FISCAL FARCE, FAILURE, FANTASY & FORNICATION

I’ve put off writing an article about what is likely to happen in 2013 so I could peruse the thousands of other articles by reputable bloggers, paid pundits, Wall Street shills and captured charlatans to gather their wisdom. It’s essential that I make predictions for 2013 so I can write another article in December rationalizing why 90% of my predictions failed to materialize. Reading all of these 2013 prediction articles made things much clearer for me. I now know for sure:

  • The stock market will reach an all-time high.
  • The stock market will fall 42%.
  • The economy will strengthen as the year progresses.
  • The economy will descend into a depression.
  • The USD will strengthen.
  • The USD will collapse.
  • Gas prices will set new highs.
  • Gas prices will fall below 2012 levels.
  • Gold will rise to $10,000 per ounce.
  • Gold will drop below $1,000 per ounce.
  • We will experience hyperinflation.
  • We will experience horrific deflation.
  • Obama will compromise with the Republicans and put the country on a path to prosperity.
  • Obama will create a debt ceiling crisis and assume dictatorial powers as a result.
  • Snooki will be a better mother than Kim Kardashian.
  • Honey Boo Boo will beat I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant in the Neilson ratings.

The majority of 2013 prediction articles are written to support the agenda of the writer. Many are trying to sell newsletter subscriptions or investment services. Their predictions will match the theme of their newsletter. Others are Wall Street paid shills who will predict what they are paid to predict by their owners. Then there are the political hacks who tow the party line with their predictions. But no one can top the predictive powers of the CBO. They just put out their ten year updated forecast reflecting the fabulous fiscal cliff deal that saved the country. According to the CBO, the “compromise” to reduce our deficits will add a mere $4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. I’m sure this will prove to be accurate. Just take a look at their 2002 projection, after passage of the Bush tax cuts:

The CBO predicted the FY2012 surplus would be $641 billion, the national debt would total $3.5 trillion, the debt held by the public would total $1.273 trillion, and GDP would total $17.2 trillion. They missed by that much.

The actual FY12 results were:

  • The true deficit was $1.37 trillion (amount national debt increased – not the phony deficit number reported by the mainstream media).
  • The national debt was $16.1 trillion.
  • The debt held by the public was $11.3 trillion.
  • GDP was $15.8 trillion.

Based on these results, I won’t be asking the CBO for help with my Super Bowl bet. Making ten year predictions is beyond worthless, but public policy in Washington DC is based on these useless CBO projections. The entire fiscal cliff kabuki theater fictitious crisis reveals the politicians and mainstream media pundits to be liars, fools and frauds. The tax the rich to cut the deficit storyline was sold to the public and won the day. Of course, the highly accurate CBO immediately revealed that the Orwellian named American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012 adds $4 trillion to the national debt over the next ten years. Based on the accuracy of their previous predictions, it’s a guarantee the national debt goes up by $8 trillion, as the rich take advantage of the thousands of loopholes in the IRS code they paid for to avoid paying the taxes expected by the CBO.

Hypocrisy abounds on both sides of the aisle in Washington DC and on the media company propaganda channels. As the national debt soared from $10.6 trillion on the day Obama took office to $16.4 trillion today, I heard shrieking liberal talking heads on MSNBC, CNN, and the rest of the liberal media blame the debt on the Bush tax cuts and the Bush wars. If the Bush tax cuts were so horrific, why did Obama and his minions just make 98% of these tax cuts permanent? Liberals held protest marches across the country against Bush’s wars and burned him in effigy. Obama’s defense budgets have been larger than Bush’s and he doubled down on our miserable failure in Afghanistan. You don’t hear a peep from the liberals about the warmongering Barack Obama who has kill lists and unleashes predator drones, killing women and children across the globe. Liberals pretend to be concerned about the welfare of the citizens, but continue to support a President that uses executive orders to imprison citizens indefinitely without charges, has expanded surveillance on citizens, has kept Guantanamo open, signs the continuation of the Patriot Act, and proposes overturning the Second Amendment by executive order. Liberals shriek about the evils of an unregulated Wall Street, while remaining silent as Obama hasn’t prosecuted a single banker for the greatest financial fraud in world history. You don’t hear a peep about Jon Corzine, who stole $1.2 billion from the accounts of farmers and ranchers. Liberals talk about regulation and then stand idly by while Wall Street lobbyists wrote the Dodd Frank law and insurance and drug company lobbyists wrote the Obamacare law. Liberal hypocrisy knows no bounds and is only matched by Neo-Con hypocrisy.

The Neo-Con controlled Republican Party is a pathetic joke. They have the guts to declare themselves the party of fiscal responsibility, after Bush’s eight year reign of error. He and his fiscally responsible party were handed a budget in surplus and managed to add $4.9 trillion to the national debt by waging undeclared wars, encouraging Wall Street to create the biggest fraudulent financial bubble in history, creating a new $16 trillion unfunded entitlement (Medicare Part D), cutting taxes without paying for them, and creating a massive new government agency (DHS) to take away our liberties and freedom. Federal government spending grew from $1.9 trillion to $3.0 trillion under Bush and the Republicans. Does that sound fiscally responsible?

Does anyone believe the Republican Party is serious about cutting anything? Tough guy Republicans like Big Chris Christie preach fiscal responsibility when going to war with teachers’ unions, but he squeals  like a stuck pig when a $60 billion pork filled, unpaid for, Sandy Relief bill is held up in Congress. The courageous fiscally responsible Congress critters passed the entire pork filled, unfunded, bloated, vote buying joke. It included $28 billion to mitigate future disasters, $3 billion to repair or replace Federal assets, and $6 billion for transportation projects completely unrelated to Sandy damage.   The hypocrisy of politicians who proclaim the $50 billion of 2013 fiscal cliff tax revenue as deficit cutting, and then immediately piss it away by paying people to rebuild their houses yards from the Atlantic Ocean while funding billions of non-disaster related projects is disgusting to behold. There is nothing like compromise to add another $60 billion to the national debt.

Our entire economic and political system is a farce. The American people are being played by the powerful interests that provide them with an illusion of choice. Both parties serve the interests of their masters and the fiscal cliff show and debt ceiling show are a form of reality TV to keep the masses alarmed, fearful, and believing there is actually a difference between the policies of the ruling class. The charade has played out in its full glory in the last few weeks with Obama convincing the masses he had stuck it to the rich, while in reality the working middle class got it good and hard when they got their January paychecks. This chart details the tax changes that went into effect on January 1.

taxbill

The funniest part this fiscal fiasco farce is watching the reaction of the sheep who believed Obama and the mainstream media storyline. Obama was able to raise the published top rate on people making over $400,000. The newly defined “rich” laughed heartily as they know only fools pay anywhere near the top rate. The rich just call their tax advisor and instruct them to use one of the thousands of tax loopholes in the 75,000 page IRS tax code to “legally” avoid the new Obama rates. Meanwhile, both parties and their mainstream media mouthpieces downplayed the 2% payroll tax increase on every working American. This tax increase has been a complete surprise to the reality TV zombies and Facebook aficionados. Even college educated professionals in my office had no idea their next monthly paycheck was going to be $150 to $200 lighter. This will wipe out most, or all, of the annual raise they received. The tax will fall heavily on the 75% of households that make less than the $113,700 Social Security cutoff. For a struggling family of four earning the median income of $50,000, the $1,000 less in their paychecks will mean less food, putting off trips to the doctor, driving on bald tires, or not taking the family on a vacation to the Jersey shore. The $2,274 increase in taxes (.57%) for the Wall Street banker making $400,000 probably won’t put too much of a crimp in his Hamptons lifestyle.

The joke is on the American people as the rich will ante up maybe $50 billion of taxes in 2013, while the working middle class will be skewered for $125 billion. How’s that “Tax the Rich” slogan working out for you?

Only in the Orwellian capital of Washington DC would a bill that was supposed to provide tax relief to the middle class and spending cuts to reduce the deficit, actually increase the tax burden of a median household by $1,000 and perpetuate the pork spending payoffs to campaign contributors and friends of the slimy politicians that slither through the halls of Congress. The list of pork and bribes should be nauseating to hard working Americans across the country:

$30 billion extension of the 99 weeks of unemployment benefits, even though we are supposedly in the 3rd year of economic recovery. Continuing to pay people to not work for two years will surely boost employment.

$14.3 billion for a two-year extension of the corporate research credit benefiting large technology companies like IBM and Hewlett Packard.

$12.2 billion one-year extension of the production tax credit for wind power.

$11.2 billion two- year extension of the active financing exception, which lets GE, Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) and Citigroup Inc. (C), among others, defer taxes on financing income they earn outside the U.S.

$1.9 billion extension of the Work Opportunity Tax Credit for hiring workers from disadvantaged groups, benefitting mega-restaurant chains like McDonalds.

$1.8 billion extension of the New Markets Tax Credit for investments in low- income areas, benefitting JP Morgan and other Wall Street shyster banks.

$650 million tax credit for manufacturing energy-efficient appliances, benefitting mega-corps like Whirlpool.

$430 million for Hollywood through “special expensing rules” to encourage TV and film production in the United States. Producers can expense up to $15 million of costs for their projects. NBC thanks you.

$331 million for railroads by allowing short-line and regional operators to claim a tax credit up to 50% of the cost to maintain tracks that they own or lease.

$248 million in special expensing rules for films and television programs.

$222 million for Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands through returned excise taxes collected by the federal government on rum produced in the islands and imported to the mainland.

$78 million for NASCAR by extending a “7-year cost recovery period for certain motorsports racing track facilities.”

$59 million for algae growers through tax credits to encourage production of “cellulosic biofuel” at up to $1.01 per gallon.

$4 million for electric motorcycle makers by expanding an existing green-energy tax credit for buyers of plug-in vehicles to include electric motorbikes.

So when you see the cut in your take home pay, just comfort yourself knowing that JP Morgan, Citigroup, GE and hundreds of mega-corporations were able to retain their tax breaks. As they have done for decades, Congress and the President agreed to address spending cuts at a future date. Of course, a government spending cut isn’t actually a cut. It’s a lower increase than their previous projection. Nothing is ever cut in Washington DC. The austerity storyline is a lie. Not a dime has been cut from the Federal budget. Intellectually dishonest ideologues try to peddle the wind down of the Obama $800 billion porkulus program as a cut in Federal spending. They sold this Keynesian “shovel ready” crap to a gullible public as stimulus to jumpstart the economy. Federal spending was $3.0 trillion before the Obama stimulus. After the two year stimulus was pissed away without helping the economy one iota, the baseline should have been back in the $3.2 trillion range. Instead, FY13 Federal spending will be $3.8 trillion. This hasn’t kept liberal ideologues like Krugman and his minions in the mainstream media from blaming crazy Tea Party Republicans for inflicting horrendous austerity measures on the poor and disadvantaged.

The chart above reveals a few truths:

  • The country has been blessed with two of the worst presidents in U.S. history over the last twelve years.
  • When Federal spending as a percentage of GDP is beyond two standard deviations over the normal range during the last sixty years, your problem is not lack of tax revenue.
  • Obama and the current Congress are spending at a level of 24% of GDP versus the 18% of GDP when Clinton left office. This amounts to a nose bleed altitude $950 billion higher than the level Clinton was spending in his final year in office.

The Op-eds in liberal rags across the land decry the lack of civility in Washington DC and plead for politicians on both sides of the aisle to come together and compromise for the good of the country. This line of bullshit would be laughable if it wasn’t so wretched in its falsity. Compromise is what has left this country with a $16.4 trillion national debt, $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities, and $1 trillion deficits as far as the eye can see. Democrats have compromised and let the Republicans create a warfare state. Republicans have compromised and let Democrats create a welfare state. The two headed monster living in the swamps of Washington DC just voted to increase taxes on all Americans. They voted to hand criminal Wall Street banks $700 billion. They voted to pass the Patriot Act. They voted to pass the NDAA. They’ve allowed the President to wage undeclared wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Iran. They voted for a $663 billion Defense bill that includes tens of billions the Secretary of Defense doesn’t even want. They will vote to raise the debt ceiling in the next two months. The last thing this country needs is more compromise. We can’t afford any more compromise. The chart above proves what can happen when gridlock ensues, spending restrictions are enforced, and confrontation displaces compromise. After the 1994 Republican takeover of Congress, gridlock ensued for the next six years. PAYGO restrictions in the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990 didn’t allow unfettered spending increases. The result was Federal spending falling from 22% of GDP to 18% of GDP and a budget surplus. The Pay-Go restrictions expired in 2002 and Democrats and Republicans have compromised to the tune of a $10.2 trillion increase in the national debt in ten years. The hypocrisy of pandering deceitful politicians is boundless and shows utter contempt for the intelligence of the American populace.

“Raising the debt ceiling does not authorize more spending. It simply allows the country to pay for spending that Congress has already committed to. If congressional Republicans refuse to pay America’s bills on time, Social Security checks, and veterans benefits will be delayed. We might not be able to pay our troops, or honor our contracts with small business owners. Food inspectors, air traffic controllers, specialist who track down loose nuclear materials wouldn’t get their paychecks. Investors around the world will ask if the United States of America is in fact a safe bet. Markets could go haywire, interest rates would spike for anybody who borrows money – Every homeowner with a mortgage, every student with a college loan, every small business owner who wants to grow and hire. We are not a deadbeat nation.

It would be a self-inflicted wound on the economy. It would slow down our growth, might tip us into recession. And ironically it would probably increase our deficit. So to even entertain the idea of this happening, of the United States of America not paying its bills, is irresponsible. It’s absurd. Republicans in Congress have two choices here. They can act responsibly, and pay America’s bills, or they can act irresponsibly and put America through another economic crisis. But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.” – President Barack Obama – January 14, 2013

“The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. The Senate continues to reject a return to the common sense Pay-go rules that used to apply. Previously, Pay-go rules applied both to increases in mandatory spending and to tax cuts.

The Senate had to abide by the common sense budgeting principle of balancing expenses and revenues. But we must remember that the more we depend on foreign nations to lend us money, the more our economic security is tied to the whims of foreign leaders whose interests might not be aligned with ours. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” – Senator Barack Obama – March 16, 2006

I could have shown quotes from George W. Bush during the 2000 Presidential campaign talking about a non-interventionist foreign policy and no need for the U.S. to get involved in nation building and then proceeding to pre-emptively attack sovereign countries while wasting trillions and impoverishing unborn generations trying to create “democracy” in the Middle East at the point of a gun as a cover to protect “our” oil. The point is that we are being given the illusion of choice. Everyone knows the debt ceiling will be raised after another episode of Washington DC Kabuki Theater, presented by the corporate mainstream media in breathtaking detail, because the politicians are beholden to their owners and those owners want more of our money. That is why spending will never be willingly cut by the spineless puppet congressmen, as their strings are pulled by the corporate puppet masters and they dance to the tune of the banking oligarchs that own this country.

After witnessing the fighting of undeclared never ending wars, passage of freedom destroying legislation like the Patriot Act & NDAA, approval of pork barrel spending to the tune of hundreds of billions, rule by Executive Order, using ZIRP to extract hundreds of billions from senior citizen savers and give it to criminal Wall Street banks, forcing the American people at gunpoint to replenish the Wall Street banks with $700 billion after they had committed the greatest financial fraud in history, and a continuing trampling of the U.S. Constitution, the American people continue to remain willfully ignorant of the truth. The American Dream is dead. We’ve allowed a rich, privileged, elite few to achieve hegemony over our economic and political system with their control of the media and manipulation of our financial markets. They will collapse the country because they will never be satisfied with the amount of wealth and power they’ve accumulated. Their voracious greed will be their downfall. The sooner we can channel the anger of George Carlin, the sooner we can put an end to this corporate fascist reign of terror.

“Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago.

It’s a big club and you ain’t in it! You and I are not in the Big Club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you in the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans are and will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white, and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day. Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.” George Carlin

I never did get around to making my 2013 predictions. I’ll give it a stab in my next article: Apparitions in the Fog.

2012 – YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY IN REVIEW

On January 8 of this year I posted my annual prediction article for this year – 2012 – The Year of Living Dangerously. Now it’s time to assess my complete and utter cluelessness when it comes to predicting things within a given time frame. Despite the fact that myself and everyone else acting like they know what lays ahead are proven wrong time and time again, we continue to make predictions about the future. It makes us feel like we have some control, when we don’t. The world is too complex, too big, too corrupt, too lost in theories and delusions, and too dependent upon too many leaders with too few brains to be able to predict what will happen next. This is the time of year when all the “experts” will be making their 2013 predictions. I haven’t seen too many of these experts going back and honestly assessing their 2012 predictions, which didn’t happen.

What I’ve learned is that “experts” usually have an agenda. Their predictions are designed to convince you to buy the stocks they recommend or purchase their newsletter. Many of these “experts” work for Wall Street, the corporate MSM, a political party or corporate interest. Half of the “experts” represent the status quo and want the masses to think everything is just fine and will steadily improve. The other half are fear mongers that want to scare you into buying their products with predictions of impending collapse at any moment. I like to read the predictions of a wide variety of pundits, bloggers, and so called journalists, while understanding they probably have an agenda.

Personally, I try to make my predictions based on the facts I observe and try to gather. My agenda is to prepare my family for whatever these facts tell me is likely to happen. My website is just a place for me to post my thoughts. I don’t depend upon it for a living and I have nothing to sell. That doesn’t mean that my biases, hopes, and desires do not color my predictions. As I reread my article yesterday, I found myself thinking, “when is this long winded gasbag going to actually make some predictions?” My article was supposed to make 2012 predictions but ended up trying to tie 2012 into the Fourth Turning Crisis paradigm. When I eventually got to the predictions, I realized that a monkey throwing darts could have done just as well. If I was one of those “experts”, I’d say that I wasn’t wrong, I was just early. Of course, that is a cop-out. Being early is the same as being wrong.

I’m more interested in why I was wrong. It seems I always underestimate the ability of sociopathic central bankers and their willingness to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions to benefit their oligarch masters. I always underestimate the rampant corruption that permeates Washington DC and the executive suites in mega-corporations across the land. And I always overestimate the intelligence, civic mindedness, and ability to understand math of the ignorant masses that pass for citizens in this country. It seems that issuing trillions of new debt to pay off trillions of bad debt, government sanctioned accounting fraud, mainstream media propaganda, government data manipulation and a populace blinded by mass delusion can stave off the inevitable consequences of an unsustainable economic system. But enough excuses. Let’s see how wrong I was:

  • All the episodes which will occur in 2012 will have at their core one of the three elements described by Strauss & Howe in 1997: Debt, Civic Decay, or Global Disorder.

This was a generic prediction. Those are a lot easier to take credit for as being right. Considering the country is about to go over the fiscal cliff, I’d say that debt has had a major impact in 2012. The disgusting political campaign, the anger over efforts to ban guns, urban violence, 20% of nation on food stamps, and real unemployment rate of 23% certainly prove that civic decay is accelerating. Uprisings in Egypt, Syria and across the Middle East intensified. Israel and Iran got closer to inevitable war. Japan and China are on the verge of conflict. The U.S. is still bogged down in Afghanistan and has failed miserably in efforts to democratize the Middle East. I’d say we have had a bit of global disorder.

  • At best, the excessive levels of sovereign debt will slow economic growth to zero or below in 2012. At worst, interest rates will soar as counties attempt to rollover their debt and rolling defaults across Europe will plunge the continent into a depression.

The best case scenario for European bankers and politicians came to pass in 2012. The GDP for the European Union went negative in the 3rd quarter of 2012. The southern European nations are experiencing depression level conditions with soaring unemployment, social unrest, and higher interest rates. But even Germany is experiencing a dramatic slowdown. The bankers continue to call the shots, with various debt schemes designed to keep the bankers whole, while throwing the people to the wolves. They have postponed the day of reckoning, but it is coming. They do not have a liquidity problem. They have a solvency problem. You cannot resolve a debt problem by creating more debt.

  • The truth that no one wants to acknowledge is the standard of living for every person in Europe, the United States and Japan will decline. The choice is whether the decline happens rapidly by accepting debt default and restructuring or methodically through central bank created inflation that devours the wealth of the middle class. Debt default would result in rich bankers losing vast sums of wealth and politicians accepting the consequences of their phony promises. Bankers and politicians will choose inflation.

This was an easy one. Bankers and politicians will never choose pain for themselves when they can shift it to the people. Bernanke and the rest of the world’s central bankers, in cooperation with their captured politicians, have chosen to inflate the debt away by printing money. They trust in the shallowness and ignorance of the masses to not notice as their standard of living steadily declines.

Controlling the distribution of data allows the oligarchs to falsify the true level of inflation and the corporate MSM dutifully spews the propaganda to the masses.

  • The European Union will not survive 2012 in its current form. Countries are already preparing for the dissolution. Politicians and bankers will lie and print until the day they pull the plug on the doomed Euro experiment.

I was 100% wrong in this assessment. The politicians and bankers are most certainly lying, but they have succeeded in keeping the EU intact. The dissolution would imperil too many bankers. Whether they can keep it intact through 2013 is another question.

  • The National Debt will be $16.5 trillion when the next president takes office in January 2013.

Barack Obama will be inaugurated on January 20, 2013. As of December 26, 2012 the National Debt stood at $16.34 trillion and according to Turbo Tax Timmy will hit the debt limit of $16.4 trillion on December 31. He will use accounting gimmicks and not fund government pensions to not exceed the limit, but the debt will continue to accumulate at a rate of $3.5 billion per day. The National Debt will be at approximately $16.47 trillion when Obama starts his 2nd term. Close enough for government work.

  • As debt servicing grows by the day, the economy losses steam. The excessive and increasing debt levels will lead to a renewed recession in 2012.

Despite the fact that the government and corporate media continue to report economic growth and a barely positive GDP, a recession did begin this past summer. Using a true level of inflation, GDP has been negative since 2006.

The horrific Christmas retail sales and declining corporate profits reveal the truth. Fourth quarter GDP will be negative and the government will eventually adjust the prior quarters lower. Excel spreadsheet models, fake inflation figures and seasonal adjustments cannot deny reality or the facts.

  • As foreclosures rise a self-reinforcing loop will develop. Home prices will fall as banks dump houses at lower prices, pushing millions more into a negative equity position. Home prices will fall another 5% to 10% in 2012, with a couple years to go before bottoming. 

Another 100% wrong prediction. I again underestimated the willingness of corrupt Wall Street bankers, in cahoots with the Federal government, to fraudulently boost home prices by withholding foreclosures from the market and creating a fake housing shortage. The Feds have willingly used Fannie, Freddie and the FHA to guarantee more bad mortgage loans and put the taxpayer further on the hook for the billions of bad debt. Bennie has swooped in and bought up billions of toxic mortgage debt from the criminal Wall Street banks, while driving mortgage rates to record low levels. With this massive intervention, they have managed to increase home prices by 4% and increase home sales to levels 60% below the peak. Job well done.

  • The working age population will increase by 1.7 million, the number of people employed will go up by 1 million, but the official unemployment rate will drop to 7% as the BLS reveals that 10 million people decided to relax and leave the workforce. Surely I jest. The government manipulated unemployment rate will rise above 9%, while the real rate will surpass 25%.

I made what I thought was an outrageous prediction as an attempt at humor, but my outrageous prediction was closer to the truth. The working age population has grown by 3.7 million people, the number of employed people has gone up by only 2.7 million, 2.4 million people decided to kick back and leave the workforce, resulting in the unemployment rate “plunging” from 8.7% to 7.7%.

Measuring unemployment on par with the method used during the 1930s would put the level at 23% today. But you should trust the BLS. Why would they lie?

  • Ben Bernanke, Wall Street shysters and Barack Obama want you to be drawn in by the allure of short-term gains based on hopes of QE3. The stock market will be volatile in 2012 with stocks falling 20% when it becomes evident the country is going back into recession. Ben will try to ride to the rescue with QE3 as he buys up more toxic mortgage debt. Wall Street will do their usual touchdown dance celebration, but the bloom will fall off this rose fast, as quantitative easing has proven to be a failure in stimulating economic growth.Gridlock in Washington D.C., chaotic national conventions, and the implosion of Europe will contribute to the market finishing down by at least 15% for the year.

I hope you didn’t follow my stock market advice as it looks like I missed by only 25% or 30% with this prediction. It is amazing what zero interest rates for Wall Street banks, QE to infinity, high frequency trading supercomputers, and fake Wall Street earnings can do for a stock market. Since the recession has not been acknowledged and rigged corporate profits still sit near their peak, the stock market has continued to rise. I applaud the oligarchs for their ability to extract every last dime from the pockets of the middle class in their avaricious plundering of America. Bernie Madoff is proudly admiring their work from his prison cell.

  • The average price of oil will exceed $100 during 2012 resulting in the highest average gas price in history for American drivers. These high prices, along with various weather related issues will keep food prices elevated, with 5% or higher increases likely. This should spur a few more peasant revolutions around the globe.

I nailed this prediction. Americans paid the highest average price for a gallon of gasoline in history during 2012. Agricultural commodities like corn, wheat and soybeans soared by 7% to 20%, as the high oil prices and drought drove food prices higher. Meat prices will rise in 2013 as herds had to be thinned in 2012 because of the high feed costs. But don’t worry. The BLS will just adjust the food inflation away as they assume you switch from hamburger to cat food.

  • Gold will finish the year higher. As always, it will be volatile and manipulated by the powers that be. A drop below $1,500 in the beginning of the year is possible, but when Ben announces QE3, it will be off to the races. I expect gold to reach $1,900 by year end. Silver will be more volatile, but will likely reach $40 by year end.

Gold will finish the year higher for the twelfth consecutive year. It was volatile, with a high of $1,796 and a low of $1,527. It will finish the year in the mid $1,600s. Silver was equally volatile, but also up for the year. It ranged between $37.50 and $26. It will finish the year in the $30 range. The powers that be know that rising gold and silver prices reveal their deceitful inflationary master plan, so they use all of their market manipulative powers to suppress the prices of these metals. The higher our debt, the higher their prices will go. When the confidence game is revealed to be a Ponzi scheme, the prices of gold and silver will be unleashed.

  • Old line mall based retailers like Sears and J.C. Penney die a slow agonizing death as they stagger into the sunset like Montgomery Ward, Circuit City and thousands before them. 

I was wrong about JC Penney. They are dying a fast agonizing death as the idiot savant from Apple has driven them straight into the ground, with sales plunging by 26% versus last year. It isn’t a matter of if, but when this employer of 159,000 declares bankruptcy. The “brilliant” (Jim Cramer says so) Eddie Lampert has Sears on a glide path to liquidation. This Christmas season will reveal these CEOs to be frauds.

  • The Occupy Movement will become more extreme with more disruptions of the economic system with less warning so the authorities don’t have time to prepare. I expect more cyber hacking into Wall Street, government, and media computer networks, causing disarray and uncertainty regarding financial information. I expect the Democratic and Republican presidential conventions to be overrun by protestors. The authorities will respond with excessive force, resulting in further violent protests in other cities.  

Another 100% miss. The Occupy Movement splintered and petered out after being brutally dismantled by the armed mercenaries of the status quo. There were some cyber-attacks, but they caused minimal disruption. The masses are satiated with their techno-gadgets and reality TV shows. No one protested. No one cared.

  • The Federal government grows ever more panicked by the knowledge that its Ponzi scheme economy is going to collapse. This is why passage of the NDAA and the future passage of SOPA are so important to them. Imprisonment of citizens without charge and shutting down the only remaining means of truth – the Internet – are essential to retaining their power and control over the masses. At the same time, gun sales are at record levels. Critical thinking Americans can see the writing on the wall and no longer trust corrupt politicians of either party. Arming yourself and buying physical gold and silver is a prudent act in today’s world.

The outrage over SOPA, led by the alternative online media, stopped it from being passed. The tyrants continue their efforts to suppress free speech on the internet, as Facebook shuts down pages that do not conform to the corporate fascist government agenda. Gun sales are off the charts, as critical thinking people no longer trust the corrupt government. Physical gold and silver sales are soaring as critical thinking people no longer trust our corrupt economic system.

  • The ruling elite hand selected puppets for the 2012 presidential election are Obama and Romney. They are virtually interchangeable and both are acceptable to the Wall Street oligarchs. The monkey wrench in the gears is Ron Paul. He will run as a 3rd Party candidate and focus a light on the crony capitalism that passes for free markets in America today. He will be vilified by both parties and their media mouthpieces, but if he gains traction I fear an unfortunate accident will befall him. Either way, he will have a dramatic impact on the debate and the outcome of the 2012 election.

With this prediction I allowed my hope to overcome reason. The oligarchs are too powerful. Ron Paul’s grassroots campaign made the oligarchs extremely uncomfortable. He drew huge crowds of young people on college campuses across the country. His message of liberty and freedom resonated with millions, but he was no match for the billionaires that call the shots in this country. He was silenced by the Republican establishment and chose not to run as a 3rd party candidate. The puppet on the left won the election. The puppet on the right retreated to one of his six mansions. Ron Paul rode off into the sunset knowing he gave it his best shot.

  • It seems more likely by the day that someone will do something stupid in or around Iran and the Persian Gulf will explode into a virtual hell on earth. The unintended consequences of such a development will far outweigh the intended consequences. The revolutions, protests, and brewing civil wars in Egypt, Syria, Libya and Iraq will flare up even if Iran doesn’t explode into a shooting war. The tensions in the Middle East will keep oil prices above $100, despite a world plunging into recession.

The showdown between Israel and Iran did not happen in 2012, despite increasingly angry rhetoric. The stealth war with Iran began, as economic sanctions and cyber warfare have begun to destroy their economy and impoverish their people. Revolutions, riots, protests and civil war spread across the Middle East throughout 2012 resulting in high oil prices and a worldwide economic contraction which is picking up speed as 2012 comes to a conclusion.

  • China’s hard landing will arrive in 2012. Keynesianism on steroids has failed as they’ve built more than enough vacant malls, vacant cities, vacant condo towers, and bridges to nowhere. Property prices will plunge, exports will decline, and peasants will revolt as food and energy prices push them over the edge.

China has come in for a hard landing. With a government more corrupt than even ours, their reported economic data would make a BLS drone blush with pride. Property prices are falling. Exports are falling. But somehow they report economic growth of 7%. And the MSM dutifully reports this gibberish as truth. Unrest and protests are a daily occurrence in China, but they are immediately crushed. The Chinese authorities continue to clamp down on the internet and media. China’s economic system is a rotting Keynesian nightmare.

I also raised the generic possibilities of earthquakes, hurricanes, pandemics and terrorist attacks. I noted that a terrorist attack in a public venue might cause a government over-reaction. Even though the slaughter of young school children by a deranged mental defective doesn’t constitute a terrorist attack, the reaction by government officials and their liberal control freak allies in the mainstream media are exactly what I feared. Every tragedy is used to gain more control over our lives and take away our Constitutional rights in the name of safety and security. The ignorant masses willingly give up their freedom and liberty, believing their Orwellian government protectors will look out for them. As we enter 2013, time grows shorter. The power hungry psychopaths continue to pillage and plunder. Our unsustainable economic system struggles under the weight of debt, despair and delusion as the endgame approaches. The willfully ignorant populace is lost in their techno-narcissistic dream world.

Will 2013 be the year it all collapses in a flaming heap of rubble? I don’t know. Maybe you should ask an “expert”.

It guarantees to be an interesting year. I’ll be hiring Bonzo the chimp to help me make my 2013 predictions in the next week or so.



 

 

DECLINE, DECAY, DENIAL, DELUSION, & DESPAIR

The majority of Americans seem OK with just waddling through life, accepting the lies and misinformation blasted from the boob tube and their various iGadgets by their owners, gorging themselves to death on Twinkies and Cheetos, paying 15% interest on their $10,000 rolling credit card balance, and growing ever more dependent on the welfare/warfare state to provide and protect them from accepting personal responsibility for their lives. A minority of critical thinking people have chosen to question everything they see and hear being spewed at us by the propagandist mainstream media, the corporate fascist government, and the powerful banking cabal that has an iron grip upon our throats as they choke the life out of the global economy in their never ending desire for more riches and more power.

The decline of the Great American Empire cannot be attributed to one factor or one bogeyman. There are a multitude of factors, villains, and choices made by the American people that have led to our moral, civil, social, and economic decline. The kabuki theater that passes for our electoral process is little more than a diversion from our imminent fate. Neither candidate for President has any intention of changing the course of the U.S. Titanic. Our rendezvous with destiny has been charted, and there aren’t nearly enough lifeboats. Those who built the ship and recklessly navigated it into a sea of icebergs will be the 1st into the few lifeboats. The leaders we’ve chosen, the choices we’ve made, and our unwillingness to deal with facts and reality have set in motion a disaster that cannot be averted. It’s a shame the majority of Americans have the math aptitude of a 6th grader, because the unsustainability of our empire can be calculated quite easily. Math is hard for Americans, but denial and delusion are easy.      

Oddly, a couple of late September days in Wildwood NJ were able to crystalize many of the aspects of our cultural and economic decline in my mind. I should have just enjoyed the 72 degree temperatures, a few beers, and the freedom to read a book on my deck. I wish I was just oblivious to my surroundings, but my weekend in Wildwood NJ was an eye opener. Everywhere I turned I saw something that made me laugh, shake my head in disgust, or wonder how our government could have become so inane, incompetent and out of control. We all generalize based upon our preconceived beliefs, but sometimes what you see is what you get. The weekend started normally with a morning bike ride on the boardwalk with my wife and son to the Hereford lighthouse in North Wildwood. Along the way we passed the usual suspects on the boardwalk: the obese, the tattooed, the pierced, and the blue haired. I wish I was exaggerating, but I saw a dozen hoveround and rascal scooters carrying extremely obese Americans on par with this person:

 

If I wanted to be politically correct, I’d call the fat asses cruising on their “free” rascal scooters, the weight challenged disabled on their powered mobility enhancement vehicles. You know a trend has become a massive scam, when South Park dedicates an entire show to the shame of obesity and the scooter brigade. The majority of the scooter squad jamming up the boardwalk was less than 50 years old. They weren’t disabled. They were just too obese and lazy to wobble down the boardwalk to the next junk food joint. They were certainly in the right place. The Wildwood boardwalk is home to pizza topped with cheese fries, chocolate covered bacon, fried Oreos, funnel cake topped with powdered sugar, and 64 ounce sugar laced lemonade. The place would make Nanny Bloomberg’s head explode.

   

 

We’ve all seen the commercials for the Scooter store urging anyone on Medicare to rush in and get a power scooter or wheelchair “at little or no cost to you”. The entitlement “free shit” mentality permeates our culture. There is a cost and it is over $800 million per year, paid for by the 53% who pay Federal taxes.  Records from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services show that the cost of motorized scooters and wheelchairs to the government health service for senior citizens rose 179% between 1999 and 2009, the last year for which full records are available. This data is fascinating as the number of Americans over the age of 65 only increased by 18% over this same time frame. The bill in 1999 was $259 million; in 2009 it was $723 million – and is surely over $1 billion today. This is another billion dollar scam being funded by your tax dollars, but there are no spending cuts possible according to our beloved Congressmen.

A recent report by Medicare’s inspector general also showed that 61% of the motorized wheelchairs provided to Medicare recipients in the first half of 2007 went to people who didn’t qualify for them. (Only people who cannot get around without one are supposed to be eligible.) The inspector general found that Medicare is billed an average of $4,018 for a motorized wheelchair that normally sells for $1,048. As a taxpayer, you will be shocked to find out that people are selling their “no cost” Rascal 600 B mobility scooters on eBay. I’m sure the keen eyed government drones working in the Health & Human Services agency are policing the resale of taxpayer paid for scooters. I find it amusing that scooters have various naming classes, just like BMW and Mercedes. The vast majority of people I see tooling around on their “mobility scooters” are just plain fat. They aren’t over 65 years old. On my Sunday bike ride I was flabbergasted and amused by the sight of a 350 pound woman on a Rascal with the pedal to the metal pulling a 275 pound man in a wheelchair attached by rope. The plague of slow metabolism is sweeping the countryside.    

 

While I was relaxing on my deck reading and trying to blot out the nightmare visions of obese boomers in Rascal formation like German panzers invading Poland, a brand new SUV pulled into the parking lot across the street. After five minutes, the driver’s side door opened and out sidled a four foot five, two hundred and fifty pound female senior citizen in all her girth. She waddled to the back of the SUV and opened the hatch to extract her walker with wheels. She began berating the three hundred pound dude that got out of the passenger side to come and get his walker. Then she motored off towards Laura’s Fudge, while her hubby conserved his energy waiting by the SUV. Minutes later she scooted her way back hauling a sack of fudge. They then trundled off towards the boardwalk, most likely headed for Kohrs Bros for a double dipped fudge ice cream cone or some Boardwalk fries smothered in cheese.   

  

Based upon my unscientific assessment of the people walking on the Wildwood boardwalk, I would conclude that 35% of the people are obese, 40% are overweight by 20 or 30 pounds (myself included), and 25% are in relatively good shape. After checking the government statistics, my assessment appears to be accurate. Who is to blame? The easy answer is to just blame the individual for their lack of self-restraint and inability to contain their impulses. But when you consider that 160 million out of 232 million adults in this country are either overweight or obese, along with 11 million adolescents, there must be something more sinister behind the phenomenon. There is no doubt that a major portion of the blame must be laid at the fat feet of those who could have exercised restraint over their cravings, but the words of master propagandist Edward Bernays provides another factor in the equation:

“If we understand the mechanism and motives of the group mind, it is now possible to control and regiment the masses according to our will without them knowing it.” – Edward Bernays

     

Bernays reveals a truth that is self-evident to those with critical thinking skills. Sadly, few Americans exhibit any thinking skills whatsoever. Our society has bifurcated into those who control and those who are controlled. The overlord Double Plus Alphas in our society consist of the Wall Street banker cabal, the executives of our mega-corporations, Federal Reserve governors, Washington DC politicians, Federal government apparatchiks, the propaganda experts in the mainstream corporate media, and the secretive billionaire set that manipulate and maneuver behind the scenes. The first step in controlling the Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, as Aldous Huxley knew in 1931, was to indoctrinate them with propaganda in our government run schools. This mission has been accomplished. The vast majority of school children graduate from the government school system with no ability to think critically or question what has been spoon fed to them as facts. The fascist alliance of corporations and the state begin in the public schools, with product advertisements by corporations now subsidizing school budgets. The road to obesity is paved with chicken nuggets, fries and pizza dispensed by the government schools on a daily basis.

Just as in Huxley’s Brave New World, America has been built upon the principles of Henry Ford’s assembly line—mass production, homogeneity, predictability, and consumption of disposable consumer goods. In the dystopian novel, members of every class, from birth, are indoctrinated by recorded voices repeating slogans while they sleep. Huxley didn’t imagine the power of TV and other mass media outlets to do the same while we are awake. We are bombarded day and night by propaganda from mega-corporations to buy their products. Mass consumption of processed food sold by the likes of multi-billion dollar corporations Kraft, Pepsico, Coca Cola, General Mills, Nestle, and Unilever is the chief cause of the obesity epidemic in America. The few know how to manipulate the many through messaging, repetition and persistently molding the opinions of the feeble minded non-thinking masses. The billions spent by corporations on advertising to convince the masses that eating a Wendy’s Baconator, KFC extra crispy bucket, or Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, washed down with a two liter Mountain Dew or Cherry Coke, is a tribute to the invisible government running the show. Huxley and Bernays had it all figured out eighty years ago:            

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons…who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.” – Edward Bernays, Propaganda, 1928

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the masses by the invisible government Alphas has transmuted citizens into overweight, non-thinking, debt dependent, egocentric consumers. This was not a mistake. The powerful interests used their control over the banking system, media outlets, and political system to lure the willfully ignorant into a debt financed lifestyle through the Federal Reserve created inflation, Wall Street peddled credit cards, auto loans and “creative” mortgages. The manipulators convinced the manipulated that borrowing today to buy houses, cars, bling, tech gadgets, clothing, and fast food was preferable to what previous generations of Americans had done – save to buy things they wanted or needed. This behavior seems to be completely irrational as a people that once saved 12% of their income and carried a moderate amount of debt chose to reduce their savings to 0% and not worry about tomorrow.

 

It is easier to understand when you realize who benefitted from this purposeful shift in societal norms. The low debt, high savings, production era from 1950 through 1980 benefitted the working middle class, allowing millions to improve their standard of living. The rising debt, low savings, consumption era, from 1980 through today, benefits the 1% Alphas while impoverishing the middle class and sentencing the lower class to a lifetime of dependent servitude to the state. Who benefitted from debt fueled conspicuous consumption and continues to benefit today? The peddlers of consumer debt on Wall Street and the mega-corporations that convinced Americans they couldn’t live without that 5,500 square foot McMansion, BMW X5, stainless steel appliances, 84 inch 3D HDTV, iPhone 5, diamond encrusted Coach handbag, and thousands of other Chinese made trinkets that pile up in underwater homes across the land, benefitted tremendously. The proliferation of debt resulted in obscene profits for the financial sector, record profits for the mega-corporations that shipped production to Asia in order to take advantage of the slave labor, and three decades of wage stagnation and increasing debt for the average working middle class American.    

 

The financialization of America was a conscious decision by the oligarchs. They controlled the issuance of credit. They controlled the currency and level of inflation inflicted upon the masses. They controlled the corporations selling consumer goods on credit. They controlled the Congress, courts, and government agencies with their deep pocket lobbying and buying of influence. Lastly, they controlled the media messages and molded the opinions and tastes of the masses through their Bernaysian propaganda techniques perfected over the decades. In one of the boldest and most blatant acts of audacity in world history, the Wall Street/K Street oligarchs wrecked the world economy in their insatiable thirst for profits, shifted their worthless debt onto the backs of taxpayers and unborn generations, threw senior citizens and savers under the bus by stealing $400 billion per year of interest from them, and enriched themselves with bubble level profits and bonus payouts. Meanwhile, median household income continues to fall, real GDP is stagnant, true unemployment exceeds 22%, and 47 million people are living on food stamps.   

 

The propaganda being flogged by the oligarchs since 2009 is the supposed deleveraging by the American consumer and trying to convince the ignorant masses to resume borrowing and spending. It’s working. Consumer credit outstanding is at an all-time high of $2.73 trillion as the Federal government has dished out billions in student loans to 50,000 University of Phoenix MBA aspirants sitting in their basements quivering with anticipation of on-line graduation and future six figure job with Goldman Sachs. The Feds have also added the impetus to the “strong” auto sales through their 85% TARP ownership of Ally Financial by doling out 7 year 0% auto loans to subprime borrowers in urban enclaves around the country. The oligarchs aren’t worried about these loans being paid back, because they are reaping the profits today. The future losses will just be foisted onto the taxpayer, as always. Total credit market debt of $55 trillion now exceeds 350% of GDP. The National Debt of $16.2 trillion will exceed $20 trillion in 2015 no matter who wins the Presidency in November. The oligarchs adapt and control whoever occupies the White House. It is essential for our owners to keep debt growing at an exponential rate or the Ponzi scheme collapses.

Narrow minded ideologues want a simple answer to a complex interaction of generational, cultural, economic, political, and criminal factors that have conspired to put the country into a predicament that, at this point, will inevitably lead to economic collapse. The truth is the American people have learned to love their servitude. They have willfully chosen ignorance over truth. They’ve chosen to believe what their keepers have instructed them. They’ve chosen to trust the storylines generated by the corporate media rather than think critically and question everything. They’ve chosen obesity and sickness over health. They’ve chosen debt financed faux wealth over savings based real wealth. They’ve chosen safety and security over liberty. They’ve chosen dependency over self-reliance. These choices were aided, abetted and promoted by the Alphas through their ability to manipulate and control the unthinking masses. Huxley understood the power of propaganda and brainwashing decades before it was perfected by our owners.  

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”Aldous Huxley

The saddest part of this episode of the Decline & Fall of the American Empire reality show is the continued delusion of the majority of the populace, as their desire for material goods and fair share of the entitlement pie outweighs their sense of obligation to their children and grandchildren. Their chosen ignorance is fulfilled through their attachment to their personal digital ignorance gadgets and supported by what passes for government education. The truth is obscured and hidden under waves of triviality, reality TV, and data manipulation by our government masters. The dystopian nightmare that engulfs our country has thus far resembled Huxley’s vision of a shallow populace easily distracted by consumerism, pleasure seeking, cultural trivialities, and a never ending ability to be distracted by meaningless minutia. Orwell’s darker vision of surveillance, captivity, information control, authoritarianism and pain will become the norm once the existing social order falls.   

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.”Neil PostmanAmusing Ourselves to Death

I despair for my country that has chosen to eat, amuse and borrow itself to death. But my despair is deepest for my children and their future. The greed, corruption, myopia, selfishness, and disregard for the well-being of future generations by current and past generations has left a barren and bleak landscape for my children. The Huxley vision of America consuming and amusing itself to death is coming to a painful conclusion, as the limits of a fiat currency and debt based lifestyle become evident. Those in power are preparing the masses for a more Orwellian vision of America when they are forced to pull the plug on the existing paradigm. The Patriot Act, NDAA, military exercises in our cities, militarization of local police forces, warrantless surveillance of our communications, searches and seizures in our airports and train stations, purchase of millions of rounds of ammo by government agencies, implementation of drone technology, camera surveillance, attempts to control the internet, manipulation of economic data, and executive orders allowing the President to take over all commerce while imprisoning citizens indefinitely without charges, are the next step in our descent into a dictatorship of tears.

The question is whether we will stand idly by, fiddling with our gadgets, tweeting about Honey Boo Boo, or will we regain our sense of duty to the future generations of this country. The manipulators are powerful, rich, connected and FEW. Those being manipulated, controlled, and abused are MANY. There will be a revolution in this country whether you like it or not. The existing social order will dissolve during the next fifteen years. What replaces it is up to us. George Carlin described what our owners want.

“Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They’ve got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest.”

What do “We the People” want?      



 

WHO DESTROYED THE MIDDLE CLASS – PART 3

This is the 3rd and final chapter of my series about the destruction of the middle class. In Part 1 of this series I addressed where and how the net worth of the middle class was stolen. In Part 2, I focused on the culprits in this grand theft and in Part 3, I will try to figure out why they stole your net worth and what would be required to restore sanity to this world.

Dude, Why Did They Steal My Net Worth?

“I have no problem with people becoming billionaires—if they got there by winning a fair race, if their accomplishments merit it, if they pay their fair share of taxes, and if they don’t corrupt their society. Most of them became wealthy by being well connected and crooked. And they are creating a society in which they can commit hugely damaging economic crimes with impunity, and in which only children of the wealthy have the opportunity to become successful. That’s what I have a problem with. And I think most people agree with me.” Charles FergusonPredator Nation

 

It is clear to me that a small cabal of politically connected ultra-wealthy psychopaths has purposefully and arrogantly stripped the middle class of their wealth and openly flaunted their complete disregard for the laws and financial regulations meant to enforce a fair playing field. Why did they gut the middle class in their rapacious appetite for riches? Why did the scorpion sting the frog while crossing the river, dooming them both? It was his nature. The same is true for the hubristic modern robber barons latched on the backs of the middle class. Their appetite for ever greater riches will never be mollified. They will always want more. They promise not to destroy the middle class, as that will surely extinguish the last hope for a true economic recovery built upon savings, investment and jobs, but it is their nature to destroy. A card carrying member of the plutocracy and renowned dog lover, Mitt Romney, revealed a truth not normally discussed by those running the show:

“I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine.”

The data from the Fed report confirms Romney’s assertion. The poorest 20% were the only household segment that saw an increase in their real median income between 2007 and 2010, while the richest 10% saw only a modest 5% decrease in their $200,000 plus, annual incomes. Meanwhile the middle class households experienced a brutal 8% to 9% decline in real income. Table 2 in Part 2 of this article reveals why the poorest 20% were able to increase their income. Transfer payments (unemployment, welfare, food stamps, SSDI) increased from 8.6% of their income in 2007 to 11.1% in 2010. Government transfer payments rose from $1.7 trillion in 2007 to $2.3 trillion today, a 35% increase in five years. I’m sure the bottom 20% are living high on the hog raking in that $13,400 per year. Think about these facts for just a moment. There are 23 million households in this country with a median annual household income of $13,400. That means half make less than that. There are 58 million households that have a median household income of $45,800, with half making less than that.

The reason Mitt Romney isn’t concerned about the very poor is because his only interaction with them is when they cut the lawn at one of his six homes. The truth is the bottom 20% are mostly penned up in our urban ghettos located in Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, NYC, LA, Atlanta, Miami, and the hundreds of other decaying metropolitan meccas. They generally kill each other and only get the attention of the top 10% if they dare venture into a white upper class neighborhood. They are the revenue generators for our corporate prison industrial complex – one of our few growth industries. They provide much of the cannon fodder for our military industrial complex. They are kept ignorant and incapable of critical thought by our Department of Education controlled public school system. The welfare state is built upon the foundation of this 20%. It is certainly true that the bottom 30 million households in this country, from an income standpoint, do receive hundreds of billions in entitlement transfers, but Table 2 clearly shows that 80% of their income comes from working. The annual $72 billion cost for the 46 million people on food stamps pales in comparison to the hundreds of billions being dispensed to the Wall Street banks by Ben Bernanke and Tim Geithner, and the $1 trillion per year funneled to the corporate arm dealers in the military industrial complex. The Wall Street maggots (i.e. J.P. Morgan) crawl around the decaying welfare corpse, extracting hundreds of millions in fees from the EBT system and the SNAP program as they encourage higher levels of spending.

This is all part of the diversion. Forty five years after the War on Poverty began, there are 49 million Americans living in poverty. That’s a solid good return on the $16 trillion spent so far. It’s on par with the 16 year zero percent real return in the stock market. We have produced a vast underclass of ignorant, uneducated, illiterate, dependent people who have become a huge voting block for the Democratic Party. Politicians, on the left, promise more entitlements to these people in order to get elected. Politicians on the right will not cut the entitlements for fear of being branded as uncaring. The Republicans agree to keep the welfare state growing and the Democrats agree to keep the warfare state growing -bipartisanship in all its glory. And the middle class has been caught in a pincer movement between the free shit entitlement army and the free shit corporate army. The oligarchs have been incredibly effective at using their control of the media, academia and ideological think tanks to keep the middle class ire focused upon the lower classes. While the middle class is fixated on people making $13,400 per year, the ultra-wealthy are bribing politicians to pass laws and create tax loopholes, netting them billions of ill-gotten loot. These specialists at Edward Bernays propaganda techniques were actually able to gain overwhelming support from the middle class for the repeal of estate taxes by rebranding them “death taxes”, even though the estate tax only impacts 15,000 households out of 117 million households in the U.S. The .01% won again.

Household Net Worth Survey of Consumer Finances Federal Reserve 2010

It is easy to understand how the hard working middle class is so easily manipulated by the corporate fascists into believing their decades of descent to a lower and lower standard of living is the result of the lazy good for nothings at the bottom of the food chain sucking on the teat of state with their welfare entitlements. I drive through the neighborhoods of West Philadelphia every day, inhabited by the households with a net worth of $8,500 and annual income of $13,400. They inhabit crumbling hovels worth less than $25,000, along pothole dotted streets strewn with waste, debris and rubbish. More than half the people in this war zone are high school dropouts, over 30% are unemployed, and drug dealing is the primary industry. When a drug dealer becomes too successful and begins to cut into the profits of the “legitimate” oligarch sanctioned drug industry, he is thrown into one of our thriving prisons. Marriage is an unknown concept. The life expectancy of males is far less than 79 years old. But something doesn’t quite make sense. Every hovel has a Direct TV satellite dish. The people shuffling around the streets all have expensive cell phones. There are newer model cars parked on the streets, including a fair number of BMWs, Mercedes, Cadillac Escalades and Volvos. How can this be when their annual income is $13,400 and they have $8,500 to their names?

This is where our friendly neighborhood Wall Street oligarchs enter the picture. These downtrodden people are not bright. They are easily manipulated and scammed. They believe driving an expensive car and appearing successful is the same as being successful. Therefore, they are easily susceptible to being lured into debt. Millions of these people represented the “subprime” mortgage borrowers during the housing bubble. The tremendous auto “sales” being reported by the mainstream media in an effort to boost consumer confidence about an economic recovery, are being driven by subprime auto loans from Ally Financial (85% owned by the U.S. Treasury/you the taxpayer) and the other government back stopped Wall Street banks. This is the beauty of credit. The mega-lenders reap tremendous profits up front, the illusion of economic progress is created, poor people feel rich for a while, and when it all blows up at a future date the middle class taxpayer foots the bill. Real wages for the 99% have been falling for three decades. You make poor people feel wealthy by providing them easy access to vast quantities of cheap debt. I’m a big fan of personal responsibility, but who is the real malignant organism in this relationship? The parasite banker class, like a tick on an old sleepy hound dog, has been blood sucking the poor and middle class for decades. They have peddled the debt, kept the poor enslaved, and have used their useful idiots in the media to convince millions of victims to blame each other through their skillful use of propaganda. They maintain their control by purposely creating crisis, promoting hysteria, and engineering “solutions” that leave them with more power and wealth, while stripping the average citizen of their rights, liberty, freedom and net worth (i.e. Housing Bubble to replace Internet Bubble, Glass-Steagall repeal, Patriot Act, TARP, NDAA, SOPA). Jesse cuts to the heart of the matter, revealing the darker side of our human nature:

“Sometimes when faced with problems that are confusing and troubling it is easier to think what someone tells you to think, particularly something that touches a deep and dark nerve in your nature, rather than carry the burden and ambiguity of struggling with the facts and thinking for yourself.  Repeating a party line is a shorthand way of avoiding real thought.  And the predators are always there to take advantage of it.  They welcome trouble and often foment crisis in order to advance their agendas.”

“Anyone can be misled by a clever person, and no one likes to readily admit that they have been had.  It is a sign of character and maturity to realize this, and admit you were deceived, and to demand change and reform. But some people cannot do this, even when the facts of the deception are revealed.  It seems as though the more incorrect that the truth shows them to be, the louder and more strident they become in shouting down and denying the reality of the situation.   And anyone who denies their perspective becomes ‘the other,’ someone to be feared and hated, shunned and eliminated, one way or the other.”

Until Debt Do Us Part

I sense signs of desperation amongst the plutocracy. Their propaganda machine is sputtering. Their storylines are growing tired. They have fended off the fury of the Tea Party movement by successfully high jacking it and neutralizing their impact under the thumb of the Republican establishment. The oligarchs called out their armed thugs to crush the OWS rage, while using their media mouthpieces to misrepresent the true purpose of the movement – Wall Street greed and criminality with Washington DC collusion. The Savings & Loan Crisis of the late 1980s resulted in 800 bankers being thrown into prison. After the greatest banker heist in history, not one banker has been thrown in jail. Obama and Holder have been neutered by their masters. The power elite openly brandish their glee at avoiding accountability for their crimes. They are desperately attempting to re-inflate the debt bubble, as debt is the lifeblood of these vampire squids. The key piece of their current propaganda campaign is to convince the people they have effectively deleveraged and their continuing austerity efforts are actually detrimental to economic recovery. It’s nothing but a confidence game to keep the Ponzi going. The Ponzi operators want to extract every last dime from the masses before the engineered collapse. The data does not confirm the deleveraging narrative. Total credit market debt in the United States is now at an all-time high and stands at 345% of GDP. In 1977 it stood at 155% of GDP and at 250% in 2000.

Total credit market debt is now $4 trillion higher than it was in 2007, prior to the financial collapse. It has gone up by $1 trillion in the last 12 months. Does this sound like deleveraging? The chart below details the truth the moneyed interests don’t want you to understand. The bastions of capitalism on Wall Street have dumped $3.4 trillion of their toxic debt and $1 trillion of mortgage and credit card debt onto the backs of middle class taxpayers and future unborn generations. They did this under the auspices of saving the economic system. Their sole purpose has been to save themselves from becoming part of the middle class. The transfer of wealth from the quarry (middle class) to the predators (moneyed interests) continues unabated.

The faux journalists in the mainstream media have been pounding the consumer deleveraging mantra. They babble on about the austere masses methodically paying down their debts. It’s a specious lie. The chart below shows that banks have written off $218 billion of credit card debt since 2008. It also shows outstanding revolving debt falling from $1.01 trillion to $819 billion, a $191 billion decrease. For the math challenged, like any Wall Street shill paraded on CNBC, this means consumers have added $27 billion of credit card debt since 2008. Does that sound like deleveraging? Households have also taken on $300 billion of additional student loan debt since 2008, buying into the government sponsored scam to keep the unemployment rate lower by offering the false hope of jobs with useless on-line degrees from the University of Phoenix. Does that sound like deleveraging?

Consumer Credit Card Debt and Charge-off Data (in Billions):

Outstanding Revolving Consumer   Debt Outstanding Credit Card Debt Qrtly Credit Card Charge-Off   Rate Qrtly Credit Card Charge-Off   in Dollars
Q1 2012 $819.4 $803.0 4.37% $8.8
2011 $864.9 $847.6
Q4 2011 $864.9 $847.6 4.53% $9.6
Q3 2011 $826.2 $809.7 5.63% $11.4
Q2 2011 $819.2 $802.8 5.58% $11.2
Q1 2011 $810.7 $794.4 6.96% $13.8
2010 $857.4 $840.2 $77.9
Q4 2010 $857.4 $840.2 7.70% $16.2
Q3 2010 $836.0 $819.2 8.55% $17.5
Q2 2010 $847.5 $830.5 10.97% $22.8
Q1 2010 $860.3 $843.1 10.16% $21.4
2009 $921.9 $903.4 $85.6
Q4 2009 $921.9 $903.4 10.12% $22.8
Q3 2009 $922.2 $903.7 10.1% $22.8
Q2 2009 $933.1 $914.4 9.77% $22.3
Q1 2009 $946.1 $927.2 7.62% $17.7
Q4 2008 $1,010.3 $990.1

(Source: CardHub.com, Federal Reserve)

They only people with the courage to tell it like it is are skeptics and outcasts from polite society inhabited by the power elite – people like Ron Paul, Michael Burry, and deceased critical thinkers like Frank Zappa and George Carlin. In one of his final appearances, Carlin brutally lashed out with a torrent of truth, only spoken by courageous people not worried about the consequences of their blunt honesty:

“Politicians are put there to give you that idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations, and they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State Houses, and the City Halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else. But I’ll tell you what they don’t want—they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interest. You know something, they don’t want people that are smart enough to sit around their kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that, you know what they want?

They want obedient workers, obedient workers. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. The table is tilted folks, the game is rigged. Nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care. Good honest hard working people, white collar, blue collar, it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Because the owners of this country know the truth, it’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

Grotesque Casino of Corporate Fascism

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” – Frank Zappa

average-income-americans

“Specifically, over the past 15 years, the global financial system – encouraged by misguided policy and short-sighted monetary interventions – has lost its function of directing scarce capital toward projects that enhance the world’s standard of living. Instead, the financial system has been transformed into a self-serving, grotesque casino that misallocates scarce savings, begs for and encourages speculative bubbles, refuses to restructure bad debt, and demands that the most reckless stewards of capital should be rewarded through bailouts that transfer bad debt from private balance sheets to the public balance sheet. What is central here is that the government policy environment has encouraged this result. This environment includes financial sector deregulation that was coupled with a government backstop, repeated monetary distortions, refusal to restructure bad debt, and a preference for policy cowardice that included bailouts and opaque accounting. Deregulation and lower taxes will not fix this problem, nor will larger stimulus packages.” John Hussman

None of the solutions put forth by Obama or Romney will fix the problems facing the country today. They are two handpicked figureheads representing the same owners. Both political parties are responsible for the grotesque casino that passes for our financial system. These political hacks have been in alternating control of our government system for the last 150 years. They don’t want to come up with real solutions to the problems they created. The owners want obedient slaves, distracted by technology and shallow entertainment, subjugated by debt used to buy things they want but don’t need, believing waging wars in distant lands keeps us safe, and favoring the imprisonment of petty thieves and drug users while the grand thieves run the country and control our currency. Keeping the willfully ignorant masses in the dark and confused is a vital part of the plan. Debt is the ingredient that enriches the issuers and keeps the dupes in check.  Wall Street bankers, Federal Reserve governors, captured financial “experts”, journalists paid by corporations, economists with an ideological agenda and bought off politicians all repeating the same theme with the same unquestioning, strident conviction is a sure sign that we are being played. The never ending series of titanic bailouts of Wall Street did not avert a catastrophic economic collapse. They protected the corporate fascists from experiencing the consequences of their monstrous predatory actions over the last few decades. And it was all done for money. Simple human greed and an insane desire by a few psychotic men to control and manipulate others for their own selfish pleasure is what has turned this country into a corporate fascist state bereft of its soul and original founding principles, as stated by Ron Paul:

“We’re not moving toward Hitler-type fascism, but we’re moving toward a softer fascism: Loss of civil liberties, corporations running the show, big government in bed with big business. So you have the military-industrial complex, you have the medical-industrial complex, you have the financial industry, you have the communications industry. They go to Washington and spend hundreds of millions of dollars. That’s where the control is. I call that a soft form of fascism — something that’s very dangerous.”

The soft form of fascism easily transforms into the hard form as those in control exhibit their supremacy with displays of military potency in our cities (Boston, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago), passage of liberty stripping legislation like the Patriot Act and NDAA, along with announcements about thousands of drones patrolling our skies over the next five years. When propaganda begins to lose its effectiveness, brute force is the next step. Whenever I write about the slow methodical disintegration of our once great republic into a dysfunctional banana republic controlled by bankers, mega-corporations and arms dealers; the apologists for the empire scoff and cynically ask for my solutions. I, along with many other rational thinking realists, have proposed solutions, but they don’t have a snowballs chance in Syria of ever even being debated by the existing ruling class. The unholy alliance between bankers, corporate interests and politicians must be broken. These proposals would go a long way towards breaking that alliance:

Political System

  • Since politicians cannot be trusted to exhibit courage or intelligence when it comes to public policy, a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution needs to be passed, with a five to ten year      implementation period to ameliorate the pain.
  • Term limits of 6 years for Congressmen and Senators. Serving in Congress should not be a career. It is a duty to the country. The purpose of Congress is to represent the existing generations of citizens and ensure that future generations have a country that offers opportunity to live a better life than their parents.
  • The entire election process would be scraped. It would be transformed into a 3 month publicly financed election. No money from corporations, unions, or individuals would be allowed. Multiple candidates      would have an opportunity to debate on public TV. The two party domination of our political process must be broken.
  • Corporations are not people. Extreme wealth does not give someone the right to buy elections. Rich oligarchs operating in the shadows and spending billions on negative advertising is not how a republic should elect their representatives.  Lobbyists, special interests and PACs and would be eliminated from the political process.
  • The President could no longer issue Executive Orders, undercutting the legislative process.
  • Every bill before Congress would immediately be put online. The constituents of every Congressmen and Senator would be allowed to voice their opinion by voting yes or no online.
  • Every bill that is proposed by a Congressman must have a funding mechanism. If the proposal increases costs to the American taxpayer, something else must be cut to pay for the new proposal. This would be unnecessary if a balance budget amendment was passed.
  • No American troops could be committed to war in a foreign country without a full vote of Congress as required by the U.S. Constitution.
  • A cost benefit analysis would be conducted regarding every department and agency in the Federal Government by the GAO. Those failing to meet minimum requirements would be drastically reduced or eliminated.
  • The education of children would be delegated to localities, without Federal mandates. Every child in America would receive vouchers for grade school, high school and college. They could choose any      school to attend – public or private. If the private school cost more than the voucher, the family would pay the difference. Excellent schools would flourish, poor schools would be forced to improve or they would close. Teacher tenure would be eliminated. Teaching excellence would be rewarded.

Economic Policy

  • The first thing to be done is to abolish the Federal Reserve. It is owned by and operated for the benefit of the biggest banks in the world. Its sole purpose has been to enrich the few at the expense of the many through its insidious use of inflation and debt issuance. It has been around for less than 100 years and has debased the USD by 96%. The U.S. Treasury has the authority to issue the currency of the country. It did so from 1789 until 1913.
  • The 2nd thing to do would be to reinstitute the Glass-Steagall Act because Wall Street cannot be trusted to manage their risk properly. This would separate true banking activities from the high risk gambling that brought the economic system to its knees. Privatizing the profits and socializing the losses is unacceptable.
  • The FASB would be directed to make all banks and financial corporations value their assets at their true market value. This would reveal the mega Wall Street banks and corporations like GE to be insolvent. An orderly bankruptcy of all insolvent financial firms involving the sell-off of their legitimate assets to well-run risk adverse banks that didn’t screw up would ensue. Bondholders and stockholders would realize their losses for awful investment decisions. The economic system would be purged of its bad debt.
  • The currency of the US would be backed by hard assets. A basket of gold, silver, platinum, uranium, and some other limited hard commodities would back the USD. If politicians attempted to spend too much, the price of this basket would reflect their inflationary schemes immediately.
  • The 16th Amendment would be repealed and the income tax would be scrapped. It would be replaced with a national consumption tax. The more you consume, the more taxes you pay. Wages, savings and investment would be untaxed. The tax code is the source for much of politicians’ power. Its demise would further reduce Washington DC control over our lives.
  • A downsizing of the US Military from $1 trillion to $500 billion annually would be initiated through the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, Germany, Japan and hundreds of other bases throughout the world. Policing the world is bankrupting the empire.
  • All corporate, farm, education, and social engineering subsidies would be eliminated. All Federal employees would have their pay slashed by 10% and the workforce would be reduced by 20% over 5 years. Federal health benefits and pension benefits would be set at average private industry levels.
  • The Social Security System would be completely overhauled. Anyone 50 or older would get exactly what they were promised. The age for collecting SS would be gradually raised to 72 over the next 15 years. Those between 25 and 50 would be given the option to opt out of SS. They would be given their contributions to invest as they see fit if they opt out. Anyone entering the workforce today would not pay in or receive any benefits. The wage limit for SS would be eliminated and the tax rate would be reduced from 6.2% to 3%.
  • The Medicare system is unsustainable. It would be converted from a government program to private market based program. The Federal mandates, rules and regulations would be eliminated. Senior citizens would be given healthcare vouchers which they would be free to use with any insurance company or doctor based on price and quality. Insurance companies would compete for business on a national basis. Doctors would compete for business. The GAO would have their budget doubled and they would audit Medicare fraud & Medicaid fraud and prosecute the criminals without impunity.
  • The healthcare bill would be repealed. Insurance companies would be allowed to compete with each other on a national basis. Tort reform would be implemented so that doctors could do their jobs without fear of being destroyed by slimy personal injury lawyers. Doctors would need to post their costs for various procedures. Price and quality would drive the healthcare market.
  • The entitlement state would be dismantled. The criteria for collecting welfare, SSDI, food stamps and unemployment benefits would be made much stricter. Unemployed people collecting government payments would be required to clean up parks, volunteer at community charity organizations, pick up trash along highways, fix and paint houses in their neighborhoods and generally keep busy in a productive manner for society.
  • A free market method for stabilizing the housing market would be for banks to voluntarily reduce the mortgage balances of underwater homeowners in exchange for a PAR (Property Appreciation Right). The homeowner would agree to pay off the PAR to the Treasury (and administered through the IRS) out of future price appreciation on the existing home or subsequent property. The homeowner would be excluded from taking on any home equity loans or executing any “cash out” refinancing until the PAR was satisfied. The maximum PAR obligation accepted by the Treasury would be based on the value of the home and the income of the homeowner.

I’m sure there are many more solutions which non-captured, intelligent, reasonable citizens could put forth to save this country. None of these ideas would be acceptable to the country’s owners. They would reduce their wealth and power. What these oligarchs do not realize is that we are in the midst of a Fourth Turning. Those who experienced the last one have died off. The existing social order will be swept away. It is likely to be violent and bloody. Good people and bad people will die. When the Crisis reaches its climax we will have the opportunity to implement good solutions. There is also the distinct possibility that our increasingly ignorant populace will turn to a messianic psychopath that promises them renewed glory. Decades of delusional decisions will lead to a future that will not be orderly or controllable.

 

 “The Banks must be restrained, and the financial system reformed, with balance restored to the economy, before there can be any sustained growth and recovery. If the suffering becomes great enough, change will inevitably come, but it may not be orderly or as controllable as the moneyed interests often like to think.” – Jesse

Parts 1 & 2 can be accessed here:

PART 1

PART 2

GoldMoney. The best way to buy gold & silver

H.L. MENCKEN WAS RIGHT

“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.” – H.L. Mencken

 

H.L. Mencken was a renowned newspaper columnist for the Baltimore Sun from 1906 until 1948. His biting sarcasm seems to fit perfectly in today’s world. His acerbic satirical writings on government, democracy, politicians and the ignorant masses are as true today as they were then. I believe the reason his words hit home is because he was writing during the last Unraveling and Crisis periods in America. The similarities cannot be denied. There are no journalists of his stature working in the mainstream media today. His acerbic wit is nowhere to be found among the lightweight shills that parrot their corporate masters’ propaganda on a daily basis and unquestioningly report the fabrications spewed by our government. Mencken’s skepticism of all institutions is an unknown quality in the vapid world of present day journalism.

The Roaring Twenties of decadence, financial crisis caused by loose Fed monetary policies, stock market crash, Depression, colossal government redistribution of wealth, and ultimately a World War, all occurred during his prime writing years. I know people want to believe that the world only progresses, but they are wrong. The cycles of history reveal that people do not change, just the circumstances change. How Americans react to the undulations of history depends upon their age and generational position. We are currently in a Crisis period when practical, truth telling realists like Mencken are most useful and necessary.

Mencken captured the essence of American politics and a disconnected populace 80 years ago. Even though many people today feel the average American is less intelligent, more materialistic, and less informed than ever before, it was just as true in 1930 based on Mencken’s assessment:

“The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

You can make your own judgment on the accuracy of his statement considering the last two gentlemen to occupy the White House. His appraisal of U.S. Senators and citizens in our so-called Democracy captures the spirit of the travesty that passes for leadership and civic responsibility in this country today.

“Democracy gives the beatification of mediocrity a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebacks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants, the grand goblins of the Ku Klux and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters — which is what makes United States Senators, fortune tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.”

People still read newspapers in the 1930s to acquire credible information about the economy, politics and economy. Today’s corporate owned rags aren’t fit to line a bird cage. The mainstream media is a platform for the lies of their corporate sponsors. Each TV network or newspaper spouts propaganda that supports the financial interests and ideology they are beholden to. Does anyone think they are obtaining the truth from Paul Krugman, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh? Evidently the answer is yes. The upcoming presidential campaign will be a nightmare of endless negative advertisements created by Madison Avenue maggots and paid for by rich powerful men attempting to herd the mindless sheeple towards their ultimate slaughter. Whichever corporate controlled party can more successfully scare the masses into pulling their lever in the voting booth on November 6th will get the opportunity push the country closer to its ultimate collapse. This collapse was destined from the time of Mencken when the Federal Reserve was created by a small group of powerful bankers and their cronies in Congress. Fear has worked for 100 years in controlling the masses, as Mencken noted during his time:

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

In the 1930s you needed to count on newspapers for the truth. The purpose of those who wield power is to keep the masses dumbed down and paranoid regarding terrorist threats and artificial enemies. By convincing the dense public that acquiring material goods on credit was a smart thing to do, they have trapped them in a web of debt. By making life an inexhaustible bureaucratic nightmare or rules, regulations, forms, ID cards, registrations, and red tape, those in power maintain control and accumulate power. H.L. Mencken would be proud:

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”

Let’s See How Far We’ve Come

“The worst government is often the most moral. One composed of cynics is often very tolerant and humane. But when fanatics are on top there is no limit to oppression.” – H.L. Mencken

 

The corporate / government / banking oligarchy started the fire. The world is burning to the ground and politicians have thrown gasoline onto the fire with passage of debt financed stimulus programs, Obamacare, bank bailouts, the Patriot Act, NDAA, and a myriad of other government “solutions”. To anyone willing to think for just a few minutes, the picture is unambiguous. This requires the ability to think critically – a missing gene among the majority of Americans.

Critical thinking is the careful, deliberate determination of whether one should accept, reject, or suspend judgment about a claim and the degree of confidence with which one accepts or rejects it. Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance and fairness. Critical thinking requires extensive experience in identifying the extent of one’s own ignorance in a wide variety of subjects (“I thought I knew, but I merely believed.”)

One becomes less biased and more broad-minded when one becomes more intellectually empathetic and intellectually humble. I have observed little or no critical thinking skills in the pompous asses that write daily columns in today’s newspapers and zero critical thinking skills among the vacuous pundits and big breasted brainless fashion models that yap all day long on CNBC, MSNBC, CNN, Fox and the Big 3 dying networks.

Any thinking would be a shocking change of pace from the corrupt corporate owned politicians in Washington DC. Other than Ron Paul and a few other truth tellers, critical thinking from a politician or a government bureaucrat is about as likely as Obama not using a teleprompter. Everything being spewed at the public from the MSM, Wall Street, and Washington DC is intellectually dishonest, manipulated and packaged by pollsters and PR firms. I’ve come to the conclusion that those in power desire that public school systems of the United States churn out ignorant, non-questioning morons. A populace that is incapable or uninterested in critically thinking about the important issues of the day is a politician’s best friend. Half the population doesn’t vote and the other half unquestioningly obeys what they are told by their parties.

Ignorance is the state of being uninformed about issues and unaware about the implications of those issues. It is not about intelligence. A huge swath of America is ignorant due to lack of education and a low class upbringing. But, I know many college educated people who haven’t read a book in 20 years or could care less about economic issues. They made a choice to be ignorant. They prefer being distracted by their latest technological toy to dealing with reality.

Most Americans are incapable of looking beyond a 2 to 3 year time horizon. That is why the median 401k balance in the US is $13,000. That is why the average credit card debt per household is $16,000. That is why 25% of all homeowners are underwater on their mortgage. Politicians, banks, and marketers take advantage of this witlessness to enslave the average American. We’ve come to love our slavery. Appearing successful because you drive the right car, wear the right clothes or live in the right house is more important than actually doing the hard work to actually become successful, like spending less than you make and saving the difference.

An informed, interested, questioning public would be a danger to the government as described by H.L. Mencken:

“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out … without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.”

There were already two fiscal hurricanes of unfunded liabilities and current deficits churning towards our shores before Obama and his non-critical thinking Democratic minions launched a third storm called Obamacare. No matter how many intellectually deceitful mouthpieces like Paul Krugman and Rush Limbaugh misrepresent the facts, the fiscal foundation of the country is crumbling under the weight of unfunded entitlement promises, out of control government spending and far flung military misadventures. Only someone who is intellectually bankrupt, like Krugman, would declare the National Debt at $8 trillion as a looming disaster when George Bush was President, but declare that a $15.6 trillion National Debt headed towards $20 trillion by 2015 isn’t a danger now that Barack Obama is President. The intellectual and moral credentials required to write for a major newspaper have fallen markedly since the days of Mencken.

The combination of educationally uninformed, ignorant by choice, and intellectually dishonest will be fatal for the country. Total US credit market debt as a percentage of GDP is just below an all-time high, exceeding 350% of GDP. It is 25% higher than it was at the depths of the Great Depression. Consumer debt fell in 2010 – 2011 because banks wrote off about a trillion dollars of bad debt, while government debt has skyrocketed to unprecedented levels. Now consumers are back racking up more debt, with government encouragement and subsidies responsible for the surge in student loan and auto debt. With GDP stalling out, government debt accumulating at $1.4 trillion per year and consumers back to their delusional selves again, this ratio will pass 400% by 2014.

The financial crisis was caused by excessive utilization of debt. In order to correct these imbalances, the country needed to undergo a deleveraging and reversion back to a country of savers. Savings equals investment. Instead, our “leaders” have reduced interest rates to 0% and have gone on an unprecedented government borrowing and spending spree. Savers and senior citizens are punished, while gamblers and speculators are rewarded. Anyone who thinks about this strategy for a few minutes will realize it is asinine and hopeless. It enriches the few and impoverishes the many.

Based upon a realistic assessment of our current spending trajectory, The National Debt of the U.S. will exceed $25 trillion by 2019. That is more than double the figure when Bush left office. George Bush almost doubled the National Debt from $5.6 trillion to $11 trillion during his reign of error. It seems one thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on is that spending money they don’t have will have no negative consequences (“deficits don’t matter” – Cheney). When you have a Federal Reserve willing to print to infinity there is no limit to how much you can spend. Only a fool would believe there won’t be consequences. That fool writes an opinion column for the NYT and has a Nobel Prize on his bookshelf.

We add $3.8 billion of debt to this figure each and every day. We add $158 million to this figure each and every hour. The interest on the National Debt reached an all-time high of $454 billion in 2011 with an effective interest rate of about 3%. Much of this interest is paid to foreign governments like China, Japan and OPEC nations. This is $1.2 billion per day of interest paid mostly to foreigners. With just the slightest bit of critical thinking one could easily perceive that with a National Debt of $25 trillion and a likely increase in interest rates to at least 6%, our annual interest costs would increase to $1.5 trillion per year. The United States needed to implement a long-term plan ten years ago to address the impossible to fulfill promises made by its corrupt, mentally bankrupt politicians. Americans’ inability to deal with reality and fondness for not thinking beyond tomorrow has shown them to be an inferior species, as Mencken noted:

“The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear – fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.”

The entire revenue of the US government totaled $2.3 trillion in 2011, with $800 billion of those funds earmarked for Social Security outlays in the future. Does this appear sustainable? President Obama submits budgets of never ending trillion dollar deficits and then gives stump speeches declaring that we must get our deficits under control. He appears on the MSM declaring his dedication to fiscal responsibility and what passes for a journalist these days nods their head like a lapdog and lobs the next softball to the President. You have to be delusional to believe this claptrap. Luckily for the politicians, most Americans are delusional and apathetic. They just got another text message from their BFF. They are consumed by who will get booted this week from American Idol or Dancing With the Stars. The NFL draft is tonight and did your hear that Kim Kardashian is doing Kanye West?

H.L. Mencken understood the false promises of democracy 80 years ago:

“Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses. It is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

We deserve to get it good and hard, and we will.

 

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NDAA AUTHORIZED PREDATOR DRONES OVER AMERICA

So not only can Obama now imprison us with no charges, he can spy on us and if need be fire a missile at us from one of the predator drones that will now be roaming the skies above America. Why the fuck would predator drones be needed in America? The weight of evidence grows by the day. Our government is preparing for an epic collapse and will do everything in their power to retain control over the ignorant masses. Will the ignorant masses ever wake up?

Chances of Central New York drone flights improve as new law allows six national test sites

Published: Thursday, January 05, 2012, 2:00 AM

Washington — The Air National Guard’s 174th Fighter Wing is a step closer to gaining federal permission to fly unmanned Reaper drones out of its base at Hancock Field, according to U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer.

The National Defense Authorization Act signed into law last week by President Barack Obama allows for the establishment of six national test sites where drones could fly through civil air space.

Schumer, D-N.Y., said Tuesday he pushed for the establishment of six spots, instead of the planned four, to improve the chances that Hancock Field would be included. The 174th Fighter Wing has been trying for almost five years to convince the Federal Aviation Administration to allow flights of the MQ-9 Reaper drones out of Hancock Field.

The FAA bans such unmanned flights because of concerns about the remotely piloted drones flying through civil airspace used by commercial aircraft at Syracuse’s Hancock International Airport.

Schumer said he sent a letter Tuesday to FAA Acting Commissioner Michael Huerta, asking for Hancock to be one of the national test sites.

Hancock Field, which will eventually host a full squadron of Reaper drones, has the largest potential training space in the Northeast. Most of the drones assigned to the 174th Fighter Wing are now remotely operated in Afghanistan and Iraq by pilots at the Mattydale base.

Schumer said Hancock already meets FAA requirements for unmanned aerial vehicles because about 7,000 square miles surrounding the airport is designated as “special use” airspace.

He said that “making Hancock a test site for this technology would be a boon for Central New York, creating jobs and bringing new investments to our defense contractors that provide thousands of good paying jobs.”

The senator noted that two Central New York companies, SRC and Saab Sensis Corp., are working on technology to help integrate drones into the national airspace with “sense and avoid” ground-based radars. In addition, the Mattydale base employs more than 1,200 people.

In his letter to Huerta, Schumer said Hancock Field’s assets make it an ideal location, including the large open spaces of Lake Ontario and the Adirondack Park.

“Hancock Field is ideally positioned to be a test site because of its attractive air space, and because the region has two restricted areas, four seasons, a varied terrain, an over water range, air to ground gunnery capability and large airspace volume – all essential to ensuring that our drones and their pilots are able to complete their missions abroad,” Schumer wrote.

FAA officials had no immediate comment.

Col. Kevin Bradley, commander of the 174th Fighter Wing, has said that any Reaper drones that eventually fly out of Hancock would not be equipped with missiles or bombs. No training would take place within civilian air space, Bradley said.

The drones would be armed with live ordnance only when used at firing ranges at Fort Drum near Watertown. Central New York peace activists have protested the Air National Guard’s decision to base the drones at Hancock Field.