Thursday, September 27, 2012

Karl Denninger's "campaign speech"


Karl Denninger at Market Ticker delivers the hypothetical speech that he believes would allow a presidential candidate to capture the flag.

He starts off badly, demonstrating that he does not know the difference between a colon and a semi-colon; I would have trouble voting for such a man. After that, however, he hits his stride and I can almost forgive him. Some excerpts:
My fellow Americans;

Almost exactly four years ago the stock market began a sickening plunge that would shake the world.  Declining from just over DOW 11,000 to under 7,500 in two short months, only to fall another 1,000 points in the next three, this period marked an unprecedented time of government intervention that you were told was for all of our good, and the good of our nation.

You were lied to.

The intentional expansion of debt unbacked by anything was the cause of the market crash.  This intentional fraud perpetrated upon all of you went back to the Tech Crash in 2000, and goaded Americans into taking out loans that could not be repaid to cover up the malfeasance of those who had systematically looted Americans' retirement accounts and offshored their jobs during the 1990s. 
Ben Bernanke of The Fed has argued that his "Quantitative Easing" has helped the jobs market and will continue to.  This too is a lie; the entire and only purpose of this program is to allow the government to continue to run its monstrous deficits -- that is, The Fed is responsible for taxing you as an unelected private body.
The funds from this tax are not going into the economy.  They are going to fill the hole in the big banks' balance sheets.  These large financial firms, banks and Wall Street companies, went from having about 20% of the size of the economy in debt in 1980 to over 120% in 2007, an expansion in relationship to the size of the economy of six times.
So to the American people, I make you these promises.  If you elect me I will jail those bankers and Wall Street hotshots who lied to you, to your pension funds and to others in industry.  I will stop deficit spending and put an end to the unbacked and fraudulent emission of credit.  I will submit to Congress and demand passage of a bill that puts teeth into The Fed mandate for stable prices, ending the shell game of inflation and back-door taxation, backing that mandate with criminal and severe civil penalties for non-performance.  I will protect depositors if we must should banks fail, but nobody else; lending people money is a hazardous enterprise, and the cost of that lending should reflect the risk.  If you loan someone money who can't pay it back, under my administration you will lose your capital.  If you swindle someone under my administration, no matter how you do it, you will be indicted, arrested, tried and if convicted imprisoned and your assets will be stripped to pay back those who you stole from.
It's a rousingly acidic "speech" and a painful summation of the financial nightmare that we've been through since the dot-com collapse and housing bubble. His threat of legal vengeance might once have seemed over-torqued, but as you may have noticed, the dog in the night hasn't barked. Billions of dollars have been nicked by the banksters, many Americans are jobless and impoverished through no fault of their own, but almost no malfeasance has been punished. Jon Corzine, lately of MF Global, had a fit of absent-mindedness in which he forgot where he put $1 billion of his investors' money. At this moment he may well be enjoying the resources for hire at a swanky hotel in some scenically favored part of the globe.

So one cheer for Karl Denninger. I'm withholding one cheer for that semi-colon, and another because Denninger is so fixated on economics -- like most of his "fellow Americans" -- that he imagines that just getting our financial house in order is all that's holding us back from a glorious restoration. 

I don't mean to be unduly critical of him. Economics is his field. But he's an example of why we're in desperate straits. There is plenty of conservative resistance to the bloated federal government, insane levels and types of immigration, irresponsible welfare handouts, Muslim appeasement, and  the rest of the fallout from our soft-Stalinist regime. The trouble is, the resistance is almost all from single-issue protesters.

Takuan Seiyo has the overview. He understands that we're fighting a multi-headed beast, Cerberus times 10. Fastening on a single issue is deathly.
Few of the few who sense that something has gone terribly wrong understand either how much worse than their expectations the consequences are going to be, or how insufficient their resistance is. Liberals who think the Left will choose to protect their liberal values in preference to growing and protecting Islam, have a surprise coming. The Counterjihad activist who is not an anti-Third World immigration activist — i.e. “racist” per the prevailing nomenclature — will see his country swamped by Uttar Pradeshis, Polynesians and Zulus even if his position on Islam prevails. And if he is not an anti-statist activist as well, even if he prevails on immigration, the state will still crush him. ...

The defender of capitalism who screams at the commie Occupiers but does not scream with them at the banksters, may save his country from ruin by the commies, but not from ruin by the banksters. The economic freedom activist who is not a reactionary cultural activist will be crushed by the open borders and free trade he advocates, and will see the lowest barbarian common denominator regnant. But the social conservative, family values warrior who is not a white ethnic activist may win the abortion fight but will still end up living in Haiti even if he lives in Maryland.
Yes, by all means, we can wish for a political administration that puts the fear of God into crooks and swindlers. But that alone won't save us. We are called to do so much more. 

7 comments:

YIH said...

I promise, I'm not a 'bot. Your review of ASP1 piqued my curiosity, so I did the even easier way {cue dramatic music} The Pirate Bay. From the time I thought ''what the hell, I want to see it'' to hitting play - about 30 min.
I can see why the story was transformed from a 'period piece' (circa about 1955) to the near future (four years from now). It was about the only way to make the idea of passenger rail travel seem plausible and to deal with the smoking issue from the book (essentially replacing it with drinking). I found it odd in the 'rail map' scene that there was no line going from Daytona to Tampa, as that is a major freight line and with rail replacing air travel for passengers it would be critical (and don't think Disney wouldn't lean on Washington to make sure of that).
For someone who states in the book, ''let's get down to business'' the 1100 - page doorstop, err, book itself fails in that regard.
One thing I do give credit to Rand for (that many to this day either overlook or ignore) is the fallacy of so-called ''free trade'' where nations work for the good of their own national interests and not for either ''the common good'' or what is best for business.
The approach to ''free trade'' that the US does is like playing cards with our hand visible to all the other players and their hands hidden. In the book/movie Dagny Taggart maintains only a minor presence in Mexico on the assumption that things in Mexico could quickly change for the worse.
Considering that 10 years ago Mexico was a reasonable vacation option and now it would be insane to visit there for any reason she got it. And from what I've been reading the same situation is happening in China now, the 'let the good times roll' era is ending and the savvy people are leaving while they still can.
As an aside, that is an ugly watchband or bracelet. I get the sentimental aspect of it but aesthetically it is tacky looking and likely uncomfortable to wear.
UH-OH!!! Dagny Taggart: ''250mph all the way!''. The Shinkansen does not do that:
''Shinkansen routes are completely separate from conventional rail lines (except Mini-shinkansen which goes through to conventional lines). Consequently, Shinkansen is not affected by slower local or freight trains and has the capacity to operate many high-speed trains punctually. The lines have been built without road crossings at grade.Tracks are strictly off-limits with penalties against trespassing strictly regulated by law..
I always though Gov. Scott was smart for saying ''take Florida High Speed Rail and shove it!'' now I'm even more sure of it. No, the Train à Grande Vitesse can't do that either (and that's where they got the high speed train footage from).
I was wondering about that, @1:23:00 in the movie a man lights a cigarette with a '$' by the dog end. That was the plot point I mentioned, although in the book the character was a short order cook in a diner.
My opinion, they took a bushel of lemons and made a pitcher of decent lemonade out of them.
The set decoration does indeed deserve billing over any of the actors, and the cinematography was pretty good. For me it wasn't a waste of time. As always, ''your mileage may vary''...

Roberto Masioni said...

Rick,

I've been following Karl Denniger for a couple of years. Though he likes to think of himself as a libertarian and sometimes as a conservative, he has strong lefty-liberal tendencies (as you can tell from his foul mouth and disgusting imagery). Actually, it's impossible to figure out what his political position really is because he's all over the board.

Though he talks a lot about politics, he is quite clueless. I know a bit about some of what he blogs about and I know he is either lying or just plain stupid. He'll make wild predictions about the outcome of some story in the news and draw some (often non-sequitur) conclusions, and then later he will cherry pick a few and get in your face with his "I told you, you morons!" schtick.

He believes he's a super genius on every topic, from computers to nuclear physics to politics to economics. If you give any calm, reasoned arguments against his position at his site, he will warn you in the strongest possible terms that you have done something disgustingly horrible and then he will ban you. It's bizarre. I've seen him ban people for the smallest infractions. I got sick of him calling people stupid so I told him he didn't know what he was talking about on a certain topic and he got very angry and threatened to ban me, too.

I don't even bother to read his full posts anymore. He's a total whack job. I just go to sites like his and Max Keiser's to see what they are talking about, then I go find more reliable sources for commentary.

Rick Darby said...

Thank you both for your comments.

YIH, as I mentioned to Stogie the other day, I tried to review ASP1 as a movie, not an ideological treatise, but obviously that didn't work. Both book and movie are basically husks around a view of life and politics. I wish the movie had been more successful, not as a work of art -- that's impossible to imagine -- but as entertainment. Heaven knows we need more cinema that isn't anchored to the mainstream movie industry's leftist reflexes, and even Ayn Rand's peculiar anti-leveling philosophy deserves a decently produced film incarnation.

Rusty,

Karl Denninger strikes me as a strange combination of egotistical blowhard and legitimate critic of the financial sins inflicted on the American people. The particular entry I linked to represents his better side.

YIH said...

I understood that but to me it would be like trying to appraise mayonnaise by how good the oil, vinegar, lemon juice and eggs by themselves were. My approach was ''is it good mayo or not?'' and while I thought some of what was presented was sci-fi nonsense, overall I was pleasantly surprised, it was better than I was expecting it to be. I'd heard it was by contemporary standards 'low budget' (IIRC, about $10mil. to produce) and hardly any promotion. And yet it didn't look like a 'hack job' and was reasonably accurate to the novel.
Typically, ''the book was better than the movie'' but this time the producers managed the rare feat of actually making a better film than the book it was based on. It's no ''great moment in American cinema'' but it's not bad either.
I wasn't disappointed, and I would seriously consider actually paying to watch ASP2.

YIH said...

Remember 0bama saying ''If I had a son he'd look just like...''
Well, see for yourself.

Anonymous said...

Ann Barhardt has been writing about the Great Swindle for sometime now.

The topic is the US Dollar, and currency in general. The Federal Reserve has been willfully and systematically debasing the US dollar for a century by claiming that 2% inflation is the benchmark of a healthy economy. Since the universities and media have been overrun by Marxists, there is hardly anyone alive who A.) is in possession of the capacity to independently think and reason their way through such a question and B.) anyone who cares in the first place.

In addition to the slow grinding debasement by the Fed, the Marxists have finally fully usurped and overthrown the government of the United States, and thus have now executed the coup de grace: wild, flagrant money “printing”, and by “printing”, please understand that we are not talking about the fabrication of paper bills. We are talking about computerized entries into the Federal Reserve’s ledger. The Fed literally types in an addition of x billion or y trillion dollars into its balance sheet – creating dollars out of thin air that exist as zeroes and ones on a computer server – and then use those new dollars to purchase US Treasury bonds. In this way, the Obama regime and its puppetmasters have debased the US dollar by roughly one half the total GDP in less than four years. This iteration of both the United States and the US Dollar are over. There is no way to walk back the damage that the Obama regime has done. They have accomplished their mission, no matter what happens from this day forward.

http://barnhardt.biz/index.cfm

DP111

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