Charles Bradlaugh
If special honor is claimed for any, then heresy should have it as the truest servitor of human kind.
Charles Bukowski
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship don’t have to waste your time voting.
Albert Camus
Integrity has no need of rules.
Albert Camus
The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to slaves.
Douglas Casey
Inventions like gunpowder, the printing press, and the computer have done far more to overpower oppression than every volume of political thought ever written.
Benjamin Disraeli
Wherever is found what is called a paternal government, there is found state education. It has been discovered that the best way to insure implicit obedience is to commence tyranny in the nursery.
Max DePree
We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are.
Alan Dershowitz
Foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right or that it’s too much of a safety hazard don’t see the danger of the big picture. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use this same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.
Albert Einstein
Never do anything against conscience even if the state demands it.
Padraig Flynn
Fate is an open road, and all you can do is put your foot on the gas and Drive, Baby, Drive.
Mohandas K. Gandhi
The first principle of non-violence is the non-compliance with everything that is humiliating.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
Robert D. Graham
Once you stop fearing government, the government fears you.
General Alexander Haig
Let them march all they want, so long as they continue to pay their taxes.
Robert A. Heinlein
Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy … censorship. When any government, or any church, for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.
W.G. Hill
The threat of people acting in their own enlightened and rational self-interest strikes bureaucrats, politicians, and social workers as ominous and dangerous.
Adolph Hitler
The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms.
Mary McCarthy
Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.
Kinsey Millhone
Once people think you’re bad, you might as well be bad. It’s more fun than being good.
Benito Mussolini
Fascism should rightly be called Corporatism as it is a merge of state and corporate power.
P.J. O’Rourke
This country was founded by religious nuts with guns.
William Pitt the Younger
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Terry Pratchett
“But look,” said Ponder, “The graveyards are full of people who rushed in bravely but unwisely.”
“Ook.” [said the orangutan]
“What’d he say?” said the Bursar …
“I think he said, ‘Sooner or later the graveyards are full of everybody,” said Ponder. “Oh blast. Come on.”
Ayn Rand
The man who produces while others dispose of his product is a slave.
George Bernard Shaw
The things most people want to know about are usually none of their business.
Henry David Thoreau
How does it become a man to behave toward this American government today? I answer, that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it.
Henry David Thoreau
The authority of government … can have no pure right over my person and my property but what I concede to it.
Alan Watts
But when no risk is taken there is no freedom. It is thus that, in an industrial society, the plethora of laws made for our personal safety convert the land into a nursery, and policemen hired to protect us become self-serving busybodies.
Walt Whitman
The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise see in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.
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