Thinking About the Federal Reserve While Nursing a Cheap Beer

8/6/2019 Thinking About the Federal Reserve While Nursing a Cheap Beer

1/5

Thinking About the Federal Reserve While Nursing a Cheap

Beer

Looting Frenzies

By LINH DINH

Hey, lets go into McGlincheys, the cheapest bar in Center City.When I first entered this place in 1982, I was only 18, so to makemyself look somewhat legal, I wore an old man jacket, bought at athrift store for 2 bucks. Inside, I was thrilled to discover that adraft of Rolling Rock was only 50 cents, and a hotdog 25. Now they

are $1.25 and 75 cents, respectively. This low life bar, my kind, isstill dirt cheap, but thats inflation for you.

Inflation is your dollars deflating. Its your money going down,down, down, depreciating as the Federal Reserve injects morebucks into our banking system. And since the biggest banks own theFederal Reserve, the Fed is the banking system. Each time thesebanks give cash to themselves to be lent to you at interest, your

dollars becomes a bit more worthless.Though perceived by most Americans as a governmental agency,even the Federal Reserve admits that it is an independent entitywithin the government, having both public purposes and privateaspects. As an independent entity, the Fed does not suffer fromPresidential control or Congressional oversight. Though its Boardof Governor is appointed by the President of the United States,each of its seven members serves for 14 years [!], with only onemember replaced every two years. Out of the limelight, theseshady gentlemen are more enduring than all of our Presidents,Senators and Congressmen, and certainly more powerful, since theyrepresent banks that bankroll all of our politicians, who are theirabject servants. The Fed can also inflate, deflate, strangle, rape or


2/5

bleed dry the global economy. With such leverage, it does not carethat a 2011 Congressional audit, the first ever, managed todiscover that in less than three years the Fed lent $16.1 trillion toCitigroup, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, aswell as banks in the U.K., Germany, Switzerland, France andBelgium. This astronomical sum is greater than our national debt oreven the GDP, so where in hell or Foggy Bottom did it come from?Nowhere. From thin air. With Godlike power, the Fed can justconjure up cash, and thus just about everything else, into being.Here a mansion, there a yacht, and now, with a few keyboardstrokes, a brand new slave, or many, many slaves!

Subconsciously thinking, Daddy, send us money, the infantile seeseach gross increase in the money supply as dollars sloshing throughthe system, benefiting everyone, but if quantitative easing were amagic bullet, Weimar and Zimbabwe would be success stories. Ifwe could just monetize our way out of trouble, then why not pay allof our debts right now with newly minted cash, and bypass thepainful interest payments? Why not revive this economy by sendingeach citizen a huge check? Not 600 piddly bucks, like Bush did, buta billion dollars for each man, woman, child and dog? It cant bedone because our creditors arent dummies. As Vladimir Putin saidabout us, They are living like parasites off the global economy andtheir monopoly of the dollar. So Russia, China, Japan, Brazil andour many other creditors are neither reassured nor amused whenAllan Greenspan explained that the U.S. can pay any debt that ithas because we can always print money to do that.

The Federal Reserve used to tell us how many dollars were incirculation, but in March of 2006, it stopped. A sane man woulddeduce that it wanted to hide how much inflation it was generating,but, no, this sudden opacity was merely a cost cutting measure, soexplained the Fed, the profligate, money pumping Fed.


3/5

To grasp immediately how much your dollar has depreciated, look nofurther than the price of gold. In 1982, an ounce was less than$500. Now it has breached $1,800. Surging gold price alsoindicates that people are losing faith in their economic, politicaland social system, and that they fear the immediate future. Whengold shoots up, this house is coming down. Wander into anyVietnamese or Cambodian neighborhood, youll see an inordinatenumber of jewelry stores selling gold. People who have beentraumatized by war and dictatorship dont trust in banks or evenmoney, but only gold to help them survive any societal upheaval.

So if the dollar is sinking, why accumulate it? First of, foreign

governments must have dollars to buy oil, since no country can sellpetroleum for anything but the dollar. The only renegades to thisrule are Iran and Venzuela. Accepting Chinese yuans for oil, theyhave constantly been threatened by Washington. If euros, yens,

yuans or rubles were generally accepted for oil, the United Stateswould quickly become irrelevant and no one would have to send usreal products for our increasingly worthless paper.

This petro dollar arrangement is enforced by the U.S. military. AsSaddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi have found out, Americawill rain bombs on your peoples heads if you try to escape fromthis racket. Gaddafi wanted to nationalize Libyas oil fields. He alsoproposed a common currency for Africa. In their trade with eachother, African countries could then be free from the tyranny ofthe dollar, but such insolence could not go unpunished. America willhold a gun to your head to make sure you go on biting its bucks.

Making money on interest, banks generate debt for you and me, andfor the government itself. This system is buoyed up from usdrowning, and to keep us spending beyond our means, it must makeus delirious with wants. Hence, this nonstop seduction everywhere

you look. Dont think or reflect. Lust. In 1982, there was only one


4/5

television in McGlincheys. Now, there are four. As music blares,the unceasing come-ons flicker above our heads. Buy this, buy that,screw me, or rather, make love to my mirage.

Traditional virtues such as prudence and self control have been jettisoned, to be replaced by an insatiable appetite that breedsfrustration, boredom, numbness and violence. In 2009, five blocksfrom here, a flash mob attacked a 56-year-old man riding homefrom work. They beat him unconscious and stole his credit cards.One of the perpetrators then bought over $5,000 of Ralph Lauren,Giorgio Armani and other high-end merchandises. He had the lootdelivered to his front door, and thats how twenty-one-year-old

Stephen Lyde was caught. Though poor and obviously inexperiencedwith a credit card, Lyde was lusting after all the finer thingspossessed by those at the very top, and just like many of them, hewas willing to commit violence. Unlike white collar crooks, however,Lyde pounced on his victim directly. If America were to start yetanother war, how many stockholders would rejoice?

Our banking system makes money out of nothing, lends us cash that

it doesnt even have, and with Washington as its protector andenforcer, ensures that what we own is worth less and less, while wemust work more and more to make payment after unendingpayment, with compounding interest, penalties, fees and whateverelse it feels like tagging on at the end. The Federal Reserve, then,is not an institution with public purposes and private aspects, butexactly the opposite. Like our federal government itself, it is acartel with ruthless, private objectives hidden behind a public

faade.

The Fed has private purposes and public aspects, and as long asthis parasite controls our wallets and government, you can count onmore wars, bankruptcies, foreclosures, increasingly severe inflationand looting frenzies of every kind.


5/5

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, anda just released novel, Love Like Hate. He's tracking ourdeteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photoblog, State of the Union.
http://www.sevenstories.com/book/?GCOI=58322100305410&fa=author&person_id=31http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/http://linhdinhphotos.blogspot.com/http://www.sevenstories.com/book/?GCOI=58322100305410&fa=author&person_id=31

Documents

Thinking About the Federal Reserve While Nursing a Cheap Beer