Can the largest debtor nation in the history of mankind remain immune from the type of austerity measures imposed on less prominent borrowers by the International Monetary Fund (IMF)?  Americans will learn the answer to this question before the year is out.

On February 18th, President Obama made good on his 2010 State of the Union speech pledge to create by executive order a “National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.” The Commission is required to present its recommendations for improving the solvency of the United States government by “no later than December 1, 2010.”

That is a drop dead date worth noting.  If what the commission is plotting is not exposed and blocked, Americans and residents of the United States who have not taken financial counter measures before that date could suffer the full consequences of the work-out plan being concocted to allow the federal government “to balance the budget, excluding interest payments on the debt, by 2015.”

All options on the table

In a giddy interview with the federal government's official propaganda organ on the day of the commission's creation, co-chairmen of the commission, former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskin Bowles and former Senator Alan Simpson (R-WY), spoke frankly.  Responding to the first question of whether the retirement age would be increased for social security benefits, Bowles was blunt, “Everything is on the table.”

Simpson was equally dramatic in addressing the naysayers who suggest his task is a suicide mission, “There are a lot of bitchers and whiners and snorters out there and we intend to listen to them all and then crush them.” As the three participants in the staged interview chuckled, Simpson clarified himself, “I didn't mean that. Must have been a sick thing...”

A better admission of the kind of mind entrusted with resolving our looming  sovereign debt default is hard to find.  Yet, Simpson attempted to out do himself just a few days later in an interview with Alan Hunt on Bloomberg News.  Cutting off Hunt who offered that, “Voters would have some sense of the panel’s proposals before the November midterm elections...” Simpson interjected,  “We don’t dare put out a report before Election Day or it’ll be total cremation and we’ll have to move to the top of Mount Somewhere -- Erskine and I -- somewhere living up there like hermits.”   

Translation: The arrogant plotters behind this commission have no intention of allowing Americans to know where their representatives stand on the pending austerity measures before they go to the polls.  But, as the executive order also dissolves the commission thirty days after it delivers its recommendations, there is a clear intent to have a vote on the pending austerity measures occur during a lame duck session of Congress.  This possibility is substantiated by the fact that the original bill in the Senate (S. 2853), which this commission is patterned off of, called for the recommendations to be made no earlier than November 3rd (the day after election day) and that a vote on them would be taken no later than December 23rd.

Though a commission formed by a presidential executive order cannot legally force Congress to vote on its recommendations, Mr. Simpson may have been reminiscing over the do as we say or else crime boss tactics used to force Congress to approve the TARP bill and AIG bailout less than 18 months ago.  As the Homeland Security Act also demonstrated, a real or imagined crisis can be used to force Congress to act legislatively on recommendations coming out of the executive branch.

Getting down to business, here is the short list of austerity measures co-chairmen Simpson and Bolwes and their backers expect to have on their table:

• Extend the retirement age for social security benefits.
• Cut Medicaid and Medicare services and reimbursements.
• Institute a valued added tax (VAT) - a national tax applied to every economic transaction in the country.
• Require all wage earners to deposit a minimum of 2% of their pay into mandatory savings accounts. (slide 27)
• Require a percentage of the funds in IRA's, 401K and new mandatory savings accounts to be held in US Treasuries.  (As the smart money bails on US Treasury auctions, Americans will be forced to buy their own toxic debt.)

There is nothing in this list that hasn't been required of hapless marks in other countries that have found themselves on the hook to the credit syndicates running the IMF and The Bank of International Settlements (BIS).  The syndicates already own the U.S. Senate.  It is not a stretch to imagine that they are working on their end game — the takeover of the rest of our country that they don't already control.

If you're not at the table, you're on the table

But, it doesn't have to be this way.   Americans who value their independence need to start organizing now to come up with a competing action plan.  We need to be sitting at our own table with our own list of options.  Here are the first two suggestions for our list:

• Rather than creating a commission to plot what IMF styled austerity measures Americans are going to be shaken down for, we should demand investigations and trials for the many racketeers who have been operating with impunity within our financial system. (The only reason these people are not already in jail is that they make the laws.) Those convicted, and the organizations they operate out of, should face asset forfeitures of their racketeering gains.  These could be put towards paying down the morally legitimate portions of our national debt.
• All current members of Congress should be required to sign a legally binding pledge refusing to vote on any recommendations for fiscal reform during this year's lame duck session.  The many needed fixes for our budget crisis need to be debated in the open during a regular session of Congress.

It's time to turn the tables on the accomplices aiding and abetting those who seek to extinguish our freedoms.  It won't be easy.  But, the alternative is worth avoiding with all of our strength.

Sidebar: It's not coincidental that one of the co-chairs of the commission, Erskin Bowles comes from an investment banking family in the state that is home to the country's second largest banking center. Bowles, who recently announced he is stepping down from his sinecure position as the president of the University of North Carolina, also sits on the board of directors of Morgan Stanley.  The commission's connections to the same banking syndicate insiders that have fed off our central government since at least 1913, does not end with Bowles.  Read More...