Friday, December 21, 2007

C'mon baby take a chance with us

"The best way to destroy the Capitalist System is to debauch the currency"


Thanks yet again to
LWTC247 - this time for passing on a link to a couple of Youtube videos of Max Keiser talking about the 'death of the dollar', much of which is equally applicable to sterling. It's a good piece but I still wouldn't buy a 2nd hand car off Max (though the title of an article on his website - '
It's debt war!!! Baby Boomers versus their children!' - is pretty special)

and even if you're not particularly interested in the Death of the Dollar, the last minute or so of the 2nd clip does feature Max wandering around a cemetery near Jim Morrison's grave singing '
This is the End ...of the dollar ... beautiful friend ... la la la ...la' to himself and giggling like a total Loon.

More financial journalism should be like that






.

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah the ending was quite good, mind you I had a good LOL when he walked into that hopsital quacked (as all good commentators do) when asking about the Dollar in critical condition.

That SC dude made me wince though - it's people like him who wont be rioting on the streets when the banks refuse to allow him in to make a withdrawl, in fact it's eco-toffs like him who probably order the doors shut!

I think Max let the shackles off feeling vindicated from his previous warnings about the dollar.

- lw

Anonymous said...

P.S. Although having watched People & Power with the very very lovely Ms. Sama Al-Shahad for quite some time now, I've only just noticed the repeated Monty Python subliminal at the start.

And now Max acting like a loon...

Quality!

- lw

Stef said...

It's only subliminal if you don't notice it

I did enjoy the question to the viewers at the end of the piece...

'So, do you think the dollar should remain the world's reserve currency? Please contact us at Al-Jazeera TV with your opinion'

comedy gold!

Stef said...

and I still think Michael Hudson sounds even duckier...

www.michael-hudson.com/audio/070815ClassWar.mp3

Anonymous said...

Max is great, I'm not sure what your reservations are Stef. He seems like a good sound conspiraloon to me, eccentric yes, over the top at times (on one of his podcasts he bet any listener £10,000 that America would have extermination camps within 10 years), but it goes without saying that he knows his subject inside out and is one of the few financial commentators out their willing to tell the brutal unvarnished truth.

How Stacey puts up with him though, is a different matter...

Wolfie said...

(on one of his podcasts he bet any listener £10,000 that America would have extermination camps within 10 years)

Interesting. Who does he think they'll be extermining this time around?

Stef said...

Max is great, I'm not sure what your reservations are Stef

slotting 'Max Keiser' and 'Zak Goldsmith' into Google will yield a clue or two, e.g.

www.guardian.co.uk/business/2004/nov/25/2

what does it say at the top of this blog? ;)

Stef said...

... I personally doubt very much that the small number of people responsible for the death of the dollar didn't see the inevitable consequences of their actions coming, though they may have fucked their timing up a little

/ searches for 13th century peasant outfit on ebay

Anonymous said...

Fair point about the Zak Goldsmith connection. As soon as one of these spawns of the billionaire globalists are involved in something my teeth start to grind. I definetly share your distaste. Having said that, listening to many of Max's podcasts I am still left with little doubt that his distaste for the right sort of people is at least as great as ours.

Wolfie, he was referring mainly to the the Muslim population but also other Americans. Keiser is of the belief that America will totally dissolve into chaos within 5-10 years and become a lawless 3rd world country that will turn on its own population, who will be mostly be reduced to serfdom. He also thinks 9/11 was a pinprick compared to what he calls the financial terrorists, who he identifies as the central bankers, hedge fund managers and the likes of Goldman Sachs.

His podcasts are well worth a listen - http://www.karmabanqueradio.com/

At the very least they're extremely amusing

Stef said...

I just gave one of Max's recent podcasts a spin...

http://karmabanqueradio.com/?p=782

It starts and ends well but the middle third degrades into pure Globalist Ecofascism

How do you guarantee to win a fight?

By backing both sides perchance?

Anonymous said...

I don't see your problem with it Stef to be honest. He seems to express all the right views as far as I can see.

Stef said...

I had a similar exchange with someone a few days ago about a video of David Ray Griffin talking about one world government. We both share many similar views about the world but disagreed over whether the content of that film was laudable or not

http://tinyurl.com/24xqwt

My problem, in general, is that I don't trust anyone who is given mainstream, or even what passes for alternative, airtime. I'm also aware that the bastards we all hate are never going to be honest about their agenda and come at us through infiltration and co-option of movements and ideas that have mass appeal

Talking about Max specifically, his association with the likes of Zak Goldsmith is a major danger signal. On top of that, I'm one of those people who suspects that Al Jazeeera might just be a little iffy

Taking the podcast I mention above as a specific example, Max and his chum start sounding disturbingly Malthusian, hark back to a mythical pre-industrial Golden Age (which was a central part of, amongst others, Nazi mythology) and spouting what is, frankly, New Age bullshit.

Our ancestors were frequently no more 'carbon aware' or sympathetic to nature than we are and, for example, did a pretty good job of deforesting Western Europe long before the invention of the internal combustion engine. That's not to say we don't have things to learn from people who work with nature but if we all go back to being yak breeders or crofters there's no way current global population levels would be sustainable

And that's the unstated punchline of what Max was talking about in that podcast - population reduction and lots of it. At one point in the talk Max compares humanity with a virus which was just a little too Prince Philip for my tastes.

And it's no accident that the likes of the Goldsmiths and the Rockefellers and the Windsors yearn for a return to pre-industrial style society. Those societies were characterised by low social mobility and an undisputed, immutable ruling class. Yup, they were the Good Old Days alright

(Max also works Peak Oil into the podcast, another personal hot button topic. I wouldn't be daft enough to claim that hydrocarbons will last forever but I can't help noticing that the price of oil has doubled in the past year or so but Peak Oil advocates don't seem to have pushed the timescales for their Doomsday Scenario back very much, if at all)

In short, I'm concerned that Max is promoting ideas that would lead to the kind of feudalism he claims to be opposed to. Maybe he's well intentioned but I do find it odd that the quality of thought he displays when discussing financial matters seems to fly out of the window when applied to other subjects

Of course, I could be completely paranoid and flat wrong and I do rate what Max has been saying about the financial markets but I just can't get away from the fact that Max is a mate of Zak's...

paul said...

Didn't get time to get back to the one about DRG. I've always been surprised how people take such umbrage towards him. He seems a fairly reasonable advocate for promoting a further look at 911 yet he get's pure ad hominems such as high priest (he's a fucking theologian, not a priest. God might not exist but religion certainly does) or the vague slur of 'globalist' when all he seemed to be suggesting (to me) was a UN that worked, that was not the plaything of a security council or moneyed interests.

I also thought he was right that there is little to stand in the face of superpower force, there are resistances but even when they succeed there is precious little left to even start rebuilding. Vietnam has returned to sweatshop status, Nicaragua looks pretty moribund, Iraq as was has pretty much been obliterated, lebanon and afghanistan are plunged into chaos. The mild, cautious and laudable reforms in venezuela are hanging by a thread.

My main thought was that there wasn't really enough there for him to be condemned outright even if you don't have much time for him.

As for the Karabal, they seem to be very much green icing on a cake of pure financial shit. When I first came across young zachary's mob, their spokesman was talking about using finance in a benign way to benefit the po' folks. It would seem they have trimmed their sails a bit to accommodate the coming storm.

I'd take Hudson over Keiser any time, he says feudalism has been the point of policy for the last 30 years.
When I saw these two articles, I remembered something he said about subprime being the mechanism to infect other economies, not just a quick buck.

An outtake from portly gatekeeper michael moore and the hollowing of a norwegian village. Might be connecting the dots with a rather long thread...but there you go.

Anonymous said...

Good post Stef, I think what you say about Keiser is largely correct. He certainly has little time for humanity and his other main topic aside from economics is global warming, of which he's in the same camp as the Zak Goldsmiths and David De Rothschilds of this world. It's a curious dichotomy really, on the one hand he rails against people like their dads, but on the other seems to share their world view about mankind.

Personaly I'm not sure what to make of it, he's so bang on about money and banking its hard to really gauge how significant some of his other views and friendships are.

That's the funny thing about Zak Goldsmith et al. I've been having a very long and unproductive debate about global warming on another forum and have pointed out how many of these jet setting sons of billionaire bankers and financiers are involved in the movement. It's amazing how people who would otherwise have no time for posh rich boys lecturing the worlds poor will defend them when it comes to this subject. It seems that global warming makes people think differently, and less critically.

Stef said...

@paul

Hand on heart, I've got no personal baggage wrt DRG and was just reacting to some of the comments he made in the film. The interviewer asks some spot on questions imho and I think DRG fudges the answers to at least a couple of them.

A benevolent, more effective UN would be a nice thing. However a global institution with the power to impose its will on individual nations and peoples would also have the potential to be nastiest thing ever. This is no small risk and, based on that video, DRG is quite cavalier about that side of things imho and I didn't hear any Big Ideas about the nature of the checks and balances that would be required (and the UN as it stands is a bucket of infiltrated, manipulated shit, so the experience of history is not with DRG on this one)

However, just because someone says things that I personally think are wrong I don't automatically assume that they're bad guys, just that they're wrong.

And I agree with you about Hudson 100%. The guy's a star though even he comes out with some frankly off the wall stuff sometimes. During one of his presentations last year he comments that friends of his in England don't invite him around to their houses any more because they can no longer afford meat. He then extrapolates that and says that most people in England couldn't afford meat because of their high mortgage costs. He then returns to talking sense again. Quite bizarre

@anon

It's amazing how people who would otherwise have no time for posh rich boys lecturing the worlds poor will defend them when it comes to this subject. It seems that global warming makes people think differently, and less critically.

nicely put

paul said...

And I just thought someone should stick up for DRG for a change.
If we all thought the same it would be a dull old world, I remember that 'meat' comment sticking out, but then it would as he retains an extremely high signal to fruit ratio.

paul said...

There goes the neighbourhood

Stef said...

@paul

re. that link to the article about Narvik's town council getting reamed on its investment decisions

years ago I used to do financial audit work, including some big charities and local councils. It was not unusual for these outfits to punt money on the markets and a question I always used to ask in as professional manner as possible was

'What the fuck are you doing you Muppets?'

I never received anything like an answer which made logical or ethical sense

a relatively trivial example from the world of canine charities...

http://tinyurl.com/323tdb

Stef said...

Tony Blair's todo list of things to do after being Prime minister...

1. Become Roman Catholic TICK

2. Appear in a cameo part on BarneyCam TICK

http://tinyurl.com/2fnawr

(five minutes in)

3. Work for Carlyle Group

4. ?

paul said...

4 Bring peace to the middle east, of course

Anonymous said...

Tony Blair becoming a Catholic, top story on the BBC news all day. No offence to Tone, but who gives a fuck?

Catholism is of course, not a religion. It's a form of government - largely characterised by a highly centralist bureaucracy with an overweening interest in regulating how people behave. Perfect for Tony Blair then!

Apparently Blair was reluctant to go on about his faith whilst he was prime minister for fear of looking like a 'nutter'. Obviously hooking up with George Bush, fabricating evidence, illegally invading another country killing over a million people in the process, then afterwards acting with almost messianic zeal in order to justify it is completely sane isn't it Tone?

Stef said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Stef said...

Tony Blair becoming a Catholic, top story on the BBC news all day. No offence to Tone, but who gives a fuck?

Not being one of those coincidence theorists I can't help but think there's some unstated connection with this story...

www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,,2232050,00.html

and it is kind of amusing to think that there are people out there who will be more incensed by the fact that Blair professes to believe in God than him 'hooking up with George Bush, fabricating evidence, illegally invading another country killing over a million people in the process, then afterwards acting with almost messianic zeal'