I regularly run into people who rant against the government, vote Republican, who’s lives are utterly dependent upon various aspect of the social safety net.
The working class’ earning power has been so squeezed by corporate America it has fallen to the government to keep many from abject poverty.
Yet large numbers of the people dependent on government programs watch nothing but Fox News, detest the current President and argue vehemently to destroy all the things that make their lives survivable.
The New York Times has done a long story on them. It is a must read.
Ki Gulbranson owns a logo apparel shop, deals in jewelry on the side and referees youth soccer games. He makes about $39,000 a year and wants you to know that he does not need any help from the federal government.
“I don’t demand that the government does this for me. I don’t feel like I need the government,??? said KI GULBRANSON, who counts on an earned-income tax credit and has signed up his children for free meals at school.
He says that too many Americans lean on taxpayers rather than living within their means. He supports politicians who promise to cut government spending. In 2010, he printed T-shirts for the Tea Party campaign of a neighbor, Chip Cravaack, who ousted this region’s long-serving Democratic congressman.
Yet this year, as in each of the past three years, Mr. Gulbranson, 57, is counting on a payment of several thousand dollars from the federal government, a subsidy for working families called the earned-income tax credit. He has signed up his three school-age children to eat free breakfast and lunch at federal expense. And Medicare paid for his mother, 88, to have hip surgery twice.
[Dean P. Lacy], a professor of political science at Dartmouth College, has identified a twist on that theme in American politics over the last generation. Support for Republican candidates, who generally promise to cut government spending, has increased since 1980 in states where the federal government spends more than it collects. The greater the dependence, the greater the support for Republican candidates.
And, here, the man who resent others who spend “his” money, doled out by entitlement check, in the same boat:
Brian Qualley, 49, has a sister who survived a brain tumor but was disabled by its removal. The government pays for her care at an assisted-living facility. Their mother scrapes by on Social Security.
Mr. Qualley said that the government should provide for those who need help, but that too much money was being wasted. Mr. Qualley, who owns a tattoo parlor in Harris, north of North Branch, said some of his customers paid with money from government disability checks.
“They’re getting $300 or $400 tattoos, and they’re wearing nice new Nike shoes that I can’t afford,???
Having played in a biker rock band for many years I’m intimately familiar with the tattoo parlor crowd. The logical mind is not one of its defining characteristics. You find no gentleness, expansive spirit or progressive value in tattoo parlors and this can hardly be news. Momentarily, I wondered why the Times even saw fit to interview someone who ran one. (The paper also uncovered a bigot — the resentment over “nice Nike shoes” being the giveaway. The reporter and editors certainly know it.)
However, scapegoating is a common characteristic of societies enduring hard times. And Paul Fussell noted in Class that the afflicted kick down at those of their own circumstance.
There’s a very thin line between disdain or contempt and outright hate between the divisions which make up our various middle-class tribes. And often there are no lines at all. Needle someone hard enough in a tribe different from yours and see it erupt.
It is easy to understand the great anger in the Tea Party, or anywhere in the hinterlands. The urge to give a presumed tormentor a good punch in the face when you get the opportunity to swing is strong and human. The presumed tormentor is usually someone within arms reach.
Here I often marvel at the many folk music videos the opposition puts on YouTube, all with more enthusiastic fans than anything from my side.
The music may be bad, the lyrics awful, the sentiment horribly misguided. It’s easy to laugh at material by people who couldn’t pass an introductory college economics course singing about Ron Paul’s love of “sound money” and returning to the gold standard.
However, one thing it doesn’t lack is gutsiness; the willingness to be taken for a fool in letting the raw shout of hurt out.
A predatory economy has set into stone conditions in which Americans now always find themselves moving down. So they’re always going to be bitter. How many people on food stamps vote for pols who want to destroy the food stamp program?
A lot more than you think, I imagine.
“There used to be room at the top,??? Paul Fussell wrote in Class.
More on the Alex Jones-like cult devotion to Ron Paul in 2011 tunes written for and about him. No one else, not even pop star celebrities, comes close. The best exude sly bits of humor in the lyrics, a rare commodity in the Paul legion. It’s a demographic so sincere in belief its default position is always closer to the dour than the joyful. Paul’s apocalyptic predictions of what will happen to the country also draw survivalists and end-timers. Like him, they strongly value the hoarding of precious metals and the building of bunkers.
This lady name checks “Aden-hauer” [sic] and Charles de Gaulle!
An tongue-in-cheek almost perfect adaptation of the old classic, “Downtown.”
Lyrics:
Ron Paul, he’s really not that old
Ron Paul, he’d rather pay with gold
Ron Paul, he’ll open up the fed
Ron Paul, drinkin’ raw milk in bed
This young fellah is trying out a poor man’s Woody Guthrie/Pete Seeger/Hank Williams soft sell approach. I like it.
Horribly unappreciated at 40-some views. If you sent them 10 dollars for every view it still wouldn’t pay for the love and money they’ve put into the Paul campaign.
Even death metal bands with Cookie Monster vocalists love the Constitution and sound money.
Lyric:
“When they’re talkin’ shit about Ron Paul, they’re walkin’ on the fightin’ side of me/I would suggest they shut their trap before they lose all their teeth …”
This appears absolutely true.
This is an adaptation of a Scottish fighting/dancing tune but, for the life of me, I can’t recall the title now. Check back later.
“I bet there is nobody singing about that douchebag Newt Gingrich,” writes one commenter under one of the many places it’s been uploaded to YouTube.
A rootsy hippie-ish folk lilt. Right now there’s probably someone singing something like this at a coffee house open mike near you. And I bet they’re mentioning freedom, liberty and something bad happening to the Fed. Go check, I’ll wait.
This video of Ron Paul, put together by TPM Think Progress, put a bopping electro-beat to strung together excerpts of the GOP Presidential candidates’ declarations that, well — everything in civil society, is unconstitutional.
The wee bit of music was subtle but effective, perfect for the imagery.
And it got me back onto a sampler I’d considered months ago, one dealing with the phenomenon in which Paul supporters write lots — and I do mean lots — of tunes recommending their man.
No other Republican nominee enjoys such a thing. And certainly no one on the other side of the line in the Democratic Party, not the President, nobody, comes close, either.
There is the big name, Aimee Allen, who recorded the official/unofficial “Ron Paul Anthem.” It’s the leader of the pack at about half a million hits on YouTube.
But it doesn’t capture the grass roots feel of the virtually countless homespun like-minded efforts uploaded to the web by Paul supporters. And while the glassy-eyed enthusiasm can be a bit frightening, there is no denial of the sincere fervor on display.
If you ever thought that singer/songwriters might be a little wary of putting lyrics about “sound money” and ending “inflation” and the Fed into something that must be sung with conviction, think again.
There’s no shortage.
Here then, a brief selection of American folk tunes on Ron Paul. And everyone wants him to be President.
Sprightly hot stuff with a light sense of humor, DJ von Mises, has uploaded many pro-Ron Paul dance tracks to YouTube.
Von Mises takes his name from the dead Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, whose economic theories form the core of Paul-ian monetary policy. That they’ve all been proven disastrously wrong by the current mess is really beside the point here.
And while the tribute inherent in using the name von Mises may be lost on random listeners, to the true believers in Paul it is exquisitely resonant. (Update: Sadly, von Mises pulled this number from YouTube soon after DD linked to it. Who knew the sound money folks could be so touchy? The world’s pleasure awaits but if being a hermit is your thing, who am I to argue?)
Ron Paul will end inflation, she sings. There isn’t any inflation to speak of but it hardly matters. She is so cute, along with the soft-peddled off camera antics, even the slight lithp at the beginning works.
“This is a song I wrote this song [sic] for Ron Paul to give any help I could towards bringing our troops home and ending the federal reserve,” writes the artist on YouTube. I would never have suspected such a person to be against the printing of fiat money.
Lyrics: President Ron Paul, how the words sound good together.
Standing for liberty, sound money and peace. Healing
our nation from big government disease.
My favorite, next to the TP Paul video. (Everyone else is number 3, or lower.) The jaunty train rhythm is really hard to beat.
If you drill down through the related videos recommended as these end, you’ll begin to grasp the size of the Ron Paul Music Machine. You’ll be delighted by it. Or you could feel need for a bit of aspirin.
But does that make the [Bitcoin] experiment a success? Um, no. What we want from a monetary system isn’t to make people holding money rich; we want it to facilitate transactions and make the economy as a whole rich. And that’s not at all what is happening in Bitcoin …
[There] has been an incentive to hoard the virtual currency rather than spending it. The actual value of transactions in Bitcoins has fallen rather than rising. In effect, real gross Bitcoin product has fallen sharply.
Krugman likens Bitcoin to a “private gold standard.”
“[It] reinforces the case against anything like a new gold standard – because it shows just how vulnerable such a standard would be to money-hoarding, deflation, and depression,” he writes.
You can leave your processor on for a century and maybe see the equivalent of a few bucks worth of bitcoins. Even semi-hard days of mining them are well over.
Think of it as the citizen’s gold mining crew shown in Pale Rider, except there’s no chance you’ll find the big rock like Spider Conway before he was gunned down by Stockburn and his marshals. And no Clint Eastwood as “Preacher,??? either.
File this one with the fiat money fear and loathers. The difference is that Bitcoin fans are obsessed libertarian young tech geeks as opposed to obsessed old nuts GOP/Tea Party white guys hoarding gold, heeding the commercial advice of Gordon Liddy and convinced the US dollar is going to turn into a one trillion Zim note.
If you download the Bitcoin software and read through the on-line site you’ll be tempted to try some bitcoin mining. Don’t bother.
I did it a couple months ago. You can leave your processor on for a century and maybe see the equivalent of a few bucks worth of bitcoins. Even semi-hard days of mining them are well over.
Think of it as the citizen’s gold mining crew shown in Pale Rider, except there’s no chance you’ll find the big rock like Spider Conway before he was gunned down by Stockburn and his marshals. And no Clint Eastwood as “Preacher,” either.
Bitcoin is all now Coy LaHood.
Maybe that will change.
But the info from F-Secure that a ‘bot controlling a Bitcoin mining operation was using purloined Twitter accounts certainly isn’t good news.
“Last month Symantec blogged about the potential of creating botnets used to mine bitcoins, without the computer owner ever knowing,” reads something from the Internets.
Security, liquidity and stability are now things one does not associate with Bitcoin. Which would seem to be very bad news, if not a death knell, for the currency. Readers searching through Google will find some wags have already come up with the new name — shitcoins.
If you have a lot of them, they’re allegedly worth something. If not, ehhh.
Bitcoins are generated all over the Internet by anybody running a free application called a bitcoin miner. Mining requires a certain amount of work for each coin. This amount if automatically adjusted by the network, such that the bitcoins are always created at a predictable and limited rate.
Believe this and you waste your time. Bitcoin exploitation is now the domain of speculators who can buy significant sums of them in the belief that value will appreciate according to the graph here. Or that value can be accumulated by exploiting Bitcoin exchange problems which cause rapid fluctuation in the currency’s value.
Unfortunately, practical bitcoin mining, which comes as a “feature” in every downloaded copy of the Bitcoin software, is totally out of reach
of Joe Average User now. (Somehow the “good boy” at the Atlantic never deigns to mention it.)
So as a currency, it’s no longer of any value to a middle class (indeed, there’s no compelling reason for anyone from the middle or lower classes to even believe in Bitcoins) — which would seem to be a requirement for the success of any newish money.
“Sounds like a Ponzi scheme,” said my friend Don, as I explained it to him at a small party a couple weeks ago.
“You should accept Bitcoins,” he added.
If you have a Bitcoin wallet, Bitcoin.org used to (at least about a month ago) suggest going to the Bitcoin Faucet (you can Google it) for some shards of the virtual currency. This to get you started and whet the whistle.
DD didn’t have much luck with that. “Sent!” said the Bitcoin Faucet, in metering out my milibits of a Bitcoin. No transactions, hours later, in the ol’ Bitcoin wallet. Not even an atom of a crumb.
Another fly in the ointment is the necessity of keeping up with everything happening re Bitcoins and the troubles of the sites built to service the networked currency. If everyone was faced with a similar but limited thicket of interesting dysfunction and intriguing trouble when using real money the homeless would rapidly become the largest segment in the American economy.
Beck’s not the only who pimps gold but he was by far the most powerful and influential player. And Fox gave him an audience, one so large it could effectively move the price of gold. The blog post explains that the goldbug market is sufficiently small — around 25,000 or so — that advertising and Beck’s daily exhortations were enough to do the job.
The accompanying graphic explains how Beck worked it for the betterment of the goldsellers as well as himself.
If one was to buy gold, the correct way was to buy bullion or accepted gold bullion coins. This is not, however, what Beck advocated. He recommended French franc Roosters and other European numismatic coins. The graphic accompanying the blog makes it quite clear.
The difference is critical to the investor, or the person about to be ripped off.
Gold bullion is compensated for sale at melt value and that is typically one to five percent less than what you would pay for the gold. This is how the sellers make their money. For you to break even on the investment the price of gold must then appreciate.
And that is the spread dealers work. However, it gets more profitable if the goldseller peddles gold numismatic coins, like those recommended by Beck. They lose their value immediately on purchase.
The graphic states bluntly: “Customer loses 42 percent of their investment instantly.”
Beck is gone from Fox but the gold commercials are not. And as anyone who watches cable news knows, many other gold sellers have entered the advertising fray. It’s not just Goldline International.
Goldline, the blog post also notes, is being investigated for criminal practices.
The current GOP is thoroughly infested with gold bugs/fiat money kooks. Paul Ryan is fond of flaunting his Zimbabwe hyperinflation note — another item Beck used to regularly frighten his audiences into buying gold.
Tea Party wingnut and candidate for the Bethlehem school board, Randy Toman — also sometimes a subject of the blog — is crazy for fringe precious metals investment newsletters and is on record going on about the collapse of the dollar. Toman is a good example of someone completely taken in by gold scams and the belief in runaway hyperinflation.
There’s this, too:
The examples are virtually without end.
I even spotted noted quack Jim Cramer advocating for gold while being laundered through MSNBC. Paradoxically, this was said to be because the US government was unstable and the GOP was looking ever more likely to push the country into default in August.
Infrequently I return to Randy Toman, the ol’ Tea Party blogger at the Lehigh Valley Conservative.
He’s the Pennsy ex-union anti-union goldbug, equipped with the Bible and scripture, judging and shaking his head at all the heathens ruining America.
Normally, this wouldn’t matter.
But Toman is running for school board in Bethlehem School District. And his views make him totally unfit for any elected office, particularly any one involved in shaping the environment in which children are educated.
Anybody that has read anything about the school districts around the country knows the gathering of students to pray or discuss God and Christianity are discouraged, challenged and shut down from happening.
The attempt to teach creationism or intelligent design will close a school district down and bring out the Darwin supporters along with the ACLU.
The extremists get elected when the local media — in the Lehigh Valley, two fairly bad newspapers, The Morning Call and the Easton Express — fall down on the job and neglect to inform people on what the names on the local ballots really believe in.
In any case, the Cult of Electromagnetic Pulse Crazy has been getting caught in the DD blog spam filter this week, first for its Internet radio show.
And now for a techno-thriller posted on-line, written by someone who cleaves to the “Ludwig Van Mises Institute,” an eye-rolling place dedicated to promoting goldbuggism and persuading assorted nuts plutocrats to hide their money in tax-dodge banking nations like Switzerland and Lichtenstein.
Here’s the spam synopsis:
“A short story showing how powerful elite Washington & London interests and central bankers could manipulate American foreign policy using a black flag event in order to guarantee the American dollar remains the world’s reserve currency. Follow what could be the next Middle East conflict in the Persian Gulf region involving the US, UK & Iran over the dollar and oil reserves and the resulting [electromagnetic pulse attack] attack and world financial crisis starting in the Middle East.”
Yeah, I know, I can’t follow the logic, either.
Be that as it may, there are threads connecting the Cult of EMP Crazy and the fiat money kooks. They mostly have to do with extreme right philosophies about imminent catastrophe linked to conspiracy from the Middle East and the collapse of American civilization. And, of course, the dollar.
DD spent a couple minutes reading the story, or what there is of it.
A poor man’s piece of Tom Clancy fan fiction, it’s a tale of a provoked war with Iran. Iran retaliates by launching an electromagnetic pulse attack on the oil fields, rather than the usual target — the United States.
The price of gold soars, the dollar “dies” and that’s the end of the installment.
There’s a stalwart old general, set up to be the hero, who doesn’t do anything in the first chapter but worry about US currency and sovereign debt.
A sample. so you get the drift (no link — Google it if you must):
Later following the 2008 financial crash [the general] delved even into finance and politics with Wood’s Meltdown book and then Ron Paul’s End the Fed. Although he didn’t vote for Ron Paul in 2008 because he thought it improper to mix politics with military service, he had begun to get a thorough education in what had happened to the Constitution and his country he had sworn an allegiance to defend.
He privately attended several Mises Institute events and when at home logged on to read The Mises Blog, LewRockwell.com and The Daily Bell almost every day. He read Hayek and Ludwig von Mises including even Human Action.
That’s draw-you-in stuff.
I also leaned William Forstchen’s One Second After is Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s favorite English-language book. Presumably because it’s about the end of American civilization after an electromagnetic pulse attack.
If you dig around enough in this type of material, eventually you find the Ludwig Van Mises fiat money kooks are, like the Cult of EMP Crazy, very fond of videos with high production values.
Laugh at Harold Camping but consider that the US is replete with extremists and kooks. And due to the shabby state of the nation many are in power locally.
[Mandate] that gold and silver coins replace federal currency as legal tender in [the] state.
South Carolina Rep. Mike Pitts has introduced legislation … banning “the unconstitutional substitution of Federal Reserve Notes for silver and gold coin” in South Carolina.
Because anything that subverts US currency is unconstitutional the South Carolina dollar abolitionists worm about the edges with wording like this, from a local Fox News affiliate:
Sen. David Thomas, a Republican from Greenville, wants to make gold and silver coins another option in the Palmetto State. Lawmakers are calling it the Sound Money Legislation … Thomas also wants a special joint committee to study the need and process for establishing an alternate currency.
“What do you think about about gold and silver coins being proposed as SC tender?” Fox asks.
Perhaps not so much. The photos accompanying the story show a small band of exclusively white, mostly old, people.
Some of them hold signs — “Say No to Tyranny, No to IMF”, abolish the dollar, get rid of the Fed — which do nothing except establish it’s more standard Tea Party nihilism.
Enter the Central Bank, or Federal Reserve System. Enter INFLATION. Creating new money is inflation of the money supply. That causes prices to go up, or in other words, the value of a dollar to go down. The purchasing power has been diluted. You have been robbed …
We live in a world of Fiat money–it’s money because the government says it is, and they get all they want. You still have to earn yours.
Worth a mordant smirk, here’s a piece from the Edmonton Sun on America’s most prominent whack jobs this week — the 6 PMers.
We don’t have so many nuts people like that here in Canada, says the story’s primary source, a man who runs a survivalist supply store.
Then the fun really begins. No, his is a different flavor of extremist. The 6PMers think they’re going to heaven. The others — the ones with their eyes really on the ball — will be setting up shop in their Farnham Freeholds, saved by their gold, guns and stock of pemmican.
You’ll note the military dry goods man also has more intellectual elasticity going for him. After 6PM today, he knows his beliefs won’t have had to suffer the savage public beating of global amusement.
“Typically, Canadians seem to be a little more rational than that,??? said Gordon McGowan owner of Mil Arms, Edmonton’s leading military and hunting gear supplier.
“We’ve seen these wackjobs since the 16th century predicting the end of the world. Personally, I’ve never met anybody astute enough to have a conversation with the being that guides us all.???
McGowan says you don’t see Edmontonians running around, stocking up for the impending apocalypse, because they’re far too logical to buy into the hype.
[On the other hand, it’s never too late to buy gold and ammo — DD]
In the event of an act of terrorism, ecological fallout, economic meltdown or zombie invasion, McGowan — tongue firmly planted in his cheek — suggests you follow one simple rule, made famous by such apocalyptic films as The Stand, The Day After and 28 Days late: he who holds the gold, makes the rules.
“In a major, global disaster, it comes down to gold, guns and generators,??? he said. “You have to make sure you have bartering tools, gold, jewelry etc. And if you don’t have resources, you’ll have to have the guts to what you need by force.???
“If it came to the end of days, you need the skills to ride a horse and the guts to steal one,??? he advised.
Methinks the Sun reporter may have been having a little bit of sport.
And since we’re on the subject, once again, of fiat money and the end of the US, we have these readings, also from the other side of the street.
First, my old fave, the genuinely mindbending Lehigh Valley Scripture Spouting Old White Dude, who informs readers one can tell the end is nigh by the following:
