Ziad Abdelnour, Lebanese American author, trader and financier is President & CEO of Blackhawk Partners, Inc., a “private family office” that backs talented operating executives in growing their companies both organically and through acquisitions and trades physical commodities.

1. Is this Capitalism?
By Ziad K. Abdelnour on 13 Jun 2013
I believe there is nothing normal about what Ben Bernanke and the Federal government have done post
the 2008 crisis and continue to do today.
The Greenspan led Federal Reserve created two epic bubbles in the space of six years which burst and
have done irreparable harm to the net worth of the middle class. Rather than learn the lesson of how
much damage to the lives of average Americans has been caused by creating cheap easy money out of
thin air, our Ivy League self-proclaimed expert on the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke, has ramped up
the cheap easy money machine to hyper-speed. There is nothing normal about the path this man has
chosen. His strategy has revealed the true nature of the Federal Reserve and their purpose – to protect
and enrich the financial elites that manipulate this country for their own purposes.
Despite the mistruths spoken by Bernanke and his cadre of banker coconspirators, he can never reverse
what he has done. Frankly, I believe the country will not return to normalcy in our lifetimes. Bernanke is
conducting a mad experiment and we are the rats in his maze. His only hope is to retire before it blows
up in his face. Just as Greenspan inflated the housing bubble and exited stage left, Bernanke is inflating a
debt bubble, stock bubble, bond bubble and attempting to re-inflate the housing bubble just in time for
another Ivy League Keynesian academic, Janet Yellen, to step into the banker’s box. This genius thinks
Bernanke has been too tight with monetary policy. It seems inflated egos are common among Ivy
League economist central bankers who think they can pull levers and push buttons to control the
economy…. Insanity at its best.
The gradual slide towards our national bankruptcy of wealth, spirit, freedom, self-respect, morality,
personal responsibility, and common sense began in 1913 with the secretive creation of the Federal
Reserve and the imposition of a personal income tax. Pandora’s Box was opened in this fateful year and
the horrors of currency debasement and ever increasing taxation were thrust upon the American people
by a small but powerful cadre of unscrupulous financial elite and the corrupt politicians that do their
bidding in Washington D.C. The powerful men who thrust these evils upon our country set in motion a
chain of events and actions that will undoubtedly result in the fall of the great American Empire, just as
previous empires have fallen due to the corruption of its leaders and depravity of its people. Creating a
private central bank, controlled by the Wall Street cabal, and allowing the government to syphon the
earnings of workers through increased taxation has allowed politicians the ability to spend, borrow, and
print money at an ever increasing rate in order to get themselves re-elected and benefit the cronies,
hucksters and bankers that pay the biggest bribes. None of this benefit the average American, who sees
their purchasing power systematically inflated and taxed away. This is not capitalism and it is not a
coincidence that war and inflation have been the hallmarks of the last century.
When I critically scrutinize the economic, political, financial, and social landscape at this point in history,
I come to the inescapable conclusion that our country and world are headed into the abyss. This is most
certainly a minority viewpoint. The majority of people in this country are still oblivious to the disaster
that will arrive over the next decade. Poor souls. The unsustainability of our economic system built upon
assumptions of exponential growth, ever expanding debt, increasing consumer spending, unlimited
supplies of cheap easy to access oil, impossible to honor entitlement promises, and a dash of mass

2. delusion should be apparent to even the dullest of government public school educated drones
inhabiting this country.
It is sad to see that the citizens of this country have allowed those in control of the government and
media to convince them the situation confronting us is just a normal cyclical variation that will be
alleviated by tweaking existing economic policies and trusting that Ben Bernanke will pull the right
monetary levers to get us back on course. The stress inflicted on their brains in the last thirteen years of
bubbles and wars has clearly made the average person incapable of distinguishing between normality
and abnormality. What they need is a rude awakening and I am afraid they will get it sooner than later.
Frankly, you have to be really blind or just plain stupid to convince yourself that everything that has
happened since 1996 is normal. Every fact supports the reality that we’ve entered a period of extreme
abnormality and our response as a nation thus far has insured that a disaster of even far greater
magnitude is just over the horizon. Anyone with an ounce of common sense realizes the social mood is
deteriorating rapidly. We are in the midst of a Crisis period that will result in earth shattering change,
but the masses want things to go back to normal and don’t want to face the facts. The dissonance
created by reality versus their wishes will resolve itself when the next financial collapse makes 2008 look
like a walk in the park.
Sticking your head in the sand will not make reality go away. The existing social, political, and financial
order will be swept away. What it is replaced by is up to us. The choice is ours. What are you going to do
about it?