Celebrating Our Great and Feared Leaders

This week, I am inspired by the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Economics to our own highly regarded Ben Bernanke, one of the world’s greatest economists who recognized, contrary to the average dolt who felt otherwise, that we were not in a recession in the summer of 2008 and that, in fact, there was no recession as far as the economist’s glass eye could see. Silly, ordinary people believed otherwise. So, thank God we had the guidance of Uncle Ben.

To this day, standing now nine months into falling GDP, BB continues to exhibit that shiny little pellet of economic insight he had back then, though he notes today we are at some risk of falling into a recession on the far horizon this time due to the Fed running without him and not seeing inflation as it should have.

As Jeffery Tucker comments,

Our times are stuffed with daily ironies all pointing to the same grim reality: the failure of experts, particularly those in charge of the many systems that manage our lives.

“A Nobel Prize for Moral Hazard“

And, so, the Nobel team awarded the honor to Gentle Ben on the basis that he masterminded the sales pitch for bailing out banksters who broke their banks with years of reckless and greedy gambling. Ben Burn-the-banky did let a few banks like Washington Mutual go up in smoke, but that was because they were not on his friends list, being risk-rolling upstarts from far outside the New York scene.

That is why the cigar smokers on Wall Street designated them with the condescending label “thrift banks,” as if they are the Salvation Army Store of banks, never mind that WAMU was one of the largest banks in the world, so as “too big to fail” as any, I should think. Yet, fail it did, and no one is the worst today for simply letting it fail and part out in bankruptcy! It was just not as important as the ivy-league banks like JPMorgan and Chase (not at that point Siamese twins as they are today) and Goldman’s Sacks of Gold in Ben’s neighborhood.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — were the recipients of 63 percent of the Fed’s average daily borrowing, representing about a half-trillion dollars at peak periods just for those firms. The bailout plan not only didn’t really help community banks, it massively accelerated their disenfranchisement, by placing them in a separate economic class from those deemed Too Big to Fail. This is why the Independent Community Bankers of America supported the bill introduced by Sherrod Brown (D-OH) and David Vitter (R-LA) in 2013 to break up Too Big To Fail banks.

“Nobel: Greed Is Good“

That bill failed, thanks in part to the diligent work of Bailout Ben, who saved the “too-big-to-fail” by forcing them to merge in secret weekend meetings; thereby making them twice as too big. Those banks Ben helped “save” — a word that nostalgically now used to be associated with the core business of banks but is no more, thanks to those like Bernanke who have remodeled them as casinos with government banking– went on to give their CEOs massive bonuses for saving their banks by socializing their risks upon the taxpayer. The loans they took out with taxpayer banking and applied to their bonuses were, of course, eventually paid back … with new loans backed by tax-payers as the insurers of last resort made out of new free money created for them by the Fed and with various other direct deposits of the free Fed funds. US Treasurer Hank Paulson worked in collusion — I mean collaboration … I mean cooperation — with Bernanke to make sure the bankers they knew best got the full support of the government.

What we learned from this, as part of the moral hazards involved, was that these CEOs deserve even larger bonuses than the obscene incomes they formerly had to live with back then because of their unique business skills. You see, to become CEO of a major American global bank, one has to have the uncanny ability to crash his bank into bankruptcy in order to convince the government it must be saved in order to save America and the world in order to turn it within a year to even greater prosperity as a result of all the new free money one acquires from Fed and Feds.

Not every CEO has the audacity to capsize something the size of the Queen Mary or the skill to do a complete roll and right-side it topside again as a glimmering palace on a sea of turmoil without even getting the passengers wet. It is for those outanding manuevering abilities that these captains of industry get the big bucks. Geniuses like Jamie Dimon (pronounced, I think, “demon,” not “diamond”) have the unique cachet in the world of business and politics to pull that off. And the kingpin of them all, the president of Club Fed, just got the world’s biggest award in economics for masterminding the salvation of these banksters.

Thanks to Uncle Ben’s perverted rice, the US was able to reinflate the crashed housing bubble and make it grander and more precarious than ever before so that we can now re-pop the bubble all over again — something they said couldn’t be done when they told us there was no moral hazard from bailing out bubble crashes.

People say that if Bernanke had not acted in 2008, the financial system would have collapsed. That’s what they always say. What it really did was forestall an important teachable moment for market actors. It bailed out a whole range of institutions that had lost concern over risk and rationality. The result was a massive moral hazard that applies to banks, politicians, and policymakers generally.

A moral hazard occurs whenever a policy response reinforces and perpetuates exactly what it is designed to prevent. It is a reward for bad behavior. That’s exactly what happened, and the lesson echoed into the future and was picked up again in 2020….

As a result, you had the political class and central bankers all working together to perpetuate one of the great policy catastrophes of the modern era….

Look where we are today: soaring credit card debt, collapsed savings, and relentless declines in real income.

“A Nobel Prize for Moral Hazard“

That is all because, with Bernanke’s steady hand, we rebuilt the entire bubble and added several more even grander bubbles around it, all of which we are now getting to crash again — the stock bubble, the zombie corporation bubble (inflated by bailouts and Fed-funded cheap credit), the gargantuan bond bubble (recreated again out of mortgage-backed securities), and what one might call “the money bubble,” itself, which is now crashing currencies all over the world and causing massive inflation.

Bernanke also helped assure that all banks that were “too big to fail” were spared from being made smaller and actually came out far more too big to fail than ever before so that there would be no way they could fail again because they are bigger! Then when 2020 came and bubbles started popping, inspired by all that Bernanke had done, we doubled down on all of it and blew them up bigger still.

That is because the genius of the Bernanke plan was that it assured major banksters that congress, which was afraid to let big banks fail from 2008-2010, would be absolutely horrified at the prospect when it came again, guaranteeing ready bailouts in the future in order to protect the bonuses of the world’s most-skilled CEOs. Of course, it came again in 2020, and now it’s coming again, again, as the bubbles foam up faster and higher and explode all over the place.

So, a Nobel Prize in Economics for Beneficial Ben, the Benefactor of Banksters!

Kamala & Kompany

All of this has brought me to where I want to reflect on some of the other great leaders like Ben Bernanke in our nation at this time. Since the Democrats are leading every branch of our splendiferous government as we come into the final days of the midterm elections (and into the present bubble collapse), I’ll have to focus my laser-light of obstreperous observation on their top dogs.

What I really want to see in the next election cycle, once we get this one out of the way, is a four-way presidential primary between the Democrat’s leading contenders — Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, and Hillary Wannabe-Wannabe Clinton. I would find that as amusing as a three-legged sack race down the halls of a nursing home by the inmates or a game of musical wheelchairs to see who winds up short a chair and on the floor. I mean, like in a movie where you know none of the animals got hurt during the making of the film so you are free to laugh at how ludicrous it looks.

Now, why would I want such a thing, you might ask. Well, entertainment value. That’s the short of it since that is all either of the major parties have to offer us anyway. The Demoncrats are looking a little old and decrepit … like their colleagues the Republicons; but the Dums are in full power, so they get my full focus today.

DonkeyHotey, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Even Kamala, the baby of the family, sounds as singularly senile as Slow Joe. It had to have been early-onset Alzheimers that caused her to refer to North Korea as a longtime US ally recently, which was kind of like introducing your brother as your sister. However, the latter would be understandable in the present world because Kamala comes from the tribe that doesn’t know how one can be sure what a woman is and advocates a world that tries its best to erase womanhood as a distinction without a meaning anyway.

That is why Kamala in a recent interview, felt compelled to tell the world, in case they were all as dumb as a Democrat I guess, that she’s a woman and her mother was a woman, too, and even her grandmother … was … drumroll … “a woman.”

I do get a little concerned when the Democrats’ ostensibly female choices for Vice Presidents and Supreme Court nominees seem to have a hard time being sure if they are women even as each celebrates being the first Black woman to serve in his/her/their position. Apparently, Kamala had her biologist present at the interview, so she was able to assure us that all of her matriarchal lineage was made up of women. In times to come, one will no longer be able to do that. I just found it disconcerting that she seemed confused enough about it to need to so strongly reassure all of us.

I never really doubted she’s a woman. In fact, I think she’s kind of cute and attractive, and I am embarrassed to say I used to think she might be bright because she managed to become a top-dog lawyer. That was until all recent displays of her intellect caused me to finally consider the old claim that she simply slept her way to the top. I had completely disregarded it during the campaign as just a slur toward women, as if Kamala couldn’t get to the top any other means, which I certainly do not believe as a general truth at all; but, dang, this woman seems dumber than her fingernail file.

For example, she always talks like a merry-go-round or a looped tape. She sounds like a damaged Stepford wife in that I’ve never heard anyone say the same vacuous thought so many times in the same paragraph as if it is the solitary thought still sparking across the fried circuitry of her brain. While she doesn’t slur her words like Biden, she’s like Alzheimer’s on speed dial where you can instantly get the same recorded message over and over.

With all of the clarifications that all the women in her life were women, I was mystified that she did not clarify that her daughters are also women, so maybe that’s still up for grabs. She could have said, to continue her lineage, “I am also the stepmother of daughters who are women.” But she didn’t.

When I think about it, I realize that makes sense now that is is popular among Democrats not to list your child’s gender on his/her/its birth certificate in order to let he/she/zhe/them choose his/her/its/their gender because it is considered healthy to start children out as confused from birth as possible about this modern primary question in life that never even raised a question in a child’s mind for thousands of years. A confused child faced with a decision that even a Supreme Court nominee is clearly not qualified to make, is a healthy child. So, Mamala Harris left the gender of her adoptive daughters up for grabs because maybe they are still being left in the confused sage.

By DonkeyHotey [CC BY-SA 2.0 ) via Wikimedia Commons

Of course, speaking of women up for grabs, lest I let the Repubs entirely off the hook here, the Republicans love a candidate who loves to grab women in those places that, in his old-school way of thinking, confirms for him that they actually are women. And, while that’s disgusting on his part, it does make No-One-F’s-a-Biden’s hair sniffing seem mild by comparison. Well, that was until Sniff-and-Blow-Joe’s daughter told us all in her absconded diary that she regularly showered with Daddy as a young woman. Yikes. That makes the photo of the Large-Mouth Don with his gorgeous mature daughter sitting on daddy’s lap seem downright tame.

With that let’s move on to …

NoMoJo

That is my campaign slogan for Biden when the time comes around: Let’s all chant for “no more Joe” because he’s got no mojo; so, “NoMoJo” is the slogan I am trying to popularize for Repubs to use in the background at Joe’s campaign speeches and on Twitter as a hashtag. Help me out so that I can accomplish just one thing of importance in life.

While Sleepy, Creepy Uncle Joe claims he is as alive as he’s ever been, that one foot he’s got in the grave is looking awfully cold and gray. Maybe that’s just because it got sprained in that bicycle accident when it was caught in the stirrup as Joe was proudly trying to show us how vigorous he still is. I actually felt kind of sorry for him. (Really, if he was anyone other than the demented president of the US, I would have found it quite sad and would have wished televisions had not shared the moment of his disgrace. It can happen to anyone, of course, but when it happens when you are almost a hundred years old, it hurts to even think of the damage such a fall could cause, and it hurts that it’s shared on television because you just want the aged and infirm to enjoy and feel good about the fact that they can still ride a bicycle at all. Seriously.)

But, getting back to the gravity of Biden-His-Time’s proximity to his cemetery days, I recently heard someone say, “Biden’s messaging is even more confusing than his medium,” and all I could think was, “Why does he need a medium?” He seems to be shaking hands with ghosts after he gives talks, even as he calls out to the dead by name as if he is hearing them in the room, “Jackie, Jackie where are you?” Last time, I watched one of his press conferences, I thought it was a seance. And, of course, we’ve all heard that those who are close to the time of their death start to see or hear from those who have already passed on.

Not-So-Jumpin’-Joe also has that special crotchetiness that belongs to the senile, calling reporters “sons of bitches” or “dog-faced pony soldiers” or maybe it was “horse muppets.” I don’t recall because I’m practically senile myself. He looks like a stand-in for Jeff Dunham’s puppet Walter. Kind of adds new nuance to the term “puppet president.” I used to think Dick Cheney had his hand up George Bush’s butt to operate his mouth, since all of Bush’s words seemed to originate from Cheney’s mind, but now I am wondering if the US presidency isn’t being controlled by a ventriloquist comedian named Dunham. It would explain everything. Biden does have an intense kinship with the Irish after all.

Or maybe everything I just wrote is a bunch o’ malarky.

You tell me:

Pillary and Pelosi

Now, there’s a duo. I would find it totally amusing to watch them run as a team. They could argue the entire time about which power-woman gets to be the first female president. Oops. How would they know without a biologist? And how would a biologist know that female-looking parts weren’t simply swapped out, especially at that age when they give out anyway? We may need a forensics expert.

Presidential puppets and their deep-state master’s considered, I notice Nancy Pelosi moves now like a creaky, old marionette on strings. She’s strung out on something. I suspect, as many do, the endless verbal slurs are just because she’s hitting the vodka hard, but that makes me wonder if she was really the one colluding with Russians all along. How else do you GET that much vodka? That, or she is starting to lose control of her verbal functions. Outside of the occasional faltering misstep, her other bodily functions still seem to be working because she does not appear so much to be sporting a loaded diaper as Joe and Fillary do.

“I’ll give you a Socialist Revolution.”

Pretty sure Over-the-Hillary isn’t going to replace Geriatric Joe as the next candidate, but latest word said she might try. So, I hope she teams up with Pelosi. They could be like the Grumpy Old Men version of Thelma and Louise, driving the US over a cliff at the end of the show.

Pelosi used to be cute, too, and she was definitely very smart, at least at how to play politics. I have no doubt she shrewdly worked her way to the top, unlike Mamala. I believe that because she far outpaces Hollywood Housewives in political skill, even as good as those are at trying to out-manuever each other. At least, she did when she could talk. She also seems to have great investment skills. She can time a stock sale or purchase to just moments before congressional action. I don’t know how she does it! I wish I had that ability. So do all of us.

The best thing about these older candidates, though, is turnover. We can be pretty sure we don’t even need term limits, as the odds of any of them making it to a second term, except maybe Mamala, are slim. Thus, I don’t really think Joe will be running because he can’t even ride a bike, much less run, and I’m not all that sure he will still be living. So, what about a Kamala-Hillary-Pelosi three-way. While the thought is beneath cringe-worthy, it does gives us a couple of VP backups in case the one who gets to be president in the coin toss dies. I think, at the upper age limits we are now constantly working with, a second backup is just a practical idea.

Perhaps between the three of them, they can find their way trough this corn maze of global troubles:

Sadly one very smart, very beautiful woman of character the Dem’s could have and should have run for president last time as a centrist, instead of extremist, just quit the party today because she said the party is but an elitist cabal of warmongers that serves party and power first while dividing the rest of us:

Now, that’s a woman of noble character, intelligent thought, and a leader! She speaks for the center of America, instead of the extremes. She’s the one Dem I might have voted for. Not sure what party she will find to go to, though, as the alternative seems just as serving of power and party first to me. Maybe she’ll stay an independent (like me!), since that is what she really is — an independent thinker who articulately speaks her intelligent mind without a single slur or stutter, regardless of what others think.

So, now that the Dem’s have lost their best candidate, I think they should hold a primary between all three of those other “women” just named and Slow Joe and see who wins. My thought is that it would most likely be Joe judging from his cycling skills in getting his feet in and out of stirrups, but only because the others would still be running circles around that cornstalk. However, if Joe wins, the next presidency will be less like Thelma and Louise II in wheelchairs, and more like Weekend at Bernie’s or The Waking of Ned Divine.

But, hey, at least Ben Bernanke finally got that Nobel prize he deserved as much as Arafat deserved the Nobel Peace Prize for having never negotiated a lasting peace or as Obama deserved it before accomplishing anything, just for saving the world from facing Dick Cheney again as president. I mean, while Trump shoots his mouth off, Cheney shoots his friends’ faces off!

Next up, barring some upsetting news again tomorrow, like a deadly presidential bicycle trip, will be another Patron Post in the next day or two.

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