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The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

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Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. Recovered crackpot here. You're stuck on a few ideas, routinely propagated by people overwhelmed by the complexity of the interface between global economics and politics, and made attractive by their apparent simplicity, that I have previously considered, and already thought myself out of. The Fed: The Fed is a pseudo-governmental organization, like the Postal Service or the Federal National Mortgage Association…

> And lending additional money into existence based on fractional reserves of currency is counterfeiting-by-the-law. It's a similiar unethical con to "naked short-selling". Are you referring to debt monetization, QE, something else? I'm unsure if you're referring to something the Fed prevents or actively practices. QE helps to heat up a faltering economy, at the expense of contributing to income inequality.

I mean nothing more than increasing the de facto money supply by lending multiple times against the same reserves. The reserve requirement is a multiplier for whatever new money the Fed decides to issue. But banks don't have to lend all the way up to their maximum, so printing new notes into a fractional reserve regime is actually kind of a mushy and inaccurate way to increase the money supply.

Quantitative easing smells like Keynesian claptrap to me, but I'm not an economist, and it might be one of those things that works if it's needlessly complicated, only because if it were simple, the markets would immediately adjust to it such that it would have no real effect. I have a sneaking suspicion that QE is what happens when you don't have enough value-backed money left in the economy to pay the interest on all the debt-backed money, and all rational actors stop borrowing. So the answer is to create dummy debt and let people use it as the backing for the money used to pay the interest on their real debt? I don't know. That science is too dismal for me.

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#82

I suspect for most of this, they were just trying to be funny or weird rather than intending this symbolism/meaning to come across to the audience. One of my economics textbooks contained an explanation of the theory that the yellow brick road was a reference to monetary policy (gold standard), but that theory seems to have been heavily challenged (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...…

Perhaps we had the same textbook, because that's also where I heard that from. Krugman and Obstfeld, International Economics?

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#83

I suspect for most of this, they were just trying to be funny or weird rather than intending this symbolism/meaning to come across to the audience. One of my economics textbooks contained an explanation of the theory that the yellow brick road was a reference to monetary policy (gold standard), but that theory seems to have been heavily challenged (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...…

Perhaps we had the same textbook, because that's also where I heard that from. Krugman and Obstfeld, International Economics?

I read that interpretation via Krugman as well.

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#85

I suspect for most of this, they were just trying to be funny or weird rather than intending this symbolism/meaning to come across to the audience. One of my economics textbooks contained an explanation of the theory that the yellow brick road was a reference to monetary policy (gold standard), but that theory seems to have been heavily challenged (See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_interpretations_of_T...…

Perhaps we had the same textbook, because that's also where I heard that from. Krugman and Obstfeld, International Economics?

You're probably right. I've forgotten at this point, even thought I apparently remember the content.

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How far we've drifted as a nation. People then seemed to realize the danger of fiat money, yet The Federal Reserve Act was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson on December 23, 1913, when most lawmakers had already left the Capital for their home states -- and it passed on a simple majority of those present vote. The Federal Reserve (a cabal of international banks that is not part of the…

> President John F. Kennedy voiced support for returning America to the Gold Standard. He was assassinated soon after. He also voiced a million other things that you might as well pin his assassination on, if you're so willing to jump to conclusions.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-EBGYF8XLQ

Note the odds calculation is slightly wrong due to a rounding error.

I checked the dates and locations (3,4,5 are unchecked and not included in the calc in the vid. I have the book... somewhere) http://dpaste.com/048G3AZ.txt

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to second this. While overshadowed by the first, all of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum are excellent reads full of imagination and compelling characters.

Not to mention amazing illustrations.

Jack Snow was an absolutely brilliant illustrator -- he did every book after the first one, for a very, very long time. After L Frank Baum wrote the original 14, a few other authors picked up the mantle (Ruth Plumbly Thompson being the most prolific by far) and Jack Snow did all of those, until he authored a few books himself.

Sadly, none of the other authors quite captured the surrealism, magic, and originality of the original 14, but many of them were still fun to read.

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#89
A detail of history connected to The Wizard of Oz that I particularly like, is that when the US Navy heard about 'Friends of Dorothy', they set up an investigation to try and catch Dorothy, to find out what she knew about gays in the military. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friend_of_Dorothy#Military_inv...

Re: The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz

#90
post #17

How does all of this connect with The Dark Side Of The Moon?

Clearly the album was written while watching the movie. Music was carefully timed to sync with a 32 year old movie. The movie ran on network television in the US only once per year back then. Maybe in Great Britain it was aired more often? Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to practice very often.
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