"History doesn't repeat itself. It merely rhymes" (Mark Twain)

Top of the morning gents,

I just got back from a slew of funerals. When you get to be my age, you'll appreciate George Burns' declaration that "the first thing I do every morning is read the obituaries, and if I don't see my name, I'll have breakfast." The worst thing us boomers can do to ourselves, our families and our generation is to run and hide like faggots and refuse to accept that we're nearing the end of our lives. We're born, we die. And in the middle, we do shit. "Just don't forget yer humping time" (Bill Pace 1985). Before you die, make a splash and do something you've always wanted to do, like rent a Norwegian super model. Me? I write stories about my friends I've met and worked with all over Alaska. That means you lot. Cops and a shit-load of pals I bump with over coffee and bong hits. Okay, some are really old men, and even more are dead, dying, buried or nuclear funeral pyre fallout. Some of these boys have shown me some serious ass bravery, on the job as policemen and bullet dumps in battle as soldiers and cannon fodder. Here in Hellblog, Alaska, it's perfectly acceptable to laugh at yer own funeral, but attending others always chokes yer shit up.

I feel obligated to bid farewell to another batch of pensioner dudes. Ancient crispy fossils I befriended here at the old folks' home that finally got fitted for wooden jackets, kicked the honey bucket, did the slip-knot hemp-rope gimp dance, did the dirt dive, got in line fer the all-you-can-eat worm buffet, tipped over their wheelchairs and crawled into a furnace. These old dudes were a bit older than the Vietnam Vets I buried at my previous residence in Sterling. In prior postings, I described my friends Steve, Ron and Richard drinking gourmet coffee, listening to old KOTZ broadcasts, taking apart rusty guns, repairing them and talking cars and boobs.

This new batch o' geezers consists of Jim, Will and George: older gents that sit in wheelchairs, wear their medals in public and wouldn't let me and bun sneak away without sharing tales of surviving village monkey Alaska. These old shrunken codgers demanded we tell them all about whaling in Barrow, shooting dogs and polar bears to bits, mud wrestling midgets in Kotzebue and swimming laps in the sewage lagoon.

We only had a few photos to share these old dudes, so I opened up my blog page with all the gutted whales, walrus and polar bears: just to blow their shit outa the water. They totally fucking dug 'em. Old Will was blinded by bun's million dollar smile and asked how he "could get me a beautiful native woman like her", whereupon she advised him that there weren't any more pretty, sober and rich Eskimo women, and she was the last of the dying breed. Beat that.

These old boys me and bun visited were born and lived during the Great Depression. The economic depression that mirrors some of the current economic data I've examined and scrutinized. Meaning now, 2022, you dumb asses. "History doesn't repeat itself, it merely rhymes" (Mark Twain). Their hard-luck stories living through the Depression impressed me, as told by Jim, Will and George: the causes and remedies and World War II. We agreed that hiding taxes inside devious schemes like inflationary spending and money printing were pert near criminal acts, as was borrowing trillions on the federal credit card by selling bonds and running up our national debt. My old dudes claimed we were in the same position as the 1930's economic collapse. To avoid an argument with old farts, I graciously agreed.

Mind you, my pretty wife is a highly trained banker, loan examiner and collateral asset auditor, so in our discussions with these old fossils we discussed the modern banking tools we have at our disposal to combat a failing economy. We also discussed the new post-depression 20th century banking regulations. We have a Treasury that's able to print unlimited currency, a Federal Reserve to set interest rates and set bank reserve ratios and Federal Depositor Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to guarantee our savings accounts.

George griped how Herbert Hoover took a drubbing for his numb-nut policies, got beat up in the presidential election and how shitty he handled the Depression. My old dudes pitched a bitch that Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal never cured shit and kept America hungry and broke for more than a decade. The Depression lasted from 1929 to 1941 and started easing when we entered World War II. War is good for manufacturing, training and ridding the world of dictators, monarchies and naked emperors. My gang of old farts claim this applies to our last half-dozen presidents. "It went to shit after Reagan" "He forced the Soviet Union into bankruptcy and turned their trillion dollar military into useless junk."

Similar to this century, the stock market set record highs during the 1920's and brought us the "roaring 20's." Bidding wars vastly over-inflated all asset class prices (stocks, bonds, commodities) and economic decisions are based on auction dynamics and inflation ballooned at the same pace as the stock market. Parallel to our Mortgage Bust of 2008 and not wanting to miss out on a red-hot sugar-high stock and commodity market, banks lowered lending requirements and lowered interest rates to hitch a ride on this kick-ass economy. Yup, dumb-ass banks loaned money out at a 10 to 1 ratio: loans against savings, leverage versus reserves, putting $10.00 at risk for every dollar you and I have in savings.

Now remember, a sugar-high economy, with a side-order of cocaine and bootleg booze, is full of amateur dopes that know nothing about buying low and selling high. They just wanted in. Millions of people dove head-first into the stock market just as it was cresting its highs, then rode the bitch all the way down. Hence, the diving boards upon the roofs of brokerage offices allowing over-leveraged, upside-down investors to perform swan dives directly into the pavement. Like the twin tower jumpers on 911, some impacts were louder than a shotgun blast.

Market makers are the agents responsible for the buying and selling all asset classes in auction-style markets. The pricing of stock shares, bonds (corporate and government debt paper), commodities like gold or silver, barrels of oil, or even slaves, are set by what's called the Bid/Ask spread: opening bids. Auctions are the buying and selling forum we use in trading houses, trading floors and open markets, so if slow delivery and shortage rumors are whispered across the trading floor, Ask prices go up and so do Bid prices.

Auctions have been around as long as prostitution and slavery: the oldest professions in the world. Wake up faggots, you all remember smoking hot babes with big boobs and sugar-cooter cow-licks worth more than money, cars and houses. We're all guilty of pitching our wives and children in the shitter and putting in bids (collateralizing our homes) on fine ass Norwegian pussy. If you close yer eyes and think back, you can still taste blond bush on yer upper lip. We're such pigs. Albeit, pigs with dicks, all the money in the world and a nose that's still the second-best seat in the house.

Okay, get yer mind off fine tasting high-dollar pussy, yer stuck in Ugly Alaska forever. A large number of cheap and easy loans that banks made were so investors could pay little or no interest, put these borrowed monies in the markets, reap the rewards and get rich. It's called leveraged positions or buying on the margin. Better known as "Borrow Buy, Borrow Die." Borrow money, invest in the stock market, then borrow against the gains. When you borrow against the capital gains profits in your rocket high stock market values, you never have to sell your stock and avoid paying capital gains taxes. Yup, all the profit, zero taxes, Unrealized gains, means zero taxes. It's the secret Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and Bill Gates do as a tax avoidance trick and pay less taxes than you do. Totally legal. If you never sell your stock, you never realize any gains and pay no taxes. But, you can borrow against them and these stock portfolios become collateral. Until the markets tank. Like right now.

Hot markets ramp up commodity prices, strain supply chains and eliminate excess inventory. Inflation exploded in the late 1920's and by 1929, the demands to purchase crops and mine ores and metals, far exceeded what farmers or miners could produce, creating tightness in the market. Or better known as shortages. Supply chains locked up, farms and mines were stripped bare and inflation went crazy. We had way too much money (saved and borrowed) chasing too few resources. America ran to the bank to take out their savings only to find banks under capitalized with insufficient cash reserves to honor these withdrawals. The banks were full of worthless IOU's collateralized with zeroed-out stock portfolios. "When the markets tanks, run fast and be first in line at your bank" (Joe Kernan CNBC).

The following year in 1933, the banks closed and locked up everybody's savings, even little kids like my buddies' paper route money, milk money and farm litter sales dollars. Litter meaning baby chicks, ducks, goats, piglets, calves, dogs and cats. State Fairs across America, like the Palmer Fair, were auction markets where farm kids with super-sized vegetables and super cute litters auctioned off their farm harvests fer big buxsh.

The death of any bank happens by making bad loans to people that don't pay them back. These bad loans are lent from our savings and between the interest we're paid for our savings and the interest the bank charges for these loans is their profit, life-blood and life-supply. In the 2008 Recession, banks across the country were making home loans to customers that were likely never going to pay back. Some stupid loans were NINJA loans (no income, no job or assets), NEG/AM loans (negative amortization loans) that had such low down payments and low monthly payments, that the unpaid balance grew over time and accelerated beyond the purchaser's ability to ever pay off that loan. Banks can loan out 10 dollars for every dollar they hold in savings accounts, called the reserve ratio, and when bad loans fail, the bank's losses are exponentially worse. They've just lost 10 dollars for every 1 dollar saved. I smell toasted nigger dicks.

Here in Alaska, we had a doozy of a depression. Ten years after completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and oil down the pipeline stabilized real cheap, we witnessed a shit-load of Alaskan banks go broke, close down and skip town. More than half of Alaska's banks fled south leaving thousands of properties foreclosed, repossessed, or abandoned to the respective city's they were located, forcing numerous cities to suck up the lost property taxes and cope with neglected, blighted, distressed properties. Roughly a decade after the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was completed, The Miners and Merchants Bank, Alaska National Bank of Fairbanks, United Bank of Alaska (UBA), and Alaska National Bank of the North all went bankrupt and closed. Numerous buildings in Fairbanks are still abandoned and boarded up and costing the city millions in lost taxes, neighborhood blight, and inevitably, demolition and scrabble removal.

When an economy is roaring, banks become really retarded and bad gamblers, and like fucking air-heads, take insufficient collateral to secure these non-performing, failing loans. Inventory Auditors and Auction Houses flew up to Anchorage, Barrow and Fairbanks to examine the stored collateral treasures, estimate their value, then following the Federal Reserve guidelines, auctioned off all these collateral assets and applied the monies toward these failed loans on properties like buildings, houses, trailers, lots and raw land.

Some folks put up artwork, jewelry, gold and silver and even deeds to properties around the state and the lower 48. All these items were valued, sold, matched to the respective unpaid loans, and the proceeds put towards the bad debt paper at the banks. Some folks even put up their Native Allotments (illegally) and the Regional Native Corporations repurchased them on the cheap and then deeded or sold them back to shareholders or utilized them for Native Corporations buildings, mines and housing.

Now dig this: a moment where natives were shrewd motherfuckers. All the big 13 native corporations bought up land deeds, homesteads and land claims that were near, bordering or inside native lands but were never native owned. By purchasing them, they became protected status native lands solely intended for traditional subsistence. 44 million acres of original ANCSA native land quickly grew in size after the Great Alaska Recession. Some native corporations built new headquarters on these repossessed properties in Fairbanks and Anchorage. Smart motherfuckers, sometimes native green-backs ain't green, they're brown. Eventually, all the savings accounts in Alaska's failed banks were honored (with interest) and the Federal Reserve picked the bones of the banks managers, bank investors, shareholders and boards of directors, clean.

Your savings accounts are guaranteed, but everybody else involved in the bank's corporate structure lost their asses. Dicks and balls, titties and snatches too. Some folks still have old stock certificates from these failed Alaskan banks: paper unworthy as pecker snot goobage butt-wipe toilet paper. Rudy Hecker's wife, Peggy, bought a pile of this bank stock paper, and she wiped Dean Westlake's herpie-ass penile-smegma with it.

Trooper Hecker, famous for stating, "I hate that asshole," was smart to divorce that bimbo, all her large-intestinal blisters and her junk bank stock certificates from Alaska National Bank of the North. And her Kiana colo-rectal fart-globs, rich in mongoloid quarter-monkey DNA. Poor shmuck, both Kathy Ward and Margaret Hanson will lecture us the riot act, "That asshole douche bag left me with an abortion and herpes." We should have funerals for tiny cookoo buttfuckers like Westlake, I laugh every time I hear ugly women piss and moan about him. Good fun.

The Great Depression of the 1930's was triggered when inflation wrecked purchasing power, backed up crop, ore and supply lines, then the commodities market rocketed upwards, then tanked, pulling the other markets into the shitter. The banks that loaned the money to investors gambling in these markets went broke, scaring customers with savings accounts and we witnessed a "run on the bank." No money coming from borrowers, no money for savings bank customers to withdraw, banks closed and zero monies were available. Shit storm perfecto. America was cleaned out. Cash is a medium of exchange. No cash, no exchange, so trade and barter emerged again like the fucking Stone Age and business was crippled slow to nearly a stand-still.

The full faith and credit in US currency evaporated. No money, no trade, no commerce: dead economy. No buying, no selling: eat crow. Or more accurately, serve yer kids cat and dog meat, trade and barter cows, pigs and horses until you got hungry, got evicted and became homeless. Depressions don't discriminate and even the blackest African American is still half-white, at the genetic level, every native in Alaska possesses mostly European DNA, so figure it out: that was us you nimrods. Imagine us all homeless, sleeping in the Sullivan Arena, picking and eating koomuks, butt camping like stink natives soaking day-old bread in kerosene. I remember when me and my reservation pal Ernie Squirrel Nuts used to "kill rats behind the Esso Station, then we sucked back a case of Lysol. It was really good." "Then we beat the shit outa his old lady." Yes, I'm a funny fucker when I quote reservation radio broadcasted outa Brockett, Canada. You get the picture. Recession is when yer neighbor loses his job and house. Depression is when you lose yours.

The Great Depression was prior to creation of the Federal Reserve that regulated interest rates and reserve ratios. The Treasury printed money and regulated the money supplies, but also sold bonds for government operations like the old war bonds. In 1932, these notions were only in the making, and almost half of America was unemployed. The establishment of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation started supporting failing banks with credit based on assets on hand and Congress approved the delivery of dollars to rebuild cash reserves.

President Herbert Hoover had no chance of winning the 1932 election, Roosevelt campaigned on the prevalence of homeless camps choking America's cities, going so far as to dub them "Hoover-villes." The new term "Soup Kitchen" became mile-long lines where hungry millions got a single meal each day. Take a sniff of Anchorage: homelessness and soup lines are back. Just look at the thousands of tent cities across America and Soup Kitchens and Rotten Food Banks serving millions of citizens that we deem unworthy of a job, house or dinner.

Imagine Fat America (OB City) dragging their bloated chunky butts all the way downtown to wait hours for diluted vegetable and mystery meat soup, bread or roll or biscuit. In the 60's, each school in America had only ONE fat kid. Today, in the 2020's, American schools have only ONE skinny kid and a third of America requires Insulin. It's okay to slug yer fat fucking kids, they're just like us fat fucks. The apple don't fall far from the tree. Or should I say, tub of lard children jiggle just like fat ass Alaskan parents. Political correctness aside, it used to be hilarious to laugh at cartoons such as Porky Pig and Mr. Magoo. Look in the mirror, we be fat old blind cunts. Just like our current and previous presidents.

Keep in mind, the Depression lasted longer than a decade. Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1933 and put 4.5 million young men to work in 4,500 work camps nationwide. All supervised by the Army, providing health care, dental care, education and recreation. The Army also provided a strong regiment of basic strength and combat skills and military discipline. The Civilian Conservation Corps, known as the CCC, was sometimes called the "tree army" because they planted more than 3 billion trees in reforestation and orchard redevelopments. The CCC also planted 45 million trees and shrubs to landscape federal lands and erosion control along rivers, lakes and ocean shores. The CCC also created 3500 beaches, installed 5000 miles of culvert drainage, water lines and fresh water pipes.

These crews of young men and boys also restored 4000 historic structures, 4500 fish ponds and lakes and 800 state parks. A lasting legacy the CCC men and boys left us was dams, picnic and cabin shelters, 46,000 bridges and thousands of miles of roads. Even Camp David, the President's retreat was once a Civilian Conservation Corps camp, later developed into what you see today. Roosevelt paid the hired boys and men $5.00 a month, but sent $25.00 a month home to their respective families. In today's money (50 to 1 ratio), that's $250 a month for the workers and $1250.00 per month for their families back home. The Federal Reserve started controlling interest rates, enforcing reserve ratios and loaning money to banks at the Prime Lending Rate. The Treasury dropped the gold standard restrictions and started printing Fiat money. Paper money backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Government.

Another interesting aspect of the Great Depression was thousands of young men and boys left home and rode the rails all over America. Mind you, automobiles weren't mainstream yet and the majority of America was rural farm country. As a matter of fact, even as late as the 1940 Census, 90% of America was classified as rural agriculture and only 10% were urban city dwellers. Without a family automobile to travel cross-country to look for work, most boys and young men simply hopped trains and "rode the rails."

The term "hobo" wasn't a negative slur, but more a lifestyle description attributed to the flight from home to greener pastures in search of work. Nobody ever called them bums or homeless, merely wanderers looking for scratch coin and scant pennies from heaven. One aspect my old dudes told me, was that stowing away on trains resulted in injury and death. Untold numbers of fatalities befell the rail travellers hitching a ride on boxcars. Another unknown number were frozen solid on the long-haul rides over the Rockies, Cascades and up north to the Great Lakes.

You'll recall famous songs about life on the road and rails performed by the likes of Boxcar Willie and Roger Miller's classic tune, "King of the Road." These tales and ballads were derivative of the depression and the popularity of leaving home for work, and even riches. John Steinbeck penned "The Grapes of Wrath" depicting the suffering by "Okies from Muskogee," entire families abandoning their unfarmed homesteads and the great Dust Bowl of Oklahoma. Steinbeck further illustrated work camp life on the road in "Of Mice and Men," a tearful yarn of two hobo travelers working for brutal camp bosses and tragic misadventure. "Tell me about the rabbits George" will forever bring bouts of weeping from our more literate readers of this posting and illustrate the virtue of shooting yer best friend in the head to avoid a lynch mob.

Remember, the Great Depression lasted more than 10 years. That's a long suffering time from the roaring 20's, massive inflation, supply chain failures, market collapses, the banking disintegration and years of trade and barter with zero dollars available to facilitate commerce. Similar to our mortgage collapse in 2008, popular sentiment was to blame and vilify the banks (banksters). Bank robbers became folk heroes, such as Bonny and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd, Machine Gun Kelly and Ma Barker. Common thieves became icons of the American imagination and fodder for Radio Broadcasts and Hollywood's product output.

Westerns became popular with the advent of "Talkies" at the theaters and brought us such legends as Tom Mix, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Charlton Heston, Gene Autry and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. As a postscript, don't overlook Shirley Temple and Judy Garland, the lead role in Wizard of Oz (1932), strolling and singing along the yellow brick road. Dirt poor, prison thin hungry farmers dream of roads paved in gold.

TV was years in the future, waiting for it's appearance in homes, but radio drew entire families to hear episodes of Flash Gordon, The Pirates and you'll all remember the closing slogan, "Only the Shadow Knows." Parallel to these broadcasts were live performance extravaganzas of traditional music and religion in radio shows like The Barn Dance and The Grand Ole Opry. If I bitch-slapped yer retarded kids, took their phones and pitched 'em in the fireplace, I'll bet they'll all join you around the radio. Just don't make 'em listen to KOTZ or KBRW, those stations suck honey bucket sauce. "Adii, radio is so depressing" (Sara Magnum).

Another tool created by Roosevelt was the GI Bill. The military student grant and loan program that retrained returning WW II vets. Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Tony Bennett, Gene Hackman and Audie Murphy were WWII vets that returned to American and returned to the classroom. Drama, Journalism and Opera were passions these soldiers sought out as both artistic expression, resume building, heart mending and post-war PTSD therapy. Bet you didn't know that.

This part will make you proud. When the Civilian Conservation Corps was finally shut down and the boys sent home, they were no longer starving and prison thin. America's young men were on average 15-20 pounds heavier, stronger, disciplined and most (like my buddies Jim, Will and George) simply walked to the Army and US Navy Recruiters and joined the war effort in the European and Pacific Theaters. Yup, my old buddies were all World War II veterans and credited their thrift, patriotism and work ethic on The Great Depression and Civilian Conservation Corps where boys and men became frugal, pragmatic, fit and strong and ultimately, soldiers.

Trade and barter are crude economic tools you and I utilized in rural monkey Alaska. Imagine having zero inventory like farm animals or firearms to trade. That's the time you think of pretty girls in a different light. Slavery and prostitution will outlast modern commerce and be around long after we're dead broke. And buried.

The next time you're day-dreaming naughty thoughts and out of nowhere, you get a whiff of candy snapper, just keep in mind: it's yer upper lip.

Karl.