He just had a bold plan - with no exit strategy.

Sound familiar? ;)

...heck is going on in the letters section? Invasion of the Troll People? I wouldn't call this Ruben Bolling's best cartoon ever (that's an awfully high standard), but I don't see what it is about this one in particular that has brought every snarky freeper crawling out from under their rocks.

Just sayin'.

BTW, welcome back bebop-o!

And their families. Fellow liberals, clap on your coveralls and march with me to liquidate the counterrevolutionaries.

People being proud of their nation show that they like to piggy-back their ego on the achievements of others. So, people feeling proud of their nation and indignant of puns at the expenses of it, most of the time end up embarassing themselves and their country (for examples, check the nazi Germans, Moslems rioting over Danish cartoons, or any other nationalistic or fundamentalist group that did/does not tollerate humor at the expenses of sacred or national symbols).

That being said, I guess the pun in this cartoon is a bit misdirected, because the founding fathers were looking East, not West when they started the revolution.

And BTW. the pyramid with the eye is there because they were Masons, not Ponzis.

When I was a junior commerce major at Rice University in the 70s, I turned in a term paper that explained treasury notes in the same manner that Tom Tomorrow has. In fact, by the late 60s and early 70s the U.S. was so desperate to cover the interest payments on the previous issues, the military was all but forcing its members to purchase savings bonds on payday.

But thank g-d for monetary inflation. Since WW-II, when the dollar became the standard for exchange rates of international currencies, we learned we could manipulate inflation rates to out-pace the interest on the foreign debt so as to pay off outstanding notes with dollars of less value.

The paper made my conservative business professor so angry he gave me a scorching red "F" that almost tore through the page and called me a communist in his remarks under the grade.

Awwwwh, those were the days. And I had never even met Abby Hoffman.

...for quite some time, but hadn't believed it until now, when after two decades of active laissez-faire (passive?) leadership by "The Maestro" Greenspan the global economy (and the US economy in particular) goes down the toilet while the big banks raid the US treasury...

I had been hearing about the noxious nature of the Fed (as nothing but a facade for an international banking consortium led by the usual suspects: Rothschilds, Rockefellers, etc) for quite some time now, but not until now when after two decades of active laissez-faire (passive?) leadership by "The Maestro" Greenspan the global economy (and the US economy in particular) goes down the toilet. I wonder what would happen if the dollar collapses and the Chinese realize they have been left holding the bag. Time for a nice trans-Pacific war perhaps?

Of course, this is a moot point because the aliens will arrive in 2012 and eat everyone anyway, so why worry?

The Revolution occurred to get out from under a pyramid scheme, namely the international bankers and their control of currency and its value. It was the central point of the Revolution.

When Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act in 1913, he basically handed the country back to the people the founding fathers took it from in the first place. The United States doesn't generate its own money, it borrows it from the Federal Reserve--at interest.

Everybody knows that a person can't have no source of income and live off of credit cards, using them to pay each other off, because the interest will always be above whatever principal is borrowed. For some reason though, everybody also seems to think that for the country to do this is perfectly reasonable and sound.

The Federal Reserve is a private corporation that is comprised a a consortium of banks. Citigroup is among the largest of these, which means that in the recent bailout of Citigroup, the United States is essentially borrowing the money to bail them out from Citigroup themselves, in part. Neat, huh? And we get to pay them interest to boot. Bonus!

For the record, that Pyramid many of you have commented on that is on our bills appeared about the time the Fed took over our money.

Why would anybody agree to enlist in such a silly and unsustainable system? To prevent market instability, inflation, and depressions/recessions. Looking at the history of the market from 1913 to present, as well as the loss of over 90% of the value of the dollar since 1913, I'd have to say that the Federal Reserve qualifies as the biggest financial scam of all time, hands down. Madoff is a two bit street grifter, by comparison.

How I read your response: SS is not a Ponzi scheme because it was never intended to be an investment. It was supposed to be a straightforward handout to those in need. Only now with the rebranding of SS into an investment it turned into... a Ponzi scheme.

The taliban is writing for Salon now. Good to know. It's good that in these troubled times, Salon is free to express who it's really felt all along.

Viva la Revolution Comradz.

Lonewolfy- actually, Social Security is NOT a Ponzi scheme because it was never intended to be an investment. It was intended to be a safety net for those members of our community who were either retired or impaired to where they could not work. When it was created, it wasn't sold to the country as "Save for your retirement" but as "We, as Americans, have a duty to help all other Americans stay afloat." It's only in the last few years that it was rebranded as the current generation investing in their own future, but that was never the stated intention.

Social Security is a system where the "old" investors (no pun intended) are paid off in retirement by "new" investors, i.e. young workers like me who pay S.S. taxes.

If the system can remain indefinitely solvent, then it would work.

But if S.S. goes bankrupt in the near future, then a 20-something like me who is paying taxes to support old retirees will never get to reap the benefits of being an "old" investor.

So, yeah: Social Security is in essence a pyramid scheme - and I hope the bottom doesn't fall out until I get old & die.