foreverfan

Glen Beck was going to expose this and he was told to shut up.

Did you watch the whole thing?

CashAndFlash

I got to about 35:00 in FF... I honestly don't remember "learning" anything that I don't know... just Jesse Ventura standing over guys who weren't as tall as him and playing "gotcha"... which is effective for ratings, I guess, but as a rhetorical method not all that convincing...


I'll try to watch the rest... really... I grew up on 1984, Brave New World, (cat's cradle though it doesn't really apply), all that stuff...


and just in case you want to get scared about the young uns taking over and turning the US into a police state... I'll go ahead and impeach myself and say that sometimes I get a comforting "Big Brother" vibe from watching Obama's telecasts... it's theater to me.

but if you could point out what, at least in the first 35 minutes, you found so troubling, I'll try to address it... I've seen Ventura on Tv before... he just loses it when somebody fails to address him with the "respect he deserves"... all I saw was the same thing here... him telling cops in Texas that he was "Governor Jesse Ventura"... BS...you want to play that card, go do inspirational speeches or something, don't run around the country because "this could be your daughter" thinks the CIA is after her....


I actually knew a guy like that when I lived in Houston... claimed that the FBI was after him... that he'd found out from friends still living in Chicago where he was from... but he also wanted me to write a letter to a senator (he specified that he wanted him to be Democratic) to get castration legal so he could reverse his sin... .Sin of Ur or something, from the bible... believed that "God and Satan had formed a fusion event" over him for something or other... I'm only bringing this up because I have a feeling that Jesse Ventura either goes home and gets ****faced so he can bring
himself to do this show again, or rambles on endlessly like that guy.


You stated elsewhere on a thread that "everybody needs to be brought down a notch" at least once in their lives... I think Jesse Ventura is about 3 notches above the looney line.

foreverfan

Things are so much different now. Our economy is on the brink of disaster as the government prints money without nothing to back it up. The Chinese and Saudi's could stop lending us money at any time. Although this is unlikely in the short term it is very likely in the long term as we continue to devaluate our currency.

So what happens to society when the Chinese say "We no lend you anymore money"? Ask Beck that.

CashAndFlash

I'm not just trying to be argumentative... promise... but videos like that are why Glenn Beck is widely ridiculed...

he is basically saying we had MUCH less than 500 billion dollars in paper money before the 1960s... if I understand the video correctly... and that then we just started printing it like crazy? what's his source? And if he is saying that we literally just printed 5 trillion dollars... which I believe is his final assertion... where the hell is it? Is he really saying that we are trying to pay off our debts with literal paper money? (see my last paragraph before you react to this)


Let's say his 1960 figure was 100 billion dollars... there were 190 million people in the US at that time. That means that for every person, there were 526 paper dollars. If he is correct that there are 5 trillion in circulation today- again, the video never made it clear what he was actually talking about... then that's $16,000 dollars per person.

I know the whole theory of the gold standard and all... but there is no such thing anymore. Every nation in the world relies on a fiat currency today.

I don't believe that the US has had a zero deficit for some time now, definitely not in any of our lifetimes...I'm pretty sure that the last time we had zero debt was after WWI, and then it ballooned during WWII and went down, only to shoot back up during the Cold War with a final spike under Reagan....

Seriously, I understand the point of Beck's rhetoric. I grew up in a very Republican household and went to Jesuit, where 82% of people (myself included) voted Bush in a 2000 mock election. But the more I look at the numbers being presented by the right, the more fudging I see... it's an easy sell... "don't borrow more than you can pay".... but the intricacies of International Finance are much, much more complex than that...this whole country was built on debt that took years to pay off. Debt is what drives private industry; without it, there are no capital improvements, no new companies, etc.


Do I realize that we may be coming to a point where we have to devalue our currency in order to pay off our debts? Yes. But I still think Beck et al's rhetoric is bombastic and does a disservice to the people who he's trying to persuade. That's my issue with the Tea party, the palin lovers... all those people. We already tried the "aw, shucks" schtick with Bush, and not only did the economy grow less than it did under Clinton, the Census... just released today... showed that it was the second-slowest decade of growth since 1910. To me, it's the equivalent of saying "just put some oil in it" when you're dealing with a computer.

CashAndFlash

Ok I just tried to watch it again... the "residential center" he visits... where is that? I can't make out the name, and everything I type into Google just comes back to Ventura.