Yes! We're #1!

That's not what I said. Your laughing out loud doesn't change that.

What I said is that the money 'creation' process of setting the reserve rate doesn't has nothing to do with the nature of the reserves. If I set a reserve rate of 10%, I just multiplied my money supply by a factor of ten. That the reserves are gold or debt is irrelevant.

No, it hasn't been more stable.

There was a big stock market bubble, and it was fired by high margin rates. That is, you could "buy" $10 worth of stock with $1, but you had to pay interest on the $9 loan. A small move of the market upward, say by

10%, and you made another $1, not $0.10 if you didn't buy on margin.

On the flip side, when the market moved down 10%, people buying on margin lost everything. The banks then got the stock, but banks are not in the stock business so they immediately sold the stock. This forced the stock market down further. The banks were not getting their $9 back, and were losing money. To meet their obligations, they called their loans.

The fed did not directly cause the great depression.

Aside from you have cause and effect confused there, and don't understand the fed's relationship to the other banks, you do have the upshot down pretty good: that the system we have now allows the banks to get vast amounts of wealth in a money crisis.

The word is FLU, not FLUE.

You have forgotten the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait? And the sanctions placed on Iraq that they and Eurofriends violated at every opportunity? The stealing of money intended to feed Iraqis that was used for building palaces? Why didn't the EU object to this? Could it be because too many found the abuses...profitable?

The US didn't invade so much as it returned to finish the job it was prevented from finishing in the Gulf War.

David

In all honesty, I think stopping the first time was a huge tactical and strategic mistake.

Myal wrote: (snip)

I've always found that curious. Wilson went to Nigeria, where, as he later reported, govt trade authorities told him the Iraqis had sought trade with Nigeria, and the only thing they had to offer was yellow cake, and wouldn't trade it to Iraq.

Wilson is called before Congress and reports that the Iraqis hadn't been looking for yellow cake in Nigeria...

What...?

David

I'm not saying there isn't a need for the central bank in the US, i'm saying it belongs in the hands of the US Government. The same families that owns the Fed today caused a lot of the economic problems. The Fed also caused the Great Depression by calling in loans in mass.

While the rich get richer. I'm not saying there isn't a need for a central bank, i'm saying it belongs in the hands of the government.

The Fed didn't create the economy, they do help to stablize the economy, but they also drain from it. There is a need for a central bank, but it belongs in the hands of the government, not owned and controled by a elite group of super rich bankers. There is also a need for a military, should that be a private army?

you have to be american , only americans lie and atribute their own claims to others like that ..

Apparently you value the

given your above tactic , Id class you and yours AS the criminal , as low as politicians at least ... and yeah , that you still breathe is amazing .

FDR liked the fed. It helped him to keep the US in the depression so he could create an emergency that got him lots of power.

Actually, the claim was Africa, and Africa is more than Nigeria. That was a stupid leftist propaganda ploy by their operatives in the CIA that only morons would fall for. Going to Nigeria and offering to pay for a forged document, and finding out that someone will sell you one, in no way proves that uranium wasn't sold in other parts of Africa, or in Nigeria itself.

And they found 500 WMDs that almost exactly account for the difference between what Saddam said he had, and what the UN saw destroyed.

Not lying; I said that self-defense is important, you called it evil. Maybe you're making a point I am missing?

OK then explain to me, sparky, what you mean by calling me evil for wanting to defend my family from criminals.

OK let's stipulate that Nigeria is a universally unreliable witness or source in any transaction and move on.

Where? Cite? If you're right I'd love to see it.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me bring you back to February 5th, 2003. This is Colin Fowell-Powell before the United Nations.

MR. POWELL (United Nations Security Council, February 5, 2003): My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we're giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

MR. RUSSERT: When you uttered those words, you believed them deeply.

GEN. POWELL: I spent five days out at the CIA going over every single piece of information that was going to be in my presentation. There were a lot of other pieces of information that different people would have wanted me to use and it was all rejected. Everything in that statement was blessed by the director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet; his deputy, John McLaughlin; and all of their senior officials. They believed it, too. George has said he believed it. And so I went to the UN having dumped a lot of stuff on the side of the road because it wasn't multiple source. It might have been right, but it wasn't multiple source and I wouldn't use it. And the reason you see Director Tenet sitting behind me is because I wanted to make sure and he wanted to make sure that people understood I was not making a political statement. I was making a statement of the facts as we knew them.

Now, those same facts, that same set of facts, was available to the Congress the previous fall in the National Intelligence Estimate that the Congress asked for. But I notice a lot of candidates are now saying they didn't read it. But it was up there and they asked for it. The mobile biological laboratories was up before the Congress months before. The president used that in his State of the Union speech. So over a long period of time, the CIA and all of the other intelligence agencies of government had created a, a statement for all of us that said, one, this is a regime that has used these kinds of weapons on the past; two, they have retained the capability of making such weapons; and three-and here's where we fell down-they have stockpiles of these weapons. And we all believed it. Our military believed it going into battle. Other governments believed it. The reality is they did not have those stockpiles. We were wrong.

And then:

MR. RUSSERT: The, the mobile trains and trucks and track-lab stories, David Kay, the former UN inspector went before the Senate and said that members of the intelligence community knew some of the information not to be true, and yet they still sent you out there. Tyler Drumheller, who headed up the European section for this CIA, writes in his book that he saw your presentation the day before it was going to be given, and he took out that reference to the mobile labs because he knew it wasn't true. And yet it never got to you that he had taken it out. What happened?

GEN. POWELL: I can't answer that, and I would ask a question of Mr. Drumheller: Why didn't you take it out when it appeared months earlier in other intelligence documents? Suddenly, the night before I'm giving a speech, we decide we have to take this out? There was a total failure in the intelligence system with respect to those mobile biological labs which turned out not to be. And the reason I made such a point of those labs in my presentation was that I got assurances from CIA that they had multiple sources, four sources, that could verify this, the existence of these labs. And then when the war was over, after the 9th of April, we found some things that looked like the labs, and everybody was saying, "We got it. See, we have it." And then after examination, people started to say, "Wait a minute, this is not-this is not clear, doesn't, doesn't look like what we thought it was going to be." And even a month afterwards, the CIA put out a paper, a

28-page paper saying, "Yes, it is. It's a mobile biological lab." But it's turned out that it, it really doesn't pass the smell test, that that's what it is.

I cannot tell you why, within the intelligence community, the people who had put out burn notices-meaning don't trust this source-those burn notices never rose to the right level. And one of the things I'm most irate about is that I have reason to believe in, in, in the CIA, the nights we were out there till midnight every night putting this presentation together, trying to make it airtight, there were people in the room who knew that burn notices had gone out on some of these sources, and that was not raised to me or to Mr. Tenet.

MR. RUSSERT: Why not?

GEN. POWELL: I can't answer that question. This is, this is for others. You know, I'm not, I'm not the investigator of the intelligence community. But if I was, we, we would be having very long meetings about this. But I do not know why the information did not surface. I don't know why it came-did not come to the proper analysts, I don't know why it went-did not go to Jami Miscik, it did not go to John McLaughlin. And Mr. Tenet says he has no recollection of these conversations, nor does Mr. McLaughlin.

MR. RUSSERT: But, general, we went to war on this rationale. Why hasn't there been accountability?

GEN. POWELL: Wait a minute. We, we didn't go to war on the sole rationale of the biological labs.

MR. RUSSERT: Of weapons of mass destruction.

GEN. POWELL: We went to war on the basis that we have a terrible regime and what makes-it's been terrible forever. What makes it so terrible now, in the aftermath of 9/11, is that they had demonstrated that they will use these weapons. They've used them against their own people, they've used them against the enemy. They had them at the time of the first Gulf war when I was chairman. And the intelligence community said and had every reason to believe that they not only had the capability of having them again, but they have stockpiles. And that was the precipitating cause. Now, some in the administration have subsequently been saying, "Well, yeah, but maybe the weapons aren't there, but they're bad guys anyway. I'm glad the regime is gone." I'm glad the regime is gone. I'm glad Saddam Hussein is gone. But the case that we took to the world and the case that we took to the American people rested not just in his human rights abuses or his cheating on the Oil for Food program, it rested on the real and present danger of weapons of mass destruction that he could use against his neighbors, or terrorists could use against us. That was the precipitating issue in my judgment, and it turned out those weapons were not there.

MR. RUSSERT: If that was the case, and you were the commander in chief, wouldn't you demand to know what happened, what went wrong and why?

GEN. POWELL: There have been a number of investigations. I mean, Mr. Silverman-Judge Silverman did an investigation. We have different congressional investigations under way. But, you know, the responsibility for looking into all that rests with the president of the United States, the national intelligence community, and, and the Congress. And I don't know if Congress has been using all the oversight power that it has to look into these kinds of matters.

MR. RUSSERT: Let me ask you about a quote from your former chief of staff, Lawrence Wilkerson. He say I-he said, "I recall vividly the secretary of state walking into my office. He said, 'I wonder what will happen if we put half a million troops on the ground in Iraq and comb the country from one end to the other and don't find a single weapon of mass destruction?'"

GEN. POWELL: Larry has a better recollection of that than I do, but I wouldn't-I'm not going to dispute Larry. I wish we had put a half million troops on the ground. We would be in an entirely different situation whether there were weapons of mass destruction or not. We didn't put a half million troops on the ground. But there was always a possibility that we were wrong. We believed we were right, and the basis of fact that the CIA was using, the intelligence community was using, was consistent throughout

2001, throughout 2002, and all the way throughout 2003, long after the war. The agency was still looking for these weapons of mass destruction stockpiles. Dr. Kay went over and spent a long time, thousands of people went over to, to work with him. And then Charlie Duelfer took it over, and he looked for a long time. And they all came to the conclusion there are none, and they're not buried in the ground, they weren't shipped to Syria. We got it wrong.

OH-kay - I follow now...

So what, the US is buying Glocks, issuing them to Iraqis, and they are going on the black market...See, on the side of each gun there is a nifty number stamped in the metal, and when the Police in Turkey find these guns in the hands of criminals, they call Glock (in Austria) and ask who bought this gun? And Glock says, 'that is part of a shipment the US bought and had sent to Iraq.'

I'm a liberal? Wow, that would sure come as a shock to a lot of people...Just because I also disagree with the neocon nutcases and the unchecked expansion of presidential power that GWB calls his 'legacy' does not make me a liberal...I'm just a simple republican that the party left behind.

Well at least you acknowledge that US purchased weapons ending up on the European black market _is_ a problem, now we are getting somewhere...

We bought them, we handed them out, we decided who got them. Who do you think bears the responsibility of making sure they end up in the hands of people who won't do improper things with them?

Just when America screws up...Remember, accepting the truth is the first step.

Stuart

Firstly, you haven't explained how the Fed has been a "disaster" at keeping the economy stable. It has been extremely stable.

Secondly, Stuart did a good job of debunking the idea that the Fed "caused" the Great Depression. The banks are institutions that pursue their interests, and creating a depression was hardly in their interest.

You might say that the structure of the system provided incentives for them to act in a way that they recognized was going to hurt them, but which they had to follow in the short term to keep from being destroyed themselves. That's what institutions often do, including governments. When you create institutions like the banking system or limited-liability corporations you have to make sure the incentives are structured right to get the results you want, because they are going to act in the direction their incentives point them, regardless of anything else.

I'm curious: What do you think of the Austrian school on these issues?

Well, that issue is subject to the one you discuss below.

It comes down to the things you believe a representative-democratic government can and can't do well. Unlike the hard-right conservatives, I happen to think there are several things government does better, or could do better, than private enterprise. Controlling banks is not among them.

I asked you for historical examples. I think you know what's aligned against your position, in terms of history: most of the 19th century, in which the political battles between tight-money interests (bankers, big property owners, other financial interests) and loose-money interests (family farmers, small businessmen, home buyers) kept the economy in turmoil for decades. That's what the Free Silver vs. Cross of Gold issue was all about.

There is no balanced political solution. There are just competing interests trying to beat the other into submission. It isn't a place for statesmanship or compromise. It's the place for single-minded authority with a particular goal in mind, one which is carefully aligned with the overall interest of the economy and thus the interests of the country as a whole.

A lot of smart people have had a hand in shaping this and they've concluded that the banking structure we have does the job, at the price of some inequities and lack of democratic control. You can argue it on principle but not on pragmatism. It works, and nothing I've heard of from our history contradicts it.

But if you have some contradictory history to support your position, I'd be interested to hear it.

-- Ed Huntress

Scratch what I said about Stuart getting the business about the Fed right.

Jesus, Stuart, how can anyone come up with a cockamamie story like that? Do you smoke something different after 9:00 PM or what?

-- Ed Huntress

It's high enough that they recommend immunizations for certain groups of people.

A reserve of 10% means that you are speculating with 90% of the depositor's money.

If gold were the media of exchange you'd have a hard time moving it around.

If there had been no fractional banking and no fed reserve, brokers wouldn't have sold stock 'on the cuff' because they wouldn't have been able to absorb any loss.

Cite me calling self defense evil

I merely pointed out people are free to choose to be so or not , you are the one making all kindsa arse-umptions about what it means to be free

given your above tactic , Id class you and yours AS the criminal , as low as politicians at least ... and yeah , that you still breathe is amazing .