Ronald Reagan called it "as violent as a mugger, as frightening as an armed robber, and as deadly as a hit man." He was talking about inflation.

the engines of inflation are being powerfully stoked beneath the troubled American economy. The dollar is being devalued before our eyes, the great middle class's savings and investments are being progressively stolen, and prices are rising on food, energy and other essentials.

The signs are everywhere: In the midst of a brutal recession, with Americans already burdened by sky-high unemployment, foreclosures and bankruptcies, shoppers are noticing disturbingly higher food prices. Indeed, a survey of Wal-Mart stores analyzing price movements in 86 products widely used by Americans reveals price inflation to be twice the government's "official" rate.

But that's just for starters. Indeed, much of the current price inflation in commodities, including food - like wheat up 50 percent and cotton up a staggering 100 percent over last year, not to mention oil, beef, soybeans, coffee, cocoa and more, all way up - is due largely to international factors out of our control: flooding in Pakistan decimating cotton crops, the diversion of corn for ethanol driving up corn prices, China's exponentially growing consumption rates, and so on.

But when it comes to explaining precious metals prices - gold and silver are up five-fold over the last decade - all eyes turn to government and its maniacal, indeed incomprehensible level of deficit spending, borrowing, money creation and regulation, all leading inexorably to the debasement of the U.S. dollar. This has led many, not just in the U.S. but worldwide, to seek refuge and stability in the time-honored monetary metals.

 

So what's really going on? First of all, the government's "official" inflation rate based on annual changes in the consumer price index - which conveniently excludes food and energy costs - is misleading. If the Wal-Mart survey puts real price inflation at around 4 percent, an even more disturbing assessment comes from economists like John Williams of ShadowStats.com, who pegs inflation at a shocking 8.5 percent!

And that's before the Federal Reserve's most recent expansion of the money supply, euphemistically dubbed "quantitative easing" or QE. As Whistleblower reports, the head of the world's largest mutual fund, Bill Gross, says the Fed's latest reckless action - so called "QE2" - may result in the U.S. dollar losing 20 percent of its value!

Echoes Congresswoman Michele Bachmann: "We're looking now potentially at losing 20 percent of the value of the dollar if they go forward with this. I wrote a letter several weeks ago to the Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and begged him not to do this." Bachmann added, simply: "This is a disaster."

Which leads to the big question of "why?" Why is the Federal Reserve, in tandem with the U.S. government, intentionally creating inflation and devaluing the dollar? Is America's "ruling class" just staggeringly incompetent?

No. The evidence is now overwhelming that the globalism-oriented elites have the ultimate creation of a global currency in mind, writes No. 1 New York Times bestselling author and WND senior reporter Jerome Corsi in "INFLATION NATION."

Indeed, while the notion of a "one-world currency" may still sound exotic and conspiratorial to some, it has openly been part of "mainstream" globalist plans for a long time. For example, as Corsi reports, the G20 summit meeting in London in April 2009 took an important step in creating a new global currency through the International Monetary Fund. Based on a "basket" of major currencies, the new "special drawing rights" or SDRs would replace the dollar as the world's foreign exchange reserve currency of choice.

Appearing on the Fox News "Hannity" show, political consultant Dick Morris and Sean Hannity agreed the decision by the G20 proved the "conspiracy theorists were right" and there is now clear evidence of a plan to create a one-world currency.

But as "INFLATION NATION" points out, it's not just the scary prospect of hyperinflation - which may or may not occur, based in large measure on what the new Congress does in the next two years - that should concern Americans. Nor is it just the destruction of the dollar and its replacement as the world's reserve currency that should concern them.

It's also the stark reality that inflation, even at a low level such as America is experiencing today, is literally the ongoing theft of the great middle class's hard-earned wealth and life substance. As economic historian G. Edward Griffin, author of the classic Federal Reserve exposé "The Creature from Jekyll Island," explains in this issue of Whistleblower:

"Inflation has now been institutionalized at a fairly constant 5 percent per year. This has been determined to be the optimum level for generating the most revenue without causing public alarm. A 5 percent devaluation applies, not only to the money earned this year, but to all that is left over from previous years. At the end of the first year, a dollar is worth 95 cents. At the end of the second year, the 95 cents is reduced again by 5 percent, leaving its worth at 90 cents, and so on. By the time a person has worked 20 years, the government will have confiscated 64 percent of every dollar he saved over those years. By the time he has worked 45 years, the hidden tax will be 90 percent. The government will take virtually everything a person saves over a lifetime."

Read more: INFLATION NATION http://www.wnd.com/?pageId=245633#ixzz1A5Bs3rx9