IS 'THE HOUSE OF FINANCIAL CARDS' NOW TEETERING?

Jeremy Lee writes: "It is finally becoming clear enough for all to see. No longer can media commentators and economic spin merchants pretend this is merely a 'blip'. The American dollar is sliding into worthlessness. The world's oil producers are increasingly rejecting it as payment for oil. Time to think about personal survival in a world which is about to move from complacency to panic!"

Dollar's Clout Sinks Worldwide:
Hit by a free fall with no end in sight, the once mighty US dollar is no longer just crashing on currency markets and making life more expensive for American tourists and business people abroad; its clout is evaporating worldwide as foreign businesses and individuals turn to other currencies.

Experts say the bleak U.S. economic forecast means it will take years for the greenback to recover its value and prestige. Negative dollar sentiment is growing in nations where the dollar was historically accepted as equal or better than local currency - and dollar aversion is even extending to some quarters in the United States. Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080313/ap_on_bi_ge/diving_dollar

Further reading: "The Money Bomb," by James Gibbs Stewart.
Gibbs Stewart writes: Recessions and depressions are an inevitable consequence of the debt structure, making nonsense of the accepted economic wisdom. AUS $20.00 posted.

DERIVATIVES, CALCULUS & OTHER SIMPLE CONCEPTS

by Mr. Mental:
We just couldn't resist reproducing one of Edgar J. Steele's recent website articles. With a very large 'tongue-in-cheek' he permitted a 'Mr Mental' to explain to his bewildered fellow Americans, the perplexing mysteries entwined in the financial system of this thing called 'derivatives'.

Mr. Mental begins:I am Mr. Mental! Today, I wrest control of the ConspiracyPenPal web site from Edgar J. Steele. Steele, is a well-meaning but merely mortal and puny earthling. Show proper respect when you are in the presence of your betters, particularly those of us from other planets (blare of trumpets) "Mr. Mental knows all. Mr. Mental sees all."

There is much to-do and consternation afoot in the land today concerning financial derivatives. Many of you do not understand derivatives, foremost among you being the Federal Reserve Chairman, the US Treasury Secretary and virtually all of those of you who buy, sell and manage that which you miserable, insignificant human beings like to call sophisticated financial instruments.

This is too easy. It would be far better if you mere mortals called upon Mr. Mental to explain complicated and important affairs, such as the mystery of the teenage female mind or the ultimate origin of the Universe, the latter of which is surprisingly close to Cleveland. Derivatives! I laugh at the concept: Ha.

Calculus Made Easy:
First, though, allow me to remove the cloud from your brain concerning another ill-understood, yet dreadfully simple field of study: Calculus. Integral calculus is nothing more than the memorization of a few simple formulas to calculate the area beneath a graphed curve. Say that you have a curve showing the population of America spiralling out of control during the period that Ted Kennedy possessed a seat in the US Senate, which is no mere coincidence, incidentally, you brain-dead morons who keep electing him.

The area beneath that curve represents the total number of people living in America while the Hero of Chappaquiddick did his best to destroy America. (If only he had shown as much concern for pulling a pregnant Mary Jo Kopechne from the murky waters of that channel now known as Poucha Pond as he shows for pulling millions of pregnant mestizos from the waters of the Rio Grande.)

One employs formulas (functions) to calculate the area beneath a curve. This is analogous to using a tool (which is all a function really is) called a yardstick to measure the size of a room. That's it. Now you understand calculus.

If only you could have attended the Grand Galactic University of Antares, as did I, you would have learned calculus in one day and spent the rest of the semester chasing girls and drinking beer, which is the proper activity of healthy, college-age males throughout the Universe.

And Now for Something Completely Derivative:
Now for Differential Calculus. In mathematics, a derivative also concerns a curve, but restricts itself to describing the shape of that curve. This is necessary in order to use integral calculus to learn the area beneath that curve. In short, a derivative tells you about a curve's rate of change. For example, in a graph of America's impending suicide by population growth, the graph of Americans plus mestizoes rises to infinity at a constant rate. In other words, its rate of change is zero.

On the other hand, if Ted Kennedy, who favours abortion for as many White babies as possible, had been aborted in his 139th trimester, as was his brother, a man who, unlike Ted, got plenty of oxygen while in the womb, the American population growth curve might actually show an ever-decreasing rate of change, the natural result of honouring the price paid by those who died for nothing at the Alamo (not to mention divers wars such as Revolution I, WWI, WWII, the War of Northern Aggression and WWIII, which now is underway on the other side of the world).

Pay attention, you slovenly, misbegotten humans, because these are pearls being cast at your feet!

Thus, a derivative calculation of population in a Ted-Kennedyless America might well be an ever-increasing negative. Extending the yardstick analogy, a derivative is a tool that describes a tool. Put a yardstick in the hands of a newly-immigrated Somali in downtown Cincinnati and he likely will try to eat it. The all-powerful Mr. Mental has blessed you, however, with the understanding (a tool) to employ another tool (like a yardstick).

Science is rife with this business of using one tool to manipulate and understand other tools. In maths, they are called derivatives, of course, because they depend upon something else (calculus) in order to have meaning - their significance is derived from another thing. Then there are Second Derivatives (simply the rate of change of a rate of change), which allow one to understand First Derivatives, which in their turn allow one to understand the integral calculus of a graphical representation (a curve) of reality. And Third Derivatives ... and so on.

See? This stuff isn't so hard. Now you understand mathematical derivatives, the concept from which financial derivatives get their name. This leaves lots of time to play hide the shuttlecraft in the free-floating asteroids of the Antarean cluster. GGUA is not known as the ultimate party school for nothing.

Derivatives and Other Worthless Concepts:
The very term "financial derivative" is itself a derivative from the mathematical analogue. A dollar bill is a derivative, you know. It has no inherent value beyond something that might well become useful in an outhouse (an idea coming soon to a surprisingly large number of Americans). A dollar derives its value from something else. Used to be, dollars derived their value from gold and silver.** Then, after Nixon severed that Constitutionally-mandated connection, the dollar derived its value from oil, because everybody in the world bought and sold oil using dollars as the medium of exchange. Today, the dollar derives its value from American military force, as in "Use our dollar to conduct business or we will come to your country, rape your daughters and kill you." Thus, the dollar, itself, is a derivative - something that derives its value from something else.

Stocks and bonds are derivatives, strictly speaking, because they derive their values from something else. Mutual funds are derivatives of derivatives, kind of like mathematical second derivatives. Options and futures are even more distantly-removed derivatives. Puts, calls, strips, straps and straddles are even more arcane forms of even more distantly-removed stock market derivatives.

During the height of the mutual fund boom there were far more mutual funds trading in equity stocks than equity stocks being traded, oddly enough, in a very junior-league illustration of the relationship of financial derivatives to their underlying assets of inherent value.

Derivatives of Derivatives of Derivatives:
The really clever thing about derivatives is how they mushroom as the levels grow, with truly huge amounts of derivative value dependent upon the value of a single dollar of genuine asset value. Investors sell each other these claims on claims on claims, back and forth, to and fro, making the mutual fund/stock disparity as but a single drop of water in the ocean. The entire world's derivative structure is a massive construct, the total size of which is both incalculable and unfathomable, but clearly thousands, if not millions, of times the size of the ultimate assets with any inherent value (inventories and fork lifts and grain, for example), upon which they rest and from which they derive their value.

Your home mortgage is a derivative, too, because its value in your lender's hands derives from the ever-decreasing inherent value of your home, which is why bankers' hands these days are so sweaty. Really clever bankers bundled hundreds of mortgages just like yours into large packages, then sold claims upon those packages (another derivative known as a "collateralized debt obligation," or CDO) to other investors (like your pension fund), kind of like raffle tickets. The real similarity will come after the raffle ends, when a great many of the buyers of CDOs find that, rather than playing musical chairs, they really have been playing musical chair.

Unwinding Derivatives: Look Out Below:
For the first time since Depression I, home values are declining, both in real terms and as adjusted for price inflation. Many foreclosed homes now are languishing on the market, with their values declining faster, even, than can be justified by the rate at which mestizo illegal aliens are sneaking into them at night to rip open their walls and strip out the copper pipes and wires to sell the following day at the junkyard. Just another job that you and I refuse to do, of course.

Now, whole swathes of neighbourhoods lie vacant in cities like Detroit and Cleveland, which today look like something straight out of Zimbabwe, speaking of dollars with value only in the outhouse.

Picture the most massive iceberg ever, with just its bare tip glistening above the waves. Now, flip that iceberg upside down, so that just the tip is in the water. That's what derivatives would look like if piled atop the real assets to which they ultimately relate.

Like the iceberg, as the tiny nucleus of real value begins to melt, huge sheets of icy debt come crashing down, having lost their bases of support. That is what is happening in the world today. And it only has just begun, you poor, dumb earth creatures.

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-haa! We had this problem on Antares in our distant past, but we solved it by stringing up all the politicians, bankers and plutocrats responsible for stealing from us that which we had earned by the sweat of our brow. You will wish you had done the same, you poor, misguided and unenlightened bipeds. But, at least, now you understand how they did it to you, because you understand derivatives. And, with that, I return control of this space to your merely human host. New America. An idea whose time has come. My name is Edgar J. Steele. Thanks for listening.
So there you have it folks. You are now one of the 'initiated' who have been shown the light and entered the inner sanctum.

** Many Americans believe their problems will be solved if their governments return to a 'gold-backed' money system. We suggest they would do better to become informed about the mysteries of Mammon. A nation's true wealth depends on its productive capacity not on how many inert gold bars sit in Fort Knox!

UNRAVELLING THE MYSTERIES OF MAMMON (MONEY)
A financial system should be simply a nation's accounting system; an honest record, an honest reflection of the real wealth of the nation and its just and honest distribution - and the private banking system should be able to charge for nothing more than its SERVICES!

IMPORTANT BOOKS:
"The Money Trick" by The Institute of Economic Democracy. $13.00 posted
"The Saga of a Peoples' Bank" by Peter Lock $3.00 posted

Further VIDEO and/or DVD viewing:
* "The Money Masters"- William Still, 3½ hours of video viewing, $16 posted;
* "The Money Game"- Jeremy Lee, $14 posted
* "The Root of all Evil"- Eric Butler, $14 posted
* "An Alternate Money System"- Charles Pinwill $14.00 posted

Videos and DVDs: From Heritage Book Services, P.O. Box 27, Happy Valley S.A. 5159.

LETTER TO THE NEW ZEALAND PRESS:
The Editor, New Zealand Herald. 16th March 2008:
Dear Sir,
All this talk of economic recession highlights the absurdities of economics and money as taught in schools and universities. There are just as many homes and farms and factories and ships and planes as last year, and pretty much the same numbers of people and skills to operate things. The laws of nature which make things grow haven't changed.
The world of banking involves the creation and transferring via computers of figures. These days, these figures, legally called bank credit, represent about 98% of developed countries' money supplies. I don't see why the general population should have to pay for the erroneous actions and mistakes of financiers; or of politicians who seem always to be easily taken in by slick-talking financial advisers whose life experiences seem to not extend beyond the study of theories and guessed financial forecasts.
Twenty years of an allegedly free-market and globalisation is proving another failure. Physically, we are one of the richest nations and quite capable of abundance and security for everyone. The 1930s Labour Government used Reserve Bank credit to get this country out of the Great Depression. We didn't need 'foreign investment" and globalisation, just some commonsense and political commitment. It's time to consider more sensible economic policy options.

- - Yours Sincerely, Bill Daly, Auckland, New Zealand.

WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES 2% REALLY MAKE?

by Charles Knightly
Evolutionary materialist critics of Christianity like to raise the issue of chimpanzees and humans sharing 98% of the same DNA. As well, of the remaining 2% a lot of that is "junk" DNA, so - according to their argument - isn't it the case that humans are just over-rated apes? Within orthodox biology Jonathan Marks in "What it Means to be 98% Chimpanzee: Apes, People and Their Genes" (University of California Press, Berkeley 2002) has given the 98% thesis a smack it truly deserves.

The very structure of DNA itself necessitates that species be no more than 75 per cent different. But the fact that humans share 25% of their genes with, say a rose, does not mean that humans are 25 % -rose. From the same building blocks, truly diverse things can be created. Thus it does not follow that humans are 98% chimp, or that chimps are 98% human. They are, what they are.

Genetic Determinism:
Biology is in the grips of genetic determinism. A rational outsider could easily see that the physiological and phenotypical differences between humans and chimps cannot be explained by mere genes alone. Rather than claim that small genetic differences account for the vast differences which we see between species, it is more plausible to suppose that DNA alone does not account for these differences at all. There must be other mechanisms at work.

MAKE THEIR HOMES AND JOBS 'OPEN BORDERS'

by Brian Simpson
What is a "global econo0mic distortion", so immense, "so huge that its effects dwarf those of all existing tariffs, quotas and subsidies." Why, according to Harvard University academic and former World Bank economist, Lant Pritchett, "border control" is the great evil. Pritchett has written a book, "Let Their people Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility" (Center for Global Development, 2006).
There he puts the economic case for a virtually open borders immigration regime. A summary is given by Kerry Howley, "How 'Border Control' Limits Opportunities for Rich and Poor Alike," The Advertiser 1/3/08 p.73.

For example, according to a 2005 World Bank report if the 30 top OECD countries would increase by 3 per cent their labour forces through liberal immigration policies, people in developing countries would gain US$300 billion. Completely open borders would deliver untold riches!

Yes. Untold riches to the global financial elites, but not to workers in developed countries who will compete with the third World for basic survival. For example, recent article in The Australian (28/2/08 p.1) has the title "Immigrants Beating Locals to New Jobs". Migrants took over half of the alleged 240,000 full-time jobs created over the last twelve months.
The article says that the overseas born have a lower unemployment rate than Australian-born and that "the Australian-born are more likely to form the bulk of the underclass."

That is the future that the globalists plan, where everybody, except them, is equal at the bottom. Would such academics preach so if their homes were "open borders" and their jobs subject to replacement by cheaper workers?

FROM THE UK: THE GREAT EU BETRAYAL:

The British will never trust those who deceive them, insists William Rees-Mogg.
"The facts about the Lisbon treaty are relatively simple, but the implications are deeply disturbing. In May 2005, the Labour Party won a general election on a manifesto that included a commitment to hold a referendum on the European constitutional treaty. There were similar commitments in the Conservative and Liberal Democrat manifestos. Referendums were actually held, and the treaty defeated, in France and the Netherlands, but no referendum was ever held in Britain, on the ground that the treaty was dead. It was not dead, it had merely gone underground.

The constitutional treaty was subsequently reconstructed and became the Lisbon treaty, which contains more than 95 per cent of the same material. Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, a former President of France, described the process: "Public opinion will be led to adopt, without knowing it, the proposals that we dare not present to them directly . . . all the earlier proposals will be in the new text, but will be hidden and disguised in some way." That is what actually was done.

The Government soon recognised that this process had not succeeded in deceiving public opinion. Opinion polls showed that a referendum on the Lisbon treaty would be defeated. The Government therefore decided to break the referendum commitment that had helped it to win the election.

It used an argument, which very few people believed, that the Lisbon treaty was different from the constitutional treaty and did not therefore need a referendum. In the debate in the House of Commons last Wednesday Kenneth Clarke, the leading Conservative Europhile, cut this down to size.

He intervened in David Miliband's lightweight justification of the Government's breach of promise. "Will he stop all this nonsense about [the treaty] being different from the constitution when it is plainly the same in substance?" The Government cannot afford to admit that the two treaties are substantially the same, because it would then have no excuse for breaking its commitment. It has to lie about the two treaties because that is the fig leaf to cover a deeper deceit.

Earlier last week the results of an independent mini-referendum were published. There have been votes in ten marginal seats, eight of which are held by Labour and two by Liberal Democrats. The results supported the findings of recent opinion polls but were based on a much larger number of responses. In all, 152,520 people returned the ballots, a 36 per cent turnout that compares favourably with many local government elections.
Two questions were asked:
§ Should there be a referendum?
§ Should we approve the Lisbon treaty?

In total 87.9 per cent of voters wanted a referendum and 88.8 per cent would vote "no" to the treaty. The results in different constituencies were surprisingly similar, though Hammersmith fell outside the pattern. We had a referendum in Somerset and Frome. The turnout was identical with the average at 36.2 per cent, while 87.9 per cent would vote "no" to Lisbon.

Different regions produced similar results. There can be no real doubt about public opinion; British voters are increasingly critical of the EU. In the House of Commons the argument was used that the public could not be expected to understand the complexities of the Lisbon treaty. If that were so, the Labour Party should not have promised a referendum in the first place. In any case, these are the traditional arguments against trial by jury, which the British trust. Juries know the difference between guilt and innocence; voters understand their own concerns.
The debate contained several very good speeches, as well as some poor ones. Prime ministers tend to make better speeches after they have retired. The same is true of party leaders. They can be more frank once they are no longer in pursuit of power.

The Commons voted against a referendum by 311 to 247. There were some Labour rebels and a handful of Tories voted with the Government. The Lib Dems adopted that cringing device, a three-line whip, to abstain. They also had rebels. The result is a direct conflict between the public and the parliamentarians, a conflict made worse by more than 300 Members of Parliament breaking their election commitments. How can we trust such people?

This is bad for Parliament, but worse for the future of Europe. Most Eurosceptics want Europe to be reformed, not destroyed. How ever much it may annoy the Eurofanatics, they are the "good Europeans" who have Europe's long-term interest at heart. No political society survives without trust. British voters believe that they have been deceived about the Lisbon treaty, a promise has been broken, and the breach justified by lies. If the EU cannot trust the people, the people cannot trust the EU

LETTER TO A POLITICAL REPRESENTATIVE

To The Hon. Jack Snelling: 9th March 2008.

I am writing, better late than never, in response to the P.M. Kevin Rudd's apology to the "Stolen Generation." While Kevin Rudd has stated that after the apology there will be no financial compensation, we note however that this apology is "the first step …" What did he mean?
Will the general public be informed as to any future plans for Aborigines as part of the 'reconciliation' process, or will they be kept in the dark until it's a 'done deal'?
Actually, we believe Bob Hawke can claim to have taken the "first step" when he promised a signed Treaty, a draft of which was prepared in 1988 and of which the late Charles Perkins spoke on ABC Radio in March 1992. We know that the signed and framed Barunga Treaty is hanging up in Parliament House. We took the opportunity to view it while in Canberra a few years ago.
We, and in fact the Australian people in our view, cannot be held responsible for the 'sins' claimed to have been committed by earlier generations. We can only be responsible for our own. No doubt some of these claims are genuine, but we are not told of the hundreds of happy and well cared for Aborigines and particularly 'part' Aborigines, who, if they hadn't been so-called 'stolen' would have continued to be ill-treated or totally abandoned by their own people. We would rather think of them as the "Rescued" generation than the 'stolen'.
We enclose a copy of the Draft copy (of the Barunga Treaty) but would appreciate an updated and final copy of the Treaty.

- - Yours sincerely, Doug and Jean Holmes, Para Hills West, South Australia.