Wow! I can’t believe it’s been over a year since I have posted anything here. Sorry for that, folks. I’ve been kind of busy. If you get a chance check out my sister site. It’s called http://www.blackamericanineurope.com. It’s kind of a travel blog that details my adventures through Europe last June and July. I will be posting more stuff here as well.
Stay tuned…
So Andrew Zimmerman from the Travel Channel goes to Uganda to try some of the local cuisine. It’s funny cause here he meets his match. The funniest part I think is when he says “I can’t take another bite of it”. LOL. Classic
So it’s been 8 days and I honestly can’t say that I miss the drinking that much. Seriously. Actually, I feel like I have more energy then before. Maybe it’s because I’m working out more or maybe it’s because I’m drinking more water (about a gallon a day), but I’m not sure. I thought that I’d be more irritable during this trial but I’m not irritable at all and my spirits have been high. I hung out with a friend on Saturday that was drinking and I had no problem abstaining whatsoever. The one thing that I do miss though is the activities that in the past drinking played a big role such as going to the nightclub and dancing. Maybe I’ll try it and see how it goes. I’ll just hit the club, go to the bar and order an orange juice, then hit the dance floor and pretend no ones watching, hahaha. More updates later…
Those that truly know me know that I am no stranger to the consumption of alcohol. I was introduced to this form of self-medication and sometimes source of total inebriation while in my late teens. Ever since then me and it have been close buddies. We’ve had a relationship driven by comfort, habit, tradition, and relief from boredom. It’s been my wingman at the club and helped me stir up the confidence to do what was always in me to do such as dance my ass off or go right up to the hottest chick and try to get her phone number. It has been my compadre at sporting events, movies, or even a long road trip. But above all, it’s been my first line of defense in my battles against social anxiety. For afterall, there is no better social lubricant than ALCOHOL. Well, all that stops on January 1st. At least for 31 days. Yes, for 31 days I am going to give up drinking alcohol. Lots of people ask me why and honestly it’s not because I think I have a problem. One of the reasons I’m doing this is to achieve a fitness goal. I’ll be starting a new workout plan that requires me to abstain from alcohol. Another reason I’m doing this is to prove to myself that I can. For, if i truly do have a problem with alcohol, giving it up will be harder than I think. It may uncover a dependence that I didn’t know that I had. I’ll also be starting off the New Year being able to save more money since I won’t be going out as much or spending money on alcohol. I’ll be posting here on a more regular basis as I go through this process. Wish me luck!!!
Here is an interesting article that I found by a writer by the name of William Sutherland. It’s pretty long but very interesting. Read up and educate yourself:
The annals of history are stained by an undeniable era of darkness; though the genocide remains unspoken, trivialized and sanitized – Africans and persons of color were the victims of an unimaginable holocaust that spanned 400 years costing between 50 and 100 million lives.Cities and villages were burned and razed, cultural treasures and technological contributions were ravaged and destroyed; a continent was raped – her youth and potential stolen, her resources exploited, a history was erased and a people denied their purpose and worth.
Born royalty, princes and princesses were stripped of their birthright, and they with their people robbed of God’s priceless gifts of freedom, dreams and aspirations.
With their dignity stripped, their beauty and worth denied, and families cruelly torn apart, a proud people were made outcasts in hostile, foreign lands and reduced to material property to labor and toil by an unenlightened society. Bound in chains, an innocent people were stuffed in squalid ship holes to die of hunger and sickness, to drown in ferocious storms or to survive to live an existence of degradation and hell…[1]
When Union forces captured the South in 1865 and put a formal end to slavery and its cruel and degrading practices, President Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) and the federal government focused on restitution and reconstruction. The earliest reparations plan offered each freed slave 40 acres of land and a mule to work this land.
Under the auspices of this plan, General William Sherman (1820-1891) “set aside tracts of land in the sea islands around Charleston, SC”[2] exclusively for freed slaves. Within a short time, about “40,000 freed slaves [had been] settled on 400,000 acres in Georgia and South Carolina.”[3]
However, when President Lincoln was assassinated, his successor, Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), a southerner from North Carolina, rescinded the federal government’s promise and reversed the reparations program. Former slaves were then evicted from their new lands that reverted back to white ownership. Despite Johnson’s opposition, Congressman Thaddeus Stevens (1792-1868) made a feeble attempt in 1867 proposing an unsuccessful bill that again called for distributing land to freed slaves.
Ten years later, when reconstruction ended followed by the passage of repressive, restrictive laws (e.g. Jim Crow) and the formation of white terrorist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) in the south, plans to address “the atrocities of slavery” and compensate its victims were forgotten. Afterwards, African-Americans saw little justice, were denied their constitutional rights, and subjected to terrorism (e.g. the entire town of Rosewood, FL was destroyed in January 1923 by white mobs while local officials sworn to uphold the law watched and even participated, leaving up to 80 black men, women, and children dead) and illegal lynching for nearly 100 years until the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s finally liberated them.
By the time Lincoln’s “Emancipation Proclamation” was implemented through force, four million Africans and their descendants had been enslaved in the U.S. and its colonies from 1619 to 1865, which played an integral role in leading to and accelerating America’s rise in becoming the “most prosperous country.” With this fact, the original promise implemented by General Sherman, calculations of the “sum total of the worth of all the Black labor stolen through means of slavery, segregation, and contemporary discrimination” ranging from $5 to $24 trillion, and estimates of the original plots given to and then stolen from freed slaves being valued at about $1.5 million each,[4] the time for slave reparations is past overdue when the concept of “unjust enrichment” is pursued as advocated by Randall Robinson, the author of “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.”
Accordingly, despite many obstacles, including legal and low support among whites, the slavery reparations movement has been revived and is “gaining momentum.”[5] In 1989, Congressman John Conyers (b. 1929) introduced H.R. 40 “to examine the effects [that slavery and its remnants –] Jim Crow have had on African-Americans since emancipation,”[6] which to date lacks the necessary support required for passage. Next in 2000, based on careful research by Deadria Farmer-Paellmann (b. 1965), an Adjunct Professor of Law at Southern New England School of Law, who discovered evidence that Aetna wrote “policies on the lives of enslaved Africans with slave owners as the beneficiaries,” the company issued an “unprecedented apology” giving birth to the “corporate restitution movement.”[7]
By 2002, nine lawsuits had been filed, the most notable in the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, NY against FleetBoston Financial, CSX (a major railways firm) and Aetna for direct involvement in the slave trade. Currently cases are pending “against 20 companies from the banking, insurance, textile, railroad, and tobacco industries.” At the same time, California and twelve other states have enacted disclosure laws requiring insurance companies doing business within their boundaries to reveal “their role in slavery,” while boycotts are being staged against firms named in the Farmer-Paellmann litigation that are challenging restitution demands.[8]
Despite critics, the case for slavery reparations is convincing and strong:
The disparity between African Americans and Whites ($6000 vs. $88,000 net worth) would have been significantly smaller had President Johnson not rescinded Lincoln’s original promise or if the 1867 Reparations bill would have passed giving freed slaves “an economic foothold before waves of European immigrants poured into the U.S. during the latter decades of the 1800s.[9]
The United States has already given land away in its 230-year history. Approximately 246 million acres of “productive” land was given to about 1.5 million people through the Homestead Act. Ironically out of the 1.5 million beneficiaries that included many white immigrants, there were only 4000 native African Americans.Internationally, land has also been awarded to compensate victims of injustices. The most notable example is the creation of Israel, which has benefited countless Holocaust (1938-1945) victims and their families.
Precedents also exist for monetary payments to victims of injustices. Since 1952, the German government and corporations (along with those of Austria and Switzerland, to name others) have paid more than $120 billion to fund early Israeli projects and compensate Holocaust survivors. Presently about 120,000 Holocaust survivors (once about 275,000) are still receiving lifetime reparation payments. At the same time, “Japanese-Americans interned during World War II are receiving reparation for their loss of property and liberty during that period” after filing a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act, which “waives the government’s ‘sovereign immunity’ in some situations,”[10] and American Indian tribes have and continue to receive compensation for “lands ceded to the U.S. by them in various treaties.”[11]
Many ask, “Would reparations for slavery be just?”[12] arguing that the practice was originally legal, “[n]ot a single person directly affected by slavery remains alive,”[13] the cost of tracing lineages to slaves would be unbearable, the process next to impossible, “no one alive today owned slaves,” and that “payments based on race alone would be perceived… as a monstrous injustice… setting back race relations”[14] without healing “the ills of the black community.”[15]
Considering that, while every slave and his/her direct family are deceased, African Americans continued to suffer disproportionately from segregation, discrimination, and barbaric attacks into the late 20th century, and at times continue to be the victims of bias (e.g. racial profiling when it comes to jobs, shopping, law enforcement and voting despite equal opportunity and equal protection laws and the 1964 Civil Rights Act), remain disproportionately disenfranchised when it comes to net worth and home ownership and still suffer from a sense of a lack of self-worth versus today’s black immigrants, slavery reparations are not only just but necessary.
Holocaust reparations continue to be paid even though the genocide that murdered more than 7 million, predominantly Jews along with opponents of Adolf Hitler’s (1889-1945) regime and other “non-Aryans” (persons with fair-skin, light hair, and blue eyes), was legal under the democratically elected Third Reich (1933-1945) government. Thus arguments that corporations should not be punished for “legal” acts are baseless. In reality, slavery was as morally repugnant as the Holocaust and “corporations that benefited from staling people, from stealing labor, from forced breeding, from torture, from committing numerous horrendous acts,” in the words of Farmer-Paellmann “should [not] be able to hold onto assets they acquired through such horrendous acts.”[16]
Back in 1999, more than 50 years after the end of the Holocaust, Jewish groups seeking at least $20 billion in new reparations called a $3.3 billion offer made by a German delegation representing the country’s government and corporations “disgusting.” They later agreed on a $5.2 billion “Nazi slave [compensation] fund” that was approved by the German Parliament in 2000. However, while these negotiations were being held, “the World Council of Orthodox Jewish Communities filed a[nother] lawsuit in the U.S. against Deutsche Bank, Germany’s second-largest bank, alleging that it funded and profited from Nazi atrocities.”[17]
Based on these two cases alone, the passage of time and existing “legalities” of the prevailing era, are irrelevant when it comes to redressing inhuman acts like the Holocaust and slavery if justice is to be served. “Slavery harmed slaves and thus, indirectly, their descendants.”[18] Furthermore, as there is no statute of limitations when it comes to the Holocaust, it can also be argued that none should exist when it comes to slavery especially since “African Americans were not allowed access to the courts in any meaningful way – even long after the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was passed [in December 1865].” Also, consistent with California’s legislation that revised existing statutes of limitations to ensure that “certain Holocaust suits would not be time-barred,”[19] legislation can also provide extensions to African Americans so as not to perpetuate past injustices that were every bit as evil as those committed by the Third Reich.
Therefore, arguments that slavery reparations are illogical and “that tax dollars [and corporate holdings] should not be used for [this] compensation”[20] are equally as “disgusting.” Per Dr. Martin Luther King (1929-1968), the only practical route is for “all citizens [to] engage as full participants in a dialogue examining what is the cost of repairing our society to make it equally accessible to everyone”[21] rather than dismissing and denying the need for past due reparations to the African American community.
In addition, the commentary offered during the 1999 Holocaust compensation fight regarding monetary payments is as appropriate to slavery reparations as it was during these negotiations when it was stated, “how to quantify this in financial terms is a difficult question… Money itself cannot bring back the dead, nor can it erase the memory of years of forced labor, but those seeking compensation say it may be the best system there is.”[22] While no amount of money nor steps can redress the sins of slavery, such reparations with a formal national condemnation of and apology for the practice can bring justice and healing, boost the self-esteem of African Americans, reduce current racial net worth and private property ownership gaps, improve standards of life for black Americans, and provide them with new opportunities that might otherwise remain unattainable for generations to come.
Although it may be impossible to give direct compensation to most slave descendants, every effort should be made to locate and compensate those with confirmed direct lineages and to African Americans who had suffered under segregation. In addition, slavery reparations funds should contribute to black foundations, black scholarships, and black community projects aimed at improving infrastructure and standards of life, especially since precedents already exist for the latter. When Germany began Holocaust reparations payments, Bonn “funded about a third of the total investment in Israel’s electrical system… and nearly half the total investment in [Israel’s] railways, [consisting of] diesel engines, cars, tracks, and signaling equipment [along with] equipment for [agriculture, construction, expanding the country’s] water supply, for oil drilling, and for operating the [country’s] copper mines.”[23]
Based on the examples of national corporate and government contributions to Holocaust reparations funds, it is not impractical, nor unfeasible for the governments and corporations of the United States, United Kingdom and other European states that benefited from slavery to make payments to slavery reparations funds. When the United States is considered, many of the named firms that have directly and/or indirectly benefited from slavery have sufficient assets and annual profits while the national government has millions of acres of federal land and holdings to utilize for slavery reparations.
Furthermore, the federal government could add a line underneath the “Presidential Election Campaign” section that reads “Slavery and Civil Rights Reparations – Check here if you, or your spouse if filing jointly, want $3 to go to this fund” on every federal tax return while states, especially those in the south that benefited the most from the slave trade and labor, most of which already have contribution lines for causes ranging from breast cancer research to wildlife, could also add such a line.
In conclusion, the African American community and advocates for justice must stand united and demand slavery reparations as stridently as the Jewish community and advocates for justice have for Holocaust compensation. Both abominations require reparations and redress since they share great similarities – morally repugnant brutal treatment and forced labor considered legal in their respective times under ruling governments that perpetrated and encouraged them, and each has cost millions of lives. As the BBC states in “The long fight for Holocaust compensation” reparations are “particularly pertinent for a generation that has little direct memory of the Holocaust [since these financial payments are] akin to acknowledging the horrors of the past and the responsibility of the present generation for ensuring that it does not happen again” such payments are equally applicable for the past practice of slavery.
In the accurate and eloquent words of Kimberley Jane Wilson, “American slavery was a sin… The principles of liberty, justice and equality didn’t apply to the millions of Africans brought to America against their will. Our history is full of racial ironies. When Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) wrote, ‘All men are created equal,’ he owned 187 slaves. Patrick Henry (1736-1799) owned over 90 slaves when he shouted the famous words, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ Union General Ulysses S. Grant (1822-1885) fought the Confederacy, but didn’t free his own slaves until Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Even after slavery ended, America – the beacon of freedom to people all over the world – still treated black Americans with indignity and, on occasion, savage cruelty.”[24]
Accordingly the long wait and many denials must end so that accruing damages can be mitigated and healing can begin. Slavery reparations must be made as soon as possible to establish greater unity with improved standards of life for all, including African Americans. Only then can racism, even if predominantly de facto in nature, be extinguished for once and for all.
__________
[1] William Sutherland. The Unspoken Holocaust. The International Who’s Who In Poetry. (The International Library of Poetry. Owings Mills, MD 2004) 3.
[2] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery
[3] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery
[4] William Reed. Blacks worth $6k; whites $88k. Insight News. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://www.insightnews.com/business.asp?mode=display&articleID=2617
[5] Making Amends: Debate Continues Over Reparations for U.S. Slavery. NPR. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/racism/010827.reparations.html
[6] William Reed. Blacks worth $6k; whites $88k. Insight News. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://www.insightnews.com/business.asp?mode=display&articleID=2617
[7] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery
[8] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery
[9] William Reed. Blacks worth $6k; whites $88k. Insight News. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://www.insightnews.com/business.asp?mode=display&articleID=2617
[10] Anthony J. Sebok. Should Claims Based On African-American Slavery Be Litigated In The Courts? And If So, How? FindLaw. 4 December 2000. 16 September 2006. http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/sebok/20001204.html
[11] Reparations for slavery. Wikipedia. 4 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery
[12] Would Reparations for Slavery be Just? The Claremont Institute. 5 May 2002. 12 September 2006. http://www.claremont.org/writings/020505erler.html
[13] Even if Millions Rally on the Mall, Reparations Won’t Heal Black America. Project 21 Press Release. 15 August 2002. 12 September 2006. http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparations802.html
[14] Civil Rights: Should Black Americans Receive Reparations Payments Because of Slavery? The National Center For Public Policy Research. 23 August 2004. 12 September 2006. http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparations802.html
[15] Even if Millions Rally on the Mall, Reparations Won’t Heal Black America. Project 21 Press Release. 15 August 2002. 12 September 2006. http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparations802.html
[16] Peter Viles. Suit seeks billions in slave reparations. CNN.com. 27 March 2002. 16 September 2006. http://archives.cnn.com/2002/LAW/03/26/slavery.reparations
[17] World: Europe Nazi slave offer ‘disgusting.’ BBC News. 7 October 1999. 12 September 2006. http://nws.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/468248.stm
[18] Civil Rights: Should Black Americans Receive Reparations Payments Because of Slavery? The National Center For Public Policy Research. 23 August 2004. 12 September 2006. http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparations802.html
[19] Anthony J. Sebok. Should Claims Based On African-American Slavery Be Litigated In The Courts? And If So, How? FindLaw. 4 December 2000. 16 September 2006. http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/sebok/20001204.html
[20] Making Amends: Debate Continues Over Reparations for U.S. Slavery. NPR. 12 September 2006. 16 September 2006. http://www.npr.org/programs/specials/racism/010827.reparations.html
[21] Civil Rights: Should Black Americans Receive Reparations Payments Because of Slavery? The National Center For Public Policy Research. 23 August 2004. 12 September 2006. http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21PRReparations802.html
[22] The long fight for Holocaust compensation. BBC News. 26 January 2000. 12 September 2006. http://nws.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/619896.stm
[23] Norman G. Finkelstein. Lessons of Holocaust Compensation. 2001. 12 September 2006. http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=4&ar=14
[24] Kimberley Jane Wilson. Reparations, Anyone? Project 21 New Visions Commentary. August 2001. 12 September 2006. http://www.nationalcenter.org/P21NVWilsonReparations801.html
Posted on Monday, November 24, 2008, 12:00AMHow did we get into the current financial mess? Great question.
Turmoil in the Making
In 1910, seven men held a secret meeting on Jekyll Island off the coast of Georgia. It’s estimated that those seven men represented one-sixth of the world’s wealth. Six were Americans representing J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and the U.S. government. One was a European representing the Rothschilds and Warburgs.
In 1913, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank was created as a direct result of that secret meeting. Interestingly, the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank isn’t federal, there are no reserves, and it’s not a bank. Those seven men, some American and some European, created this new entity, commonly referred to as the Fed, to take control of the banking system and the money supply of the United States.
In 1944, a meeting in Bretton Woods, N.H., led to the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. While the stated purposes for the two new organizations initially sounded admirable, the IMF and the World Bank were created to do to the world what the Federal Reserve Bank does to the United States.
In 1971, President Richard Nixon signed an executive order declaring that the United States no longer had to redeem its paper dollars for gold. With that, the first phase of the takeover of the world banking system and money supply was complete.
In 2008, the world is in economic turmoil. The rich are getting richer, but most people are becoming poorer. Much of this turmoil is directly related to those meetings that took place decades ago. In other words, much of this turmoil is by design.
Power and Domination
Some people say these events are part of a grand conspiracy, and that might well be. Some people say they represent the struggle between capitalists, communists and socialists, and that might be, too.
I personally don’t participate in the debate over a possible global conspiracy; it’s a waste of time. To me, the wider struggle is for power and domination. And while this struggle has done a lot of good — and a lot of bad — I just want to know how to avoid becoming its victim. I see no reason to be a mouse trying to stop a herd of elephants from fighting.
Currently, many people are suffering due to high oil price, the slowdown in the economy, loss of jobs, declines in home values, increased bankruptcies and businesses closings, savings being wiped out, the plummeting stock market, and rising inflation. These realities are all direct results of this financial power struggle, and millions of people are its victims today.
An Extreme Example
I was in South Africa in July of this year. During my television and radio interviews there, I was often asked my opinion on the world economy. Speaking bluntly, I said that South Africans had a better opportunity of comprehending the global turmoil because they’re neighbors to Zimbabwe, a country run by Robert Mugabe.
In my interviews, I said, “What Mugabe has done to Zimbabwe, the Federal Reserve Bank and the IMF are doing to the world.” Obviously, my statements disturbed many of the journalists. I did my best to comfort them and assure them I was not an anarchist. I explained, as best I could, that Zimbabwe was an extreme example of an out of control power struggle.
After they were assured I was only using Zimbabwe to illustrate my point, I said, “If you want to understand the world economy, take a refugee from Zimbabwe to lunch.” I advised them to ask the refugee these questions:
1. How fast did the economy turn?
2. When did you know that you were in financial trouble?
3. When did you finally decide to leave Zimbabwe?
4. If you could do things differently, what would you have done?
Three Approaches to a Crumbling Economy
I spoke to three young couples from Zimbabwe while I was in South Africa. Two couples were recent refugees now living in South Africa, and one couple still lives in Zimbabwe. All three couples had interesting stories to tell.
One couple said that they would have quit their jobs earlier. Instead, they hung on, hoping the economy would change. Then, virtually overnight, the value of the Zimbabwean dollar dropped and inflation went through the roof. Even though they received pay raises, the couple couldn’t survive and soon depleted their savings. They left Zimbabwe by car with almost nothing. If they could’ve done something differently, they told me, they would have started a business in Zimbabwe and began exporting products to South Africa, so that they would have had South African currency and a bank account there before they fled.
The second couple that fled the country said they saved money and paid off their house and other debts even as the Zimbabwean dollar fell in value. Looking back, they say they would’ve saved nothing and gotten deeply in debt in Zimbabwe, allowing them to pay off their debt with the cheaper dollars. Instead, they fled after they lost their jobs, leaving behind their house and owning $200,000 in nearly worthless Zimbabwean dollars.
The third couple still lives in Zimbabwe. When they saw the writing on the wall, they set up a business in South Africa and, with the profits, began acquiring tangible assets in Zimbabwe. Often, they’ll buy an asset in Zimbabwe and pay the seller in South African currency. They believe that once Mugabe is gone and order is restored, they’ll be in a strong financial position.
Many Problems, Few Solutions
There are three major problems with the events of 1913, 1944, and 1971. The first is that the Fed, the World Bank, and the IMF are allowed to create money out of nothing. This is the primary cause of global inflation. Global inflation devalues our work and our savings by raising the prices of necessities.
For example, when gas prices soared, many people said that the price of oil was going up. In reality, the main cause of the high price of oil is the decreasing value of the dollar. The Fed, the World Bank, and the IMF, like Zimbabwe, are mass-producing funny money, thereby increasing prices and devaluing our quality of life.
The second problem is that our economic crises are getting bigger. In the 1970s, the Fed faced and solved million-dollar crises. In the 1980s, it was billion-dollar crises. Today, we have trillion-dollar crises. Unfortunately, these bigger crises mean more funny money entering the system.
Apocalypse Soon
The third problem is that in 1913, the Fed only protected the large commercial banks such as Bank of America. After 1944, the Fed, the World Bank, and the IMF began bailing out Third World nations such as Tanzania and Mexico. Then, in 2008, the Fed began bailing out investment banks such as Bear Sterns, and its role in the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac debacle is well known. By 2020, the biggest of bailout of all will probably occur: Social Security and Medicare, which will cost at least a $100 trillion.
Even if we find more oil and produce more food, prices will continue to rise because the value of the dollar will continue to decline. The dollar has lost over 90 percent of its value since the Fed was created. The U.S. dollar will continue to decline because of those seven men on Jekyll Island in 1910.
Granted, the funny-money system has done a lot of good — it has improved the world and made a lot of people rich. But it’s also done a lot of bad. I believe somewhere between today and 2020, the system will break. We’re on the eve of financial destruction, and that’s why it’s in gold I trust. I’d rather be a victor than a victim.
Today I purchased my ticket for my European Adventure. I will be leaving from Vancouver Airport on June 2 travelling to London Gatwick. London will be my jump off point to various countries in Europe. I haven’t fully nailed down the exact countries that I will be visiting but roughly I’d like to visit Amsterdam, parts of Germany, Prague (Czechloslovakia), Paris, Rome, Sardinia (beautiful island off the coast of Italy), Athens (Greece), and end the trip in Egypt to see the great Pyramids. I will be going it alone and staying in hostels for the most part and I’m sure I will meet lots of interesting people along the way. I’m going to create a travel blog to detail all my adventures complete with stories, pictures, videos, etc. I’ve already purchased a couple of domains for the website but have yet to decide which one I want to use. It’s a toss up between www.pogsquest.com or www.blackamericanineurope.com. This trip will be a good opportunity for me to reflect on my ultimate purpose in life and what direction I see myself headed in. Travel has always been my passion. We shall see. I will keep everyone that follows this blog updated as I get into later stages of the planning.
Today was another horrible day on the stock market. As of now I have lost $2,614.74 of my portfolio. My 401K has lost 35% since the beginning of the year. The money that I had been counting on to grow and help to fund my world travels and investments is quickly decimating. All this leads me to ask myself “Should I Just Take My Losses?” To be perfectly honest, I’ve thought about it greatly over the last week. But every time I think about throwing in my chips and cutting my losses, my stronger side slaps me in the face and says HELL NO. We got ourselves into this mess and we need to wait it until until either A) we can get out and a comfortable loss B) We break even or C) We take some sort of profit. There are a lot of people out there panicking right now. I don’t need to see them physically but I can feel them with every negative percentage in the market. Well, people I’m here to tell that a loss is not realized until you sell! So stick with it, turn off the TV, turn off your computers and wait this storm out. It’s really not as bad as it seems. And if you know what I know, this whole financial crisis was planned and calculated from the beginning to create panic. Panic will drive down the stock market to record lows so that the financial vultures can come in and get unbelievable deals. Not only that, but panic wins elections. Think about it.
Today T-Mobile introduced it’s new G1 phone based off of the new Google android software and I must say that it looks pretty slick. I’ve already pre-ordered mine and it should arrive on Oct. 22. I truly hope that it’s all that it has been hyped up to be. For more information about this phone you can point your browser here:
http://www.t-mobileg1.com/
