Well, there’s young Tim again, trim and handsome little devil, as reported in the Washington Post, claiming that even if he uses “’extraordinary measures’ to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations, lawmakers will need to raise the legal limit on government borrowing by July 8.
“Current projections show the US will reach its $14.3 trillion cap on borrowing ‘no later than May,’ Geithner wrote in a letter Monday to leaders on Capitol Hill. He said that he would ‘use all measures available to me’ [him] to delay additional borrowing above that cap.’”
It seems that the old national debt goes up an average of $125 billion a month, buying us less than eight weeks for Congress to act. And of course, Tim adds, “Default by the United States is unthinkable. This is not a new or partisan judgment; it is a conclusion that has been shared by every Secretary of the Treasury, regardless of political party, in the modern era.”
Yes, and none of them, have done a damn thing about it, except to raise it and spend more since 1980 when President Reagan decided to lower taxes for the rich and raise the military budget astronomically. The national debt increased to slightly under $1 trillion when he finished. Now the National Debt is projected out to 2016 to be at $21 trillion, twenty-one times what it was 36 years ago. See the pie chart for yourself. Now that’s raising the ceiling and the roof!
So, my heartfelt advice is to start withdrawing those troops from Afghanistan and Iraq; stop bombing Pakistan with drones; and stay the hell away from Libya. Although we could learn a financial lesson or two from its much maligned leader Mommar Gaddafi, who the UN’s Human Rights Council is ready to praise for Libya’s human rights record. Yes, believe it or not.
Ellen Brown at Intrepid Report commented, Libya: All about oil or all about banking? Then she pointed out, “[Libyans] are entitled to free treatment [healthcare], and their hospitals provide the best in the world of medical equipment. Education in Libya is free, capable young people have the opportunity to study abroad at government expense. When marrying, young couples receive 60,000 Libyan dinars (about 50,000 U.S. dollars) of financial assistance. Non-interest state loans, and as practice shows, undated. Due to government subsidies the price of cars is much lower than in Europe, and they are affordable for every family. Gasoline and bread cost a penny, no taxes for those who are engaged in agriculture. The Libyan people are quiet and peaceful, are not inclined to drink, and are very religious.”
How about them apples, Congress? Why doesn’t Gaddafi advise you all, including the Fed? The enmity of the international community was supposedly about the struggle against his regime. But the truth is he’s so good at leading his country, he’s making the political crooks in the region look bad, including our own home-bred thieves. Let me, with Ms. Brown’s help, tell you why . . .
Gaddafi’s Libyan government brought water to the desert by building the largest, most expensive irrigation project in history, the $33 billion GMMR (Great Man-Made River) project. Since water is more crucial to life than oil in Libya, it provides 70 percent of the population with water for drinking and irrigation, pumping it from Libya’s vast underground Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System in the south to populated coastal areas 4,000 kilometers to the north.
Libya produces only about 2 percent of the world’s oil. But Saudi Arabia has enough spare capacity to make up for any lost production. So why did US General Wesley Clark (Ret.) say in a 2007 “Democracy Now” interview circulating on the Net that another general told him, the US plans to take down seven countries in five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iran? Brown asks, “What do these seven countries have in common? In the context of banking, one that sticks out is that none of them is listed among the 56 member banks of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). That evidently puts them outside the long regulatory arm of the central bankers’ central bank in Switzerland.”
The two exceptions to the lot seem to be Libya and Iraq, the two that have actually been attacked. “Kenneth Schortgen Jr., writing on Examiner.com, noted that [s]ix months before the US moved into Iraq to take down Saddam Hussein, the oil nation had made the move to accept Euros instead of dollars for oil, and this became a threat to the global dominance of the dollar as the reserve currency, and its dominion as the petrodollar.”
But the real deal Brown says is that Gaddafi is being punished. A Russian article stated he moved to turn down the dollar and the euro and asked Arab and African nations to use a new currency, the gold dinar. Gaddafi even thought of creating a united African continent, with its 200 million people using a single currency. That must have scared the bejesus out of the US and France.
But the capper is that the Central Bank of Libya is 100 percent state owned. And right now, the Libyan government creates its own money, the Libyan Dinar, through the facilities of its own central bank. Can you beat that with a stick, Timmy boy, you and your Wall Street pals, getting fat on breaking America’s bank, piling on the interest, the Quantitative Easements, et al, and this old Arab boy knowing how to stay solvent and then some?
Brown also mentions that the “globalist banking cartels . . . in order to do business with Libya . . . must go through the Libyan Central Bank and its national currency, a place where they have absolutely zero dominion or power-broking ability. Therefore taking down the Central Bank of Libya (CBL) may not appear in the speeches of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy but this is certainly at the top of the globalist agenda for absorbing Libya into its hive of compliant nations.” Not surprising.
Another stopper: “Libya not only has oil. According to the IMF, its central bank has nearly 144 tons of gold in its vaults. With that sort of asset base, who needs the BIS (Bank of International Settlements), the IMF (International Money Fund) and their rules?” Are you choking yet, Timmy, Benny boy Bernanke, and Alan Greenspan, in whatever hole you are hiding these days?
Therefore says Brown, “Applying the State Theory of Money, any government can fund with its own currency all its domestic developmental needs to maintain full employment without inflation.” The “state theory of money” refers to money created by governments rather than private banks. Isn’t that sweet.
“ . . . Borrowing it [money] from the government’s own central bank has the advantage that the loan is effectively interest-free. Eliminating interest has been shown to reduce the cost of public projects by an average of 50 percent.” An interest-free loan: anybody in the US know what that is?
It seems that’s how the Libyan system works. “According to Wikipedia, the functions of the Central Bank of Libya include “issuing and regulating banknotes and coins in Libya” and “managing and issuing all state loans.” Libya’s wholly state-owned bank can and does issue the national currency and lend it for state purposes.” Well, I’ll be darned. That reminds me of the North Dakota State Bank, which is its sole shareholder, and produces a 25–26 percent payback to the people per year, over $300 million in the last decade. It’s the only state in the union not in debt, has a surplus, full employment, and supplies low-interest loans to its depositors. I call it The Miracle of North Dakota’s Fed-free bank.
Finally, Brown asks, “So is this new war all about oil or all about banking? Maybe both—and water as well. With energy, water, and ample credit to develop the infrastructure to access them, a nation can be free of the grip of foreign creditors. And that may be the real threat of Libya: it could show the world what is possible.” What is possible, yes Tim, yes Congress, yes President Obama. Listen up!
What’s also possible is we don’t have to keep climbing the debt ladder higher and higher. Get rid of that Fed that’s sucking us dry. Get rid of Geithner and his whole crew. Get some legit bankers in there and let the US produce its own currency, not the crooked Fed’s that supposedly lends us our money with interest, and which is crushing us. If Gaddafi figured all this out, why couldn’t we?
Well, Lincoln did. He had the USG print “greenbacks” during the Civil War to pay off the war debt. Maybe that’s one of the reasons he was assassinated. McKinley was shot, after having the government put out its own money. One reason JFK was killed was for issuing silver coinage to back the US not the Fed dollar. You could say that is what D.C.’s despot billionaires want: to have the people penniless, helpless, and no threat to Big Money sucking up the last buck in sight.
Brown wonders, If the Gaddafi government goes down, it will be interesting to watch whether the new central bank [of the ‘revolutionaries’] joins the Bank for Internal Settlements, whether the nationalized oil industry gets sold off to investors, and whether education and health care continue to be free.”
I’m sure those rebels in leadership are dying to privatize everything but the kitchen sink, just like here. Privatize or eliminate, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, healthcare, infrastructure, the whole enchilada, except the military budget, which keeps getting (like Pinocchio’s nose) longer and longer and bigger and bigger with all the lies, the scams, the false-flag wars to pay for, plus the extra war monies that get laid on endlessly.
That’s why the banks are running on drug cartel money, any form of liquidity they can suck up, since they’ve burnt out our treasury with money-printing powers. As Daniel Estulin pointed out in Shadow Masters, “An international network of governments and secret-service agencies work together with drug dealers and terrorists for mutual benefit and profit.” So let’s not listen to the language of fear that Geithner is preaching like his predecessor Hank Paulson that “We must have $700 billion in three days or the economy will fall.” Everyone took the bait, i.e. socialized their risk, paid off the too big to fail banks’ bad debts,” as the banks continued to privatize profits, including still paying their ridiculously large bonuses.
This time give them an extension of several months to raise the debt ceiling, as the Fed is dismantled, a new currency is implemented, and the government prints it as the US money. We can use it to back treasuries. They will used around the world to pay down debts. Its value will be pegged to the power of our government to do the right thing. If that power still exists. Otherwise, we will go farther down the road of financial perdition, to hyperinflation, deflation, the end of life as we know it. The choice is simple. And don’t let anyone talk you out of it, especially Tiny Tim.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of theintrepidreport.com (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
