Tag: Orwell

CULTURE OF IGNORANCE – PART ONE

“Five percent of the people think;
ten percent of the people think they think;
and the other eighty-five percent would rather die than think.”
– Thomas Edison

The kabuki theater that passes for governance in Washington D.C. reveals the profound level of ignorance shrouding this Empire of Debt in its prolonged death throes. Ignorance of facts; ignorance of math; ignorance of history; ignorance of reality; and ignorance of how ignorant we’ve become as a nation, have set us up for an epic fall. It’s almost as if we relish wallowing in our ignorance like a fat lazy sow in a mud hole. The lords of the manor are able to retain their power, control and huge ill-gotten riches because the government educated serfs are too ignorant to recognize the self-evident contradictions in the propaganda they are inundated with by state controlled media on a daily basis.

 

“Any formal attack on ignorance is bound to fail because the masses are always ready to defend their most precious possession – their ignorance.” – Hendrik Willem van Loon

The levels of ignorance are multi-dimensional and diverse, crossing all educational, income, and professional ranks. The stench of ignorance has settled like Chinese toxic smog over our country, as various constituents have chosen comforting ignorance over disconcerting knowledge. The highly educated members, who constitute the ruling class in this country, purposefully ignore facts and truth because the retention and enhancement of their wealth and power are dependent upon them not understanding what they clearly have the knowledge to understand. The underclass wallow in their ignorance as their life choices, absence of concern for marriage or parenting, lack of interest in educating themselves, and hiding behind the cross of victimhood and blaming others for their own failings. Everyone is born ignorant and the path to awareness and knowledge is found in reading books. Rich and poor alike are free to read and educate themselves. The government, union teachers, and a village are not necessary to attain knowledge. It requires hard work and clinging to your willful ignorance to remain stupid.

The youth of the country consume themselves in techno-narcissistic triviality, barely looking up from their iGadgets long enough to make eye contact with other human beings. The toxic combination of government delivered public education, dumbed down socially engineered curriculum, taught by uninspired intellectually average union controlled teachers, to distracted, unmotivated, latchkey kids, has produced a generation of young people ignorant about history, basic mathematical concepts, and the ability or interest to read and write. They have been taught to feel rather than think critically. They have been programmed to believe rather than question and explore. Slogans and memes have replaced knowledge and understanding. They have been lured into inescapable student loan debt serfdom by the very same government that is handing them a $200 trillion entitlement bill and an economy built upon low paying service jobs that don’t require a college education, because the most highly educated members of society realized that outsourcing the higher paying production jobs to slave labor factories in Asia was great for the bottom line, their stock options and bonus pools.

Instead of being outraged and lashing out against this injustice, the medicated, daycare reared youth passively lose themselves in the inconsequentiality and shallowness of social media, reality TV, and the internet, while living in their parents’ basement. They have chosen the ignorance inflicted upon their brains by thousands of hours spent twittering, texting, facebooking, seeking out adorable cat videos on the internet, viewing racist rap singer imbeciles rent out sports stadiums to propose to vacuous big breasted sluts on reality cable TV shows, and sitting zombie-like for days with a controller in hand blowing up cities, killing whores, and murdering policemen using their new PS4 on their 65 inch HDTV, rather than gaining a true understanding of the world by reading Steinbeck, Huxley, and Orwell. Technology has reduced our ability to think and increased our ignorance.

“During my eighty-seven years, I have witnessed a whole succession of technological revolutions. But none of them has done away with the need for character in the individual or the ability to think.” – Bernard M. Baruch

The youth have one thing going for them. They are still young and can awaken from their self-imposed stupor of ignorance. There are over 80 million millenials between the ages of 8 and 30 years old who need to start questioning the paradigm they are inheriting and critically examining the mendacious actions of their elders. The future of the country is in their hands, so I hope they put down those iGadgets and open their eyes before it is too late. We need many more patriots like Edward Snowden and far fewer twerking sluts like Miley Cyrus if we are to overcome the smog of apathy and ignorance blanketing our once sentient nation.

The ignorance of youth can be chalked up to inexperience, lack of wisdom, and immaturity. There is no excuse for the epic level of ignorance displayed by older generations over the last thirty years. Boomers and Generation X have charted the course of this ship of state for decades. Ship of fools is a more fitting description, as they have stimulated the entitlement mentality that has overwhelmed the fiscal resources of the country. Our welfare/warfare empire, built upon a Himalayan mountain of debt, enabled by a central bank owned by Wall Street, and perpetuated by swarms of corrupt bought off spineless politicians, is the ultimate testament to the seemingly limitless level of ignorance engulfing our civilization. The entitlement mindset permeates our culture from the richest to the poorest. Mega-corporations use their undue influence (bribes disguised as campaign contributions) to elect pliable candidates to office, hire lobbyists to write the laws and tax regulations governing their industries, and collude with the bankers and other titans of industry to harvest maximum profits from the increasingly barren fields of a formerly thriving land of milk and honey. By unleashing a torrent of unbridled greed, ransacking the countryside, and burning down the villages, the ruling class has planted the seeds of their own destruction.

When the underclass observes Wall Street bankers committing the crime of the century with no consequences for their actions, they learn a lesson. When billionaire banker/politicians like Jon Corzine can steal $1.2 billion directly from the accounts of farmers and ranchers and continue to live a life of luxury in one of his six mansions, they get the message. Wall Street bankers are allowed to commit fraud, reaping profits of $25 billion, and when they are caught red handed pay a $5 billion fine while admitting no guilt. No connected bankers have gone to jail for crashing the worldwide financial system, but teenage marijuana dealers are incarcerated for ten years in our corporate prison system. The message has been received loud and clear by the unwashed masses. Committing fraud and gaming the system is OK. Only suckers play by the rules anymore. A culture of lawlessness, greed, fraud, deceit, swindles and scams was fashioned by those in power. Reckless disregard for honesty, truthfulness, fair dealing, and treating others as you would like to be treated, has permeated the beliefs and behavior of our society.

The ever increasing number of people in the SNAP program along with abuses committed by retailers and recipients, the skyrocketing number of people faking their way into the SSDI program, billions of taxpayer dollars lost to Medicare fraud, billions more lost paying out earned income tax credit refunds based on non-existent children, public schools falsifying test scores, students cheating on SAT tests, credit card fraud on a grand scale, failure to report income and falsifying tax returns, and a myriad of other dodges and scams are just a reflection of a moral and cultural collapse. The dog eat dog mentality glorified by the media, with such despicable men as Dimon, Greenspan, Corzine, Clinton, Trump, Rubin, Bernanke and Bloomberg honored as pillars of society, has displaced honesty, compassion, humanity, shared sacrifice, and caring about our descendants. Self-interest, self-indulgence, and a narcissistic focus on what is in it for me today has led to an implosion of trust and an attitude of “who cares” about our fellow man, morality, right or wrong, and the fate of future generations. We ignored the warnings of our last President who displayed courageousness and truthfulness when speaking to the American people.

“As we peer into society’s future, we — you and I, and our government — must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.” – Dwight D. Eisenhower

The Me Generation has devolved into the Me Culture. While the masses have been mesmerized by their iGadgets, zombified by the boob tube, programmed to consume by the Madison Avenue propaganda machines, enslaved in chains of debt by the Wall Street plantation owners, and convinced by their fascist government keepers that phantom terrorists are hiding behind every bush, they surrendered their freedoms, liberties and sense of self-responsibility. There will always be evil men seeking to control and manipulate the ignorant and oblivious. A citizenry armed with knowledge, critical thinking skills, and moral integrity would not passively submit to the will of a corporate fascist oligarchy. Well educated, well informed citizens, capable of critical thinking are dangerous to rich men of evil intent. Obedient, universally ignorant, distracted, fearful, morally depraved slaves are what the owners of this country want. As the light of knowledge flickers and dies, we sink into the darkness of ignorance.

 

“No people will tamely surrender their Liberties, nor can any be easily subdued, when knowledge is diffused and virtue is preserved. On the Contrary, when People are universally ignorant, and debauched in their Manners, they will sink under their own weight without the Aid of foreign Invaders.” – Samuel Adams

Cult of Ignorance

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” – Isaac Asimov

  

“While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.” – Henry Hazlitt

America’s cult of ignorance, combined with the selfish interests of various constituencies, the character weakness of the people elected to office, a lack of understanding or interest in basic mathematical concepts, and inability to comprehend the long term and unintended consequences of every piece of legislation, have brought the country to the brink of fiscal disaster. But still, the vast majority of Americans, including the supposed intellectuals and economic “experts”, are basking in their ignorance, as the stock market reaches a new high, the local GM dealer just gave them a 7 year $40,000 auto loan at 0% on that brand new Cadillac Escalade, Bank of America still hasn’t foreclosed on their McMansion two years after making their last mortgage payment, and they just received three pre-approved credit card notices from Capital One, American Express and Citicorp. As long as Bennie has our back printing $1 trillion new greenbacks per year, nothing can possibly go wrong. Our best and brightest economic minds are always right:

“Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.” – Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929

“Many of the new financial products that have been created, with financial derivatives being the most notable, contribute economic value by unbundling risks and shifting them in a highly calibrated manner. Although these instruments cannot reduce the risk inherent in real assets, they can redistribute it in a way that induces more investment in real assets and, hence, engenders higher productivity and standards of living.” – Alan Greenspan – March 6, 2000

“We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So, what I think what is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize, might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s gonna drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though.” – Ben Bernanke – July 2005

The profound level of ignorance displayed by economists, politicians, business leaders, media personalities, and the average American, regarding the mathematically unsustainable path of our fiscal ship is perplexing to me on so many levels. If the Federal government was a family, the budget ceiling debate would be put into the following terms. Our household earns $28,000 per year, but we spend $38,000 per year and add $10,000 to our credit card balance, which stands at the limit of $170,000. In addition, we owe our neighbors $2 million we don’t have because we promised to pay if they voted for us as Treasurer of our homeowners association. We celebrate our good fortune of getting approved for another credit card with a $30,000 limit by increasing our spending to $39,000 per year. Intellectuals scorn such simplistic analogies by glibly pointing out that the family has a crazy uncle with a printing press in the basement and can pay-off the debt with his freshly printed dollars. And this is where the deliberate and calculated ignorance by the highly educated Ivy Leaguers regarding long term and unintended consequences is revealed. They ignore, manipulate, cover-up and obscure the facts because their wealth, power and influence depend upon them doing so. But ignorance doesn’t change the facts.

“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” – Aldous Huxley

Nothing exposes the ignorance of various factions within our society better than a debate about budgets, spending, and unfunded liabilities. This is where every party, group, special interest, and voting bloc ignore any and all facts that are contrary to their selfish interest. They only see what they want to see. The fallacies, errors, omissions and mistruths of their positions are inconsequential to people who only care about their short-term self-seeking interests. When I question the out of control spending on entitlements and our impossible to honor level of unfunded liabilities, those of a liberal persuasion lash out with accusations of hating the poor, starving children and throwing granny under the bus. Anyone suggesting we should slow our spending is branded a terrorist by the overwhelmingly liberal legacy media.

When I accuse Wall Street bankers of criminal fraud and ongoing manipulation of the financial markets, the CNBC loving apologists for these felons bellow about the market always being right. When I rail about the military industrial complex and our un-Constitutional invasions of other countries, the neo-cons come out in force blathering about the war on terror and imminent threats. When I point out the horrific results of our government run educational system and how mediocre union teachers are bankrupting our states and municipalities with their gold plated health and pension plans, I’m met with howls of outrage about the poor children. The common thread is that facts are ignored because each of their agendas requires ignorance on the part of their team’s fans.

The following chart of truth portrays an unsustainable path. Ignoring the facts will not change them. This isn’t a Republican problem or a Democrat problem. It’s an American problem.

 

“There are men regarded today as brilliant economists, who deprecate saving and recommend squandering on a national scale as the way of economic salvation; and when anyone points to what the consequences of these policies will be in the long run, they reply flippantly, as might the prodigal son of a warning father: “In the long run we are all dead.” And such shallow wisecracks pass as devastating epigrams and the ripest wisdom.” – Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt may have written these words six decades ago, but they aptly describe Paul Krugman and the legions of Keynesian apostles whose bastardized interpretation of Keynes’ theory has led us to this fiscal cliff. How anyone can truly believe that borrowing to consume foreign produced goods versus saving and making job creating capital investments is a rational and sustainable economic policy is the height of ignorance. One look at this chart exposes the political party system as a sham. When it comes to the fiscal train wreck, set in motion thirty years ago, the ignorant media pundits peddle a narrative about politicians failing to compromise as the culprit in this derailment. Nothing could be further from the truth. Compromise is what has gotten us to this point. The Republicans compromised and allowed the Democrats to create a welfare state. The Democrats compromised and allowed the Republicans to create a warfare state. The Federal Reserve compromised their mandate of stable prices and preventing financial calamities by inflating away 95% of the dollar’s purchasing power in 100 years, while creating bubbles every five or so years, like clockwork. There are a myriad of facts related to the chart above that cannot be ignored:

  • It took 192 years for the country to accumulate $1 trillion in debt. It has taken us 30 years to accumulate the next $16 trillion of debt. We now add $1 trillion of debt per year.
  • If the Federal government was required to use GAAP accounting, the annual deficit would amount to $6.7 trillion per year.
  • The fiscal gap of unfunded future liabilities for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and government pensions is $200 trillion.
  • Using realistic growth assumptions adds another $6 trillion of state and local government unfunded pension benefits to the equation.
  • The Federal government has increased their annual spending from $1.8 trillion during Bill Clinton’s last year in office to $3.8 trillion today, a 110% increase. The population has increased by 12% over that same time frame, and real GDP has advanced by 25% since 2000.
  • Defense spending has increased from $358 billion in 2000 to $831 billion today, despite the fact that no country on earth can challenge us militarily.
  • The average Baby Boomer will receive $300,000 more than they contributed to Social Security and Medicare over their lifetime. Over 10,000 Boomers per day will turn 65 for the next 17 years.
  • The Social Security lockbox is filled with IOUs. The funds collected from paychecks over the last 80 years were spent by Congress on wars of choice, bridges to nowhere, and thousands of other vote buying ventures.
  • A normalization of interest rates to long-term averages would double or triple the interest on the national debt and increase our annual deficits by at least 30%.
  • Obamacare and the unintended consequences of Obamacare will add tens of trillions to our national debt. The initial budget projections for Medicare and Medicaid showed only a modest financial impact on the financial situation of the country. How did that work out?
  • Entitlement spending in 2003 was $1.3 trillion. Entitlement spending in 2008 was $1.7 trillion. Entitlement spending in 2013 was $2.2 trillion. Entitlement spending in 2018 will be $2.8 trillion, as these programs are on automatic pilot.

When you consider the facts in a rational manner, without vitriolic denials, bitter accusations, acrimonious blame, and rejection of the entire premise, you come to the conclusion that we’ve passed the point of no return. Decades of bad choices, bad leadership, bad men in important positions, bad education, bad governance, and bad citizenship have led to bad times. But very few people, across all socio-economic classes, have any interest in understanding the facts or making the tough choices required to save future generations from a life of squalor. We willfully choose to ignore the facts.

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

Our degraded and ignorant society is incapable of comprehending their dire circumstances or acting for the common good of the country. We are a nation on the take. Greed really is good. Everyone needs to play the game. From the top floor corporate CEO suite to the decaying urban wastelands, we have chosen comforting ignorance to uncomfortable knowledge. Our warped form of democracy enriches the few at the top, while dispensing enough subsistence payments to the lower classes to keep them from revolting, while enslaving the middle class in debt and convincing them it’s really wealth. Mencken understood the pathetic impulses of the American populace decades before we reached our point of no return.

“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” – H.L. Mencken

The only way a democracy can survive is if the population is knowledgeable, vigilant, skeptical, educated, individually responsible, self-reliant, moral, capable of critical thinking and willing to accept the consequences of their actions. A nation of takers, fakers and blamers will not last long. We’ve degenerated into a nation of knowledge hating book burners. Our culture of ignorance will lead to the destruction of our culture and the ignorant masses will wonder what happened.

 

“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.” – Ray Bradbury – Fahrenheit 451

In Part Two of this examination about our culture of ignorance I’ll explore the roles of technology, family breakdown, government, and propaganda in creating the ignorance that is consuming our system like a mutant parasite. If you are seeking a happy ending, I suggest looking elsewhere.

WHY ARE WE SUPPORTING AL QAEDA (EASTASIA)?

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

Bonus:

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

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

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

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

A War 20 Years In the Making

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

The Last “Humanitarian War”

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

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

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

The Hindustan Times reported:

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

“I AM NOT A CROOK” – “THIS IS NOT A COUP” – THE RULE OF LAW NO LONGER EXISTS IN THE UNITED STATES

I notice that some of the conservative websites I follow are not outraged in the least by the coup in Egypt. This is one of those situations that separates the phony Constitutionalists from the people who believe in the Constitution. The neo-cons hate Muslims in general and religious Muslims in particular. They hate Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood. I’m sure he’s an asshole and his followers are dangerous fanatics. I’m also sure the Egyptian generals that backed Mubarek and his dictatorship for decades are also evil fuckers. The entire Middle East is a religious clusterfuck of dangerous fanatics who blow each other up. The Egyptian people elected Morsi through the democratic process. Many Egyptians hate his guts and hate his policies. The American people elected Obama. Many Americans hate his guts and hate his policies. The Egyptian military overthrew Morsi last week and placed him under arrest. They are now killing his supporters as they riot. Is it OK for our military to overthrow Obama because his popularity rating is now only 40%?

For the slow witted (Congressmen, MSM pundits) here is the definition of a coup:

The sudden deposition of a government, usually by a small group of the existing state establishment—typically the military—to depose the extant government and replace it with another body, civil or military.

There is absolutely no doubt that a democratically elected leader of Egypt was overthrown and deposed. Our LAW states unequivically that foreign aid of $1.5 billion MUST be stopped immediately. Obama, his minions, Congress and the mainstream media tell me that laws must be followed when it comes to my every day existence. But the slimy snakes in Washington DC from both parties have decided they can ignore laws when they interfere with their agendas. The $1.5 billion will continue to flow to Egypt because our owners think it’s good for business. Most of this money benefits our Arms Peddlers in the military industrial complex. The lesson from this episode and dozens of other episodes over the last few years proves that the rule of law is meaningless in this country. Numerous laws will be enforced on the peasants but will be ignored and flaunted when they apply to the lords of the manor. Laws are designed to control you and allow the oligarchs to pillage without consequence.

In case you hadn’t noticed:

  • Wall Street bankers engineered the largest control fraud in world history and not one banker has gone to jail. Over 1,000 bankers went to jail during the S&L Crisis of the early 1990’s.
  • Mortgage brokers and the Wall Street banks colluded to create fraudulent mortgages, package them as MBS, paid off rating agencies to get a AAA rating, sold them to clients, shorted them knowing they would explode, and destroyed the lives of millions in the process. No one was prosecuted or went to jail. 
  • Wall Street bankers have commited foreclosure fraud on a grand scale (robo-signing) and not one banker has gone to jail.
  • Ben Bernanke and Hank Paulson lied to Congress and the American people about the true implications of the September 2008 meltdown and neither has been held accountable.
  • Eric Holder gave assault weapons to Mexican drug lords, which were used to kill U.S. law enforcement officers, and no one has gone to jail.
  • The government is illegally collecting meta-data from all Americans in violation of the 4th Amendment. No one will be prosecuted.
  • James Clapper lied to Congress about spying on the American people. There is no effort to prosecute him for this crime.
  • The Obama administration has used the IRS to punish political opponents. No one will go to jail.
  • Jon Corzine stole $1.2 billion directly from the accounts of his clients. He is not going to be prosecuted.
  • Wall Street banks are caught using inside information on a daily basis to generate billions of illegal profits. The government fines them a few million. No one goes to jail.

Tacitus was right:

“The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws.”

Our state is corrupt to its core. A true patriot, Edward Snowden, reveals the illegal traitorous actions of the government (Obama, Congress, NSA) and he is vilified by the oligarchs and their MSM mouthpieces. Edward Snowden should be hailed as a hero, but those in power will use their interpretation of the LAW to throw him in prison for life.

The message is obvious to anyone who chooses to think. THEY will use the law to crush you and keep you controlled, but the LAW does not apply to them. THEY are above the law. You are not free. You are a slave. The democratic process does not exist in this country. The system will never be changed from within. Their power, wealth and control is immense. The future will resemble Orwell’s vision unless enough people like Edward Snowden make a stand.

 

 

15 EYE OPENING MINUTES AT WALGREENS

I dropped into the Walgreens near my house yesterday to pick up a couple of prescriptions. Every time I go to this store, the workers outnumber the customers. It must have something to do with the other 10 drug stores within five miles. There is absolutely no possibility this store is turning a profit. It will eventually be closed. But, in the meantime it is very convenient for our family. I noticed two things that I hadn’t seen before in this Walgreens. As I walked towards the pharmacy I noticed there were big red signs on all of the refrigerator doors. There must have been 10 of these signs. SNAP ain’t just for West Philly anymore. I live in an upper middle class area. There are no slums or ghettos within 20 miles. Why would Walgreens be making such a big deal about accepting SNAP? This is just another example of what a scam this program has become. Allowing people to purchase ice cream and goodies with taxpayer money is a joke. I’d love to know what volume of business this Walgreens is doing in SNAP purchases. 

Once I arrived at the pharmacy, I had to wait a few minutes for the customer ahead of me. I glanced up at the wall and saw a large notice. I started scanning it and was blown away by who Walgreens will give our private health information to. Below is the complete notice that was hung on their wall. Calling it protect health information is an oxymoron. Walgreens essentially is telling you they will give your information to any governmental agency that asks for it. They will give it to the police, FBI, FDA, DHS, and probably to MSNBC if they ask nicely. Here is the best one:

National Security, Intelligence Activities, and Protective Services for the President and Others. We may release PHI about you to federal officials for intelligence, counterintelligence, protection to the President, and other national security activities authorized by law.

They will provide information about your constipation or having a limp dick to DHS in order to protect the President. I feel so much safer now.

Nothing you say, do, type, order online, or put into your body is not known to the Orwellian government we live under today. We’ve learned to love our servitude as long as we can use our EBT cards to buy Cherry Garcia ice cream.

 

Notice of Privacy Practices

THIS NOTICE DESCRIBES HOW MEDICAL INFORMATION ABOUT YOU MAY BE USED AND DISCLOSED AND HOW YOU CAN GET ACCESS TO THIS INFORMATION. PLEASE REVIEW IT CAREFULLY.

Walgreen Co., including its subsidiaries, is required by law to maintain the privacy of Protected Health Information (“PHI”) and to provide you with notice of our legal duties and privacy practices with respect to PHI. PHI is information that may identify you and that relates to your past, present or future physical or mental health or condition and related health care services. This Notice of Privacy Practices (“Notice”) describes how we may use and disclose PHI to carry out treatment, payment or health care operations and for other specified purposes that are permitted or required by law. The Notice also describes your rights with respect to your PHI. We are required to provide this notice to you by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (“HIPAA”).

Walgreens is required to follow the terms of this Notice. We will not use or disclose your PHI without your written authorization, except as described or otherwise permitted by this Notice. We reserve the right to change our practices and this Notice and to make the new Notice effective for all PHI we maintain. Upon request, we will provide any revised Notice to you.

Examples of How We Use and Disclose Protected Health Information About You

The following categories describe different ways that we use and disclose your protected health information. We have provided you with examples in certain categories; however, not every use or disclosure in a category will be listed.

Treatment. We may use your health information to provide and coordinate the treatment, medications and services you receive. For example, we may contact you regarding medications, equipment, supplies, compliance programs such as drug recommendations, therapeutic substitution, refill reminders, other product or service recommendations such as specialty and infusion therapies, counseling and drug utilization review (DUR), product recalls or disease state management.

Payment. We may use your health information for various payment-related functions. Example: We may contact your insurer, pharmacy benefit manager or other health care payer to determine whether it will pay for your medications, equipment and supplies and the amount of your co-payment. We will bill you or a third-party payer for the cost of medications, equipment and supplies dispensed to you. The information on or accompanying the bill may include information that identifies you, as well as the medications you are taking.

Health Care Operations. We may use your health information for certain operational, administrative and quality assurance activities. Example: We may use information in your health record to monitor the performance of the staff and pharmacists providing treatment to you. This information will be used in an effort to continually improve the quality and effectiveness of the health care and service we provide. We may disclose health information to business associates if they need to receive this information to provide a service to us and will agree to abide by specific HIPAA rules relating to the protection of health information.

We may also use your health information to provide you with information about benefits available to you, and, in limited situations, about health-related products or services that may be of interest to you. If you register your email address on Walgreens.com, or any of our other websites, you may elect to receive this information via email.

We are permitted to use or disclose your PHI for the following purposes. However, Walgreens may never have reason to make some of these disclosures.

To Communicate with Individuals Involved in Your Care or Payment for Your Care. We may disclose to a family member, other relative, close personal friend or any other person you identify, PHI directly relevant to that person’s involvement in your care or payment related to your care.

Food and Drug Administration (FDA). We may disclose to the FDA, or persons under the jurisdiction of the FDA, PHI relative to adverse events with respect to drugs, foods, supplements, products and product defects, or post-marketing surveillance information to enable product recalls, repairs, or replacement.

Worker’s Compensation. We may disclose your PHI to the extent authorized by and to the extent necessary to comply with laws relating to worker’s compensation or other similar programs established by law.

Public Health. As required by law, we may disclose your PHI to public health or legal authorities charged with preventing or controlling disease, injury, or disability.

Law Enforcement. We may disclose your PHI for law enforcement purposes as required by law or in response to a subpoena or court order.

As Required by Law. We will disclose your PHI when required to do so by federal, state, or local law.

Health Oversight Activities. We may disclose your PHI to an oversight agency for activities authorized by law. These oversight activities include audits, investigations, inspections, and credentialing, as necessary for licensure and for the government to monitor the health care system, government programs, and compliance with civil rights laws.

Judicial and Administrative Proceedings. If you are involved in a lawsuit or a dispute, we may disclose your PHI in response to a court or administrative order. We may also disclose health information about you in response to a subpoena, discovery request, or other lawful process instituted by someone else involved in the dispute, but only if efforts have been made, either by the requesting party or us, to tell you about the request or to obtain an order protecting the information requested.

Research. We may disclose your PHI to researchers when their research has been approved by an institutional review board or privacy board that has reviewed the research proposal and established protocols to ensure the privacy of your information.

Coroners, Medical Examiners, and Funeral Directors. We may release your PHI to a coroner or medical examiner. This may be necessary, for example, to identify a deceased person or determine the cause of death. We may also disclose PHI to funeral directors consistent with applicable law to enable them to carry out their duties.

Organ or Tissue Procurement Organizations. Consistent with applicable law, we may disclose your PHI to organ procurement organizations or other entities engaged in the procurement, banking, or transplantation of organs for the purpose of tissue donation and transplant.

Notification. We may use or disclose your PHI to notify or assist in notifying a family member, personal representative, or another person responsible for your care, regarding your location and general condition.

Fundraising. We may contact you as part of a fundraising effort.

Correctional Institution. If you are or become an inmate of a correctional institution, we may disclose to the institution or its agents PHI necessary for your health and the health and safety of other individuals.

To Avert a Serious Threat to Health or Safety. We may use and disclose your PHI when necessary to prevent a serious threat to your health and safety or the health and safety of the public or another person.

Military and Veterans. If you are a member of the armed forces, we may release PHI about you as required by military command authorities. We may also release PHI about foreign military personnel to the appropriate foreign military authority.

National Security, Intelligence Activities, and Protective Services for the President and Others. We may release PHI about you to federal officials for intelligence, counterintelligence, protection to the President, and other national security activities authorized by law.

Victims of Abuse or Neglect. We may disclose PHI about you to a government authority if we reasonably believe you are a victim of abuse or neglect. We will only disclose this type of information to the extent required by law, if you agree to the disclosure, or if the disclosure is allowed by law and we believe it is necessary to prevent serious harm to you or someone else.

Other Uses and Disclosures of PHI
We will obtain your written authorization before using or disclosing your PHI for purposes other than those provided for above (or as otherwise permitted or required by law). You may revoke an authorization in writing at any time. Upon receipt of the written revocation, we will stop using or disclosing your PHI, except to the extent that we have already taken action in reliance on the authorization.

Your Health Information Rights

Obtain a paper copy of the Notice upon request. You may request a copy of our current Notice at any time. Even if you have agreed to receive the Notice electronically, you are still entitled to a paper copy. You may obtain a paper copy from a pharmacy, home care facility, mail service location or the Privacy Office.

Request a restriction on certain uses and disclosures of PHI. You have the right to request additional restrictions on our use or disclosure of your PHI by sending a written request to the Privacy Office. We are not required to agree to those restrictions. We cannot agree to restrictions on uses or disclosures that are legally required, or which are necessary to administer our business.

Inspect and obtain a copy of PHI. In most cases, you have the right to access and copy the PHI that we maintain about you. To inspect or copy your PHI, you must send a written request to the Privacy Office. We may charge you a fee for the costs of copying, mailing and supplies that are necessary to fulfill your request. We may deny your request to inspect and copy in certain limited circumstances.

Request an amendment of PHI. If you feel that PHI we maintain about you is incomplete or incorrect, you may request that we amend it. To request an amendment, you must send a written request to the Privacy Office. You must include a reason that supports your request. In certain cases, we may deny your request for amendment.

Receive an accounting of disclosures of PHI. You have the right to receive an accounting of the disclosures we have made of your PHI after April 14, 2003 for most purposes other than treatment, payment, or health care operations. The right to receive an accounting is subject to certain exceptions, restrictions, and limitations. To request an accounting, you must submit a request in writing to the Privacy Office. Your request must specify the time period. The time period may not be longer than six years and may not include dates before April 14, 2003.

Request communications of PHI by alternative means or at alternative locations. For instance, you may request that we contact you at a different residence or post office box. To request confidential communication of your PHI, you must submit a request in writing to the Privacy Office. Your request must tell us how or where you would like to be contacted. We will accommodate all reasonable requests.

Where to obtain forms for submitting written requests. You may obtain forms for submitting written requests from any Walgreens store, home care facility, mail service location or by contacting the Privacy Officer at Walgreen Co. Privacy Office, 200 Wilmot Road, Mail Stop 9000, Deerfield, Illinois 60015 or toll-free by telephone at (877) 924-4472. You can also visit www.walgreens.com to obtain these forms.

Incidental Disclosures
Walgreens will make reasonable efforts to avoid incidental disclosures of protected health information. An example of an incidental disclosure is conversations that may be overheard between the pharmacy staff and the patient at the drive-thru, as a result of the speaker system. To reduce the likelihood of this happening, we recommend that you go inside the store to the pharmacy for any consultations.

Minors
If you are a minor who has lawfully provided consent for treatment and you wish for Walgreens to treat you as an adult for purposes of access to and disclosure of records related to such treatment, please notify a staff member, pharmacist or the Privacy Office.

For More Information or To Report a Problem
If you have questions or would like additional information about Walgreens’ privacy practices, you may contact our Privacy Officer at Walgreen Co. Privacy Office, 200 Wilmot Road, Mail Stop 9000, Deerfield, Illinois 60015 or toll-free by telephone at (877) 924-4472. If you believe your privacy rights have been violated, you can file a complaint with the Privacy Officer or with the Secretary of Health and Human Services. You can also file a complaint through www.walgreens.com, and we will route your complaint to the Privacy Office. There will be no retaliation for filing a complaint.

Effective Date
This Notice is effective as of April 13, 2003.

ABNORMALCY BIAS

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

 they-live-billboards-messages-john-carpenter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Abnormality Reigns

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

  total debt market owed

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

Loving Your Servitude

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 antidepressant-facts-400x400

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

 

 

 

ANIMAL FARM (Oldie but Goodie)

Originally published in July 2009.

image

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”  George Orwell – Animal Farm

The United States has gradually degenerated from a Republic based on individual liberties to a socialized oligarchy run by an exclusive few. The country was founded upon the platform of individual rights. We declared our independence from Great Britain because of excessive regulation and taxation. Americans fought for the right to live their lives free from the subjugation of an overbearing governmental body. The Founding Fathers declared our independence with these immortal words:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

Since the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the United States has gone from taking personal responsibility for our own lives to dependence on government to make all decisions in our lives. There are 306 million Americans and we have defaulted on our responsibility for governing this nation to 535 corrupt politicians, 10 “too big to fail” banks, a secretive Central Bank, 17,000 corporate lobbyists, and thousands of government bureaucrats. Essentially 306 million citizens are managed by a few thousand elitist rulers. George Orwell’s classic novel Animal Farm was inspired by the a scene he witnessed:

“I saw a little boy, perhaps ten years old, driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck me that if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich exploit the proletariat.”

Orwell wrote the novel during World War II and published it in 1945. It was a contemptuous indictment of Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. He recognized that propaganda and abuse of language could smoothly control the opinions of enlightened intellectuals in democratic countries. He saw through the prism of Soviet propaganda to the true evil of Stalin and his KGB Dogs. Intellectuals in Great Britain’s Ministry of Information attempted to censor his right to publish the book because it would offend their supposed ally Joseph Stalin. He knew the truth, while intellectuals were horribly wrong. Stalin murdered 700,000 Russian citizens during the Great Purge of the 1930s.

The plot of Orwell’s Animal Farm is quite simple. It follows the Russian Revolution from 1917 through 1944. Three pigs—Snowball (Leon Trotsky), Napoleon (Joseph Stalin), and Squealer (Vyacheslav Molotov) formulate Old Major’s (Vladimir Lenon) principles into a philosophy called Animalism. The animals defeat the farmer Mr. Jones (Czar Nicholas II) in a battle, running him off the land. They rename the property Animal Farm (Soviet Union). The cart-horse Boxer (Russian working class) devotes himself to the cause with particular passion, committing his great strength to the prosperity of the farm and adopting as a personal axiom the affirmation “I will work harder.” Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky) increasingly argue over the future of the farm, and they begin to struggle with each other for power and influence among the other animals. After a speech, nine attack dogs (KGB) burst into the barn and chase Snowball (Trotsky) from the farm.

Napoleon (Stalin) assumes leadership of Animal Farm (Soviet Union) and declares that there will be no more meetings. From that point on, he stresses, the pigs alone will make all of the decisions for the good of every animal (Workers). Napoleon (Stalin) begins expanding his powers, rewriting history to make Snowball (Trotsky) a villain. Napoleon (Stalin) also begins to act more and more like a human being—sleeping in a bed, drinking whisky, and engaging in trade with neighboring farmers. The original Animalist principles strictly forbade such activities, but Squealer (Molotov), Napoleon’s propagandist, justifies every action to the other animals, convincing them that Napoleon (Stalin) is a great leader and is making things better for everyone despite the fact that the common animals are cold, hungry, and overworked. Looking in at the party of Pigs and Farmers through the farmhouse window, the common animals can no longer tell which are the Pigs and which are the human beings.

The perversion of founding principles is not limited to communist countries. On the farm there were the Seven Original Commandments:

  1. Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
  2. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
  3. No animal shall wear clothes.
  4. No animal shall sleep in a bed.
  5. No animal shall drink alcohol.
  6. No animal shall kill any other animal.
  7. All animals are created equal.

All of the Seven Commandments are eventually broken by the pigs for their own gain. Squealer (Molotov) constantly changes the Commandments to the pigs’ benefit, taking advantage of the other animals. Through the manipulation of language, the Pigs accumulate more power and privileges:

  • No animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets;
  • No animal shall drink alcohol to excess
  • No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

Ultimately, all the commandments are boiled down to one commandment:

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Could this degeneration of founding principles happen in the United States? The distressing answer is that it already has. It has accelerated at a breakneck pace since 2000. Orwell’s themes are as true today as they were in 1944.

Corruption

“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell

Our elected officials are supposed to represent the wishes of the citizens that elected them. They derive their just powers from the governed. In the early days of our Republic, citizens could freely enter the White House without hesitation. Federalist Papers 55 and 56 explicitly promised, without qualification, that there would beone Representative for every thirty-thousand inhabitants. The framers of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights intended that the total population of Congressional districts never exceed 50,000 to 60,000. Currently, the average population size of the districts is nearly 700,000 and, consequently, the principle of proportionally equitable representation has been abandoned. Our elected officials no longer represent the people. They represent the 17,000 corporate lobbyists who spend $3.3 billion per year to “persuade” them what is best for their special interests. This is why a Congressperson can receive 9 to 1 calls from their constituents against a $700 billion banker bailout bill and still vote for the bill. The ideals of our fledgling Republic have been corrupted by politicians who have sold their souls to corporate and banking interests.

The corruption became more insidious with the creation of the Federal Reserve and the institution of the Federal income tax in 1913. The levers of money printing and raising taxes gave the select few (Pigs) the wherewithal to control and manipulate the working class population. Debt and taxes are the friends of a corrupt politician. The Cabal of bankers who control the Federal Reserve has been printing money for 96 years to such an extent that the U.S. dollar has lost 96% of its purchasing power versus gold. But, with Orwellian irony our government leaders proclaim a “strong dollar policy”. This is a lie. The only way out of the current colossal debt dilemma is by allowing our currency to depreciate even more so that the debt becomes less burdensome in dollar terms. The National Debt is now $11.6 trillion. The National Debt in 1913 was $2.9 billion. Therefore, the National Debt has gone up by 400,000% in 96 years. FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND PERCENT! I had to go back and check my calculation three times. The people we elected to Congress have spent $11.6 trillion more than the government has generated in revenues, with $10 trillion of it accumulated since 1981.

Despite this “investment” spending by our elected officials, the country’s infrastructure is crumbling, we import 66% of our energy supplies versus 28% in 1982, our public education system is on par with a Third World country, our healthcare system is bloated, expensive and corrupt, and we have racked up another $56 trillion of future liabilities for unfulfillable promises made by our myopic leaders. The Bills passed by Congress (written by lobbyists) exceed 1,000 pages, with payoffs and pork to constituents, corporate contributors and other influential allies. These Bills are not even read by our leaders before being passed. Hundreds of pages of amendments are added at 3:00 am. As the ruling pigs in Animal Farm are slowly corrupted, they take the spoils while the working class proletariat toil for nothing. Congress and the bankers are the ruling Pigs, we are the overworked common animals. Talk is cheap and lies are expensive.

Do as I say not as I do because
The shit so deep you can’t run away
I beg to differ on the contrary
I agree with every word that you say
Talk is cheap and lies are expensive
My wallet’s fat and so is my head
Hit and run and then I’ll hit you again
I’m a smart ass but I’m playing dumb

Standards set and broken all the time
Control the chaos behind a gun
Call it as I see it even if
I was born deaf, blind and dumb
Losers winning big on the lottery
Rehab rejects still sniffing glue
Constant refutation with myself
I’m a victim of a catch 22
 Green Day – Walking Contradiction

Class Oppression

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

The American Revolution was fought for the ideals that “All men are created equal” and we had the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The Russian Revolution of 1917 was based upon Karl Marx’ idealistic Communist Manifesto which pitted the oppressors against the oppressed. Communism was supposed to be a system in which goods were owned in common and available to all as needed. The ten conditions for a transition to Communism are:

  1. Abolition of property in land application of all rents of land to public purposes.
  2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
  3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
  4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
  5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a National Bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
  6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
  7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
  8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
  9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equal distribution of the population over the country.
  10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.

George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm were biting condemnations of the Soviet Union, its perversion of the revolution’s ideals and class tyranny that ultimately widened in its society. The American Republic was constructed upon the individual and their freedom and liberty. After reading the above list of conditions, the United States is at least 50% of the way to a perverted form of communism as our leaders have instituted a progressive income tax, restricted the right of inheritance through taxes, centralized credit in the hands of the State, allowed corporate farms to dominate agriculture along with providing tax breaks and protective tariffs, gotten into bed with the Military Industrial Complex, banking industry, and auto industry, provide free public education to the working classes while they send their privileged children to private schools. By satiating the poor working classes with bread and circuses like welfare programs, easy credit, no income taxes, cable TV, fast food, cheap liquor, and drugs, the ruling classes are able to reap obscene riches through the systematic raping of the American public through the use of inflation and taxes on the middle class.

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

The success of any system of government is ultimately dependent upon the integrity, honesty and honor of its leaders. If they become corrupted by power and money, the system will ultimately collapse. It may be a natural progression in all societies that intellectuals with superior intelligence will take advantage of those who perform physical labor. The intelligentsia in Animal Farm is the Pigs, who learn to walk on two legs, wear clothes, sleep in beds, drink alcohol and consider animals that walk on four legs as their inferiors. They perverted the founding principles of the revolution. The intelligentsia of the United States has perverted the founding principles that all men are created equal and we are each entitled to our individual liberty. The ruling elite constitute the 1% richest Americans and the politicians they have bought. The top 1% own 35% of all the net worth in the country. They own as much as the bottom 90% of Americans. They “earn” 22% of the income and pay 40% of the taxes in the U.S. I would contend that the majority of the intelligentsia has utilized their private education, Washington and Wall Street connections and ability to manipulate the financial and political system to further enrich themselves at the expense of the average American.

[Charts]

Source: CNN Money

Gullible Working Class

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning. George Orwell

The definition of democracy is: government by the people. Today, the United States is democratic in name only. The political class, which supposedly represents the citizens, has perverted the original concept of a representative democracy. Our representatives were supposed to personally sacrifice by taking time off from their everyday professions to do what was best for the country. After performing this noble duty they would go back to their original vocations. Instead 40% of Congress is lawyers, their goal is to make a career in Washington DC and after leaving Congress they seek riches as lobbyists. Once elected, they utilize the power and money gained from the position to maintain that position permanently. This is why incumbents win elections 95% of the time. In 2004, incumbents spent $700 million to get re-elected, while challengers spent $200 million. These obscene sums of money have perverted the original intention of the Founders.

Candidate Status U.S. House U.S. Senate
Incumbents $456,859,509 $223,964,295
Challengers $112,498,172 $79,852,117
Open-Seat Candidates $127,051,491 $238,890,389
TOTAL $696,409,172 $542,706,801
SOURCE: Federal Election Commission

 

The combination of a permanent political class with an undereducated, uninterested, gullible, naïve electorate has permitted the few to wield immense power over the majority. In Animal Farm, the working class is represented by Boxer the workhorse. He is a hard working non-thinking animal that repeats over and over that “Napoleon (Stalin) is always right”. He is representative of those who believe everything that Barack Obama says is gospel. Ultimately, Boxer is sacrificed so that the Pigs can live more luxuriously. A highly educated involved electorate would be dangerous to those in power. An atrocious public education system is actually beneficial to the Pigs. There are 34 million Americans without a high school degree, constituting 15% of those over 18 years old. Another 112 million have graduated high school without progressing any further with their education. Many of these people are functionally illiterate, can’t add, can’t spell, don’t know when World War II happened, or who is the Vice President. Only 69% of entering 9th graders in the public school system graduate high school. The graduation rates and educational achievements of minorities are dramatically worse than these numbers. Only 26% of the population has a bachelor’s degree, with only 6% possessing a master’s degree.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6c/Historical_median_personal_income_by_education_attainment_in_the_US.png
Source: Wikipedia

The proliferation of drugs among the poor keeps them dazed and sedated. Various welfare programs and easy credit keep them from rioting as they can “purchase” luxury cars and electronic gadgets enjoyed by the upper classes. The bad debts are picked up by the taxpayers. As a further control, those in power have put 2.3 million people in prisons, most of whom are poor and 60% who are minorities. By distracting the majority of people in the country with cable TV entertainment, the internet, Twitter, cell phones, sports, movies, and shopping malls, the Pigs who run the show are able to oppress and control the masses. The highly educated use the idiocy and naïveté of the oppressed to their advantage by using the rigged financial system to generate ever more riches for themselves. The banker gods peddled fraudulent mortgage schemes throughout the world in order to enrich themselves. When it blew up in their faces, they turned to their government co-conspirators (Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and most of Congress) to keep their riches. Their Congressional benefactors have obliged by stealing trillions from the taxpaying classes and redistributed it to the Pigs running Goldman Sachs, Citicorp, and Bank of America.

Abuse of Language

George Orwell’s most pointed criticism of political leaders was their misuse of language to further their wicked agendas. He exposes the outrageous abuse of words in 1984 and Animal Farm. The ruling elite manipulate the language as an instrument of control over the masses.

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”  George Orwell

The intelligentsia understands that the masses can be manipulated with convincing talking points and misleading slogans. Politicians never tell their constituents they are doing some pork barrel spending. Every dollar of new spending is spun as “investment spending”. We have evidently made $11.6 trillion of “investments” in our National Debt. Somehow we enacted “campaign finance reform” and still manage to spend $1.3 billion on political campaigns. Our beloved numbskull Vice President Joe Biden said last week, “We have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt”. President Bush said, “I’ve abandoned free-market principles to save the free market system”. President Obama insisted that the only way to save our country from catastrophe caused by excessive debt was to borrow $700 billion and spend it on infrastructure projects, of which only 3.5% was allocated to our crumbling infrastructure. During the Vietnam War a U.S. Major declared, “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.” In 1947 the government changed the name of the Department of War to the Department of Defense, as we today have garrisons of 100,000 troops in 117 foreign countries. The Department of Homeland Security, Patriot Act, and War on Terror are all deceptive titles and slogans purposely meant to hoodwink Boobus Americanus.

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

President Obama and his cronies hammer away that 47 million Americans are uninsured. It is a lie, but that does not deter them from continuing to make the claim. The latest Census report says that within the borders of the United States as of 2007 there were 45.65 million people without health insurance. But this number included 9.73 million foreigners, leaving only 35.92 Americans who were uninsured. Among the uninsured in the United States there were also 9.1 million people making more than $75,000 per year who did not choose to purchase health insurance. Therefore, we are imposing a trillion dollar solution for 28 million people who are poor and uninsured. That is $36,000 per person while imposing a huge invasive bureaucracy on the lives of the other 278 million Americans. The masses believe the lies.

Green Extremists have convinced children and dullards that global warming is destroying the planet. They state their position as fact, when their thesis does not meet the scientific method criteria as fact. Their contentions are based on computer models. Our financial system was also based on financial models that said that worthless mortgages were really gold. We know how that worked out. The facts are that the earth has warmed prior to the industrial revolution and has cooled. The sun, water vapor, earth’s orbit, volcanoes, interstellar clouds, cosmic rays, tectonic plates, land use, CO2, sunspots, gravitational pulls, ocean currents and solar flares all impact earth. It is far too complex to declare that we know what is happening. Let’s get tomorrow’s weather forecast right first. Men plan and God laughs.

global warming hockey stick correction

Must have been a lot of cows farting in the 1400s

The Orwellian language of Big Government turns people into pliable subjects. It lulls us into passively accepting ever-increasing taxes while encouraging our reliance on an embedded and mutating bureaucracy administered by corrupt career politicians and backed by corporate sugar daddies. Wall Street shysters have mastered the art or twisting and distorting reality to benefit themselves. Subprime loans, which triggered the worldwide financial crisis, were called “nonprime”. The billions of worthless toxic loans that still sit on the books of our biggest banks at original cost are now referred to as “legacy loans”. How quaint. The lowest rated bonds of the worst companies are referred to as “high yield debt”, not junk bonds. We describe our economy as “free market”. There is nothing further from the truth. Bailouts for corporate failures and rewarding the excess risk takers are not hallmarks of free market capitalism. Government takeovers of banks, insurance companies, and auto companies are not free market capitalism. It is a warped form of corporate fascism – the intermingling of the State and corporations for the benefit of a few. Kevin Depew from Minyanville.com described the Orwellian lies of Hank Paulson as he sat before Congress explaining his criminal actions last Fall.

“Paulson asserted throughout his testimony that he, almost single-handedly, averted an “economic collapse” and, moreover, that we should actually be thanking him for it. The ugly assemblage of half-truths, obfuscations, smarmy evasiveness and prickly showboating would have embarrassed Bernie Madoff. But it wasn’t Bernie Madoff. It was a former United States Treasury Secretary.”

Myopia

“Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.” George Orwell

Animal Farm represents any human society whether it be capitalist, socialist, fascist, or communist. Leaders are capable of being corrupted by power within any form of government. The myopic thinking of the Pigs in Animal Farm will eventually destroy the farm. Orwell ends the novel with the animals watching the Pigs mingling with farmers through a window. They couldn’t tell the difference between the supposed revolutionaries and those they had fought against. If he had looked into the future he would have seen that the Soviet Union would decay from the inside as the corrupt few eventually came to believe their own lies and propaganda. It collapsed 44 years later as a corrupt, bankrupt, shell of a country. The combination of myopia, greed, wickedness, ignorance and indifference are a brew that are leading the United States down the same path. As the Pigs in our society have enriched themselves, the average American has seen their real standard of living stagnate over the last 40 years. The Pigs have manipulated government inflation statistics so the masses think they are getting ahead.

The myopia of our politicians has put the country into a predicament that we can’t escape without tremendous pain and suffering. In order to keep their positions of power they have passed bills for decades that promise trillions more in goodies than we can possibly pay for. They have paid no thought to the long-term consequences of their actions because they don’t care. Future generations are of no concern to gluttonous power hungry Pigs. During the eight years of the Bush presidency the ruling class used fear tactics and propaganda to ram through laws which allow Government to monitor the movements and communications of every American. Liberties have been stripped and freedoms have been restricted. Now President Obama is attempting to take control over the few aspects of our lives that remain relatively free. The Orwellian phrase “Cap & Trade” sounds much more innocuous than an energy tax of $1,500 on every household in America that will drive manufacturers out of the country, along with millions of jobs. “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act” is the Orwellian name for a bill that will create a massive new bureaucracy, cost at least $1 trillion, cost small businesses billions more in health costs, give government the final decision on whether you are worth saving, and provide more freebies to poor Americans. This will keep the poor sedated and less likely to cause trouble for the ruling class.

Bill of Frights

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances except when the Department of Homeland Security determines that you are a domestic terrorist who is a member of the Libertarian Party and attend Tax Day Tea Parties.

Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances except when the Department of Homeland Security determines that you are a domestic terrorist who is a member of the Libertarian Party and attend Tax Day Tea Parties.
Amendment II
A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed except when the government fears you will use those arms against them.
Amendment III
No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Amendment IV
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized unless we suspect that you are a terrorist or anti-government activist.
Amendment V
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation unless politicians decide that a shopping mall would be a better use for your private property.
Amendment VI
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense unless we classify you as a non-combatant and put you in prison for two years without charging you or providing counsel.
Amendment VII
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law after you wait for two years for your speedy trial.
Amendment VIII
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted unless approved by Dick Cheney.
Amendment IX
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people unless activist judges determine otherwise.
Amendment X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people except that all these powers have been usurped by the Federal government. “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” George Orwell

As we look through the window at the raucous party between the Pigs and the farmers it is impossible to distinguish between the imperial monarchists who taxed the colonies to such an extreme that it caused a revolution and the revolutionaries that have adopted the same characteristics and traits of those they revolted against. The American people are like sheep being led to slaughter. Our Founding Fathers declared that the common people were in control. Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government. The time has come to abolish the corrupt system and institute a new Government.

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Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.
You better watch out,
There may be dogs about
I’ve looked over Jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem.

What do you get for pretending the dangers not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream.

Have you heard the news?
The dogs are dead!
You better stay home
And do as you’re told.
Get out of the road if you want to grow old.
Pink Floyd – Sheep

2012 – YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY IN REVIEW

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



 

 

V FOR VENDETTA – 2011(Oldie but Not Goodie)

It has been almost two years since I whipped this article out in a one day sleepless frenzy. I was then reminded of it by the BART incident, the London riots and the indictment of the Tea Party as terrorists by the liberal MSM and Democratic politicians in the summer of 2011, so I posted it again . There were calls for civility that week. I knew it wouldn’t happen. Now the horrific mass murder in Connecticut brought it back to my mind again. This Fourth Turning gets worse by the day.

 

Remember remember the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
Should ever be forgot…

 

After the horrific mass murder in Tucson yesterday I had trouble sleeping last night. When my mind gets overloaded, I can’t sleep. I came downstairs at 3:30 am and for some reason decided now was the time to watch the movie V For Vendetta. Many people had recommended this movie over the years, but I had never gotten around to it. Well, on the day after the attempted assassination of a Congresswoman and murder of six others, including a Federal Judge, this movie provided a vision into what could happen next in this country.

The 2006 movie centers around a man wearing a Guy Fawkes mask who refers to himself as V.  He is a bold, charismatic freedom fighter driven to exact revenge on those who disfigured him.  The film is an allegory of oppression and coercion by government. It is a declaration against government intervention into the lives of the citizens. He blows up the Old Bailey on November 5, Guy Fawkes Day. He promises to blow up Parliament one year later on the 5th of November. His speech at the beginning of the movie, broadcast to all of England, explains what happened in a fictional England and what is happening here:

“Good evening, London.

Allow me first to apologize, for this interruption. I do, like many of you, appreciate the comforts of everyday routine, the security, the familiar, the tranquility, repetition… I enjoy them as much as any bloke. But in the spirit of commemoration, whereby those important events of the past, usually associated with someone’s death or the end of some awful, bloody struggle, are celebrated with a nice holiday, I thought we could mark this November the 5th, a day that is certainly no longer remembered, by taking some time out of our daily lives to sit down and have a little chat.

There are, of course, those who do not want us to speak. I think that even now orders are been shouted into telephones and men with guns will soon be on their way. Why? Because when the truncheon maybe used in lieu of conversation, words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who would listen, the enunciation of the truth. And the truth is, there is something terribly wrong with this country, isn’t there?

Cruelty and injustice, intolerance and oppression, and where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission? How did this happen? Who’s to blame? Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again, truth be told, if you’re looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

I know why you did it. I know you were afraid! Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease… There were a myriad problems that conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor, Adam Suttler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient, consent.

Last night, I sought to end that silence. Last night, I destroyed the Old Bailey to remind this country of what it has forgotten. More than 400 years ago, a great citizen wished to embed the 5th of November forever in our memory. His hope was to remind the world that fairness, justice and freedom are more than words, they are perspectives. So if you’ve seen nothing, if the crimes of this government remain unknown to you, then, I would suggest you allow the 5th of November to pass unmarked. But if you see what I see, if you feel as I feel, and if you would seek as I seek, then I ask you to stand beside me, one year from tonight, outside the gates of Parliament, and together we shall give them a 5th of November that shall never, ever, be forgot.”

 

The movie’s central theme revolves around the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament. The plot was a failed assassination attempt against King James I of England by a group of provincial English Catholics led by Robert Catesby. The plan was to blow up the House of Lords during the State Opening of Parliament on November 5, 1605, as the prelude to a popular revolt in the Midlands during which James’s nine-year-old daughter, Princess Elizabeth, was to be installed as the Catholic head of state.

  

 Guy Fawkes, who had 10 years of military experience fighting in the Spanish Netherlands in suppression of the Dutch Revolt, was given charge of the explosives. The plot was revealed to the authorities in an anonymous letter sent to William Parker, 4th Baron Monteagle. During a search of the House of Lords at about midnight on November 4, 1605, Fawkes was discovered guarding 36 barrels of gunpowder – enough to reduce the House of Lords to rubble – and arrested. He was hanged shortly thereafter. November the 5th has been celebrated ever since this event with celebrations and fireworks.

Anarchy Has Arrived

There’s no certainty – only opportunity. V – V For Vendetta

 

As I watched hour after hour of coverage about the ambush and assassination attempt on a Congresswoman from Arizona, I couldn’t help but think this could be the spark for something bigger. There were almost immediate reactions from the MSM that this murder was instigated by the Tea Party. The liberal ideologue Paul Krugman blamed the Republican Party for the murders. Apoplectic left wing faux journalist Keith Olbermann described conservative commentators as those “who have so irresponsibly brought us to this time of domestic terrorism”. The local sheriff, an Arizona State Senator and the Congresswoman’s father all blamed the Tea Party, either directly or indirectly. Based on my reading of the murderer’s writings and youtubes, he appears to be a mentally deranged psycho. Somehow, every liberal MSM “journalist” has concluded that this was due to the contentious political atmosphere in the country. This is code for “we need less dissent”. Stop disagreeing with the Obama agenda. If you disagree, you are dangerous.

The scene in the movie that made me think of yesterday’s events was toward the end of the movie when Inspector Finch, who is trying to capture V, has a feeling about what is going to happen:

Finch: I had to see it. There wasn’t much left. But when I was there it was strange. I suddenly had this feeling that everything was connected. It’s like I could see the whole thing, one long chain of events that stretched all the way back before Larkhill. I felt like I could see everything that happened, and everything that is going to happen. It was like a perfect pattern, laid out in front of me. And I realized we’re all part of it, and all trapped by it.
Dominic: So do you know what’s gonna happen?


Finch: No, it was a feeling. But I can guess. With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid. And when they do, things will turn nasty. And then Sutler will be forced to do the only thing he knows how to do. At which point, all V needs to do is keep his word. And then…
[Dominoes collapse with TV footages showing conflicts between rioting citizens and the anti-riot police]

The line that hit me like a ton of bricks was, “With so much chaos, someone will do something stupid.” As Inspector Finch was speaking these words a scene of a policeman shooting a 10 year old girl with a Guy Fawkes Mask on is shown and then an angry mob surrounds and kill the policeman.

Yesterday, someone did something stupid. The question is what happens next.

Already, a fringe religious fanatic pastor and his followers, who have previously picketed the military funerals of Americans killed in Iraq, issued this press release:

 “Thank God for the shooter – 6 dead! WBC will picket their funerals!”  It continues on to condemn what it condemns as violence unleashed on WBC by a “hateful nation…hoping to silence our kind warning to obey God and flee the wrath to come.”

There is one thing I’m sure about. This will not result in more civil discourse. Opposing ideologies will become further entrenched in their positions. Those who attempt to be peacemakers will be shouted down. Passions will rise as they did in the 1850s when another member of Congress was badly injured as national passions flamed over slavery.  On May 19, 1856, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a prominent voice in the anti-slavery movement, delivered an impassioned speech denouncing the compromises that helped perpetuate slavery and led to confrontations in Kansas. Sumner singled out Senator Andrew Pickens Butler of South Carolina. Butler, who had recently been incapacitated by a stroke and was recuperating in South Carolina, was held to particular ridicule by Sumner. Sumner said that Butler had taken as his mistress “the harlot, slavery.” Sumner also referred to the South as an immoral place for allowing slavery, and he mocked South Carolina.

Preston Brooks, a member of the House of Representatives from South Carolina, was particularly incensed. Not only had the fiery Sumner ridiculed his home state, but Brooks was the nephew of Andrew Butler, one of Sumner’s targets. Brooks walked to Sumner’s desk in the Senate chamber, and reportedly said: “You have libeled my state and slandered my relation, who is aged and absent. And I feel it to be my duty to punish you.” With that, Brooks struck the seated Sumner across the head with his heavy cane. Brooks continued raining blows with the cane upon Sumner, who tried to fend them off with his arms. As might be expected, northern newspapers responded to the violent attack on the Senate floor with horror. Southern newspapers published editorials lauding Brooks, claiming that the attack was a justified defense of the south and slavery. Supporters sent Brooks new canes, and Brooks claimed that people wanted pieces of the cane he used to beat Sumner as “holy relics.”

This attack was a foreshadowing of what was to come – the deaths of 600,000 Americans in the space of four years – over 4% of the male population. Yesterday’s tragedy is another step deeper into this Fourth Turning. Every Fourth Turning has proven to be a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

Words Matter, Ideas Can Change the World

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people. V – V For Vendetta

 

The prior Fourth Turnings in U.S. history (American Revolution, Civil War, Great Depression/World War II) all proved to be secular upheavals of immense proportions, tore apart the existing civil order, but had numerous moments of danger and uncertainty about the future turn of events. We are six years into a twenty year Crisis saeculum. Every Crisis intensifies as time progresses to an ultimate crescendo. The initial financial crisis built to a dramatic peak in September 2008 as the government and Federal Reserve have taken extraordinary and immoral actions to protect Wall Street banks. Since September 11, 2001, the government has used fear as its primary means of controlling the American population. Fear of terrorists, fear of flying, fear of WMD, fear of mushroom clouds, fear of the axis of evil, fear of economic collapse, fear of a Great Depression, and now fear of the Tea Party movement. This attack by a crazy man will lead to further losses of liberties and freedoms. That is a certainty.

Americans have been lulled into a false sense of security. V’s speech to the people of England invokes Ben Franklin:

“I know why you did it. I know you were afraid! Who wouldn’t be? War, terror, disease… There were a myriad problems that conspired to corrupt your reason and rob you of your common sense. Fear got the best of you, and in your panic, you turned to the now High Chancellor, Adam Suttler. He promised you order, he promised you peace, and all he demanded in return was your silent, obedient, consent.” – V – V For Vendetta

Those who would give up Essential Liberty
to purchase a little Temporary Safety,
deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

– Ben Franklin

This country has not reached the level of control and fear seen in Orwell’s 1984 and V For Vendetta, yet. We are moving relentlessly in that direction. Surveillance, monitoring, spying, censorship, secret prisons, predator drones, and conforming to state rules and regulations put citizens further under the thumb of an all powerful state. The freedom to dissent, the freedom to be left alone, the freedom to speak out against injustice, the freedom to disagree with your government, and the freedom to present your ideas without fear of retribution or penalty are essential in a democratic society. The next phase of this Fourth Turning will surely include another downward spiral in financial markets as un-payable debts accumulate to a tipping point level. When ATM machines stop spitting out twenties, food shelves are bare and gas stations are shuttered, social chaos will ensue. The government will react with further command and control measures. In V For Vendetta, the government creates a terrorist incident in order to gain unquestioned control over the population. Americans will need to be more vigilant than they have been over the last ten years in keeping an eye on their government.

In the movie, Parliament is the symbol of government power. The thought of destroying this symbol provided the people with a renewed sense of purpose and power. By V’s destruction of the building, the people regained their hope for the future. The symbol of America is the Statue of Liberty. The pedestal at the base of the statue states:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The idea of America is still alive. Whether it is kept alive is up to us. Words matter. Ideas can change the world.

 “I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot… But what of the man? I know his name was Guy Fawkes and I know, in 1605, he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But who was he really? What was he like? We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world. I’ve witnessed first hand the power of ideas, I’ve seen people kill in the name of them, and die defending them… but you cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it… ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love… And it is not an idea that I miss, it is a man… A man that made me remember the Fifth of November. A man that I will never forget.” – Evey Hammond – V For Vendetta

THE IDEA OF AMERICA – THE CHOICE IS OURS

 

BE CAREFUL OUT THERE – READ THIS!!!!

Hill Street Blues was one of my favorite shows as a kid. The Sarge always ended his morning talk with, “Be careful out there.”

Well, that is my recommendation to all TBP members and commentors.

I was grilled by a police detective over the phone yesterday for about an hour regarding comments made on a thread here on the site. The authorities are watching. Big Brother is monitoring us. Anything we say can be used against us.

Every comment made on TBP has your IP address attached to the comment. The authorities do not have any problem approaching the company that hosts this site and demanding the IP address associated with a particular comment. We all need to keep this in mind. I fear this site will be under increased scrutiny as things spiral out of control over the next few years.

I don’t want anyone on the site to get in trouble for what they post. Any registered member who is worried about being tracked down by the authorities can request on this thread or by emailing me at [email protected] that I delete their profile. By deleting your profile, any of your posts will disappear from the site.

It seems free speech ain’t so free in this country anymore. Time to get a passport if you don’t have one yet.

ORWELL’S 2009 (Oldie but Goodie)

I originally wrote this article in January, 2009. It seems even more pertinent today. The term Doublespeak came to mind as I watch Obama and Bernanke.

war is peace
freedom is slavery
ignorance is strength

“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.” George Orwell

George Orwell wrote his legendary novel 1984 just after World War II. It is renowned for its portrayal of government’s encroachment on the rights of the individual. It was Orwell’s warning against totalitarianism, specifically Stalin’s Soviet Union. Pervasive thought control and surveillance of citizens is prominent throughout the novel. After living through the last eight years under the Bush administration and observing the marketing effort of the coming stimulus plan by the Obama team, the U.S. has moved closer than ever to Orwell’s nightmare world. In the novel, The Party maintained control of Oceania by manipulating facts, history, and citizens to retain power and dominate the masses. In the United States of today we theoretically have two major parties, Democrats and Republicans. In reality, we have one Party made up of the wealthy elite ruling class backed by enormous corporate interests and protected by the military industrial complex. There are no major differences between Republicans and Democrats, just minor meaningless variations. They are both under the control of the fascist corporate oligopoly that runs this country. Representative Ron Paul explains how The Party is able to maintain control in today’s world:

“Pretending that a true difference exists between the two major candidates is a charade of great proportion. Many who help to perpetuate this myth are frequently unaware of what they are doing and believe that significant differences actually do exist. Indeed, on small points there is the appearance of a difference. The real issues, however, are buried in a barrage of miscellaneous nonsense and endless pontifications by robotic pundits hired to perpetuate the myth of a campaign of substance. Influential forces, the media, the government, the privileged corporations and moneyed interests see to it that both party’s candidates are acceptable, regardless of the outcome, since they will still be in charge. It’s been that way for a long time. The two parties and their candidates have no real disagreements on foreign policy, monetary policy, privacy issues, or the welfare state. They both are willing to abuse the Rule of Law and ignore constitutional restraint on Executive Powers. Neither major party champions free markets and private-property ownership. Those candidates who represent actual change or disagreement with the status quo are held in check by the two major parties in power, making it very difficult to compete in the pretend democratic process. This is done by making it difficult for third-party candidates to get on the ballots, enter into the debates, raise money, avoid being marginalized, or get fair or actual coverage.”

Government has progressively acquired more power over the lives of Americans. They have done it subtly for decades but it has accelerated at warp speed in the last eight years. Since 9/11, Americans have seen their liberties taken away on a scale reminiscent of the McCarthy years during the 1950s. In the last year, government has taken advantage of this financial crisis to step into the breach and gained complete control over our banking system and auto industry. They are choosing the winners and losers in our society. They have chosen to save their rich ruling elite brethren who made billions by taking excessive criminal risk, and throw the middle class under the bus. The average American does not see the insidious method that The Party has used to gain overwhelming power over their lives. The U.S. government has used chaos, fear, and exaggeration to expand their control. The method used to gain control is simple. Government creates a problem, fans the flames to make the problem appear to be extremely dangerous, and then provide a solution that only government can implement.

The Government now spends $2.9 trillion per year, or 20% of GDP. With the proposed stimulus, government spending could breach 30% of GDP. In 1929, Government spending accounted for only 9% of GDP. In 2000, when President Bush ascended to power, spending on National Defense was 3.8% of GDP. Today it is 4.8%, having risen by 79% since 2000. In 1940, prior to WW II, National Defense accounted for 2.5% of GDP.

                              TRUTH                                                          GOVERNMENT PROPAGANDA
FY2009 federal piechartthe government's deceptive pie chart
Source: www.warresisters.com                                   Source: CBO

By 2011, 30% of all the spending in our country will be done by BIG GOVERNMENT. When the costs of Homeland Security, veteran’s benefits, interest on the debt related to military spending, spending on NASA and nuclear arms are included, National Defense accounts for 54% of Government spending. The Military Industrial Complex is calling the shots when it comes to how government operates. A question everyone needs to ask themselves:

Is it worth the loss of liberties and rights to allow the government to control and protect you?

Control of Information and History

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.           

Party slogan 1984

The complete lack of interest or care about American history by the vast majority of citizens, allows them to be misled by the State. The past is portrayed as being worse than today. The public is easily manipulated by the propaganda put out by the government and trumpeted by Big Media. As the Democrats make their misleading case for a $1 TRILLION pork filled stimulus package, they are telling the American public that FDR’s New Deal spending in the 1930s worked to pull the country out of the Great Depression. That is a bold faced lie. The GDP of the U.S. was $104 billion in 1929. It did not exceed that level until 1941 as spending on National Defense jumped by 500%. Unemployment was still 19% in 1938, years after the New Deal programs had been instituted. Economists Lowell E. Gallaway and Richard K. Vedder argue that the “Great Depression was very significantly prolonged in both its duration and its magnitude by the impact of New Deal programs. Without Social Security, work relief, unemployment insurance, mandatory minimum wages, and without special government-granted privileges for labor unions, business would have hired more workers and the unemployment rate during the New Deal years would have been 6.7% instead of 17.2%.” If the American public was not being misled, they would see that the next decade will be a government induced nightmare.

The Bush administration led by Dick Cheney, have been masters of manipulating the masses through lies, deception and half truths. I can easily envision Dick Cheney speaking the O’Brien dialogue from 1984.

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—do not forget this, Winston—always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face … forever.

In the 1980s the United States provided Sadaam Hussein with the weapons and funding to fight a war with our mortal enemy, Iran. We provided Osama Bin Laden with weapons to defeat our other mortal enemy, the Soviet Union. We enabled these maniacs to gain power and prestige in the Muslim world. By the 1990’s these two were our sworn enemies. The vast majority of Americans have no idea that we supplied these men with weapons and financial support, which ultimately led to thousands of American deaths. Alliances and enemies are interchangeable in the America of today, very much like Oceania in Orwell’s 1984.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which HE happened to remember. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had ALWAYS been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible. Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth    Jackie Jura – www.orwelltoday.com

The U.S. government controls the flow of information that is used to stage-manage public opinion. Every statistic is massaged in a way to reflect the most positive view of the world. The gullible public and clueless Wall Street professionals accept these statistics with no questions asked. Government has learned that they can make bad news seem like a victory if they’ve built expectations for worse news. The Bush administration a few years ago forecasted a budget deficit of $400 billion and broke out champagne bottles when it finished at $300 billion. Only government bureaucrats could celebrate such a disastrous result. The Party attempts to keep the public in the dark, but the Resistance exists to shed light on their lies. Economist John Williams has been uncovering the government manipulation of facts and revealing the truth for many years.

Chart of Unemployment Rate. U-3, U-6, SGS
Source: www.Shadowstats.com

The government reports an unemployment rate of 7.2% to the public. This figure does not include discouraged workers or marginally attached workers. A discouraged worker is one who is willing, able and ready to work but has given up looking because there are no jobs to be had.

This level is currently 13.8%. During the Clinton administration, The Party decided that if you were discouraged for more than a year, you no longer counted. If these people are included, the current unemployment rate is 17.8%. This is a comparable figure to the 25% rate from the Great Depression. If you use the non-seasonally adjusted change in employment figures, the U.S. lost 2.8 million jobs in 2008. In this figure is a made up number that is supposed to account for the number of jobs gained or lost by small business. This birth/death model adjustment added 904,000 phantom jobs in 2008. This is an insult to the intelligence of all thinking Americans.

Luckily for the government, there are very few thinking Americans who care about such things. Reality is that small businesses probably lost 1 million jobs, which would make the true loss 4 to 5 million jobs. The Party will report the true numbers two years from now in a footnote after the market closes on a Friday.

Inflation: Chart of the CPI.
Source: www.Shadowstats.com
 Inflation was 14% in 1980. Government data cleansers have methodically used gimmicks to reduce the reported rate of inflation. Alan Greenspan spearheaded the effort to save Social Security by saying that if the price of steak rose, people would substitute with hamburger so the price didn’t really go up. If the price of hamburger rose, I’m sure a government robot would theorize that we would substitute with dog food. Further hedonistic “adjustments” were introduced to reduce reported inflation. Based on the methodology used in 1980, our current “deflationary” environment has led to a drop from 13% to 9%. Ask yourself whether your true everyday costs are up 1% or 9% in the last year.
When using the real inflation figures, you realize that we have been in a recession since 2000. This explains why the majority of Americans have fallen behind in the last eight years. The median household income was $50,557 in 2000. Using the government CPI adjusted figure for 2007, median household income had fallen to $50,233. If you used real inflation, the figure would be in the range of $47,000. Trickle down hasn’t worked as advertised. Only the rich ruling elite surged ahead. The criminals on Wall Street partied like it was 1999, while the middle class fell further into oblivion. Now that the rich are losing their shirts in the market, we have a REAL crisis. All the government information manipulators are working around the clock to spin the story in a way that will ensure permanent government control of our economy and our lives.

U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) Chart
Source: www.Shadowstats.com
Psychological Manipulation
Freedom is Slavery, War is Peace

Party Slogan 1984
The concept of doublethink as described in Orwell’s 1984 is being used effectively by The Party in our current totalitarian state:
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them….To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.

The Bush administration has used doublethink almost exclusively since 9/11. In both foreign affairs and the economy they have told deliberate lies, while ignoring inconvenient facts, in order to create an artificial reality. Karl Rove understood what journalist Walter Lippman noted in 1922 about the average American:

“Elites can manufacture consent because the average American is like a deaf spectator in the back row at a sporting event: He does not know what is happening, why it is happening, what ought to happen.”

The Bush/Cheney/Rove propaganda machine that convinced the majority of Americans to support a pre-emptive war against Iraq spun, scores of lies using partial facts and ignoring any fact that did not fit into their reality. Satellite pictures of mobile biological weapons labs, listening to informants (Curveball) that provided information they wanted to hear, ignoring information that didn’t fit, and creating fantasy meetings between 9/11 hijackers and Iraqi agents were all spun to keep the lie one step ahead of the truth. Orwell was clearly speaking about people like Dick Cheney and Karl Rove when he wrote these words:

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

When Joe Wilson exposed the Bush administration lies about Iraq trying to obtain materials to build nuclear bomb from Africa, his wife was revealed as a CIA agent by Karl Rove and Dick Cheney as retribution for interfering with their reality. Only in the doublethink world created by Karl Rove could a man get shot three times, win three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star fighting in Vietnam, like John Kerry, and be declared a coward and traitor. In the meantime, his presidential opponent was protecting the skies of Texas during the Vietnam War.

Other examples of doublethink are as follows:

  • Fighting for Peace – You cannot fight for peace. You fight to kill. George Carlin once said “Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity”. Fighting, or any form of conflict, is the very thing that stands in the way of peace. Fighting is the opposite of peace. This is reminiscent of the Ministry of Peace, which conducts perpetual war. The Iraq war wasn’t about democracy, it was about oil. Orwell knew the reality of war.

“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”

  • Pre–Emptive War – This concept is a warped rationale for attacking an opponent before they attack you. The Bush/Rove propaganda machine provided visions of mushroom clouds and weapons of mass destruction as their reason for attacking a country that had no nuclear or mass destruction weapons. Orwell described war in 1948:

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”
The Iraq War was sold as an act of self defense against Sadaam Hussein.

  • Peace-Keeping Forces – Peace keeping forces are those troops left in a country to help enforce a particular regime. The very fact that a military presence is required would suggest that there is no peace there to ‘keep’. The U.S. soldiers that will be left in Iraq for eternity will be called peace keepers, as civil war simmers and bombs explode daily.
  • Department of Defense – The Department of Defense bears striking resemblance to Orwell’s ‘Ministry of Peace’ not only in the classic use of doublethink in the name but also in its actions. Both are primarily concerned with warfare and seem to spend the majority of their time and efforts dealing in attack and invasion as opposed to the implied defense or peace. Another country has not attacked the U.S. since 1941, but we have invaded other countries seven times since then.
  • War on Terror – The definition of war according to Webster’s is a state of usually open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations. President Bush’s war on terror is an open ended war against no nation or state in particular. It can never be won or lost. It is just a justification for never ending expenditures and restrictions on civil liberties. Orwell described the effect of nationalism:

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

The war on terror concept allows Dick Cheney to think it is fine to torture prisoners and not give them a fair trial while spending years in Guantanamo. Don Rumsfeld thought it was OK to abuse prisoners at Abu Ghraib, until someone took a few pictures and ruined his party. The following quotes from Mr. Rumsfeld show his level of remorse:

“We’re functioning in a — with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.”

“What has been charged so far is abuse, which I believe technically is different from torture. I’m not going to address the ‘torture’ word.”

He is more concerned with people breaking the law with cameras then about the torture being inflicted upon prisoners.

  • Sacrificing Rights to Insure Freedom – This is the most dangerous aspect of doublethink in our society today. With Orwellian surveillance like listening in on private conversations and acts such as ‘The Patriot Act’, we are being forced to give up the very freedoms that ‘The War on Terror’ is alleged to protect, all in the name of freedom.
  • Affirmative Action – This is the concept of discriminating against white people or men in an attempt to end discrimination. The best person for a job is not chosen because a quota for minorities must be met. This is to justify the years of discrimination against minorities and women. A new era of discrimination will surely solve a past era of discrimination. Orwell explains who could go along with such doublethink:

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”
Corporations, government and educational institutions have instituted this reverse discrimination policy to relieve their perceived guilt for past offenses.

Language as Thought Control

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

If George Orwell thought politics were like that in the 1940’s, imagine what his thoughts would be if he were alive today. With 17,000 lobbyists, hundreds of PACs, thousands of PR leeches, and thousands of sleazy lawyers running Washington DC, orchestrating the actions of 550 elected officials, the game of politics has never been at such a low point. The best job in Washington is at the Ministry of Slogans & Acronyms. The use of acronyms fits into the Orwellian concept of Newspeak, “the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year.” The aim of The Party is make thoughtcrime or speech impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom or rebellion. The dumbing down of concepts before they are sold to the American public is how this is accomplished today.

Shock and Awe – This was the Don Rumsfeld marketing phrase for the initial stage of the Iraq Invasion. The U.S. military launched 1,700 air attacks, including 504 cruise missiles on March 21, 2003. The U.S. military insisted that the strikes were surgical and we did everything to avoid civilian casualties. Reports of casualties ranged from 3,000 to 6,000. We inflicted devastation on par with 9/11 on innocent Muslim citizens. This was U.S. terrorism disguised as self defense. The U.S. military refers to this as collateral damage.

USA Patriot Act – Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. It is beyond comprehension that people in our government spend their time creating acronyms that disguise the fact that they are taking away civil liberties. These people must work in the Ministry of Truth, the masters of propaganda. The definition of Patriot according to Webster’s is, one who loves his or her country and supports its authority and interests. By naming it the Patriot Act, anyone that voiced dissent, didn’t love their country and was cast as a traitor. This act was rammed through Congress on October 26, 2001, only forty-five days after the 9/11 attack. Senators and Congressmen did not even read the law before passing it. The Party now has legal authority without a court order to wiretap your phone, read your emails, listen to cell phone conversations, search your mail, search your financial records, search your medical records, detain anyone who they suspect may commit terrorism, and indefinitely detain you based on secret evidence.

Terror Threat Levels – The threat levels are used by government officials to manipulate the public through the use of fear. The local law enforcement authorities have no idea what they are supposed to do when the level is changed. The public has no idea what the colors mean. The threat level was raised shortly before the 2004 Presidential election. No one ever explains why the level is raised or lowered.

Operation Iraqi Freedom – The Party always has a catchy patriotic slogan for the invasion of other countries. The “facts” sold to the gullible American public was that we needed to attack Iraq because they had Weapons of Mass Destruction that would eventually be used on American cities. False links to 9/11 and fake stories about nuclear weapons from Africa were the immediate reasons. Freedom and Democracy were not part of the equation. Only after we found no WMD did the invasion purpose become freeing Iraqis from the tyranny of Sadaam Hussein. If this was the real reason, then we should be invading North Korea, Russia, China and 50 other dictatorships throughout the world.

Community Reinvestment Act – This should be named the U.S. Taxpayer Gets Screwed Act. This law forced banks to make mortgage loans to poor people who should have been renting. This is another Democratic Party welfare state boondoggle. Bob McTeer, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank from 1991 to 2004, described the pressure on banks:

“There was a lot of pressure from Congress and generally everywhere to make homeownership affordable for poor and low-income people. Some mortgages were made that would not have ordinarily been made. When a bank made a decision to purchase mortgaged-backed securities, they would somehow determine if some of them were in zip codes covered by the CRA, and therefore they could get CRA credit.”

The result was subprime losses in the billions being foisted onto the backs of American taxpayers who made their mortgage payments. People who received these loans don’t pay taxes.

Death Tax – A deliberate and carefully crafted word designed by the Republican Party in order to gain support for repealing the estate tax. Repealing the estate tax had no support among the American public. Manipulating the name of the tax generated support for repeal.

Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 – This brilliant piece of legislation signed in July 2008 was designed to instill confidence in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and keep subprime borrowers in their homes. It didn’t help housing or the economy recover. It just poured more money down a rat hole. Fannie & Freddie collapsed under the weight of their incompetence and billions of losses in September 2008. They continue to make bad loans to undeserving borrowers, but now the losses flow directly to you and I, the American taxpayer.

Government Accountability – If this isn’t the biggest oxymoron in history, I don’t know what is. The Party has a tremendous interest in making sure that no one knows where our tax dollars are spent and whether they were spent wisely. A company has a bottom line and can calculate a return on the investments they make. No one can calculate a return on anything Government does. If every government project was listed on-line and citizens could see what was spent and for what purpose, the bureaucracy would come crashing down. Therefore, The Party will never allow light to be shone upon their deeds.

Department of Homeland Security – Its stated goal is to prepare for, prevent, and respond to domestic emergencies, particularly terrorism. This department most resembles Orwell’s Ministry of Love, the agency responsible for the identification, monitoring, arrest and torture of dissidents, real or imagined. We aren’t too far off from being monitored by telescreens. This department was created after 9/11. Its biggest claim to fame is the response to Hurricane Katrina, when 1,836 Americans died. Mismanagement, incompetence, lack of preparation, and slow response were the traits best exhibited by this agency that spends $50 billion per year and employs 208,000 bureaucrats. The department was blamed for up to $2 billion of waste and fraud after audits by the GAO revealed widespread misuse of government credit cards by DHS employees, with purchases including beer brewing kits, $70,000 of plastic dog booties that were later deemed unusable, boats purchased at double the retail price (many of which later could not be found), and iPods ostensibly for use in “data storage”. It is pure luck that we have not experienced another terrorist attack. It is not due to the actions of this agency.

Troubled Asset Relief Program – This is also known as TARP or the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. It’s lucky they put a date at the end, so we can have another in 2009 and another in 2010. A better name would be WARP – Worthless Asset Reprieve Program. This catchy little acronym described assets as if they had a bad day at the office. I’m troubled by the bullshit that keeps being rammed down my throat by politicians and bankers. Assets aren’t troubled. The “assets” on the books of the biggest banks in the world are worthless. They are fictitious pieces of paper backed by nothing. This $700 billion bad banker bailout was supposed to buy these assets from the banks and allow the banks to lend. Henry Paulson lied to Congress and used the first $350 billion to buy preferred stock in the banks. It has been a miserable failure. The second $350 billion will be thrown at these same banks and nothing will happen. No one knows how the money is being spent and Bank of America and Citicorp are on the brink again. The U.S. banking system is insolvent and is being propped up by the American taxpayer.

Stable Prices – It seems the politicians running The Party these days like to pick and choose what they want from John Maynard Keynes. They prefer the goodies of increased government spending and ignore the other advice:

“The best way to destroy the capitalist system is to debauch the currency. By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens.”

One of the key mandates of the Federal Reserve is price stability. This is a lie. The facts are that the Federal Reserve purposefully generates unending inflation which slowly lowers the standard of living of every American. The US dollar has lost 95% of its purchasing power since 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created by a Congress in the back pockets of bankers.

Foreclosure Mitigation – Barney Frank is demanding that the 2nd $350 billion of TARP funds be used for this purpose. It is a noble goal to reduce foreclosures. I’m sure Mr. Frank is a noble man. What this really means is that he would like to take your tax dollars and give them to people who bought houses with mortgages they could not afford. Rather than being properly kicked out of the house, you will make their mortgage payment for them, along with your own monthly mortgage payment. That is what mitigation means.

Quantitative Easing – This is a luminous term that 98% of Americans don’t understand. It sounds so soothing. When Ben Bernanke uses the term in his speeches you can imagine blue birds singing on his shoulder. What it means is that the Federal Reserve will print as many dollars as it takes to generate inflation so that the country’s enormous debt burden can be inflated away. Instead of one helicopter, picture thousands of B-52s dropping dollars over NYC. Japan tried the same thing in the 1990s with absolutely no success. Ben’s motto is, when you earnestly believe you can compensate for a lack of skill by doubling your efforts, there’s no end to what you can’t do.

Economic Recovery Program – This is Barrack Obama’s first contribution to Newspeak. His shrewd economic team didn’t like the sound of stimulus program. It sounded too much like Bush’s rebate checks, which didn’t work. Of course, one of the key elements of this plan is a $500 rebate per person. The term investment is used quite often in this plan. Investment in infrastructure, education, green initiatives, and energy are the backbone of the plan. Ask yourself why we have 156,000 structurally deficient bridges, crumbling water pipes, antiquated power grid, urban decay, and dangerous schools. It is because we have relied on the Government to be responsible for these things with taxes we have already paid. Now we are supposed to support a program with future tax dollars to do what Government should have done in the first place. When you are stuck in a traffic jam next year and see six union construction workers standing on the side of the road all making $50 an hour watching one guy with a jack hammer working, know that your tax dollars have been spent wisely.

Love Big Brother or Make a Stand Now
In the end, Winston Smith, the rebel in Orwell’s 1984, is brought to Room 101 and O’Brien threatens to let rats chew his face off if he doesn’t pledge his love for Big Brother. He cracks and learns to Love Big Brother. We are nearing a point of no return in this country. Government is acquiring more power and the citizens are losing their liberty and freedom. We can either learn to love it or make a stand against it now.

Ayn Rand in her book Atlas Shrugged describes how we have slowly transformed our country into Orwell’s Oceania:

“Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . . and the downward spiral repeats itself until the productive sectors of the economy collapse under the collective weight of taxes and other burdens imposed in the name of fairness, equality and do-goodism.”

Orwell lived during a time of unadulterated evil, with madmen like Hitler and Stalin using the Big Lie and military brutality to keep their populations under their jackboot. Orwell saw a bleak future:

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history. During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

We are living in times of universal deceit. Your government is lying to you, the media is lying to you, organized religion is lying to you and corporations are lying to you. Most Americans are oblivious to the lies or simply don’t care. If you believe that bigger government will solve our troubles, borrowing more money will solve the quandary of too much debt, giving your tax dollars to the worst run banks and corporations is good policy, letting government choose the winners and losers in banking, autos, and energy is a good scheme, debasing the currency is a fine idea and allowing government agencies to monitor your conversations and emails makes you safer, then learn to Love Big Brother.

I, on the other hand, will not sit idly by while this country goes into permanent decline. I prefer liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of thought, free markets, and freedom to live my life as I wish. Government is too big, too powerful, and too regulating. New regulation is the current mantra from the Democrats. We had plenty of regulations. Government is just not capable of enforcing the laws that already exist. More laws will not make government more competent. Much of what I write, people do not want to hear. Orwell understood what liberty meant.

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

I’m angry with what has been going on in this country for the last eight years. I believe there are millions of other frustrated angry Americans who are tired of having this country dominated by crooked politicians in the back pocket of corporate fascists from the Defense Industry, Financial Industry, and Healthcare Industry. Only a few people within Government are as angry and ready to fight for liberty. Ron Paul is able to channel that anger:

“The issue boils down to this: do we care about freedom? Do we care about responsibility and accountability? Do we care that our government and media have been bought and paid for? Do we care that average Americans are being looted in order to subsidize the fattest of cats on Wall Street and in government? Do we care? When the chips are down, will we stand up and fight, even if it means standing up against every stripe of fashionable opinion in politics and the media? Times like these have a way of telling us what kind of a people we are, and what kind of country we shall be.”

Together we stand, divided we fail. Get involved with organizations that tell the truth about our economic and political crisis. David Walker, Ross Perot and Ron Paul are those people.

LIES ACROSS AMERICA

“Every single empire, in its official discourse, has said that it is not like all the others, that its circumstances are special, that it has a mission to enlighten, civilize, bring order and democracy, and that it uses force only as a last resort.” – Edward Said

The increasingly fragile American Empire has been built on a foundation of lies. Lies we tell ourselves and Big lies spread by our government. The shit is so deep you can stir it with a stick. As we enter another holiday season the mainstream corporate mass media will relegate you to the status of consumer. This is a disgusting term that dehumanizes all Americans. You are nothing but a blot to corporations and advertisers selling you electronic doohickeys that they convince you that you must have. Propaganda about consumer spending being essential to an economic recovery is spewed from 52 inch HDTVs across the land, 24 hours per day, by CNBC, Fox, CBS and the other corporate owned media that generate billions in profits from selling advertising to corporations schilling material goods to thoughtless American consumers.  Aldous Huxley had it figured out decades ago:

“Thanks to compulsory education and the rotary press, the propagandist has been able, for many years past, to convey his messages to virtually every adult in every civilized country.”

Americans were given the mental capacity to critically think. Sadly, a vast swath of Americans has chosen ignorance over knowledge. Make no mistake about it, ignorance is a choice. It doesn’t matter whether you are poor or rich. Books are available to everyone in this country. Sob stories about the disadvantaged poor having no access to education are nothing but liberal spin to keep the masses controlled. There are 122,500 libraries in this country. If you want to read a book, you can read a book. The internet puts knowledge at the fingertips of every citizen. Becoming educated requires hard work, sacrifice, curiosity, and a desire to learn. Aldous Huxley  describes the American choice to be ignorant:

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

It is a choice to play Call of Duty on your PS3 rather than reading Shakespeare. It is a choice to stand on a street corner looking for trouble rather than reading Hemingway. It is a choice to spend Black Friday in malls fighting other robotic consumers for iSomethings, the latest innovative, advanced TVs, flashy Rolexes, and ostentatious Coach bags rather than spending the day reading Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, a brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning history of the outset of World War I, which would provide insight into what could happen on the Korean Peninsula. It is a choice to watch 6 hours per day of Dancing With the Stars, American Idol, Brainless Housewives of Everywhere, or CSI of Anywhere rather than reading Orwell or Huxley  and discovering that their dystopian warnings have come true.

 Conspicuous Consumption Conquistadors

Americans have chosen to lie to themselves. They have persuaded themselves that buying stuff with plastic cards while paying 19% interest for eternity, driving BMWs while locked into never ending indecipherable lease schemes, and living in permanently underwater McMansions bought with 0% down on an interest only liar loan, is the new American Dream. They think watching the boob tube will make them smart. They soak in the mass media hype, misinformation and lies like lemmings walking off a cliff. Depending on their political predisposition, they watch Fox or MSNBC and unthinkingly believe the propaganda that pours from the mouths of the multi-millionaire talking heads who read Teleprompters with words written by corporate media hacks. They tell themselves that buying stuff on credit, giving them the appearance of success as measured by the media elite, is actually success. This is a bastardized, manipulated, delusional version of accomplishment. Americans have chosen to believe the lies because the truth is too hard to accept.

Becoming educated, thinking critically, working hard, saving money to buy what you need (as opposed to what you want), developing human relationships, and questioning the motivations of government, corporate and religious leaders is hard. It is easy to coast through school and never read a book for the rest of your life. It is easy to not think about the future, your retirement, or the future of unborn generations. It is easy to coast through life at a job (until you lose it) that is unchallenging, with no desire or motivation for advancement. It is easy to make your everyday troubles disappear by whipping out your piece of plastic and acquiring everything you desire today. If your brother-in-law buys a 7,000 sq ft, 7 bedroom, 4 bath, 3 car garage, monolith to decadence for his family of 3, thirty miles from civilization, with no money down and a no doc Option ARM providing the funds, why shouldn’t you get in on the fun. It’s easy. Why sit around the kitchen table and talk with your kids, when you can easily cruise the internet downloading free porn or recording every trivial detail of your shallow life on Facebook so others can waste their time reading about your life. It is easiest to believe your elected leaders, glorified mega-corporation CEOs, and millionaire pastors preaching the word of God for a “small” contribution to their mega-churches.

Americans love authority figures who act as if they have all the answers. It matters not that these egotistical monuments to folly and hubris (Bush, Obama, Paulson, Geithner, Greenspan, Bernanke) have committed the worst atrocities in the history of our Republic, leaving economic carnage and the slaughter of thousands in their wake. The most dangerous man on this earth is an Ivy League educated, arrogant ideologue who believes they are smarter than everyone else. When these men achieve power, they are capable of producing catastrophic consequences. Once they seize the reigns of authority these amoral psychopaths have no problem lying to the American public in order to achieve their objectives. They know that Americans love to be lied to, so the bigger the lie, the more likely it is to be believed.

The current lie proliferating across the land of the free financing and home of the debtor is that austerity has broken out across the land. The mainstream media and the government, aided by various “think tanks” and Federal Reserve propagandists insist that Americans have buckled down, reduced spending, increased savings, and have embraced austerity.

Austerity – Circa 1932

Austerity – Circa 2010

They now proclaim that it is time to spend again. It is the patriotic thing to do, just like defeating terrorists by buying an SUV with 0% down from GM was the patriotic thing to do after 9/11. Defeating terrorists by going further into debt was the brilliant idea of those Ivy League geniuses Bush & Greenspan. Let’s critically examine the facts to determine how austere Americans have become:

  • Consumer credit outstanding is $2.41 trillion, the same level reached in early 2007, and up from $1.5 trillion in 2000. This is a 60% increase in ten years. Personal income has risen from $8.4 trillion to $12.6 trillion over this same time frame, a 50% increase. Americans have substituted debt for income in order to keep up with the Joneses. The mass delusion lives.
  • The MSM declares that the reduction in overall consumer debt from its peak of $2.56 trillion in 2008 to $2.41 trillion today proves that consumers have been cutting back and paying off debt. This is another media lie. Non-revolving debt, which includes car loans, education loans, mobile home loans and boat loans sits at $1.6 trillion, an all-time high matched in 2008. Credit card debt has “plunged” from $957 billion to $814 billion, not because consumers paid down their balances. The mega Wall Street banks have written off $20 billion per quarter since early 2009, accounting for ALL of the reduction in credit card debt. Clueless consumers continue to charge at the same rate as the peak in 2008.
  • Average credit card debt per household with credit card debt: $15,788
  • There are 609.8 million bank credit cards held by U.S. consumers.
  • The U.S. credit card default rate is 13.01%
  • In 2006, the United States Census Bureau determined that there were nearly 1.5 billion credit cards in use in the U.S. A stack of all those credit cards would reach more than 70 miles into space — and be almost as tall as 13 Mount Everests.
  • Penalty fees from credit cards added up to about $20.5 billion in 2009.
  • The national average default rate as January 2010 stood at 27.88% and the mean default rate is 28.99%.
  • Total bankruptcy filings in 2009 reached 1.4 million, up from 1.09 million in 2008. Bankruptcies in 2010 are on pace to exceed 1.6 million.  
  • 26% of Americans, or more than 58 million adults, admit to not paying all of their bills on time. Among African-Americans, this number is at 51%.

           Does This Look Like Austerity? Really?

This data clearly proves that austerity has not broken out across the land of delusion. The billions in consumer loan write-offs by the Wall Street banks that run this country have masked the fact that Americans have not cut back on their spending habits at all. GMAC (taxpayer owned) and Ford Credit continue to dish out car loans to anyone with a pulse and a 600 credit score. The Federal Reserve and the FASB have encouraged, if not insisted, that banks fraudulently value the commercial real estate loans on their books. The Federal Reserve has bought $1.5 trillion of toxic mortgage loans from the criminal Wall Street banks at 100 cents on the dollar. The government’s corporate fascist public relations firms then spread the big lie that the economy is recovering and consumers should join the party and spend, spend, spend.

If Americans were capable or willing to do some critical thinking, they would realize that those in power have created the illusion of a recovery by handing $700 billion of your money to the banks that created the financial meltdown, spending $800 billion on worthless pork barrel projects borrowed from future generations, dropping interest rates to 0% so that the mega-Wall Street banks can earn billions risk free while your grandmother who depended on interest income from her CDs edges closer to eating cat food to get by, and lastly Ben Bernanke’s blatant attempt to enrich Wall Street by buying US Treasury bonds in an effort to make the stock market go up, while the middle and lower classes are crushed under the weight of soaring fuel and food price increases that exceed 30% on an annual basis. The illusion of recovery is not a recovery. With a true unemployment rate of 22%, a true inflation rate of 8% and a real GDP of -1.5% (Shadowstats), we are in the midst of the Greater Depression. You are being lied to, but most of you prefer it.

The Little Lies We Tell Ourselves

“Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know.” – M King Hubbert

When Jimmy Carter gave his malaise speech in 1979, Americans were in no mood to listen. Carter’s solutions were too painful, required sacrifice, and sought to benefit future generations. The leading edge of the Baby Boom generation had reached their 30s by 1979, and the most spoiled, pampered, egocentric generation in history could care less about future generations, long term thinking, or sacrifice for the greater good. They were the ME GENERATION. The 1970s had proven to be tumultuous episode in US history. M King Hubbert’s calculation in 1956 that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s proved to be 100% correct.

File:US Oil Production and Imports 1920 to 2005.png

 

The Arab oil embargo resulted in gas shortages and economic chaos in the U.S. Hubbert used the same method to determine that worldwide oil production would peak in the early 2000s. If long term planning had been initiated in the early 1980s, combining exploration of untapped reserves, greater utilization of natural gas, development of nuclear plants, more stringent fuel efficiency standards, increased taxes on gasoline, and more thoughtful development of housing communities, we would not now face a looming oil crisis within the next few years. Instead of dealing with reality, adapting our behavior and preparing for a more localized society, we put our blinders on, chose ignorance over reason and pushed the pedal to the medal by moving farther away from our jobs, building bigger energy intensive mansions, and insisting on driving tank-like SUVs, Hummers, and good ole boy pickups. Kevin Phillips in American Theocracy explained that hyper-consumerism, fear, and inability to use logic have left our suburban oasis lives in danger of implosion when the reality of peak cheap oil strikes:

Besides the innate thirst of SUVs, some of the last quarter century’s surge in U.S. oil consumption has come from Americans driving more – some twelve thousand miles per motorist per year, up almost one – third from 1980 – because they as a whole live farther from work. In consumption terms, exurbia is the physical result of the latest population redistribution enabled by car culture and the electorate that upholds it.

Family values are central – if by this we mean having families and accepting lengthy commutes to install them in reasonably safe and well churched places. In the 1970’s such households might have been fleeing school busing or central city crime; in the post – September 11 era, many sought distance from “godless” school systems or the random violence and terrorist attacks expected to occur in metropolitan areas.

We willingly believe the lies espoused by the badly informed pundits on CNBC and Fox   that if we just drill in Alaska and off our coasts, we’ll be fine. The ignorant peak cheap oil deniers insist there are billions of barrels of oil to be harvested from the Bakken Shale, even though there is absolutely no method of accessing this supply without expending more energy than we can access. Environmentalists lie about the dangers of nuclear power, while shamelessly promoting the ridiculous notion that solar, wind and ethanol can make a visible impact on our future energy needs. Ideologues on the right and left conveniently ignore the facts and the truth is lost in a blizzard of their lies. Here is an explanation so clear, even a CNBC “drill baby drill” dimwit could understand:

When oil production first began in the mid-nineteenth century, the largest oil fields recovered fifty barrels of oil for every barrel used in the extraction, transportation and refining. This ratio is often referred to as the Energy Return on Energy Investment (EROEI). Currently, between one and five barrels of oil are recovered for each barrel-equivalent of energy used in the recovery process. As the EROEI drops to one, or equivalently the Net Energy Gain falls to zero, the oil production is no longer a net energy source. This happens long before the resource is physically exhausted.

File:Hubbert peak oil plot.svg

 

After the briefest of lulls when oil reached $145 per barrel, Americans have resumed buying SUVs, pickup trucks, and gas guzzling muscle cars. They have chosen to ignore the imminence of peak cheap oil because driving a leased BMW makes your neighbors think you are a success, while driving a hybrid would make your neighbors think you are a liberal tree hugger. It boggles my mind that so many Americans are so shallow and shortsighted. According to Automotive News, at the start of 2008 leasing comprised 31.2% of luxury vehicle sales and 18.7% of non-luxury sales. This proves that hundreds of thousands of wannabes are driving leased BMWs and Mercedes to fill some void in their superficial lives.

I bought a Honda Insight Hybrid six months ago. It gets 44 mpg and will save me $1,500 per year in gasoline costs. I put 20% down and financed the remainder at 0.9% for three years. My payment is $450 per month. I will own it outright in 2 ½ years. I could have leased a 2010 BMW 328i with moonroof, bluetooth, power seats with driver seat memory, lumbar support, leather interior, iPod adapter, 17″ alloy wheels, heated seats, wood trim, 3.0 Liter 6 Cylinder engine with 230 horsepower for 3 years at $389 per month. At the end of 3 years I’d own nothing. In 2 ½ years I’ll be able to put $450 per month away for my kids’ college education and I’ll be saving more on fuel as gasoline approaches $5 per gallon. The self important egotistical BMW leaser pretending to be successful will need to hand over their sweet ride and move on to the next lease, never saving a dime for the future. I’m sure they’ll make a killing in the market or their McMansion will surely double in price, providing a fantastic retirement.

             Delusional                                   Practical

 

The delusion that cheap oil is a God given right of all Americans can be seen in the YTD data on vehicle sales. Pickups and SUVs account for 48.5% of all sales, while small fuel efficient cars account for only 16.5% of all sales. Americans will continue to lie to themselves until it is too late, again.

  Oct 2010 % Chg from
Oct’09		 YTD 2010 % Chg from
YTD 2009
Cars 448,127 3.9 4,840,525 5.3
   Midsize 220,998 -0.2 2,407,457 9.9
   Small 142,983 9.7 1,616,840 -1.5
   Luxury 78,487 9.7 742,278 7.2
   Large 5,659 -31.9 73,950 -0.8
Light-duty trucks 502,038 23.5 4,730,196 16.7
   Pickup 147,207 16.9 1,334,133 13.9
   Cross-over 195,274 20.0 1,928,191 16.8
   Minivan 55,596 21.0 561,736 15.1
   Midsize SUV 51,494 86.6 443,922 37.9
   Large SUV 23,946 1.5 202,806 12.1
   Small SUV 14,861 53.6 146,000 -3.8
   Luxury SUV 13,660 22.1 113,408 26.2
Total SUV/Cross-over 299,235 27.4 2,834,327 18.3
Total SUV 103,961 44.3 906,136 21.7
Total Cross-over 195,274 20.0 1,928,191 16.8

Americans are so committed to their automobiles, hyper-consumerism, oversized McMansions, and suburban sprawl existence that they will never willingly prepare in advance for a future by scaling back, downsizing, or thinking. Our culture is built upon consumption, debt, cheap oil and illusion. Kevin Phillips in American Theocracy concludes that there are so many Americans tied to our unsustainable economic model that they will choose to lie to themselves and be lied to by their leaders rather than think and adapt:

A large number of voters work in or depend on the energy and automobile industries, and still more are invested in them, not just financially but emotionally and culturally. These secondary cadres included racing fans, hobbyists, collectors, and dedicated readers of automotive magazines, as well as the tens of millions of automobile commuters from suburbs and distant exurbs, plus the high number of drivers whose strong self-identification with vehicle types and models serve as thinly disguised political statements. In the United States more than elsewhere, a preference for conspicuous consumption over energy efficiency and conservation is a signal of a much deeper, central divide.

M King Hubbert was a geophysicist and a practical man. He observed data, made realistic assumptions, and came to logical conclusions. He didn’t deal in unrealistic hope and unwarranted optimism. He knew that our culture had become so dependent upon lies and an unsustainable growth model based on depleting oil and debt based “prosperity”. He knew decades ago that we were incapable of dealing with the truth:

“Our principal constraints are cultural. During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential-growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance of exponential growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth.” – M King Hubbert

Our country is at a crucial juncture. It is time for thinkers. It is time for realists. It is time to deal with facts. It is time to drive the ideologues off the stage. Are you tired of lying to yourselves? Are you tired of being lied to by the corporate fascists that run this country? It is time to wake up. Right wing and left wing ideologues will continue to spew lies and misinformation as they are power hungry and care not for the long-term survival of our nation or the unborn generations that depend upon the decisions we make today. It is time to see how we really are.

 “Most of one’s life is one prolonged effort to prevent oneself from thinking. People intoxicate themselves with work so they won’t see how they really are.” –   Aldous Huxley