Fear, It's Frightening

Fear, It’s Frightening


Most of us have seen the old newsreel of Franklin D. Roosevelt sitting there during the depth of the depression in 1932 and with jutting jaw and his trademark clinched teeth smile say to the Congress and American people, “The only thing we have to fear, (patented FDR pause for dramatic effect) is fear itself.” Of course the reason that this quote comes to mind nowadays is that unbounded fear is spreading throughout the land once again because our economy is collapsing just like in 1929 and the leadership that is responding to this crisis are the very same ones that permitted and encouraged greed to replace honest enterprise, and without a doubt, greed is the primary cause for the cascading collapse that our economy is experiencing. We all should be very much frightened because greed is not being addressed in any manner whatsoever in the headlong rush to mitigate the continuing economic crisis. In fact, rather than stamping down greed, it (greed) is being encouraged to take advantage of the bankrupting of America as dollars are flowing from the Fed printing press to the very same Financial Services Robber Barons that enabled greed to replace honest enterprise in the first place. To bring this more into focus I am going to quote what Thomas Jefferson said in 1802:
“I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standingarmies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issueof their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks andcorporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people ofall property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent that theirfathers conquered”.
What I am talking about here is the fact that Financial Services (a synonym for practical greed) enabled our manufacturing sector to go from 25% of the nation’s GNP in the 1970s to less than 12% of GNP today and they accomplished this feat by replacing honest enterprise with greed. How this occurred is that financial entities, such as Hedge Funds, have bought into Public Corporations using worthless leveraged money and gained overwhelming control. Once in control, they (financial entities) demanded more and more profits until the only way to satisfy the insatiable demands was to ship jobs and factories overseas in the search of cheap labor and intellect in order to boost profits until today the displacement of our manufacturing sector is nearly complete. The result being that we are becoming a country that can no longer “make it here.” This is important because when countries (like the old British Empire) can no longer make its goods and things domestically, they lose control of their destiny and become relegated to third world status. Greed is causing this to happen (see my pieces “OBL and the 3rd Deadly Sin and One World Eggheads and Credit Default Swaps”) because greed only craves money, not the necessary honest enterprise that is required to make money that represents something of value (like an automobile, corn, house, pig, intellectual property, etc). Sometimes we forget in order for money to be viable, it has to represent something of value that people have faith and trust in and greed just makes money off of money and does not really represent anything of value. Oh, by the way, Financial Services now represent over 21% of our national GNP today. Think about it. A segment of our economy that makes nothing of value is 21% of our GNP. Now that’s something to become frightened about Mr. FDR.