Over the Rainbow

Rick Perry smeared us all by averring that anyone who doesn't favor in-state tuition for illegal immigrants "has no heart..."

The serial screw-ups that define the Obama presidency leave people wondering if he has a brain...

Obama's bouquet of apologies and appeasement has our enemies confident we have lost our nerve...

The Wizard of Oz is one of my favorite movies. It's a beautiful classic with wonderful characters and great musical numbers.  I snuggle up with my kiddos at least twice a year to enjoy this uniquely American masterpiece.

The Frank L Baum classic is an allegory written for his era, but it could easily apply to our own times as well, writes Steven Lindman.  I'd read much of this before in different places, but he ties it up all in one convenient source.

Dorothy and her companions are ordinary workaday Americans beset by powerful, greedy forces bent on their destruction.  Little do they know that they have the power within them to thwart the designs of the evil malefactors.  Sound familiar?

Here a a few excerpts from Lindman's piece:

Today, international bankers are looting world economies with the aim of turning them into Guatemala - subjugated, unempowered, enslaved, and impoverished like in Orwell's classic dystopian novel - "Nineteen Eighty-Four." He warned that: "Big Brother is watching you (and) If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

In "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," Baum struck a different theme even though he claimed to have written it "solely to pleasure the children." Some scholars, however, see another purpose, allegorically portrayed in his characters:

-- Dorothy is the typical American girl; in her case, a rural Midwestern one;
-- the Scarecrow is the American farmer;
-- the Tin Woodman is the American factory worker;
-- the Cowardly Lion is silver advocate William Jennings Bryan, best remembered for his 1896 Democratic National Convention "Cross of Gold" speech in which he railed against banker-controlled gold-backed money;
-- the Munchkins are Eastern "little people" who didn't understand how banking wizards control money, the economy and government - much like how ignorant most people are today (Steven Lindman - Over the Rainbow)

If that's too fantastical for you, then try this on for size.  Jeffrey Snider explains how The Federal Government and The Federal Reserve brought us to the brink of total calamity.  It is a very interesting read.  Snider is no Alex Jones kook; he's a buttoned-down president of an investment advisory firm.

It is a well-known and well-worn trope that you don't fight the Fed, it will run you over no matter how right you think you may be.

This cliché is an extraction from Keynes and his observation that the markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. In our modern world, the Fed has become the irrational market, backed by the supposition of unlimited money printing. [...]

The economy needs to be returned to its foundation of capital allocation, free from constraining intervention. Stability is found there, under the cover of market discipline and real price discovery. There is no happiness at the end of the paper chase since sustainable enterprises never follow from it. (Jeffrey Snider - The Aura of The Fed is Gone: Good Riddance)

Somewhere...  Over the rainbow, I suppose...

Other Links:
How the DC-NY Axis of Evil Screws Ordinary Americans