Acknowledgements

Although my backround in IT and the computer industry may be irrelevant, it would be remiss of me not to mention the principle writers who helped me form my views, or whose views I completely co-opted.

Adam Smith , Alexis De Tocqueville and Thomas Wolfe notwithstanding, most of these are ongoing influences: authors that I found on the web, since the world of TV “journalism”, and newspapers in general have completely abandoned the serious topics necessary to remain informed about the world. Some of these, my personal Rock Stars, I will list here, starting with the man who had the most influence in opening my eyes to the true nature and scale of the calamity the American public was being led into in order to enrich the upper class to such an extent that the ensuing Gotterdammerung was totally predictable.

That particular gentleman was Doug Noland, a scribe for David Tice’s Prudentbear.com. With charts of not only the growth of MBS, federal deficits, cad’s, and other debt instruments, he projected their unsustainable growth paths way back in 2003 or so when I started reading him to the present time…charts that could only send chills down the spine of anyone interested in where the policies of the feckless Bushies and their chicaneries were taking us.
And to get to his post, it took about a year of following my nose, disregarding the harlots who echoed the same garbage spouted during the dot.com boom, such as Jim Cramer, that people, inexplicably, still hearkened to…how could this be? How could an entire country, in fact the entire globe, still heed the blandishments of the very coterie of little foxes that brought us the dotcom debacle and the Enron “scandal”? (Of course, the fact that a “news” organization could actually call itself Fox (in the henhouse) News and actually be taken seriously, should have been a clue right there).

So to get to Doug Noland, I first had to go through that stalwart band of dedicated gold aficionados such as James Turk, referred to as “goldbugs”, who rue the day we went off the gold standard and believe the barbaric relic to still have relevance as a basis for monetary value. Their theories took me to Anatole Fekete and his Gold University, Adrian Ash from Goldbullion.com, and Richard Daughty of Mogambo Guru fame from Safehaven .com and ATOL, the best online newspaper (Asia Times online) for opinions outside the American purview, including not only Henry C.K. Liu and the above-mentioned Doug Noland, but Gareth Porter, Julian Delasantellis, Jack Crooks (since left), Chan Akya, Tom’s dispatch , Micheal Klare, even Spengler, a nasty piece of work, and Martin Hutchinson, for a sprinkling of the dark side.

Mike Ruppert’s “fromthewilderness (is Stan Goff still out there?) also had excellent coverage of events the mainstream press didn’t cover, and Stephen Roach of Morgan Stanley looked at the world from a doubting Thomas perspective until going over to the rose-colored glasses crowd just as his more nuanced view of the state of the world was about to be vindicated.

Which brings me to my current faves which includes Naked Capitalism, Nouriel Roubini, IRA, and Mish's (Mike Shedlock) Global Economic Analysis. I first read Mish in a Newsletter called Whiskey and Gunpowder, and his prognostications were so dire, yet undeniably based in fact, as opposed to the fantasy-delusion on the mainstream press, that, together with Peter Schiff's more famous, as they are on video tape, predictions, were like Emma Thompson's in Harry Potter, bone-chillingly accurate.

I know this is all choppy, but I don’t want to forget anyone, and yet know I must, as I‘ve gone through numerous computers on whose drives are still articles and stories I deemed cogent enough for saving, yet that now sit in magnetic limbo, saved but inaccessible , but I plow on and that’s one of the reasons for this, at least now as the computers bite the dust, perhaps the data and the chronicling of the Demise of American Capitalism, indeed of the very USSA, in my humble opinion, can be perused.

To paraphrase Pogo, We've not seen the enemy, because it is US. The longer we retain our self-inflicted, triumphalism-inspired, PNAC-documented, blindness, the more apparent it will become that the USSA will suffer the same consequences of its fatal hubris that the USSR did, and dissolution becomes the only solution.