{"id":536772,"date":"2010-04-20T23:01:47","date_gmt":"2010-04-21T03:01:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.personalliberty.com\/?p=12968"},"modified":"2010-04-20T23:01:47","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T03:01:47","slug":"fear-and-loathing-why-it%e2%80%99s-bullish-for-gold","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/536772","title":{"rendered":"Fear and Loathing: Why It\u2019s Bullish for Gold"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>\u201cI hate to say this, but this place is getting to me. I think  I&#8217;m getting the Fear.\u201d<\/em> <strong>Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>First it was Saddam Hussein and his weapons  of mass destruction. We had to invade Iraq. Never mind that the United  States had a no fly zone over the country and had practically destroyed the  Republican Guard; that Iraq had no effective way to deliver such weapons or  that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department didn\u2019t  think such weapons even existed.<\/p>\n<p>Then in 2008 the Washington fear machine was at work again. The  White House, the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department were screaming  that the world was falling into another Great Depression. <\/p>\n<p>The latest End of Days is a prophecy from Hillary Clinton. At the Nuclear  Security Summit in Washington  last week, the U.S. Secretary of State said that terrorists  like al-Qaida  pose a nuclear threat. It is all part of the Obama administration\u2019s plan to  convince the American people that al-Qaida is going nuclear. <\/p>\n<p>According to journalist Emily Gertz, \u201cFear  of the terrorist has been used for the past several years to induce Americans  to accept an increasingly authoritarian government and the dilution of our  civil liberties.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>It is not just the fear of terrorists that  President Obama and his Liberal elite are using to expand their sphere of  influence. It is FEAR of everything: the jobs we might lose, the food we eat;  even the water we drink and the air we breathe.<\/p>\n<p>In his essay, <em>The Politics of Fear<\/em>, Alex Gourevitch writes that fear mongering is part and  parcel of the environmental movement. \u201cEnvironmentalism is a left-wing politics  of fear because it rests on the deeply fearful idea that only an overweening  threat to our physical and collective health\u2026 Threats to the very conditions of  life, rather than social controversies over power and distribution, come to motivate  political engagement\u2014an engagement that presumes setting to one side inequality  and unfreedom (sic) as the central categories of political contestation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>A Gentler Time<\/strong><br \/>\n  America has vastly changed from when FDR proclaimed: \u201cThe only thing we  have to fear is fear itself.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>No doubt The Age of Fear began with 9\/11. Before,  Washington  did its best to keep a lid on anxieties. The Crash of \u201987 is an example.<\/p>\n<p>I was driving to work and the radio  announcer said: \u201cThe Dow Industrials  are currently down 325 points.\u201d <\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat\u2019s ridiculous,\u201d I thought. The Dow  couldn\u2019t be down that much. Either the announcer was stupid or he was playing a  prank.<\/p>\n<p>But it was true. The stock market was  plunging. It was Black Monday and the Dow plummeted 508 points, or 23 percent, to 1,739.  Half a trillion dollars in wealth had just been erased. Over the next few days the world witnessed  the Dow\u2019s fall from over 2,600 to 1,700.<\/p>\n<p>What I remember most about the Crash of \u201987  was the Federal government\u2019s response to it. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan  Greenspan not only provided liquidity for the banks but urged calm and told the  world that America\u2019s  economy was \u201cfundamentally sound\u201d. It was a message reiterated by House Speaker  Jim Wright, President Ronald Reagan and U.S. Treasury Secretary James Baker. It  was our Federal government doing its damndest to reduce panic; to stabilize a  dangerous situation.<\/p>\n<p>The stock market crash of \u201908 brought an  entirely different response from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury  Secretary Henry Paulson, as explained by Andrew Ross Sorkin in his bestseller, <em>Too Big To Fail<\/em>. According to Sorkin,  the leadership of the Fed and Treasury opted for a novel strategy to get  Congress to ante up half a trillion dollars to bail out Wall Street\u2014fear.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is only going to work if you scare  the sh** out of them.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That had been Jim Wilkinson\u2019s advice for  Paulson before he and Bernanke left to meet with the congressional leadership  at Nancy Pelosi\u2019s office that evening. By Wilkinson\u2019s reckoning, unless they  could convince Congress that the world was literally going to come to an end,  they would never receive approval for a $500 billion bailout package for Wall  Street.<\/p>\n<p><strong>History\u2019s Lessons About Fanning Fears<\/strong><br \/>\n  Washington had struck on something that  tyrants have known for centuries\u2014that fanning fear makes a populace compliant to just about anything.<\/p>\n<p>A few years before the Wall Street bailout  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi warned of impending  danger out of Iraq:  \u201cSaddam Hussein has been engaged in the  development of weapons of mass destruction technology.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Then in the autumn of 2008 Pelosi did a  flip-flop; first opposing and then embracing what had become a $700 billion  bailout of the financial markets. In the end Pelosi and two presidents argued that without the taxpayer bailout  our entire financial system faced collapse.<\/p>\n<p>No doubt Pelosi will stand shoulder to shoulder with Secretary  Clinton on the latest great fear, nuke  toting mullahs. The real question is what is Pelosi and the Obama  administration really selling? The answer is submission\u2014the handing over of our  liberty\u2014in the name of national defense, the economy and the environment.<\/p>\n<p>Of course pedaling fear is nothing new. Ancients  like Alexander did it. So too has the Catholic Church, Joseph Stalin and Adolph  Hitler. The difference is that America\u2019s  leaders once allayed our fears. Today they incite them. FDR was wrong, what we  really need to fear is the fear-makers themselves.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Washington<\/strong><strong>\u2019s New Strategy Will Send Gold Soaring<\/strong><br \/>\n  America\u2019s leaders might not be less moral than  those before them (I will let you decide). What has changed is that Washington once had a  vested interest in quieting fear. It was how government supported the once  mighty U.S. dollar.<\/p>\n<p>What is painfully evident is that over the  past decade the Federal government has been intent on getting its way, the  dollar be damned. And it certainly has been. The U.S. dollar index, a  measurement against a basket of other currencies, has fallen by one third. During  the same period the price of gold has risen fourfold.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Action To Take:<\/strong> Expect Washington  to fan fears on everything from the environment to the economy, even at the  expense of the dollar. That means you should diversify out of most dollar  instruments and buy physical precious metals. I urge you to store 1-ounce gold  and silver Eagles and 1-ounce platinum rounds for your safekeeping.<\/p>\n<p>Yours for real wealth and good health,<\/p>\n<p><em>John Myers<br \/>\n  Myers\u2019 Energy and Gold Report<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cI hate to say this, but this place is getting to me. I think I&#8217;m getting the Fear.\u201d Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. First it was Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. We had to invade Iraq. Never mind that the United States had a no fly zone over the country and [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4697,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-536772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4697"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=536772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/536772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=536772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=536772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=536772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}