Day #6 - Federal Reserve

The Fed.  Oh yeah, this has GOT to be one of my FAAAAAAAVORITE subjects!

I remember, I used to never know what "The Fed" was.  As soon as I did, however, I knew it was BS.  And Fort Knox, that magical place, guarded by tens of thousands of magical soldiers that are under oath, to guard, with ferocity, our national supply of the remaining gold we have.  Oh, and our gold is not just held here, there's more that we can't verify we have either.  Yes, another massive supply is being held at The Fed as well.

Fort Knox and the gold we have in reserve was "Audited" last in 1953.  80% of the gold in Fort Knox, has, since then, disappeared overseas (and if you read up on the audit of 1953, the use of the word "audit" is pretty laughable.) It was a best guess after the government appointed inspector (supposedly) formally tested less than 5% of that gold reserve and deemed it authentic.  Outside auditors were and are not allowed.  And neither are visitors to Ft. Knox.  A magical place indeed!!  I'm betting that same magic has made the gold, that MAY have been there once...magically disappear.  Of course, we'll never know.  No visitors.  No outsiders, other than allowed by the government.  Land mines, barbed wire and more cubic ft. of concrete than it took to build our tallest skyscrapers, stop us from ever really knowing what they have.  The funniest thing of all is what we get away with, when we "borrow" money from other countries.  Most just take our word for it.  "Yeah, we got it.  What, you don't believe me?  Well, here's the sheet of paper we filled out this year, promising that we have gold stashed away."  And the German bank buys it!!  I can't believe we still, after all these years, get away with that!

The Fed, the central "Bank" of the United States, is ALSO magical.  It produces American moneys out of thin air.  When we need more to spend, we "create" more.  "Fire up the presses!!  The President wants to spend a billion dollars today, and we only have half a billion available!"  More magical than the Magic Kingdom at Disneyland.

Now here's what kills me.  We have all this debt.  Trillions upon trillions.  Yet, the Fed (in 2008) was magically able to "loan" AIG Insurance Corp. 85 billion dollars...one lone company...to STAVE OFF BANKRUPTCY!!??  Why??  Sooooo......here are the things I'm forced to wonder.  How can our central bank loan 85 billion dollars to one company to stop it from going bankrupt, something that happens probably a 1000 times a day with other companies in the U.S., when our national debt is trillions of dollars large?  By definition then, I shouldn't worry about starting a business here...when I near bankruptcy, it's OK!!  The Fed will come to my rescue, right?  They've shelled out as much as 85 billion dollars before...I should be FINE!!  No one knows where the money came from...or why it wasn't used to pay off part of the national debt...but they did it!  MAGIC I tells ya!!  Heck, the national debt gets too big, we can just borrow money from ourselves and fix it, from the way it looks!  And if there's not enough?  We can just print up extras, no sweat.

Really America.  A gigantic magical castle in Kentucky holding all of our gold...probably guarded by a monstrous dragon on the inside, hoarding our gold and frying all who dare come near.  The Fed, our "national central bank" and Government pocket.  Magical paper Monopoly money with no proven backbone.  One day it's gonna come out.  Our citizens will storm the minefield and the 30,000 strong soldiers (and the ferocious dragon) to find out what we've suspected for over 50 years, that our ace in the hole, our collateral on countless world loans, was systematically squandered away, and the government, that's been merrily spending all of our money (taken from us beginning at the same time as "The Fed"s birth), I'm sure, mostly because they ran out of their own.  So more boxes were added to our paychecks.  So now, instead of just a third or better of our income, they began taking out social security money, adding to it even later, medicaid money to be taken out...then, adding insult to injury, the state had to come up with yet another little scam to compete with federal greed, "Unemployment Insurance".

All of these little boxes were added because of the shortage of government moneys to spend.  Oh sure, like your standard Ponzi scheme, you use new money coming in to pay out on debts...and when you can't pay anymore because the money's running out, then you look for new ways to gouge your clients...in this case, the investors, the gouge-ees in schemes like this, are not all that different in definition or looks, to us, the American Public, in our relation to government.  We're "Investing" in our nation for reasons the government sells you, then when the money's not there and the payouts aren't given to you anymore, not unlike the Ponzi scheme initiator, the government implements more new funds with different investors, and that money is used to pay off existing ones.  When the money runs dry and the accounts and assets are frozen, the little guys that funded the whole thing start to see their futures go down the drain.  And what happens to the lead manager of these little schemes?  Pretty much what'll happen to us someday.  Justice will come a callin', and the nations of the world and their banks will start calling in our debt.  And when they find out it was all a con?  There's gonna be some really pissed off people out there. A lot of them have not only been dying for a reason to mess us up, they'd be happy to do it, just out of spite.

By the way, notice that the retirement age, before you can collect back the social security money you put in for it, is steadily creeping further and further up?  And why not?  By the time most get to that age, the further up it is, the chances that you're dead before that collection age is increased, and the number of years that you would live after that (and the money you collect of course) would decrease.  Besides, they had to raise the retirement age...they had to quickly make up for the number of people the baby boom produced, as well as the increase in the number of Americans in our country, factor in our increased life expectancy in this day and age and the government (whom if we had inspected closely, might just notice them sticking their fingers into it to "borrow" some of it) had to come up with a miracle, and FAST!!

The solution?  Raise the ages that you're allowed to retire.  Yeah, that'll fix everything.  Notice that our security payments never seem to increase a whole lot?  I've been noticing, too, that the amount of money taken out of your checks for social security not only got larger, but SURPASSED even, every other amount taken from you in your paychecks.  Hmmm....Medicaid needs are growing, yet pay-outs seem to be on the decrease, and with Obamacare the new norm?  Medicaid is on it's way out.  I mean, it's just barely feasible to keep it going, isn't it?  Notice that is the LEAST amount taken out of your check.  That's because it's soon to be extinct.  The less they take out (the numbers taken out have been getting steadily smaller in relation to the others), pretty soon?  You won't even remember it was there.  When you get there, of course, you'll say "What about all that Medicaid I paid out all those years I worked?", but it'll be a dream forgotten by then...it's already that dream, and this is the way you'll be forced to forget about it, with the implementation of our national health act, and the slow decrease in Medicaid you pay out.  When the amount is negligible, (about where it is now), the box will probably just forget to include itself on your paychecks one day.  When you bring it up, it'll be a forgotten ideal that we just rolled over on and let go.  You may not even be able to tell your children what it was by the time you get to your social security years, not only because you forgot what it was, thanks to your dementia, but because it was oh so long ago that you paid it out of your paycheck...or you'll be six feet under.  That's probably more likely.

Back to unemployment insurance...payouts are more and more restricted, fought against, etc...yet they take this money, whether you want to pay it or not, under the #1 American con name of "Insurance", which, by definition should be paid out when you're in need of it, in a perfect world.  Yet, when you REALLY need it...when you're unemployed, of course...it's a big war - with the state, as well as with your former employer (who always seems to have all the right reasons that you were let go, ready to roll for denial or refusal to pay up), to even be approved to receive it.  It can take as long as a month to kick in after you're let go.  If you're lucky enough to be approved, that is.  In this respect, I suppose,  it appears to be very MUCH insurance...since insurance companies are extremely experienced at finding reasons NOT to give you your money back after you've paid it in, so that makes the premise for unemployment "Insurance" acceptable, correct?.  No wonder they called it insurance!  Now it all makes sense!  (Please see my upcoming Day 9 of America's deadly sins, Insurance.)

And then after you start receiving it (also not unlike insurance companies), they're on you to hurry back out there and get a job again before you even get the first check!  And be sure and report all the job hunting you've done, with an address of that guy you talked to about getting it, just to be sure that you're not just sitting on your butt and taking a very much needed vacation from the 20 years of straight sweating you did up to that point, without one.

To wrap it up (we're just listing the sins, right?  Not writing BOOKS on them, for chrissakes), The Fed is an opaque, secretive, magical place (not unlike a cardboard store front) that not only prints all of our money, holds our gold boullion for financial back-up, and doubles as a deep pocket for increased government spending.  Riiiiiiight.

Open it up.  Audit that sucka.  Stick Ft. Knox on the list as well.  The sooner the better.  Personally, I wanna see how deep the rabbit hole really goes.  How many, former as well as current Presidents that we can catch with their hands stuck deep inside the proverbial "Golden" cookie jar.  I'm guessing it'll be more like egg on their faces, when we look inside and find...nothing.  No magical gold bars.  You can't convince me that, after spending over 80% of that gold over 60 years that they just....stopped one day.  They said "Kids!!  NO.  We just can't spend any more of our citizen's gold!  They trusted us with it!!  We can't do THAT!!" and left it alone.  Gimme a break.  I mean how gullible ARE YOU PEOPLE????  Suddenly "Beach Front Property" and "Arizona" come to mind.