Some of you might be familiar with the Navy Jack “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. Similar to the Gadsden flag, used by our Marines during the American Revolution, the Navy Jack, with its snake insignia, has struck fear in the hearts of our enemies on the seas. More recently, at the beginning of the war on terror, the U.S. Navy instructed its ships as a matter of code to fly the Navy Jack flag, and Navy SEALs were allowed to wear the flag as a shoulder patch, which they did in unison.
A former Navy SEAL by the name of Carl Higbie publicized an e-mail that a former SEAL teammate had intercepted on October 22, 2013. The e-mail came from a senior enlisted advisor stating that SEALs were no longer allowed to wear the Navy Jack “Don’t Tread on Me” patch:
ALL:
WARCOM and GROUP TWO/ONE have pushed out the uniform policy for NWU III and any patches worn on the sleeve.
All personnel are only authorized to wear the matching “AOR” American Flag patch on the right shoulder. You are no longer authorized to wear the “Don’t Tread On Me” patch.
Again the only patch authorized for wear is the American flag on the right shoulder. Please pass the word to all
Thanks
Senior Enlisted Advisor
Higbie responded with an op-ed piece in the Daily Caller. “The Obama administration and the yes-men top brass have decided to wage war on our Navy’s heritage,” he wrote. “Will the SEALs choose to defend that heritage and defy them, with all the impertinence the flag’s slogan implies? Or will they be tread upon?”47
As it turns out, it was the former. I know of not one SEAL who removed the patch. And the administration not only blinked, it caved. Earlier this year, a spokesperson for the Navy released a statement saying that the flag patch, once authorized only for personnel who were deployed overseas, is now also authorized for wear in the continental United States.
Though this victory might have been small, the significance is huge. Our side has a heartbeat, and it pounds in the chests of the brave men in our fighting force. This is where we start to fight back. This is where we begin, by following our military’s lead in standing up for the Constitutional principles on which this nation was built.
Ultimately, we must find a way to fight back that avoids a civil war. Like the military commanders whose stories I’ve told in this chapter, we must stand up and fight for what is right.
CHAPTER 5
The War on the Middle Class
The goals of this administration’s economic policies are simple: funnel increasingly worthless billions of dollars into the hands of the economic vultures that have taken over the economy while increasing the number of Americans dependent on the federal government to support them at a subsistence level.
Historians will argue about the turning point of the American Civil War until they run out of breath. Some will say it was the Battle of Gettysburg, others the crossing of Burnside’s Bridge in the Battle of Antietam. Still more insist it was the death of Stonewall Jackson that ended a Confederate hope for victory.
What I find remarkable is that there was a turning point at all. The Civil War was not a fair fight. The South was out-machined, out-manned, and out-moneyed—and by a considerable margin. The amount of resolve, guile, and guts the Confederate Army showed was such a surprise to the North they almost lost the war before they knew what was happening to them.
But when the discussion turns to the economic factors that tipped the balance of the Civil War, there are few who dispute the importance of the Union Navy’s capture of New Orleans.
To give you the junior high school summary: The North had an industrial-based economy. The South’s was agricultural, mostly tobacco and cotton. It was primarily cotton exported to England that funded the war for the South. Now, from which port do you think the cotton from the South was shipped?
If you said New Orleans, you get an A.
Once the North was successful in its blockade of New Orleans and other Southern ports, the South was in big financial trouble. They had no money coming in; they couldn’t trade cotton for guns or supplies; they couldn’t even pay their troops.
So what did they do?
They printed money. They printed it until they nearly ran out of ink. Until they practically papered all of Dixie with worthless Confederate notes.
And how do you think that worked out for them?
At the beginning of the Civil War, the Confederate States dollar was worth ninety cents on the U.S. dollar. Toward the war’s end, the Confederate buck had dropped to less than two cents on the dollar against its northern counterpart.
If the South’s solution to its financial trouble sounds familiar, it should. I’ll tell you why in a moment, but first let’s put down some factual foundation to this chapter.
I’ve told you the ways this administration’s policies are designed to polarize every segment of the population, from gender to age. But the most serious wedge, the wedge that causes the most pain and does the most damage, is the wedge they drive between the economic classes.
The goals of this administration’s economic policies are simple: Funnel increasingly worthless billions of dollars into the hands of the economic vultures that have taken over the economy while increasing the number of Americans dependent on the federal government to support them at a subsistence level.
The End of the Middle Class
Under the Obama administration, the number of have-nots continues to climb to levels not seen since the1930s.
How bad has it gotten? Let me give you an example. Outside of Baltimore, Maryland, in an area called “the woodlands,” a makeshift community has sprung up. The houses are made of sheets of plastic or canvas and furnished with discarded mattresses, crates, and busted lawn chairs. The city’s homeless, who feel safer living out on their own than in homeless shelters, occupy this shantytown.1
The same phenomenon occurred during the Great Depression. The shantytowns then were called Hoovervilles, after Herbert Hoover. Many held our thirty-first president responsible for the dire economic conditions that forced so many into poverty.
The tent community outside of Baltimore has been appropriately named after another president.
It’s called “Obamaville.”
And Obamavilles are now starting to appear like skin cancers across the country.
Their occupants are the most visible victims of our stagnant economy.
You don’t have to be a Republican or a conservative to understand what kind of economic danger we’re in right now. While the White House is inundated with scandals, the gang on Wall Street that broke the economy in 2008 is at it again.
They’re speculating beyond comprehension.
They’re trading on derivatives that don’t even exist. They have created fiduciary instruments that aren’t real.
They’ve run the stock market up to unsupportable levels.
Why?
Because federal power brokers have given them the green light.
The fat cats on Wall Street don’t care that they’re profiting off an agenda that has an ultimate goal of socialism and ruin. It doesn’t bother them in the least that the money that fuels their private jets and pays for their personal chefs and exclusive country clubs comes right out of the pockets of a dying middle class.
As long as the greenbacks are flowing, the Wall Street gang will keep their mouths shut.
As long as they’re making billions of dollars in trades on information you and I will never see, they’re happy.
As long as Wall Street regulations do more harm than good to American taxpayers, they’re perfectly content.
Rather than setting policies that put the poor back to work, those who steer our fortunes have built a kind of trapdoor economy through which more and more middle-class Americans have dropped into poverty.
Here’s how they’re getting away with it:
• Setting near-zero “stimulus” interest rates that wildly inflate the stock market while gutting middle-class savings.
• Creating an abs
urd number of new regulations that business owners, especially owners of small businesses who want to expand, have to abide by.
• Redefining full-time employment as thirty hours a week through Obamacare, which has all but eliminated the core jobs of many middle- and upper-middle-class employees, pushing them into part-time status or causing them to lose their jobs altogether and become dependent on the government for unemployment benefits, food stamps, and welfare in order to survive.
Our increasingly manipulated economy is destroying the middle class, robbing taxpaying Americans who have jobs and run small businesses of their hard-earned money by using their tax dollars to bail out the biggest and most corrupt banks in the world. At the same time, the administration turns a blind eye to the corruption of the megabanks that now control the economy.
So what does the South’s economic policy during the Civil War have to do with the way things are now? I’ll tell you. But I must warn you first, the results of this administration’s agenda are at least as devastating as those that crippled the Confederate States and quite possibly could signal the end, not just of economic prosperity in this country, but of free-market capitalism itself.
The Fed
The Federal Reserve Bank, formerly under Ben Bernanke and now under Janet Yellen, has effectively become the lead player in what, as I see it, amounts to a banking conspiracy.
Our founding fathers were very clear when they drafted the Constitution. They said that it was Congress, and not a banking system, that had the authority to “coin Money [and] regulate the value thereof.”2 Now, I’m not saying that today’s Congress would do a better job than the Fed of controlling the money supply, but at least we could vote them out of office if we felt they were driving us into financial ruin.
The Fed is “a unique public/private structure that operates within the government, but is still relatively independent of government.”3 It is effectively immune to the will of the people.
It’s become the tool of crony capitalists around the world who have commandeered not only the U.S. financial industry but global finance as well. And as I noted earlier, one of the primary ways the Fed is manipulating our economy is through artificially keeping interest rates near zero percent.
It’s done that through its policy of quantitative easing.
The Fed started the practice of quantitative easing, or QE as it’s known, after the economic crash of 2008. Its purpose was to use taxpayer money to bail out the largest U.S. financial institutions. What started as a temporary and limited attempt to restore the liquidity of major U.S. banks became a perpetual nightmare. Since the bailout began, there have been three rounds of quantitative easing. We’re now well into QE3.
In implementing quantitative easing (and here’s where we’re replicating the fiscal policy of the Confederacy), the Fed prints tens of billions of dollars a month—up to a trillion dollars annually—for the purpose of buying U.S. Treasury bonds and worthless mortgage-backed securities in order to keep interest rates near zero percent.
When Ben Bernanke stepped down and Janet Yellen, another financial crony of the corrupt bankers, took over, Bernanke had printed $4,102,138,000,000.00—that’s $4 trillion in what amounts to Confederate counterfeit money.
It shows up on the Fed’s balance sheet as debt, and American taxpayers are on the hook for that debt. To give you an idea of how much counterfeit money $4 trillion is, it’s more than the IRS collects in income taxes from American citizens in an entire year. The worthless debt on the Fed’s balance sheet has increased almost 400 percent since Bernanke took over as Fed chairman in 2006.
That $4 trillion represents the administration’s attempt to simulate the economy.4
When Bernanke tried to “taper” down the amount of QE debt he was creating each month from $85 billion to $75 billion, the stock market tanked.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for business being profitable. What I object to is our government funneling money to financial crooks so they can continue to game the system.
When the Fed dropped monthly QE spending down to $65 billion a month, stocks plunged again.
Bernanke has handed the American taxpayers a four-trillion-dollar saddle, fiat currency that is backed only by the increasingly hollow “full faith and credit” of the U.S. federal government.
Come to think of it, what the South did during the Civil War was more responsible than what is happening now. The South only printed money.
The Fed is printing debt.
As long as the interest rate remains near zero, we pay only a small amount—about 6 percent of federal government spending a year5—as interest on the federal debt. But each increase of 1 percent in the interest rate adds another $200 billion the feds have to shell out. At 5 percent, they’ll be spending more than a trillion dollars a year on interest payments alone. This money comes out of taxpayers’ pockets.
Let me put that into perspective for you: The total amount the federal government takes in annually through income and other federal taxes is less that $3 trillion.6
When the interest rate on the federal debt reaches 5 percent—not an outrageous number by any means—we’ll be paying more than a third of federal revenues on federal debt interest alone.
The Fed’s solution? Keep adding to the debt in order to keep interest payments low.
The problem is this: If interest rates rise, and they always do, then we’re broke.
It’s the most utterly irresponsible policy imaginable; the policy affects everything from quality of life to foreign policy to our ability to defend ourselves militarily.
Since QE and the Fed’s money printing spree, do you know what has happened to Americans’ savings?
They’ve disappeared.
Those artificially low interest rates have cost Americans $9 trillion in interest that they should have received on the money in their savings accounts. Instead of the interest going to Americans who responsibly saved their money, it was transferred to megabanks so they could gamble it away on risky investments.7
If you had put $100 in a savings account in 2008, by 2014 you would have made about ninety cents in interest. Less than one dollar—or nine-tenths of 1 percent—in six years. After you factor in cost-of-living increases, you actually lose money when you put it in the bank.
Retired people, unable to earn any interest on their savings because of the Fed’s zero-interest-rate policy, are being forced to draw down their savings in order to pay their bills.8
Eliminating their ability to save money is one of the ways the left continues its ongoing attack on responsible middle-class Americans.
A former Ronald Reagan advisor sums up quantitative easing this way:
QE [is] a scheme for pumping profits into the banks and boosting their balance sheets. The real purpose of QE is to drive up the prices of the debt-related derivatives on the banks’ books, thus keeping the banks with solvent balance sheets.9 The financial world is under Washington’s thumb. And Washington is printing money for the sake of 4 or 5 mega-banks.10
I’d change one thing in the advisor’s statement: It’s clear to me that the financial world is not under Washington’s thumb.
It’s Washington that is under the financial world’s thumb.
How good is quantitative easing for fat-cat bankers and hedge fund crooks? “It’s the greatest Wall Street backdoor bailout of all time,” says one former Federal Reserve official.
Andrew Huszar was in charge of the Fed’s bond-buying spree after the 2008 financial collapse. In late 2013, Huszar finally came to his senses and realized that quantitative easing was implemented only to increase the price of the derivatives in order to keep the big banks solvent. Derivatives are nothing more than worthless securities manufactured out of thin air and given whatever value those trading them choose to assign. After he left the agency in disgust, he wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal in which he explained how he had had his eyes opened. He started with an apology: “I can only say: I’m sorry America.�
� He went on to describe his role in creating the financial disaster we’re currently in the middle of, saying that he “was responsible for executing the centerpiece program of the Fed’s first plunge into the bond-buying experiment known as quantitative easing.” He went on, “Because QE was relentlessly pumping money into the financial markets during the past five years, it killed the urgency for Washington to confront a real crisis: that of a structurally unsound U.S. economy.”11
Quantitative easing is nothing short of robbery, but it’s only the latest felony in big banking’s sordid history, which dates back to the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act during the Clinton administration; since the 1930s, this act had prevented banks from being brokerage houses and making risky investments with their clients’ money. With a stroke of his pen, Clinton signed legislation that effectively made it no longer necessary for banks to manage their assets responsibly and honestly.
The result has been that banks are hiding tens of trillions of dollars in debt off their books because of failed investments. When they’re no longer able to hide that debt, we face a devastating economic crash.12
The financial crash of 2008 was engineered by an elite group of financial professionals in order to help ensure the election of Barack Obama and guarantee the continued complicity of the U.S. government and its cadre of economic advisors, advisors who formerly worked with financial behemoth Goldman Sachs.
The government’s response to the crash was the passage in 2010 of the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, a 2,300-page behemoth containing more than four hundred new regulations. When he signed the bill into law, the president promised that the American taxpayer “will never again be asked to foot the bill for Wall Street’s mistakes.” The president even added his favorite word for emphasis, as he does frequently when he’s deceiving the American people: “There will be no more tax-funded bailouts—period.”13
Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth Page 8