Richard Haas President of the CFR was just on MSNBC and said something interesting.

[Joanne98]

Something I have never heard anyone say before. He said that there has always been a balance between being the world's fiat currency and printing money for that and printing money for our domestic needs. He said we need to do something about "entitlements" (aka SS and medicare).

Now I have never heard anyone say that there was a difference. I thought we printed money for our own needs and everyone in the world just used our money because we're the big kahuna.

This was in the context of talking about China and the statement made about the security of it's assets. So I guess we should be on the lookout for this argument. "We can't continue our "entitlement" programs because we are the world's fiat money and the world is our primary responsibility. We print money for the world and not ourselves" Something like that...

I posted a debt chart the other day that should the debt starting to rise around 1971. When Nixon took us off the gold standard..
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After the Second World War, a system similar to the Gold Standard was established by the Bretton Woods Agreements. Under this system, many countries fixed their exchange rates relative to the US dollar. The US promised to fix the price of gold at $35 per ounce. Implicitly, then, all currencies pegged to the dollar also had a fixed value in terms of gold. Under the regime of the French President Charles de Gaulle up to 1970, France reduced its dollar reserves, trading them for gold from the U.S. government, thereby reducing US economic influence abroad. This, along with the fiscal strain of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society expenditures and the Vietnam War, led President Richard Nixon to eliminate the fixed gold price in 1971, causing the system to break down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard

It seems like this was the beginning of our problems but there were others. The 1973 oil shock then the 1974 recession and stagflation. Then Reagan won the election in 1980. He ran up the debt...
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The fiscal shift in the Reagan years was staggering. In January 1981, when Reagan declared the federal budget to be "out of control," the deficit had reached almost $74 billion, the federal debt $930 billion. Within two years, the deficit was $208 billion. The debt by 1988 totaled $2.6 trillion. In those eight years, the United States moved from being the world's largest international creditor to the largest debtor nation.

Benjamin M. Friedman, a Harvard University economist who lamented Reagan's fiscal policies in his 1988 book "Day of Reckoning," said the expansion of foreign credit has tempered the feared hikes in long-term interest rates that he thought would cripple the economy. But, he said, "that doesn't let deficits off the hook."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26402-2004Jun8.html

How we went from the world's largest creditor to the world's largest debtor in 8 years was the Reagan WH figured out that borrowing from other countries instead of ourselves didn't raise interest rates. They made it look like Reagan was doing a good job on the economy.

The reason I'm bringing this up is we can see that our leaders seem to think that the only way out of our financial problems is to hit the little people again. This has been the plan for over thirty years. Lowering the medium income of households has gone on since 1973. Then we had the 82' recession and the hostile takeovers afterwords. When they shut down small mom and pop manufacturers all over this country. To centralize production in the hands of the multi-nationals so they could ship them overseas.

If you take a look at who we lost our jobs too it was the same countries who were loaning us money. First Japan in the 80's then China in the 90's.

I think as this fight about SS and medicare which are INSURANCE programs which people have paid into their whole lives, we need to focus on what has really gone on over the past 30+ years and what they are really doing.

What Haas exposed was the opinion that our responsibilities as far as printing money is concerned should be for the world FIRST and our country SECOND. This is a big change of policy and we can't let this slip by us. We need to make them state that clearly.

As far as China goes I think it's an outrage that they are complaining. China wouldn't even have any money to lend us if we haven't shipped 80% of our jobs over there. Obviously China is worried about the end of easy credit for American consumers. The end of the gravy train. They can't get their own citizens to spend so nothing will get sold. Bummer. But that's not our problem. If they care so much why don't they start a credit card company with low fixed interest rates? Instead they want us to throw millions of old people under the bus just so we can pay them back?

I don't know what to do about this but I do think that the American worker shouldn't have to bare the whole brunt of their stupid economic policies. Tax cuts for the rich and endless wars of empire are to blame. And when you lower the wages of your people for thirty years you eroded your tax base. This was a bomb all along.

I really think that the people who brought us these insane economic policies should be tried for treason. They have destroyed the country. And they don't plan on stopping. The duty our politicians have is to the country first NOT the world first. Maybe we should put that in the Constitution. Our debt bomb is a really big deal. Tax cuts and Empire are KILLING US.

It's obvious that if something isn't done about this millions of Americans will suffer.

[Captain Hilts]

1. We've completely lost control of our currency. nt

[dixiegrrrrl]

2. I would not trust anything that came from the CFR.

They are the think tank that created most of our problems.

As to what he said being true...probably.
the red herring is, as you pointed out, the attack on Soc. Sec. and Medicare.

The reality is as you said: "I really think that the people who brought us these insane economic policies should be tried for treason. They have destroyed the country. And they don't plan on stopping."

All I know to do is keep the e-mail going to the Banking Comm. the WH, the Pres.
It is useless to send anything to my Repug. Congress critters.