Making it Easy to be Greedy
The figure $800,000,000 has come up several times in different contexts since I first noticed it in an article about our immense national debt in the NY Times business section last December. Later, I saw it as the amount of arms we have sent to Ukraine on two different days since the war started. And more recently that figure appears as the amount of cash Russia gets every day from sales of its oil and gas. But the first instance is a doozy.
Everyone has heard of the national debt and how it gets bigger everyday but few know the exact facts we are dealing with, and how the banks game the system.
The amount of $800,000,000 is what We the People pay to Them the Banks every single day of the year in INTEREST ALONE on our national debt.
Multiply that figure by 365 and you’ll see how much we pay the banks over a whole year. And yet the figure keeps going up because we only pay the interest but don’t pay down the debt at all.
If we divide that annual figure by $30 Trillion, (our current total national debt) we find the current rate of interest we pay the banks for their loans. But these loans merely pay the interest on our debt.
That figure does not seem high: 2 ½ percent but with a $30 Trillion debt it piles up quickly.
Here’s the kicker that illustrates what a mess we’ve allowed the bankers and their politicians to saddle us with:
Most Americans don’t realize that the Department of the Treasury and the Federal Reserve Bank are two completely different entities. The U.S. Department of the Treasury is the one that is Constitutional.
But they are BOTH working in concert to deprive millions of us perplexed Americans the honest calculation of what it means to be in debt to the Wall Street banks. These banks have a scheme to redistribute our national wealth to those very banks and we long ago rolled out a red carpet for the banks to destroy our monetary system.
Here's how they do it: The Treasury needs funds to avoid default on our debt so it borrows from the banks and pays only the interest at two and one half percent. But these same banks themselves borrow those funds from the Federal Reserve which, in an act of JP Morgan style robber barony composed of hypocrisy and outright theft, waves its magic wand and creates newly printed dollars to pay our daily debt. We hear about it every time the Fed floods our monetary system with this goofy money where the banks get loans from the Fed at one half of one percent or less.
In other words, the banks borrow from the Fed at one half of one percent and then turn around and lend that SAME money to the Treasury for two and one half percent, an instantaneous profit of two percent that works out to be $600,000,000 per day. And when you’re dealing with such a massive sum it quickly adds up to big bucks. Big bucks that would feel real good in the pockets of our consumers and tax payers but are instead diverted into the black hole of Wall Street interests.
And they perform this scam in plain sight. Why can’t We the People do the capitalist thing and simply “eliminate the middlemen?” That is, we can just skip the interest and have the Federal Reserve lend this fiat currency directly to the Treasury and eliminate the greedy banks from the deal altogether. Then we will be treated to the aural spectacle of hearing the squeal of a stuck pig. It won’t be pretty, but will be extremely satisfying.
The Fed has been in power for 110 years and it is not even legal. How can it be Constitutional when the entire idea of the Constitution, its essential genius, is to create a governing system of checks and balances?
However, the Fed is not part of this system because the moment that the Fed “governors” are confirmed they get complete and total power over our monetary system, personal immunity and cannot be removed or directed as any other dutiful creature of a government entity can be. Their duty is to the private banks, NOT the Treasury Department and certainly not to the American taxpayer.
Once they get in they are in for good and can inflict whatever damage that Wall Street needs to be done to the middle class, rural areas and small business so it can continue to increase Wall Street power to gain ever more wealth and then use that wealth to buy even more politicians and judges to continue their rotten process.
These individuals work not for the benefit of We the People but instead only for the banks which get this daily largess of the difference between what they pay for this $800,000,000 (one half of one percent) and what they charge the Treasury for that same cash, (2.5%.) This is a tidy profit for the banks, but a HUGE loss for the taxpayers, to the tune of $600,000,000 per day, every single day, 365 days per year.
Do we really have to accept this? If we default only the banks get hurt. The banks employ this system because they are wealthy and powerful enough to warp our whole economy, and even our very democracy, for their own benefit.
Can we do anything better with an extra $800,000,000 per day to spend? The Russians use their $800,000,000 per day to try to conquer their peaceful neighbors but our greedy banks take their $800,000,000 per day and give some of it to the lying politicians who think Putin is a genius.
The rest of it floods into the stock markets which are unconnected to the “official” inflation figures. During the past 12 years most of the Fed “output” went directly into Wall Street, which made the markets artificially rise.
This is why Wall Street has always been the “investment market of last resort,” which gets all sorts of dirty money from abroad with no questions asked.
But most of Federal Reserve credit has gone to inflating the stock market out of all proportion to rational economic practices in a kind of turbo-charged, red, white and blue casino that former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan once called “irrational exuberance.” We had a “correction” in 2009 but now much of the Fed’s printing of money goes straight to the corporations buying up each other with ever fatter loans with skinny interest rates but no actual financial justification beyond the greed of the market.
The elitist bankers love this “free market” system that they invented and foisted on us because they adore the daily $600,000,000 in “free money” they gain with every transaction between the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury.
Most Americans consider our country to be a Christian nation but we rarely take the guidance of the Bible to make our culture one that Jesus would be proud of. Jesus said: “It would be easier to pass a camel through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to attain the Kingdom of Heaven.” (1 Timothy 6:10)
Or, more to the point, “Love of money is the root of all evil.” (Matthew 19:21-24) Jesus beats J.P. Morgan (at least on paper.) Let’s end this evil.
We can easily default and only the banks and their investors will lose out. We the People still have the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to protect our real cash in our real accounts.
Here’s a short history of our debt woes: Ronald Reagan ran for president from 1975 until 1980 and in every speech he gave he lamented the plight of our grand-children having to pay for the excesses of our government at the time. He promised to not only balance the budget but to pay off the national debt as well, which, when he took office in 1981, was $450 Billion. But after 12 years of Reagan-Bush “voodoo economics” tax cuts for the rich it skyrocketed to $5 Trillion, an eleven fold increase! Another President Bush used the same arguments and got another huge tax cut for the rich and then the very next time the Republicans were in full power they did it a third time and now our debt is $30 Trillion.
And now Reagan’s grand-children are worried that their own great grand-children will still be on the Wall Street hook.
The very people responsible for this mess are the ones who qualify for the “insanity” label by believing that continually doing the same stupid thing over and over will actually result in a financial miracle that will eliminate our debt. But in practice all they accomplish is making the rich richer and the rest of us bitter, cynical and PERMANENTLY in debt with no recourse than to keep paying the crooked banks for ever and ever.