Parallel paths and the dangers of hyperinflation

Unemployment at a historic high. The mood of the people is low and full of discontent. The country is fraught with social and economic tension, while the economy is on the verge of collapse. Millions are living in poverty trying to protect their families as turmoil, political destruction, and violence is abundant. The value of the dollar dramatically plunging as government recklessly prints money by the wheelbarrow to pay off a skyrocketing debt.

These conditions aren’t far off from what faces America today, but on TheBlaze’s hyperinflation special Wednesday night Glenn explained that these conditions were actually those of Germany at the end of the first World War I as the Weimar Republic went through horrific hyperinflation. And while many would argue that the path to hyperinflation was a long and complex affair, the undeniable truth was that it was a result of the government printing money they didn’t have in order to pay off the debt. Sound familiar?

Germany ended up having to print all that money for three key reasons: 1. Negative consequences of a deadly and expensive war 2. Economic crisis of unprecedented proportions 3. Social and class division.

As a result of the First World War, Germany had several punitive reparations placed on them by the Treaty of Versailles. As the loser of the war, they were supposed to pay back the Allies for all loss and damages the victorious countries incurred.

Germany also had expensive entitlement programs, including benefit programs for veterans that they could not afford to pay. German soldiers returning home had a difficult time re-entering society, and felt betrayed when the promised benefits were not there.

Germany simply could not afford to pay their debts, and citizens could not afford increased taxes. The costs of running the government increased, so the Weimar Republic began printing money. As prices surged, sometimes increasing exponentially over a single day, people realized they had to spend their money quickly before it lost its value (hyperinflation).

During this same period, Germany saw a rise in riots, anti-semitism, political violence, and unrest. With everyone’s money becoming worthless, the institutions upon which these values were based eroded and so did the values themselves.

The deteriorating conditions left the German people desperate for a leader who could feed them, clothe them, and restore Germany to what it once had been. Coming out in strong opposition to the Weimar Republic, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were able to eventually seize power by promising the German people a different path.

And we all know how that went.

Glenn explained on the show how today America is facing a similar situation. We stand at the edge of a fiscal cliff. We have an out of control national debt that we aren’t able to pay. Our political leadership is deadlocked, and the Fed’s solution is quantitative easing. In many way, America is following a parallel path to Germany in the 1920s.

So what do you do? Glenn explained that “In a crisis of chaos, only the most organized will take control.”

He explained there were three areas to focus on to organize and prepare: (PK’s note – some of these aren’t a priority – focus on food, heat, light, survival)

1. Contact your governor. Tell them they get your states gold back. Strengthen local and regional banks. Make sure your state is as independent and secure as possible. Be self-sufficient at home and with your local community.

2. Get your children out of the public education system where they are being indoctrinated.

3. Change the media. Glenn is trying to do this with TheBlaze, but the truth is that the mainstream media is feeding the American people half-truth and lies. Look at primary sources, read with a critical eye, and question with boldness what the media is trying to tell you.

Extra:

On TheBlaze TV Wednesday night, Glenn hosted a special on hyperinflation. The impetus for the show was a diary that Glenn came across, written by a German woman who lived through hyperinflation in Germany during the First World War Glenn’s team ended up taking the diary and turning her entries into a video package so you can see real scenes from this horrible time in German and world history while listening to words of a person who lived through it. Please share this video with your friends and family so they can see the dangers that come with our of control printing of money.

http://www.glennbeck.com/2012/11/14/watch-a-german-womans-diary-details-the-horrific-effects-of-hyperinflation/

Bureaucrats Go After Santa Claus for…Not Having a Business License

William Mitchell of Shelby County, Tenn., was told that if he wanted to continue making money from his Santa Claus gig, he’d have to purchase a business license or face prosecution.

Mitchell sent a flyer to the Shelby County Clerk’s Office saying he would love to work their Christmas party this year.

They didn’t hire him.

Instead, they sent him a letter saying he better come buy a business license or they would turn him over to the district attorney’s office for prosecution.

The clerk’s office told us anyone who sells a service must have a business license.

Funny thing is, the county office didn’t tell Mitchell that only businesses generating more than $3,000 need to apply for the license. Unsurprisingly, Mitchell makes a whole lot less than three grand dressing up as St. Nick for Christmas parties.

Now he wants his $30 back.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/bureaucrats-go-after-santa-claus-for-not-having-a-business-license/

Northwestern U. Marxism conference packed with teachers

Teachers filled the ranks at the 2012 Midwest Marxism Conference, which was held Saturday at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey, who spoke at one of the breakout sessions, was just one of the hundreds of attendees, many of them teachers, there to strategize about the next phases of the partnership between Chicago Socialists and the Chicago Teachers Union.

Of course, all recording was strictly verboten unless you had been preapproved by the Chicago Socialists.

The event kicked off with Becca Barnes’s keynote speech. Barnes, a Chicago teacher, spoke about the new era of Marxism in America stemming from the Chicago Socialists’ recent successes in running the show during the Chicago Teachers Strike. Said Barnes, who referred to everyday American capitalists as “capitalist vampires,” “the struggle here in the United States has entered a new phase. Nowhere have we pointed the way forward more clearly than here in Chicago with the teachers union strike.” From her talk and other succeeding events throughout the day, it was clear that the Teachers Union and Marxists were one and the same.

I attended three break-out sessions in addition to the opening plenary. Each began with the speaker congratulating Barack Obama on his win. Rather than allowing discussion, the Chicago Socialists had a policy that disallowed actual person-to-person interaction; rather, the moderator required that you “raise your hand in a fist” in order to be placed in line to discuss. If you didn’t raise your hand in a fist, you were placed after those who did conform and raise their hand in a fist. As a queue formed, the result was that no comment addressed the previous issue raised.

Thankfully, after hours of enduring non-discussion and hate speech against Americans (and being amongst those celebrating a philosophy of mass murderers), I was “outed” as not a communist, told I was “not in solidarity” and surrounded by members of the Chicago Socialists who told me to leave the Northwestern School of Journalism premises. Also “spotted” as not in solidarity was Rebel Pundit, who had a more interesting exit than I:

Just what did the Chicago Socialists feel they had to hide, that attendees such as myself, observing, might expose?

Perhaps just how intertwined the Chicago Teachers Union is with the Chicago Socialists. Perhaps that Northwestern University was hosting a conference where the philosophy of mass murderers was held up.

Perhaps that parents might feel uncomfortable that these ideas were being presented to their children on-campus. And perhaps that parents of local schoolchildren might find out that their pre-school teacher, social worker, or Teachers Union rep had more than “for the kids” on their mind during this summer’s protests.

It is not an overstatement to say, based on the words of the teachers who filled the rooms at the Marxism Conference, that the Teachers agenda and the Marxist agenda is one and the same.

Welcome to the New Education of your children.

http://legalinsurrection.com/2012/11/northwestern-u-marxism-conference-packed-with-teachers/#more

GOP has chance to wage war on corporate welfare

Corporate welfare was the dog that didn't bark in this year's elections. "One of the things that got the Tea Party excited was opposition to the bank bailout," Paul said. "That sort of became a nonissue for us because Gov. Romney supported the bank bailout." The current lame-duck session of Congress provides a few opportunities for House and Senate Republicans to stake out free-market, populist ground.

Sugar subsidies, bank bailouts and special tax credits for well-connected industries will be on the table between now and the end of the year. In every case, the limited-government position is also the anti-big business position.

The sugar prop is probably the nation's least defensible corporate welfare program. The federal government, at the behest of domestic sugar growers, chokes off sugar imports, making sugar much more expensive in the United States than in the rest of the world. Meanwhile, Washington gives generous nonrecourse loans to sugar growers with sugar as collateral. So if somehow U.S. prices fall too low for the growers, taxpayers have to buy up all the sugar.

The sugar program will expire at the end of this year unless Congress renews it. On the campaign trail, President Obama blasted House Republicans for not having passed the farm bill that would reauthorize the sugar program along with other corporate welfare farm subsidies.

Republicans may not yet have the fortitude to wind down all farm subsidies, but the House could easily pass a farm bill that omits the sugar subsidy. If the White House and the Democrat-controlled Senate go to the mat for the sugar program, Republicans could point out that Dems are holding the farm bill hostage for a few politically connected businesses that force American consumers to pay higher prices.

Then there's the shadowy bank bailout that top congressional Democrats and the bank lobby want to extend. It's called the Transaction Account Guarantee. TAG provides a taxpayer guarantee on checking account balances -- above and beyond the $250,000 the FDIC insures.

In the heat of the 2008 financial panic, Congress created TAG to deter bank runs. The 2010 Dodd-Frank bill, which Obama touts as a broadside against banks, extended the bailout measure to the end of 2012.
The American Bankers Association is lobbying hard to extend the provision. Rep. Barney Frank, the top Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, has supported another extension. So have Democratic Sens. Sherrod Brown and Jon Tester.

The Obama administration disagrees with the bank lobby and some of his party's lawmakers: Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says TAG should be allowed to expire. Even so, Republicans opposing this bailout could draw a line distinguishing themselves from big-government, big-bank liberals in Congress. Or they could oppose the White House and the free market and side with the American Bankers Association.

Expiring tax breaks provide another opportunity for Republicans to battle the special interests while striking a blow for free markets.

General Electric, the American Wind Energy Association and other lobbying giants are fighting to extend tax credits for renewable energy. If Republicans attacked these credits as corporate welfare, and simultaneously pulled the plug on tax credits for the oil industry, they could plant a flag as scourges of the special interests. And if they kill these loopholes and reduce rates, they can claim real populist tax reform.

Tax reform is itself a populist issue. Tax credits typically accrue to the well-connected. Complexity is an asset for the well-connected and a burden for Mom and Pop. Witness GE's 2011 corporate income tax of $0. It's no coincidence that GE spends more than any other company on lobbying and has a 1,000-person tax division.

Big government benefits those who can afford the best lobbyist. Republicans can reach out to everyone else.

http://washingtonexaminer.com/carney-gop-has-chance-to-wage-war-on-corporate-welfare/article/2513495#.UKU1MmeaKSp

President Obama's silly, sexist defense of Susan Rice

Don't pick on the little lady.

Wednesday, President Obama bizarrely cast the U.N. Ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, as some delicate flower the boys should stop picking on for her dissembling claims on five Sunday talk shows following the killing of 4 Americans in Benghazi. But, there is no damsel in distress and Obama's paternalistic bravado in defense of a top administration official is going to come back to haunt him.

"If Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me," Obama intoned to the stenographers worshipping at his feet. The media had gathered for a rare "press conference" where Fox News' Ed Henry and ABC's Jake Tapper are usually the only ones who ever seem to ask a question that elicits anything other than filibustering presidential pabulum. (One "journalist" actually congratulated the president on his win and gushed about how she has never seen him lose an election.)

Group hug!

Obviously caught up in his own silly yarn about meanie Senators and helpless U.N. Ambassadors, the President complained, "When they go after the U.N. ambassador apparently because they think she's an easy target, then they've got a problem with me."

Imagine George Bush saying that people criticized John Bolton because he was an "easy target." He wouldn't.

It's absurd and chauvinistic for Obama to talk about the woman he thinks should be Secretary of State of the United States as if she needs the big strong man to come to her defense because a couple of Senators are criticizing her.

Believe it or not, Rice isn't the first potential Cabinet nominee to be opposed by members of Congress up on the Hill. Obama also left out the inconvenient detail that there is another senator who has Rice in the crosshairs: Sen. Kelly Ayotte. But perhaps a female Senator holding Rice accountable didn't sound menacing enough in the era of the "War on Women."

But it gets much worse.

As the president expressed outrage over the atrocity of members of Congress holding administration officials accountable, he said, "I'm happy to have that discussion with them. But for them to go after the U.N. ambassador? Who had nothing to do with Benghazi?"

Feast on those words for a second: The U.N. Ambassador had "nothing to do with Benghazi." At this point, the White House press corps should have flown into a frenzy, demanding to know why a person who had nothing to do with Benghazi was put on five Sunday talk shows as...the face of Benghazi!

This was an issue that had people scratching their heads the day of the Rice interviews, and plenty of questions were asked as to where Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was, and why Rice was put out instead. The administration at the time acted as though there was nothing remarkable about it, even though there clearly was.

But now we know -- straight from the lips of the president of the United States -- that they sent out a person who knew "nothing" about Benghazi to explain an atrocious attack against the United States that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans serving their country abroad.

No temper tantrum from the White House on the insult of being questioned about a terror attack against the U.S. abroad would be complete without their perennial favorite: the straw man.

The conceit of Obama's argument is that people are picking on a helpless girl -- a lowly U.N. ambassador -- because they are afraid of the big bad president.

Oh, please.

President Obama, incredibly, claimed that he was "happy to have the discussion" about Benghazi.

Really?

Because every time anyone asks the president about Benghazi he claims he can't say anything because there is an investigation going on. The State Department actually said at one point that they would no longer take questions on the issue from reporters.

Senator Graham's response to the president's revelations and accusations at the press conference was exactly right: He said, "Mr. President, don't think for one minute I don't hold you ultimately responsible for Benghazi."

The president says he is ready to talk about this? Great. We are all ears.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/11/15/president-obama-silly-sexist-defense-susan-rice/