If you love the smell of napalm in the morning, turn on your television, which I am watching from underneath my desk, cell phone open, putting in "to go" orders for ammo and gold.

The odor comes through the screen.

There is Henry Paulson, Goldman Sachs U.S. Treasury Secretary, looking like he has just shoplifted a box of BC off a Wal-Mart shelf.

There is Ben Bernanke, Counterfeiter-in-Chief of the Federal Reserve, looking like the victim of an all-night round of domestic abuse.

There is George Bush, the Decider, looking every bit the caricature of leadership he is paid to be.

As our monetary system implodes in corruption and deceit, desperate men reel in shock and awe.

First, Treasury trumpeted a plan to strong-arm banks into forming a $100 billion fund to buy bonds to hide their worthlessness.

Then, the federales proposed that the mortgage behemoths Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae buy bad mortgages.

Next, Paulson cooked up the BIG FREEZE, in which lenders would not raise their teaser rates for five years.

This week, the Fed cut its federal funds rate, and the Dow promptly plunged 294 points.

After a long night of second thoughts, the Fed unveiled another scheme the next morning. They will auction loans to U.S. banks and extend lines of credit to European banks sinking in the toxic waste of U.S. mortgage debt.

The AP called this a "novel approach."

Here come the lawyers.

We turn now for legal advice to San Mateo attorney Sean Olender, writing "Mortgage Meltdown" in the San Francisco Chronicle.

He says the bailouts are not about U.S. home prices, working families or keeping people in their homes.

Say it's not so, Sean.

He says the goal is to "prevent owners of mortgage-backed securities, many of them foreigners, from suing U.S. banks and forcing them to buy back worthless mortgage securities at face value — right now almost 10 times their market worth."

Uh-oh.

"The ticking time bomb in the U.S.

banking system is not resetting subprime mortgage rates. The real problem is the contractual ability of investors in mortgage bonds to require banks to buy back the loans at face value if there was fraud in the origination process."

We will henceforth refer to Sean as Mr. Olender.

"Fraud is everywhere," he says, in the loan applications and in the appraisals.

E-mails and memos at banks, investment banks and appraisal companies will show that many knew of it, right up to the executive suites, such as the one Henry Paulson crawled out of at Goldman Sachs.

Here's the beauty part. Mr. Olender recommends a hot industry for investment — shredders.

Let us examine the merits of these hourly bank bailout plans.

Hmmm.

OK, we are done with the merits.

Now for the ugly part.

The big banks, which are international corporations loyal to no nation, have defrauded investors worldwide.

The bailout plans for their benefit require massive creation of money and credit — monetary inflation of such magnitude as to crush American households.

The Fed is expanding M3, the broadest measure of money, by 16 percent annually.

This week, the federales reported that consumer price inflation ballooned to 0.8 percent in November, or 9.6 annually. Wholesale inflation jumped 3.2 percent, or 38.4 annually, the biggest rise since 1973.

Remember 1973?

It was the start of a seven-year plague of double-digit inflation, of lending rates that topped 20 percent. Prices of everything went up and up, and the battered American household went from one earner to two.

Perhaps we could legalize polygamy and get three earners in our households.

No wonder they run scared.

Nothing else in the world smells like it.

Smells like — fear.

Phil Lucas is executive editor of The News Herald in Panama City, Fla. Contact him at plucas@pcnh.com. To find out more about Lucas and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2007 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.