Tag Archives: Peter Schiff

Since dispensing advice to people we don’t know has replaced baseball as the great American pastime, here ya go, more unsolicited opinion.  Maybe you are the Alchemist who can pull a rabbit out of all these tuppence.

There is no doubt that Chris Dodd should be run out of politics on a rail but, if I cared about you, I would counsel you not to run for Senate and I’ll tell you why.  The respect you presently command for financial prowess with be matched measure for measure with scorn, envy, suspicion, contempt, you name it.  The label Guru will be stripped away and replaced with Big Money — your every intent interrogated, your every interest suspected.  If your own predictions are correct, rank-and-file will be worse and worse off in the coming couple years.  With no relief in sight, those who HAVE money will increasingly become objects of scorn to the millions upon millions who do NOT have money, not even enough to make ends meet.  

We are much more generous with ridicule than we are with respect, I expect you’ve noticed.

In an economy like this, it would be laughable to divest yourself of your company in order to maintain an appearance of propriety, but I that is exactly what would be required to avoid your becoming the ass that anyone with a resentment can stab with a sharp stick.  If Warren Buffet were in office right now, believe you me, we’d be giving him what-for.

But observe how well he is regarded, how much less harsh the limelight, when he maintains professional distance from where the buck stops.  People admire financial wizardry well enough, but they are also notorious for resenting success. 

I am much distressed by wannabe candidates’ relentless calls for the beleaguered American citizenry to SEND MORE MONEY.  I am contemptuous of newcomers’ assertion that this time/their candidate will be different.  The politicos and strategerists who casually deny possibility of the pitfalls that have bedeviled man’s lordship over man since the dawn of recorded history are precisely the inside track types that people in the bleachers need most to fear.  Nay, revile.  

If we would have things be different, we must do things differently.  As they say on the recovery circuit, we will act our way into right thinking before we will think our way into right acting.

Extrapolating from the derivative concept, I propose a bundling of Independent candidates to mitigate risk and enhance performance . . .  a SLATE of candidates, 50 states broad, who stand squarely on a platform which, to this untrained eye, has yet to be built.  The good news is, it only needs 10 planks — God himself has not enjoyed success on a To Do list as long as that.

I am even MORE distressed by the absence of oversight and accountability with all this fundraising.  I say again that political junkies who chirp that their candidates/organizations/movements are beyond corruption are either young, stupid or insincere.  You know better, and so do I.  Power corrupts?  You bet.  So does money.  In many credible circles, they are held to be one and the same.

Rather than you sullying yourself and muddying the water as a candidate, I suggest that you might serve as the as rock-solid economic adviser to the aforementioned slate of candidates who are kept safer and dryer under the Liberty Umbrella than most of them could ever manage on their own.  Further, I envision a repository for aggregate donations made To The Cause, which is inarguably great, rather than to individuals who are unfailingly human. Principles over personalities.  

Funds could be invested short-term while the Mooovement’s Committee of SENSE determines their most effective and influential apportionment.  Establish a go-to Name Brand for the many many people who are disgusted by partisan politics but who, frankly and not without reason, look askance at upper case Libertarians.  Throwing the deck of cards up in the air, are we?  Here, have a Hoola Hoop.  The consumers-more-like-carnivores of Extremes, from pet rocks to men on the moon, WILL BUY A NEW IDEA.  Me, I think they’ll buy a new idea before they’ll buy the tall tale that the Really-Grand-As-In-Graft Old Party has mended its ways.  Hell, the cast of characters has barely changed.  Karl Rove, trusted FOX correspondent.  I know I couldn’t sell that to any but those who voted for John McCain and SARAH PALIN.  I wouldn’t sell it to anyone.  Only this year, after nearly 35 years as a registered Republican did I mean ENOUGH IS ENOUGH to bail.  Independent from here on out.  The major parties are undependable.

I will rather bow out altogether, into a relaxed and groovy go-around-the-potholes-instead-of-fight-City-Hall Way Cool Fort, and leave y’all to the madness.  Tell everyone I TRIED to speak Reason and Truth . . . either I’m go good at it, or they’re not havin’ it.  Six of one, half a dozen of the other.  The result is the same. old. same. old.  Unacceptable.

If I do not appreciate, I certainly understand that there is a labyrinth of regulations that attend campaign financing, just like there is a labyrinth of regulations for everything from what to put in our bodies to how to dispose of our trash.  A quick search for The Rules landed me on the august document “FEDERAL ELECTION CAMPAIGN LAWS Compiled By THE FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION.”  Capital letters, indeed.  TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY NINE pages of prime USDA Legaleze.

A person of quite average intelligence and objectivity who pays regular attention to American politics can plainly see that the acres of pages of semantic fine tuning that accompany legislation-read-that-law are the breeding ground of Exceptions To The Rule. Surplus Legal Hairsplitting = Deficit Honorable Intent.  Always.

An excerpt FROM PAGE ONE HUNDRED of the document makes it clear as mud that David, The Downtrodden, Third Parties and The Little Guy can make the case that purposeful obfuscation and impediment perpetuate the two-party stranglehold on American politics AND COMMERCE.  Auto asphyxiation, decidedly minus erotica.

(c) Minor and new parties.

In order to be eligible to receive any payments under section 9006, the candidates of a minor or new party in a presidential election shall certify to the Commission under penalty of perjury, that— 

(1) such candidates and their authorized committees will not incur qualified campaign expenses in excess of the aggregate payments to which the eligible candidates of a major party are entitled under section 9004, and 

(2) such candidates and their authorized committees will accept and expend or retain contributions to defray qualified campaign expenses only to the extent that the qualified campaign expenses incurred by such candidates and their authorized committees certified to under paragraph (1) exceed the aggregate payments received by such candidates out of the fund pursuant to section 9006. 

Such certification shall be made within such time prior to the day of the presidential election as the Commission shall prescribe by rules or regulations. 

http://www.fec.gov/law/feca/feca.pdf 

Very literally, rules are made to be broken in America . . . it is the genesis and the lifeblood of Big Law.  Only because the  people who are out of power are not so different from people who are in power as it is emotionally convenient for the out-of-power people to suppose, I am awed to think what the People might pull off with a Good Economic Advisor and a Good Attorney.  Good and bad.

What’s John Edwards up to, I wonder, since HIS tarring and feathering?  The process ITSELF must be challenged, not joined.  Joining IS the perpetuation.

If communal donations and short-term investment could be maneuvered around bends in the law, there would still be the matter of checking egos at the door.  A stretch for politicians, to be sure.  A stretch also for Big Money, in my experience.

I don’t know the answer beyond knowing that the same ineffective solution to the same abiding problem is NOT the answer.  The same ineffective solution to the same abiding problem is bollocks — either magical thinking or mercenary thinking.  This much I DO know.  I will deride ALL candidates who give the open-ended high-flying SEND MORE MONEY pyramid another whirl.  Think scathing political satire.  I will spend money to expose candidates before I will send money to elevate candidates.

Or not.  Why bother?  If we would be so pedestrian as to let history be a guide, we would see that in the collapsing-empire-every-man-for-himself paradigm, what follows on the heels of rapacious taxation and strong-arm compliance is Brain Drain.  ”I don’t give a shit anymore” is not without its own awesomeness.  Unless you’re gettin’ paid for it, politics is no way to spend a life.  A person might just as well say they are “into” sado-masochism as say they “into politics.”

Which brings me full circle to throwing two more cents in the DON’T RUN pile.  A slate of in-your-face, balls-to-the-wall, no-nonsense, straight-talking, get-er-done types . . . people with little to lose and lots to gain . . . I’m tellin’ ya, Americans LOVE underdogs.  ESPECIALLY in Hard Times.   The Little Engine That Could.  Adam Kokesh.   

By contrast, Americans love to loathe the top of the heap . . . build ‘em up just to let ‘em down, I think there was a song about that brand of crazy-making.  Yours is the opposite story, little to win and lots to lose while being an easier target.  A side of aggravation to go with your disappointment? 

As it happens, I don’t know you to care about you beyond perfunctory, and I confess intermittent, Goodwill toward all. If my thinking is wrong, let’s just say it wouldn’t be the first time.  Definitely, take everything I say with a grain of salt — perhaps on the rim of a slushy margarita while pot smokers languish in prison — consider the source, there’s no accounting for taste, that’s what makes horse races, to each his own, do what you think is best, today is the first day of the rest of our lives, may the best man win.