Tag: collapse

TRYING TO STAY SANE IN AN INSANE WORLD – PART 1

“I mean—hell, I been surprised how sane you guys all are. As near as I can tell you’re not any crazier than the average asshole on the street.” – R.P. McMurphy – One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

“Years ago, it meant something to be crazy. Now everyone’s crazy.” – Charles Manson

 

“In America, the criminally insane rule and the rest of us, or the vast majority of the rest of us, either do not care, do not know, or are distracted and properly brainwashed into acquiescence.” – Kurt Nimmo

I have to admit to being baffled by the aptitude of the Wall Street and K Street financial elite to keep their Ponzi scheme growing. I consider myself to be a rational, sane human being who understands math and bases his assessments upon facts and a sensible appraisal of the relevant information obtained from trustworthy sources. Of course, finding trustworthy sources is difficult when you live in a corrupt, crony-capitalist, fascist state, controlled by banking, corporate and military interests who retain absolute control over the mainstream media and governmental propaganda agencies. Those seeking truth must pursue it through the alternative media and seeking out unbiased critical thinkers who relentlessly abide by what the facts expose. This is no time for wishful thinking, delusions and fantasies. In the end, the facts are all that matter. As Heinlein noted decades ago, the future is uncertain so facts are essential in navigating a course that doesn’t lead you to ruin upon the shoals of ignorance.

“What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell,” avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the un-guessable “verdict of history” – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!” ― Robert A. Heinlein

Facts are treasonous and dangerous in an empire of lies, fraud and propaganda. It is maddening to watch the country spiral downward, driven to ruin by a psychotic predator class, while the plebs choose to remain willfully ignorant of reality and distracted by their lust for cheap Chinese crap and addicted to the cult of techno-narcissism. We are a country running on heaping doses of cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias, an irrational belief in our national exceptionalism, an absurd trust in the same banking class that destroyed the finances of the country, and a delusionary belief that with just another trillion dollars of debt we’ll be back on the exponential growth track. The American empire has been built on a foundation of cheap easily accessible oil, cheap easily accessible credit, the most powerful military machine in human history, and the purposeful transformation of citizens into consumers through the use of relentless media propaganda and a persistent decades long dumbing down of the masses through the government education system.

This national insanity is not a new phenomenon. Friedrich Nietzsche observed the same spectacle in the 19th century.

“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

The “solutions” imposed by the supposed brightest financial Ivy League educated minds and corrupt bought off political class upon people of the United States since the Wall Street created 2008 worldwide financial collapse are insane and designed to only further enrich the crony capitalists and their banker brethren. The maniacs are ruling the asylum. John Lennon saw the writing on the wall forty five years ago.

“Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives…. I think we’re being run by maniacs for maniacal ends … and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s what’s insane about it.” – John Lennon, Interview BBC-TV (June 22, 1968)

The world is most certainly ruled by a small group of extremely wealthy evil men who desire ever more treasure, supremacy and control, but the vast majority of Americans have stood idly by mesmerized by their iGadgets and believing buying shit they don’t need with money they don’t have is the path to happiness and prosperity, while their wealth, liberty and self-respect were stolen by the financial elite. Our idiot culture, that celebrates reality TV morons, low IQ millionaires playing children’s sports, egomaniacal Hollywood hacks, self-promoting Wall Street financers, and self-serving corrupt ideologue politicians, has been degenerating for decades.

“We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.” – Carl Bernstein -1992

The examples of our national insanity are almost too vast to document, but any critical assessment of what we’ve done over the last one hundred years reveals the idiocracy that has engulfed our collapsing empire.

The Madness of Crowds

“In reading The History of Nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities, their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first.” – Charles MacKay – Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

We have become a nation that seamlessly goes mad every five years in pursuit of some new delusionary fantasy sold to us by the ruling class, only to see those dreams shattered like a wooden ship on the reef of reality. You can never underestimate the power of human stupidity. Ben Bernanke and his Federal Reserve cronies have printed $2.6 trillion of new money out of thin air since September 2008 in order to prop up their Wall Street owners, who had engineered the largest control fraud (mortgage debt/housing bubble) in world history, recklessly gambled in their ravenous appetite for sordid profits, and drove their firms into insolvency. It took the Federal Reserve 95 years to accumulate a balance sheet of $900 billion of safe U.S. Treasuries.

fed balance sheet

They have insanely quadrupled their balance sheet in the last 5 years by accumulating toxic mortgage debt from Wall Street banks and purchasing the majority of new Treasury debt being issued to fund the Federal government’s insane trillion dollar annual deficits. Bernanke, the corporate media, government apparatchiks, and captured political class act as if this is normal, when it is clearly the act of a desperate ruling class in its final death throes. Bernanke has leveraged his balance sheet 60 to 1. Lehman and Bear Stearns were leveraged 30 to 1 when they collapsed. The 100 basis point move in rates over the space of two months has resulted in Bernanke losing $200 billion and effectively wiping out his $55 billion of capital.

fed 10 year

Of course, in a corrupt regime accounting fraud is encouraged and applauded by the status quo. Just as the spineless accountants on the FASB buckled to threats from Bernanke and Paulson in early 2009 and reversed the requirement that assets be marked to market so the felonious Wall Street banks could fraudulently hide their insolvency, the Federal Reserve has decided their losses don’t matter. The Federal Reserve classifies their losses as an asset. Don’t you wish you could classify your 401k losses and your home value losses as an asset? The tapering bullshit storyline is just another attempt to distract the masses from focusing on the fact that Bernanke will never stop expanding his balance sheet because if he stops the financial system will collapse in a catastrophic implosion. The Ponzi scheme will continue until loss of faith leads to a scramble away from the U.S. dollar.

fed balance sheet

Since the infamous creation of the Federal Reserve by a secretive cabal of bankers and politicians in 1913, the ultimate destination of the American empire was set. Every fiat currency in world history has collapsed. Our entire system has been based on infinite exponential growth. The fallacy of American exceptionalism has been built on an underpinning of pure stupid luck and the issuance of more and more debt. The American empire grew to epic proportions due to the discovery of cheap easily accessible oil in the late 19th century and the physical and economic destruction of Europe, Russia and Japan during World War II. The accumulation of debt was fairly moderate during the glory years after World War II, but began to accelerate after the fateful year of 1971 when U.S. oil production peaked and Tricky Dick Nixon removed the last vestiges of restraint from central bankers and politicians by closing the gold window. With the shackles removed from the wrists of corruptible knaves and shysters, America’s future depended upon the wisdom, honesty and financial acumen of Washington politicians and Wall Street financers. Once the citizens realized they could vote for more bread and circuses, our ultimate demise was set in motion. A nation that had produced real annual growth of 4% during the 1950’s and 1960’s has seen a steady decline for the last four decades.   

The term pushing on a string describes the Quantitative Easing (literally money printing) and Keynesian debt financed pork spending efforts of our increasingly frantic owners. The insanity of what we’ve done since 1971 is almost too crazy to comprehend. In the first 182 years of our existence the leaders we elected to steward the nation accumulated $400 billion of national debt. By 1981, unleashed from any semblance of spending control, the politicians and bankers had added another $600 billion of debt, a 150% increase in 10 years. By 1991 our beloved leaders had added another $2.6 trillion of debt, another 160% increase in 10 years. By 2001 another $2.2 trillion had been accumulated, only a 60% increase due to the end of the Cold War and a one-time tax surge from the Dot.com stock bubble. Bush’s worldwide War on Terror, expansion of the police state, tax rebate stimulus idiocy, and expansion of the welfare state (Medicare Part D) drove the national debt up by another $2.2 trillion in just eight years, a 40% increase.

The insane amassing of debt since 2008 has put a final nail in the coffin of the ridiculous Keynesian theory, as the Federal government has increased annual spending by 35% over the last five years and the economy is still moribund. Our fearless leaders have driven the national debt from $7.8 trillion to $16.7 trillion in less than five years, a 110% increase. The country continues to add $2 to $3 billion of debt per day. Consider how insane it is that we now accumulate more debt in half a year than we did cumulatively over the first 182 years of our existence as a country. And our elected, or should I say selected, leaders, cheer on the intellectually bankrupt academics like Bernanke whose only solution to every crisis is to print moar and then lie to the American people about his true purpose, act as if annually spending $1 trillion more than we collect while knowing there are over $200 trillion of unfunded promises to fulfill is a reasonable and realistic way to manage the national finances. Any sane person knows our current path will lead to ruin. When you need to issue new debt in order to honor old debt, the end is in sight.

The multitude of insane responses to a financial crisis created by a few greedy psychopathic bankers will be looked upon by historians with contempt and scorn. Future generations will wonder “What were they thinking?” Trillions in wealth were vaporized due to the actions of a small secretive league of highly educated, egocentric psychopaths whose warped sense of morality led them to pillage the wealth of the nation through fraudulent financial products, bribing regulatory agencies, stabbing clients and competitors in the back, and peddling lies, propaganda and misinformation to the public through their captured media mouthpieces. Not only haven’t any predator bankers been thrown in jail, but these villains have grown their parasitic entities to enormous proportions while paying themselves obscene billion dollar bonuses. Jon Corzine stole $1.2 billion directly from the accounts of his customers to cover his gambling losses and he remains free to laze about in one of his five gated mansions. The largest banks on earth have been caught red handed forging mortgage documents, rigging LIBOR, front running the muppets with non-public economic information, insider dealing, and using their HFT supercomputers to manipulate the markets at their whim. Government spy agencies regularly use the U.S. Constitution like toilet paper while accumulating electronic dossiers on every citizen in the country. The rule of law does not exist for the ruling class.

Only in a world gone insane would we be celebrating Wall Street generating all-time high profits through the use of accounting fraud and Bernanke filling their coffers with trillions of interest free money while bilking senior citizens out of $400 billion per year of interest income through his dastardly ZIRP “save a Wall Street banker” scheme. Bernanke has stolen close to $2 trillion from the bank accounts of little old ladies since 2008 and given it to Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfien and the rest of the Wall Street scumbags. While Wall Street and the crony capitalist mega-corporations report record profits, Main Street is left with 5 million less full-time jobs than they had in 2007 and a real unemployment rate exceeding 20%. While the government has insanely reported a recovering economy since mid-2009, the food stamp rolls have grown from 33 million to 47 million. The ruling class cheers the record highs in the stock market that overwhelmingly benefit the top .1% because they are the .1%. Meanwhile, the average schmuck out in the hinterlands is paying double the price they were paying for gas in 2009 and their everyday living costs are rising by greater than 5% annually. Luckily for the financial elite, the average American would rather watch Honey Boo Boo than try to understand the evilness of Federal Reserve created inflation. The economic recovery storyline is obliterated by the fact that real household income is still 9% below its 2008 peak and amazingly 8% below its 2000 level.

Since the 2009 low, the household net worth of the wealthiest 7% has grown by 28%, while the other 93% have seen their net worth decline by a further 4%. The profits accrue to those who run the show, buy the politicians, write the laws, command the media propaganda machine and control the currency. As a sane person in this insane world I’m flabbergasted that there is virtually no outrage at the perpetrators of these crimes against humanity. Americans have earned the moniker – ignorant masses. Bread and circuses have won the day in our declining empire. The oligarchs thank you.

The blame doesn’t rest solely on the shoulders of the evil men running the show. They have only done what we allowed them to do. From top to bottom our society has hopped on the crazy train. The lack of national morality, sense of civic duty, inter-generational responsibility, and willful ignorance regarding sensible financial policies has led us to a tipping point. Decades of feckless self-serving political leadership making entitlement promises they could never honor to win votes, combined with a parasitic financial class peddling debt to millions of witless, narcissistic, math challenged, materialistic morons, has left the country in debt up to its eyeballs with no escape other than cataclysmic default. Michael Lewis documents the bleeding out of our society in his recent book:

“The people who had the power in the society, and were charged with saving it from itself, had instead bled the society to death. The problem with police officers and firefighters isn’t a public sector problem; it isn’t a problem with government; it’s a problem with the entire society. It’s what happened on Wall Street in the run-up to the subprime crisis. It’s a problem of taking what they can, just because they can, without regard to the larger social consequences. It’s not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans. Alone in a dark room with a pile of money, Americans knew exactly what they wanted to do, from the top of the society to the bottom. They’d been conditioned to grab as much as they could, without thinking about the long-term consequences. Afterward, the people on Wall Street would privately bemoan the low morals of the American people who walked away from their subprime loans, and the American people would express outrage at the Wall Street people who paid themselves a fortune to design the bad loans.” – Michael Lewis – Boomerang

The insanity of our debt accumulation in relation to our pathetic economic growth is clearly evident to even an Ivy League educated economist or a bubble headed CNBC anchorwoman. Since 1971 nominal GDP has grown by a factor of 14. Over this same time frame total credit market debt (household, corporate, government) has grown by a factor of 32. Real GDP (even using the fraudulent BLS manipulated CPI) has only expanded by a factor of 3.5 since 1971. The exponential growth model is clearly failing, with debt going hyperbolic, while GDP has stagnated.

us-debt-and-gdp

Since 2007 real GDP has gone up $500 billion while total credit market debt has gone up by $6 trillion. Only an insane society would allow itself to be convinced by the perpetrators of the financial crimes that collapsed our economic system that accelerating the level of debt in our system will resolve the dilemma of Too Big to Trust banker insolvency. Transferring the immense losses of greedy sham capitalist gambling addicts from their insolvent balance sheets onto the balance sheets of the taxpayer has allowed the criminals to retain and expand their wealth, while sovereign states shift the pain and suffering onto the backs of the sinking middle class. This is a worldwide phenomenon perpetuated by central bankers at the behest of their crony capitalist co-conspirators. They call it capitalism when the scams, dodges and swindles work and the profits accrue to the schemers. When the gamblers and extreme risk addicts roll craps they use their crony capitalist connections, bought with blood money, to socialize their losses. The game is rigged and your owners don’t care about your hopes and dreams or your children’s future. They care about their own wealth and lifestyles of luxury. When the richest 300 people in the world have a greater net worth than the poorest 3 billion people on earth, a sane person realizes a chaotic end of the existing social order beckons.

“All over the world people borrowed vast sums of money they could never repay. The honest toting up, and taking, of the losses is being delayed. There’s a reason for this. The bad debts are owed, largely, to big banks. The big banks (even bigger than they were at the start of this crisis) and the people who own them enjoy a wildly disproportionate amount of political influence. And so, even now, five years into this mess, we remain at the mercy of the failed financial institutions that sit at the center of our capitalism. Geithner & Bernanke, along with their European counterparts, are doing everything in their power to prevent banks from failing. But the effect of this new financial order is bizarre: capitalism for everyone but the capitalists. Ordinary workers remain fully exposed to the increasingly harsh collisions in the marketplace while the highest paid financial elites ride protected by a passenger airbag.” – Michael Lewis – Boomerang

Clearly we’ve entered the final phase of our debt financed orgy of narcissistic materialism and self-absorbed avarice. The unsustainability of our course is a fact. Our society has gone mad en-masse but we are only recovering our sanity one by one. The global financial system is insolvent. A fractional reserve fiat money based system requires continuous growth or it collapses. The global banking system is overleveraged and real global growth is stagnant. Central bankers are not smart men. They have one response to every crisis – print!!! Bernanke and his fellow banker cronies are printing at hyper-speed in order to prop up the terminally ill mega-banks. Bernanke feigns confusion at the fact that his QE to infinity and ZIRP have only benefitted his banker puppet masters and the richest .1%, while further impoverishing senior citizen savers and the working middle class.

The anger at the true Wall Street malefactors manifested itself in the Tea Party movement and Occupy Wall Street movement, but both efforts were quickly hijacked by neo-con right wingers and socialist left wingers for their own ideological purposes. The existing social order continues to hold the reins of power, but their grip is growing precarious. The anger, dismay and resentment in the country simmer beneath the surface. The average person senses that all is not well, but most absurdly continue to believe the lies and propaganda spewed at them on a daily basis by the ruling class and their corporate media pawns. When the next shoe drops and billions of stock market and housing wealth are wiped out again, the national anger will sweep away the corrupt social order in a torrent of blood and retribution. Innocent and guilty alike will suffer the consequences. Michael Lewis is somewhat perplexed by the lack of outrage and violence so far.

“A lot has happened. And yet, given the provocation, it’s amazing how little has happened. No one on Wall Street has been shot, or even jailed – and the existing social order has not been seriously challenged. There’s a reason for this, too. The anger arising from the financial crisis finds no natural channel. In another era – an era before catastrophic experiments with radical socialism and nationalism – we would be watching market capitalism being displaced by something far uglier. But today there is no natural place for anger to flow, and so the anger flows haphazardly, like raindrops down a windowpane. The only political ideology that anger benefits these days is anarchy. From the point of view of those who enjoy political stability, it’s a stroke of luck that anarchists have no natural talent for organizing themselves. But how long will it take them to learn?”  – Michael Lewis – Boomerang

Staying sane in a society gone mad is not easy. Millions of people believe themselves to be sane, but they have really just adapted to an insane society, so they appear sane within the warped paradigm of that insane society. The truly sane people appear to be insane in an insane society. It’s enough to drive a man crazy. The immense forces of normalcy bias and social inertia have led millions to refuse to understand the mathematical certainty of the coming collapse. The worldwide banking system is like a great white shark that needs to keep moving or it dies. Exponential growth and continuous credit expansion have been the essential ingredients to expanding the American empire, but the growth has stopped, while the debt keeps growing. Infinite growth on a finite planet is impossible. As natural resources deplete and become more expensive to obtain, while the planet’s population continues to grow, the fractional reserve banking system and the nation states who continue to pile up trillions in debt will suddenly suffer a catastrophic collapse. We are in the end stages of a confidence game. Your government will not give you warning. We need to come to our senses one by one, until there are enough sane people to tip the scales in our favor. I’ve concluded that I live in a dishonest, insane, intolerable world and consider it my duty to spread discontent among those I can reach. I’m a dangerous man in the eyes of our corporate fascist surveillance state. So be it.

“The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is apt to spread discontent among those who are.” – H.L. Mencken

In Part 2 of this article I will attempt to figure out why mass insanity has gripped the world and ponder what might happen when sanity returns.

order non hybrid seeds

FIVE STAGES OF COLLAPSE

I started reading Dimitri Orlov’s The Five Stages of Collapse – Survivor’s Toolkit this week. He seems like an extremely rational fellow who understands the big picture. Here are his 5 stages of collapse:

  1. Stage 1: Financial Collapse. Faith in “business as usual” is lost. The future is no longer assumed to resemble the past in any way that allows risk to be assessed and financial assets to be guaranteed. Financial institutions become insolvent; savings wiped out and access to capital is lost.
  2. Stage 2: Commercial Collapse. Faith that “the market shall provide” is lost. Money is devalued and/or becomes scarce, commodities are hoarded, import and retail chains break down and widespread shortages of survival necessities become the norm.
  3. Stage 3: Political Collapse. Faith that “the government will take care of you” is lost. As official attempts to mitigate widespread loss of access to commercial sources of survival necessities fail to make a difference, the political establishment loses legitimacy and relevance.
  4. Stage 4: Social Collapse. Faith that “your people will take care of you” is lost, as social institutions, be they charities or other groups that rush to fill the power vacuum, run out of resources or fail through internal conflict.
  5. Stage 5: Cultural Collapse. Faith in the goodness of humanity is lost. People lose their capacity for “kindness, generosity, consideration, affection, honesty, hospitality, compassion, charity.” Families disband and compete as individuals for scarce resources. The new motto becomes “May you die today so that I can die tomorrow.”

These are not pre-destined to occur. He uses the Soviet Union collapse as an example. They were able to arrest the collapse at Stage 3. The stages don’t necessarily have to follow in order. The stages can occur simultaneously. You can recognize various elements of the 1st three stages in the United States today.

We are clearly deep into Stage 1. Our economic and financial system is no longer based on free markets or capitalism. They are propped up by Ben Bernanke and built on a foundation of accounting fraud. Our largest financial institutions and our government are as insolvent as Detroit.

We are in the early portion of Stage 2. Faith in the markets is deteriorating. Small businesses are folding up their tents. Only the mega-corporations who have bought off the politicians are still making money. They are doing it by cutting workers and using accounting gimmicks. Revenues are declining as consumers are sucked dry by higher prices for everything they need to live in their day to day lives. The Commercial collapse will gather momentum in 2014.

Stage 3 – political collapse is well under way. The political establishment has lost its legitimacy. The recent revelations from Edward Snowden about the government spying on all Americans and the Gestapo like tactics of the state in locking down Boston while searching for a wounded teenager has been a tipping point. The President is despised by over 50% of the people. Congress is scorned by 90% of the people. The bankruptcy of Detroit is an early warning that government will not take care of you. The government is broke. They are grasping at straws. They don’t have the answers. The government is corrupt to its core. It will need to be destroyed and rebuilt.

Orlov and many other critical thinking people realize we are in the midst of a collapse. But we do not know when it will turn nasty. Some people think we have decades of slow decline. I doubt it. The numbers point to a financial collapse within the next five years. This fits with the Fourth Turning timing. The future is not bright. Anyone with an ounce of common sense and a functioning brain should be able to see this. The existing social order will be swept away. What it is replaced by is up to us. We don’t want to reach Stage 5.

The Five Stages of Collapse – Survivor’s Toolkit

AND THE BAND PLAYED ON

A confluence of events last week has me reminiscing about the days gone by and apprehensive about the future. I’ve spent a substantial portion of my adulthood rushing to baseball fields, hockey rinks, gymnasiums, and school auditoriums after a long day at work. I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed every moment. Watching eight year olds trying to throw a strike for two hours can become excruciatingly mind-numbing. But, the years of baseball, hockey, basketball, and band taught my boys life lessons about teamwork, sportsmanship, winning, losing, hard work, and having fun. There were championship teams, awful teams and of course trophies for finishing in 7th place. As my boys have gotten older and no longer participate in organized sports, the time commitment has dropped considerably. Last week was one of those few occasions where I had to rush home from work, wolf down a slice of pizza and head out to a school function. It was the annual 8th grade Spring concert.

My youngest son was one of a hundred kids in the 8th grade choir. I think it was mandatory, since none of my kids like to sing. As my wife and I found a seat in the back of the auditorium where we could make a quick escape at the conclusion of the show, neither of us were enthused with the prospect of spending the next ninety minutes listening to off-key music and lame songs. I’ve been jaded by sitting through these ordeals since pre-school. But a funny thing happened during my 30th band concert. I began to feel sentimental about the past and sorrowful about the future for these Millennials.

The Millennial generation was born between 1982 and 2004. Therefore, they range in age from 9 years old to 31 years old. There are approximately 87 million of them, or 27.5% of the U.S. population. In comparison, the much ballyhooed Boomer generation only has 65 million cohorts remaining on this earth. The Millennials will have a much greater influence on the direction of this country over the next fifteen years than the currently in control Boomers. There has been abundant scorn heaped upon this young generation by their elders. In a fit of irrationality befit the arrogant, hubristic, delusional elder generations, they somehow blame a cohort in which 54 million of them are still younger than 21 years old for many of the ills afflicting our society. This disgusting display of hubris is par for the course among these delusional elders.

Are Millennials addicted to their iGadgets, cell phones and Facebook pages? Probably. Do they spend too much time on the internet and playing PS3 & Xbox? Certainly. Have they been indoctrinated in social engineering gibberish like diversity and planet worship by government run public school bureaucrats? Absolutely. Are they young, foolish, immature, irrational and not respectful towards their elders? You betcha. Teenagers have acted like this forever. You acted like that. The ongoing crisis in this country and our unsustainable economic system are in no way the result of anything perpetrated by the Millennial generation.

Can the Millennial generation be blamed for the $17 trillion national debt, $222 trillion of unfunded un-payable social obligations promised by corrupt politicians, $1 trillion of annual deficits, undeclared wars being waged across the globe on behalf of the military industrial complex arms dealer mega-corporations, economic policies that have resulted in 48 million people dependent on food stamps, tax policies that enrich those who write the code, trade policies that benefit corporations who gutted the industrial base and shipped jobs overseas to slave labor factories, or monetary policies that have destroyed 96% of the dollar’s purchasing power? They had no say in the creation of our untenable welfare/warfare state.

There are no Millennials among the 535 corrupt bought off politicians slithering down the halls of Congress. There are no Millennials running the Too Big To Control Wall Street banks. There are no Millennials in charge of the mega-corporations that buy and sell our politicians. There are no Millennials at the upper echelon of the Military Industrial Complex or in the upper ranks of the U.S. Military. But, and this is a big but, they have done most of the dying in the Middle East over the last ten years in our multiple undeclared preemptive wars of aggression. They have died under the false pretenses of a War on Terror, when they are truly dying on behalf of the crony capitalists who profit from never ending war. They have been fighting and dying to protect “our oil” that happens to be under “their sand”. If the energy independence storyline was true, why is our military perpetually at war in the Middle East?

The Millennials will also be required to do the heavy lifting over the next fifteen years of this Fourth Turning Crisis. The Silent Generation is dying off rapidly. The Boomer generation has done some hard living and some hefty eating and with the oldest of their cohort hitting 70 years old, their supremacy will begin to diminish over the coming fifteen years. At 87 million strong, and millions yet to reach voting age, the Millennials will become more influential by the day regarding the future course of this nation. The question is what will be left of this country by the time they assume control. They are saddled with $1 trillion of student loan debt, peddled to them by the government and Wall Street with the false promise of good paying jobs and the opportunity for a better life than their parents lived. They have obediently followed the path laid out by their elders, but they have been badly misled. This American dream has been shattered upon an iceberg of debt, delusion, deception and denial. The unsinkable American empire’s hubris and arrogance are leading to its demise. The Millennials are coming of age during a Crisis that will reach momentous magnitudes over the next fifteen years, and they had nothing to do with creating the circumstances which will propel the chaos and anarchy that ensues. But, they will bear the brunt of the dreadful consequences.

Generational Bridge

“The Boomers’ old age will loom, exposing the thinness in private savings and the unsustainability of public promises. The 13ers will reach their make or break peak earning years, realizing at last that they can’t all be lucky exceptions to their stagnating average income. Millennials will come of age facing debts, tax burdens, and two tier wage structures that older generations will now declare intolerable.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The kids on the stage at the 8th grade Spring concert were all around 14 years old. They are unaware they are in the midst of a twenty year period of Crisis. The boys are at that gawky looking stage with pimply faces and gawky limbs. The girls mature quicker than the boys at that age. These youngsters have barely begun their lives. I was amazed at their proficiency with a wide variety of musical instruments. They displayed poise and talent. The soloists exhibited composure well beyond their years. The performers were all musically endowed and proved that hard work and practice pays off. They were clearly enjoying themselves. They were all dressed in their Sunday best. I found myself enjoying the show despite my jaded attitude upon entering the auditorium. Even my son, wearing one of my ties, actually appeared to be singing during the choir performance. What I saw were hundreds of bright eyed Millennials with their hopes and dreams for a bright future intact. They have no idea what trials and tribulations await them.

I reached a milestone on the age chart last week that had me ruminating about yesteryear and contemplating the future. I reached the half century mark. Birthdays generally do not faze me, but the intersection of the 8th grade concert and my landmark birthday had me pondering my purpose for inhabiting this world. I’ve likely realized two-thirds of my life. The final third of my life will be spent trying to maneuver through the minefields of this Fourth Turning. I’m a father to three Millennial boys. I consider it my duty to defend and support them during this Crisis. Strauss & Howe wrote their book in 1997 and predicted a Great Devaluation in the financial markets around the time Millennials were entering their twenties. This Crisis began in September 2008 with the worldwide financial collapse created by Wall Street “Greed is Good” Boomers, as the oldest Millennials entered their twenties. It continues to worsen as more Millennials approach their twenties. We’ve reached a point in history when the elder generations need to sacrifice in order to insure younger generations have a chance at some form of the American dream.

I believe each generation has an obligation to future generations. We are bridge between preceding generations and future generations. We have a civic obligation to manage the resources of the country in a prudent manner. It’s our duty to leave the country in a financially viable condition so younger generations have an opportunity to live a better life than their parents. Every generation that preceded the Millennials has achieved the goal of having a better standard of living than their parents. I don’t believe my boys will enjoy a better life than I’ve lived. We’ve lived well beyond our means for decades. Government, Wall Street banks, corporations and individuals have run up a $56 trillion tab and are sticking the Millennials with the bill.

The $17 trillion national debt accumulated by elder generations to benefit themselves and $222 trillion of unfunded entitlements promised to themselves is nothing but generational theft. It’s immoral and possibly the most selfish act in human history. I’m ashamed that my generation and older generations have committed this criminal act of theft. Deficit spending today with no intention of repaying that debt is a tax on future generations. This egotistical abuse of power by the current and past regimes must be reversed voluntarily or it will be done by force. I’m 50 years old and will dedicating my remaining time on this earth fighting to create a sustainable future for my kids and their kids. The lucky among us get eighty years on this planet to make a difference. When did the definition of success become dying with the most toys and spending your life screwing your fellow man by accumulating obscene levels of wealth at their expense? If Boomers and Generation X have any sense of guilt about what they have done, they would be willingly offering to sacrifice their ill-gotten entitlements.

Not only are those currently in power not proposing to scale back their spending, debt accumulation, or entitlement transfers, but they have accelerated the pace of each in the last five years. An already unsustainable corrupted economic structure is being driven towards collapse by psychopathic central bankers and cowardly captured politicians. These are acts of treason against the youth of this country and larceny on a grand scale. It will lead to generational warfare and these crooks will pay for their transgressions. Strauss & Howe suspected in 1997 the elders might cling to their illicit profits acquired at the expense of the Millennials:

“When young adults encounter leaders who cling to the old regime (and who keep propping up senior benefit programs that will by then be busting the budget), they will not tune out, 13er – style. Instead, they will get busy working to defeat or overcome their adversaries. Their success will lead some older critics to perceive real danger in a rising generation perceived as capable but naïve.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The elders who represent the status quo do perceive real danger in the rising Millennial generation. The initial skirmishes occurred in the midst of the Occupy protests. The young protestors initially focused on the true culprits in the crashing of the financial system and vaporizing of the net worth of millions – Wall Street bankers and their sugar daddy at the Federal Reserve. In a display of status quo bipartisanship you had liberal Democrat mayors in cities across the country call out their armed thugs to beat the millennial protestors into submission while being cheered on by Fox News and the neo-cons.

The existing status quo regime provides the illusion of choice, but both political parties are interchangeable in their desire to control our lives, flex our military might around the globe, indebt future generations and write laws to favor their corporate and banking masters. The establishment is showing contempt for the futures of our youth. Their solutions to the criminally created financial crisis have been to reward reckless debtors and bankers at the expense of future generations. Their doling out of hundreds of billions in student loan debt and artificial propping up of home prices has effectively made it impossible for millions of young people to get their lives started. Boomers have done such a poor job saving for their retirements they are unable to leave the workforce. Since January 2009, despite adding $400 billion of student loan debt, Millennials have a net loss in jobs, while the Boomers have taken 4 million jobs.

Strauss & Howe anticipated that older people would be anguished to see good kids suffer for the mistakes they had made. They thought the elders couldn’t possibly be shallow enough, selfish enough, or immoral enough to deny the Millennial generation a chance at the American Dream. They were wrong. The old regime has no plans to step aside or sacrifice on behalf of younger generations. The implications of this resistance will be dire.   

“The youthful hunger for social discipline and centralized authority could lead Millennial youth brigades to lend mass to dangerous demagogues. The risk of class warfare will be especially grave if the 20% of Millennials who were poor as children (50% in inner cities) come of age seeing their peer-bonded paths to generational progress blocked by elder inertia.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

The social mood in this country continues to deteriorate as the sociopathic financial elite accelerate their pillaging of the working middle class, steal money from senior citizens through zero interest rate inflationary policies, and enslave our youth in the chains of crushing debt and promise of dead end jobs. When the next leg down in this ongoing depression strikes like an F5 tornado, the simmering anger in this country will explode in a chaotic frenzy of violence and retribution. The chances of class and generational warfare have increased exponentially due to the actions of the elderly regime over the last five years.

Generational Sacrifice

“You got your whole life ahead of you, but for me, I finish things.” – Walt Kowalski – Gran Torino   

  

A couple days after the Spring concert I was flipping through the 650 channels on my TV with nothing worth watching when I stumbled across the 2008 Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. This was the third episode within the week that had me thinking about the future of my kids. It was his highest grossing film in history. Eastwood played a bigoted tough guy Korean War veteran whose Detroit suburban neighborhood had deteriorated into a dangerous gang infested Asian war zone. The movie did not follow the standard Eastwood plot where he kills dozens of bad guys. He grudgingly befriends two young Millennial teenage Laos refugees who live next door. He had lost his wife of 50 years. He was in his 70s and dying from some undiagnosed illness. I viewed the movie as an allegory for the generational sacrifice that should be taking place now.

Eastwood’s character, Walt Kowlaski, decided to finish things his way. He realized the two Millennials would never find peace or have a chance at a better life until the criminal gang running the show in the neighborhood were confronted and defeated. He knew he was too old to kill six gang members singlehandedly, so he made a choice to sacrifice himself and be gunned down in cold blood in front of multiple witnesses so the perpetrators would go to jail and allow his Millennial companions to have a chance at a better life. He sacrificed his life for the good of young people who weren’t even related to him.  This message has not connected with the elder generations who control the purse strings and political system in this country. The media propaganda machine supporting the existing regime continues to peddle a storyline that debt doesn’t matter, consumption is good, saving is for suckers, and passing the bill for unfunded entitlements to future generations is not immoral and cowardly. Walt Kowalski displayed courage, bravery, and valor that is sorely lacking in the elderly generations today.

At the age of 50 I have a choice with my remaining 20 or 30 years. I can choose to keep accumulating material goods with debt, voting for politicians who promise never to cut my entitlements, believing deficits growing to infinity are beneficial to the economic health of the nation, supporting the military industrial complex as they wage undeclared wars across the world, applauding the Orwellian fascist surveillance measures instituted to give the illusion of safety while sacrificing freedoms and liberties and selfishly looking out for my best interests. Or I can stand up to the corporate fascist old boy regime and lure them into a violent response that will ultimately lead to their downfall. I’m willing to sacrifice what is supposedly “owed” to me on behalf of my kids and all Millennials. They don’t deserve to start life in a $200 trillion hole created by their parents and grandparents. It is disconcerting to me that more Boomer and Generation X parents are unprepared, unwilling or too willfully ignorant to forfeit entitlements awarded them under false pretenses in order to preserve a decent standard of living for their children and grandchildren. The Bernaysian propaganda programmed into their brains over decades by the sociopathic central planning status quo has created this inertia.

The inertia will be replaced by frenzied activity when this unsustainable system ultimately fails. Time seems to be standing still. People have been lulled into a false sense of security even though history is about to fling us into a chaotic transformational period in history. How do I know this is going to happen? Because it happens every eighty years like clockwork. The best laid plans of the men running the show will be swept away in a whirl of pandemonium, violence, war and reckoning for sins committed against humanity. There will be no escape.

“Don’t think you can escape the Fourth Turning the way you might today distance yourself from news, national politics, or even taxes you don’t feel like paying. History warns that a Crisis will reshape the basic social and economic environment that you now take for granted. The Fourth Turning necessitates the death and rebirth of the social order. It is the ultimate rite of passage for an entire people, requiring a luminal state of sheer chaos whose nature and duration no one can predict in advance. The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and effort – in other words, a total war. Every Fourth Turning has registered an upward ratchet in the technology of destruction, and in mankind’s willingness to use it.” – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

Our country has entered a period of Crisis. We may or may not successfully navigate our way through the visible icebergs and more dangerous icebergs just below the surface. The similarities between the course of our country and the maiden voyage of the Titanic are eerily allegorical.

The owners of the ship (Wall Street, Washington politicians, crony capitalists) are arrogant and reckless. They declare the ship unsinkable, while only providing half the lifeboats needed to save all the passengers in case of disaster in order to maximize their profits. The captain (Ben Bernanke) has been tendered the greatest cruise liner (United States) in history. The initial voyage across the Atlantic Ocean has drawn the financial elite ruling class (financers & bankers) onboard, occupying the luxurious state rooms on the upper decks. But, the lower decks are filled with young poor peasants (Millennials) who are sneered at and ridiculed by those in the upper decks. A maiden voyage should always be approached cautiously. A prudent captain would not take undue risks.

Our captain (Ben Bernanke) wants to make his mark on history. He considers himself an expert in navigating dangerous waters (Great Depression) because he studied dangerous waters at his Ivy League school. It doesn’t matter that he never actually captained a ship in the real world.  He declares full steam ahead (reducing interest rates to 0% and throwing vast amounts of fiat currency into the engine room boilers). Midway through the voyage, the captain is handed a telegram warning of icebergs (potential financial catastrophe) ahead. If he slows down the vessel, he will not set the speed record and receive the accolades of an adoring public. He ignores the warning and steams on to his rendezvous (eternal disgrace) with destiny.

In the middle of the night, the lookouts (Ron Paul, John Hussman, Zero Hedge) cry iceberg!! But, it is too late. The great ship (United States) has struck an enormous iceberg (debt & currency crisis). At first, it seems like everything will be OK. The captain and crew assure the passengers that everything is under control and their evasive action has saved the ship. But below the waterline, the great ship (United States) is taking on water (toxic levels of debt, un-payable entitlement promises, trillion dollar deficits, political & financial corruption). The engine room (Federal Reserve) works frantically to alleviate the damage (QE to infinity). The captain is sure the compartmentalization of the ship will save it. One of the designers of the ship (David Stockman) sadly declares that the ship will surely sink. The captain orders the band (CNBC, Fox, MSNBC, CNN) on deck to distract the passengers from their impending fate with soothing music. The owners of the ship (Wall Street, Washington politicians, crony capitalists) aren’t worried. They collected their fees upfront and over-insured the vessel. They anticipate a windfall when the ship sinks. It worked last time.

To avoid mass panic, the crew (government apparatchiks) has locked the youthful poor peasants (Millennials) below deck. The captain and his crew are content to let them go down with the ship. They’ve decided the women, children, and senior citizens (Middle Class) can also be sacrificed. The financial elite ruling class (financers and bankers) are piling into the boats with the ship’s jewels, escaping the fate of the peasants. The captain (Ben Bernanke) has no intention of going down with the ship. In a cowardly act, he leaps onto the 1st lifeboat to be launched. We are on a voyage of the damned. The great cruise liner (United States) has a fatal wound and is headed for a watery grave. Are we going to let the owners, captain and crew dictate who will be saved in the few lifeboats or will we rise up and throw these guilty parties overboard?

 

It comes down to the abuse of power by a few evil men and their henchmen as they have centralized their control over our financial, political, economic and social institutions. The existing social order is an ancient, rotting, fetid swamp of parasites that will be drained during this Fourth Turning. The Millennials are rising and will be the spearhead of the coming revolution. As each day passes they will become a more powerful force and the power of the existing regime will wane. Meanwhile, the band will play on as the ship of state descends into the abyss.

JC PENNEY COMING IN FOR A LANDING

I got my glossy JC Penney ad in my newspaper this morning. I threw it out, just like millions of Americans do every day. I have previously detailed the downward spiral of JC Penney in previous posts. They will join the ranks of that great retailer Montgomery Ward in the retail graveyard in the not too distant future. Their delusional egomaniacal, former Apple executive, CEO is driving the company into bankruptcy at a breakneck pace.

http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=38725

http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=34521

The brilliant Wall Street shysters are “shocked” with the results reported this morning. These paid shills will come out and recommend buying this piece of shit because the CEO has a brilliant plan. The free haircuts on Sunday are going to save the day. Here is a link to their horrific results and my assessment:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/j-c-penney-company-inc-120000473.html

  • They lost $211 million in one quarter and have lost $734 through nine months.
  • Their sales declined by a mind boggling 26.6% versus last year. That is a $1.1 billion sales decline versus the prior year. Picture an airplane headed straight into the ground at 600 miles per hour.
  • Their gross margin collapsed from 37.4% to 32.5% as NO ONE is buying their shit. Imagine their Christmas season.
  • They are now selling off assets to generate cash to survive. These idiots were buying back stock, just like Kohls, just over a year ago.
  • This company employees 159,000 people. It is and will be laying off thousands. Thousands more will see their hours cut.
  • The balance sheet will reveal when this stinking carp goes belly up. They have burned through $560 million of cash even after selling off $279 million of assets to raise cash. They have $525 million left and their operations are deteriorating rapidly. At this rate of burn, they will surely be done during 2013.
  • The only thing saving them now is the fact that they don’t have debt due in the next year and they have reduced their inventory by $1 billion. Don’t look for a big selection at JC Penney during the holiday season.
  • With their free cash flow declining by $1.3 billion in nine months, they are in a death spiral.

The only way for the moron running this company to save it would be to reverse course on his No Sales mantra and to close his 20% worst performing stores immediately. His hubris and ego will not allow him to do this. He will go on his conference call and tell the Wall Street douchebags that his vision will eventually achieve success. In the near future you will see an announcement that JC Penney has declared bankruptcy, will be laying off 75,000 people and closing 600 stores. Book it.

 

DECLINE, DECAY, DENIAL, DELUSION, & DESPAIR

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

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

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

 

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

   

 

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

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

 

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

  

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

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

     

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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



 

UNFORGIVEN – PART FIVE

 

 

“You’d be William Munny out of Missouri, killer of women and children”. – Little Bill Daggett – Unforgiven 

 “That’s right, I’ve killed women and children, I’ve killed just about everything that walked or crawled at one time or another, and I’m here to kill you Little Bill, for what you did to Ned” – Willam Munny – Unforgiven 

Funny thing, killin’ a man. You take away everything he’s got and everything he’s gonna have. – William Munny – Unforgiven 

Clint Eastwood’s final western was one of the darkest, most violent, vicious westerns ever made. Much of the film takes place in darkness. The tone of the film is depressing, with a drained wintery look reminiscent of High Plains Drifter. The script had been written in 1976 during our last Awakening, but Eastwood held off making the movie until 1991 when he was old enough to play the lead role. Age, stages of life, and mood are key elements in the movie, as they are in the plot playing out in the world today. Unforgiven  is a story of atonement, justice and retribution. The cold forbidding atmosphere reflects a Fourth Turning mood. We’ve entered our hibernal Crisis, with its violent struggles and compulsory sacrifices in an era of maximum danger and ultimately a fight for survival. This decisive test of human strength and fortitude was as predictable as the change in seasons. Strauss and Howe understood the generational dynamics of the country would align to create the mood change which would usher in the third Fourth Turning in American history:

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

Unforgiven  follows the journey of William Munny, a cold blooded vicious bandit in his youth, turned peaceful farmer in his old age. As a widower with two kids and a failing farm, he agrees to kill two cowboys who had disfigured a prostitute in the town of Big Whiskey, in return for a reward of $1,000. In his youth he drank heavily and murdered for fun, now he was killing for money. The town is run with an iron fist by an aging gunfighter, turned sheriff, named Little Bill Daggett, who doesn’t allow guns in his town. Munny and his two companions arrive amidst a driving rain storm in the middle of the night. They proceed to execute the two cowboys, but both of Munny’s companions reveal they don’t have a stomach for killing anymore. After collecting the reward, Munny finds out that his friend Ned was captured, tortured, and murdered by Little Bill Daggett. He takes a drink of whiskey and the tale turns into a story of retribution and atonement. He arrives back in town in the pitch black of night and enters the saloon where Little Bill and his men are gathered. He guns down six men, including Little Bill. As he lies on the floor wounded, Bill laments that he doesn’t deserve to die this way. Munny declares:

“deserves got nothin’ to do with it.”

Bill tells Munny he will “see him in hell”, a sentiment which Munny agrees with. Munny then kills him. There is no rousing ending. No cheers from the audience. The ugliness of violence is portrayed realistically and myths of the Old West are demolished. You are left to meditate about the concepts of age, repute, courage, heroism and the fine line between good and evil.

The themes, atmosphere, violence, brutality and finale of this eulogy to the western genre are a perfect representation of our current dire circumstances. The town of Big Whiskey represents the United States. The sheriff rules with an iron fist over the population, but his cronies can get away with murder. Hypocrisy abounds across the U.S. as politicians use the rule of law to keep the masses controlled while rewarding their corporate and banker cronies with government handouts, tax breaks, and free money. I see Munny, his companions and the prostitutes as symbols of the flawed citizens of the United States. They’ve made mistakes, committed crimes, made poor life choices, but they ultimately tried to make an honest living as upstanding citizens. When the authorities pushed them to the brink with their overbearing regulations, brazen criminal actions and blatant institutional corruption, each constituent reacted differently. Some responded with defiance, most rolled over, some ran away, and Munny responded with viciousness and retribution.   

This is how it will play out over the next ten to fifteen years. Cynicism about solutions put forth by corrupt politicians, distrust of government bureaucrats and crooked bankers, and a society wide demoralization, as widespread unemployment and declining living standards for middle class Americans has darkened the landscape like an approaching winter storm. The disillusionment of average Americans is reflected in poll after poll, with only 20% of the population satisfied with the direction of the country versus 70% just prior to 9/11. The mood change in the country since 2005 is palpable. The gap between the Haves and the Have Nots has never been greater and continues to widen. The middle class has floundered for decades, while bankers, politicians and corporate titans have reaped vast riches through peddling debt and gaming a system rigged in their favor.

In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the U.S. at this time?

Recent data from the Pew Foundation finds that Americans are sick of being the world’s policeman. Even conservative Republicans are becoming more isolationist in their views. This was also the case during the 1930’s in the last Fourth Turning. The vast majority of Americans want to keep our noses out of other countries’ affairs because they realize the trillions spent are bankrupting the country.

Even though Americans, by a large majority, favor slashing foreign aid, ending our three foreign wars of aggression, and no longer allowing the super rich and mega-corporations to use the 60,000 page tax code as their means to avoid taxes, our leaders increase war spending, continue to meddle in the affairs of foreign countries, and seek further tax benefits for the super rich and mega-conglomerates. The will of the people is ignored because the government has been bought by the financial and military industrial complex, with funding by the Federal Reserve and the banking cartel that pulls the strings on their puppet – Ben Bernanke.

 

I’ve previously detailed how the baby boom generation contributed to our financial quandary in Part One – For a Few Dollars More, how the traitorous deeds of the Federal Reserve over the last few decades have ruined the middle class and placed the country on the precipice of disintegration in Part Two – Fistful of Dollars, addressed the nefarious conception of a central bank in Part Three – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly and revealed how the super rich have used the tax code and their control of politicians to pillage the nation in Part Four – Outlaw Josey Wales. Now I will detail the likely result of years of frivolous consumerism, creation of a debt tsunami, corrupt myopic leadership, crooked bankers, and a angry despondent populace. The lack of preparation by government and individuals ensures this Crisis will be far worse than it had to be. The violent clash between competing forces will be extreme, bloody and result in retribution dished out to the guilty. Ultimately, the country will need to atone for its sins.    

Preparation

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

This Fourth Turning was as predictable as the seasons. The American Revolution Crisis ended in 1794. The Civil War Crisis arrived 66 years later in 1860. That abbreviated vicious Crisis ended in 1865. The Depression/World War II Crisis arrived 64 years later in 1929. Our current Crisis arrived in the 2008/2009 time frame, exactly 64 years after the end of the last Crisis. Strauss and Howe wrote their book in 1996. They knew we had about a decade to prepare for the looming winter ahead. We had time to fortify, prepare, save, not waste our seed corn on foreign adventures, and reduce all non-essential spending. Not only did we not do what needed to be done, we did the exact opposite of what needed to be done.

The reason is the country has been run by ideologue linear thinkers. Believers in linear history are constantly blindsided by the fact that history is cyclical and periods of progress are counterbalanced by periods of regression. As neo-con Republicans continue to push their lowering taxes on the rich, Christian fundamentalism, drill drill drill energy plan, bowing down to Wall Street bankers and wars on Muslims, drugs, and immigrant agenda, the mood of the country has shifted away from their falsehoods and fabrications. As ultra-liberal Democrats continue to push their agenda of ever increasing entitlements, ridiculous Keynesian stimulus, disengenuous green energy plans, blind support of corrupt unions, wars to prove they’re as tough as Republicans, pushing for gay marriage and rolling over for Wall Street bankers the people of the country have tired of their lies and deceit.

Our country had a decade to prepare for the coming tempest. All generations should have worked to elevate the moral and cultural standards of the country. Instead the decadence, selfishness, materialism and profligacy of the nation were taken to new heights. The complete lack of self control exercised by the media and the public has allowed government bureaucrats to impose despotic laws and regulations to protect us from ourselves and phantom terrorists. The Federal government needed to cut back its size and scope so that it would be nimble in the face of the Crisis. Politicians needed to prevent further civic decay by speaking bluntly and honestly to the American people about the future challenges, while stressing collective duties over personal rights. We needed a revival of citizenship over individualism, with a focus on future generations who would be left with the fallout of thirty years of debt induced societal degradation. The government should have shifted its budgetary focus away from the non-needy old to the young people of our once great Republic. The future of the country depends on the young, not the old. The preparation scorecard on all these accounts is a miserable failure:

  • Since 9/11 the American public has willingly allowed the government to strip liberties and freedoms away in the name of safety and security through passage of the Patriot Act, spying on US citizens, and wars of aggression in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya.
  • The government wolves control the sheep through the use of fear and misinformation. The War on Terrorism is used at every opportunity to keep the sheep-like populace under control in their holding pens.
  • The corporate owned mainstream media glorifies wealth, celebrity, and sensationalism while infecting the culture with a vapid mind numbing array of TV shows and spewing toxic levels of filth and porn across the airwaves and internet.
  • The Federal government cut back its scope by increasing its annual spending to $3.8 trillion in 2011 versus the $1.6 trillion it spent in 1996, a 138% increase in fifteen years. Meanwhile, GDP only increased by 92% over this same time frame.

 

  • Our leaders prepared for the tough times ahead by increasing the National Debt from $5.2 trillion to $14.3 trillion in fifteen years, a 175% increase, or almost twice the rate of GDP growth. Rational leaders always triple their debt level when knowing harsh times are coming.
  • The blunt talk coming from politicians since 1996 included: buy an SUV with 0% financing to defeat terrorism; sure we can pay for your drug costs with Medicare Part D; home prices never fall and everyone deserves a house; free market capitalism always works; cutting taxes on the rich will increase tax revenue; they have weapons of mass destruction; debt doesn’t matter; giving bankers $700 billion will save our economy; spending $800 billion will generate 3.5 million jobs; and QE2 will reduce mortgage rates and jump start the economy.
  • Our leaders have thrown the Millenial generation under the bus, while promising to never cut Medicare, Medicaid, or Social Security for the 76 million Boomers that make up the largest voting bloc in the country. The collective long-term survival of the country has been cast aside in the name of the selfish desires of the generations in power.

The lack of cultural and civic preparation has been far outdone by the extraordinarily deficient amount of preparation in the economic and military areas. Everyone knows that when you discern tumultuous times are on the horizon, you conserve, save, and marshal your forces for the coming storm. Our leaders needed to level with Americans and tell them the entitlements they were promised could never be honored. Americans needed to ramp up their savings and become more self reliant in preparing for their old age. Federal, state and local governments needed to shift their employees from defined benefit plans to defined contribution plans. Americans needed to pare back their debt and stop over-consuming. The government needed to balance budgets, reform the tax code shifting toward consumption, and reduce entitlement promises. America needed to gird for a possible war whose scale, cost, manpower and casualties would seem impossible in 1996 (every prior Fourth Turning led to all encompassing war). The preparation scorecard for these areas was dreadful:

  • The most damning data in proving how delusional the government, consumers, businesses and banks has approached the future is the rise in total credit market debt from $18 trillion in 1996 to an all-time high of $52.6 trillion today, or 350% of GDP.

 

  • Rather than level with people and explain that entitlement promises could not be fulfilled, a supposedly fiscal conservative Republican President added another $15 trillion unfunded liability to our $100 trillion obligation. 

   

  • Our current socialist president rammed through a national healthcare bill that will filter 30 million people into the system and will add in excess of $1 trillion of unpaid for costs, further burying the hopes and dreams of our youth under a mountain of un-payable obligations.
  • Americans, who used to save 10% of their disposable income, were only saving 5.5% in 1996. Rather than prepare for the future by saving more, they put their faith in housing values growing 10% per year for infinity, and let their savings rate drop below 1% by 2005. The current level of 4.9% is not sufficient and is reflected in the fact that two-thirds of all workers have less than $50,000 in total savings.

 

  • States have unfunded pension liabilities approaching $3 trillion, with the Federal government carrying a $1 trillion pension liability. Unfunded liabilities are really future tax increases on unborn generations.
  • The one area that seemed under control in the late 1990s was budget deficits. Budget surpluses in the late 1990s turned into $1.5 trillion annual deficits today and as far as the eye can see. The national debt at 95% of GDP has past the point of no return.
  • The price for a barrel of oil was $12 in 1998. Rather than take advantage of this Indian summer and creating a plan to transition from depleting oil to other energy sources, our leaders did nothing. The American people bought massive SUVs, minivans and pickups and moved further into the suburban countryside, miles from civilization. The bumpy plateau of peak oil has arrived and oil prices have ranged between $70 and $140 a barrel for the last few years. We will long for these prices in a few short years.

 

  • Rather than conserving our military forces and preparing for a future major confrontation we have overextended our limited forces, spent $1.2 trillion on wars of choice, killed 7,300 American soldiers, and wounded another 43,000 soldiers.

The complete lack of preparation, indeed the choice to actively do the opposite of prepare, has insured this Fourth Turning Crisis will be that much more destructive.

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

Retribution

“The refusal of the political class to imposes losses on large bank creditors since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual in 2008 illustrates the extent to which the financialization of the western industrial economies has turned into a gradual coup d’état by the banks and the global speculators who dominate their client base.” – Chris Whalen

 

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

As the average American continues their epic struggle to stay afloat in these turbulent times it is clear to those with critical thinking skills, like Chris Whalen and Ron Paul, that the game is rigged in favor of those with enormous wealth and power. There is no doubt the levers of government and finance have been seized by a super rich minority of men, willing to use all means necessary to increase their wealth and power at the expense of those they consider lowly expendable peasants. The myth perpetuated by those in control of the system is that everyone in America has ample opportunity to move up the ladder, even as they push the ladders away from the parapet surrounding their castle.

The talking points of the super rich, which are pounded into the brains of slumbering Americans, are they pay all the taxes, create all the jobs, create all the wealth, and drive innovation. The facts say otherwise. The super rich aren’t creators, they are destroyers. The top 0.1% richest Americans didn’t get rich by creating new companies and letting their entrepreneurial talents shine. These 152,000 people, with an average income of $5.6 million per year are overwhelmingly executives at large corporations, banks, law firms, and real estate firms. These people account for 68% of the richest of the rich. Entrepreneurial creators and producers account for less than 10% of the richest Americans. The executives that make up the 68% are masters of creating debt, wealth for themselves by peddling debt to the middle class, and creating jobs in China and India by outsourcing U.S. jobs.

The average income of the 137 million people that sit at the bottom of the income pyramid has declined by 1% since 1970. The people at the top of the pyramid saw their average income rise by 385%. Was this because they worked harder? No. It was because they used their existing wealth to buy politicians and pay lobbyists to write laws, create loopholes, reduce regulations, and alter the tax code in their favor. This was not a conspiracy. It was human nature. Humans are driven by greed and fear. Lusting for power and wealth is a common human frailty. Those who are able to acquire wealth and power through their superior abilities and intellect are usually driven individuals. It is built into their DNA to seek more wealth and power. There are 310 million Americans and based on the chart below, only 1.5 million would be classified as very rich or extremely rich. Many of these people associate in the same circles. This incestuous relationship is what breeds the growing inequality in our country. The game is rigged in favor of these 1.5 million people because they run the corporations, occupy the halls of Congress, peddle the debt products to the bottom 90%, and use their mass media to control the message to the under-educated, over-medicated, gadget distracted masses.

 

The problem with humans is they always push the envelope too far. The rich and powerful have methodically accumulated more wealth and more power since their glorious coup in 1913 with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the personal income tax. They have used inflation and the tax code to further their agenda. The rate of their pillaging has waxed and waned over the last century as the mood of the country has oscillated during the five turnings between crisis and triumph. The rate of looting has accelerated in the last thirty years as their false message of free market capitalism, lower tax rates for the rich, and the issuance of unparalleled amounts of debt was bought hook line and sinker by the American public. Their plundering of the national wealth reached a sickening crescendo in the last ten years, as their internet bubble was replaced by their housing bubble, which has been replaced by their debt bubble of immense proportions. As the middle class has been impoverished, 30 million people are unemployed or underemployed, senior citizens have been sacrificed at the altar of Wall Street and 45 million people are forced to use food stamps, the top 1% has done fabulously. They continue to rake in a greater proportion of the national income every year.  In 2009, in the midst of an epic financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States soared by 16% to 7.8 million as despair and hopelessness spread across the land and fearful Americans were railroaded into bailing out the bankers that initiated the crisis and believing the Obama’s Keynesian solutions would actually trickle down to them.

 

As the game approaches its inevitable termination those in control have become increasingly audacious and frantic in their attempts to embezzle what remains of middle class wealth. The anger and disillusionment grows by the day. The mood of the country darkens like the sky before an approaching blizzard. The intensity and violence during a Fourth Turning hastens as events spiral toward a climax. The extreme actions taken by those in power since September 2008 have set in motion a chain of events that will lead to civil war. The powerful elite in government (Bush, Paulson, Bernanke, Congress) chose to bail out the powerful elite on Wall Street (Blankfein, Dimon, Pandit, Lewis) on the backs of the American middle class. TARP, QE1, QE2, and the $800 billion stimulus package were all created by the ruling elite to benefit the ruling elite, who control the vast amount of financial wealth in the country. Savers and seniors have been thrown under the wheels of a Lamborghini driven by the profligate Wall Street gamblers.

financial-wealth-united-states

Average Americans feel betrayed by politicians, bankers and corporate America. The Tea party movement is a reflection of that anger. Fourth Turnings always sweep away the old order and replace it with a new order. The old order isn’t ready to be swept away, but their time is coming. The U.S. economic model is unsustainable and is guaranteed to collapse in the near future. Those in power are trying to engineer a controlled collapse, but they will lose control just as they did in 2008. Panic and depression will ensue. Vast amounts of wealth will be destroyed. When the middle class realizes they have been screwed again by Wall Street and K Street, and they no longer have anything left to lose, they will lose it.

The welfare class will only riot if their EBT cards stop working and the monthly welfare direct deposit ceases. It’s the critical thinkers in the middle class that will lead a revolution. There are 250 million guns owned by Americans. With this amount of firepower and millions of Americans with nothing left to lose, those attempting to retain power will be at a distinct disadvantage. I believe armed vigilantes will hunt down those responsible for the destruction of the American economy and invoke their own justice. Their gated communities and penthouse suite doormen will not protect them. No politician, banker, or corporate executive will be safe. Some will escape in their Lear jets to foreign lands, but the rest of the world will be equally chaotic and unsafe for those who committed crimes against humanity. Innocent people will die. Deserve will have nothing to do with it. The very existence of our country will hang in the balance.

Atonement

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

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

No one can predict the exact events (debt ceiling, Euro collapse, Middle East war) that will propel this Fourth Turning. But, the underlying drivers are clear: public debt, private debt, banker coup, military overreach, corporate fascism, Federal Reserve created inflation, an oil dependent society with depleting oil and rampant corruption across all levels of government. The fingers of instability grow longer as we add $4 billion per day to the national debt. A grain of sand will fall on the wrong part of the sand pile triggering a collapse of our currency. The event is unknown, the timing unclear, but the destination is certain. A dollar collapse will trigger a surge in interest rates, which will be fatal to our debt bloated society. Every previous Fourth Turning involved revolutionary aspects. The American Revolution and Civil War were wars of revolution. The stirrings of revolution were rampant in the early 1930s, with a plot foiled by General Smedley Butler. The New Deal was a response designed to quell discontent among the masses. Enough people are becoming aware of who to blame for the ills in our society that Henry Ford’s prediction is ever closer to being realized:

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before morning.”

 

An uprising against the super rich and their banking cartel partners in crime is in the cards over the next ten years. Our society has degenerated and has been ransacked by sociopaths in suits as Jesse from Jesse’s Café Americain  so eloquently states:

“Not all sociopaths wield knives and knotted cords. Some wear suits, and are exceptionally intelligent and articulate, obsessively driven, and are able to use and undermine the law and the rules for their advantage, like weapons.  It is never about the win, never about the money.  It is about the kill, the expression of their hatred, about elevating themselves with the suffering of others. Bind, torture, kill.  Not only with ropes and knives, but also with power and money, and the subversion of law.  Lawlessness is their addiction, their will to power.

When societies become lax and complacent, these sociopaths can possess great political power through great amounts of unprincipled money.  And over time they become almost anti-human, destroyers of all that is good, all that is life, all that offends their insatiable sickness with its goodness.  They twist the public against itself, and turn a broad sweep of society into their killing grounds. This is the undeniable lesson of the last century.  There are monsters, and they walk among us.” 

Human beings are a flawed species. We are often driven by emotion rather than reason. We are easily convinced of things we want to be convinced about. Those with superior intelligence often take advantage of those with inferior intelligence. We are prone to mass hysteria and believing things that, in retrospect, were utterly ridiculous. We can be swayed by fear and greed in alternating degrees of delusion. History teaches us that this time isn’t different. We’ve experienced depression, war and social upheaval on an epic scale three times since the founding of this country. With only three data points it is tough to discern patterns that would reveal exactly how this Fourth Turning will play out. But it is apparent to me that each Fourth Turning alternates between a mostly external struggle and a mostly internal struggle. The American Revolution was a struggle against an external oppressor – Great Britain. The Civil War was an internal struggle between the industrial North and the agrarian South. The Depression/World War II struggle was mainly against an external threat – Germany, Japan, and Italy.

The Fourth Turnings that centered upon an external threat ended with a glorious High. The Civil War Fourth Turning resolution felt more like defeat, with the country exhausted, bitter and angry. All indications are this Fourth Turning will be mainly an internal struggle between the ruling class of bankers, business elites, and politicians and the downtrodden middle class. The lying, cheating, fraud, theft and other wrongs committed by those in power will need to be atoned for. The generational dynamics in place will drive the reactions of the country moving forward. We have been badly led. A vast swath of the populace has lived beyond their means. The existing system is unsustainable. The Boomer generation does not want to yield on their perceived entitlements. The Millenial generation will be saddled with un-payable debts. Generation X is caught in the middle of this generational struggle. The huge imbalances in our society have built up over decades like flood waters behind a weakening levee. When the levee breaks the existing order will be swept away in the raging torrent that will follow.

The ruling class will be stripped of their unseemly acquired wealth; the Boomer generation will be scorned for their reckless disregard for future generations and stripped of their entitlements; Generation X will resign themselves to a lower standard of living, knowing full well by doing so, their children will not be saddled with crushing levels of debt; Millenials will have borne the burden of the revolution and violence which will be inevitable as the ruling class fights to retain their dominating position in society.  Darkness descends upon our land. Storm clouds gather on the horizon. We’ve all played a part in the catastrophe that lies before us. Everyone in our crumbling society will need to atone for its sins, whether they deserve to or not. Will Munney was not an innocent man, but he ultimately atoned for his sins by digging deep into his soul and finding the strength and fortitude to fight the evil establishment. Each generation’s rendezvous with destiny awaits. There are no guarantees. The myth of American Exceptionalism will not protect us from the choices we’ve made. God will not shield us from the consequences of our actions. The American Empire hangs in the balance. As the ghosts of Roman emperors whisper – Glory is fleeting.

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

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

 

 

 

PUMP IT UP

Down in the pleasure centre,
hell bent or heaven sent,
listen to the propaganda,
listen to the latest slander.
There’s nothing underhand
that she wouldn’t understand.
Pump it up until you can feel it.
Pump it up when you don’t really need it.

Elvis Costello – Pump It Up

I had been planning an article based on the Green Day song – Static Age – about the propaganda, lies and misinformation that are endlessly directed at the American people by the government, the mainstream corporate media, and the wealthy elite that control the levers of our society. Then Barack Obama presented his 2012 Budget proposal, including his 10 year projection for our country. I know you’ve heard the term Peak Oil, but the term that came to my mind when I saw Obama’s budget was Peak Bullshit. I thought that would be a great article name, but some sites wouldn’t like the foul language. I was in a quandary until the Elvis Costello song Pump It Up came on the radio while I was driving to work. Down in the pleasure center of Washington DC, the propaganda, slander and most blatant lies are spoken without a hint of guilt or even the faintest whiff of shame. The politicians in Washington DC on both sides of the aisle believe the American people are stupid, gullible, apathetic and easily manipulated. They may be right, but there are a few people out there who can cut through their bullshit and find the truth.

Obama, Wall Street, and the corporate mouthpieces in the mainstream media have been pumping up the American people for months with false data, unwarranted optimism, bank profits created out of thin air by accounting fraud, and attempting to create an economic recovery built on a foundation of sand, supported only by lies. The Obama budget is worse than a joke. It is a tragic joke. It amazes me that he can stand in front of the American people and present such a lie. The liberal media then unquestioningly presents the budget as a frugal cost cutting proposal that will reduce deficits and inflict painful cuts upon the poor American people. It would be laughable, if it wasn’t so sad. One look at Obama’s deficit projections for FY11 and FY12, presented one year ago, should be enough to convince you that no one in Washington DC has a clue what they are doing.

Federal (Deficit)
Year Spending Surplus
2011 $3,834 -$1,267
2012 $3,755 -$828

Obama projected a two year deficit of $2.1 trillion. His current projection, just one year later, is $2.75 trillion. He missed it by this much.

The rocket scientists running our country underestimated the deficit by 31% in the space of one year. I suppose that is considered highly accurate for a government drone. Now let’s get some perspective on Obama’s projected FY11 deficit of $1.65 trillion. This is the projected DEFICIT. Do you remember back to the Clinton administration? Did you feel like your Federal government wasn’t spending enough? In 1998 the TOTAL SPENDING of the Federal government was $1.65 trillion. We now run deficits that equal the entire budget of the United States in 1998, without blinking an eye or questioning how we got here. The politicians have scared the populace into thinking that the country will collapse without the Federal Government spending $3.8 trillion of your money, every year.

Static Age

Can you hear the sound of the static noise?
Blasting out in stereo
Cater to the class and the paranoid
Music to my nervous system
Advertising love and religion
Murder on the airwaves
Slogans on the brink of corruption
Vision of blasphemy, war and peace
Screaming at you

I can’t see a thing in the video
I can’t hear a sound on the radio
In stereo in the static age  – Green Day – Static Age

The politicians prefer their actions be bathed in shades of grey. The corporate payoffs, backroom deals, union arm twisting and selling of votes to the highest bidder are how business is done in Washington DC. They believe that if there is enough static noise being generated by the mainstream media, then the American public will be distracted and not notice they have destroyed the country. When analyzing Obama’s budget we need some perspective. Below is a chart showing actual Federal spending and deficits from 1999 through 2010 and projections from 2011 through 2021. My assessment is that the Great American Empire peaked in 1999-2000. The unemployment rate was 4% and 64.4% of the working age population, or 137 million Americans, were employed. Corporate profits were surging, along with the stock market. The Federal government was spending $1.8 trillion and generating budget surpluses of $236 billion. The National Debt of $5.7 trillion was only 57% of GDP.

The decline of the American Empire can be seen in the chart of woe. The unemployment rate today is 9%. Only 58.4% of the working age population is employed. Eleven years after peak empire, the working age population has grown by 26 million people and the number of employed Americans has grown by 2.4 million. At least 64.4% of the population would like to be working. This means that there are 14.4 million people who would work if the jobs were available. The Federal government is spending $3.8 trillion and generating deficits of $1.6 trillion. The National Debt is $14.2 trillion, or 94% of GDP. Except for Wall Street banks and mega-corporations, small business profits are weak and the stock market is at the same levels reached in 1999. These are the truths you won’t hear from politicians or the mainstream media.

Federal   (Deficit)
Year Spending % Change Surplus
1999 $1,702 $125
2000 $1,789 5.1% $236
2001 $1,863 4.1% $128
2002 $2,011 7.9% -$158
2003 $2,160 7.4% -$378
2004 $2,293 6.2% -$413
2005 $2,472 7.8% -$319
2006 $2,655 7.4% -$249
2007 $2,729 2.8% -$161
2008 $2,983 9.3% -$459
2009 $3,518 17.9% -$1,413
2010 $3,456 -1.8% -$1,293
2011F $3,819 10.5% -$1,645
2012B $3,729 -2.4% -$1,101
2013B $3,771 1.1% -$768
2014B $3,977 5.5% -$645
2015B $4,190 5.4% -$607
2016B $4,468 6.6% -$649
2017B $4,669 4.5% -$627
2018B $4,876 4.4% -$619
2019B $5,154 5.7% -$681
2020B $5,422 5.2% -$735
2021B $5,697 5.1% -$774

So now let’s assess the reality of Obama’s ten year budget. If you were to believe the reports in the media, you would think that Obama is cutting deficits and making hard choices. Amazingly, deficits plummet all the way down to “only” $600 billion to $800 billion after 2012. In the chart above, I ignore the revenue side of the equation, because Obama’s assumptions are beyond ridiculous. His assumption of the GDP growing from $15 trillion in 2011 to $24.6 trillion in 2021, a 64% increase, is a fantasy. During the last 10 years, GDP grew by only 51%. So, despite mind numbing debt levels, structurally high unemployment, peak oil, and a rapidly aging population, GDP is going to surge over the next ten years? I certainly believe that. Under the Obama budget, tax revenues will grow from 14.4% of GDP in 2011 to 20% of GDP in 2021. By comparison, the historical average is only 18% of GDP. Some of Obama’s tax revenue assumptions are as follows:

  • Raising the top marginal income tax rate from 35% to 39.6%. This is a $709 billion/10 year tax hike
  • Raising the capital gains and dividends rate from 15% to 20%
  • Raising the estate tax rate from 35% to 45% and lowering the estate tax exemption amount from $5 million ($10 million for couples) to $3.5 million. This is a $98 billion/ten year tax hike
  • Capping the value of itemized deductions at the 28% bracket rate. This will effectively cut tax deductions for mortgage interest, charitable contributions, property taxes, state and local income or sales taxes, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and unreimbursed employee business expenses. A new means-tested phase-out of itemized deductions limits them even more. This is a $321 billion/ten year tax hike
  • Massive new taxes on energy, including LIFO repeal, Superfund, domestic energy manufacturing, and many others totaling $120 billion over ten years
  • Increasing unemployment payroll taxes by $15 billion over ten years
  • Increasing tax penalties, information reporting, and IRS information sharing. This is a ten-year tax hike of $20 billion.

It is an absolute certainty that the Democrats will lose control of the Senate in 2012. Obama will never get any of his tax increases through a Republican controlled Congress. They are DOA. Therefore, his revenue assumptions are overstated by hundreds of billions every year. Even using his optimistic assumptions, the National Debt would reach $18 trillion in 2015. Using real world numbers, the National Debt will exceed $20 trillion in 2015. In what must be a gag, Obama says that interest on the debt will “only” be $500 billion in 2015. Hysterically, this would mean our debt holders will only require a crumbling empire to pay 2.5% on our debt. How about 5% as a minimum and 10% as a more likely rate? This would put interest on the debt between $1 trillion and $2 trillion per year. The collapse of America is a certainty if Obama’s budgeted spending and deficits play out. Somehow, the majority of Americans are overwhelmed with indifference.

Overwhelmed By Indifference

Some of my friends sit around every evening
and they worry about the times ahead
But everybody else is overwhelmed by indifference
and the promise of an early bed
You either shut up or get cut up;
they don’t wanna hear about it. – Elvis Costello – Radio, Radio 

Do you remember when the politicians of both parties were making dire predictions of Great Depressions, economic collapse and 10% unemployment if we didn’t pass their “save an investment banker” rescue package and the $800 billion “jobs creation” stimulus package? They assured the American people that these expenditures were temporary and were only being made to save the country. Before the crisis, Federal spending was $2.7 trillion. The talking heads at the Fed and in the White House assure us they saved the world. GDP is growing and Obama told me we’ve added over 1 million jobs in the last year. Sounds like the emergency is over. The $400 billion per year of emergency spending should now be rolled back, since it was temporary. Therefore, Obama’s budget surely must going from $3.8 trillion back down to a pre-emergency level of $3.0 trillion in 2012. Not quite. You see, government spending never goes down. His proposal shows $3.7 trillion of spending in FY12. Emergencies never end for a politician in Washington DC. Spending equals power and control over our lives. There will always be another emergency that requires more spending.

You are now hearing the spin from the ideologues on both sides of the aisle about their cost consciousness and desire to restrain spending. It’s all a load of bull. Bush and the Republicans added $4.3 trillion to the National Debt during their reign of error. Obama has matched Bush in the space of 2 1/2 years by adding another $4.3 trillion. There is no effort to cut spending. Obama’s budget shows spending rising from $3.7 trillion in FY12 to $5.7 trillion in FY21. The propaganda and misinformation being spewed from these corrupt politicians is mind numbing.

Again, some perspective is needed to realize how out of control our Federal Government has become. According to the BLS, inflation has risen by 33% since 1999. Real GDP has grown by 23%. The population of the U.S. has grown by 10%. The number of employed Americans has risen by 1.8%. The average pay for a Federal drone (aka worker) has risen by 58%, while the average pay for real workers has risen by only 30%. Therefore, the average non-government employee has seen a decrease in their standard of living as inflation has risen faster than wages. As you can calculate yourself, Federal government spending surged by 124% between 1999 and today. Have you noticed a doubling in service level, competence, educational scores, new energy solutions, or safety and security? What did we get for an extra $2.1 trillion of spending?

What we got was exhausting wars of choice, less freedom, less liberties, less safety, more rules, more regulations, more bureaucrats, more corruption, a financial collapse, and a government that has put us on a path to fiscal ruin. We’ve almost tripled spending on Defense. Are we safer? We’ve more than doubled spending on healthcare. Are we healthier? We’ve more than doubled spending on welfare. Are the poor less impoverished? We’ve more than doubled spending on education. Are our children smarter? The Federal government is out of control. When you hear a politician or pundit detailing the horrors of “spending cuts”, please keep in mind they are lying. There will be no cuts until they are forced upon the government by the looming collapse of our economic system.

Year Defense Pensions Health Care Welfare Education
1999 $333 $431 $332 $165 $56
2000 $359 $454 $352 $171 $60
2001 $366 $481 $390 $183 $64
2002 $422 $503 $427 $224 $78
2003 $483 $518 $469 $242 $91
2004 $543 $537 $509 $238 $96
2005 $600 $565 $549 $246 $106
2006 $621 $591 $583 $250 $128
2007 $653 $636 $642 $254 $102
2008 $730 $669 $671 $313 $102
2009 $794 $739 $764 $407 $91
2010 $847 $756 $821 $496 $140
2011F $965 $801 $882 $488 $130
2012B $925 $813 $866 $424 $121
% Increase 177.8% 88.6% 160.8% 157.0% 116.1%

Now the question is what do we do about it? I know my first inclination would be to do what that Iraqi reporter did a few years ago during a Bush press conference in Iraq. I’d love to throw my shoes at Obama and every lying corrupt politician in America, but the momentary feeling of pleasure would be snuffed out in seconds by a hail of bullets from the Department of Homeland Security thugs guarding these traitors to the American republic.

 

 

Below is my CHART OF DOOM. Using real world assumptions, the National Debt will reach $25 trillion by 2019. That level of debt would be 130% of a realistic GDP figure. The interest on this level of debt would likely exceed $2 trillion per year, more than the entire Federal spending budget in 2002. This chart will not come to pass. Our economic system will collapse well before we reach a $25 trillion debt level. This is already baked in the cake. There are not enough politicians willing to tell the truth and not enough citizens that want to hear the truth. The result will be default, insolvency, currency collapse, vaporization of wealth, chaos, and pain.

The only way to avert the coming financial catastrophe is to go Egyptian on their asses. Maybe mobs of Americans surrounding the White House, Federal Reserve building and Wall Street bank headquarters would get their attention. It wouldn’t take a majority, but a minority of angry Americans willing to fight for the future of the country. The anger is building. More people are becoming aware. The internet is working its magic, just as it is doing in the Middle East. Those in control can keep pumping out their lies and propaganda, but the truth is plain to see, if you open your eyes.
 
“It does not take the majority to prevail, but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brush fire freedom in the minds of men.” – Samuel Adams 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 

EMERGING MARKETS POISED TO COLLAPSE

Smokey. The Super Bowl isn’t too far off. China will collapse beforehand. Pucker up.

Albert Edwards: The Bubble In China And The Rest Of The Emerging World Is On The Brink Of Popping

Gregory White | Dec. 1, 2010, 2:59 PM |

The emerging market bubble that everyone has been ignoring is on the brink of popping, according to Albert Edwards of Societe Generale.

This isn’t’ the first Edwards has pointed out the threat of the EM bubble. But this time he’s backing it up with a little more data.

Specifically, leading indicators around the emerging world are now saying slowdown.

From Societe Generale:

Not only is the market’s favorite EM economy seemingly set to slow rapidly, but the OECD concludes that Brazil is also officially in “slowdown”. India is even worse, being defined as in a “downturn”, as are the Asian big five in aggregate, China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Korea – link. Funny how this news just doesn’t seem to be getting much attention recently amid the runaway EM/commodity euphoria.

China’s leading indicator is now where it was back in the middle of 2008, right before the crash.

 

Chart

Image: Societe Generale

And while the situation in emerging markets is bad, Edwards warns that the U.S. isn’t much better, even if the data suggests otherwise.

From Societe Generale:

The rally in the US equity market seems to be underpinned by some stronger than expected economic data. Yet we once again urge caution and remind our readers of the early 1990s experience. Then we went through a few years of private sector de-leveraging in the wake of the Savings and Loans crisis (see chart below). It wasn’t until the second half of 1993, well after the recession finished, that the private sector’s appetite for debt recovered and “normal service” was resumed.

Chart

Image: Societe Generale

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/albert-edwards-china-and-the-rest-of-the-emerging-world-is-on-the-brink-of-popping-2010-12#ixzz16zK8DhQL