Melding the Corporatocracy with a Kleptocracy

Below are two presentations that get to the bottom of the issues that we face here in America. The First is a presentation from Dr. Paul Craig Roberts that defines the waste and dysfunction of the American Economic system as it stands today entitled Klepocrats at Work. The second is a video interview of Catherine Austin Fitts by Max Keiser on his TV program On the Edge.

What is it going to take for people to wake up to what are the actual underlying systemic, problematic issues in our economy and what will it take for people to take action? We have seen upheaval in the Middle East related to their cost of living and governments that are autocratic protecting the interests of the ruling class at the expense of the people. We have been buffered to a great degree from the cost of living issues, because of the American Dollar's role as the World Reserve Currency.

Fundamental Economics have not played a role in the value of our money since the Dollar was taken off of the Gold Standard in 1971 (Nixon Shock - The ending of the Bretton Woods agreement). The Dollar became a "Legal Tender" currency, which many define as being backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government. Thus today the notes are backed only by the government's ability to levy taxes to pay its debts. In another sense, because the notes are legal tender, they are "backed" by all the goods and services in the U.S. economy and have value because the public may exchange them for valued goods and services in the U.S. economy.

This led to the Petrodollar and the role of the dollar as the World Reserve currency (Petrodollar), because of agreements made between the United States Government and Oil Exporting Nations (mainly The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries - OPEC). American Dollars have been used for the basis of exchange for oil. This was originally instituted, because we were the leading importer of oil from Oil Exporting nations. Instead of pegging our currency to Gold (prior to 1971), it would now be pegged to oil (shortly thereafter ever since). This peg supposedly led to stability in oil prices, as well as stability in the value of our dollar.

What we have seen is that the Dollar has been hijacked as a result of this system. Instead of Petrodollars bringing stability, they have brought instability. We are engaged in worldwide conflicts that propagandists try to insinuate are a result of ideological principles, when the baseline hostilities could easily be defanged by a reduction in the exchange of American dollars to buy foreign imports, mainly centered on Oil. Would the issues we face in the Middle East and North Africa be as perilous today if we were not tangled in this Oil Web?

What Catherine Austin Fitts details in the Video below is that, "What happens to the Dollar will be the result of our Military. The central banks print money and the Military makes sure everybody takes it, while trading back natural resources cheap." That is what we have seen. That is where the "Full Faith and Credit" is enforced.

This Federal Credit mechanism keeps the liquidity going through force. This system has been breaking down, because it must constantly grow and it cannot grow to infinity. Over the years this system has allowed America to become an Empire, but as the fundamental system based around our dominant currency continues to break down and as this breakdown accelerates it becomes more impossible to sustain and eventually it will completely collapse as people wake up and realize that this system is dysfunctional and they choose not to participate in the American Dollar system any longer. Because as Gerald Celente states, "It is not worth the paper it is not printed on."

The Fiat Dollar was functional in the beginning because it was backed by our wealth as a nation. It was backed by the assets we had built up as a nation since our inception and because of our status created as a result of the role we played in solving the disputes of World War I and II. Now, instead of playing a role in solving disputes, we are playing a major role in the inception and continuation of hostilities both overtly in some instances and covertly through wars of proxy. Now we have shrunk our Industrial capacity and strained our creative abilities to the extent that we are contributing to our own implosion and eventual demise.

It is time that we get back to our core principles as a nation. It is time that we restore our roots as a Republic. It is time to revalidate the Constitution and the principles of our founders. The founders of this nation were men who were willing to put their lives on the line. They would have been executed if they had failed in their mission. The "leaders" of today are men of clay, who want to maintain the status quo and continue to enjoy the fruits of an unmanageable and crumbling system that is harming the people of this nation. What they don't understand is that when it crumbles they will be holding a whole lot of nothing.

Kleptocrats at Work - Paul Craig Roberts - Infowars.com - February 8, 2011

Kleptocracy is as old as government. Exotic car broker Michael Sheehan discovered an amazing case nine years ago when he was invited to purchase rare Ferraris and McLaren F1s from a Brunei collection. He writes about it in the current issue of Sports Car Market.

Brunei is a family-owned oil sultanate of 400,000 people located on the island of Borneo in southeast Asia. A brother of the sultan was finance minister until 1997, when the Asian financial crisis hit Brunei. The Arthur Andersen accounting firm was called in to audit the books. The accountants found that between 1983 and 1998 $40 billion had disappeared and that the finance minister himself had personally spent $14.8 billion.

The finance minister had a collection of 2,500 exotic cars, 500 properties, five yachts, and nine world-class aircraft. He had managed to spend $900,000,000 in the London jeweler Asprey, apparently guaranteeing the old age retirements of a number of attractive women who consort with kleptocrats.

The finance minister was allowed to keep 500 of the cars, but he had to turn in the rest of his loot – to no avail as we shall see.

Sheehan went to Brunei to view the cars. From his general description of the collection, I estimate that the finance minister had paid six figures for the least expensive car in the collection. Many cost much more. McLaren F1s cost $1,000,000 new. They are more valuable now. In October 2008 one sold at a London auction for $4,100,000. Many of the cars were custom built. Some of the high-speed Ferraris “were coated in radar-absorbent matte-black coatings and fitted with infrared cameras for night driving.” Easily more than one billion dollars of Brunei’s oil revenues had found their way into the finance minister’s car collection.

Sheehan reports that the cars were stored in about 12 buildings “surrounded by a high wall topped with razor wire and with a bomb-proof front gate” and patrolled by “armed Gurkhas with very serious German shepherds.” The security was for naught, because “the air conditioning was off, but the tropical sun was not.” Years of heat and humidity had destroyed the cars. The storage facilities had become a car tomb.

Sheehan concluded that most of the cars were in such a state of ruin that only a few of the cars had sufficiently high inherent values to support commercially viable restorations. The best use of the rest, Sheehan decided, would be to turn them into an artificial ocean reef.

The careless waste is shocking and even more so to car buffs who consider many of the ruined cars to be artistic masterpieces. This is the kind of opulent waste that we associate with family-owned countries. But before we Americans start feeling superior, consider that the U.S. government puts the Brunei finance minister to shame.

On Jan. 29, 2002, the CBS Evening News reported that the Pentagon had lost track of $2.3 trillion, yes, $2,300 billion. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted, “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” “We know it is gone,” said Jim Minnery of the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, “but we don’t know what they spent it on.”

Reported thefts from Iraq and Afghanistan reconstruction aid rival Brunei’s missing billions. Pallets of cash stacked high have been flown out of Afghanistan in plain view. The stories of corruption and missing funds are so numerous that they are no longer reported.

The U.S. Congress, at President Obama’s request, recently passed the largest military spending bill of all time in behalf of the share prices of the military/security complex, while many of the 50 states teeter on bankruptcy and default on pensions and municipal bonds and slash education, medical, and other services. For “our” government in Washington, it is a no-brainer that the profits of the military-security complex take every precedence over every need of the American people.

If the Brunei finance minister’s billion-dollar car collection becomes an artificial reef, it will foster marine life. In contrast, Dick Cheney seriously damaged, perhaps for many years to come, the Gulf of Mexico, because Cheney believed a few extra bucks for the oil companies were more important than safety standards. The missing safety standards have cost British Petroleum $20 billion in clean up and restitution costs.

U.S. taxpayers are paying the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security $56,336,000,000 this year to porno-scan and grope them and otherwise invade their privacy, while millions of Americans are foreclosed out of their homes.

How are the priorities of the U.S. government superior to those of the Brunei finance minister? When it comes to waste and corruption, lies and deception, the U.S. government has no equal.

Dr. Paul Craig Roberts is the father of Reaganomics and the former head of policy at the Department of Treasury. He is a columnist and was previously the editor of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, “How the Economy Was Lost: The War of the Worlds,” details why America is disintegrating.

Catherine Austin Fitts interview with Max Keiser - Revolutions and Economy