Rubicon-They hide in plain sight.

 “They hide in plain sight.” That deciphered code came from the new AMC program called Rubicon. It is all about conspiracy, government, and the deeply embedded corporate elite who seem to be behind the military industrialized complex as it moves about the globe influencing who stays in power and who does not.

David Michael Green wrote on his Regressiveantidote.com site this week why this country is going down the tubes and away from a representative government and democracy. He offers three options, and one being all about oligarchy. He speaks about the moderate Republicans: Eisenhower/Ford as opposed to the destructive Reagan/Bush regimes, and the warnings from the former and what the latter would bring to us all.

President Eisenhower warned of an all-powerful military industrialized complex centered at the Pentagon. Today we learn that the US Navy is headed toward South America. Columbia and Venezuela might be headed toward a US military coup d’etat. An attack on Iran is the talk of the town, too. The Obama administration is being told from behind the scenes, no doubt, that this is what is meant by Change We Can Believe In, and the “We” meaning the deep, dark and all-powerful corporate mobsters. Will this be the direction the writers of Rubicon are going? We will have to watch and see!

Now, let us decipher the word Republican. We will morph this word into what many have been calling this political party---Republicon. Let us remove the letters e, p, l, and we get the word rubicon—a show about conspiracy, and deception; and, I will add the deeply embedded corporate elite mobsters running that party. Here is the definition of rubicon: A limit that when passed or exceeded permits no return, and typically results in irrevocable commitment.

“They hide in plain sight.” In the first episode (not the sneak preview), Will, the main Hitchcock-like character, deciphers a letter-number combination code into that sentence.

The United States is going down the rabbit hole, as it appears today. “Consumer borrowing has now dropped 16 out of the last 17 months. Credit card debt has fallen 21 months in a row. The personal savings rate in June rose to 6.4% from 2.1% before the recession began. Wages and salaries are down 3.6% in the last two and half years. Despite decreased credit and income and increased savings, all three of which are negatives for consumer spending, GDP figures claim American consumers are buying more.” That comes from Daryl Montgomery, Less Credit and Income-More Consumer Spending”.

He went on to say, “According to the BEA (Bureau of Economic Analysis), wages and salaries of US workers have declined only 3.6% since the first quarter of 2008…..More government jobs and government subsidized jobs prevented this number from being worse. Even more amazing, total personal income actually increased by 1.5% during this time.” What he also said was that there was a 27% increase in government supporting working people in the last 9 quarters.

Yes. That was because the corporate mobster elite stole the working people’s savings and retirement investments to BUBBLE the economy with a housing mortgage give-away program (Bush’s Ownership Society program), and selling around the globe garbage derivatives mounting into the hundreds of trillions of dollars, many of which has not yet to be unwound; and, the corporate financial mobster elite stood in line at the Federal Reserve to trade cash for collateral trash at near 0% interest in order to manipulate all markets for the purpose of continuing the transfer of wealth to the top 10% of the income earners. David Stockman, and Reagan’s Trickle Down economics turned all around on it’s head.

Since the private sector has not created real jobs in the real economy, government continues to hire and move the GDP numbers along. The military industrial complex, including the intelligence divisions, continue to get government cash as they hire private sector contractors.

Watch Rubicon!

The Republicons continue to want more tax cuts. Free Bush’s Tax Cut Willie! But the outcry against it is beginning to shake-da’-base.

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspam, or is it Greenspan, recently said the following:

“Our problem, basically, is that we have a very distorted economy in the sense that there has been a significant recovery in a limited area of the economy amongst high-income individuals who have just had $800 billion added to their 401(k)s and are spending it and are carrying what consumption there is. Large banks, who are doing much better, and large corporations, whom you point out and the–and everyone’s pointing out, are in excellent shape.

The rest of the economy, small business, small banks, and a very significant amount of the labor force, which is in tragic unemployment, long-term unemployment, that is pulling the economy apart. The average of those two is what we are looking at, but they are fundamentally two separate types of economy.”

He has come forward to say that the shit has begun to hit the fan, the economy is heading toward the rabbit hole, again, so don’t renew the Bush tax cuts.

David Michael Green wrote in another piece about “another conservative darling who turned on his masters this weekend [being] Reagan’s OMB Director David Stockman, who eviscerated current Republican fiscal policies in a NY Times Op-Ed this weekend, summing it up neatly with the title: "How the GOP Destroyed the US Economy," which is a must-read but here’s a few juicy tidbits:

“IF there were such a thing as Chapter 11 for politicians, the Republican push to extend the unaffordable Bush tax cuts would amount to a bankruptcy filing. The nation’s public debt — if honestly reckoned to include municipal bonds and the $7 trillion of new deficits baked into the cake through 2015 — will soon reach $18 trillion. That’s a Greece-scale 120 percent of gross domestic product, and fairly screams out for austerity and sacrifice. It is therefore unseemly for the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, to insist that the nation’s wealthiest taxpayers be spared even a three-percentage-point rate increase…

…This approach has not simply made a mockery of traditional party ideals. It has also led to the serial financial bubbles and Wall Street depredations that have crippled our economy. More specifically, the new policy doctrines have caused four great deformations of the national economy, and modern Republicans have turned a blind eye to each one.

…The third ominous change in the American economy has been the vast, unproductive expansion of our financial sector. Here, Republicans have been oblivious to the grave danger of flooding financial markets with freely printed money and, at the same time, removing traditional restrictions on leverage and speculation. As a result, the combined assets of conventional banks and the so-called shadow banking system (including investment banks and finance companies) grew from a mere $500 billion in 1970 to $30 trillion by September 2008.

But the trillion-dollar conglomerates that inhabit this new financial world are not free enterprises. They are rather wards of the state, extracting billions from the economy with a lot of pointless speculation in stocks, bonds, commodities and derivatives. They could never have survived, much less thrived, if their deposits had not been government-guaranteed and if they hadn’t been able to obtain virtually free money from the Fed’s discount window to cover their bad bets.”  (From “A Bottomless Well of Greed”.)

These two creators of economic doom: Greenspan and Stockman, are no longer useable for the deeply embedded corporate mobster elite, so now they are squealing.

From Karl Denninger’s site-Market-ticker.com, he writes about jobless and unemployment claims. “In the week ending July 31, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 479,000, an increase of 19,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 460,000. The 4-week moving average was 458,500, an increase of 5,250 from the previous week's revised average of 453,250.

The problem with the claim is that it's a lie, and if you read the entire report, it becomes obvious - they simply ignore the roll-down into "not counted" buckets for the long-term unemployed.

The truth is that the unemployment situation is 17% worse now than it was a year ago, from July 10th to July 17th it deteriorated, and that understates the case, as those who have exhausted the 99 weeks of "benefits" (all but 26 of which are a handout) don't show up in the EUC 2008 line any more either! In June, marginally attached, there were 1.2 million discouraged workers in June, up by 414,000 from a year earlier.”

Jobs are disappearing. The corporate mobster elite believes they don’t need the United States anymore. As GM takes its new battery technology jobs to China after the taxpayers ended up owning 60% of the company via a bailout-loan granted them by the Obama administration. Jobs keep growing for GM in China as they shrink in the country of taxpayer issued bailouts and protection from bankruptcy loans.

The Rubicon is beginning to be played out in the open. “They hide in plain sight.”

“Republicans used to stand for balanced budgets, sound monetary policy and fiscal discipline and, as Stockman points out, the Neocons and the Follow-the-Con-Democrats, have jammed our military budget up to $1Tn a year (1/2 of the entire planet’s military spending) while Republican Congressmen have never met an earmark they didn’t like - until Obama took office, of course.”

“The mood of the country is clearly shifting and old-guard Republicans are circling the wagons to attempt to salvage what they can of their legacy; that leaves the Bush Republican’ts out on an increasingly unpopular limb as they call for a completely unrealistic policy of tax cuts for the rich and austerity for everyone else.”

“Art, Gold, oil and other speculative investments not only take money out of circulation but cause TRILLIONS of dollars of damage by inflating what the bottom 99% have to pay for what’s left after the hoarders get their fill. This is also true of land to some extent as it trades around from wealth to wealth and drags up the cost of land for the poor (same land for more money = NEGATIVE benefits). Cash is another place money is hoarded - when the top 0.01% skim their profits off the bottom 99.99% and pay their 17% taxes (the actual average paid by the top 0.01%) and then put the other 83% in a bank that refuses to lend money - that money is OUT OF CIRCULATION! It’s been taken from the American people after they slaved to create it and then the opportunity to re-use what they have created is taken away from them.”

“Money is only an asset to the top 1%; for the rest of the country, it’s a disposable item, more like a work chit that enables them to buy consumables but nothing more. Most of the top 1% can’t see it because they live near the top and only think of money as an asset - which it is when you have more than you need. Unfortunately, 99% of the people in this country have less than they need and even 99% of the top 1% are simply delusional in their belief that they are on an even playing field with the top 0.01%, who are 100x wealthier than the average person in the top 1% (and that INCLUDES their wealth, which brings the average way up).”

“What the Republicans are positioning as a tax hike but is really the end of a tax holiday that was put in place under Bush II is now looking more likely, and the rest of the World is seeing this as a very positive sign that America is finally waking up and will begin putting its economic house in order the way all responsible governments do - by raising an appropriate amount of taxes to meet their financial obligations. It’s fine if we want to add more stimulus to the economy - as long as we are willing to pay for it. What has been objectionable to the rest of the World is our current policy of spending more and earning less - something that hasn’t worked out too well on our National balance sheet for the past decade.

Yes, Democrats are the "tax and spend" party but the choice has been between the tax and spend party and the "no tax and spend anyway" party and it’s only just now that that argument is coming into its proper focus. On the whole, this is a good thing for America - a possible sign that we are growing up.” (Phil Davis, “Another Manic Monday: Greenspan Finally Agrees With Me”, 8-2-10, Seekingalpha.com.)

The Royal Scam that none of the Republicons or Democons are telling their people back home is that the Federal Reserve has stuffed the corporate elite bankstas, who are deeply tied to the corporate mobsters, with $1.7 trillion in reserves, while lending is nowhere in sight. Consumer credit is diving down the rabbit hole at a rate of 5% per year. And, the total circulation of money, or M3-the broadest category- has dropped to -6%. The amount of money circulating inside the economy has dropped into negative territory.

We are very likely headed toward a Japanese style of a generation of deflation. Bada Bing Bernanke has loaded up the richest bankstas with taxpayer cash, and very little of it is leaving their tight grip; therefore, any hope he had of creating inflation, or another BUBBLE, has been broken. He thought he was in tight with the deep, dark elite mobster crowd, but I guess he isn’t. He ain’t included on da’ inside. They got their $1.7 trillion, and they are happy. They robbed the Treasury. The largest bank heist in US history!

In a brilliant piece written by the economist Richard C. Koo, “U.S. Economy in Balance Sheet Recession: What the U.S. Can Learn From Japan’s Experience in 1990-2005”, he writes how we are headed in this direction. It seems that Bernanke fell asleep while driving the bus and is now headed toward deflation—a generation of it.

Professor Koo says, “The biggest casualty here has been monetary policy. Businesses and consumers suffering from a debt overhang are not interested in increasing their borrowings at any interest rate, and few banks want to lend money to borrowers with impaired balance sheets.” “But in a balance sheet recession, demand for funds can remain far less than the supply even with interest rates at zero because there are so few borrowers. As a result, unborrowed funds remain trapped in the financial system, constituting a leakage from the income stream and a deflationary gap in the economy. If unchecked, this gap will throw the economy into a deflationary spiral as the economy loses demand equivalent to the saved but unborrowed fund each year. And, that is exactly what happened during the Great Depression, the last great balance sheet recession, where U.S. GDP was cut in half in just four years.”

Dr. Koo closed by speaking about needing a fiscal policy that works. “…capital injection…which requires substantial and seamless government borrowing and spending to offset the deflationary impact of private sector deleveraging. Although government deficit spending should be avoided when the private sector is healthy and forward looking, once…when the private sector gets carried away in a bubble and damages its financial health, a prompt and sustaining fiscal policy medicine from the government is essential in minimizing both the length of the recession and the eventual bill to the taxpayers.”

But in this “Rubicon”, those inside the economic conspiracy had other plans. They decided to rob the working class people blind, and cry wolf about the sky getting ready to fall, and continue to rob the cash reserves inside the Federal Reserve dry.

Will this administration, and Congress, turn this around? It appears if the American people vote against their own self interests and bring in the Tea Party candidates, or career politicians who are not on the side of working people, then we will likely see no action steering us away from a Japanese style deflation: lower wages, longer hours for less pay, further falling of home price values, more foreclosures, less consumer spending, fewer jobs, more unemployment, and the dollar buying less when spent.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government in a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country”.

James Madison also said, “The growing wealth acquired by [corporations] never fails to be a source of abuses”.

And then there was Grover Cleveland, who said:  “As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel.  Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters.”

Or, how about Teddy Roosevelt,  “Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people.  To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day.”

And, of course, there was Dwight D. Eisenhower Dwight (career military man, five-star general, commander of the Normandy invasion, Supreme Commander of NATO, conservative Republican President of the United States) who famously invocated against the all-consuming power of the military-industrial complex. (Quotes taken from the excellent article by David Michael Green, “A Bottomless Well of Greed”, 8-2-10).

There is a Rubicon, and we swirl inside of it!

Thanks for reading, jerry

http://eye-on-washington.blogspot.com