1984 – Page 6 – The Burning Platform

IS THE U.S. TURNING INTO A POLICE STATE?

2014: A Brave New Dystopian “1984” World

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 03/30/2014 14:24 -0400

While many have pointed out that the Middle-East/Far-East are drifting to a more “Orwellian” world and the West is a more “Huxleyan” environ, the merger of the two dystopias is seemingly growing each day. As The Guardian previously noted, Huxley’s dystopia is a totalitarian society, ruled by a supposedly benevolent dictatorship whose subjects have been programmed to enjoy their subjugation through conditioning and the use of a narcotic drug – the rulers of Brave New World have solved the problem of making people love their servitude. On the Orwellian front, we are doing rather well – as the revelations of Edward Snowden have recently underlined. We have constructed an architecture of state surveillance that would make Orwell gasp.

The most striking parallel of course is that both men foresaw the future as totalitarian rather than democratic and free.

Both Big Brother’s world and the Brave New World are ruled by authoritarian elites of a basically socialist/communist nature, whose only real purpose is the maintenance of their own power and privileges.

We discussed this a year ago but it seems an opportune time – with the world’s brainwashing and control accelerating – to revisit the two

Decades ago they saw it all coming…

As The Guardian so appropriately summed up,

Huxley’s dystopia is a totalitarian society, ruled by a supposedly benevolent dictatorship whose subjects have been programmed to enjoy their subjugation through conditioning and the use of a narcotic drug – soma – that is less damaging and more pleasurable than any narcotic known to us. The rulers of Brave New World have solved the problem of making people love their servitude.

Which brings us back to the two Etonian bookends of our future. On the Orwellian front, we are doing rather well – as the revelations of Edward Snowden have recently underlined. We have constructed an architecture of state surveillance that would make Orwell gasp. And indeed for a long time, for those of us who worry about such things, it was the internet’s capability to facilitate such comprehensive surveillance that attracted most attention.

In the process, however, we forgot about Huxley’s intuition. We failed to notice that our runaway infatuation with the sleek toys produced by the likes of Apple and Samsung – allied to our apparently insatiable appetite for Facebook, Google and other companies that provide us with “free” services in exchange for the intimate details of our daily lives – might well turn out to be as powerful a narcotic as soma was for the inhabitants of Brave New World. So even as we remember CS Lewis, let us spare a thought for the writer who perceived the future in which we would come to love our digital servitude.

And Chris Hedges’ infamous comparison of the two frightening visions of the future…

The two greatest visions of a future dystopia were George Orwell’s “1984” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World.” The debate, between those who watched our descent towards corporate totalitarianism, was who was right. Would we be, as Orwell wrote, dominated by a repressive surveillance and security state that used crude and violent forms of control? Or would we be, as Huxley envisioned, entranced by entertainment and spectacle, captivated by technology and seduced by profligate consumption to embrace our own oppression? It turns out Orwell and Huxley were both right. Huxley saw the first stage of our enslavement. Orwell saw the second.

We have been gradually disempowered by a corporate state that, as Huxley foresaw, seduced and manipulated us through sensual gratification, cheap mass-produced goods, boundless credit, political theater and amusement. While we were entertained, the regulations that once kept predatory corporate power in check were dismantled, the laws that once protected us were rewritten and we were impoverished. Now that credit is drying up, good jobs for the working class are gone forever and mass-produced goods are unaffordable, we find ourselves transported from “Brave New World” to “1984.” The state, crippled by massive deficits, endless war and corporate malfeasance, is sliding toward bankruptcy. It is time for Big Brother to take over from Huxley’s feelies, the orgy-porgy and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. We are moving from a society where we are skillfully manipulated by lies and illusions to one where we are overtly controlled.

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The corporate state does not find its expression in a demagogue or charismatic leader. It is defined by the anonymity and facelessness of the corporation. Corporations, who hire attractive spokespeople like Barack Obama, control the uses of science, technology, education and mass communication. They control the messages in movies and television. And, as in “Brave New World,” they use these tools of communication to bolster tyranny. Our systems of mass communication, as Wolin writes, “block out, eliminate whatever might introduce qualification, ambiguity, or dialogue, anything that might weaken or complicate the holistic force of their creation, to its total impression.”

The result is a monochromatic system of information. Celebrity courtiers, masquerading as journalists, experts and specialists, identify our problems and patiently explain the parameters. All those who argue outside the imposed parameters are dismissed as irrelevant cranks, extremists or members of a radical left. Prescient social critics, from Ralph Nader to Noam Chomsky, are banished. Acceptable opinions have a range of A to B. The culture, under the tutelage of these corporate courtiers, becomes, as Huxley noted, a world of cheerful conformity, as well as an endless and finally fatal optimism. We busy ourselves buying products that promise to change our lives, make us more beautiful, confident or successful as we are steadily stripped of rights, money and influence. All messages we receive through these systems of communication, whether on the nightly news or talk shows like “Oprah,” promise a brighter, happier tomorrow. And this, as Wolin points out, is “the same ideology that invites corporate executives to exaggerate profits and conceal losses, but always with a sunny face.” We have been entranced, as Wolin writes, by “continuous technological advances” that “encourage elaborate fantasies of individual prowess, eternal youthfulness, beauty through surgery, actions measured in nanoseconds: a dream-laden culture of ever-expanding control and possibility, whose denizens are prone to fantasies because the vast majority have imagination but little scientific knowledge.”

Our manufacturing base has been dismantled. Speculators and swindlers have looted the U.S. Treasury and stolen billions from small shareholders who had set aside money for retirement or college. Civil liberties, including habeas corpus and protection from warrantless wiretapping, have been taken away. Basic services, including public education and health care, have been handed over to the corporations to exploit for profit. The few who raise voices of dissent, who refuse to engage in the corporate happy talk, are derided by the corporate establishment as freaks.

…

The façade is crumbling. And as more and more people realize that they have been used and robbed, we will move swiftly from Huxley’s “Brave New World” to Orwell’s “1984.” The public, at some point, will have to face some very unpleasant truths. The good-paying jobs are not coming back. The largest deficits in human history mean that we are trapped in a debt peonage system that will be used by the corporate state to eradicate the last vestiges of social protection for citizens, including Social Security. The state has devolved from a capitalist democracy to neo-feudalism. And when these truths become apparent, anger will replace the corporate-imposed cheerful conformity. The bleakness of our post-industrial pockets, where some 40 million Americans live in a state of poverty and tens of millions in a category called “near poverty,” coupled with the lack of credit to save families from foreclosures, bank repossessions and bankruptcy from medical bills, means that inverted totalitarianism will no longer work.

…

The noose is tightening. The era of amusement is being replaced by the era of repression. Tens of millions of citizens have had their e-mails and phone records turned over to the government. We are the most monitored and spied-on citizenry in human history. Many of us have our daily routine caught on dozens of security cameras. Our proclivities and habits are recorded on the Internet. Our profiles are electronically generated. Our bodies are patted down at airports and filmed by scanners. And public service announcements, car inspection stickers, and public transportation posters constantly urge us to report suspicious activity. The enemy is everywhere.

…

“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating?” Orwell wrote. “It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself.”

Watching Aldous Huxley describe the world we have now a stunning 60 years ago is horrific…

h/t Kirk

Though, in our view, Emmet Scott summed up the present in relation to Huxley and Orwell’s prophecies best:

The most striking parallel of course is that both men foresaw the future as totalitarian rather than democratic and free. Neither presumably believed their vision of the future to be inevitable, though it is equally clear that each saw aspects of mid-twentieth century life which clearly pointed in the totalitarian direction. Thus 1984 and Brave New World may be seen as warnings against what might be if the trends identified by the two authors persisted. What these trends were and why the authors saw them leading towards totalitarianism is an important question and one that will be addressed presently.

The totalitarian states described by Orwell and Huxley differed in most details, though there were also many correspondences. Both Big Brother’s world and the Brave New World are ruled by authoritarian elites of a basically socialist/communist nature, whose only real purpose is the maintenance of their own power and privileges.

2014 Will Bring More Social Collapse

Submitted by Dr. Paul Craig Roberts via Alt-Market blog,

2014 is upon us. For a person who graduated from Georgia Tech in 1961, a year in which the class ring showed the same date right side up or upside down, the 21st century was a science fiction concept associated with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film, “2001: A Space Odyssey.” To us George Orwell’s 1984 seemed so far in the future we would never get there. Now it is 30 years in the past.

Did we get there in Orwell’s sense? In terms of surveillance technology, we are far beyond Orwell’s imagination. In terms of the unaccountability of government, we exceptional and indispensable people now live a 1984 existence. In his alternative to the Queen’s Christmas speech, Edward Snowden made the point that a person born in the 21st century will never experience privacy. For new generations the word privacy will refer to something mythical, like a unicorn.

Many Americans might never notice or care. I remember when telephone calls were considered to be private. In the 1940s and 1950s the telephone company could not always provide private lines. There were “party lines” in which two or more customers shared the same telephone line. It was considered extremely rude and inappropriate to listen in on someone’s calls and to monopolize the line with long duration conversations.

The privacy of telephone conversations was also epitomized by telephone booths, which stood on street corners, in a variety of public places, and in “filling stations” where an attendant would pump gasoline into your car’s fuel tank, check the water in the radiator, the oil in the engine, the air in the tires, and clean the windshield. A dollar’s worth would purchase 3 gallons, and $5 would fill the tank.

Even in the 1980s and for part of the 1990s there were lines of telephones on airport waiting room walls, each separated from the other by sound absorbing panels. Whether the panels absorbed the sounds of the conversation or not, they conveyed the idea that calls were private.

The notion that telephone calls are private left Americans’ consciousness prior to the NSA listening in. If memory serves, it was sometime in the 1990s when I entered the men’s room of an airport and observed a row of men speaking on their cell phones in the midst of the tinkling sound of urine hitting water and noises of flushing toilets. The thought hit hard that privacy had lost its value.

I remember when I arrived at Merton College, Oxford, for the first term of 1964. I was advised never to telephone anyone whom I had not met, as it would be an affront to invade the privacy of a person to whom I was unknown. The telephone was reserved for friends and acquaintances, a civility that contrasts with American telemarketing.

The efficiency of the Royal Mail service protected the privacy of the telephone. What one did in those days in England was to write a letter requesting a meeting or an appointment. It was possible to send a letter via the Royal Mail to London in the morning and to receive a reply in the afternoon. Previously it had been possible to send a letter in the morning and to receive a morning reply, and to send another in the afternoon and receive an afternoon reply.

When one flies today, unless one stops up one’s ears with something, one hears one’s seat mate’s conversations prior to takeoff and immediately upon landing. Literally, everyone is talking nonstop. One wonders how the economy functioned at such a high level of incomes and success prior to cell phones. I can remember being able to travel both domestically and internationally on important business without having to telephone anyone. What has happened to America that no one can any longer go anywhere without constant talking?

If you sit at an airport gate awaiting a flight, you might think you are listening to a porn film. The overhead visuals are usually Fox “News” going on about the need for a new war, but the cell phone audio might be young women describing their latest sexual affair.

Americans, or many of them, are such exhibitionists that they do not mind being spied upon or recorded. It gives them importance. According to Wikipedia, Paris Hilton, a multimillionaire heiress, posted her sexual escapades online, and Facebook had to block users from posting nude photos of themselves. Sometime between my time and now people ceased to read 1984. They have no conception that a loss of privacy is a loss of self. They don’t understand that a loss of privacy means that they can be intimidated, blackmailed, framed, and viewed in the buff. Little wonder they submitted to porno-scanners.

The loss of privacy is a serious matter. The privacy of the family used to be paramount. Today it is routinely invaded by neighbors, police, Child Protective Services (sic), school administrators, and just about anyone else.

Consider this: A mother of six and nine year old kids sat in a lawn chair next to her house watching her kids ride scooters in the driveway and cul-de-sac on which they live.

Normally, this would be an idyllic picture. But not in America. A neighbor, who apparently did not see the watching mother, called the police to report that two young children were outside playing without adult supervision. Note that the next door neighbor, a woman, did not bother to go next door to speak with the mother of the children and express her concern that they children were not being monitored while they played. The neighbor called the police. http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow/mom-sues-polices-she-arrested-letting-her-kids-134628018.html

“We’re here for you,” the cops told the mother, who was carried off in handcuffs and spent the next 18 hours in a cell in prison clothes.

The news report doesn’t say what happened to the children, whether the father appeared and insisted on custody of his offspring or whether the cops turned the kids over to Child Protective Services.

This shows you what Americans are really like. Neither the neighbor nor the police had a lick of sense. The only idea that they had was to punish someone. This is why America has the highest incarceration rate and the highest total number of prison inmates in the entire world. Washington can go on and on about “authoritarian” regimes in Russia and China, but both countries have far lower prison populations than “freedom and democracy” America.

I was unaware that laws now exist requiring the supervision of children at play. Children vary in their need for supervision. In my day supervision was up to the mother’s judgment. Older children were often tasked with supervising the younger. It was one way that children were taught responsibility and developed their own judgment.

When I was five years old, I walked to the neighborhood school by myself. Today my mother would be arrested for child endangerment.

In America punishment falls more heavily on the innocent, the young, and the poor than it does on the banksters who are living on the Federal Reserve’s subsidy known as Quantitative Easing and who have escaped criminal liability for the fraudulent financial instruments that they sold to the world. Single mothers, depressed by the lack of commitment of the fathers of their children, are locked away for using drugs to block out their depression. Their children are seized by a Gestapo institution, Child Protective Services, and end up in foster care where many are abused.

According to numerous press reports, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 year-old children who play cowboys and indians or cops and robbers during recess and raise a pointed finger while saying “bang-bang” are arrested and carried off to jail in handcuffs as threats to their classmates. In my day every male child and the females who were “Tom boys” would have been taken to jail. Playground fights were normal, but no police were ever called. Handcuffing a child would not have been tolerated.

From the earliest age, boys were taught never to hit a girl. In those days there were no reports of police beating up teenage girls and women or body slamming the elderly. To comprehend the degeneration of the American police into psychopaths and sociopaths, go online and observe the video of Lee Oswald in police custody in 1963.

Oswald was believed to have assassinated President John F. Kennedy and murdered a Dallas police officer only a few hours previously to the film. Yet he had not been beaten, his nose wasn’t broken, and his lips were not a bloody mess. Now go online and pick from the vast number of police brutality videos from our present time and observe the swollen and bleeding faces of teenage girls accused of sassing overbearing police officers.

In America today people with power are no longer accountable. This means citizens have become subjects, an indication of social collapse.

WHY ARE WE SUPPORTING AL QAEDA (EASTASIA)?

There were no Al Qaeda terrorists in Iraq before we invaded. Now it’s swarming with Al Qaeda fighters. Libyan dictator Ghaddafi was fighting Al Qaeda. We killed him. Mubarek kept the radical Islamists under control. We deposed him. Assad is fighting Al Qaeda terrorists. We are about to kill him. When will the American people use their fucking brains and see what is going on.

Do you see any resemblance to Orwell’s description of war in his training manual for American democracy?

“In 1984, there is a perpetual war between Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia, the super-states which emerged from the atomic global war. “The book”, The Theory and Practice of Oligarchic Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, explains that each state is so strong it cannot be defeated, even with the combined forces of two super-states—despite changing alliances. To hide such contradictions, history is re-written to explain that the (new) alliance always was so; the populaces accustomed to doublethink accept it. The war is not fought in Oceanian, Eurasian or Eastasian territory but in a disputed zone comprising the sea and land from Tangiers (northern Africa) to Darwin (Australia) to the Arctic. At the start, Oceania and Eastasia are allies combatting Eurasia in northern Africa.

That alliance ends and Oceania allied with Eurasia fights Eastasia, a change which occurred during the Hate Week dedicated to creating patriotic fervour for the Party’s perpetual war. The public are blind to the change; in mid-sentence an orator changes the name of the enemy from “Eurasia” to “Eastasia” without pause. When the public are enraged at noticing that the wrong flags and posters are displayed they tear them down—thus the origin of the idiom “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia”; later the Party claims to have captured Africa.

“The book” explains that the purpose of the unwinnable, perpetual war is to consume human labour and commodities, hence the economy of a super-state cannot support economic equality (a high standard of life) for every citizen. Goldstein also details an Oceanian strategy of attacking enemy cities with atomic rockets before invasion, yet dismisses it as unfeasible and contrary to the war’s purpose; despite the atomic bombing of cities in the 1950s the super-states stopped such warfare lest it imbalance the powers. The military technology in 1984 differs little from that of the Second World War, yet strategic bomber aeroplanes were replaced with Rocket Bombs, Helicopters were heavily used as weapons of war (while they didn’t figure in WW2 in any form but prototypes) and surface combat units have been all but replaced by immense and unsinkable Floating Fortresses, island-like contraptions concentrating the firepower of a whole naval task force in a single, semi-mobile platform (in the novel one is said to have been anchored between Iceland and the Faroe Islands, suggesting a preference for sea lane interdiction and denial).”

http://georgeorwellnovels.com/books/about-nineteen-eighty-four/#The_War

Experts: U.S. Case that Syrian Government Responsible for Chemical Weapons Is Weak

Submitted by George Washington on 08/30/2013 15:33 -0400

Bonus:

The civil war in Syria started in March 2011. And see this. However, the U.S. has been funding the Syrian opposition since 2006 … and arming the opposition since 2007.

So the American government’s argument that “we must stop Assad because he’s brutally crushing a spontaneous popular uprising” is false. The U.S. started supporting the rebels 5 years before the protests started.

Moreover, reports from mainstream media sources such as the New York Times, (and here), Wall Street Journal, USA Today, CNN, McClatchy (and here), AP, Time, BBC, the Independent, the Telegraph, Agence France-Presse, Asia Times, and the Star (and here) – confirm that supporting the rebels means supporting Al Qaeda and two other terrorist groups. Indeed, the the New York Times has reported that virtually all of the rebel fighters are Al Qaeda terrorists.

By supporting the rebels, we’re supporting our sworn terrorist enemies.

A War 20 Years In the Making

If there is any doubt about this timeline, please keep in mind that the U.S. and Britain considered attacking Syrians and then blaming it on the Syrian government as an excuse for regime change … 50 years ago (the U.S. just admitted that they did this to Iran) And the U.S. has been planning regime change in Syria for 20 years straight.

The Last “Humanitarian War”

Libya’s Gaddafi claimed that the rebels in that country were actually Al Qaeda.

That claim – believe it or not – has been confirmed.

According to a 2007 report by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center’s center, the Libyan city of Benghazi was one of Al Qaeda’s main headquarters – and bases for sending Al Qaeda fighters into Iraq – prior to the overthrow of Gaddafi:

The Hindustan Times reported:

“There is no question that al Qaeda’s Libyan franchise, Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, is a part of the opposition,” Bruce Riedel, former CIA officer and a leading expert on terrorism, told Hindustan Times. It has always been Qaddafi’s biggest enemy and its stronghold is Benghazi.

(Incidentally, Gaddafi was on the verge of invading Benghazi in 2011, 4 years after the West Point report cited Benghazi as a hotbed of Al Qaeda terrorists. Gaddafi claimed – rightly it turns out – that Benghazi was an Al Qaeda stronghold and a main source of the Libyan rebellion. But NATO planes stopped him, and protected Benghazi.) Al Qaeda is now largely in control of Libya. Indeed, Al Qaeda flags were flown over the Benghazi courthouse once Gaddafi was toppled. There is a direct connection to Syria. Specifically, CNN, the Telegraph, the Washington Times, and many other mainstream sources confirm that Al Qaeda terrorists from Libya have since flooded into Syria to fight the Assad regime. And the post-Gaddafi Libyan government is also itself a top funder and arms supplier of the Syrian opposition.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that there are no few good guys involved in the Syrian war. The solution is not to bomb the country … or to send more arms to the rebels. The solution is to make sure that less weapons – chemical and conventional – get into that tinder box of a country. And to stay the h@!! out of a conflict which has no bearing on our national security.

ABNORMALCY BIAS

“The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does. They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World Revisited

The political class set in motion the eventual obliteration of our economic system with the creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913. Placing the fate of the American people in the hands of a powerful cabal of unaccountable greedy wealthy elitist bankers was destined to lead to poverty for the many, riches for the connected crony capitalists, debasement of the currency, endless war, and ultimately the decline and fall of an empire. Ernest Hemingway’s quote from The Sun Also Rises captures the path of our country perfectly:

“How did you go bankrupt?”
Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”

The 100 year downward spiral began gradually but has picked up steam in the last sixteen years, as the exponential growth model, built upon ever increasing levels of debt and an ever increasing supply of cheap oil, has proven to be unsustainable and unstable. Those in power are frantically using every tool at their disposal to convince Boobus Americanus they have everything under control and the system is operating normally. The psychotic central bankers, “bought and sold” political class, mega-corporation soulless chief executives and corporate controlled media use propaganda techniques, paid “experts”, talking head “personalities”, captured think tanks, and the willful ignorance of the majority to spin an increasingly dire economic descent as if we are recovering and getting back to normal. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There is nothing normal about what Ben Bernanke and the Federal government have done over the last five years and continue to do today. Truthfully, nothing has been normal since the mid-1990s when Alan Greenspan spoke the last truthful words of his lifetime:

“Clearly, sustained low inflation implies less uncertainty about the future, and lower risk premiums imply higher prices of stocks and other earning assets. We can see that in the inverse relationship exhibited by price/earnings ratios and the rate of inflation in the past. But how do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values, which then become subject to unexpected and prolonged contractions as they have in Japan over the past decade?”

The Greenspan led Federal Reserve created two epic bubbles in the space of six years which burst and have done irreparable harm to the net worth of the middle class. Rather than learn the lesson of how much damage to the lives of average Americans has been caused by creating cheap easy money out of thin air, our Ivy League self-proclaimed expert on the Great Depression, Ben Bernanke, has ramped up the cheap easy money machine to hyper-speed. There is nothing normal about the path this man has chosen. His strategy has revealed the true nature of the Federal Reserve and their purpose – to protect and enrich the financial elites that manipulate this country for their own purposes.

Despite the mistruths spoken by Bernanke and his cadre of banker coconspirators, he can never reverse what he has done. The country will not return to normalcy in our lifetimes. Bernanke is conducting a mad experiment and we are the rats in his maze. His only hope is to retire before it blows up in his face. Just as Greenspan inflated the housing bubble and exited stage left, Bernanke is inflating a debt bubble, stock bubble, bond bubble and attempting to re-inflate the housing bubble just in time for another Ivy League Keynesian academic, Janet Yellen, to step into the banker’s box. This genius thinks Bernanke has been too tight with monetary policy. It seems inflated egos are common among Ivy League economist central bankers who think they can pull levers and push buttons to control the economy. Results may vary.

The gradual slide towards our national bankruptcy of wealth, spirit, freedom, self-respect, morality, personal responsibility, and common sense began in 1913 with the secretive creation of the Federal Reserve and the imposition of a personal income tax. Pandora’s Box was opened in this fateful year and the horrors of currency debasement and ever increasing taxation were thrust upon the American people by a small but powerful cadre of unscrupulous financial elite and the corrupt politicians that do their bidding in Washington D.C. The powerful men who thrust these evils upon our country set in motion a chain of events and actions that will undoubtedly result in the fall of the great American Empire, just as previous empires have fallen due to the corruption of its leaders and depravity of its people. Creating a private central bank, controlled by the Wall Street cabal, and allowing the government to syphon the earnings of workers through increased taxation has allowed politicians the ability to spend, borrow, and print money at an ever increasing rate in order to get themselves re-elected and benefit the cronies, hucksters and bankers that pay the biggest bribes. None of this benefit the average American, who sees their purchasing power systematically inflated and taxed away. This is not capitalism and it is not a coincidence that war and inflation have been the hallmarks of the last century.

“A system of capitalism presumes sound money, not fiat money manipulated by a central bank. Capitalism cherishes voluntary contracts and interest rates that are determined by savings, not credit creation by a central bank. It is no coincidence that the century of total war coincided with the century of central banking.” – Ron Paul

As you can see, the bankruptcy of our country and our culture began gradually, accelerated after Nixon closed the gold window in 1971, really picked up steam in 1980 when the debt happy Baby Boom generation came of age, and has “suddenly” reached maximum velocity as we approach the true fiscal cliff. There were many checkpoints along the way where fatefully bad choices were made. They include the New Deal, Cold War, Great Society, Morning in America, Dotcom New Paradigm, Housing Wealth Retirement Plan, Obamacare, and present belief that creating more debt will solve a problem created by too much debt. The Federal Reserve allowed interventionist politicians to fight two declared wars (World War I, World War II), fight five undeclared wars (Korea, Vietnam, Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq), conduct hundreds of military engagements around the globe, occupy foreign countries, begin a war on poverty that increased poverty, begin a war on drugs that increased the amount of available drugs, and finally start a war on terror that has increased the number of terrorists and pushed us closer to national bankruptcy. The terrorists have already won, as the explosion of stupidity and irrational fear has allowed those in power to acquire more power and dominion over our lives.

Abnormality Reigns

“We live surrounded by a systematic appeal to a dream world which all mature, scientific reality would reject. We, quite literally, advertise our commitment to immaturity, mendacity and profound gullibility. It is as the hallmark of the culture. And it is justified as being economically indispensable.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

When I critically scrutinize the economic, political, financial, and social landscape at this point in history, I come to the inescapable conclusion that our country and world are headed into the abyss. This is most certainly a minority viewpoint. The majority of people in this country are oblivious to the disaster that will arrive over the next decade. Some would attribute this willful ignorance to the normalcy bias that infects the psyches of millions of ostrich like iGadget distracted, Facebook addicted, government educated, financially illiterate, mass media manipulated zombies. Normalcy bias refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster. It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to inform the populace about the impending disaster. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster hasn’t occurred yet, then it will never occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with the disaster once it occurs. People tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.

The unsustainability of our economic system built upon assumptions of exponential growth, ever expanding debt, increasing consumer spending, unlimited supplies of cheap easy to access oil, impossible to honor entitlement promises, and a dash of mass delusion should be apparent to even the dullest of government public school educated drones inhabiting this country. I don’t attribute this willful ignorance to normalcy bias. I attribute it to abnormalcy bias. In a profoundly abnormal society, adjusting your thinking to fit in appears normal, but is just a symptom of the disease that has infected our culture. There is nothing normal about anything in our society today. If you were magically transported back to 1996 and described to someone the economic, political, financial and social landscape in 2013, they would have you committed to a mental institution and given shock therapy.

Even though we’ve been in a 100 year spiral downwards, things still appeared relatively normal in 1996 when Greenspan uttered his “Irrational Exuberance” faux pas that so upset his Wall Street puppet masters. The ruling class had not yet repealed Glass-Steagall (pre-requisite for pillaging the muppets), created the internet bubble, fashioned the greatest control fraud in world history (housing bubble unrecognized by Ben Bernanke), or taken advantage of mass hysteria over 9/11 to begin the never ending war on terror and expansion of the Orwellian state. The citizens, and I use that term loosely, of this country have allowed those in control of the government and media to convince them the situation confronting us is just a normal cyclical variation that will be alleviated by tweaking existing economic policies and trusting that Ben Bernanke will pull the right monetary levers to get us back on course. The stress inflicted on their brains in the last thirteen years of bubbles and wars has made the average person incapable of distinguishing between normality and abnormality. What they need is slap upside of their head. Is there anything normal about these facts?

The Federal Reserve’s balance sheet in 1996 consisted of $422 billion, of which 91% were Treasury securities. Today it consists of $3.25 trillion, of which only 56% are Treasury securities, and the rest is toxic home mortgages, toxic commercial mortgages, and whatever other crap the Wall Street banks have dumped on their books. Their balance sheet is leveraged 57 to 1 and Bernanke has promised his Wall Street bosses he will add another $750 billion before the year is out. Is there anything normal about a central bank adding twice as much debt to its balance sheet in less than twelve months than existed on its entire balance sheet in 1996?
The National Debt at the end of fiscal 1996 was $5.25 trillion. It increased by $250 billion that year. The GDP of the country was $7.8 trillion. Our national debt as a percentage of GDP was only 67% and our annual deficit was only 3% of GDP. At the time, the country was worried about these outrageous levels of debt. Today the National Debt stands at a towering $16.8 trillion. It has increased by a staggering $1.12 trillion in the last twelve months. The GDP of the country today is $15.7 trillion. Our national debt as a percentage GDP has soared to 107%. Our annual deficits now exceed 7% of GDP on a consistent basis. Our budgets are on automatic pilot, with the $20 trillion level to be breached by 2016. Is it a normal state of affairs when the GDP of your country rises by 100% over seventeen years, while your debt rises by 320%?

Total government spending (Federal, State, Local) in 1996 totaled $2.7 trillion, or 35% of GDP. Today total government spending is $6.3 trillion, or 40% of GDP. In 1979, before the belief in government became a religion, total government spending was only 31.5% of GDP (27% in 1965). Are you receiving twice the service from government than you received in 1996? Are you safer from terrorists due to the massive expansion of the police state? Are your kids getting a much better education than they did in 1996? Have the undeclared wars benefitted you in any way, other than tripling the price of gas? Are the higher wage taxes, real estate taxes, school taxes, sewer fees, utility fees, phone fees, gasoline taxes, permit fees, and myriad of other government charges worth it? Is it normal for government to account for almost half of our economy?

In 1996 personal consumption expenditures accounted for 67% of GDP, while private domestic investment accounted for 16% of GDP and we ran small trade deficits of 1% of GDP. Today, consumer spending accounts for 71% of GDP (despite the storyline about consumer retrenchment), while domestic investment has contracted to 13% of GDP and our trade deficits have surged to almost 4% of GDP. The Federal government has expanded their piece of the GDP pie by 130% since 1996, with the Department of War accounting for the bulk of the increase. Saving and capital investment is now penalized in this country. Is it normal for a country to borrow, consume and bleed itself to death?
Consumer credit outstanding totaled $1.2 trillion in 1996, or $4,500 per every man, woman and child in the country. Today, the austere balance is now $2.8 trillion, or $8,800 per every man, woman and child inhabiting our debt saturated paradise. The more than doubling of consumer debt would be acceptable if wages were rising at a similar rate. But that hasn’t been the case, as wages have only advanced from $3.6 trillion in 1996 to $7.0 trillion today. With even the massively understated CPI showing 50% inflation since 1996 and 23% more Americans in the working age population (45 million), real wages have advanced by 30%. Using a true measure of inflation, real wages have fallen. Total credit market debt in 1996 was $19 trillion, or 243% of GDP. Today total credit market debt sits at an all-time high of $56.2 trillion, or 358% of GDP. Is it normal for credit market debt to increase at three times the rate of GDP?

In 1996, personal income totaled $6.6 trillion, with wages accounting for 55% of the total, interest income on savings accounting for 12% and government entitlement transfers accounting for 14%. Today personal income totals $13.6 trillion, with wages accounting for 51% of the total, interest income on savings plunging to 7% due to Bernanke’s “Screw a Senior Zero Interest Policy”, and Big Brother entitlement transfers skyrocketing to 18%. In what Orwellian dystopian society is taking money from wage earners and redistributing it to non-wage earners considered personal income? Is it normal for a government to punish savers and makers in order to benefit the borrowers and takers?
Prior to the financial collapse and during the mid-1990s prudent risk-averse savers could get a 4% to 5% return on money market accounts. Since the Wall Street created worldwide financial collapse, Ben Bernanke, at the behest of these very same Wall Street banks, has reduced short term interest rates to 0%. The result has been to transfer $400 billion per year from the pockets of savers and senior citizens into the grubby hands of bankers that have destroyed our economy. The prudent are left earning .02% on their savings, while the profligate bankers can borrow for 0% and earn billions by re-depositing those funds at the Federal Reserve. In what bizarro world this be a normal state of affairs?

Total mortgage debt outstanding in 1996, before the epic Wall Street produced housing bubble, was $4.7 billion. Today, even after the transfer of almost $1 trillion of bad debt to the balance sheet of the American taxpayer, the amount of mortgage debt is an astounding $13.1 trillion. Despite home values rising since 1996, there are 20% of all households still in a negative equity position. Total household real estate equity was 60% in 1996, plunged below 40% in 2009, and has only slightly rebounded to 47% today because Wall Street dumped the bad mortgages on the backs of the American taxpayer. Is it normal for mortgage debt to triple and home equity to plunge in a rationally functioning world? Is it normal when 25% of all existing home sales are distressed sales and another 30% are sales to Wall Street hedge funds like Blackrock?

In 1996 there were 200 million working age Americans, with 134 million (67%) in the labor force, 127 million (63.5%) employed, and 66 million (33%) not in the labor force. Today there are 245 million working age Americans, with 155 million (63%) in the labor force, 143 million (58%) employed, and 90 million (37%) supposedly not in the labor force. The number of working age Americans has increased by 22.5%, while the number of those employed has advanced by only 12.5%. The population to employment ratio has reached a three decade low as millions have given up, been lured into college by cheap plentiful government debt, or developed a mysterious ailment that has gotten them into the SSDI program. Is it normal for millions of Americans to leave the labor force when the economy is supposedly recovering?

In 1996 there were 25.5 million Americans on food stamps, or 9.6% of the population, costing $24 billion per year. Today there are 47.8 million Americans on food stamps, or 15% of the population, costing $75 billion per year. Historically, the number of people in this program would rise during recessions and recede when the economy recovered, just as a safety net program should function. According to our government keepers the economy has been in recovery since late 2009. The number of people entering the food stamp program has gone up by 7 million since the recession officially ended. This is not normal. Either the government is lying about the recession or they are screwing the taxpayer by encouraging constituents to enter the program in an effort to gain votes. Which is it?

The price of oil averaged $20 per barrel in 1996 and it cost you $1.20 per gallon to fill your tank. Oil averaged $85 per barrel in 2012 and currently hovers around $90 per barrel. Most Americans are now paying between $3.50 and $4.00 per gallon to fill their tanks. This result seems abnormal considering the propaganda machine is proclaiming we are on the verge of energy independence. After two Middle East wars, 6,700 dead American soldiers, 50,000 wounded American soldiers, and $1.5 trillion of national wealth wasted, this is all we get – a tripling in gas prices and creation of thousands of new terrorists?

You have to have a really bad case of normalcy bias to be able to convince yourself that everything that has happened since 1996 is normal. Every fact supports the reality that we’ve entered a period of extreme abnormality and our response as a nation thus far has insured that a disaster of even far greater magnitude is just over the horizon. Anyone with an ounce of common sense realizes the social mood is deteriorating rapidly. We are in the midst of a Crisis period that will result in earth shattering change, but the masses want things to go back to normal and don’t want to face the facts. The cognitive dissonance created by reality versus their wishes will resolve itself when the next financial collapse makes 2008 look like a walk in the park. But, until then most will just stick their heads in the sand and hope for the best.

Loving Your Servitude

“Liberty is lost through complacency and a subservient mindset. When we accept or even welcome automobile checkpoints, random searches, mandatory identification cards, and paramilitary police in our streets, we have lost a vital part of our American heritage. America was born of protest, revolution, and mistrust of government. Subservient societies neither maintain nor deserve freedom for long.” – Ron Paul

The most disgraceful example of abnormality that has infected our culture has been the cowardice and docile acquiescence of the citizenry in allowing an ever expanding police state to shred the U.S. Constitution, strip us of our freedoms, and restrict our liberties. Our keepers have not let any crisis go to waste in the last seventeen years. They have also taken advantage of the willful ignorance, childish immaturity, extreme gullibility, historical cluelessness, financial illiteracy and techno-narcissism of the populace to reverse practical legislation and prey upon irrational fears to strip the people of their constitutionally guaranteed liberties and freedoms. If you had told someone in 1996 the security measures, laws, and police agencies that would exist in 2013, they would have laughed you out of the room. Every crisis, whether government created or just convenient to their agenda, has been utilized by the oligarchs to expand the police state and benefit the crony capitalists that profit from its expansion. The character of the American people has been found wanting as they obediently cower and beg for protection from unseen evil doers. The propagandist corporate media reinforces their fears and instructs them to submissively tremble and implore the government to do more. The cosmic obliviousness and limitless sense of complacency of the general population with regards to a blatantly obvious coup by a small cadre of sociopathic financial elite and their army of bureaucrats, lackeys and jackboots is a wonder to behold.

The 1929 stock market crash and ensuing Great Depression was primarily the result of excessively loose Federal Reserve monetary policy during the Roaring 20’s and the unrestrained fraud perpetrated by the Wall Street banks. The 1933 Glass-Steagall Act was a practical 38 page law which kept Wall Street from ravenously raping its customers and the American people for almost seven decades. The Wall Street elite and their bought off political hacks in both parties repealed this law in 1999, while simultaneously squashing any effort to regulate the financial derivatives market. The day trading American public didn’t even look up from their computer screens. Over the next nine years Wall Street went on a fraudulent feeding frenzy rampage which brought the country to its knees and then held the American taxpayer at gunpoint to bail them out. The Federal Reserve arranged rescue of LTCM in 1998 gave the all clear to Wall Street that any risk was acceptable, since the Fed would always bail them out. Just as they did in the 1920’s, the Federal Reserve set the table for financial disaster with excessively low interest rates and non-existent regulatory oversight.

The downward spiral of our empire towards an Orwellian/Huxley merged dystopian nightmare accelerated after the 9/11 attacks. Within one month those looking to exert hegemony over all domestic malcontents had passed the 366 page, 58,000 words Patriot Act. Did the terrified masses ask how such a comprehensive destruction of our liberties could be written in under one month? It is apparent to anyone with critical thinking skills that the enemy within had this bill written, waiting for the ideal opportunity to implement this unprecedented expansion of federal police power. Electronic surveillance of our emails, phone calls and voice mails, along with warrantless wiretaps, and general loss of civil liberties was passed without question under the guise of protecting us. Next was the invasion of a foreign country based upon lies, propaganda and misinformation without a declaration of war, as required by the Constitution. Our government began torturing suspects in secret foreign prisons. The shallow, self-centered, narcissistic, Facebook fanatic populace has barely looked up from texting on their iPhones to notice that we have been at war in the Middle East for eleven years, because it hasn’t interfered with their weekly viewing of Honey Boo Boo, Dancing With the Stars, or Jersey Shore. They occasionally leave their homes to wave a flag and chant “USA, USA, USA”, as directed by the media, when a terrorist like Bin Laden or Boston bomber is offed by our security services, but for the most part they can live their superficial vacuous lives of triviality unscathed by war.

The creation of the Orwellian Department of Homeland Security ushered in a further encroachment of our everyday freedoms. They attempted to keep the masses frightened through a ridiculous color coded fear index. Little old ladies, people in wheelchairs and little children are subject to molestation by lowlife TSA perverts. Military units conduct “training exercises” in cities across the country to desensitize the sheep-like masses, who fail to acknowledge that the U.S. military cannot constitutionally be used domestically. DHS considers military veterans, Ron Paul supporters, and Christians as potential enemies of the state. The use of predator drones to murder suspected adversaries in foreign countries, while killing innocent men, women and children (also known as collateral damage), has just been a prelude to the domestic surveillance and eventually extermination of dissidents and nonconformists here in the U.S. We are already becoming a 1984 CCTV controlled nation. DHS has been rapidly militarizing local police forces in cities and towns to supplement their jackbooted thugs. Obama’s executive orders have given him the ability to take control of industry. He can imprison citizens without charges for as long as he deems necessary. Attempts to control gun ownership and shutdown the internet is a prologue to further government domination and supremacy over our lives when the wheels come off this unsustainable bus.

The last week has provided a multitude of revelations about our government and the people of this country. The billions “invested” in our police state, along with warnings from a foreign government, and suspicious travel patterns were not enough for our beloved protectors to stop the Boston Marathon bombing. After stumbling upon these amateur terrorists by accident, the 2^nd responders, with their Iraq war level firepower, managed to slaughter one of the perpetrators, but somehow allowed a wounded teenager to escape on foot and elude 10,000 donut eaters for almost 24 hours. The horde of heavily armed, testosterone fueled thugs proceeded to bully and intimidate the citizens of Watertown by illegal searches of homes and treating innocent people like criminals. The government completely shut down the 10^th largest metropolitan area in the country for an entire day looking for a wounded 19 year old. The people of Boston obeyed their zoo keepers and obediently cowered in their cages.

The entire episode was an epic fail. The gang that couldn’t shoot straight needed an old man to find the bomber in his backyard boat. The people of Boston exhibited the passivity and subservience demanded by their government. Since the capture of the remaining terrorist, the shallow exhibitions of national pride at athletic events and smarmy displays of honoring the police state apparatchiks who screwed up – allowing the attack to occur and looking like the keystone cops during the pursuit of the suspects, has revealed a fatal defect in our civil character. We are living in a profoundly abnormal society, with millions of medicated mindless zombies controlled by a vast propaganda machine, who seemingly enjoy having their liberties taken away. Most have willingly learned to love their servitude. For those who haven’t learned, the boot of our vast security state will just stomp on their face forever. We’re realizing the worst dystopian nightmares of Orwell and Huxley simultaneously. This abnormalcy bias will dissipate over the next ten to fifteen years in torrent of financial collapse, war, bloodshed, and retribution. Sticking your head in the sand will not make reality go away. The existing social, political, and financial order will be swept away. What it is replaced by is up to us. Will this be the final chapter or new chapter in the history of this nation? The choice is ours.

“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
– George Orwell

“There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution” –Aldous Huxley, 1961

DECLINE, DECAY, DENIAL, DELUSION, & DESPAIR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’ve got you by the balls.

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

What do “We the People” want?

Your Ad Here

THE NOOSE TIGHTENS

The government slowly and methodically tightens the noose around our throats and no one notices or cares. Do you feel safer than you did in 2000? The Federal government was spending $1.8 trillion per year in 2000. Today they are spending $3.8 trillion, a 111% increase in 12 years. The GDP has risen from $10 trillion to $15.6 trillion over this same time frame, a 56% increase. Do you think the Federal government is twice as good as it was in 2000? Total government spending in the country (Federal, State & Local) has gone from $3.2 trillion in 2000 to $6.3 trillion today. Government spending was 32% of GDP in 2000. Today it is 40% of GDP. Has this been beneficial to the country or your life? We need to open our eyes and realize what is happening before it’s too late.

Your license plate may be an open book

Monday, October 1,2012

A CAR SAYS a lot about its owner, perhaps a lot more than the owner might suspect.

In an extensive examination of automated license-plate tracking technology, The Wall Street Journal reports that the new tracking devices have the capacity to do more than a one-shot confirmation whether a car is legally registered but over time build a picture of the driver’s habits, travel routes and destinations.

And there is now the capacity to store the information cheaply and in huge quantities. One plate-tracking company, according to the Journal, has 700 million scans on record.

As the cost of plate-tracking technology has dropped, more and more police departments are acquiring the devices — more than one-third of large U.S. police agencies in 2012 by one estimate — many of them paid for by the Department of Homeland Security.

Meanwhile, the camera and software technology to photograph and read license plates has improved dramatically.

Law enforcement agencies say they use the devices to identify stolen cars, ticket scofflaws and track the vehicles of suspected criminals.

THE PRIVACY implications are chilling, especially to the International Association of Chiefs of Police that cautioned the devices can record “vehicles parked at addiction counseling meetings, doctors’ offices, health clinics or even staging areas for protests.”

In the course of their analysis, Journal reporters Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries found that data about a typical American is collected in more than 20 different ways during everyday activities.

And there is a growing capacity to match this data with credit card, cellphone location, online searches and social network databases.

The early entrant firms to the field of tag tracking were typically started by “repo men,” specialists in retrieving vehicles from deadbeats. Scott Jackson, founder of MVConnect, tells the Journal he would never sell the data his firm collects to marketers or the general public.

THAT’S NOT to say someone else won’t. One firm, Baltimore-based Final Notice Location & Recovery LLC, tells the Journal that it has amassed a database of 19 million plates in locations in Maryland and Washington, D.C. The information is given free to police, but the company tells the newspaper that it soon hopes to sell the information to jail bondsmen, process servers, insurance companies and private investigators.

Privacy stands little chance where there is an economic incentive to intrude upon it. Indeed, privacy seems more and more like a quaint notion left over from the 20th century.

— Scripps Howard News Service

BAD WEEK FOR FREEDOM

“We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy.”– Henry Miller

With each passing week it seems this country spirals further into the depths of a frightening dystopian fantasy reminiscent of Huxley and Orwell’s dark world of isolation, fear and government brutality portrayed in their masterpieces Brave New World and 1984. I keep speculating whether it’s me that’s crazy and not the things I’m witnessing on a daily basis. The President signs the National Defense Authorization Act, passed by an overwhelming majority of Congress, which allows the government to imprison American citizens indefinitely without charge. And there is barely a squeak from the docile masses as they are soothed by Obama promising to never use that part of the law. I bet you $10,000 a President will invoke that portion of the NDAA in the very near future.

Jon Corzine, a card carrying member of the ruling elite .01%, remains free to roam one of his five palatial estates after stealing $1.6 billion from the accounts of farmers, widows, and thousands of other “clients” of MF Global. In his spare time he raises money for Obama’s re-election campaign. The Federal government, Federal courts and Wall Street banking cabal have circled the wagons and declared the money just vaporized, even though it sits in Jamie Dimon’s vaults at J.P. Morgan. No one is being prosecuted for this deliberate thievery. The psychopathic Wall Street criminals have been getting away with murder for so long they act invulnerable to societal mores and scoff at our laws, rules and regulations. Those are for the 99%. When you control the politicians, regulators, courts, and mainstream media, it’s easy to get away with murder. The jackals and hyenas are laughing in their NYC penthouse suites as they continue to collect $20 million bonuses for a job well done.

After this past week I’m apoplectic with rage and fury as the rule of law has been discarded and the Constitution trampled upon by a wealthy connected oligarchy bent upon using their absolute power to further enrich themselves. The Wall Street banks that committed the largest financial crime in history, including: fraud in the inducement, forgery, fabricating documents, bribing rating agencies to rate toxic mortgages as AAA, selling fraudulent derivatives to customers, shorting the derivatives they sold to their customers, throwing millions of Americans out of their homes, charging inflated and bogus fees during the foreclosure process, and conducting a colossal cover-up, were slapped on the wrist and made to pay a miniscule $5 billion to the millions of victims of their crimes. Not one banker has been prosecuted. Not one person has gone to jail. Justice in this country is a putrid joke. There has been no outrage from the general public. The propaganda spewed by the corporate media instructs the masses to rejoice at this fair and just verdict. The truth is that 95% of the population didn’t know or didn’t care about the 50 state foreclosure-gate settlement. They were engrossed by the huge controversy over M.I.A. flipping the bird during the Super Bowl halftime show and whether Madonna was upset about the incident.

“Free” Healthcare

While this travesty of justice was playing out, we were treated to a glimpse into the future of healthcare in America administered by politicians and bureaucrats based upon vote count expediency. The government drones at DHHS mandated from on high that every woman in America would receive “free” contraceptives from their employers. Obama had made this decision and instructed his minions to implement his visionary dictate. The outrage and anger from religious groups and employers was instantaneous. Obama saw the 2012 election slipping away and reversed course within a day. He is quite the man of principle. His “solution” was to force insurance companies to provide “free” contraception to any employee of a religious employer that didn’t provide that coverage in their insurance plan. When I hear these sociopathic politicians use the word “free” when describing healthcare or any of their thousands of bankrupt government programs, I have an overpowering impulse to smash something. Insurance companies will not provide “free” contraceptives to women. Insurance premiums will rise for everyone.

Remember Obama’s assertion about his government takeover of healthcare:

“As a consequence of the Affordable Care Act, premiums are going to be lower than they would be otherwise; health care costs overall are going to be lower than they would be otherwise.”

The next government program that reduces costs, provides better service, and is more efficient than the private market will be the first government program to do so. Examples of government ineptitude, corruption and waste include: Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, the Energy Dept., the Education Dept., and the Dept. of War. Jonathan Gruber, MIT economist and chief architect of Obamacare and Romneycare, recently admitted the truth about Obamacare:

“After the application of tax subsidies, 59% of the individual market will experience an average premium increase of 31%. My findings reflect the high cost of folding state high risk pools into the [federal government’s] exchange — without using the money the state was already spending to subsidize those high risk pools.”

Based on what Obamacare has done for the American people before its full implementation in 2014, you’ll be begging for a death panel to put you out of your misery. The following “free” healthcare services were required to be covered by insurance companies in 2010:

Cover preventive care without co-pays or deductibles.
Allow adult children to stay on parents’ policies until age 26.
Increase annual coverage limits.
Cover children without regard for preexisting conditions.

Obama’s promise that families would save $2,500 per year in the future might come up a tad short, as insurance premiums skyrocketed by 9% in 2011. Not only have premiums soared, but many companies have increased co-pays from $10 to $25 for doctor visits.

Only a deceitful government busybody do-gooder would actually argue that forcing insurance companies to cover millions more Americans and cover pre-existing conditions would result in lower costs for the average family. I wonder what will happen in 2014 when 30 million more Americans are guaranteed “free” healthcare under Obamacare. The saddest part of this oncoming train wreck is that millions of willfully ignorant people actually believed the blatant lies and false storyline fed to them by sociopathic politicians who desire to control every aspect of their lives. These people believe they know what is best for you. They believe they are smarter than you. They do not care what means are required to achieve their ends of absolute domination over your life. Personal freedom, individual liberty and a critical thinking populace are the antithesis to the desires of the governing elite.

Home Sweet Home

The central planners within government and inhabiting the Federal Reserve are never in doubt that their theories, programs, solutions, mandates and schemes will achieve their desired outcome. The trouble for the American people is the desired result is not designed or planned to actually benefit them. The psychopaths drawn to politics, regulatory agencies, and government bureaucracies have no remorse or qualms about lying, utilizing propaganda, and instilling fear to achieve the ends that endorse their self serving agenda. Every dime of government spending is seized from the people by force or created out of thin air by an all knowing self-proclaimed Great Depression expert named Ben Bernanke. This Ivy League professor who has spent his entire life in academia and government thinks he knows which levers to pull to revive an economy that he destroyed. His wisdom is borne out in his prescient assessment of the U.S. housing market as it was imploding:

“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. I don’t think it’s gonna drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.” – July 2005

“House prices have risen by nearly 25 percent over the past two years. Although speculative activity has increased in some areas, at a national level these price increases largely reflect strong economic fundamentals.” – October 2005

“Housing markets are cooling a bit. Our expectation is that the decline in activity or the slowing in activity will be moderate, that house prices will probably continue to rise.” – February 2006

“All that said, given the fundamental factors in place that should support the demand for housing, we believe the effect of the troubles in the subprime sector on the broader housing market will likely be limited, and we do not expect significant spillovers from the subprime market to the rest of the economy or to the financial system. The vast majority of mortgages, including even subprime mortgages, continue to perform well. Past gains in house prices have left most homeowners with significant amounts of home equity, and growth in jobs and incomes should help keep the financial obligations of most households manageable.” – May 2007

It should be clear to everyone that Ben is a goddamn genius. You can see why the mainstream corporate media hangs on his every utterance. He has accepted no responsibility for his part in producing an epic housing collapse and the subsequent recession that continues to this day. His lack of conscience comes in handy as he has destroyed the finances of millions of senior citizens dependent upon interest income to make ends meet. Having no guiding principles or ethics allows him to declare with a straight face that inflation is well contained as gas prices approach $4.00 per gallon, food prices surge 10%, and his inflationary policies contribute to revolutions around the globe.

Last week this sage spoke to the Home Builders Association and left no doubt that he has no interest in what is best for the American people. His economic remedies are the exact opposite of what is needed to cure the disease of a debt ravaged society. Dr. Bernake’s prescription is more debt fueled spending by consumers to refill the coffers on Wall Street. This is not surprising considering he is nothing but a puppet of Dimon, Pandit, Blankfein and the rest of the Wall Street cabal. His speech revealed his allegiances:

“One of the effects of declines in housing wealth is to reduce the ability and willingness of households to spend. It appears that recent declines in housing wealth may be reducing consumer spending between $200 billion and $375 billion per year. That reduction corresponds to lower living standards for many Americans. And, importantly, lower sales of goods and services also reduce the incentives of firms to invest and hire, thereby slowing the recovery. Low or negative equity creates additional problems for households. It reduces financial flexibility: Homeowners who are underwater on their mortgages cannot tap home equity to pay for emergency health expenses or their children’s college educations.”

Whenever I read Bernanke’s words, I’m reminded of George Orwell’s quote about intelligent people:

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”

This is a man who believes he knows better than the market. He’s an economics professor that doesn’t believe in the law of supply and demand as taught in Econ 101. He thinks he can control home prices. He thinks he knows the ideal interest rate. He thinks he knows just how much money printing will revive the economy. He believes a healthy economy is driven by artificially propping up home prices, encouraging people to spend money they don’t have, recommending that homeowners borrow against their homes ($3 trillion borrowed and pissed away from 2003 through 2008), and forcing banks to make loans to subprime borrowers – again. His solution to the millions of bank owned homes is to use the taxpayer owned Fannie and Freddie to initiate bulk discount sales of these homes to his friends in the .01% so they can turn around and rent them to their former owners. I wish someone could explain to me how this helps the 99%. It is another backdoor bailout of Wall Street on the straining backs of the American taxpayer.

Obama’s housing solutions in 2009-2010 included multiple home buyer tax credits, loan modification programs, and a myriad of other Keynesian claptrap spending schemes. Bernanke supported all of those measures. They spent $30 billion of your tax dollars in an effort to artificially prop up home prices. Home prices have fallen 10% since they threw your money down the rat hole where all government programs reside, and they continue to fall. These central government planners don’t like to publicize the fact they continue to operate Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and the FHA as a way to shift losses from Wall Street to Main Street. Fannie and Freddie have lost $160 billion of your tax dollars since 2008, but amazingly the losses don’t show up in the Federal budget because reality has no place in politics or governmental accounting. The FHA just announced they will require a taxpayer bailout for the first time in their 78 year existence, as they lose $5 billion of your money per year on behalf of the Wall Street banking cartel. The toxic mortgages that don’t reside on the books of Fannie, Freddie and the FHA are sitting on Ben’s balance sheet. They reside, hidden from public view, in the “Other Assets” section of the chart below. His tripling of the Federal Reserve balance sheet was done for one reason only – to save the Wall Street bankers, their shareholders, and their bondholders. His actions have in no way benefitted the American people or the American economy.

It is mind boggling the degree to which central planners like Bernanke, Geithner, Obama and Congress will inflict their vision of how the economy and world in general should operate upon the trusting masses. The American people want to believe their leaders are doing what is best for them. They like dwelling in a land of delusion, security and luxury, where government guarantees to protect them from: terrorists; Iranian invasion; saving for retirement; looking out for their own health; educating themselves; and accepting the consequences of living above their means. Their ability to distinguish between truth and propaganda has been thoroughly degraded by years of government proscribed education. We have chosen to become a knowingly ignorant nation of true believers. There is no time for critical thinking while we anticipate our next tweet about the death of drug addicted pop singer. We have been taught to love our servitude.

“…most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”– Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

The fallacy of government protecting you, taking care of you and providing you “free” benefits is so ingrained in the American psyche that it is virtually impossible to voluntarily reverse the trend. The truth that Americans refuse to acknowledge is that nothing is free in this life. We are not entitled to own a home, a free education, free healthcare, or a comfy privileged existence. Everything government provides is taken by force from someone else. Everything government does has a cost. Americans have traded freedom and liberty for the appearance of safety and security.The cost is constant war, getting groped by TSA perverts, surveillance by government agencies, threat of imprisonment without charges and a $1 trillion price tag per year. The cost of “free” healthcare is mind numbingly ludicrous rules and regulations for doctors and patients, massive fraud, outrageously expensive procedures and medications, and a $100 trillion unfunded liability left for future generations. The ultimate cost of an overbearing, all controlling government will be economic collapse and revolution.

Who Decides?

“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” – Joseph Stalin

The concluding act during this bad week for freedom occurred on Saturday in the great state of Maine. When it became clear that Ron Paul was going to win the Maine caucuses, the GOP establishment, that has already anointed Mitt Romney the Republican nominee, decided the people of Maine would be told who won. Using the excuse of an impending snowstorm (less than 1 inch), the powers that be cancelled the caucuses in Washington County where a large contingent of youthful Ron Paul supporters dominated. The Girl Scouts didn’t cancel their event in the same county that day. The men who cancelled the caucus are strong Romney supporters. This was a blatant Stalinist act of voter disenfranchisement. The GOP leaders declared those votes would not count in the totals. Despite this despicable act of rigging an election, Ron Paul doubled his vote percentage from 2008. His message of freedom, liberty, non-interventionism, sound money and self-reliance is reverberating across the land among young people who have not been programmed by the governing elite and the corporate mass media. The establishment will do everything in their power, including vote fraud, to prevent Ron Paul’s anti-establishment message from being heard.

A small delegation of authoritative, rich men continues to pull the strings in this country. The examples I’ve sited in the last week prove we are moving ever more rapidly towards what Friedrich Hayek described as a‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The actions of the governing class point to no other conclusion as described by Simon Black:

Hundreds of thousands of mortgage contracts abrogated by the Federal government;
Suspension of gun rights by several local governments;
The continued criminalization of protest and free assembly;
Increased surveillance and police state tactics;
Authorization of military force and detention against the citizens;
Seizing and/or voiding pension systems into which workers have paid lifelong contributions;
Rejection of long-standing senior debt positions in favor of labor unions;
Executive and police agencies ruling by regulation and policy, not by legislative process;

When you pose the possibility of a dictatorship in America, the defender of freedom and democracy, old timers scoff and laugh off the possibility. We are the bright shining light on the mountaintop – that preemptively invades other countries; murders suspected foes with predator drones; imprisons and tortures foreigners in secret prisons; and plans to have 30,000 spy drones patrolling the skies over U.S. cities within the next few years. The government now has the authority to imprison U.S. citizens without cause for as long as they see fit. The government plans to lock down and control the internet. How could we possibly descend toward dictatorial rule? The conditions are perfect for sociopaths dwelling in government bureaucracies to make their move, as elucidated by Doug Casey:

“You may be thinking that what happened in places like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia and scores of other countries in recent history could not, for some reason, happen in the US. Actually, there’s no reason it won’t at this point. All the institutions that made America exceptional – including a belief in capitalism, individualism, self-reliance and the restraints of the Constitution – are now only historical artifacts.On the other hand, the distribution of sociopaths is completely uniform across both space and time. Per capita, there were no more evil people in Stalin’s Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China, Amin’s Uganda, Ceausescu’s Romania or Pol Pot’s Cambodia than there are today in the US. All you need is favorable conditions for them to bloom, much as mushrooms do after a rainstorm.”- Casey Report

Call me a raging optimist, but I see positive signs that an irate tireless minority of Americans are coming to their senses and preparing for a showdown with the ruling oligarchy. The tremendous support for Ron Paul’s message among those under the age of 30 is inspiring. His devoted followers have incredible enthusiasm and will be a force to be reckoned with. The upcoming election will be won or lost based upon whether Ron Paul decides to run as a 3^rd Party candidate, spreading his inspirational message. The Occupy Movement is also being driven by people under the age of 30. Their courage and audacity in standing up to brutal establishment military tactics and focusing the attention of the world on the greed, avarice and corruption rampant throughout our economic and political system has given me hope that the good guys can win. Every day the Millenial generation gains strength as the power of the older generations slowly wanes.

The internet has proven to be the best weapon in the fight against the governing elite. It offers people the freedom to ignore government sponsored propaganda being blasted by the corporate media. Critical thinkers can connect with other critical thinkers, while seeking the truth and spreading ideas. You can examine websites like Zero Hedge, Jesse’s Café Americain, Of Two Minds, and Mish to comprehend what is really happening in your world. The tumult and outrage exhibited by millions when the despotic Congressional jackals attempted to pass SOPA and PIPA was inspirational. The people’s voice was heard loud and clear. The politicians ruling over our lives have no guiding principles or moral code. They peddle their votes to the highest bidder. They conduct polls to determine what their constituents want to hear and then shockingly tailor a message that voters find to be exactly what they think. These sociopaths only respond to one thing – being exposed as liars and thieves. When they are confronted by an irate citizenry they scatter like roaches in a West Philly row house kitchen when you turn the light on. Yes votes on SOPA turned to No votes quicker than the Federal government can spend a billion of your tax dollars (10 hours). Obama showed how principled his positions are by backtracking on his “free” contraception mandate in less than 24 hours. If we speak loud enough they will listen, or else.

The “or else” is reflected in the chart below showing gun purchases over the last ten years. Millions of good law abiding Americans are armed. The accelerating trend is a hopeful sign that we will not allow a small contingent of corrupt politicians backed by shadowy rich men (22 men have contributed 67% of all the Super Pac money in the GOP primaries), hiding from public view, to treat this country as their personal playground.

It was a bad week for freedom loving people, but I believe there are enough patriots left in this country to change our course. We are being buried under a blizzard of lies on a daily basis. We have a choice. We can support the existing corrupt crony capitalist establishment (Obama & Romney) or we can declare war on lies, deceit and misinformation by rallying behind the only person who would truly attempt to reverse decades of corruption, sleaze, incompetence, bloat, debt accumulation, and a warped version of free market capitalism – Ron Paul. He is the only public figure willing to level with the American people and tell them the truth. Will we let the concept of truth fade out of the world? The choice is ours.

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.” – George Orwell