Month: September 2008

The financial meltdown the economists of the Austrian School predicted has arrived

Last night the president addressed the nation about the financial crisis. There is no point in going through his remarks line by line, since I'd only be repeating what I've been saying over and over – not just for the past several days, but for years and even decades.

Still, at least a few observations are necessary.

The president assures us that his administration "is working with Congress to address the root cause behind much of the instability in our markets." Care to take a guess at whether the Federal Reserve and its money creation spree were even mentioned?

We are told that "low interest rates" led to excessive borrowing, but we are not told how these low interest rates came about. They were a deliberate policy of the Federal Reserve. As always, artificially low interest rates distort the market. Entrepreneurs engage in malinvestments – investments that do not make sense in light of current resource availability, that occur in more temporally remote stages of the capital structure than the pattern of consumer demand can support, and that would not have been made at all if the interest rate had been permitted to tell the truth instead of being toyed with by the Fed.

Not a word about any of that, of course, because Americans might then discover how the great wise men in Washington caused this great debacle. Better to keep scapegoating the mortgage industry or "wildcat capitalism" (as if we actually have a pure free market!).

Speaking about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the president said: "Because these companies were chartered by Congress, many believed they were guaranteed by the federal government. This allowed them to borrow enormous sums of money, fuel the market for questionable investments, and put our financial system at risk."

Doesn't that prove the foolishness of chartering Fannie and Freddie in the first place? Doesn't that suggest that maybe, just maybe, government may have contributed to this mess? And of course, by bailing out Fannie and Freddie, hasn't the federal government shown that the "many" who "believed they were guaranteed by the federal government" were in fact correct?

Then come the scare tactics. If we don't give dictatorial powers to the Treasury Secretary "the stock market would drop even more, which would reduce the value of your retirement account. The value of your home could plummet." Left unsaid, naturally, is that with the bailout and all the money and credit that must be produced out of thin air to fund it, the value of your retirement account will drop anyway, because the value of the dollar will suffer a precipitous decline. As for home prices, they are obviously much too high, and supply and demand cannot equilibrate if government insists on propping them up.

It's the same destructive strategy that government tried during the Great Depression: prop up prices at all costs. The Depression went on for over a decade. On the other hand, when liquidation was allowed to occur in the equally devastating downturn of 1921, the economy recovered within less than a year.

The president also tells us that Senators McCain and Obama will join him at the White House today in order to figure out how to get the bipartisan bailout passed. The two senators would do their country much more good if they stayed on the campaign trail debating who the bigger celebrity is, or whatever it is that occupies their attention these days.

F.A. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks' manipulation of interest rates creates the boom-bust cycle with which we are sadly familiar. In 1932, in the depths of the Great Depression, he described the foolish policies being pursued in his day – and which are being proposed, just as destructively, in our own:

Instead of furthering the inevitable liquidation of the maladjustments brought about by the boom during the last three years, all conceivable means have been used to prevent that readjustment from taking place; and one of these means, which has been repeatedly tried though without success, from the earliest to the most recent stages of depression, has been this deliberate policy of credit expansion.

To combat the depression by a forced credit expansion is to attempt to cure the evil by the very means which brought it about; because we are suffering from a misdirection of production, we want to create further misdirection – a procedure that can only lead to a much more severe crisis as soon as the credit expansion comes to an end… It is probably to this experiment, together with the attempts to prevent liquidation once the crisis had come, that we owe the exceptional severity and duration of the depression.

The only thing we learn from history, I am afraid, is that we do not learn from history.

The very people who have spent the past several years assuring us that the economy is fundamentally sound, and who themselves foolishly cheered the extension of all these novel kinds of mortgages, are the ones who now claim to be the experts who will restore prosperity! Just how spectacularly wrong, how utterly without a clue, does someone have to be before his expert status is called into question?

Oh, and did you notice that the bailout is now being called a "rescue plan"? I guess "bailout" wasn't sitting too well with the American people.

The very people who with somber faces tell us of their deep concern for the spread of democracy around the world are the ones most insistent on forcing a bill through Congress that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. The very fact that some of you seem to think you're supposed to have a voice in all this actually seems to annoy them.

I continue to urge you to contact your representatives and give them a piece of your mind. I myself am doing everything I can to promote the correct point of view on the crisis. Be sure also to educate yourselves on these subjects – the Campaign for Liberty blog is an excellent place to start. Read the posts, ask questions in the comment section, and learn.

H.G. Wells once said that civilization was in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.

In liberty, Ron Paul

NaturalNews) Here at NaturalNews, we've been publicly predicting the fall of Western Medicine for nearly five years. During that time, we've also covered the increasingly precarious financial situation, warning readers in 2005 and 2006 about the impending housing bubble crash and the implications for the entire financial system.

#1 They're both based on fraud and deception
Both Western Finance and Western Medicine are fundamentally based on fraud. The fraud of Western Finance is that you can create money from nothing and everybody can get rich by selling each other fictitious financial instruments that have no connection to reality. The fraud of Western Medicine is that everybody can get healthy by taking fictitious patented chemicals (pharmaceuticals) rather than addressing fundamental issues of nutrition, exercise and exposure to consumer chemicals.

Western Finance's fraud is committed by high-brow academics who contrive complicated derivative financial instruments that are then presented to the investment community as things of real value (which they are not). Western Medicine's fraud is committed by high-ego medical researchers who selectively massage clinical trial data to create fictitious "scientific" results that are then presented to the FDA as fact. The FDA then "approves" such drugs which are sold to the public as medicines that treat "disease" (which are also fictitious, by the way; being voted into existence by a panel of experts who benefit from such disease definitions).

Both the financial instruments and FDA-approved medications are fraudulent to begin with, and they offer nothing of real, lasting value to anyone. They're both sold simply for momentary profits, without any regard for the health or the wealth of the People.

#2 When problems arise, they both treat symptoms rather than solving the causes
The $700 billion financial bailout created in Washington is a classic example of Western Medicine's "treat the symptoms" mentality. Rather than address the root cause of the problem (the Fed's control over the money supply and the very structure of fractional-reserve banking), politicians seem satisfied to rig up a series of financial bandages that allow them to pretend the problem has been solved.

In Western Medicine, this "treat the symptoms" approach is the de facto treatment philosophy taught in medical school: Ignore the real cause, don't bother educating patients about diet or exercise, and simply prescribe pharmaceuticals to mask the problem for as long as possible.

In both cases, the patient inevitably gets sicker: The financial situation festers and grows like an unchecked cancer tumor, and while stop-gap measures can create the illusion of a healthy patient, these actions inevitably contribute to far greater crisis down the road, where the patient eventually crashes and dies.

The financial sickness now infecting banks, lenders and insurance companies across the globe is an unchecked pandemic of infectious debt. But rather than addressing the cause of the infections, the financial industry seems satisfied to refinance the disease carriers so they can rise up, coughing and sputtering as they pass along the disease to anyone within breathing distance.

#3 They both enrich powerful corporations while impoverishing the People
The key agenda of both the financial and health industries is to enrich wealthy corporations at the expense of the public. In Western Finance, this is being done by privatizing the financial gains while socializing the financial losses. In other words, all the profits go to the wealthy elite while all the losses are passed along to taxpayers (this is the fundamental point of the $700 billion bailout, of course).

In Western Medicine, virtually every regulatory policy in effect today is constructed to enrich corporations. The FDA's censorship of true health claims on nutritional supplements, the FTC's crackdown on anti-cancer herbal remedies, the DEA's raids on medical marijuana… these campaigns are all conducted solely to protect the profits of the pharmaceutical companies at the expense of public health.

Think about it: Monopoly pricing on pharmaceuticals sold in the USA is enforced by the FDA and FTC. Approvals of drugs based on outright fraudulent science is openly granted by the FDA. Raids against vitamin companies, supplement companies and natural product retailers are organized and conducted by both the FTC and FDA, two regulatory bodies that engage in outright extortion, threatening natural health companies with bankruptcy and criminal charges if they don't pay outrageous fines based on fabricated accusations of things like "linking to a scientific journal from your website" (which is now a crime in the U.S. if you sell nutritional products).

These are all the actions of governmental tyrants who act solely as Big Business street thugs, wiping out the competition to protect the profits of their (mob) bosses.

#4 They're both based on arrogance and the worship of money
Arrogance runs high in Western Medicine, where clever men at the top of the pharmaceutical companies think they've outsmarted mother nature by brainwashing consumers into thinking the human body is born with deficiencies of patented synthetic chemicals. This same arrogance is woven directly into the fabric of Wall Street, where greed-based financial players convince themselves they're so brilliant that the mere idea of how to make money is now recorded as a bankable asset on the balance sheets (that's the Enron style of accounting, which has now infected all of Wall Street).

The arrogance in both these industries is astounding. Neither Western Finance nor Western Medicine believes there is such a thing as a reality that shall ever hold them accountable. They don't believe in gold, or real food, or cause and effect. Things are things because they say they are, and nothing is subject to economic reality, scientific scrutiny or real-world common sense.

These two industries have been living in the Twilight Zone for so long, they've completely lost touch with reality. In fact, they no longer have any familiarity with reality. Doctors, for example, have no knowledge of nutrition or superfoods. They are nutritionally illiterate the day they graduate from medical school. Similarly, bankers are almost universally ignorant of the basic laws of economics. Few understand how fractional-reserve banking really works, nor do they grasp the correlations between increases in the money supply and inflation.

Bankers and doctors, it could be accurately stated, have almost no knowledge about the very things over which they have been granted authority.

(For the record, yes I know there are many exceptions to this. Lots of well-educated bankers and doctors break out of the box of ignorance by learning, on their own, those things not taught to them in the land of academia.)

#5 They both seek instant profits at the expense of future generations
Western financial institutions are famous for their focus on the next fiscal quarter. If it doesn't create a profit in the next 90 days, it's not considered a worthwhile investment. This "instant profit" mentality inevitably leads to an abandonment of virtues like saving money or honoring future generations. Instead of leaving our children with equity, the United States of America (and its financial co-conspirators) have burdened future generations with an impossible debt burden.

Pharmaceutical companies think much the same way. Rather than uplifting the health of the nation with sound prenatal nutrition policies (and infant health programs based on disease prevention), it seeks to vaccinate and medicate every living being with a never-ending parade of high-profit pharmaceuticals… from birth to death. There is no attention paid to the environmental effects of flushing all those drugs down the drain (pharmaceuticals are now found in the drinking water of over 50 American cities), nor is there any attempt to actually prevent cancer (or other diseases) in any way whatsoever.

Instead, Western Medicine prefers to wait until people get sick so it can cash in on their disease. Similarly, Western Finance prefers to hide its problems, expanding its debt base until it gets too big to fail, at which point someone has to come along and bail it out.

Neither industry operates with any degree of accountability.

#6 Both are run by unindicted criminals
If I break into your house and steal your wallet, I would be considered a criminal. But when Congress breaks into your finances and steals your life savings, they consider themselves to be heroes!

Make no mistake: Both the Western Finance and Western Medical industries are run by unindicted criminals who steal, lie, and deceive their way to the greatest profits possible. Drug companies routinely bury studies they don't want you to see, and FDA leaders routinely stack their decision boards with "experts" who maintain direct financial ties to the companies selling the pharmaceuticals they're voting to approve.

Meanwhile, top bankers are shelling out hundreds of millions of dollars in favors to Washington politicians in order to avoid any reduction in their multi-million dollar salaries, even while the financial institutions they led are about to be bailed out by taxpayer money. What all this has in common is that the top CEOs, politicians and regulatory decision makers are unindicted criminals who are guilty of various crimes against the People: Theft, conspiracy, racketeering and much more.

If these people were held up to the same laws applied to you and me, they'd all be arrested and spend their lives in prison (or worse).

#7 Both are doomed to collapse
The final parallel between Western Finance and Western Medicine? They're both doomed to collapse.

That very idea was considered absolutely loony just 30 days ago. But I've stuck to this prediction for five years: Western medicine is doomed to collapse. And now, all of a sudden, more people are waking up and seeing their fictional world crumbling around them. The near-collapse of the global financial system, it seems, has rudely awakened a few people who were sleepwalking through life, intoxicated by visions of free riches, free pharmaceuticals and life in the land of zero accountability.

Reality, though, is a stubborn thing. You can daydream all you want, but the laws of economics cannot be violated any more so than the laws of human physiology. When there's a poison in the system (biologically or financially speaking), something must be done to eliminate the poison and bolster the health of the patient. Sadly, Washington remains in the business of denying the problem, which makes it all the more difficult to try to solve it.

Interestingly, the collapse of Western Finance is inevitably linked to the collapse of Western Medicine. How so? Because Big Pharma is almost entirely dependent on the government to protect and feed itself. Without Big Government creating an artificial monopoly market where competing natural products are censored or outlawed, Big Pharma could not compete!

Nobody would buy arthritis drugs if they knew cherry extracts or potent fish oils could solve the problem more safely and affordably. No one would buy high-profit cholesterol drugs if they learned the truth about red yeast rice, aged garlic or policosanol.

Big Pharma is entirely dependent on the government to prop up its business, and when the U.S. government goes operationally bankrupt (which is coming), Big Pharma may suddenly find itself competing in a free marketplace where it no longer has the tools of oppression, censorship and tyranny to bludgeon the competition into irrelevancy. When Big Government goes, Big Pharma will follow, and the collapse of Western Finance is thus a precursor to the collapse of Western Medicine.

Both institutions, of course, will attempt to claw their way back to power, even as they are crumbling. They won't go without a fight, and they may be able to put in place clever tactics that delay their demise by years. But in the end, no nation has a future when its finance — and its medicine — are based on fraud.

Think about that. It's a powerful realization. The U.S. simply cannot continue the way it's running today. With 50% of the population on pharmaceuticals, and children being drugged with Speed (ADHD drugs), and mandatory vaccines poisoning (and killing) young girls, there is no future unless something changes.

With junk foods and energy drinks intoxicating our youth, and dangerous chemicals running rampant through the personal care product industry, and foods being irradiated to destroy their nutritional content, there is no future.

With banks stealing money from the working taxpayers, and $10 trillion national debt knocking on our door, and the government taking ownership of more than 50% of the national economy, there is no future!

The real world will be a shock to many
The end of these systems is now in sight. They are crumbling under their own arrogance and stupidity, revealing a society based on self-righteous deception and global scandal. Everything we thought was real turns out to be fabricated: The money, the medicine, the economy, the law… it's all being revealed for what it is: A Matrix of enslavement, designed to keep the People believing they live in a free society, even as their health and wealth are stolen from them by the sinister few who wield political power.

Western Finance will fall, and Western Medicine will soon end its reign of terror over the people. We will live to see the end of the FDA as we know it; the end of the AMA, the cancer industry and the dominance of the drug companies. We may lose our savings and we may even lose our nation, but we will not lose the one thing that matters most in this cold, dark universe: Our sense of connection with life, nature and each other.

Because when all the fictions fall apart, and the facade of the American Empire crumbles like the twin towers on 9/11, when it's all said and done, we still have one thing we can count on: Mother Nature.

Nature will still be there. The trees, the gardens, the herbs… these things are real. The water, the oceans, the honeybees… these are the things that bring us real wealth.

Wealth is not a collection of digits in a computer. It isn't a promise printed on green paper money. Real wealth is a garden that feeds you, a river that hydrates you, and a system of medicine that nourishes and supports you. Real wealth is a day with sunshine, a night under the stars and a life lived with purpose.

Real wealth is not fleeting, nor subject to cascading collapse. It is as real as the morning dew on a cabbage plant, or the sweet taste of fresh blueberry juice, or the buzz of ten thousand honeybees pollinating an orchard.

These are the things Western society has forgotten, and in that forgetfulness, it has suffered a dangerous, multi-generational amnesia … a disease of delusion, if you will, that is about to collide head-on with reality.

The awakening will be rude. Some will embrace reality and thrive in the Next Society. Others will deny reality and suffer.

As we watch all of this unfold, I invite you to join me in the real world; to eat real food, to experience real (natural) medicine and to make real, lasting contributions to the future of life on Earth. As fictional constructs fall to the ground around us, we are all being granted front-row seats to one of the most amazing transformations in the history of life on Earth: We are about to watch one civilization end, and another civilization emerge from the ruin.

We are, indeed, watching history unfold before our eyes. And you know what? We are all fortunate enough to participate in it! Don't miss this. Stay confident. Help those you can, and prepare yourself for the transition. The next few years are going to be the most interesting we'll see in our lifetimes.

Dr. Emoto did scientific research on how water responds to words – spoken, written and even music.  He chose to study water because it is the most abundant substance on earth and our bodies are approximately 90% water.  He found that words of love, blessing and gratitude created perfect, beautiful, ordered ice crystals.  Words of anger, hatred and cursing created ugly, distorted crystals.  The photographs of his results are startling and dramatic.  You can see these amazing pictures in his books, such as ‘The Hidden Messages in Water,” which are available from www.amazon.com.

Without a doubt his research confirms the truth of God’s Word.  His Word says pleasant words are health to our bones (Pr. 16:24); a wholesome tongue is a tree of life (Pr. 15:4); and by guarding our mouths we preserve our lives (Pr. 13:3).  It gives new meaning to the power of prayer to sanctify our food (1 Timothy 4:5)!  Our words are vibrations and every emotion and thought expressed has a particular vibrational energy.  In fact, we are “electrical” beings who are constantly emitting vibrations with our thoughts and words, affecting not just ourselves, but those around us as well.  Just think about how an angry person affects the atmosphere in a room!  Is it any wonder our words can change things on a molecular level?  Research shows the electromagnetic frequencies of our bodies controls every chemical reaction.

Scientists have proven that the energy of our thoughts, feelings and emotions can positively or negatively effect our DNA structure.  We’ve all heard about how someone taking a placebo is healed simply because they believe the medication (which actually has no medicinal value) will heal them.  Worry and stress changes the pH of your body from alkaline to acidic very quickly.  Even our food has energy – natural, whole food the way God created it does – and that energy is vital to health.

While all words are powerful, God’s Word is especially power-packed (Hebrews 4:12).  Speak and think life and health and blessing to yourself and others – we truly do have the power of death and life in our mouths.

Patients with heart disease should be screened and treated for depression because it can adversely affect their health outlook and quality of life, according to a new report by the American Heart Association.

Typical diets focus on weight loss, but CR is a different kind of diet that reduces long term calorie intake and promotes the consumption of nutrient dense foods. This pursuit holds the elusive promise of lengthening the human life span, and even — as some submit — immortality.

There are many compelling arguments to support the longevity issue, but advocates believe that at the very least, following CR precepts will enhance your health right now by minimizing body fat, inhibiting cell mutation, lowering blood glucose levels, decreasing inflammation, activating brain-alertness, promoting deep restful sleep, increasing energy levels and creating a more youthful biological age.

Recent studies from the National Institute on Aging, Harvard University, and Washington University concur and say that a calorie restricted diet includes many benefits, one of them being extending human life. Lab studies dating back to the thirties show that mice and all sorts of laboratory critters, when placed on a severely restricted diet, lived fifty percent longer than the oldest members of their peer community.

Biosphere 2 seemed like a study out of a science fiction novel; nevertheless it proved an unintended point. In 1991 in the Arizona desert, eight scientists sealed themselves inside an airtight terrarium to prove they could live isolated for two years in a self-sustained ecosystem. Something went terribly wrong and they realized they couldn’t grow enough food for them to survive the two years. Without Roy Walford, a UCLA pathologist and team physician, the entire team would have starved to death, but fortuitously he had been studying calorie restriction for decades and was able to parse their meager food supply thereby drastically cutting their calories for the duration of the experiment. You would think when they emerged from their habitat they would be gaunt, pasty and in need of medical help; quite the opposite. They were healthier in almost every respect than when they had sealed themselves in two years prior. Dr. Walford later wrote a book, Beyond the 120-Year Diet: How to Double Your Vital Years.

While there is no specified meal plan with CR, the recommendation is to eat twenty to thirty percent less than accepted conventional recommendations for healthy calorie intake. Sugar, saturated fats, and most dairy products are shunned. Fruits, vegetables and whole grains are the mainstay foods which make up the bulk of the diet, but savvy people already know that these particular foods are the ones hallowed as the basis of a healthy diet anyway.

Be forewarned though lest you rush to throw everything out in your refrigerator. It has been shown that without an accompanying healthy lifestyle, including exercise in particular, strict calorie restriction can lead to loss of bone density. A one year study of 46 participants at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, conducted by Dennis T. Villareal M.D. revealed that individuals in the CR group not only lost weight, but also lost an average of 2.2% of their bone density in the lower spine, 2.2% at the hip and 2.1% at the top of the femur, all high risk areas for fracture. An article in the Archives of Internal Medicine – JAMA, states that without exercise, restricting calories may lead to bone density loss.

This would seem to be the green light; if we exercise and restrict calories maybe then we can live forever, but not so. Other studies have shown that if people with very little body fat drastically cut calories they can actually do more harm than good to their health. So, we have to count every calorie, know if our body fat is appropriate, exercise enough to keep our bones strong — then it could be worth it.

The fountain of youth, living forever; the temptation to jump on board is tantalizing. The prudent thing to do is proceed with caution, understand the positives and negatives and keep a discerning mind. It might be wonderful to live a long life, but not if it’s one burdened by osteoporosis and fractured bones.

Your health mate,

Deanna Dean