THIS DAY IN HISTORY – Occupy Wall Street begins – 2011

Via History.com

Timeline of Occupy Wall Street - Wikipedia

On September 17, 2011, hundreds of activists gather around Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan for the first day of the Occupy Wall Street Movement—a weeks-long sit-in in New York City’s Financial District protesting income inequality and corporate corruption. While the movement failed to see any of its goals or policy proposals come to fruition, years later, Occupy Wall Street is still considered a blueprint for decentralized activism.

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WE TRADED LIBERTY & FREEDOM FOR SAFETY & SECURITY

LLPOH asked for a reposting of an article from the old days to see the shit throwing monkeys in full display regarding OWS. This was from October 2011.

Our finest doing their duty in Oakland, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and NYC.

Do you feel safe now?

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THE UNBEARABLE SLOWNESS OF FOURTH TURNINGS (PART TWO)

In Part 1 of this article I provided the background regarding the phases of Fourth Turnings and where we stand nine years into this period of crisis. I will now ponder what could happen during the remainder of this Fourth Turning.

“History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The most important point to comprehend is the death of the existing social order always occurs during the course of a Fourth Turning. Thus far, those constituting the Deep State hierarchy have fended off their demise. They are utilizing every tool at their disposal to retain their wealth, power and control. As their mass media propaganda machine falters, they have redoubled their rigging of financial markets to promote a narrative of economic recovery, while further enriching themselves and their cronies.

It is clear they have reached the peak of financial manipulation, money printing, and artificial interest rate suppression. The narrative is faltering. Their last and final option to retain power is war. As their “everything bubble” (stocks, bonds, real estate) inevitably implodes, civil and/or global military conflict will be utilized to distract the populace from their Deep State domestic disasters.

Continue reading “THE UNBEARABLE SLOWNESS OF FOURTH TURNINGS (PART TWO)”

THE UNBEARABLE SLOWNESS OF FOURTH TURNINGS

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning 

This Fourth Turning was ignited suddenly in September 2008 as the housing bubble, created by the Federal Reserve and their criminal puppeteer owners on Wall Street, collapsed, revealing the greatest control fraud in world history. A crisis mood was catalyzed as the stock market dropped 50%, unemployment surged to highs not seen since 1981, foreclosures exploded, and captured politicians bailed out the criminal bankers with the tax dollars of the victims.

The mood of the country darkened immediately as average Americans flooded their congressmen’s websites and phone lines with a demand not to bailout the felonious Wall Street banks with $700 billion of TARP. But they ignored their supposed constituents and revealed who they are truly beholden to.

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COMFORTABLY NUMB (Oldie but Goodie)

Originally published in November 2011.

Hello?
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone at home?
Come on, now,
I hear you’re feeling down.
Well I can ease your pain
And get you on your feet again.
Relax.
I need some information first.
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?

Pink Floyd – Comfortably Numb

As I observe the zombie like reactions of Americans to our catastrophic economic highway to collapse, the continued plundering and pillaging of the national treasury by criminal Wall Street bankers, non-enforcement of existing laws against those who committed the largest crime in history, and reaction to young people across the country getting beaten, bludgeoned, shot with tear gas and pepper sprayed by police, I can’t help but wonder whether there is anyone home. Why are most Americans so passively accepting of these calamitous conditions? How did we become so comfortably numb? I’ve concluded Americans have chosen willful ignorance over thoughtful critical thinking due to their own intellectual laziness and overpowering mind manipulation by the elite through their propaganda emitting media machines. Some people are awaking from their trance, but the vast majority is still slumbering or fuming at erroneous perpetrators.

Both the Tea Party movement and the Occupy Wall Street movement are a reflection of the mood change in the country, which is a result of government overreach, political corruption, dysfunctional economic policies, and a financial system designed to enrich the few while defrauding the many. The common theme is anger, frustration and disillusionment with a system so badly broken it appears unfixable through the existing supposedly democratic methods. The system has been captured by an oligarchy of moneyed interests from the financial industry, mega-corporations, and military industrial complex, protected by their captured puppets in Washington DC and sustained by the propaganda peddling corporate media. The differences in political parties are meaningless as they each advocate big government solutions to all social, economic, foreign relations, and monetary issues.

There is confusion and misunderstanding regarding the culprits in this drama. It was plain to me last week when I read about a small group of concerned citizens in the next town over who decided to support the Occupy movement by holding a nightly peaceful march to protest the criminal syndicate that is Wall Street and a political system designed to protect them. My local paper asked for people’s reaction to this Constitutional exercising of freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Here is a sampling of the comments:

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FOURTH TURNING – SOCIAL & CULTURAL DISTRESS DIVIDING THE NATION

I wrote the first three parts of this article back in September and planned to finish it in early October, but life intervened and truthfully I don’t think I was ready to confront how bad things will likely get as this Fourth Turning moves into the violent, chaotic war stage just over the horizon. The developments in the Middle East, Europe, U.S., China and across the globe in the last months have confirmed my belief war drums are beating louder, global war beckons, and much bloodshed will be the result. Fourth Turnings proceed at their own pace within the 20 to 25 year crisis framework, but there is one guarantee – they never de-intensify as they progress. Just as Winter gets colder, stormier and more bitter as you proceed from December through February, Fourth Turnings get nastier, grimmer, more perilous, with our way of life hanging in the balance.

In Part 1 of this article I discussed the catalyst spark which ignited this Fourth Turning and the seemingly delayed regeneracy. In Part 2 I pondered possible Grey Champion prophet generation leaders who could arise during the regeneracy. In Part 3 I focused on the economic channel of distress which is likely to be the primary driving force in the next phase of this Crisis. In Part 4 I will assess the social and cultural channels of distress dividing the nation, Part 5 the technological, ecological, political, military channels of distress likely to burst forth with the molten ingredients of this Fourth Turning, and finally in Part 6 our rendezvous with destiny, with potential climaxes to this Winter of our discontent.

The road ahead will be distressful for everyone living in the U.S., as we experience the horrors of war, economic collapse, civil chaos, political upheaval, and the tearing of society’s social fabric. The pain and suffering being experienced across the globe today will not bypass the people of the United States. Winter has arrived and lethal storms are gathering in the distance. Don’t think you can escape. You can prepare, but this Crisis will reshape our society for better or worse, and you cannot sidestep the consequences or cruel environment we must survive.

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FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART TWO

In Part One of this article I laid the groundwork of the Fourth Turning generational theory. I refuted President Obama’s claim that the shadow of crisis has passed. The shadow grows ever larger and will engulf the world in darkness in the coming years. The Crisis will be fueled by the worsening debt, civic decay and global disorder. I will address these issues in this article.

Debt, Civic Decay & Global Disorder

The core elements propelling this Crisis – debt, civic decay, and global disorder – were obvious over a decade before the financial meltdown catalyst sparked this ongoing two decade long Crisis. With the following issues unresolved, the shadow of this crisis has only grown larger and more ominous:

Debt

  • The national debt has risen by $7 trillion (64%) to $18.1 trillion since 2009 and continues to accelerate by $2.3 billion per day, on track to surpass $20 trillion before Obama leaves office and $25 trillion by 2019.

  • The national debt as a percentage of GDP is currently 103% (it would be 106% if the BEA hadn’t decided to positively “adjust” GDP up by $500 billion last year). It is on course to reach 120% by 2019. Rogoff and Reinhart have documented the fact countries that surpass 90% experience economic turmoil, decline, and ultimately currency collapse and debt default.
  • Despite the housing collapse and hundreds of billions in mortgage, credit card, auto, and corporate debt being written off, dumped on the backs of taxpayers and hidden on the Federal Reserve balance sheet, total credit market debt has reached a new high of $58 trillion.

  • Harvard professor Laurence Kotlikoff has been a lone voice telling the truth about the true level of unfunded promises hidden in the CBO numbers. The unfunded social welfare liabilities in excess of $200 trillion for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Obamacare are nothing but a massive future tax increase on younger and unborn generations. Kotlikoff explains what would be required to pay these obligations:

To honor these obligations we could (a) raise all federal taxes, immediately and permanently, by 57%, (b) cut all federal spending, apart from interest on the debt, by 37%, immediately and permanently, or (c) do some combination of (a) and (b).”

The level of taxation and/or Federal Reserve created inflation necessary to honor these politician promises is too large to be considered feasible. Therefore, these promises, made to get corrupt political hacks elected to public office, will be defaulted upon.

Continue reading “FOURTH TURNING – THE SHADOW OF CRISIS HAS NOT PASSED – PART TWO”

FOURTH TURNING ACCELERATING

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability –problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

This past week saw an event revealing the cluelessness and ignorance of the linear thinking establishment. They are oblivious to the cyclicality of history and unaware of their precarious situation, as the mood of the country and the world portends their demise. Eric Cantor, the ultimate establishment neo-con Republican House Majority Leader, was crushed in a primary by a completely unknown economics professor, outspent by Cantor $4.9 million to $123,000. Cantor spent more at steakhouses than David Brat spent on his entire campaign. Cantor, a lackey for Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Israel, and dozens of other mega-corporations, was the first House Majority leader defeated in a primary since the position was created in the 1890s. He won his last primary by 60%.

This was as big a shock to the Republican establishment as it was to the Democratic establishment, the mainstream corporate media establishment, and the Tea Party establishment that didn’t provide David Brat one red cent of their vast horde of contributions. They are now scrambling to generate a storyline explaining this unexplainable development as if it was entirely predictable. These wealthy, myopic, propaganda peddling, purveyors of the status quo just felt the foundation of their world shudder beneath them. Like a volcano, with pressure building within, the world as we know it is about to blow. Who gets devastated by the massive explosion and flow of molten lava is yet to be determined, but there is nothing the establishment can do to stop the eruption. This entire Deep State hierarchy has been developed over decades, as they have flawlessly implemented Edward Bernays teachings from the Propaganda playbook.

“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 linear thinkers, who constitute the invisible government and unelected true ruling power, are flabbergasted their game plan, which has worked for the last seven decades, is failing to have the usual sway over the normally compliant masses. Lies, misinformation, deception, propaganda, easy debt, cheap oil, endless commercial expansion, relentless marketing, never ending war, politicians selected by bankers and mega-corporations, tax code created to benefit the .01%, and laws written by the lobbyists for the oligarchs designed to control the plebs and enrich the modern aristocracy, made the world go round until 2008. Linear thinkers in government, business, banking and media have been perpetuating the falsehood of a return to normalcy, recovery, and linear progress. They are willfully ignorant of history because acknowledging its cyclicality would be admitting how precarious their positions of power, wealth, and control truly are.

History does not proceed in a straight line of forward advancement. It has a seasonal nature geared to the 80 year life cycle of human beings. The most basic lesson of history is we never seem to learn the lessons of history. A period of Crisis arrives like Winter, approximately 60 years after the resolution of the prior Crisis, with a climax occurring approximately 80 years after the prior Crisis climax. The generational dynamics based upon human life cycles have lined up once again into Crisis mode. Anyone who hasn’t sensed the mood change in the country since 2008, hasn’t been paying attention. The linear thinking establishment refuses to accept the inevitability of their existing paradigm collapsing in a chaotic whirlwind of violence, death on a grand scale and decisive war. The existing social order is always swept away during a Fourth Turning.

Saeculum (climax year) Crisis (Full Era) Time from one Crisis climax to next Crisis climax
Revolutionary (1781) American Revolution(1773–1794)
Civil War (1863) Civil War(1860–1865) 82 years
Great Power (1944) Great Depressionand World War II(1929-1946) 81 years
Millennial (2025?) Global Financial Crisis(2008–2029?) 81 years?

The Global Financial Crisis, which began in September 2008, marked the beginning of a likely two decade long episode of fierce winter-like blizzard conditions that will get progressively worse as this Fourth Turning churns toward its bloody climax. The evil wealthy men and their paid off pawns in politics and the media who constitute the invisible government, governing behind the scenes, molding minds, forming tastes and suggesting ideas to the gullible masses, will not relinquish their wealth and power without a fight. They have been utilizing all emergency monetary and fiscal levers, while conducting a data disinformation campaign and utilizing their control of the dying legacy media to keep the masses distracted, entertained and confused.

The establishment has convinced a vast swath of the public to actually believe 0% interest rates for the last 5 years, adding $1 trillion per year to the already Himalayan national debt, allowing the Federal Reserve buy $3 trillion of toxic debt from their Wall Street banking cabal owners, while creating a high rate of inflation in energy, food, healthcare and tuition costs, and negative growth in real wages, is somehow beneficial to them and reflects a return to normalcy. The current state of our economic, financial, political and judicial systems, along with the fraying social fabric of society reflects EXTREME dysfunction and in no way exhibits anything resembling a normal state of affairs. The government apparatchiks, corporate media talking heads, Wall Street captured economists, and lackeys for billionaire oligarchs are highly paid liars using every Bernaysian trick to manipulate the beliefs, desires, and prejudices of the willfully ignorant masses. They capitalize on the cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias being practiced by the majority of people in the country. Like a dog chasing its tail, they have the public up in arms about meaningless social issues and ignoring the looting of the country by sociopathic bankers.

Those in power need to sell their storyline of advancement, despite the overwhelming evidence of a societal implosion and economic regression for the 99.99%. They need to distract the masses with inconsequential emotional issues like gay marriage, mass murderers, climate change, party politics, racism, and phantom terror threats, so the masses don’t focus on how badly they are being screwed by the One Party invisible government. For those who have been too dumbed down by our government public education system to even comprehend anything beyond a third grade level, we have The Kardashians, Bridezilla, Duck Dynasty, I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant, iGadgets, Twitter, Facebook, professional sports, Hollywood blockbusters, and toxic fast food paid for with your EBT card. Our world is besieged by triviality, plagued by idiocy, inundated with propaganda, and consumed with consumption.

In a country of 318 million people, the few believe they must mold the minds of the masses in order for society to function smoothly. Of course this is a huge lie. They need to mold those minds in order to retain their power, wealth, control. They are focused on the daily dose of lies, mistruths, disinformation, and distractions required to keep the masses anesthetized. They have ignored the lessons of history and the big picture driving the Crisis events which will change the world over the next fifteen years. Fourth Turnings don’t calm down, fizzle out, or revert to what happened in the prior twenty years, just as the unyielding harsh Winter cannot revert to the glorious days of Fall or the sweltering days of Summer. There is no escaping the dire, deadly and dangerous times directly ahead of us.

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning

Strauss and Howe wrote their epic historical treatise in 1997 and their predictions, based upon centuries of generational analysis, have been uncannily accurate. The predictions are not event based, but based upon generational mood and core elements of Crisis, which were predictable over a decade before the 2008 start to this Crisis. The core elements of Debt, Civic Decay, and Global Disorder were evident to anyone with a functioning critical thinking brain, not in the employ of the establishment. These core elements are front and center today, as the Fourth Turning gains momentum like a gathering winter storm. The captured mainstream media does their utmost to obscure, downplay, and ignore these issues, but alternative truth telling websites like Zero Hedge, Mike Krieger’s Liberty Blitzkrieg, Mike Shedlock, John Rubino’s Dollar Collapse, Jim Kunstler, John Hussman, Jesse’s Cafe Americain, Charles Hugh Smith, Karl Denninger, and number of other freedom minded websites keep the spark of truth alive for those seeking it. A perusal of headlines from these sites over the last week or so provides the true nature of this worsening Fourth Turning Crisis:

Debt

Mindblowing Fact Of The Day: China Has Over 52 Million Vacant Homes

The Subprime Auto-Lending Credit Bubble Is Bursting

China HSBC PMI Misses; Economy Contracts For 5th Month In A Row

Will Spain Default?

Fed Prepares to Maintain Record Balance Sheet for Years

Steve Forbes Warns Of Economic “Catastrophe” Due To Fed’s Dollar Debasement

Obama Unveils Student Loan Debt Bubble Bailout

America’s Insatiable Demand For More Expensive Cars, Larger Homes And Bigger Debts

China Scrambling After “Discovering” Thousands Of Tons Of Rehypothecated Copper, Aluminum Missing

Western Banks Scramble As China’s “Rehypothecation Evaporation” Goes Global

Consumer Credit Has Fifth Biggest Monthly Jump In History; Revolving Credit Soars By Most Since November 2007

Abenomics’ Legacy: Japan’s Greatest “Misery” In 33 Years

NIRP Has Arrived: Europe Officially Enters The “Monetary Twilight Zone”

EU Warns Greece Is “A Cause Of Serious Concern” As Top Tax-Collector Resigns

Why Central Bank Stimulus Cannot Bring Economic Recovery

Summer Gas Prices Highest Since 2011 As Oil Hits 9-Month Highs

It Was A Reeeeeally Bad Winter: JPM Cuts Q1 GDP From -1.1% To -1.6%

How The Fed Feeds The Sharks, While Shafting Wage Earners And Savers

Fed’s Bubble Finance Is Primary Cause of Massive Wealth Gains At The Top

Former ECB Chief Economist Says Central Bank Run Monetary System Is “Pure Fiction”

More On The China Property Bubble: April New Housing Starts Down 25%; Beijing/Shanghai Sales Down 50%

What Happens After The Bubble Bursts: 85% Of Pension Funds Could Fail Due To An Era Of Niggardly Returns

Civic Decay

Across America, Police Departments Are Quietly Preparing For War

Meet The “Minerva Research Initiative” – The Pentagon’s Preparation For “Mass Civil Breakdown”

The Obama Administration Is Forcing Local Cops To Stay Silent On Surveillance

In 33 U.S. Cities, Feeding The Homeless Has Been Criminalized

Obama Popularity Plunges To New Low: “No Longer Likeable Enough”

Historic Loss: House Majority Leader Cantor Loses Virginia Primary To Tea Party’s Brat

Suspect Yells “Tell The Police, The Revolution Has Started” Before Shooting Spree In Las Vegas WalMart

Two Thirds Of Gen X Households Have Less Wealth Than Their Parents Did At The Same Age

7 In 10 Americans Believe The Crisis Is Not Over Or Worst Is Yet To Come: 52% Can’t Afford Their Homes

1 In 4 Obamacare Signups Are Faulty – But, We Are Sure Obama Never Knew Anything About It Until Now

Fed Warns The Plunge In “Routine” Jobs Won’t Slow Down Anytime Soon

US Finally Recovers All Jobs Lost Since 2007 While People Not In Labor Force Increase By 12.8 Million

Two-Thirds Of Americans Do Not Back Obama’s Decision On Bergdahl

Hiring In The US Remains Far Below Pre-Recession Levels

Half The Country Makes Less Than $27,520 A Year And 15 Other Signs The Middle Class Is Dying

The Rich Get Richest: Household Net Worth Rises To All Time High Courtesy Of $67 Trillion In Financial Assets

Challenger Job Cuts Soar 45%; Most Layoffs Since Feb 2013

It’s Not Just Europe; As Many As 16 California Counties May Seek Secession From The State

America’s Insanely Complex And Endemically Corrupt Tax Code: Mother Lode Of Crony Capitalist Plunder

Global Disorder

Al-Qaeda Jihadis Loot Over $400 Million From Mosul Central Bank, Seize Saddam’s Hometown

Al Qaeda Militants Capture US Black Hawk Helicopters In Iraq

Iraq Update: Kurds Take Kirkuk, Al Qaeda Surges Toward Baghdad

“Well-Armed” Taliban Tried To Hijack Airplane Leading To Pakistan Airport Shootout

Gruesome Footage Of ISIS Atrocities Reveals Al Qaeda Jihadists “Will Stop At Nothing”

Ukraine Military Transport Plane Shot Down, 49 Killed

Marc Faber Blasts “American Military Presence In Asia Is Completely Unacceptable”

B-1 Stealth Bomber “Friendly Fire” Strike Kills 5 US Soldiers In Afghanistan

World Needs Record Saudi Oil Supply as OPEC Convenes

Déjà vu: echoes of pre-crisis world mount

Chinese military spending exceeds $145 billion, drones advanced: U.S.

Ukraine Closes 8 Border Crossings On Reports Of Russian Troop Movement

Firefight Underway As Russian “Rebels” Cross Border Into Ukraine

US Begins Delivering F-16s To Iraq This Week, A Decade After It Wiped Out Iraq’s Air Force

Two Ukraine Helicopters Shot Down: Watch As Gunship Engages Eastern Militia In Intense Fighting

Saudi Arabia Reveals Surge In MERS Deaths: One Third Of Infected Patients Die

Japan Base Wages Decline 23 Months In A Row

Obama Calls for $1 Billion Europe Security Fund; Will Increase U.S. Military Presence in Eastern Europe

China Sends 4 More Fighter Jets To Oil Rig Area As Vietnam Threatens Legal Action

“Political Earthquake” – Nigel Farage “Big Winner” In Local Elections

Do these headlines indicate a lessening or deepening of the ongoing Crisis? You won’t see these truthful headlines in the mainstream captured media. You will see feel good headlines touting non-existent economic recoveries, decreasing unemployment rates with record levels of non-working Americans, and storylines of government, corporate and consumer austerity as debt levels reach all-time highs. You will see stories scorning Edward Snowden as a traitor for exposing the highest levels of the United States government as criminals for shredding the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. You will see articles hyping one hundred years of shale oil and gas as energy prices approach record highs and the point of peak cheap oil has been passed. You will see publications owned by billionaires peddling hogwash about fantastic Wall Street profits entirely dependent upon mark to fantasy accounting and accounting journal entries relieving loan loss reserves as loan losses rise. You will see hyperbolic fear mongering dreck about foiled terrorist plots concocted by the FBI and DHS. You will see stories about the evil Russians and evil Chinese as our CIA promotes the overthrow of democratically elected officials in countries around the globe. You will see stories about the dangers of foreign countries conducting cyber-warfare against the U.S. as our government intercepts every electronic communication of our allies and citizens. It’s as if we are lost in a blizzard of lies.

Debt, Civic Decay, Global Disorder

Propaganda and the molding of minds cannot change the course of history. Those in power can ignore the facts, but they can’t change the facts. During the “austere” period from 2009 through until today, total credit market debt in the U.S. has expanded from $53.4 trillion to $59.4 trillion. It now stands at 350% of GDP, even after the government added $500 billion out of thin air to GDP to further their deception of recovery. The U.S. national debt is at a record $17.5 trillion and goes up by $2.0 billion per day. This doesn’t include the $200 trillion of unfunded liabilities politicians have committed taxpayers to pay over the next few decades. Corporate debt is at record highs as CEO’s borrow to buy back their stock at record highs in order to boost EPS and drive their compensation higher.

US total debt 2014

Consumer debt has surged to new highs reaching $3.2 trillion, as government pushed subprime student loan debt and government peddled subprime auto loan lure more math challenged dupes into the banker web of debt. Even credit card debt surged in May as people can no longer make monthly payments for energy, food, rent, and healthcare. Retailers continue to report horrific profits as disposable income has been disposed of by the Federal Reserve’s QE and ZIRP “solutions”. The immense levels of debt plague the entire world as total global debt now surpasses $230 trillion, 313% of world GDP. The 40% surge in global debt since the 2008 debt created collapse is unprecedented in its scope and lunacy. Trying to resolve a debt problem created by criminal Wall Street bankers by allowing Wall Street controlled central bankers, politicians, and government bureaucrats to issue more debt, reduce interest rates to zero, and enrich the oligarchs, will end in catastrophe. The house of cards is teetering as trust dissipates, rehypothecated assets evaporate, the suppression of price discovery fails and the rigged stock market crashes for the third time in fourteen years.

The 2008 global financial crash was the catalyst for this Fourth Turning and the next leg down will unleash the fury of the masses as their remaining wealth, along with their hopes and dreams are obliterated. The civic decay is unmistakably visible, like a fissure in the road after an earthquake, and has left the masses angry, confused, dependent, ignorant, distracted, and suspicious. The extreme and growing wealth inequality driven by Federal Reserve policies, corporate lobbyist written government regulations and tax laws, and bankers controlling the political, economic, financial, and media levers has reached levels previously associated with collapse and revolution. The greed, hubris and arrogance of the .01% will lead to their downfall.

Screen Shot 2014-03-29 at 9.23.25 PM

A country with 102 million of its 247 million working age population not working is a powder-keg and the politicians are acting like slow witted monkeys lighting matches. With 20% of the 145 million jobs part-time, more than half low paying service industry jobs, real wages lower than they were in 1998, and a median salary of $25,000, it’s understandable why 20% of the population relies on food stamps to survive. The discontent is growing. We got a preview of how the establishment will deal with disgruntlement during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests. Liberal Democrat mayors aligned with Fox News neo-cons, Wall Street bankers, and police state thugs to eradicate, beat, tear gas, and pepper spray young people exercising their right to free speech protesting the wolves of Wall Street, who had pulled of the largest heist in human history with absolutely no consequences for their criminality. Both OWS and the Tea Party were co-opted by the establishment in short order and have been used by the One Party of oligarchs as a means to divide and conquer, by keeping the masses blaming liberal or conservative phantoms for the state of disunion.

The seemingly never ending revelations from the hero of this Fourth Turning – Edward Snowden – of government surveillance regarding every electronic communication of every American by the NSA is proof of a complete disregard for Constitutionally guaranteed protections by the powers that be. The current administration in conjunction with the hacks from the two headed party ignore, flaunt and show disdain for the Bill of Rights and legal precedent as they run roughshod over the citizens. The transformation of our republic into an authoritarian surveillance police state is almost complete.

The militarization of local police forces by the DHS, military training exercises in major cities, and plans being drawn up by the authorities to confront civil unrest all point towards the coming breakdown of civil society. The complete lockdown of Boston to apprehend two teenage cooking utensil terrorists was a dry run and probably gave the oligarchs confidence in their plan, as Bostonians cowered in their homes as heavily armed police thugs pissed on the Fourth Amendment by conducting door to door searches. If you listen closely, you can hear the fabric of our civilization being torn asunder.

The past few weeks have seen global disorder reach new heights, as Iraq has become Mission Un-Accomplished, the Ukraine explodes into civil war as Russia cuts off their natural gas, violent protests continue to rock Brazil, Egypt, Spain, Greece, France, Turkey and a myriad of other hotspots around the world. The very same forces Obama, McCain and the military industrial complex have been arming in Syria to fight a dictator who was our ally, are now ransacking Iraq, murdering the people we put into power when we deposed another dictator who had been our ally when he was fighting our sworn enemy – Iran. It seems Iran is now helping Iraq fight these jihadists, as they slowly but surely gain control over Iraq. The EU has papered over their national insolvency problems with more debt, while imposing austerity measures on the peasants. See French Revolution for the ultimate resolution of this banker-centric solution. The endemic fraud in China, along with an imploding real estate market, and corruption on an epic scale are creating a perfect storm which will derail the China miracle meme.

Meanwhile, the new dictator in Egypt who overthrew the democratically elected government, after our former dictator ally was deposed when Obama refused to support him, has clamped down on the citizens with his military force. The Ukraine is being torn apart after the CIA and their counterparts in the EU undermined the democratically elected government and started a civil war to undermine Russian influence in that country. To an impartial observer, you might think the American Empire is purposely sowing seeds of discontent, war, and disorder around the globe. Never ending war benefits the military industrial complex, as tremendous profits are generated from the sale of arms to all parties involved. Iraq and Syria are good for the bottom line of the U.S. Defense Industry. War and global disorder also benefit the worldwide banking cabal, as the only way to fund these misadventures is through debt. As we all know, debt is what makes this world go round – until it doesn’t.

There has been a virtual mainstream media blackout regarding the Ukraine as government forces bomb and murder civilians. The billionaires running America need to support the billionaire president of the Ukraine because he is one of them. Truth has no place in modern governmental affairs. The mainstream media ignores the fact the United States has armed Sunni terrorists in Syria who are now on the verge of overrunning Baghdad, as they slaughter Iraqi Shiites by the thousands. They ignore the fact that Iraq was a modern, stable, non-religious, oil producing nation under Hussein, with no Al Qaeda or sectarian violence. The United States invaded a sovereign country under false pretenses, wasted over $1 trillion of precious national wealth, killed over 100,000 Iraqis, sustained over 37,000 physical casualties, untold numbers of mental casualties, and now Iraq is dissolving into a quagmire of religious violence threatening oil supplies and driving prices higher. After 13 years and 21,000 casualties in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than ever as we declare victory and slink away. Libya has been another feather in the cap of American foreign policy as we deposed another former ally dictator and have left the country in disarray and civil war. Just because the American corporate media doesn’t report these facts, doesn’t make them not so.

It should be clear to anyone willing to open their eyes and not be influenced by the establishment propaganda that this Fourth Turning is entering a new ominous phase, as the 2008 Global Financial Crisis catalyst has ignited a volcanic eruption which has put tremendous strain on the areas of extreme vulnerability – debt, civic decay, global disorder. The few aware Americans who frequent truth telling websites are frustrated and impatient, waiting for the tsunami of change to sweep over the world. History operates at its own cyclical pace. An accelerated Fourth Turning would likely not be a positive development. The Civil War Crisis was accelerated, resulting in 700,000 deaths in four years. With the worldwide proliferation of nuclear missiles, this Fourth Turning could be over with the push of a button. I don’t think anyone is rooting for that outcome.

You can easily be distracted by the day to day machinations of evil men, relentless propaganda, meaningless distractions, and various forms of bread and circuses. But history is unforgiving. The details and events will be different, but the path of this Crisis will follow past Crisis periods. The worldwide debt bubble will burst. The resulting loss of wealth, jobs, entitlements and trust will ignite mass civil disorder as years of civic decay lead to a swift societal collapse. With China also entering a Fourth Turning, a global debt implosion, resource wars breaking out, religious extremism, and nationalistic drums beating, the likelihood of global war is high.

For some perspective, six years into the last Fourth Turning in 1935, GDP had risen by 30% from its 1933 low and FDR’s New Deal was supposedly lifting the country from its depths. In reality, the population was experiencing a worsening depression and a few years later a world war killed 65 million people. After six years the Civil War Crisis was resolved with 5% of the nation’s male population killed, a president assassinated, and the South left in ruins. This Fourth Turning will proceed along its destined path at its own pace. The molten ingredients of debt, civic decay and global disorder are conjoining in an explosive concoction leading to a conflagration which will flow across the globe on a scale not seen since the Second World War. There is no escaping the trials and tribulations awaiting us. The outcome is uncertain. It could end in glory or destruction. Individual sacrifice, shared burdens, courageous stands and inspired leadership will be required to survive the perilous trials ahead.

I see the bad moon arising

I see trouble on the way

I see earthquakes and lightnin’

I see bad times today

Creedence Clearwater Revival

“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All you know in advance is something about the molten ingredients of the climax, which could include the following:

  • Economic distress, with public debt in default, entitlement trust funds in bankruptcy, mounting poverty and unemployment, trade wars, collapsing financial markets, and hyperinflation (or deflation)
  • Social distress, with violence fueled by class, race, nativism, or religion and abetted by armed gangs, underground militias, and mercenaries hired by walled communities
  • Political distress, with institutional collapse, open tax revolts, one-party hegemony, major constitutional change, secessionism, authoritarianism, and altered national borders
  • Military distress, with war against terrorists or foreign regimes equipped with weapons of mass destruction” –  The Fourth Turning – Strauss & Howe – 1997

WALL STREET JUSTICE IN THE SURVEILLANCE STATES OF AMERICA

Cecily McMillan was sentenced yesterday to 90 days in prison for assaulting a police officer who was trying to clear Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, where Occupy Wall Street protesters had gathered. McMillan, 25, denied the second-degree assault charge.

 

Thank God for our justice system. Look at that face. She is truly a dangerous criminal and a menace to society. I can’t believe they only locked her up for 3 months. Exercising your First Amendment rights in a public park is a dangerous example of freedom. We can’t stand for this. She is clearly a violent thug. The NYPD police officer that was manhandling her was most certainly in danger. Look at those lethal elbows that inadvertently hit one of Bloomberg’s security state thugs in the face. I understand they were considering a firing squad from the NYPD, but they couldn’t find 10 of these bozo thugs who could shoot straight. 

We are now in the sixth year since the criminal CEOs and executives of the biggest Wall Street banks committed the largest financial fraud in human history and not one of these fuckers has been prosecuted, let alone sentenced to jail. Dimon has used shareholder money to pay tens of billions in fines as their payoff to their fellow government cronies without admitting they did anything wrong. These motherfuckers created the fraudulent mortgage products that blew up the worldwide financial system. They reaped hundreds of billions in dirty profits and the judicial system bought off by Wall Street is still throwing young protestors in jail. The police thugs brutalized and bloodied hundreds of protestors during the Occupy protests. None of them went to jail because the establishment is not here to protect the rights of citizens. They will protect the rights of the oligarchs to fuck you over.

 

KNOW YOUR ENEMY

 

She fought Wall Street, and now she’s off to jail

Opinion: Unlike CEOs, this ‘Occupy’ protestor couldn’t avoid prosecution

By David Weidner, MarketWatch

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) — The last few days have been a busy one for the Wall Street crime blotter. But as you review the following cases, you might find the scales of justice are more than just a little off-kilter.

Credit Suisse (NYSE:CS) Chief Executive Officer Brady Dougan will keep his job — one that paid him $9 million last year after a 26% raise— even thought the bank will pay a $2.6 billion settlement and plead guilty to criminal charges for helping its U.S. clients evade taxes.

SAC Capital Advisors LLC founder Steven A. Cohen spent the weekend free as a bird, perhaps counting the sum of what had been years of an annual compensation package of $1 billion. He did so after another one of his lieutenants, Michael Steinberg, was sentenced Friday to 3 1/2 years in prison for his role in a firm-wide insider-trading scheme.

Steinberg was the latest in a string of former SAC traders and managers who have been ratting out one another and receiving prison sentences.

And after walking around Italy for a few months, former Societe Generale trader Jérôme Kerviel surrendered to police Sunday . He will spend three years in prison for making unauthorized trades at the bank that led to more than $8 billion in losses. At least, that’s if you believe he wasn’t making the trades with tacit approval from his bosses or negligence on their part.

Lest you think these cases suggest that it’s just the small fish who meet the hook of justice, consider the 90-day jail term just handed out to Cecily McMillan for second-degree assault.

McMillan is the last Occupy Wall Street protestor to be sentenced for her role in the 2010 and 2011 protests in New York that were ultimately swept away by a city police raid ordered by then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

McMillan, now a 25-year-old graduate student, was in Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan on March 17, 2012, celebrating the six-month anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, which was evicted from the park in November 2011. The police were ordered to clear the park. Scuffles ensued. Chaos. An officer claims McMillian elbowed him in the face. McMillan said someone grabbed her breast.

There is a grainy video of the elbowing that was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal reporter covering the case. It “doesn’t definitively show if it was intentional or not,” the Journal reported . During the trial, McMillan’s lawyers were barred from cross-examining the officer.

Her case received unusual attention. There were protests at the courthouse. After her conviction May 5, city council members called for leniency in her sentencing. Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez was also arrested at Zuccotti Park. His charges were dismissed.

Jail time for McMillan, he said, would send “a message that if you join a protest, if you defend your rights, you will be charged with assaulting a police officer.”

That’s one message. Another possible one: better to be at the top of a multi-billion-dollar institution that helps people hide from the Internal Revenue Service or disguises ill-gotten gains or takes no responsibility for the conduct of its employees.

The list doesn’t end with SAC Capital and Credit Suisse. Since the financial crisis, companies including Goldman Sachs Group Inc. (NYSE:GS) , J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM) , Bank of America Corp. (NYSE:BAC) and Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) all have been investigated for fraud perpetrated on customers and investors — including taxpayers. In most cases they’ve settled without admitting wrongdoing or copping to criminal charges.

That last part about criminal charges has changed recently after U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder came under fire a year ago when he testified that “the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for us to prosecute them when we are hit with indications that if you do prosecute, if you do bring a criminal charge, it will have a negative impact on the national economy, perhaps even the world economy.”

Many observers took his statement as a concession that some banks were “too big to jail.”

Holder is trying to walk his statement back . “No company, no matter how large or how profitable, is above the law,” he said in a video posted on the Justice Department website early this month.

Individuals aren’t exempt either, it appears, as long as they are low ranking and don’t have the political and financial means to put up a fight.

Cecily McMillan, on the other hand, doesn’t pose a threat to anyone except maybe a police officer who may or may have not been too aggressive or in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not many seem to be questioning if city officials had the authority to break up a peaceable assembly as guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.

This isn’t to excuse McMillan’s elbow or any injury it may have caused. But if a peaceful protestor who if forcibly evicted from a protest can get jail time and a permanent criminal record, why can’t the leaders of firms accused of or admitted to chronic insider trading, tax-evasion schemes or mortgage-securities fraud get their 90 days in lockup?

A woman gives an officer a black eye, but a justice system where money and influence rob us of inequality is life- — and liberty- — threatening.

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.



 

 

A DYING REGIME & THE REVOLUTION THAT WILL TOPPLE IT

Why the Occupy Movement Frightens the Corporate Elite

By: Chris Hedges

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In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability—keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits—ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process—Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. The poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do not mount revolutions, although they join them and often become cannon fodder. The real danger to the elite comes from déclassé intellectuals, those educated middle-class men and women who are barred by a calcified system from advancement. Artists without studios or theaters, teachers without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the elite and the oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered. This is especially acute among the educated and the talented. They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And the longer the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime—and our corporate regime is dying—is to employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion from the centers of power. Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant ruling class that perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual death.

In every revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, the leadership emerged from déclassé intellectuals. The leaders were usually young or middle-aged, educated and always unable to meet their professional and personal aspirations. They were never part of the power elite, although often their parents had been. They were conversant in the language of power as well as the language of oppression. It is the presence of large numbers of déclassé intellectuals that makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the United States threatening to the overlords at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. They must face down opponents who understand, in a way the uneducated often do not, the lies disseminated on behalf of corporations by the public relations industry. These déclassé intellectuals, because they are conversant in economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power, real power, are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the criminal class on Wall Street.

This is what made Malcolm X so threatening to the white power structure. He refused to countenance Martin Luther King’s fiction that white power and white liberals would ever lift black people out of economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm’s view. Malcolm X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until we see the corporate state, and the games it is playing with us, with the same kind of clarity, we will be nothing more than useful idiots.

“This is an era of hypocrisy,” Malcolm X said. “When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe that white folks want ’em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you’re my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe you’re my brother.”

Those within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a Chekhov play, increasingly understand that the system that enriches and empowers them is corrupt and decayed. They become cynical. They do not govern effectively. They retreat into hedonism. They no longer believe their own rhetoric. They devote their energies to stealing and exploiting as much, as fast, as possible. They pillage their own institutions, as we have seen with the newly disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown of Chesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers. The elites become cannibals. They consume each other. This is what happens in the latter stages of all dying regimes. Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility by revoking patents of nobility and reselling them. It is what most corporations do to their shareholders. A dying ruling class, in short, no longer acts to preserve its own longevity. It becomes fashionable, even in the rarefied circles of the elite, to ridicule and laugh at the political puppets that are the public face of the corporate state.

“Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for years,” Alexander Herzen wrote, “but it is hard for them ever to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people.”

This loss of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the elites employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the streets charged with carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a decade later. The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a dress rehearsal in 1905. The most effective revolutions, including the Russian Revolution, have been largely nonviolent. There are always violent radicals who carry out bombings and assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early stages, more than help revolutions. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin during the Russian Revolution condemned the radical terrorists, asserting that they only demoralized and frightened away the movement’s followers and discredited authentic anarchism.

Radical violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests. The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather Underground, the Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army arose in the ferment of the 1960s. Violent radicals are used by the state to justify harsh repression. They scare the mainstream from the movement. They thwart the goal of all revolutions, which is to turn the majority against an isolated and discredited ruling class. These violent fringe groups are seductive to those who yearn for personal empowerment through hyper-masculinity and violence, but they do little to advance the cause. The primary role of radical extremists, such as Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack successful revolutions. They unleash a reign of terror, primarily against fellow revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of the old regime. They often do not play much of a role in building a revolution.

The power of the Occupy movement is that it expresses the widespread disgust with the elites, and the deep desire for justice and fairness that is essential to all successful revolutionary movements. The Occupy movement will change and mutate, but it will not go away. It may appear to make little headway, but this is less because of the movement’s ineffectiveness and more because decayed systems of power have an amazing ability to perpetuate themselves through habit, routine and inertia. The press and organs of communication, along with the anointed experts and academics, tied by money and ideology to the elites, are useless in dissecting what is happening within these movements. They view reality through the lens of their corporate sponsors. They have no idea what is happening.

Dying regimes are chipped away slowly and imperceptibly. The assumptions and daily formalities of the old system are difficult for citizens to abandon, even when the old system is increasingly hostile to their dignity, well-being and survival. Supplanting an old faith with a new one is the silent, unseen battle of all revolutionary movements. And during the slow transition it is almost impossible to measure progress.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong,” Fanon wrote in “Black Skin, White Masks.” “When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”

The end of these regimes comes when old beliefs die and the organs of security, especially the police and military, abandon the elites and join the revolutionaries. This is true in every successful revolution. It does not matter how sophisticated the repressive apparatus. Once those who handle the tools of repression become demoralized, the security and surveillance state is impotent. Regimes, when they die, are like a great ocean liner sinking in minutes on the horizon. And no one, including the purported leaders of the opposition, can predict the moment of death. Revolutions have an innate, mysterious life force that defies comprehension. They are living entities.

The defection of the security apparatus is often done with little or no violence, as I witnessed in Eastern Europe in 1989 and as was also true in 1979 in Iran and in 1917 in Russia. At other times, when it has enough residual force to fight back, the dying regime triggers a violent clash as it did in the American Revolution when soldiers and officers in the British army, including George Washington, rebelled to raise the Continental Army. Violence also characterized the 1949 Chinese revolution led by Mao Zedong. But even revolutions that turn violent succeed, as Mao conceded, because they enjoy popular support and can mount widespread protests, strikes, agitation, revolutionary propaganda and acts of civil disobedience. The object is to try to get there without violence. Armed revolutions, despite what the history books often tell us, are tragic, ugly, frightening and sordid affairs. Those who storm Bastilles, as the Polish dissident Adam Michnik wrote, “unwittingly build new ones.” And once revolutions turn violent it becomes hard to speak of victors and losers.

A revolution has been unleashed across the globe. This revolution, a popular repudiation of the old order, is where we should direct all our energy and commitment. If we do not topple the corporate elites the ecosystem will be destroyed and massive numbers of human beings along with it. The struggle will be long. There will be times when it will seem we are going nowhere. Victory is not inevitable. But this is our best and only hope. The response of the corporate state will ultimately determine the parameters and composition of rebellion. I pray we replicate the 1989 nonviolent revolutions that overthrew the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. But this is not in my hands or yours. Go ahead and vote this November. But don’t waste any more time or energy on the presidential election than it takes to get to your polling station and pull a lever for a third-party candidate—just enough to register your obstruction and defiance—and then get back out onto the street. That is where the question of real power is being decided.

QUOTES OF THE DAY – FOURTH TURNING EDITION

“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation and empire. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.” – Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning 

“Reflect on what happens when a terrible winter blizzard strikes. You hear the weather warning but probably fail to act on it. The sky darkens. Then the storm hits with full fury, and the air is a howling whiteness. One by one, your links to the machine age break down. Electricity flickers out, cutting off the TV. Batteries fade, cutting off the radio. Phones go dead. Roads become impossible, and cars get stuck. Food supplies dwindle. Day to day vestiges of modern civilization – bank machines, mutual funds, mass retailers, computers, satellites, airplanes, governments – all recede into irrelevance. Picture yourself and your loved ones in the midst of a howling blizzard that lasts several years. Think about what you would need, who could help you, and why your fate might matter to anybody other than yourself. That is how to plan for a saecular winter. Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted.” – Strauss & Howe The Fourth Turning

“History offers no guarantees. If America plunges into an era of depression or violence which by then has not lifted, we will likely look back on the 1990s as the decade when we valued all the wrong things and made all the wrong choices.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“The seasons of time offer no guarantees. For modern societies, no less than for all forms of life, transformative change is discontinuous. For what seems an eternity, history goes nowhere – and then it suddenly flings us forward across some vast chaos that defies any mortal effort to plan our way there. The Fourth Turning will try our souls – and the saecular rhythm tells us that much will depend on how we face up to that trial. The saeculum does not reveal whether the story will have a happy ending, but it does tell us how and when our choices will make a difference.”  – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning the way you might today distance yourself from news, national politics, or even taxes you don’t feel like paying. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted. The Fourth Turning necessitates the death and rebirth of the social order. It is the ultimate rite of passage for an entire people, requiring a luminal state of sheer chaos whose nature and duration no one can predict in advance.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

“History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

PAYCHECKS, PERCEPTION, PROPAGANDA & POWER

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” – Upton Sinclair

 

I began to write this article in early December. I had just written a piece that attempted to scrutinize how the American public could stand idly by while heavily armed mercenary thugs viciously crushed the Occupy encampments across the country in a Department of Homeland Security coordinated attack at the behest of the ruling oligarchy.  Comfortably Numb made a case that the political and economic systems of the United States have been captured by a few evil men and they use their wealth and power to control the message hammered into the psyches of an apathetic, distracted, vincibly ignorant public. I started to tackle the question of why Americans could stand by as the new Greatest Generation was being abandoned, derided, scorned, beaten, tear gassed, and arrested for having the courage and audacity to stand up to a powerful corrupt unholy alliance between Wall Street psychopaths, corporate fascist barbarians, and Washington DC power hungry jackals. But I became overwhelmed with a feeling of disillusionment and hopelessness and was unable to write anything for about a month. I found myself questioning whether it was worth fighting such a powerful foe after seeing how easily they crushed the opposition put forth by OWS. After a month I decided I am not one to love my servitude.

Most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.” Huxley’s Brave New World

I owe it to my three sons to keep fighting the good fight. They deserve a future. Day by day we draw ever closer to a showdown with the traitors who have sold this country into debt slavery. I don’t dream of revolution, but my eyes are wide open and I see it coming. I had been trying to wrap my head around what happened with the Occupy Movement since the Department of Homeland Security coordinated destruction of most of the encampments around the country in November. The corporate mainstream media immediately moved onto more pressing issues like the Kim Kardashian divorce and Jessica Simpson’s weight gain. The American public has been instructed by the media the Occupy story is history, just like the BP oil spill, the Fukushima nuclear meltdown, and the Egyptian revolution. In a society consumed by reality TV Occupy Wall Street was just another show. The credulous American populace dutifully turned their attention to Black Friday and whipping out one of their 15 credit cards to purchase remote control pillows, 3D 72 inch HDTVs, a see through tank top from the Snooki line of slutware, or thousands of other ludicrous Chinese crap churned out by slave labor in factories built to support the “efficiency” efforts of U.S. conglomerates.

Without a constant irritating presence in the heart of NYC and other large cities, the Occupy Movement appears to have lost steam. I’ve been trying to figure out how and why this happened. The issues that motivated the protests have not gone away. The despicable MF Global crime, committed by a hall of shame member of the .01% – Jon Corzine – has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt the Wall Street/Washington DC criminal conspiracy is alive and well. Unless you have been sitting in line at a Wal-Mart for the last two months to get a $3 waffle-maker, you saw young people across the country tear gassed, shot with rubber bullets, maced, bludgeoned, and brutalized by the paid thugs of the ruling oligarchy on a daily basis. The outrage at the continued looting by the psychopathic Wall Street aristocracy and the horrific police brutality against young people exercising their Constitutional right to free speech and assembly should have ignited widespread anger and mass protest. Instead the reaction has been silence, scorn and smug satisfaction with the government response.

Paychecks & Perceptions

There are a plethora of rationales for the apathy and lack of critical thinking overwhelming our society as we plunge into the depths of a looming economic calamity. They include economic self interest, the power of propaganda to condition the masses, fear of opposing authority, and the perception of a reality that allows you to sleep at night. The Upton Sinclair quote above hit home for me a few weeks ago and explains much of the disdain for the Occupy movement. I was in a high level meeting at my University and during the course of the meeting the Occupy Movement was brought up. A senior executive made a derogatory comment about Occupy and then laughed. I smiled and bit my tongue. In retrospect it shouldn’t have surprised me. I work at one of the top business schools in the world. The person who made the comment has spent his entire life educating students who end up with jobs at Wall Street financial institutions and with America’s largest corporations. It is a natural response for someone whose whole life is reliant upon the existing financial system to psychologically overlook the obvious criminality of the Wall Street fat cats and corporate executives who validate his entire existence and life’s work. He chooses to not understand the message of these protestors because to truthfully comprehend their message would nullify his thirty years of academic efforts. My non-response to the comment about the Occupy Movement was also based upon self-interest and reliance on a paycheck to make a living. I had learned my lesson the hard way during a previous career stop.

It appears older generations have a considerably more negative view of young people protesting the capture of our political and economic system than younger generations. This also makes sense because they have the most to lose and cannot visualize a society other than the one they have created. To acknowledge the validity of the Occupy Movement and the justice of their positions would be to admit their own guilt in the creation of a society that has allowed a chosen few to enrich themselves at the expense of the many. The Baby Boom Generation has been living a lie their entire adulthood. It is true that prior generations created the welfare/warfare state we have today, but the Boomers have had the reins of power for the last two decades in Congress and chose to not only ignore the fact the entitlement promises made by previous administrations could not be fulfilled. They even made further promises in the trillions to their fellow Boomers. Instead of making a budgetary choice between guns and butter, the Boomers chose guns, butter, education, universal healthcare, the right to own a home, the right to a 72 inch HDTV, and zero percent financing on their Cadillac Escalade from government motors. The consequences of these choices are a $15.2 trillion National Debt growing at a rate of $3.7 billion per day and unfunded entitlement liabilities totaling in excess of $100 trillion.

I had the pleasure of meeting Neil Howe, co-author of The Fourth Turning and fourteen other books, in early December. His ground breaking work with William Strauss on generational theory has proven to be uncannily accurate, as their 1997 assessment of what dynamics would drive the course of history over the coming decades have materialized exactly as they presumed. We had a fascinating two hour discussion about various topics impacting the world today and I found that we were in agreement on just about everything, except for the Occupy protests. Neil Howe is an expert on interpreting how generations react to events. I expected him to be impressed by the courage and fortitude of the Millenials leading this protest against Wall Street gluttony and audacious criminality. This is the new GI Generation and I anticipated him perceiving these protests as a prelude to greater feats ahead by this generation. Instead he described them as naive adolescents being led down a phony path by anarchist Boomers. As an example he referenced the fact that many of the protestors were wearing Guy Fawkes masks, the most famous anarchist in history. He found this distasteful and dangerous. My interpretation of the Guy Fawkes masks was more in line with the movie V For Vendetta and the theme of a corrupt evil government keeping the public living in perpetual fear.

“Because while the truncheon may be used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there? Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression. And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror. I know why you did it. I know you were afraid. Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease. There were a myriad of problems which conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic you turned to the now high chancellor, Adam Sutler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient consent.” V For Vendetta

Neil Howe’s impression of the movie centered on the terroristic aspects of blowing up Parliament, not on the symbolism of citizens rising up and casting off the yoke of a malevolent oligarchy that has used propaganda, fear and intimidation to manipulate and control the population. Howe is a Baby Boomer and I’m Generation X. We are each viewing the Occupy Movement through the prism of our life experiences and perceptions about the intentions of these protestors. The existing social, economic, and political structure is dominated by Boomers. Neil Howe views the Occupy Movement as a threat to the system he believes in and supports. As a cynical Xer with no allegiance to a corrupt government, a crony capitalist economic system or a greedy self centered society, I see these young revolutionaries as our last great hope.

 

Neil Howe runs a very successful consulting firm whose clients include Fortune 500 corporations, including Wall Street financial firms. His annual income and net worth is dependent upon the existing corporate dynamic. When your living depends upon not understanding the real reason young people are protesting corporate malfeasance, fraud and corruption, your mind can ignore observable facts and visible truths. Anything can be rationalized when putting food on the table requires you to ignore obvious truths and understandable facts.

Propaganda & Power

“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 

   File:Edward Bernays.jpg

I was shocked when I came across the above quote a few months ago. Bernays had it figured out 84 years ago before mass media, television, or spin doctors. His vision of a society manipulated by a small number of governing elite who believe they know better than the masses has come to fruition. True republican equality as defined by the founders in the Constitution is considered quaint and a belief of the trusting and naïve masses by the wealthy elite. Manipulation of the masses through a relentless never ending barrage of propaganda disguised as news and unremitting false advertising is designed to control and herd the cattle into the slaughterhouse. We are given the illusion of free choice, when in reality the choices are being made for us by a chosen few who think they know what is best. These puppeteers controlling the strings inhabit the financial, government and corporate halls of power. Their purpose is not to benefit society and its citizens but to protect their wealth and influence, using any means at their disposal. Propaganda to control the minds of a willfully uninformed public has been their most potent weapon.

Source: Mike Kreiger

Most people have never heard the name Edward Bernays. That is the way public relations specialists (manipulators of the truth) like it. They operate in the shadows, subtly influencing public opinion through what Bernays arrogantly referred to as the sinister method of “engineering of consent”. The Governing Elite have no time for messy processes like true capitalism or non-manipulated free elections. The objective for Bernays and his ilk has always been to provide corrupt government power brokers, shadowy bankers and corporate media kingpins with potent psychological instruments of social persuasion and mind control. Edward Bernays is considered the “father of public relations”, and he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud. He pioneered media manipulation techniques.

He understood the weaknesses of the human mind and developed methods and processes for taking advantage of that weakness.

“The average citizen is the world’s most efficient censor. His own mind is the greatest barrier between him and the facts. His own ‘logic proof compartments,’ his own absolutism are the obstacles which prevent him from seeing in terms of experience and thought rather than in terms of group reaction.”Bernays, Crystallizing Public Opinion

Bernays got his big break during the administration of Woodrow Wilson, the outset of the American interventionist empire bankrolled by an inflation creating Federal Reserve and a tax and spend Congress.  During WWI, Edward began work for the Committee on Public Information, the immense propaganda machine ordered by Woodrow Wilson to sway the American public towards a war he campaigned to keep us out of. He became so instrumental he was invited to accompany Wilson to the Paris peace conference. His claims to fame afterward included:

  • Creating a false storyline of communists in Guatemala on behalf of his client United Fruit Company, resulting in a CIA led military coup which ushered in a brutal dictatorship resulting in the dislocation, torture and death of thousands.
  • He was responsible for breaking the taboo of women smoking in public while working for American Tobacco Company.

His biggest claim to fame was inspiring the most reviled propagandist in history. Bernays’ techniques were so effective that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, made copious use of Bernays’ book, “Propaganda” throughout the Holocaust, often crediting Bernays. That was quite a feather in Bernays’ cap. The German people were gradually indoctrinated by their government through propaganda into consenting and supporting the most horrific crimes in history as described by Milton Mayer in his book, They Thought They Were Free – The Germans, 1933-45:

“This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath, of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.

“To live in this process is absolutely not to be able to notice it—please try to believe me—unless one has a much greater degree of political awareness, acuity, than most of us had ever had occasion to develop. Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted,’ that, unless one were detached from the whole process from the beginning, unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ that no ‘patriotic German’ could resent must someday lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing. One day it is over his head.”

Bernays was a master of using psychological techniques to mask the motives of his clients, as part of a calculated strategy aimed at keeping the public unaware of the forces that were working to mold their psyches. Bernays died in 1995, but his techniques have been taken to a new level as our government, media and financial elite use any means at their disposal to keep the masses sedated and content while they are fleeced and herded towards the slaughterhouse. The Big Lie perpetrated upon the masses is the fallacy of America being a democratic society. The anti-democratic and treacherous corporate public relations Madison Avenue maggots manage and manipulate the opinions of the many in order to make sure a true democratic system doesn’t threaten the privileges and supremacy of the governing elite.

I wonder if it was coincidental the creation of the Federal Reserve, implementation of the personal income tax, and virtually non-stop war coincided with the rise of an industry designed to manipulate and control the thoughts and opinions of an easily influenced and willfully unaware populace. Most people want to be led and told what to believe. Critical thinking and taking personal responsibility for your life and your society requires hard work, sacrifice, honesty, and self restraint. Simply believing storylines supplied by authority figures and media pundits allow the masses to continue living lives of debt delusion and hope, occasionally stirred into a frenzy of fear and loathing towards the foreign bogeyman of the moment, chosen by the governing elite. Bernays and his disciples understood this dynamic and have been able to utilize corporate mass media and the human weakness of trusting in the judgments of authority figures to control and manage the vast swath of America without them knowing it.

“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

The propaganda techniques employed to manipulate the masses seemed less abhorrent when they centered upon just consumer products. Convincing women they would look like a gorgeous model if they used a company’s cosmetics or convincing a man he’d be admired by his neighbors if he drove a certain car was small potatoes. In the last few decades the misinformation and outright lies fed to the American public by oligarchy of governing elite has become more manifest and repugnant. The list of abuses is virtually endless.

  • The American public has been lured into debt by the incessant unrelenting lifestyle marketing messages spewed from our TVs 24/7. From the introduction of the show Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous in the early 1980s, wealth, materialism, and consumerism became the motivating force in America. Consumption accounted for only 63% of GDP in 1980, with capital investment accounting for 17%. Today, consumption accounts for 71% of GDP and capital investment only 12%. Keeping up with the Kardashians is the mantra of our times.
  • The utter failure of our government controlled educational system in teaching our children how to think critically or question the validity of government created data has allowed the elite to paper over the fact the average American worker has not had any real income gains in at least four decades. The insidious nature of Federal Reserve created inflation (up 600% since 1970) is incomprehensible to a public that finds math boring and not essential in their lives.

 

  • Once the manipulators convinced the masses they needed a 4,000 sq ft McMansion, two brand new stylish cars, four big screen HDTVs, three computers, stainless steel appliances, granite countertops, a Rolex, Armani suits, an in-ground pool, an ATV, and house at the shore, there was only one thing left to do – loan them the money to live the faux American dream. GDP has grown 525% since 1980. Personal consumption expenditures have grown 600% since 1980. Consumer debt outstanding has grown 700% since 1980. And total household debt outstanding has grown 800% since 1980. It seems the purveyors of debt on Wall Street have been the only beneficiaries of the apparition of an American dream sold to a willingly duped American populace.

 

  • The dream of home ownership was used by politicians of both parties to further their agendas, egged on by the Wall Street elite and the National Association of Realtors – two of the largest contributors to politicians. As politicians tried to outdo themselves creating programs to get poor people into homes, Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan urged the masses to use creative new adjustable rate mortgage products. With a wink and nod from Greenspan and no fear of any regulation whatsoever, the Wall Street elite created liar loans, negative amortization loans, subprime loans, Alt-A loans and a myriad of other products to induce fraud in the housing market. Appraisers did their part by overstating the values of homes and Wall Street colluded with the rating agencies to package the toxic mortgages and sell them to clueless dupes around the globe with a AAA rating stamped on them. At the absolute peak in 2005, with prices two standard deviations above the long term average, Ben Bernanke declared the housing market strong and the NAR proclaimed it the best time to buy. As the coup de grace, Wall Street urged home owners to unlock that equity in their homes and borrow $3 trillion to spend on gadgets, home upgrades, automobiles, facelifts, new boobs, and exotic vacations. The greatest mass fraud in history was complete. And not one person has gone to jail.
  • Not only have the governing elite lured the masses into debt slavery, but they’ve convinced them to love their slavery. The governing elite have done a fantastic job of using their media mouthpieces to deflect criticism away from their pillaging and looting of the national wealth. They’ve successfully persuaded the slaves the extreme income inequality is beneficial to the country because the 1% are the job creators and have earned their way to the top through our free market capitalism system. Convincing the middle class to blame the poor for their three decade decline is a tribute to the effectiveness of their propaganda crusade. Jesse gives accolades to the father of propaganda as the moneyed interests have won:

“The moneyed interests have done quite a successful PR job in refocusing the national discussion on priorities involving social issues, and the reform of the support systems for the weak, the unfortunate, and the elderly. Turning one group against another, and objectifying your intended victims through slogans and stereotypes, has always been an effective method of bending the herd to your will. Score one for Edward Bernays.”

 

  • The Social Security System is an example of propaganda and misinformation on a grand scale. A modest (1% tax) insurance program designed to help widows and orphans during the Great Depression, which should have been treated much like term life insurance, morphed into a massive retirement plan at the behest of politicians over the last eight decades. The voters shockingly voted for more benefits. Millions are now totally dependent upon the monthly pittance they receive, as the promise of a Social Security pension deterred them from saving for their old age. Politicians perpetuated lies about the funds being protected in a lockbox. The truth is the politicians raided the lockbox and took every dime to spend on wars of choice, aid to dictators, paying off their corporate masters, and leaving only IOUs. They have promised $17.5 trillion more than they can payout. It could be made viable with a gradual rise in the retirement age and a simple means test that would eliminate payouts to those who do not need it. Instead politicians use it as a means to control their constituents and obscure the simple truths. Americans choose to remain ignorant of the facts based on their perceptions of a false reality.

 

  • Another storyline propagated by politicians of a liberal bent is that Medicare is a successful Federal government program. Only someone from the governing elite would declare a program that is $90 trillion underfunded, racked by fraud and abuse totaling almost $100 billion per year, despised by doctors across the land for its insane bureaucracy, and allows corporate insurance, drug and hospital conglomerates to dictate the costs, a success. The entire government run sickcare industry is a scam designed to enrich the corporations that contribute to the campaigns of the politicians writing the rules and regulations. The pricing mechanism between doctor and patient is broken, with neither having any say in the decisions.
  • With the unleashing of a torrent of inflation during the 1970s the governing elite needed to resort to obfuscation and manipulation of inflation figures to create the illusion of price stability and positive GDP, while screwing seniors citizens out of their Social Security benefits and convincing the middle class their annual 3% wage increases were getting them ahead in life. Inflation has been systematically understated by 5% to 7% annually since 1980.

 

  • The government drones at the BLS do the dirty work for their masters by reporting unemployment of 8.6% when the real level exceeds 20%, Great Depression levels. The corporate media just does the bidding of the corporate fascist state by unflinchingly reporting the bogus figures. Reporting the truth would be detrimental to the political and financial elites, so propaganda is rationalized as being beneficial to the country. The sheep just keep grazing as their shepherds herd them toward the slaughterhouse.

 

  • By conducting focus groups and testing words, master manipulators like Frank Lutz have been able to convince the masses to support repeal of the estate tax even though it does not affect 99.7% of American taxpayers. By renaming it a Death Tax, the public was convinced that this horrible abuse of the tax code should be repealed. The 0.3% with the ability and means to manipulate public opinion, won again.
  • The tax code and the propaganda campaign being waged by the richest .01% to obscure the truth and misinform the masses is the most barefaced attempt of the elite to retain their wealth and power. Their corporate media legions pound home the storyline of 50% of Americans not paying their fair share because they pay no Federal income tax. It sure sounds like these weasels must be doing something dishonest to avoid paying Federal taxes. What is not mentioned by the media mouthpieces is 50% of Americans make less than $25,000 per year. What is also conveniently forgotten is these people pay payroll taxes, local income taxes, state income taxes, real estate taxes, sales taxes, tolls and a multitude of other taxes, fees and charges to their utility, cable, and phone providers. In the real world, the total effective tax rate for someone making $50,000 per year exceeds the total effective tax rates of Mitt Romney, Lloyd Blankfein and Warren Buffett.

 

  •  The IRS tax code did not grow to 75,000 pages because the middle class and the poor used their undue influence to convince politicians in Washington DC to insert credits, loopholes and deductions for mega-corporations and the wealthy elite into the code. Only those with wealth, power and influence are allowed to “sway” legislation in Congress. This is called crony capitalist democracy. The current propaganda coming from the GOP candidates is our poor mega-corporations that outsourced millions of American jobs to Asia are overburdened by the 35% corporate tax rate, despite the fact they actually pay an effective rate of 18% and many multi-billion dollar conglomerates pay nothing. The truth is not important or relevant to those running the show in this country.

  • The most damaging and far reaching use of propaganda, misinformation and outright scare tactics by the financial and political elites was during the financial meltdown during September and October of 2008. The American public was whipped into a frenzy of fear by the protectors of Wall Street – Hank Paulson and Ben Bernanke – in order to funnel trillions of taxpayer funds to the Wall Street cartel that created the crisis in the first place. The governing elite declared the economic system would fail unless Wall Street was bailed out. When some courageous Congress members balked at passing TARP, the masters of the universe crashed the stock market with their super computer trading machines. The hysterical pundits on CNBC and the other corporate media outlets shrieked that our way of life would surely die if the banks were not saved. TARP was passed and Wall Street bankers rejoiced by paying themselves billions in bonuses. The truth not revealed to the masses was that the failure of a few reckless ravenously greedy Wall Street banks would not have destroyed our economic system. It would have destroyed the wealth of psychotic bankers like Blankfiein, Dimon, Pandit and a slew of other criminals on Wall Street. Wealthy stockholders and bondholders would have been wiped out. Bank depositors would not have lost a dime. The irresponsible risk junky bankers would have seen their banks liquidated. Bad debts would have been written off. The remaining good assets would have been sold to prudent banks. But instead, the ethically and financially bankrupt were saved by their corporate fascist partners in crime at the expense of the confused and disoriented American citizens. Saving bankers had been successfully marketed to the sheep as being on par with saving the nation. Chalk another one up for Bernays and his brethren.
  • After Bush and his banker cronies successfully fleeced trillions from taxpayers and handed it to bankrupt bankers, Obama and his minions continued the con on the middle class. With the help of Pelosi and Reid he was able to dispense $800 billion of payoffs to various contributors, constituents and special interests while calling it a job creating stimulus plan. When it became clear to even the ignorant masses that no jobs were being created, the governing elite channeled their best Edward Bernays and invented the term “jobs saved”. The beauty of this concept was the impossibility of ever verifying the figures spouted by the paid shills disguised as expert economists. Billions more were funneled to the housing industry and auto industry as paybacks for their contributions in the form of homebuyer tax schemes and Cash for Clunker scams. The bill for these complete failures was passed onto future generations as the National Debt soared from $10.6 trillion to $15.2 trillion in just three years of Obama rule.
  • The latest fraud being perpetrated on the American public is the lie about energy independence touted by GOP candidates for president. Rather than leveling with the people and explaining the facts of peak cheap oil to them honestly, the governing elite prefer slogans, half-truths and fantasy projections. The left touts solar, ethanol and other green energy fantasies, while the right peddles drilling, fracking, and fake estimates of supplies. Both are lying. All the cheap easy to access oil in the world has been found. The oil being discovered and accessed today is harder to reach, more expensive to produce and requires producers to expend almost one barrel of oil to produce a new barrel of oil. The easy to access oil is being depleted at the same rate that new hard to access oil is being brought on line. Meanwhile, demand grows across the globe. Our far flung suburban sprawl society teeters on the edge of an abyss and the governing elite pretend all is well.

The above list of abuses committed by the ruling oligarchy pales in comparison to the totalitarian like measures that have been executed since September 11,2001. With the country cowering in fear, the governing elite passed an Orwellian like 350 page bill that changed this country forever. The USA PATRIOT Act, which changed the relationship between our government and its citizens forever, was supposedly written, introduced, debated and passed in the space of 30 days in October 2001. I wonder which public relations firm came up with the Orwellian acronym?  Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. The purpose of naming this bill was to imply that anyone who was against allowing our government to spy, monitor or place under surveillance anyone our government chooses would make you unpatriotic. The American people chose implied safety and security over true freedom and liberty by their deafening silence. The governing elite used fear and propaganda to achieve their goal of more domination over our lives.

Drunk with their new found power, the political elite decided to change the world by using their spin machine to create visions of mushroom clouds over U.S. cities in the minds of a gullible public to craft a believable storyline for the invasion of Iraq. A willingly pliant press corp. spread the misinformation about weapons of mass destruction and Al Qaeda connections to fashion a convincing plot for pre-emptive war on a sovereign country that did not threaten our country. Who benefitted from war with Iraq? The military industrial complex reaped billions in profits and the Wall Street banks bankrolled the invasion with more debt. It only destroyed the lives of thousands of low income American soldiers, killed 100,000 Iraqi peasants, drove the price of oil from $25 a barrel to $100 a barrel, and will ultimately cost American taxpayers $4 trillion. And the great thing about passage of the Patriot Act and invasion of Iraq was the bipartisan cooperation pushing us ever closer to an authoritarian state.

The erroneous notion that Americans have a choice between two political parties that offer distinct and clear opposing policies addressing the major issues facing our country is still perpetuated by politicians and the corporate media. It is untrue, as we have seen the Obama administration employ the same repressive methods instituted by the Bush administration. Military spending rises. Wars of choice proliferate and grow. Obamacare is virtually identical to a plan created by the leading GOP presidential nominee. Further restrictions, regulations and laws are put forth to keep the masses controlled, sedated and fearful. The governing elite and their propagators of misinformation are again formulating a false storyline to convince the easily fooled ignorant public that a sovereign country 7,500 miles from our shores is actually a threat to their lives. While our government has already committed acts of war against Iran (sanctions, assassinations, cyber warfare, and using drones to spy), the public is being worked into a bloodthirsty frenzy of nationalism. Bipartisanship worked so well with Iraq. How could it possibly go wrong with Iran?                      

In the last six months cracks have begun appearing in the fascist façade masquerading as a democratic republic. The rise of the Occupy Movement, increasing pain and discontent among the middle class, a small but vocal irate minority utilizing the internet to organize, inform and spread knowledge, and the growing support among the liberty minded for Ron Paul’s candidacy are the opening salvos in a coming revolution. The volleys being traded between the forces of the American aristocratic elite and the leading forces of this revolution are only the opening shots on par with Bunker Hill. The oligarchs have won the initial skirmishes with the Occupy Movement through their control of superior mercenary fire power and ability to falsify the message and nature of the protestors. The corporate mass media propaganda machine convinced an apathetic, non critical thinking public the protestors were nothing but dirty, lazy, college students looking for government handouts organized and led by George Soros. Journalist Robert Fisk reveals the true nature of the protests and rage:

“And that is the true parallel in the West. The protest movements are indeed against Big Business – a perfectly justified cause – and against “governments”. What they have really divined, however, albeit a bit late in the day, is that they have for decades bought into a fraudulent democracy: they dutifully vote for political parties – which then hand their democratic mandate and people’s power to the banks and the derivative traders and the rating agencies, all three backed up by the slovenly and dishonest coterie of “experts” from America’s top universities and “think tanks”, who maintain the fiction that this is a crisis of globalization rather than a massive financial con trick foisted on the voters.

The banks and the rating agencies have become the dictators of the West. Like the Mubaraks and Ben Alis, the banks believed – and still believe – they are owners of their countries. The elections which give them power have – through the gutlessness and collusion of governments – become as false as the polls to which the Arabs were forced to troop decade after decade to anoint their own national property owners. Goldman Sachs and the Royal Bank of Scotland became the Mubaraks and Ben Alis of the US and the UK, each gobbling up the people’s wealth in bogus rewards and bonuses for their vicious bosses on a scale infinitely more rapacious than their greedy Arab dictator-brothers could imagine.” – Robert Fisk, Bankers are the Dictators of the West

The mounting desperation of the oligarchs is palpable. They have circled the wagons as one of their leaders – Jon Corzine – was caught stealing $1.2 billion directly from the accounts of his customers after making reckless bets that went wrong and bankrupted his firm. The Department of Homeland Security coordinated brutality unleashed upon peaceful protestors in cities across America opened the eyes of more people to the approach of an increasingly oppressive state. The media lapdogs have come out in force with an organized smear campaign designed to derail the presidential campaign of Ron Paul, the only candidate talking about real change and a real downsizing of the American empire. Ron Paul’s platform of liberty, freedom, non-interventionism, sound money, and a government not controlled by bankers and corporate interests is anathema to the ruling elite of both parties. A vote for one of the hand selected candidates offered by the moneyed interests is simply a vote for the special interest status quo. As our economic system becomes more saturated with debt by the day a tipping point approaches.

Obama’s signing of the NDAA, overwhelmingly supported by politicians of both parties, now gives the ruling class the ability to track down and imprison indefinitely any American citizen they consider a threat to their power, without charges. The only remaining thorn in their side is the internet. The internet has allowed critical thinkers to share information, organize resistance to the oligarchs, create communities of like-minded citizens, and allow individuals the opportunity to turn the tables and perform surveillance on the state. The state does not like an unfettered internet because it allows citizens to find the non-manipulated truth and undermines their mainstream media propaganda machine. Young people are less able to be manipulated. The introduction of abominable legislation like SOPA and PIPA are a blatant attempt by the governing elite to crush dissent by locking down the internet and eliminating sites that question their version of reality.

Humans are a flawed species. Our minds are easily manipulated. We don’t like pain. We prefer instant gratification. We are susceptible to mass delusion. We will often choose hope over critical thought. Those with higher IQs will regularly attempt to take advantage of those with lower IQs. Fear and greed are the two motivations used by the minority in power to control and manipulate the majority. The American people have been led astray by a small group of powerful men. We were herded through a door in the wall of perception that promised an American dream of material goods, entitlements and pleasure with no obligations or responsibility to future generations. There is only one choice that can save this country from ruin. Each individual must make a choice to either to continue supporting the manipulative, corrupt status quo or coming back through the Door in the Wall.

 

“The man who comes back through the Door in the Wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser but less sure, happier but less self-satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things, of systematic reasoning to the unfathomable mystery which it tries, forever vainly, to comprehend” – Aldous Huxley

2012 – THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY

“In retrospect, the spark might seem as ominous as a financial crash, as ordinary as a national election, or as trivial as a Tea Party. The catalyst will unfold according to a basic Crisis dynamic that underlies all of these scenarios: An initial spark will trigger a chain reaction of unyielding responses and further emergencies. The core elements of these scenarios (debt, civic decay, global disorder) will matter more than the details, which the catalyst will juxtapose and connect in some unknowable way. If foreign societies are also entering a Fourth Turning, this could accelerate the chain reaction. At home and abroad, these events will reflect the tearing of the civic fabric at points of extreme vulnerability –  problem areas where America will have neglected, denied, or delayed needed action.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning – 1997

 

In December 2010 I wrote an article called Will 2012 Be as Critical as 1860?, that pondered what might happen with the 2012 presidential election and the possible scenarios that might play out based on that election. Well, 2012 has arrived and every blogger and mainstream media pundit is making their predictions for 2012. The benefit of delaying my predictions until the first week of 2012 is that I’ve been able to read the wise ponderings of Mike Shedlock, Jesse, Karl Denninger, and some other brilliant truth seeking analysts regarding what might happen during 2012. The passage above from Strauss & Howe was written fifteen years ago and captured the essence of what has happened since 2007 and what will drive all the events over the next decade. Predicting specific events is a futile human endeavor. The world is so complex and individual human beings so impulsive and driven by emotion, that the possible number of particular outcomes is almost infinite.

But, as Strauss and Howe point out, the core elements that created this Crisis and the reaction of generational cohorts to the implications of debt, civic decay and global disorder will drive all the events that will occur in 2012 and for as far as the eye can see. Linear thinkers in mega-corporations, mainstream media and Washington D.C. focus on retaining the status quo, their power and their wealth. They believe an economic recovery can be manufactured through monetary manipulation and Keynesian borrowing and spending. They are blind to the fact that history is cyclical, not linear. In order to have an understanding of what could happen in the coming year, it is essential to keep the big picture in focus. As we enter the fifth year of this twenty year Crisis period, there is absolutely no chance that 2012 will see an improvement in our economy, political atmosphere or world situation. Fourth Turnings never de-intensify. They exhaust themselves after years of chaos, conflict and turmoil. I can guarantee you that 2012 will see increased mayhem, riots, violent protests, recessions, bear markets, and a presidential election that will confound the establishment. 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.

Debt – On the Road to Serfdom

The world is awash in debt. Everyone is focused on the PIIGS with their debt to GDP ratios exceeding the Rogoff & Reinhart’s 90% point of no return. But, the supposedly fiscally responsible countries like Germany, France, U.K., and the U.S. have already breached the 90% level. Japan is off the charts, with debt exceeding 200% of GDP. These figures are just for the official government debt. If countries were required to report their debt like a corporation, their unfunded entitlement promises to future generations are four to six times more than their official government debt.

Any critical thinking person can look at the chart above and realize that creating more debt out of thin air to solve a debt problem is foolish, dangerous, and self serving to only bankers and politicians. The debt crisis took decades of terrible choices and bogus promises to produce. The world is now in the midst of a debt driven catastrophe. 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 largest banks in Europe are leveraged 40 to 1, therefore a 3% reduction in their capital will cause bankruptcy. Once you pass 90% debt to GDP, your fate is sealed.

“Those who remain unconvinced that rising debt levels pose a risk to growth should ask themselves why, historically, levels of debt of more than 90 percent of GDP are relatively rare and those exceeding 120 percent are extremely rare. Is it because generations of politicians failed to realize that they could have kept spending without risk? Or, more likely, is it because at some point, even advanced economies hit a ceiling where the pressure of rising borrowing costs forces policy makers to increase tax rates and cut government spending, sometimes precipitously, and sometimes in conjunction with inflation and financial repression (which is also a tax)?”Rogoff & Reinhart

The ECB doubling their balance sheet and funneling trillions to European banks will not solve anything. 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. They believe they can control the levers of inflation, but they have proven to be incompetent, hubristic, and myopic. 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.

The false storyline of debt being paid down in the United States continues to be propagated by the mainstream press and decried by Paul Krugman. The age of austerity storyline gets full play on a daily basis. Total credit market debt in 2000 was $27 trillion. It skyrocket to $42 trillion by 2005 as George Bush and Alan Greenspan encouraged delusional Americans to defeat terrorism by leasing SUVs and live the American dream by putting zero down on a $600,000 McMansion, financing it with a negative amortization no doc loan. Paul Krugman got his wish as a housing bubble replaced the dotcom bubble. Debt accumulation went into hyper-speed in 2006 and 2007 as Wall Street sharks conducted a fraudulent feeding frenzy by peddling their derivatives of mass destruction around the globe. By the end of 2007, total credit market debt reached $51 trillion.

In a world inhabited by sincere sane leaders, willing to level with the citizens and disposed to allow financial institutions that took world crushing risks to fail through an orderly bankruptcy process, debt would have been written off and a sharp short contraction would have occurred. The stockholders, bondholders and executives of the Wall Street banks would have taken the losses they deserved. Instead Wall Street used their undue influence, wealth and power to force their politician puppets to funnel $5 trillion to the bankers that created the crisis while dumping the debt on taxpayers and unborn generations. The Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve provided risk free funding and took toxic mortgage assets off their balance sheets. The result is total credit market debt higher today than it was at the peak of the financial crisis in March 2009.

 

Our leaders have done the exact opposite of what needed to be done to address this debt crisis. The country is adding $3.7 billion per day to the National Debt. With the debt at $15.2 trillion, we have now surpassed the 100% to GDP mark. The National Debt will be $16.5 trillion when the next president takes office in January 2013. Ben Bernanke has been able to keep short term interest rates near zero and the non-existent U.S. economic growth and European disaster has resulted in keeping long-term rates near record lows. Despite these historic low rates, interest on the National Debt totaled $454 billion in 2011, an all-time high. The effective interest rate was approximately 3%. If rates stay at current levels, interest will be between $400 and $500 billion in 2012. Each 1% increase in rates would cost American taxpayers an additional $150 billion. A rapid increase in rates to the 7% level would ratchet interest expense above $1 trillion and destroy the last remaining vestiges of Bernanke’s credibility. It can’t possibly happen in 2012. Right? The world has total confidence in pieces of paper being produced at a rate of $3.7 billion per day. Confidence in Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama and the U.S. Congress is all that stands between continued stability and complete chaos. What could go wrong?

Debt related issues that will likely rear their head in 2012 are as follows:

  • A debt saturated society cannot grow. 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 as clearly detailed by ECRI, John Hussman and Hoisington Investment Management.

“Here’s what ECRI’s recession call really says: if you think this is a bad economy, you haven’t seen anything yet. And that has profound implications for both Main Street and Wall Street.” – ECRI 

At present, we observe agreement across a broad ensemble of models, even restricting data to indicators available since 1950 (broader data since 1970 imply virtual certainty of recession). The uniformity of recessionary evidence we observe today has never been seen except during or just prior to other historical recessions.-  John Hussman 

Negative economic growth will probably be registered in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2011, and in subsequent quarters in 2012. Though partially caused by monetary and fiscal actions and excessive indebtedness, this contraction has been further aggravated by three current cyclical developments: a) declining productivity, b) elevated inventory investment, and c) contracting real wage income. In summary, the case for an impending recession rests not only on cyclical precursors evident in productivity, real wages, and inventory investment, but also on the disfunctionality of monetary and fiscal policy. – Van Hoisington 

  • The onrushing recession will send housing down for the count. With 2.2 million homes already in the foreclosure process and another 13 million homes with negative or near negative equity, the recession will push more people over the edge. 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.
  • The recession will result in companies laying off more workers. It won’t be as dramatic as 2008-2009 because companies have already shed 6 million jobs. 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%.
  • The American people rationally increased their savings rate to 6.2% in the 2nd Quarter of 2009. When you are over-indebted and the country heads into recession, spending less and saving more is a sane option. Consumer expenditures accounted for 69% of GDP in 2007, prior to the economic collapse. The “recovery” of 2010-2011 has been driven by Ben’s zero interest rate policy, the resumption of easy credit peddling by the Wall Street banks, and consumers convinced that going further into hock to attain the American dream is rational. Consumer spending as a percentage of GDP has actually risen to 71% and the savings rate has plunged to 3.6%. The 20% drop in gas prices since April bottomed in December. This decline temporarily boosted consumer spending, but prices are on the rise again. With the State and local governments reducing spending, do the Wall Street Ivy League economists really believe consumers will increase their consumption to 73% of GDP and reduce their savings rate to 1%? If you open your local newspaper you will see the master plan. Car dealers are offering 0% financing with nothing down for 60 months. The GMAC/Ditech/Ally Bank zombie lives as subprime auto loans are back. The “strong” auto sales are a debt financed illusion. Ashley Furniture is offering 0% financing for 50 months with no payments through Wells Fargo Bank. When the Federal Reserve provides the Wall Street banks with 0% funding, banks are willing to take big risks knowing that Uncle Ben and the naive American taxpayer will be there to bail them out when it blows up again.

 

  • With recession a certainty as fiscal stimulus wears off, home prices fall, employment stagnates, and consumer spending grinds to a halt, what will happen to the stock market? The Wall Street shills paraded on CNBC and interviewed by the multi-millionaire talking head twits assure you that stocks are undervalued and the market will surely be up 10% to 15% by 2013. It’s a mortal lock, just as it has been for the last twelve years, with the S&P 500 at the same level as January 1999. The fact is the stock market drops 30% on average during a recession. The talking heads declare that corporate profits are at record levels and will continue higher. Not bloody likely. Corporate profit margins are at an all-time peak about 50% above their historical norms. Profits always revert to their mean. These profits are not sustainable as they were generated by firing millions of workers, zero interest rates for banks, fraudulent accounting by the banks, and trillions in handouts from the middle class taxpayers to corporate America.

 

In a true free market excess profits will draw more competitors and profits will fall due to competition. When corporate profits exceed the mean by such a large amount, you can conclude that crony capitalism has replaced the free market. Government bureaucrats have been picking the winners (Wall Street, War Industry, Big Media, Big Healthcare) and the American people are the losers. Corporate oligarchs prefer no competition so they can reap obscene risk free profits and reward themselves with king-like compensation. Mean reversion will eventually be a bitch. Real S&P earnings have reached the 2007 historic peak. To believe they will soar higher as we enter a recession takes the same kind of faith shown by Americans buying a $600,000 McMansion in Stockton with no money down in 2005. The result will be the same. Do you ever wonder how corporations are doing so well while the average American sinks further into debt, despair and poverty?

The brilliant John Hussman captures the gist of an investor’s dilemma in his latest article:

“With 10-year Treasury yields below 2%, 30-year yields below 3%, corporate bond yields below 4%, and S&P 500 projected 10-year total returns below 5%, we presently have one of the worst menus of prospective return that long-term investors have ever faced. The outcome of this situation will not be surprisingly pleasant for any sustained period of time, but promises to be difficult, volatile, and unrewarding. The proper response is to accept risk in proportion to the compensation available for taking that risk. Presently, that compensation is very thin. This will change, and much better opportunities to accept risk will emerge. The key is for investors to avoid the allure of excessive short-term speculation in a market that promises – bends to its knees, stares straight into investors’ eyes, and promises – to treat them terribly over the long-term.”

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.

  • Even though the U.S. economy has been stagnant for the past year and Europe is back in recession, oil is trading at $102 a barrel (Brent – $113 a barrel). This is a classic Catch-22 for Bernanke and his central banker buddies. The higher the price goes, the more recessionary economies become as energy and food costs rise. This would normally decrease demand and lower prices, but the massive money printing by the Fed and ECB artificially inflates the price of oil. The Canadian oil sands are only viable at $90 a barrel. Saudi Arabia needs $90 oil to balance their budgets. The onset of peak cheap oil, lack of Libyan supply, possible war with Iran, and increased demand from the developing world (China, India) will put a floor of $80 to $90 a barrel under oil. A shooting war with Iran would result in $150 a barrel of oil overnight. The trend in gasoline prices over the last three years is not your friend:

January 2009           $1.65

January 2010           $2.57

January 2011           $3.04

January 2012           $3.29

Gas prices are rising during the lowest usage time of the year. 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.

  • The question of whether gold can keep its streak of 11 consecutive positive return years in a row intact is an easy one. Will Obama and Congress spend $1.3 trillion more than they bring in during 2012? Will Ben Bernanke and other central bankers around the globe keep printing pieces of paper and calling it currency? If the answer to these two questions is yes, then 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.

Civic Decay – Occupying, Plundering, Capturing

Civic decay revealed itself dramatically in 2011 as millions of young people across the country occupied parks and town squares in a fruitless effort to correctly point out how the ruthless oligarchs inhabiting Wall Street bank executive suites, Mega-corporation boardrooms, the Marriner S. Eccles Federal Reserve Board Building, and the hallways of Congress had pillaged the wealth of the middle class through inflation, taxation, fraud and outright thievery. The majority of over-medicated, lethargic, uninterested, ignorant Americans yawned at this selfless display of courage and civil disobedience as they chose to occupy lines for hours to get the latest iPad or $3 waffle-maker at Wal-Mart. Delusional, non-thinking dolts across the land watched on their 60 inch HDTVs as young protestors got clubbed, beaten, tear gassed, tasered, maced, and brutalized by paid mercenaries for the ruling oligarchy. They treated the horrific scenes of brutality as if it was just one of their 30 favorite reality TV shows like I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant or Toddlers & Tiaras. They thought this was a new show called Mace A Millenial.

Despite controlling the media, the money and the levers of power in Washington D.C., those in power cannot spin the reality of a middle class being systematically wiped out by the policies put in place by the corporate fascist oligarchs running this country. As Wall Street profits and bonuses flow like honey, the lines at food banks look like the lines at Best Buy on Black Friday and homeless shelters overflow with former members of the middle class. The ministry of propaganda (BLS, BEA) reports improving economic conditions while the number of Americans in the food stamp program has jumped from 38 million when the recession officially ended in late 2009 to 46.3 million today. Having 15% of the population surviving on food stamps is surely a sign of economic recovery.

 

The mainstream media methodically spews misinformation and happy talk about increased consumer spending and retail sales above expectations as if Americans borrowing to buy another laptop, TV, Kindle, or Rolex proves we have a real recovery. Meanwhile, 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. There is a disconnect in society as high end retailers like Saks, Tiffany, and Neiman Marcus report record sales as the 1% feel confident and flush with cash. Meanwhile, real median income is lower than it was in 2001. It seems tax cuts didn’t lift all boats, just the yachts. The average Joe pays twice as much for a gallon of gas and 50% more for food since 2001 while taking home less pay. The ruling elite can’t figure out why the peasants are getting restless.

 

The wealthy elite have been out in force over the last few months broadcasting their storyline about 50% of Americans not paying taxes. They and their media mouthpieces pound this message home unceasingly. They portray themselves as job creators, when the facts prove they have destroyed jobs here in America. They successfully painted the Occupy Movement as a bunch of lazy good for nothing socialists who needed to get a job. Then they unleashed the full fury of their brute strength upon these citizens practicing their right to assembly and free speech by crushing them with their hired police thugs, while the ignorant by choice public looked away. Controlling the message is essential for the oligarchs to retain their wealth, power and control. Aldous Huxley’s understanding of the American people is as true today as it was eighty years ago:

 “Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.”

It is time to not choose ignorance. The storyline peddled to the masses is false. The ruling oligarchy will do everything in their power to obscure and manipulate the truth. It is true that 50% of American workers pay no Federal income tax. It is also true that 50% of American workers make less than $25,000 per year. If these workers are employed in Philadelphia they pay 4% city income tax, 3% state income tax, 7.65% Social Security and Medicare tax, 6% sales tax on everything they buy, 15% state and federal taxes on gasoline, and they pay city and county property taxes whether they own or rent. They also pay the various sewer, trash, and myriad of other fees inflicted on them by government drones. Maybe someone should inform multi-billionaire hedge fund guru Steve Schwarzman that lower income families actually have most of their skin in the game. They can’t hire hoards of high powered lawyers and tax accountants to minimize their tax burden while contributing millions to politicians who write the laws to protect the oligarchs. I wonder why hedge fund managers don’t pay taxes on their profits.

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax. “You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”

We are all part of the system, and the system is rigged. The middle class is systematically being obliterated as high paying jobs were shipped to low paying countries by mega-corporations. Their huge cost advantages have driven small domestic “job creating” firms out of business. The middle class has the majority of their wealth tied up in their homes, and they continue to see that wealth decline on a daily basis. The culprits in the housing collapse – the major Wall Street banks – have seen their profits skyrocket as they held the middle class hostage to a multi-trillion dollar banker bailout. Americans don’t hate the wealthy. Wealthy men like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates have been admired and emulated by Americans because they exhibited the true admirable traits of entrepreneurship, creativity, hard work, taking chances, and creating a better society. Wall Street shysters create nothing. They exhibit the worst traits of greed, avarice, and non-existent empathy for their fellow man.

 Gains and Losses in 2007-2009, Average CEO Pay vs. Average Worker Pay

Matt Taibbi summed up how the system is rigged rather succinctly in a recent article:

“And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air. The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.”

The wealth inequality in this country did not occur because half the population is lazy and stupid. It didn’t happen because the 1% is intellectually superior, more highly motivated, or more entrepreneurial than the 99%. If any of these statements were true, the inequality would be consistent across decades and centuries. But, as the chart below details, the phenomenon has happened since 1979. Interestingly, it also occurred just prior to the 1929 stock market crash and Great Depression.  

  

The chart reflects the results of three decades of crony capitalism based upon phony tax canards; delusions of a debt based American dream peddled by bankers, politicians and the media; and complete capture of our economic and political system by a self selected wealthy few. Jesse captures the essence of how it happened in a recent article:

“Anyone who has seriously studied applied macroeconomics knows that crony capitalists hate free markets, with all the fairness and transparency that they imply. Competition is a serious drag on enormous profits and introduces significant uncertainty and risk. As soon as the game is underway, successful capitalists are constantly pushing the envelope of the rules, seeking to establish rents, monopolies, unfair advantages, and debt traps to snare the bulk of the players and stifle the profit-eroding tendency of real competition.

This is the basis of all aristocracies, which are merely the institutionalization of privilege.  Once they make it they bloody well want to change the rules to hang on to it, and take the risk out of their equation. They foster a culture of two sets of books, two sets of rules, and two systems of justice. They are given over in their personal and professional lives to the benefits of hypocrisy and cheating, with little conscience to restrain them. There is a predatory class that is nationless, without allegiance to anything, any principle, but their own greed and lust for power.”

What has happened over the last three decades is not particular to the United States. It is a flaw in all humanity. The majority of humans are inherently honest and if raised by good parents will do the right thing most of the time. When society allows psychopaths and evil men to attain high status in government and business through chosen ignorance, lack of vigilance, casting aside the rule of law, or admiration for wealth attained by any means, then wealth disparity reaches extreme levels. The fatal defect of the Wall Street psychopaths is their hubris. Too much is never enough. They are like sharks, always needing more to satiate their hunger. They will eventually go too far and collapse their crony capitalist system resulting in revolution and ultimately their demise. We are very close to the tipping point and 2012 is likely to reveal deep cracks in the foundation of our warped dysfunctional corporate fascist economic system. These are a few things I expect to happen in 2012:

  • 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.
  • Two simultaneous trends will eventually result in a domestic conflict. 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. If the financial system implodes in 2012 and an MF Global like stealing of customer funds from IRAs, 401ks, and bank accounts happens, all hell could break loose.
  • 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. His message of freedom, liberty, non-interventionism, living within our means, self reliance, and a sound currency are poison to the establishment. His message appeals to young people and a growing number of realists who understand we are already bankrupt. 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.

The question for 2012 is whether the gaping multitude will come to their senses and respond accordingly against the ruling oligarchy.

“Modern fanaticism thrives in proportion to the quantity of contradictions and nonsense it pours down the throats of the gaping multitude, and the jargon and mysticism it offers to their wonder and credulity.”William Hazlitt

Global Disorder – War, Oil, Religion

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Disorder is an understatement when describing what is happening on the global scene. It seems like the inmates are running the insane asylum. The beauty of globalization, sold to Americans by the corporate oligarchs, is being revealed for all to see. Besides seeing millions of jobs shipped overseas by mega-corporation executives and our industrial base gutted beyond repair, the other “benefits” are aplenty. The interconnectedness of the global economy insures that a recession in Europe and the U.S. will spread across the world. The producing countries will fall when the consuming countries run out of fiat currency to spur consumption. Federal Reserve created inflation in the United States instantaneously spreads around the world creating revolutions across the Middle East and social unrest in China as food and energy prices surge to levels of pain which cause the poor to revolt against the ruling establishment. People lose it when they have nothing to lose.

But, the biggest gift of globalization has been provided by whom else – the Wall Street banks and the large European banks. The European banks did their part by loaning hundreds of billions to PIIGS that could never pay them back. Next, they leveraged their balance sheets 40 to 1, insuring that a 3% loss on their capital wipes them out. When their losses clearly exceeded 40%, the bankers employed their politician puppets running the insolvent countries across the continent to dump the losses on the taxpayers through austerity measures that insure a deep European recession. Since derivatives of mass destruction link the insolvent Wall Street banks to the insolvent European banks, the Federal Reserve has now stepped into the breach with American taxpayer money by providing swap lines to European banks. The oligarchs are perfectly willing to destroy the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens across the globe to insure their wealth and power remains intact.

The other crucial component of global disorder is oil. The storyline currently being peddled to the masses is the return of energy independence for America. The political class and their lapdog media pundits blatantly lie to the American public with stories of 100 years of oil supply under our soil. GOP candidates declare we can be energy independent in two years if we just drill, drill, drill. Meanwhile, in the real world 33 billion barrels of oil are consumed every year, with the U.S. consuming 7 billion barrels per year, of which 3.3 billion barrels are imported. Total U.S. oil production continues its 40 year decline, despite the shale oil boom in the Dakotas and the massive fracking hype touted by the gas industry. If Americans used some critical thinking skills they would conclude that our oil dependent society is balanced on the head of a pin. The chart below paints a picture of current and future global disorder.

One look at this chart and you begin to understand the War on Terror cover story. The average person in these Muslim oil rich countries wants a chance for a better life, food, clothing, and hope for their children’s future. They are not the evil, freedom hating, religious fanatic terrorists portrayed by the neo-cons and war mongers like Santorum, Gingrich and Romney. American troops are stationed in or around the countries with the most oil. Any dictator that fails to play along with the U.S. and its oil demands isn’t around for long. Hussein and Gaddafi learned the hard way. It’s just a matter of time for Ahmadinejad. Expect the rhetoric about the dangerous Chavez to escalate in the near future. Controlling 300 billion barrels of oil will be essential to keeping our suburban sprawl society functioning. Soccer moms will become irate when they can’t fill up their GMC Yukon with 39 gallons of precious fuel. Our own military clearly documented why the War on Terror will never end in their 2010 Joint Operating Environment report:

 A severe energy crunch is inevitable without a massive expansion of production and refining capacity. While it is difficult to predict precisely what economic, political, and strategic effects such a shortfall might produce, it surely would reduce the prospects for growth in both the developing and developed worlds. Such an economic slowdown would exacerbate other unresolved tensions, push fragile and failing states further down the path toward collapse, and perhaps have serious economic impact on both China and India. One should not forget that the Great Depression spawned a number of totalitarian regimes that sought economic prosperity for their nations by ruthless conquest. By 2012, surplus oil production capacity could entirely disappear, and as early as 2015, the shortfall in output could reach nearly 10 MBD.

The likeliest global events which will make 2012 a year to remember include:

  • The disintegration of the European Union with outright default by Greece and the exit from the Union by Italy, Spain, and Portugal. A default and currency devaluation would bankrupt banks across Europe and would guarantee a worldwide recession and possibly depression.
  • 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.
  • 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. Chinese leaders will look for a foreign bogeyman so they can rally their 1 billion peasants around the flag. With 11% of their oil supply coming from Iran, it could get very interesting.

Just as no one saw the most significant events of 2011 (Arab Spring, Mubarak & Gaddafi overthrown, Japanese earthquake, tsunami, nuclear meltdown, and Occupy Wall Street) in advance, 2012 will surely have some surprises. Possibilities include:

  • An earthquake on the New Madrid fault or off the coast of California causing a tsunami to hit the west coast.
  • One or more hurricanes entering the Gulf of Mexico causing widespread oil rig destruction and causing oil and natural gas prices to soar.
  • A new bird flu or swine flu pandemic that spreads around the world.
  • An actual terrorist attack in the United States in a mall, hotel or public venue that provokes a massive over response by our government could change this country forever.
  • The assassination of political leaders and prominent bankers around the world as radicals take retribution into their own hands.

We have now entered the fifth year of this Fourth Turning Crisis. George Washington and his troops were barely holding on at Valley Forge during the fifth year of the American Revolution Fourth Turning. By year five of the Civil War Fourth Turning 700,000 Americans were dead, the South left in ruins, a President assassinated and a military victory attained that felt like defeat. By the fifth year of the Great Depression/World War II Fourth Turning, FDR’s New Deal was in place and Adolf Hitler had been democratically elected and was formulating big plans for his Third Reich. The insight from prior Fourth Turnings that applies to 2012 is that things will not improve. They call it a Crisis because the risk of calamity is constant. There is zero percent chance that 2012 will result in a recovery and return to normalcy. Not one of the issues that caused our economic collapse has been solved. The “solutions” implemented since 2008 have exacerbated the problems of debt, civic decay and global disorder. The choices we make as a nation in 2012 will determine the future course of this Fourth Turning. If we fail in our duty, this Fourth Turning could go catastrophically wrong. I pray we choose wisely. Have a great 2012.          

“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. Thus might the next Fourth Turning end in apocalypse – or glory. The nation could be ruined, its democracy destroyed, and millions of people scattered or killed. Or America could enter a new golden age, triumphantly applying shared values to improve the human condition. The rhythms of history do not reveal the outcome of the coming Crisis; all they suggest is the timing and dimension.” – Strauss & Howe

 

  Source: www.williambanzai7.blogspot.com

2011 – CATCH-22 YEAR IN REVIEW

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” – Mark Twain

 

I published my predictions for 2011 on January 3, 2011 in my article 2011 – The Year of Catch-22. Humans evidently enjoy being embarrassed by how pitiful they are at predicting the future, because we continue to do it year after year. The mainstream media pundits don’t dare look back at their predictions or the predictions of the Wall Street shills that parade on CNBC and get quoted in the Wall Street Journal, eternally predicting 10% to 15% stock market gains. The multi-millionaire Wall Street strategists like the spawn of the squid, Abbey Joseph Cohen, have used all of their Ivy League brain power to predict at least a 10% stock price gain every year since 1999. The S&P 500 stood at 1,272 on January 6, 1999. As of this writing it currently stands at 1,261. ZERO appreciation over the last twelve years.

The Wall Street mantra of stocks for the long run is beginning to get a little stale. If Abbey Joseph Cohen had been right for the last twelve years, the S&P 500 would be 4,000. For this level of accuracy, she is paid millions. Her 2011 prediction of 1,500 only missed by16%. The S&P 500 began the year at 1,258 and hasn’t budged. The lowest prediction from the Wall Street shysters at the outset of the year was 1,333, with the majority between 1,400 and 1,500.

The same Wall Street clowns are now being quoted in the mainstream media predicting a 10% to 15% increase in stock prices in 2012, despite the fact we are headed back into recession, China’s property bubble has burst, and Europe teeters on the brink of dissolution. They lie on behalf of their Too Big To Tell the Truth employers by declaring stocks undervalued, when honest analysts such as Jeremy Grantham, John Hussman and Robert Shiller truthfully report that stocks are overvalued and will provide pitiful returns over the next year and the next decade.

I will take my chances with a few predictions for 2012 after reviewing my lack of foresight regarding 2011. I declared 2011 the year of Catch-22 because no matter what happened, it would not translate into a positive result for the American people. This was my thesis:

The United States and its leaders are stuck in their own Catch 22. They need the economy to improve in order to generate jobs, but the economy can only improve if people have jobs. They need the economy to recover in order to improve our deficit situation, but if the economy really recovers long term interest rates will increase, further depressing the housing market and increasing the interest expense burden for the US, therefore increasing the deficit. A recovering economy would result in more production and consumption, which would result in more oil consumption driving the price above $100 per barrel, therefore depressing the economy. Americans must save for their retirements as 10,000 Baby Boomers turn 65 every day, but if the savings rate goes back to 10%, the economy will collapse due to lack of consumption. Consumer expenditures account for 71% of GDP and need to revert back to 65% for the US to have a balanced sustainable economy, but a reduction in consumer spending will push the US back into recession, reducing tax revenues and increasing deficits. You can see why Catch 22 is the theme for 2011.

My predictions for 2011 were as follows:

  • The first half of 2011 is guaranteed to give the appearance of recovery. The lame-duck Congress ”compromise” will pump hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars into the economy. The continuation of unemployment benefits for 99 weeks (supposedly to help employment) and the 2% payroll tax cut will goose consumer spending. Ben Bernanke and his QE2 stimulus for poor Wall Street bankers is pumping $75 billion per month ($3 to $4 billion per day) directly into the stock market. Since Ben gave Wall Street the all clear signal in late August, the NASDAQ has soared 25%. Despite the fact that there are 362,000 less Americans employed than were employed in August 2010, the mainstream media will continue to tout the jobs recovery. The goal of all these efforts is to boost confidence and spending. Everything being done by those in power has the seeds of its own destruction built in. The Catch 22 will assert itself in the 2nd half of 2011.

The payroll tax cut, extension of unemployment benefits and Bernanke’s gift to Wall Street criminal banks did nothing to help real Americans in the real world. The government manipulated GDP has languished between 0.4% and 1.8% in the first three quarters of 2011. Using a true measure of inflation, as detailed by John Williams at www.shadowstats.com, GDP has remained at a recessionary level of -2% to -3%.

 

Easy Ben accomplished his goal of pumping up the stock market with his QE2 gift to Wall Street bankers during the first six months of 2011, with the S&P 500 peaking at 1,364 in late April. The market began to fall the second Ben stopped handing Jamie Dimon and his friends $4 billion per day, with the market dropping 18% in three months. The market has risen back near the breakeven level for the year based on Ben’s promise to keep interest rates at zero forever and the hope of QE3.

  • A new perfect storm is brewing for housing in 2011 and will not subside until late 2012. You may have thought those bad mortgages had been all written off. You would be wrong. There will be in excess of $200 billion of adjustable rate mortgages that reset between 2011 and 2012, with in excess of $125 billion being the dreaded Alt-A mortgages. This is a recipe for millions of new foreclosures.

The brainless twits on CNBC will dutifully report the number of completed foreclosure sales plunged by 24% in 2011, giving the impression to their non-critical thinking viewership that all is well on the housing front. What they will fail to point out is that the number of foreclosures in process went up in 2011 and now stands 59% ABOVE the level in 2009 at the height of our recession. The reason that completed foreclosures have fallen is twofold. The criminal Wall Street banks can’t prove they hold the mortgage notes on hundreds of thousands of homes and they have a few legal issues related to the massive robo-signing fraud they committed. Kicking old ladies and Iraq War veterans out into the street using fraudulent documentation has caused the Wall Street Too Evil To Believe Banks some public relations issues. Secondly, the Wall Street Plutocrats have these mortgage loans valued at 100% on their balance sheets due to the FASB gift of mark to fantasy accounting rules. Foreclosing actually reveals their assets to be overvalued by at least 50%. This may explain why millions of Americans are still in their homes after not making a mortgage payment for two years, as detailed by economist Tom Lawler:

Given the number of loans either seriously delinquent or in the process of foreclosure at the beginning of the year, the number of completed foreclosure sales in 2011 is almost absurdly low, reflecting the complete screw-up of the mortgage servicing industry, and the resulting dramatic slowdown in foreclosure resolutions. As of the end of October, 2011 LPS estimated that there were 1.759 million seriously delinquent loans with the average number of days delinquent at 388 (compared to 192 days in January 2008), and there were 2.210 million loans in the foreclosure process that had been on average delinquent for 631 days.

Completed Foreclosure Sales And Short Sales/DILs (thousands, estimates)
  2008 2009 2010 2011(E)
Completed Foreclosure Sales 914 949 1,070 815
Owner-occupied N.A. N.A. 785 608
Non-owner-occupied N.A. N.A. 285 207
Short Sales/DILs 105 270 354 380
Foreclosures plus Short Sales/DILs 1,019 1,219 1,424 1,195
Outstanding first liens: Jan-08 Jan-09 Jan-10 Jan-11
Seriously Delinquent (90+) 1,016 1,983 3,061 2,168
In Process of Foreclosure 860 1,386 2,110 2,203
 
The concerted effort to not complete foreclosures did nothing to slow the continued descent in home prices. As you can see in the chart below from http://www.calculatedriskblog.com/, real home prices will have fallen another 5% in 2011. Obama and his minions threw $50 billion of your tax dollars at the housing market in 2009 – 2010 with tax credits, loan modification programs, homebuilder tax loss carry-backs, and a myriad of other Keynesian claptrap solutions. They succeeded in pissing your tax dollars down the toilet as prices have declined another 12% in the last 18 months. Prices have fallen 42% nationally since 2006. I wonder who missed the boat on that development?
 
“We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit.” – Ben Bernanke – July 2005
 
 

There are approximately 48.5 million homes with mortgages in the United States and 10.7 million of them have negative equity. Another 2.4 million have less than 5% equity. Considering it costs more than 5% in closing costs to sell a house that means 27% of home occupiers with a mortgage are trapped like rats in a cage. With 2.2 million foreclosures still in the pipeline and a looming recession, home prices will continue to fall another 10% to 20% over the next two years and one third of all home occupiers will be underwater. That sounds like a recipe for 10% to 15% stock market gains.

  • Quantitative easing has benefited only Wall Street bankers and the 1% wealthiest Americans. The $1.4 trillion of toxic mortgage backed securities on The Fed’s balance sheet are worth less than $700 billion. How will they unload this toxic waste? The Treasuries they have bought drop in value as interest rates rise. Quantitative easing’s Catch 22 is that it can never be unwound without destroying the Fed and the US economy.

Bennie and his Inkjets did a bang up job in 2011. He was able to expand his balance sheet from $2.47 trillion to $2.95 trillion in twelve short months. According to Ben and his Federal Reserve friends, increasing your balance sheet by $480 billion isn’t really printing money out of thin air and handing it to their Wall Street owners for free, so they can prop up the stock market and enrich their executives. Ben is now leveraged 57 to 1. He should move to Europe, where this level of leverage is commonplace. In comparison, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns were leveraged 40 to 1 when they went belly up.

There is absolutely no way that Ben Bernanke could ever reduce the Federal Reserve balance sheet to the pre-crisis level without destroying the U.S. economy. He knows that and will never sell off those toxic mortgage assets. Not only won’t he reduce the Fed balance sheet, but by mid-2012 he will institute QE3 and buy another $600 billion of mortgage debt. His hubris knows no bounds, as his reckless illegal actions thus far have not driven interest rates sky high – YET. He has only destroyed the finances of senior citizens, savers and people who eat food and use gasoline. He will surely go down in history, but not the way he envisions.

  • The rise in oil to $91 a barrel will not be a top. The Catch-22 of a declining dollar is that prices of all imported goods go up. If the dollar falls another 10%, the price of oil will rise above $120 a barrel and push the economy back into recession.

As Bernanke printed like a drunken sailor during the first six months of 2011, the USD fell by 9% and the price of oil did exactly as expected, rising to a peak above $125. The NATO “intervention” in Libya also added a few bucks to the price of a barrel of sweet crude.

                  DXY

One-Year Chart for DOLLAR INDEX SPOT (DXY:IND)

The complete implosion of Europe and the ensuing weakness of the Euro have given the false impression that the U.S. dollar is a safe haven. The USD has regained its losses and will end the year exactly as it started versus a Euro heavy basket of world currencies. With annual deficits equaling 10% of GDP, a national debt now exceeding 100% of GDP, and Ben Bernanke in perpetual printing mode, the USD is destined to reach its intrinsic value of zero. With Brent crude still above $108 a barrel, employment still weak, and double digit food and energy inflation slowing consumer spending, the ECRI knows a recession during 2012 is baked in the cake.  

 

  • The imminent collapse of the European Union as Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain are effectively bankrupt. Spain is the size of the other three countries combined and has a 20% unemployment rate. The Germans are losing patience with these spendthrift countries. Debt does matter.

It seems I was wrong about Europe. It turned out to be much worse than anyone envisioned, with Italy now the likely fuse that blows the whole thing sky high. The ECB has made Ben Bernanke look like a lightweight by increasing their balance sheet by 44% to over $3.5 trillion in a futile effort to solve a debt crisis with more debt. It seems central bankers are programmed to print until the very end (see Weimar). The European Union will not survive 2012. Too many countries, too much government debt, too many zombie banks, too many bureaucrats, too much austerity rammed down the throats of citizens, and not enough honesty or reality based solutions.

  • State and local governments were able to put off hard choices for another year, as Washington DC handed out hundreds of billions in pork. California will have a $19 billion budget deficit; Illinois will have a $17 billion budget deficit; New Jersey will have a $10.5 billion budget deficit; New York will have a $9 billion budget deficit. A US Congress filled with Tea Party newcomers will refuse to bailout these spendthrift states. Substantial government employee layoffs are a lock.

State and local governments have laid off 535,000 workers since 2008. With borrowed Federal government stimulus handouts evaporating into thin air during 2011 – 2012, this total will reach 800,000 by the end of the next year. The U.S. Postal Service will do their part by cutting 28,000 jobs in 2012, even though they need to cut 100,000. States and municipalities based their budgets on the revenues produced by the fake debt driven housing boom from 2003 – 2007. The tax revenue dried up, but the union jobs added are a gift that keeps on costing taxpayers billions. States and localities can’t print, so layoffs will continue.   

 

  • There is a growing probability that China will experience a hard landing as their own quantitative easing has resulted in inflation surging to a 28 month high of 5.1%, with food inflation skyrocketing to 11.7%. Poor families spend up to half of their income on food. Rapidly rising prices severely burden poor people and can spark civil unrest if too many of them can’t afford food.

According to official government statistics China’s economy continued to boom in 2011. But, of course Chinese government reports make the BLS look honest. The fact is the Chinese stock market has fallen 28% since April as the property bubble deflates. If their economy has truly grown at an annual rate of 8% to 10% over the last five years, why is their stock market down 62% from its 2007 high?

   SHANGHAI INDEX

One-Year Chart for Shanghai Stock Exchange Composite Index (SHCOMP:IND)

The price inflation in food and energy prices, along with the property bubble bursting has led to breakouts of civil unrest across China. China’s two biggest markets – Europe & the United States – are in or near recession and are buying less of their crap. They can only build so many vacant cities and shopping malls to create the appearance of growth. The hard landing is about to get harder in 2012.

  • The Tea Party members of Congress are likely to cause as much trouble for Republicans as Democrats. If they decide to make a stand on raising the debt ceiling early in 2011, all hell could break loose in the debt and stock markets. 

It seems I got the timing wrong on this prediction, but the August showdown was a doozy. The threat of a government shutdown resulted in the stock market collapsing by 18% in a matter of weeks in August. Our beloved politicians then came up with another bullshit non-solution by creating a commission which, after months of negotiations, failed to do anything. The $1.2 trillion of automatic spending cuts will never happen. The slime that inhabit the hallowed halls of Congress will pretend to cut, while actually increasing spending. And so it goes. The stock market has risen from its October low based on Easy Ben’s assurances to keep interest rates at zero forever and the anticipation of QE3 in the new year.

  • Will the consensus forecast of a growing economy, rising corporate profits, 10% to 15% stock market gains, 2 million new jobs, and a housing recovery come true in 2011? No it will not. By mid-year confidence in Ben’s master plan will wane.

Corporate profits did rise, mostly due to Ben Bernanke providing free money to the Wall Street Mega-Banks so they could generate risk free profits on the backs of senior citizens getting .15% on their savings. It also helps when the same Wall Street banks can make accounting entries declaring that future loan losses will be minimal and the toxic mortgages on their books aren’t really worthless. Who knew accountants could do so much for America? Abbey Joseph Cohen only missed her stock market projection by a smidgeon. The S&P 500 is essentially unchanged for the year, while the NASDAQ and Russell 2000 will finish in the red.

The country did not add 2 million new jobs. It added 1.4 to 1.5 new jobs. Too bad the working age population went up by 1.7 million people. But our friends at the BLS, when they aren’t manipulating away the inflation that real people in the real world experience every day, have the gall to declare the unemployment rate has fallen from 9.8% to 8.6% in the last twelve months. How could this be you might ask, since the working age population went up by more than the number of people who found jobs. Easy if you are a BLS government drone. Everyone knows that things are so good out in the real world that 1.8 million Americans decided to kick back and enjoy the good life by leaving the workforce. It wasn’t because they gave up looking for the jobs that were shipped to the Far East by the mega-corporations making record profits and paying record bonuses to their executives. It’s just a rumor that those long lines at food banks around the country have a few of these “lucky” non-members of the workforce in them.

The housing recovery is just around the corner. Larry Yun, chief liar for the National Association of Realtors, assures us that it’s the best time to buy. We all know that the NAR is a bastion of honesty and truth. Just because they reported 3 MILLION more home sales than actually occurred between 2007 and 2010, you can’t scorn, ignore and treat everything they say as a bald faced lie. If Larry says the housing recovery has arrived, it must be true.

  Revised Previous % Change
2007 5,022,000 5,652,000 -11.1%
2008 4,124,000 4,913,000 -16.1%
2009 4,334,000 5,156,000 -15.9%
2010 4,182,000 4,907,000 -14.8%

When the pundits on CNBC sum up the year, they will not be touting the fact that gasoline prices went up 10% in the past year and the average price for a gallon of gas was the highest in U.S. history. They will not be proclaiming that even the government manipulated CPI shows food prices up 6% and clothing prices up 5% in the last year. I’m sure glad Ben Bernanke doesn’t see any inflation on his radar. Maybe he should ask his chauffer about his inflation. Lastly, the stocks for the long run crowd will not be yakking about the fact that gold finished up 10% for the year and has been up for TEN consecutive years. I wonder whether the numbskulls on CNBC can look at the chart below and figure out why gold is up ten years in a row. The national debt reaching $20 trillion by 2015 is a given. I wonder whether the price of gold will be higher. Maybe I’ll give Abbey Joseph Cohen a call and ask for her prediction.

Overall, my assessment of what would happen in 2011 wasn’t too far off. But, it was the things that I and virtually everyone on the planet missed that will reverberate in 2012 and for the next ten years. Our 20 year Crisis deepened, became more violent, and clearly revealed that the establishment will use all their power to put down protests and crush opposition to their corrupt crony capitalistic policies. The major developments I missed regarding 2011 included:

  • The self-immolation of a young Tunisian man set off revolutions around the globe, toppling U.S. supported dictators in Tunisia and Egypt. Dictators attempted to retain power by killing citizens by the thousands. The self-immolation of a man in New Hampshire in front of a courthouse was completely ignored by the mainstream media. I wonder why.
  • The Arab Spring has resulted in revolutions in Yemen, Bahrain, Syria and Libya. Depending upon how much oil was at stake, the U.S. has supported the dictator or the people whenever it suited them. This is called democratic principles.
  • Young people across the U.S. were inspired by the Arab Spring and began to Occupy Wall Street and many other streets in 97 other U.S. cities this past Fall. The spirit of these protests was against Wall Street criminality, Washington corruption, and corporate malfeasance. Peaceful civil disobedience by citizens of this country was met with beatings, tear gas, mass arrests and bulldozing their encampments. Students were maced while sitting in front of a college building. Ultimately a Department of Homeland Security coordinated attack on all the protests squashed the movement. The American people were too distracted by Dancing With the Stars and the latest iGadget to notice. The corporate media did their part by spewing misinformation and propaganda about the Occupy Movement, while the Wall Street Elite giggled with delight from their NYC penthouse suites.
  • Shockingly, no bankers were prosecuted despite clear unequivocal evidence of the greatest financial fraud in world history. The former head of Goldman Sachs, U.S. Senator, and NJ Governor continues to eat caviar and drink champagne in his glorious mansion after stealing $1.2 billion directly from customers’ accounts. These funds now reside in the pocket of Jamie Dimon and his upstanding JP Morgan institution.
  • The Federal government methodically moved closer to a totalitarian regime by passing legislation that will enable them to imprison U.S. citizens without charges. The only remaining area that has allowed critical thinking Americans to find the truth – the Internet – is on the verge of being locked down by the Feds. Pending legislation will allow them to shut down any website that may inconvenience their agenda. We inch ever closer to Orwell’s vision of the future.
  • No one in the MSM or government anticipated that the only truthful, honest, forthright politician in Washington D.C. – Ron Paul – could possibly win the Iowa caucus. His message of freedom, liberty, self reliance, and non-interventionism has struck a chord with young people and those capable of distinguishing between MSM propaganda and reality. The establishment is terrified of Ron Paul and is now on a mission to destroy him. What they don’t realize is their time is coming to an end. The existing social order will be swept away in a violent manner. The youth of this country will lead the charge. 2012 should be a real doozy.

I’ll take another shot at predicting the unpredictable with my next article:  2012 – The Year of Living Dangerously.

OCCUPY PISSES OFF EVERYONE

The editorial below was in my paper yesterday. It really grabbed my attention. It was from Dale McFeatters of the Scripps News Service. They are a liberal leaning organization. Their editorials skew to the left. They are sick and tired of Occupy Wall Street. They say it is time to go home and work through the existing establishment rules, regulations and captured party system.

Mayor Bloomberg is an Independent. He is sick and tired of Occupy Wall Street. He destroyed their encampment site yesterday and is fed up with their tactics. He also happens to be a multi-billionaire whose wealth was created from selling his product to Wall Street.

The Mayor of Phila is an ultra-liberal who just won re-election in this bastion of Democratic politics with 75% of the vote. He went on TV this week and said he is fed up with Occupy Phila and their refusal to move when his City Hall construction project begins.

The Mayor of Oakland makes the Mayor of Phila look like a conservative. She ordered an all out attack on the Occupy Oakland encampment.

Fox News and the Wall Street Journal despise the Occupy Wall Street movement and spew lies and misinformation about the movement 24 hours per day. They are the mouthpiece of right wing neo-con Rupert Murdoch, a multi-billionaire. The NY Daily News has been highly critical of the movement and is owned by left leaning Mort Zuckerman.

The narrow minded people who are easily led by the MSM buy into the various storylines spun by a media that does not want this movement to gain traction. They are distracted by minutia when the big picture is so disgusting. They applaud as young people brave enough to fight the elements and make a stand against corruption are bludgeoned and imprisoned for exercising their right to free speech and public assembly, while remaining silent as Wall Street bankers committed the crime of the century – absconding with trillions of American middle class wealth.

Step back for a moment and think. Who is the enemy? Is it really the thousands of young people just starting their lives and lashing out against a system that is designed to benefit Wall Street bankers, Mega Corporations and politicians of both parties in Washington DC?

The enemy is clear to me. The entire financial/corporate/political establishment is corrupt, dysfunctional, and benefits only the ruling oligarchy of this country. The nation’s lifeblood has been sucked dry by these vampires. The entire system has been hijacked by the few. You can call it crony capitalism or corporate fascism, but the bottom line is that the average American is getting screwed and the people getting the most screwed are the Millenial generation that is being left with an un-payable debt burden, no jobs, and no hope for a better tomorrow. This is why they are enraged. This is why they are protesting.

The self righteous Boomer generation leaders who control the levers of power in Washington DC, Wall Street and the corporate boardrooms do not want the system to change. They like the system just fine. Therefore, they hate a movement that threatens their wealth, power, and status. Both parties are frightened by the Occupy movement. The left and the right have their talking points and the existing system works just fine as they both get enriched as the country plunges deeper into debt by $4 billion per day.

The non-thinking and willfully ignorant people of this country need to snap out of their daze and think for themselves. The endless propaganda spewed at them day after day has dulled their sense of right and wrong. The Occupiers have begun to open the eyes of some people. They have forced a discussion of issues the establishment wants to keep buried. Neither Bush or Obama has attempted to go after the criminals on Wall Street. That is the tell. Both parties are captured. The Dodd-Frank bill was a toothless 700 page waste of time written by bank lobbyists.

When I see people and pundits declare the Occupy Movement irrelevant, I laugh at their utter stupidity. Would hundreds of billions been transferred from the criminal Wall Street banks to credit unions without the Occupy Movement spurring this effort? Would the $5 per month debit card fee inflicted on Americans by the criminal Wall Street banks been withdrawn without the rage and anger of the Occupy Movement? The answer is NO. Wall Street hates having the Eye of Mordor focused on their criminal and immoral activities.

This movement will not die because police thugs kick them out of parks using their 100,000 rules, regulations, ordanances, laws, and curfews. A society that depends on so many laws to “protect” its citizens has descended into a moral cesspool. I don’t need laws to tell me right from wrong and moral from immoral. The heart of these protests is a system that is broken. There will be many different solutions offered by those that are angry, but the BIG PICTURE is that the system must be brought down. It will not fix itself. Tinkering on the edges will not fix it.

We are in the midst of a Fourth Turning. It is a chaotic and confusing time. Anger, misery and bloodshed are a given. The existing social order will be swept away. That is guaranteed. What replaces it will be up to us. I’ll support any movement that spits in the eye of the establishment. I’ll support people like Ron Paul that want to tear down the established order. Everyone will need to choose sides. There is no fence sitting during the Fourth Turning. I hope you are pissed off. I know I am. 

Editorial: Occupy protesters have made their point. Now go home

Submitted by SHNS on Mon, 11/14/2011 – 15:20

In 1981, a group of demonstrators set up camp outside a British air base to protest the government’s decision to allow U.S. nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to be based there.

The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp initially generated a great deal of publicity, inspired imitators in other countries, sporadically tried to block access to the air base, and perhaps reached its zenith in 1983 when as many as 70,000 people turned out for one of their demonstrations.

The women survived several attempts by police to evict them, and eventually the authorities left their tent cities alone, as long as the women, and they were almost all women, confined themselves to picketing, leafleting and chanting.

In 1991, thanks to a nuclear-arms treaty with the Soviet Union, the last of the cruise missiles were removed, taking with them, one would have thought, the reason for the camp. But the women stayed on for nine more years, expressing an increasingly vague and inchoate commitment to “peace.” Many of the Greenham women cited a sense of unity, sisterhood, shared purpose and, when pressed, little desire to return to the humdrum routine of their former lives.

One senses that, in accelerated fashion, the Occupy Wall Street movement has arrived at that point. On Wall Street and in cities across the country, the protesters have effectively made their point about income inequality — the 1 percent versus the 99 percent; lopsided tax breaks given to hedge-fund managers and the proclivity of Wall Streeters to lavishly reward themselves regardless of whether their performance merits it. And, yes, economically the great middle class has been stagnant for a decade or more.

As the Occupy movement drags on — the first encampment went up Sept. 17 — the issues that inspired it are receding in the public consciousness and the issue has increasingly become the encampments themselves.

There have been problems of noise, sanitation, isolated incidents of crime and violence and the inevitable run-ins with police, but generally the Occupy movement has been a benign one. But its time in the public square is over. Public space meant for the enjoyment of the many should not be arrogated to advance the interests of the few.

Go home. Find political candidates who share your views and go to work for them. Raise money. Man phone banks. Knock on doors. Help the poor and minorities and those with limited English get government IDs in states that have passed voter-suppression laws.

And don’t forget to vote yourself. It really works in this country. Always has.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)