THE WALL STREET CRISIS: A SOMBER WARNING

This may be very speculative but it is definitely something to think about. Surely this world will have to be set up for the coming of Antichrist. The USA will have to be minimized as a threat to his power and we could be seeing the beginning of something very strategic in that regard. Jesse

THE WALL STREET CRISIS: A SOMBER WARNING
By Gary Kah

On September 15th, Lehman Brothers, one of this nation’s oldest and most prestigious banking firms, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This represents the largest financial failure in U.S. history and will produce enormous ripple effects. It will impact our economy and markets more than any of the other negative financial developments of the past year. Why? Lehman owed its creditors a staggering $613 billion. Those parties will now be unable to regain their funds, nor spend or invest them elsewhere in the economy. The money has evaporated!

The Feds balked at rescuing the financial giant. They didn’t have the funds available. They had just bailed out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to the tune of $200 billion the week before. Our government has also stepped in with $85 billion to save AIG (American International Group) — America’s largest insurer — which was nearing bankruptcy. After helping AIG the Feds may have few resources left to channel elsewhere. The pot is drying up.

The government only has three options. It could raise our taxes in order to pay for these bailouts, which would extract money from the economy at a time when it needs more. It could print more currency, which would lead to hyper-inflation and an eventual collapse. Or, it could borrow even more from foreign entities — if they are willing to loan us the money. This last option would further increase our colossal debt (currently over $10 trillion) and lead to our government’s eventual bankruptcy.

The fact is our government is almost as broke as the institutions it is trying to assist. It is in no position to help. The obvious next question is, “Who will bail out the U.S. Government when it goes broke?”

Once the current system has become completely undone, I believe a new system will be proposed as the solution. It will include some form of global government based on regional economic arrangements, similar to the European Union and the proposed North American Union. Global planners have long understood there can’t be a new one-world system until the old order has failed. Developments in the U.S. will most certainly impact the entire world.

Make no mistake, the current situation is very serious and will get worse. Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan today warned, “This is a once-in-a-century crisis.”

As people increasingly feel the pinch in their pocketbooks, they will look for someone to blame for their hard times. So far, the federal government is getting the most heat. The Federal Reserve, which is responsible for many of our economic policy decisions, is especially feeling the pressure.

The last two Fed Chairmen have been Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke — both Jews. And some of the individuals overseeing our largest remaining banks are also Jewish. One can see the “handwriting on the wall.”

I fear that with 8 million Muslims now in America, outnumbering the 5.7 million Jews, and with anti-Semitism on the rise among the general public, the Jewish people could once again become the scapegoat. History has a way of repeating itself. What is happening in America today is very reminiscent of what happened in Germany preceding the rise of Hitler. I believe it may be just a matter of time before Jews are persecuted and forced to return to Israel. The persecution of true Christians could follow on the heels.

From a spiritual standpoint, draw near to Christ and get on His agenda. Being in step with Jesus and serving Him faithfully is all that will ultimately matter. Love Him wholeheartedly and serve Him with integrity — living blamelessly among those around you.

Remember that God is still in control and is aware of all your needs. Pursue Him, work hard, plan wisely — leave the rest in His hands. Expect Him to do great things, even under difficult circumstances.

Common Sense About the Bailouts

Read the entire article here:What Should Be Done About the Financial Markets?

Eight principles for bailouts

Now that a massive bailout of Wall Street is being debated, Heritage Foundation economic experts have laid out eight goals and strategies for lawmakers to keep in mind as they evaluate the proposed legislation. 

   1. Do not prop up failed or failing institutions. Government should not try to keep failed businesses afloat; instead, as with Bear Stearns, they should “ensure that they are restructured or wound down in a way that does not cause undue disruption in the financial system as a whole.”

   2. Do not try to support prices. “Policymakers should not attempt to keep stocks or housing prices from falling to their proper market-determined levels.”

   3. Do not allow the government to become the permanent “owner of last resort.” Any assets the government buys should be disposed of as expeditiously as possible.

   4. Strictly limit legislation to the immediate need to stabilize the financial situation. “Lawmakers should oppose any and all attempts to expand the legislation being proposed” into a bonanza for special interests or pet liberal causes.

   5. Avoid “moral hazard.” Policymakers must discourage others from seeking government support by ensuring businesses receiving taxpayer funds have “skin in the game” and suffer the consequences of their miscalculations.

   6. Carefully define the Fed’s role. The Federal Reserve must avoid “unwarranted mission creep” as it exercises its “lender of last resort” responsibilities to ensure liquidity.

   7. Limit taxpayer exposure and keep actions temporary. “Any new mechanism or authority to halt the deterioration in the market should ensure that affected firms pay a cost and be strictly limited in time and scope to minimize taxpayer exposure.”

   8. Assure liquidity in markets but require full pricing of government insurance. As it considers providing insurance to money market funds, “the Treasury must ensure that the price of that insurance fully reflects the market risk.”

— David Talbot

Message From Obama

An Amnesty For Stupidity

This is from Pat Buchanon. I think it is a sobering assessment of what has happened. Jesse

Is it fair that businessmen who fail in neighborhood stores have to close shop and often sell their homes, while Wall Street titans are spared the consequences of monumental stupidity and greed?

No, it is not fair. Yet, Treasury’s Hank Paulson may be right. To save the sheep who might have been wiped out in a general financial panic, we may have to save the pigs.

Life is unfair, said JFK.

Yet, this is going to be the mother of all bailouts. Paulson will be voted by Congress authority to spend $700 billion, 5 percent of our gross domestic product, to buy all that toxic paper stinking up the books of our biggest banks.

And this is not the first such bailout of foolish and incompetent financiers and politicians.

In 1975, when its cravenness to extortionate union demands had bankrupted New York, the Big Apple had to be rescued by Gerald Ford.

Marion Barry’s Washington, D.C., was next in line at the cashier’s window.

In the Reagan era, it was Chrysler. Later that decade, Citibank, Chase-Manhattan and Bank of America were staring into the abyss, as Latin American regimes, to whom they had lent scores of billions, were balking at paying their debts. Uncle Sam stepped in.

Then came the Mexican and Asian financial crises and the U.S.-IMF bailouts of the 1990s. The Mexican bailout was as much a rescue of Goldman-Sachs as Mexico City, as Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin’s old firm was choking on all its Mexican paper.

The great myth is that these 1990s bailouts were models of U.S. financial statesmanship and great successes. The reality is the U.S. workers took it in the neck.

For the countries bailed out, like Mexico, Thailand, Indonesia and South Korea, were forced to devalue. This radically reduced the wages of their workers relative to American workers, creating incentives for U.S. manufacturers to shut plants here and move them abroad. The devaluations also slashed the price of foreign goods relative to U.S. goods. Imports flooded in.

Who ultimately paid for the Mexican bailout? Florida tomato growers wiped out by Mexican producers, the price of whose tomatoes was chopped two-thirds by the devaluation. U.S. autoworkers who saw Ford and Delphi plants shuttered as new Ford and Delphi plants opened in Mexico. U.S. textile workers whose mills closed and jobs vanished.

Middle-class American families have paid and paid — in lost jobs, lower wages, a falling median income — to save the big banks from the consequences of their follies. And those bank bailouts are behind the trade deficits that set five records in the Bush era, reached 6 percent of GDP, forced huge U.S. borrowings from abroad and ravaged the dollar.

Having bailed out Latin America, Mexico, Asia and their U.S. creditors, we now find our own country in trouble. And how are our allies reacting?

“Europeans on left and right ridicule U.S. money meltdown,” ran the Los Angeles Times headline. Italy’s finance minister compares us to corruption-ridden Albania, where “a nationwide pyramid scheme cost hundreds of thousands of people their savings and ignited anarchic civil conflict” in the 1990s.

How will the bailout work? Will every bank that brings in toxic paper be able to dump it on the Treasury? Will the Treasury buy securities based on subprime U.S. mortgages from foreign banks? Apparently so. What about mortgage-backed securities held by U.S. companies and individual investors? Is there to be a general amnesty for bad judgment, or just a bankers amnesty?

About one thing we may be sure. The U.S. deficit and national debt are going to soar. The credit rating of the United States, as this nation of non-savers has to borrow abroad to save its banks, and their banks, is going to fall. We are going to be a poorer nation and people.

As for the promises and plans of Barack Obama and John McCain — be it for national health insurance or middle-class tax cuts — they are going by the wayside. For the United States is as bankrupt as Lehman Brothers, with this difference: Uncle Sam can still borrow from abroad because foreigners see many juicy U.S. assets they would like to take off our hands with their hoards of ever-cheapening U.S. dollars.

Looking at the federal budget — the five or six major items are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, defense and interest on the debt. All are going up, as tax revenues fall. Add the cost of two wars and a bailout of U.S. banks that some estimate will cost $1 trillion to $2 trillion, and we appear to be looking at budget deficits ad infinitum.

“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” Adam Smith once consoled a friend who lamented that Britain would be ruined if the 13 Colonies were lost.

We are about to test Smith’s proposition.

Obama and Abortion

Message to Obama

Pentecostalphobia and Palin

The Washington Post has gone too far!

Have you seen this from the Washington Post? How terrible. Did they run a cartoon ridiculing Joe Lieberman for thinking that God spoke through a burning Bush? Or Barack Obama for thinking that Jesus rose from the dead? I guess this Palin lady scares the libs senseless. Now they pull out the fact that she is Pentecostal and mock her and all those who are. Last time I checked there were over 500 million Pentecostals worldwide. I don’t know how many there are in the USA but I’m sure that if they were motivated properly they would constitute one major voting block. Guess who they would be voting for?

“The cartoon is despicable,” states AG General Superintendent George O. Wood. “Millions of Christians today follow the example of first century Christians who prayed in other tongues. The Washington Post would not think of printing a cartoon that mocked members of the Muslim or Jewish faiths. It should be ashamed. Furthermore, Sarah Palin has to my knowledge never said she prays in other tongues. Since God is multi-lingual, I’m sure He doesn’t have problems understanding any prayers – whether they are articulated in a known or unknown language. He looks for prayers that come from the heart.”

Thank you Brother Wood. Well said.

A very mad registered tongue talker,

Brother Jesse

NATO Membership for Georgia, Ukraine a Very Bad and Dangerous Idea

This is food for thought. It is a press release from the America First Party. I don’t know that I completely agree (yet) but we do need a comprehensive foreign policy that keeps us safe first of all. I think we are being spread very thin. Read it and let me know what you think.

Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Boulder, CO – Despite the stratospheric commitments of U.S. foreign policy, Vice President Cheney, Senators McCain and Obama, Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and the entire U.S. Senate have endorsed the goal of expanding those commitments even further by supporting the admission of Georgia and Ukraine into NATO. This would continue the trend of expanding NATO security guarantees, which were recently extended to Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.

Like other treaties which have ensnared nations in bloody carnage during the last century, the NATO treaty provides a war guarantee; it commits the United States and its forces to heroic sacrifice and potentially to dangerous escalations with other nuclear armed nations. The treaty considers an attack on any alliance nation as an attack on all the member nations, and ensures the response of the alliance, militarily and in any other way deemed necessary, to restore the peace.

The recent nonsensical war in Georgia and the regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (effectively independent of Georgia since 1991 and 1992, respectively) and the Russian intervention, illustrate the risk of extending NATO. Russian President Medvedev recently affirmed that Russia’s response would have been identical if Georgia had already been in the alliance. If Georgia had been part of NATO at the time of the Russian intervention, there is great possibility that the U.S. and Russia would now be at war.

The danger of this contingency is highlighted by the Russian reliance on nuclear weapons to compensate for their degraded conventional military capability; their 2000 Military Doctrine and large scale military exercises indicate a preparedness to respond to conventional attacks on themselves and their allies, including attacks by NATO, with massive nuclear counterstrikes.

In addition to the current danger of present NATO policy, U.S. membership in the alliance is inappropriate for other reasons. As our party platform states, NATO is illegal under U.S. law because the alliance claims “authority to direct our nation’s armed forces into a war [armed conflict] without the constitutional requirement of Congress declaring war. Since NATO no longer serves a defensive purpose for the United States, it is therefore time that we withdraw from NATO and permit Europe the task of defending itself.”

Jesse