Yes...but!

April 29 2008

Home > Columns >Yes...But! Year 8-25

Actually I was not a bit surprised when I heard President Bush claim with a straight face that the USA was not in a recession. Dalton McGuinty, on the other hand, was frank in telling us that Ontario is now officially suffering from that dreaded “R” condition. We all know that our province is dependent for much of its industrial production on export to the USA, yet we don’t nearly have the negatives the USA has.

Of course gas prices are up every week. Of course food prices are reaching ever higher levels in record time: the price of rice, the staple of half the world’s people, has tripled in a matter of months, all because China, India, Japan with billions of worthless dollars in their back pockets buy up supplies everywhere. We are fortunate that our dollar has increased in value so the sticker shock for us is much less than for the poor people in the USA whose wages, in the last few decades, have actually decreased, hit by higher prices and less income: they feel the full brunt of any global price increases, all of which will have a tremendous impact on the purchasing power of the average US citizen.
President Bush’s statement didn’t startle me because it is part of a pattern of deception that has fooled Americans for the past 2 decades.

The best known example of an outright lie by the highest office in the world is the well-known Iraq Weapons of Mass Destruction issue. That war also was sold by one of its architects, Paul Wolfowitz, as being a profitable enterprise: Iraqi oil would foot the bill, which, at the most, would be $50 billion. Cost estimates now range up to $3 trillion, or 60 times as much.

We do well to take any announcement coming from Washington or Ottawa with at least 2 grains of salt. This is especially true about today’s economic data. Officials don’t want voters to become aware of the extent of the disaster in progress. So they flood the media with fictitious news, by drowning “bad” objective news with a multitude of “good subjective news”.
This massaging of information started with the great optimist Ronald Reagan, who, by executive order, created a very secret committee, the so-called “Working Group on Financial Markets”, with as task to give a positive spin to financial happenings. We must see President Bush’s statement that “We are not in a recession” as part of this strategy.
Reagan, in March 1988, formed this body following the October 1987 stock exchange crisis with as objective “to promote the integrity, the effectiveness, the regularity and the competitiveness of the markets of the country, and to maintain the confidence of investors”.
Ever since the world abandoned gold as a basis for its currency, “confidence of investors”, public trust that a dollar bill means something, has been the mainstay of our money market. Once that dogma is doubted gone also is the monetary foundation of society.

The current group of official deceivers, chaired by Henry Paulson, Secretary of the Treasury – everywhere else called the Minister of Finance- produces no reports; has no public visibility and details neither the agenda, nor the composition of its meetings. Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Bank, is part of this body, as well as the president of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

This committee, for instance, ordered to stop publication of the M3 indicator – which kept the financial world informed about the amount of dollars floating around in the world – as well as other data that allowed those interested to follow the flow of credits in dollars globally: all this to obfuscate the real economic situation. This body also gave a more favourable twist to the Consumer Price Index and Unemployment figures, because governments want little inflation, in order to keep interest rates low, and so keep the increase in pensions and other benefits, at a minimum. Of course, Canada had to follow suit.

We now are experiencing the unravelling of the Lie. There is a Dutch saying, freely translated as “Even though the Lie is fast, in a race with Truth it comes in last.”

John Williams, who operates “Shadow Governments Statistics,” from Oakland California, has reconstructed the Truth on matters of government untruths. Based on real numbers, the US unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 and 12 percent, a far cry from the official 4.5 percent. The true inflation rate, including food and energy could be as high as 10 percent, rather than the proclaimed 2-3 percent.

By tampering with the rate of inflation and unemployment, the blame for the Housing Bubble lies squarely with Washington. Banks, assuming that 2 percent inflation was correct, gave money out based on these false statistics, tricking homeowners into buying homes they could not afford, while real estate brokers perpetuated the myth that house prices always rise.

Lots of other truths are emerging as well, such as Peak Oil and rising oil prices, and Peak Food and food shortages.

We now know that the belief that Americans have been granted infinite use – only God has infinity - of finite resources, is idolatry, shattering their widely-held conviction, that America is a ‘City on the Hill’, a country especially blessed by the Almighty.