Sir, I have nothing to do with the Tea Party movement, nor do I wish to. I merely speak facts. I do not support what is going on the the House of Representatives and will not even listen to Eric Cantor's voice when watching CSPAN. I am disgusted with DC.
You are most welcome to disagree with me, as you do. However, the facts do not support your supposition. Bernanke is no hero, neither is Greenspan, nor Paul Volcker for that matter. Nor are Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush. That is if you stop watching television and read facts about what has happened to our great nation over the past 40 years. Here is a sampling for you.
As Europe was recovering from World War II, and France achieved the milestone of re-pegging the franc to the Gold Standard, they undervalued it considerably. This created a flight of capital from the United States to Europe in the 1970s because trade debt had to be paid for in gold. Paul Volcker raised interest rates to double digits to put a drag on the economy and stop the flight of gold primarily to France.
Richard Nixon removed America from the International Gold Standard following the Feds intervention because the huge drag on the global economy was bad politics for Nixon. A good deal of Europe had previously decided to stabilize their own post-war fiat currencies by pegging them to the Gold Standard Driven U.S. dollar after World War II. After RN made that move, it destabilized many European economies (France and Britain excluded). The Fed began printing money in ernest after that, and the U.S. enjoyed the illusion of prosperity due to the lag of prices catching up to the money supply.
Ronald Reagan spent his presidency "talking" small government while growing our national debt and government spending exponentially at the same time. He also deregulated the media industry which sponsored much of the cost of his presidential campaigns. The resulting merger mania concluded with the 5 multi-national super-conglomerates that control almost everything we read, see, and hear today. This is the reason why you can change channels and hear not only the same news, but the same news at the same time in the same sequence of reporting.
Bill Clinton spent his presidency supporting the repeal of what little legislation remained to protect Americans from Wall Street and permitted the merger of investment and retail banking--something that had been prohibited since the Great Depression because it was a major cause of the Great Depression.
Protecting America from Wall Street investment banks is why the Federal Reserve was created in 1913 following the 1907 Banking Crisis which required a major banking bailout (financed by J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller, and others of the 1% class). After his presidency, Clinton's family moved to New York to reap the rewards of his service to Wall Street, his wife has enjoyed an "out of nowhere" career in politics ever since, and the rest is history.
George W. Bush may well go down in history as the worst president ever to be elected to office. Every Texas president in the last 50 years has created a war, and war is good for the Texas economy, which relies on the petroleum and technology. But, Bush's wars were different than the other two Texas presidents. He compounded the financial burden of war on the deficit with tax cuts financed through debt and adding a huge burden to Social Security with the unfunded Part D obligation. He did these deeds right smack in front of an avalanche of retirees, consisting of almost 1/3 of the American workforce, due to retire between 2010 and 2028. Stupid doesn't even come close to capturing the folly of his presidency, but as you can see, he does have competition.
Alan Greenspan's, whom I admire a great deal for his intellect--he was just wrong and says so himself, heavy printing of new currency combined with ultra-low interest rates and CPI meddling, created the fertile ground investment bankers needed to cash in on Clinton's good work. And, cash in they did. Entire countries had their economies collapse from the effects of these banks. And, in the United States, there is a "shadow inventory" of millions of homes (est is around 3 million) being kept off the market to hold home prices artificially high. The decade or so that the bankers will spend bleeding off this inventory onto the market will keep home owners underwater on their mortgages for probably another 20 years and ruin the chances of an entire generation of Americans to use home equity as a source of retirement income--the norm for retirees. This will place even more burden on America's social safety net.
The federal reserve multiplied the money supply by 1,500% since Richard Nixon removed the U.S. from the international gold standard in 1971. The net effect of meddling with the CPI to mask inflation created by printing so much currency is also to reduce worker wages and retiree Social Security benefits. However, "prices" and "exchange rates" are not throttled back in the manner of income. The net effect is that you now pay a dollar for a cucumber that cost a nickel forty years ago. And spending that dollar hurts more than spending the nickel hurt--a lot more.
Go to the Federal Reserve, the White House, and U.S. Treasury websites. They all have this information posted there. All you have to do is ferret it out from the long thin layer of documents the data is spread across. For that matter, go to the Bureau of Justice Statistics and find out why 1 in every 130 Americans was under penal control in 1980, but today it is 1 in 31. We have had no presidential, or Federal Reserve, heros in the last 50 years. Some of their behaviors are criminal.
I happen believe these topics I write about are all very relevant to Texas Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul. They are relevant to the initial post of Ron Paul's honesty, to his position to close the Fed, to his discussion that America cannot afford more war, and other points in his platform. Moreover, they are relevant to why the political party that has been a major contributor to the mess we are in claims to be free of all blame, and claims that we should put the fox right back in the hen house yet one more time.
Ron Paul disagrees, and it is doubtful he will be elected. If he were elected, it is doubtful he would be effective as a president. Honesty at this late date is like going after a tank with a flyswatter. And, as your comments prove, waking the public to the facts is even more difficult.
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