INSIDEOUS INVOLVEMENT - Stealth Capture of Controlling Financial Repression Information

All U.S. Intelligence Agencies – Including CIA and NSA – to Spy On Americans’ Finances 03-14-13 Washingtonsblog.com

Government to Spy On Everyone Who Banks In the U.S.

Reuters notes:

U.S. to let spy agencies scour Americans’ finances

The Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a massive database that contains financial data on American citizens and others who bank in the country, according to a Treasury Department document seen by Reuters.

***

Financial institutions that operate in the United States are required by law to file reports of “suspicious customer activity,” such as large money transfers or unusually structured bank accounts, to Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN).

The Federal Bureau of Investigation already has full access to the database. However, intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, currently have to make case-by-case requests for information to FinCEN.

The Treasury plan would give spy agencies the ability to analyze more raw financial data than they have ever had before ….

***

The planning document, dated March 4, shows that the proposal is still in its early stages of development, and it is not known when implementation might begin.

***

The plan calls for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence – set up after 9/11 to foster greater collaboration among intelligence agencies – to work with Treasury. The Director of National Intelligence declined to comment.

The excuse given for this intrusion on privacy?

As with the destruction of all of our privacies and other liberties, the excuse given is terrorism.

Indeed, given that the government claims the right to assassinate or indefinitely detain Americans without any due process of law, do you think government employees will hesitate in seizing the assets of Americans labels as “enemies?”

The government has done it before, and President Obama authorized seizure of property again last year.

And the government’s take-down of Megaupload was an exercise of the power to seize all of the legal property held in a storage facility because a handful of crooks have illegal property in theirs.

The Puppet Master: Government 03-31-13 Bill Buckler, author of The Privateer via ZH

The Puppet Master - Government

It has been well and often said that only two types of “paper” money have ever existed in history - those that are already worthless and those that are going to be. Eventually, the physical pieces of paper or plastic which have been given a function as a medium of exchange by government order may remain - but their purchasing power on the market does not. The transition point always comes when the “promises to pay” on which the fiat money depends are exposed beyond the possibility of denial to be the LIES which they always were. History is replete with examples, yet very few ask the obvious question: “Pay? - WITH WHAT??” One of the great wonders of the twentieth century was the lengths to which the economics “profession” proved willing to go to avoid even facing that question let alone trying to answer it.

For hundreds if not thousands of years of human history, the vast majority were all too well aware that the government “lives” on the backs of the people. Today, that long-held knowledge has been astonishingly successfully reversed. Today, the perceived “wisdom” is that the people live on the back of the government. In the realm of the history of ideas, it took many centuries to bring forward the idea that a life might be lived without constant kowtowing to government. It has only taken one century - the time since WW I - to all but totally submerge that legacy in a new wave of government dependency.

The old and tired phrase - “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you” - is met by as much derision as it has ever been when people bemoan the impositions of their rulers. But those same people rely on the government to insulate them from the consequences of any action they may choose to undertake.

There are people who love government, people who hate it, and people who fear it. But when the chips are down, the majority of those same people profess to have “confidence” in the government’s power to protect their “welfare”. Governments count on that confidence” above all other things.

Short On Credit And Long On Faith

The ignorance over the mechanisms and procedures which power the modern global financial and monetary system is fiercely held. When it comes to the general public, we have seen demonstrations of that on numerous occasions over the past few years, the latest being in Cyprus. As was the case in all previous like instances in other nations in Europe and elsewhere, very few of those demonstrating in the street have ever thought about the TRUE nature of the banks, central banks and governments in which they place their “trust”. Many reports on the anger of the Cypriots have talked about the end of the “age of innocence”.

Unfortunately, the term innocence is not defined as the fierce refusal to see what is right in front of one’s face. At the end of his great work, Human Action, Ludwig von Mises dealt with the real problem like this:

“There is no means by which anyone can evade his personal responsibility. Whoever neglects to examine to the best of his abilities all the problems involved voluntarily surrenders his birthright to a selfappointed elite of supermen. In such vital matters blind reliance upon ‘experts’ and uncritical acceptance of popular catchwords and prejudices is tantamount to the abandonment of self-determination and to yielding to other people’s domination. As conditions are today, nothing can be more important to every intelligent man than economics. His own fate and that of his progeny are at stake.”

“Whether we like it or not, it is a fact that economics cannot remain an esoteric branch of knowledge accessible only to small groups of scholars and specialists. Economics deals with society’s fundamental problems; it concerns everyone and belongs to all. It is the main and proper study of every citizen.”

Human Action was published in 1949. The problems which von Mises so brilliantly dissected then are incomparably worse now. But the main failing remains the same. Those who refuse to gain the knowledge necessary to stand for something will fall for anything. The result in Cyprus is the latest in a long line of similar cases. To give one example, how many of the “Occupy Wall Street” crowd could give a cogent explanation of what they were protesting against? The specific instances may differ, but the reaction remains the same: “But ... BUT ... YOU TOLD US IT WAS ‘SAFE’!!”

What makes it worse is that most knew that it was NOT ‘safe’ - but they refused to admit it to themselves.

CENTRALIZED COMMAND AUTHORITY - The Path to Statism

Big Government: An Unnecessary Evil That Should Be Abolished 03-29-13 Brandon Smith of Alt-Market blog,via ZH

There are two types of people in this world; those who worship the ideal of centralized command authority, and those who do not.  Those who value freedom regardless of risk or pain, and those who value slavery in a desperate bid to avoid risk and pain.  When I consider the ultimate folly of man, in the end I look to the meek and unquestioning masses who strive to avoid risk, because it is they who always end up feeding the machines of war, despair, and tyranny.  The power thirsty halls of elitism surely instigate and manipulate the tides of this wretched ocean of quivering souls, but ultimately, the weak-hearted and weak minded make all terrible conquests possible.  

They live by the rule of fear, and their fear drives them to seek control; control of their environment, control of others, and by extension they believe, control of the future.  They attempt to mitigate their overwhelming fear by containing the world and sterilizing it of everything wild, untamed, and unknown.  They dream of a society of pure predictability, and zero responsibility.  They are willing to sacrifice almost anything to attain this position of artificial comfort.    

The concept of “big government” appeals to such people for many reasons…

Government in most cases is nothing but an abstraction.  It is merely a tool that serves the interests of a particular group of people at any given time.  Modern politics is an expression of the foolish cat fight between factions of people to decide who gets to wield the weapon of government and impose their ideology on the rest of us.  At least, that’s what it almost always devolves into.  The great illusion of the system, though, is that ANY group of average people ever actually wields any power. 

The truth is, big governments are always operated by very small and exclusive clubs of root beneficiaries out of the sight of the population. The smaller this dominant group becomes, the more corrupt and criminal the government generally is. 

A government reaches a state of despotism whenever its functions are twisted for the sake of an elite few to the detriment of the common man, and when it ignores the natural inborn rights of the individual for the sake of some fabricated collective . 

If one were to closely examine the birth of every iron-fisted oligarchy throughout history, they would find

A Cyclical Pattern of Centralization;

1. The removal of checks and balances,
2. The removal of legitimate public involvement in the political process,
3. A dependent and infantized citizenry, and
4. The rise of a “bureaucratic class” which regards itself as superior and born to lead. 

All steps taking place within Western societies today.  

Unfortunately, the masses tend to view big government as an inevitability of life; as a natural extension of culture.  Rarely if ever do they ask what tangible purpose it serves.  Are they really getting what they want out of their government?  Or, is the government taking what it wants from them?

I have always found the worshipful attitude that some citizens ascribe to government simultaneously fascinating and disturbing, because these people are not bowing down to a wise and benevolent entity.  Rather, they are bowing down to their own delusions of what they believe that entity to be.  The most dangerous and insidious of governments present themselves as a kind of social vanity mirror.  They allow the citizenry to project their collective desires, biases, shortcomings, and fears, and reflect back an image that entices and placates the majority.  The lies and manipulations of big government are designed to satiate our basest fantasies, but what we see as a concrete edifice of political and legal might, in the end, is a mirage mired in the fog of our own naïve expectations. 

So, the question again arises; if the structure of big government is built upon deceit and misrepresentation, what tangible purpose does it really serve?

The answer is no purpose…at least, no purpose that elevates and enriches the public at large.

Big government is not a “necessary evil”.  It is just evil.  Like the ring of Sauron, it lures in the weak with promises of power, but this power is a ruse.  Each side of our false left/right paradigm, Democrat and Republican, thinks that if only THEY were the bearers of the ring they would “finally use it for good”.  But once in their possession, they are overtaken, overwhelmed, and corrupted by personal temptation. 

The Democratic Party, with all of its proclamations of humanism and respect for civil liberties, is a perfect example.  How quickly did the rank and file Democrats turn away from their anti-war, anti-torture, anti-banker, anti-surveillance, anti-tyranny stance once Barack Obama, a self proclaimed Democrat, was placed in office?  Very quickly!     

And what about the common Republican?  How many of them utterly abandoned their ideals of limited government, reduced spending, Constitutional rights, and Christian understanding as soon as Bush and the Neo-Con regime was installed?  Most of them!

And when all is said and done, who has reaped profits and gained dominance during both disastrous administrations? 

1. The corporate high priests and
2. International banking cartels,

not the oblivious participants of the fake political theater.  Yet, a masochistic cycle of misplaced trust in the system on the part of the masses continues... 

If these latest signs of big government corruption aren’t enough to make the public question the validity of the establishment, I’m not sure what will…

The Rape Of Cyprus

Even in the face of unmitigated government theft, I still hear the occasional rationalization of the Cyprus debacle.  Defenders of the bailout measures (which the EU demanded) allowing the confiscation of private citizen savings to pay off government mismanaged debt, argue two things:

1) The banks that were targeted contained “Russian blood money” and hidden funds, so confiscation really amounted to a “punishment of rich criminals” rather than the Cyprus public. 

2) It is “better” that the citizens go along with the confiscation of a percentage of their accounts, rather than lose everything through collapse. 

Just to be clear, any sizable Russian funds being stored in Cyprus were removed before the bailout measures were instituted.  Therefore, the assertion that such people were “punished” is a lie and a distraction.  The Russian scapegoat was merely being promoted by global financiers and political elites in order to con people around the world (not just those in Cyprus) to accept the concept of government theft of private funds as being “moral” under “certain extraneous circumstances”.  When a government wants you to set aside your conscience in support of an immoral action that serves their interests, they will almost always conjure a false villain and engineered consequences for you to direct your fear and anger at.  Once they can convince you to abandon your own principles to smite an imaginary enemy or avoid a manufactured threat, even if only one time, it will be much easier for them to convince you again a second time. 

Large and corrupt governments love to use the magic of the false choice.  For instance, “…it is better to sacrifice some of your money and your principles to the establishment than it is to live through total collapse of the nation…”  This false choice process, though, never ends.  The offending government will demand more property and more freedom from the citizenry everyday while constantly warning that if we do not submit, the alternative will be “far worse”.

The truth is, Cyprus is not the issue.  What the disaster in Cyprus reflects, however, concerns us all.  It is a moment of precedence; an action which sets the stage for the final destruction of the idea of private property.  It dissolves one of the final barriers to total government control.  Governments and elitists have always stolen from the public through misspent taxation and rampant inflation, but with Cyprus, we see a renewed feudalistic paradigm.  The EU and the banking hierarchy are sending a message to the Western world:  You are now their personal emergency fund, and nothing you own is actually yours anymore. 

When an institution confiscates property and capital at will from a subdued and frightened populace without consent, they are essentially exploiting the labor of that populace.  In any culture or language, this is called “slavery”.

Private Corporations Openly Dictating The Law

As most in the Liberty Movement know, the seeds of Fascism germinate in the soil where the corporate world meets the political world.  This is one of the primary reasons why we will stop at nothing to eliminate entities like the Federal Reserve; a privately run banking cartel that mingles with government yet answers to no one, including Congress or the people.  The Fed has existed since 1913, and has dominated the value and circulation of our currency ever since.  However, today, they are taking on new powers…

As a part of the recent bailout bonanza and the legislation surrounding it, the Fed has begun writing operational policy for other private banking institutions:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/26/us-citigroup-moneylaundering-idUSBRE92P0OO20130326

The transition has been subtle but the implications are dangerous.  The Fed is becoming a regulatory body with expanding influence outside of the electoral process.  It is preparing the ground for other private central banks to become fully unaccountable governing structures.  Right now, they are limited to the banking sector, but eventually, this dynamic will poison every aspect of the financial world until every economic decision will be made without any oversight from the public. 

Moving in a slightly different direction, the Federal Government is beginning to establish law which removes the ability of the public to have any means of redress against particular corporations.  The ‘Monsanto Protection Act’ hidden within the pages of the HR 933 spending bill creates special circumstances that protect the GMO producer from litigation and public examination over the dangerous genetic products it markets.  This legislation, in essence, builds a coalition between Monsanto and the government, and even allows Monsanto in some cases to dictate what the government can and cannot do when dealing with GMO’s. 

The Obama Administration’s support of this bill should be a shock to any environmentally inclined Democrat, and any Democrat who is still willing to defend Obama after learning of this legislation, in my opinion, is a lost cause. 

This move on the part of our government is striking because of its open criminality.  It shows that we have entered a new stage of the totalitarian process; one that will invariably lead us to catastrophe.

Legislation By Special Interest Group

In the halls of big government, politicians do not produce major legislation.  Rather, bureaucrats and think tanks fashion policy while elected officials serve as mouthpieces and middlemen.

How often do we discover after the passage of particularly nefarious pieces of legislation that the politicians who voted for them NEVER read the bills themselves?

This past week, sources within NY governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration claimed that he didn’t actually read the NY Safe Act before championing it, and blamed the vast mistakes and unconstitutional oversteps of the bill on Mayor Bloomberg and the Brady Center.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/gov_faking_care_of_business_execs_9uIcEq5lJPk96ayylaRAGL

Now, I do not believe that Cuomo was not aware of the implications of the Safe Act, even if he didn’t read the bill.  But I do believe that the bill was drafted purely by special interest groups like the Brady Center without any oversight from actual state legislators, who then passed it overnight without a second thought. 

In a big government system, legislative wrangling is non-stop.  A bureaucracy thrives on the endless introduction of new laws and new restrictions, and so it makes perfect sense that political representatives, who now act merely as mascots, never have the time to read all the paperwork.  Why would they read it, when they are no longer making decisions on such policies anyway?  All they have to do is vote how they are told to vote by their handlers, and trust that they will be protected by the establishment from public anger. 

Legislation by proxy is rampant in our government today, and it begs us to consider this - If our government has become so oversized and complex that our elected leaders can no longer oversee the actual writing of legislation and must use private think tanks to write it for them, perhaps we should cut the system down until their work load is manageable.  The alternative is a legal and political structure that is engineered entirely by obscure interest groups with an agenda, and this is highly unacceptable.

Complete Disregard For Individual Rights

In the evolution of big government, there comes a point at which the oligarchy has attained enough power that it feels safe in admitting its true intentions.  Usually, this is done in the name of the “greater good”.  Sometimes, they don’t even try to sugar coat it. 

This past week, NY Mayor Michael Bloomberg in an unguarded moment stated the underlying philosophy behind the impositions of government control over the people.  When questioned about the Constitutionality of the growing drone surveillance grid in American skies, Bloomberg had this to say:

“Everybody wants their privacy, but I don’t know how you’re going to maintain it.  It’s just we’re going into a different world, uncharted, and, like it or not, what people can do, what governments can do, is different. And you can to some extent control, but you can’t keep the tides from coming in.”

“The argument against using automation, it’s this craziness– oh, it’s Big Brother. Get used to it.”

http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/bloomberg-new-york-eventually-surveillance-city-article-1.1296103

And there you have it.  The new age (for Bloomberg and big government elites like him) is a place in which government is separate and above the people.  The government does not exist to serve the citizenry; the citizenry exists to serve the government.  Privacy is a privilege that governments can take anytime they wish.  Citizens, being slaves, should not expect such privileges.  And, this subjugated nightmare world is a place that we must accept as a natural extension of progress.  Big Brother is the future, so grow up and “get used to it”…

I will not be “getting used to it”, and neither will millions of Americans like me.  We'll tear the whole monstrosity down first.              

Institutions of law and order are supposed to reflect the highest inherent principles of humanity and defend those principles regardless of the nature of the times.  Honor and conscience do not suddenly become obsolete simply because danger looms, or catastrophe strikes.

Big government bastardizes the original intent of the founders, who formed a small subservient central federal structure to fulfill one purpose – as a protector of the natural freedoms of the population.  The federal system was never meant to have any domestic power beyond this task, nor should it.  Today, as we have shown over and over again, the centralized political behemoth we live under is absolutely unnecessary and completely destructive to the freedom and prosperity of the culture it was originally tasked to defend.  It can and must be dissolved, and it is time for average Americans to deeply and seriously ponder this option rather than ignorantly assume that because it exists, it should exist.  Otherwise, like a weaponized cancer, it will devour what is left of the healthy fabric of our society and destroy whatever good remains within us.

STATISM - The Deadly Symbiotic Relationship of Politicians and Bankers; Governments and Banks

STATISM - Funding the Enterprise

Expect These Eight Steps From The Government’s Playbook 03-26-13 Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog via ZH

To anyone paying attention, reality is now painfully obvious. These bankrupt, insolvent governments have just about run out of fingers to plug the dikes. And history shows that, once this happens, governments fall back on a very limited playbook:

1. Direct confiscation

   As Cyprus showed us, bankrupt governments are quite happy to plunder people’s bank accounts, especially if it’s a wealthy minority.

   Aside from bank levies, though, this also includes things like seizing retirement accounts (Argentina), increases in civil asset forfeiture (United States), and gold criminalization.

2. Taxes

   Just another form of confiscation, taxation plunders the hard work and talent of the citizenry. But thanks to decades of brainwashing, it’s more socially acceptable. We’ve come to regard taxes as a ‘necessary evil,’ not realizing that the country existed for decades, even centuries, without an income tax.

   Yet when bankrupt governments get desperate enough, they begin imposing new taxes… primarily WEALTH taxes (Argentina) or windfall profits taxes (United States in the 1970s).

3. Inflation

   This is indirect confiscation– the slow, gradual plundering of people’s savings. Again, governments have been quite successful at inculcating a belief that inflation is also a necessary evil. They’re also adept at fooling people with phony inflation statistics.

4. Capital Controls

   Governments can, do, and will restrict the free-flow of capital across borders. They’ll prevent you from moving your own money to a safer jurisdiction, forcing you to keep your hard earned savings at home where it can be plundered and devalued.

   We’re seeing this everywhere in the developed world… from withdrawal limits in Europe to cash-sniffing dogs at border checkpoints. And it certainly doesn’t help when everyone from the IMF to Nobel laureate Paul Krugman argue in favor of Capital Controls.

5. Wage and Price controls

   When even the lowest common denominator in society realizes that prices are getting higher, governments step in and ‘fix’ things by imposing price controls.

   Occasionally this also includes wage controls… though wage increases tend to be vastly outpaced by price increases.

   Of course, as any basic economics textbook can illustrate, price controls never work and typically lead to shortages and massive misallocations.

6. Wage and Price controls– on STEROIDS

   When the first round of price controls don’t work, the next step is to impose severe penalties for not abiding by the terms.

   In the days of Diocletian’s Edict on Prices in the 4th century AD, any Roman caught violating the price controls was put to death.

   In post-revolutionary France, shopkeepers who violated the “Law of Maximum” were fleeced of their private property… and a national spy system was put into place to enforce the measures.

7. Increased regulation

   Despite being completely broke, governments will dramatically expand their ranks in a last desperate gasp to envelop the problem in sheer size.

   In the early 1920s, for example, the number of bureaucratic officials in the Weimar Republic increased 242%, even though the country was flat broke from its Great War reparation payments and hyperinflation episode.

   The increase in both regulations and government officials criminalizes and/or controls almost every aspect of our existence… from what we can/cannot put in our bodies to how we are allowed to raise our own children.

8. War and National Emergency

   When all else fails, just invade another country. Pick a fight. Keep people distracted by work them into a frenzy over men in caves… or some completely irrelevant island

GOVERNMENT TRANSPARENCY - Quietly Shrinking

Government Transparency Hits Record Low 03-14-13 Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog via ZH

“It’s National Security”…Government Transparency Hits Record Low in 2012 Under Obama

Surprise, surprise... the 'most transparent administration ever' is, well, the least transparent.  Not that any of you are shocked by this revelation, but a new report by the Associated Press demonstrates just how secret our government and intelligence agencies have become.  Not only did they claim “national security” over and over like a bunch of drunk parrots, they also claimed the need to protect “internal deliberations.”  Specifically, the number of times the government withheld or censored reports in 2012 was 479,000 times, up 22% from 2011.  The CIA denied 60% of requests, up from 49% in 2011.  From the Associated Press:

The AP examined more than 5,600 data elements measuring the administration’s performance on government transparency since Obama’s election.

When the government withheld or censored records, it cited exceptions built into the law to avoid turning over materials more than 479,000 times, a roughly 22 percent increase over the previous year.

In a year of intense public interest over deadly U.S. drones, the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, terror threats and more, the government cited national security to withhold information at least 5,223 times — a jump over 4,243 such cases in 2011 and 3,805 cases in Obama’s first year in office. The secretive CIA last year became even more secretive: Nearly 60 percent of 3,586 requests for files were withheld or censored for that reason last year, compared with 49 percent a year earlier.

U.S. courts are loath to overrule the administration whenever it cites national security. A federal judge, Colleen McMahon of New York, in January ruled against The New York Times and the American Civil Liberties Union to see records about the government’s legal justification for drone attacks and other methods it has used to kill terrorism suspects overseas, including American citizens. She cited an “Alice in Wonderland” predicament in which she was expected to determine what information should be revealed but unable to challenge the government’s secrecy claim. Part of her ruling was sealed and made available only to the government’s lawyers.

Think about how scary that is.  Judges just accept government claims and then the public isn’t allowed to see the relevant parts of her ruling.

Let’s now finish with this statement from Alexander Abdo, an ACLU staff attorney for its national security project:

"In some ways, the Obama administration is actually even more aggressive on secrecy than the Bush administration."

Full article here.

RULING CLASS - Washington Relection Bias

Historical chart illustrates the biggest problem in America today: Congressional Recidivism

Many fine writers have observed that there exists a de facto Ruling Class in Washington. Once men and women get to Congress, no matter how inept, inane, or diabolical they prove to be, the power of incumbency makes dislodging them akin to prying a Reese's Cup from Michael Moore's pudgy fingers.

An exhaustive study -- "Reelection Rates of Incumbents in the U.S. House" (PDF) -- performed in 2006 illustrates the dramatic changes in reelection rates since America's founding. It aggregates the results of every House election cycle between the years 1790 and 2006.

Over the years, the reelection rate of incumbents has increased steadily, likely the results of pork, quid pro quo funding to campaign contributors, and legislative skulduggery (the McCain-Feingold bill, for instance, could have been called The Incumbent Protection Act):

Until the Woodrow Wilson era, incumbent reelection rates hovered between 70 and 80 percent. Since then, however, massive wealth redistribution programs at the federal level -- the New Deal, the Square Deal, the Fair Deal, Great Society, etc. -- began cementing incumbents in place. Constituents dependent upon federal largesse became permanently addicted to these programs and the incumbents who fueled them.

Had the various branches of government shown fidelity to the Constitution, none of these programs would have come to be.

Term limits are one option to resisting incessant federal power grabs, but so too would be leveling the playing field for challengers.

Only a return to Constitutional government will solve the Congressional Recidivism problem.

DISTRUST - Corruption, Crony Capitalism and Trampling on the Bill of Rights Lead to Widespread Distrust

Only 30% of Americans Trust Our Government 03-11-13 WashingtonsBlog

DEATH OF MAINSTREAM JOURNALISM - An Example

Sequestration And The Death Of Mainstream Journalism 03-10-13 Peter Klein at Organizations and Markets blog,via ZH

Much virtual ink has been spilled over the decline of the mainstream media, measured by circulation, advertising revenue, or a general sense of irrelevance. Usual explanations relate to the changing economics of news gathering and publication, the growth of social media, demographic and cultural shifts, and the like. These are all important but the main issue, I believe, is the characteristics of the product itself. Specifically, news consumers increasingly recognize that the

"mainstream media outlets are basically public relations services for government agencies, large companies, and other influential organizations."

Journalists do very little actual journalism — independent investigation, analysis, reporting.

1. They are told what stories are “important” and, for each story,
2. there is an official Narrative, explaining the key issues and acceptable opinions on these issues.
3. Journalists’ primary sources are off-the-record, anonymous briefings by government officials or other insiders, who provide the Narrative.

A news outlet that deviates from the Narrative by doing its own investigation or offering its own interpretation risks being cut off from the flow of anonymous briefings (and, potentially, excluded from the White House Press Corps and similar groups), which means a loss of prestige and a lower status. Basically, the mainstream news outlets offer their readers a neatly packaged summary of the politically correct positions on various issues. In exchange for sticking to the Narrative, they get access to official sources. Give up one, you lose the other. Readers are beginning to recognize this, and they don’t want to pay.

Nowhere is this situation more apparent than the mainstream reporting on budget sequestration. The Narrative is that sequestration imposes large and dangerous cuts — $85 billion, a Really Big Number! — to essential government services, and that the public reaction should be outrage at the President and Congress (mostly Congressional Republicans) for failing to “cut a deal.” You can picture the reporters and editors grabbing their thesauruses to find the right words to describe the cuts — “sweeping,” “drastic,” “draconian,” “devastating.” In virtually none of these stories will you find any basic facts about the budget, which are easily found on the CBO’s website, e.g.:

• Sequestration reduces the rate of increase in federal spending. It does not cut a penny of actual (nominal) spending. 
• The CBO’s estimate of the reduction in increased spending between 2012 and 2013 is $43 billion, not $85 billion.
• Total federal spending in 2012 was $3.53 trillion. The President’s budget request for 2013 was $3.59 trillion, an increase of $68 billion (about 2%). Under sequestration, total federal spending in 2013 will be $3.55 trillion, an increase of only $25 billion (a little less than 1%). 
• Did you catch that? Under sequestration, total federal spending goes up, just by less than it would have gone up without sequestration. This is what the Narrative calls a “cut” in spending! It’s as if you asked your boss for a 10% raise, and got only a 5% raise, then told your friends you got a 5% pay cut.
• Of course, these are nominal figures. In real terms, expenditures could go down, depending on the rate of inflation. Even so, the cuts would be tiny — 1 or 2%.
• The news media also talk a lot about “debt reduction,” but what they mean is a reduction in the rate at which the debt increases. Even with sequestration, there is a projected budget deficit — the government will spend more than it takes in — during every year until 2023, the last year of the CBO estimates. The Narrative grudgingly admits that sequestration might be necessary to reduce the national debt, but sequestration doesn’t even do that. It’s as if you went on a “dramatic” weight-loss plan by gaining 5 pounds every year instead of 10.

This is all public information, easily accessible from the usual places. But mainstream news reporters can’t be bothered to look it up, and don’t feel any need to, because they have the Narrative, which tells them what to say. Seriously, have you read anything in the New York Times, Washington Post, or Wall Street Journal or heard anything on CNN or MSNBC clarifying that the “cuts” are reductions in the rate of increase? Even Wikipedia, much maligned by the establishment media, gets it right: “ sequestration refers to across the board reductions to the planned increases in federal spending that began on March 1, 2013.” If we have Wikipedia, why on earth would we pay for expensive government PR firms?

MILITARIZATION OF POLICE - Unwitting Building Blocks of Statism

How Cops Became Soldiers: An Interview with Police Militarization Expert Radley Balko 03-05-13 Motherboard

POLITICAL ELITE - The Strategy to Place Power in the Hands of Presidential Appointees

The Growing Tyranny of the Political Elite 02-27-13 American Thinker

Recently, the White House released a photo of the president shooting skeet.  But where's the snap of him fishing for bass?  Apparently the White House felt compelled to portray Obama as a marksman in light of the widespread pushback over the administration's gun control agenda but felt no urgency to defend the prospect of the EPA's potential regulation of lead in fishing weights.  Yet the agency seriously entertained just such a ban last year.  What's next?  The lead in barbells?

For hundreds of years, human beings have used lead for many purposes, and life on earth has not exactly come to an end.  Now we are told that the lead used in hunting and fishing is harming animals and fish, and it may just have to stop.  The scary thing is that one individual, an appointed bureaucrat directing the Environmental Protection Agency, has the power to impose such a ban.

The pattern is familiar with this administration.  A small cadre of elite administrators, czars, judges, or politicians -- often just one person -- thinks it (or he or she) has the right to decide what's best for 320 million Americans. Without adequate information, debate, or cost analysis, regulations are written and imposed, and no one, not even the people's representatives in the House of Representatives, has the right to influence them.

Political elites have always existed in America, and during the past 100 years they have gravitated toward the Democratic Party.  FDR's "brain trust," which included Guy Tugwell and Hugh Johnson, was just one example.  But perhaps no administration in our history has been controlled by elites to the extent that the Obama presidency has.  With academics like Cass Sunstein and crony capitalists like those backing green energy projects calling the shots, the elite have stepped in, determined to rule in place of the public will.

What is now happening was predicted -- and celebrated -- over forty years ago by Robert L. Heilbroner, one of the darlings of the New Left.  

In The Limits of American Capitalism, Heilbroner laid out a plan by which the innately conservative leanings of the American people could be quashed and replaced by the centralized control of a political elite.  Heilbroner's book concludes with a chilling vision of the way forward.  What he advocates is, in effect, a socialist totalitarian state, where the government controls every aspect of human life.  In the name of reform, this statist system would regulate if not nationalize all major industries -- but it would also go farther than that.

What Heilbroner envisaged was the rise of a ruling elite centralized in government, media, and the universities.  This group of decision-makers would operate "on behalf of" the public and on the basis of "scientific principles" of social control.  As Heilbroner writes, "[n]ot alone economic affairs ... but the numbers and location of the population, its genetic quality, the manner of social domestication of children, the choice of lifework -- even the duration of life itself -- are all apt to become subjects for scientific investigation and control" (The Limits of American Capitalism, New York, 1966, pp. 129-130).

Heilbroner's books were bestsellers in the 1960s, widely read and admired by liberals everywhere.  They were, in effect, neo-Keynesian, pro-statist instruction manuals studied by the likes of Bill Ayers and Cass Sunstein, President Obama's tutors in state control and regulation.

Heibroner's books popularized the liberal premise that the political elite has the right and obligation to make fundamental decisions on behalf of the mass of citizens.  In doing so, Heilbroner understood, the elite must find ways to subvert the naturally conservative inclinations of the people -- especially those lumpen-headed businessmen whom Heilbroner so despised.  

• Decision-making must be shifted from individuals and elected representatives to bureaucrats and judges appointed by leftist politicians.  
• Public opinion must be shaped and molded by elitist academics and journalists.  
• The will of the state must be imposed, by violence if necessary.  

This was the future of America, according to Robert L. Heilbroner, and it is the vision of America adopted by those young activists in the 1960s and 1970s who now constitute the leadership of the Democratic Party.

Heilbroner believed that it would take hundreds of years to overturn democracy in America, in part because of

1. The nation's widespread support of capitalism and
2. The country's pesky tradition of individual rights.  

He noted, however, that the process could be speeded up in the event of a severe economic crisis.  

Another great national depression or prolonged recession would make it possible for government to enact a series of "reforms" that would shift control from the private sector to government.  

Government would then control not just major sectors of the economy, but the personal lives of all citizens.  

• Their incomes,
• Their health care,
• Their educations,
• Their home mortgages,
• Their communications and entertainment,
• Their access to news and information

would all fall under the control of the political elite.  At that point, Heilbroner believed, utopia would be at hand.

Everything that Heilbroner predicted is now coming to pass.  

• Attorney General Holder has waged a virtual war against Arizona's attempt to defend itself against unchecked immigration.
•  Congress has created an office of consumer affairs with broad powers to regulate financial transactions.
• A European-style bureaucrat has been appointed to direct the rationing of medical services.  
• The EPA believes that it has the authority not just to police hunting and fishing supplies, but to regulate carbon dioxide, a natural product of the act of breathing.

The preferred modus operandi, in fact, is to appoint a single individual with the power to control some large part of American life.  So much power has now been concentrated in the hands of a handful of appointees, most of them reporting directly to the president, that it is now doubtful whether America can still be considered a democratic nation.  

Government has become the enemy of the people, because it is now in the hands of left-wing elitists who are opposed to traditional American values and who have only contempt for the democratic process.

Fortunately, Americans are becoming more aware of the concentration of power within the new political elite and more skeptical of the elite's ability to govern.  While the president's job approval rating has for the moment risen following his election victory, a growing number of Americans "strongly disapprove" of his performance.  An even larger percentage finds that Congress, with leaders like Democrat Harry Reid in charge of the Senate, is incapable of governing.

What's needed is to make 2014 another 2010 and throw the rascals out -- all of them who support Obama's unconstitutional "recess" appointments and agency power grabs.

ADVANCING STATISM - Tools of Change

CREATING SOCIETAL CRISIS

Lord Keynes and Vladimir Lenin knew this clearly (thank you Paul Brodsky of www.qbamco.com for the expanded quote):

“Lenin is said to have declared that the best way to destroy the capitalist system was 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. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some (authors note: banksters, leviathan government, crony capitalists, and special interest elites).

The sight of this arbitrary rearrangement of riches strikes not only at security, but at confidence in the equity of the existing distribution of wealth. Those to whom the system brings windfalls, beyond their deserts and even beyond their expectations or desires, become 'profiteers,' who are the object of the hatred of the bourgeoisie, whom the inflationism has impoverished, not less than of the proletariat.

As the inflation proceeds and the real value of the currency fluctuates wildly from month to month, all permanent relations between debtors and creditors, which form the ultimate foundation of capitalism, become so utterly disordered as to be almost meaningless; and the process of wealth-getting degenerates into a gamble and a lottery.

Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose”

UNSOUND MONEY (money printed out of thin air, backed by nothing, yielding nothing, always losing purchasing power and redeemable in nothing) is the father of the "something for nothing societies" we live in today. 

POLITICIANS (Psychopaths and Sociopaths) historically have risen to power and met their demise on the shoals of inflation and deflation.

"We all know what to do, we just don't know how to get re-elected after we have done it."

"When it gets serious, you have to lie"
- Jean Claude Juncker, prime minister of Luxembourg

Fixing the bad policies is NOW impossible until the pain of economic and societal failure FORCES the

• public servants and their
• handmaidens
  • crony capitalists,
  • banksters,
  • special interest elites

to change policies or be destroyed.

FIAT CREDIT MONEY IS A WEALTH CONFISCATION DEVICE!

The greatest transfer of wealth from those that hold/store it in paper to those that don’t is underway!

BONDS: IOU’s denominated in IOU’s

PRICE is what you pay, VALUE is what you get. WEALTH is the the accumulation of VALUE.

HOW DO YOU DETERMINE VALUE: REAL Wealth creation is producing more than you consume thereby creating capital to fuel savings and investment. Within a SOUND money economy, money is a store of value and wealth can be denominated in Money. In a fiat economy wealth must be denomiated in value. Asset valuations are based on Discounted Free Cash Flow (unemcumbered, inflation adjusted), then adjusted for currency debasement.

WHAT WILL CAUSE HYPERINFLATION?

"There are TWO reasons why INFLATION has not really accelerated to hyperinflation as all this money has been PRINTED and it is:

The second reason as the real economic activity must collapse as you saw in Zimbabwe, Wiemar Germany, and as you see TODAY in socialist paradises known as Venezuela and Argentina. 

The developed world is just a step or two behind them, but rapidly following the same path…"

"There are TWO sets of canaries in the coal mine concerning the future and both singing very different tunes.  In one corner you have: Ray Dalio of Bridgewater, Bill Gross of Pimco, Kyle Bass of Hayman capital, George Soros, David Einhorn all telling you to take your paper money get into real things, gold, commodities, CASH flowing businesses, etc.  In Austrian terms this is called the INDIRECT exchange.  It is sound advice from REAL money managers, in fact some of the best in the world.

In the other corner you have Paul Krugman, Larry Summers, Tim Geithner, Barack Obama, Mario Draghli, Francois Hollande, Mariano Rajoy, Mervyn King, Mark Carney, Ben Bernanke, Martin Wolf and The European Commission to name a few.  Telling you they “will do whatever it takes” and PRINT THE MONEY as required.  All Socialists and academics, with NO experience in the real world or have experience in the belly of the beast known as Banks and Government Treasury departments.

CONSTITUTION IN PERIL - Bill of Rights Under Attack

How Many Rights Have Americans REALLY Lost? 02-21-13 George Washington Blog

Preface: While a lot of people talk about the loss of our Constitutional liberties, people usually speak in a vague, generalized manner … or focus on only one issue and ignore the rest.

This post explains the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution – and provides a scorecard on the extent of the loss of each right.

First Amendment

The 1st Amendment protects speech, religion, assembly and the press:

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.

However, the government is arresting those speaking out … and violently crushing peaceful assemblies which attempt to petition the government for redress.

A federal judge found that the law allowing indefinite detention of Americans without due process has a “chilling effect” on free speech. And see this and this.

The threat of being labeled a terrorist for exercising our First Amendment rights certainly violates the First Amendment.   The government is using laws to crush dissent, and it’s gotten so bad that even U.S. Supreme Court justices are saying that we are descending into tyranny.

For example, the following actions may get an American citizen living on U.S. soil labeled as a “suspected terrorist” today:

• Being young (if you live near a battle zone, you are fair game; and see this)

• Using social media

• Reporting or doing journalism

• Speaking out against government policies

• Protesting anything (such as participating in the “Occupy” movement)

• Questioning war (even though war reduces our national security; and see this)

• Criticizing the government’s targeting of innocent civilians with drones (although killing innocent civilians with drones is one of the main things which increases terrorism. And see this)

• Asking questions about pollution (even at a public Congressional hearing?)

• Paying cash at an Internet cafe

• Asking questions about Wall Street shenanigans

• Holding gold

• Creating alternative currencies

• Stocking up on more than 7 days of food (even though all Mormons are taught to stockpile food, and most Hawaiians store up on extra food)

• Having bumper stickers saying things like “Know Your Rights Or Lose Them”

• Investigating factory farming

• Infringing a copyright

• Taking pictures or videos

• Talking to police officers

• Wearing a hoodie

• Driving a van

• Writing on a piece of paper

• (Not having a Facebook account may soon be added)

And holding the following beliefs may also be considered grounds for suspected terrorism:

• Being frustrated with “mainstream ideologies”

• Valuing online privacy

• Supporting Ron Paul or being a libertarian

• Liking the Founding Fathers

• Being a Christian

• Being anti-tax, anti-regulation or for the gold standard

• Being “reverent of individual liberty”

• Being “anti-nuclear”

• “Believe in conspiracy theories”

• “A belief that one’s personal and/or national “way of life” is under attack”

• “Impose strict religious tenets or laws on society (fundamentalists)”

• “Insert religion into the political sphere”

• “Those who seek to politicize religion”

• “Supported political movements for autonomy”

• Being “anti-abortion”

• Being “anti-Catholic”

• Being “anti-global”

• “Suspicious of centralized federal authority”

• “Fiercely nationalistic (as opposed to universal and international in orientation)”

• “A belief in the need to be prepared for an attack either by participating in … survivalism”

• Opposing genetically engineered food

• Opposing surveillance

Of course, Muslims are more or less subject to a separate system of justice in America.

And 1st Amendment rights are especially chilled when power has become so concentrated that the same agency which spies on all Americans also decides who should be assassinated.

Second Amendment

The 2nd Amendment states:

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.

Gun control and gun rights advocates obviously have very different views about whether guns are a force for violence or for good.

But even a top liberal Constitutional law expert reluctantly admits  that the right to own a gun is as important a Constitutional right as freedom of speech or religion:

Like many academics, I was happy to blissfully ignore the Second Amendment. It did not fit neatly into my socially liberal agenda.

***

It is hard to read the Second Amendment and not honestly conclude that the Framers intended gun ownership to be an individual right. It is true that the amendment begins with a reference to militias: “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.” Accordingly, it is argued, this amendment protects the right of the militia to bear arms, not the individual.

Yet, if true, the Second Amendment would be effectively declared a defunct provision. The National Guard is not a true militia in the sense of the Second Amendment and, since the District and others believe governments can ban guns entirely, the Second Amendment would be read out of existence.

***

More important, the mere reference to a purpose of the Second Amendment does not alter the fact that an individual right is created. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is stated in the same way as the right to free speech or free press. The statement of a purpose was intended to reaffirm the power of the states and the people against the central government. At the time, many feared the federal government and its national army. Gun ownership was viewed as a deterrent against abuse by the government, which would be less likely to mess with a well-armed populace.

Considering the Framers and their own traditions of hunting and self-defense, it is clear that they would have viewed such ownership as an individual right — consistent with the plain meaning of the amendment.

None of this is easy for someone raised to believe that the Second Amendment was the dividing line between the enlightenment and the dark ages of American culture. Yet, it is time to honestly reconsider this amendment and admit that … here’s the really hard part … the NRA may have been right. This does not mean that Charlton Heston is the new Rosa Parks or that no restrictions can be placed on gun ownership. But it does appear that gun ownership was made a protected right by the Framers and, while we might not celebrate it, it is time that we recognize it.

The gun control debate – including which weapons and magazines are banned – is still in flux …

Third Amendment

The 3rd Amendment prohibits the government forcing people to house soldiers:

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.

Hey … we’re still honoring one of the Amendments! Score one for We the People!

SECURITY-SURVEILLANCE COMPLEX - Stealth and Unconstitutional

Meet Stingray Surveillance: The "Unconstitutional, All-You-Can-Eat Data Buffet" 02-13-13 Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,via ZH

It’s getting impossible to keep track of all the new spy tools being rolled out by the police state in the name of “fighting terrorism”, aka spying on innocent American citizens unconstitutionally.  I thought that I had my hands full the other day with ARGUS: The World’s Highest Resolution Video Surveillance Platform, but this “Stingray” system is already being deployed illegally in cities throughout the United States.  As the EFF states: “The Stingray is the digital equivalent of the pre-revolutionary British soldier.”  From the EFF:

The device, which acts as a fake cell phone tower, essentially allows the government to electronically search large areas for a particular cell phone’s signal—sucking down data on potentially thousands of innocent people along the way. At the same time, law enforcement has attempted use them while avoiding many of the traditional limitations set forth in the Constitution, like individualized warrants. This is why we called the tool “an unconstitutional, all-you-can-eat data buffet.”

Recently, LA Weekly reported the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) got a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant in 2006 to buy a stingray. The original grant request said it would be used for “regional terrorism investigations.” Instead LAPD has been using it for just about any investigation imaginable.

Of course, we’ve seen this pattern over and over and over. The government uses “terrorism” as a catalyst to gain some powerful new surveillance tool or ability, and then turns around and uses it on ordinary citizens, severely infringing on their civil liberties in the process.

Stingrays are particularly odious given they give police dangerous “general warrant” powers, which the founding fathers specifically drafted the Fourth Amendment to prevent. In pre-revolutionary America, British soldiers used “general warrants” as authority to go house-to-house in a particular neighborhood, looking for whatever they please, without specifying an individual or place to be searched.

The Stingray is the digital equivalent of the pre-revolutionary British soldier.

On March 28th, the judge overseeing the Rigmaiden case, which we wrote about previously, will hold a hearing on whether evidence obtained using a stringray should be suppressed.  It will be one of the first times a judge will rules on the constitutionality of these devices in federal court.

It will be interesting to see what happens in late March.  I will be watching.

Full article here.

As Secretive "Stingray" Surveillance Tool Becomes More Pervasive, Questions Over Its Illegality Increase 02-12-13

THE ROADMAP - Argentina Shows the Way

This Is What Textbook Capital Controls Look Like 02-12-13 Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog, via ZH

Selling snake oil and issuing unbacked paper currency are not so different. They're both wildly successful ploys for the guys pulling the strings. And they're both complete scams that depend solely on the confidence of a willing, ignorant public.

But once the confidence begins to erode, the fraud unravels very, very quickly, and the perpetrators resort to desperate measures in order to keep the party going.

In the case of fiat currency, governments in terminal decline resort to a very limited, highly predictable playbook in which they try to control... everything...

1. imposing capital controls,
2. exchange controls,
3. wage controls,
4. price controls,
5. trade controls,
6. border controls, and
7. sometimes even people controls.

These tactics have been used since the ancient Sumerians. This time is not different.

Today, Argentina presents the most clear-cut example. Here the 'mafiocracy' unites organized crime, big business, and politicians to plunder wealth from Argentine citizens. Just since 2010, President Cristina Fernandez has--

* Nationalized private pensions, plundering the retirement savings of her people.

* Increased tax rates across the board-- income, VAT, import duties, etc. as well as imposed a new wealth tax.

* Inflated Argentina's money supply, printing currency with wanton abandon; M2 money supply has increased 215% in the past three years.

* Driven the value and purchasing power of the currency down by 50%. Street-level inflation is now 30%+ per year.

* Made a mockery of official statistics, comically understating the level of Argentine inflation and unemployment. She even began punishing economists for publishing private estimates of inflation that didn't jive with the government figures.

* Taken over control of one industry after another, most notably the nationalization of Spanish oil firm YPF's Argentine assets.

* Imposed export controls of agriculture products from beef to grains, forcing growers to sell at artificially lower domestic prices.

* Imposed capital controls, reducing her citizens' capability to dump their poorly performing currency and hold gold, dollars, euros, or anything else.

* Imposed a two month 'price freeze' on items in the supermarket, and encouraged retail consumers to rat out any grocer that doesn't abide by the government order.

* Imposed controls over the media, most recently ordered an advertising ban in Argentine newspapers (weakening their financial position).

Cristina's policies here are leading to shortages in everything from food to fuel to electricity. Hardly a month goes by without major strikes and disruptions to public services. The purchasing power of their currency is diminishing rapidly. And most people are completely trapped.

Of course, there were a handful of people who saw the writing on the wall. They learned the important lesson never to trust their government. They moved their savings to stable foreign banks. They purchased property abroad. They bought gold and silver, and stored it overseas. They were prepared when the plundering began.

The developed West is rapidly heading down this path. Europe is beginning to impose capital controls, and the IMF has sanctioned them. The US is rapidly printing its currency into oblivion, and confidence is eroding quickly. Russia just purchased an historic amount of gold, choosing real assets over more US dollar reserves.

It would be foolish to think the same things can't happen in the West. And even if it never happens, would you be any worse off for taking some of these basic steps?

STATISM - It Takes A Compliant Society

Seldom do moral questions come into the discussions of eliminating enemies of the state.

Drone Wrath for a Compliant Society 02-10-13 Sartre BATR.org

The military has transformed warfare into a deadly computer game with drone weapons. Media programs like Weaponology or Future Weapons on the Military Channel provide detailed examples of the lethalness of autonomous technology. The use of drones as the preferred method of carnage is well established. Seldom do moral questions come into the discussions of eliminating enemies of the state. The rules of engagement vested in international law and the Geneva Convention, either ignored or rewritten for high-tech 21st Century combat, becomes the foundational tactic to maintain the killing force of the grand empire.  

The video, Remote Control War, is an informative summary of the capabilities and uses of a drone air force. After viewing the range of aftermaths from GPS targeting, ponder the role of perpetual DARPA conflict. The distress from invented terrorism is used against the American public as a tool to incrementally relinquish basic rights and individual liberties. Matt K. Lewis offers up this assessment in an item published by This Week, Obama, drones, and the blissful ignorance of Americans.

"And here's the ugly truth: Obama is giving us what we want . . .

Americans, it turns out, don't really have the stomach for the unseemly business of taking prisoners, extracting information from prisoners, and then (maybe) going through the emotional, time consuming, and costly business of a trial.

American citizens want someone who will make the big, bad world disappear. Problems only exist if we have to confront them. Obama has made warfare more convenient for us — and less emotionally taxing."

Beware of the unseen predators over foreign lands for the blowback is the real source of the instability and a root cause of hatred for American hegemony. What you are witnessing is the imbalance between Legislature and the Presidency. The war powers responsibility of Congress, long surrendered to the imperial commander and chief of killing incorporated is a national tragedy.

In another TW article, Peter Weber raises an essential question, Will Congress curb Obama's drone strikes?, provides a mainstream assessment that seems lacking within the federal government.

"Since at least the 9/11 attacks, Congress has been less than confrontational with the White House over presidential powers to conduct war and anti-terrorism operations, to the dismay of civil libertarians. So we had President George W. Bush's warrantless domestic wiretaps retroactively green-lighted by Congress, torture only officially nixed by a change in presidents, and a big ramping-up of lethal drones being used to kill terrorism suspects under President Obama. But Obama's decision to kill at least two Americans working for al Qaeda in Yemen in 2011, and the legal justification that emerged in a leaked white paper (read below) this week, has caused a big, unusual outcry from both the Left and Right."

The esteemed New York Times, part of the Obama fawning media, continues to carry water for the administration in Congress to See Memo Backing Drone Attacks on Americans.

"This week, NBC News obtained an unclassified, shorter "white paper" that detailed some of the legal analysis about killing a citizen and was apparently derived from the classified Awlaki memorandum. The paper said the United States could target a citizen if he was a senior operational leader of Al Qaeda involved in plots against the country and if his capture was not feasible."

One might be accused of NYT bashing if you dare point out that their reporting resembles a briefing session from White House press secretary, Jay Carney. The use of warbots on home soil is a short step from spreading terminal sanctions of homeland security.

Reason.com warns of the threat from a robotic police state and the common ground to oppose this misuse of surveillance in the essay, The Bipartisan Opposition to Domestic Drones.

"Both the progressive American Civil Liberties Union and the libertarian Rutherford Institute cheer legislative efforts to place strict limits on unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs. And, prodded by privacy groups, state lawmakers nationwide-Republicans and Democrats alike-have launched an all-out offensive against the unmanned aerial vehicles.

The prospect of cheap, small, portable flying video surveillance machines threatens to eradicate existing practical limits on aerial monitoring and allow for pervasive surveillance, police fishing expeditions and abusive use of these tools in way that could eliminate the privacy Americans have traditionally enjoyed in their movements and activities," the bill's author, Sen. Robyn Driscoll, a Democrat from Billings, testified."

The ACLU presents a list of provisions that the Civil Liberties organization advocates. AlsoRead the ACLU's full report on domestic drones. "Congress has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to change airspace rules to make it much easier for police nationwide to use domestic drones, but the law does not include badly needed privacy protections. The ACLU recommends the following safeguards:

USAGE LIMITS: Drones should be deployed by law enforcement only with a warrant, in an emergency, or when there are specific and articulable grounds to believe that the drone will collect evidence relating to a specific criminal act.

DATA RETENTION: Images should be retained only when there is reasonable suspicion that they contain evidence of a crime or are relevant to an ongoing investigation or trial.

POLICY: Usage policy on domestic drones should be decided by the public's representatives, not by police departments, and the policies should be clear, written, and open to the public.

ABUSE PREVENTION & ACCOUNTABILITY: Use of domestic drones should be subject to open audits and proper oversight to prevent misuse.

WEAPONS: Domestic drones should not be equipped with lethal or non-lethal weapons."

Relying on Rutherford Institute Model Resolution, Charlottesville Becomes First U.S. City to Limit Police Drones; TRI Calls on Rest of Country to Follow Suit.

"In a 3-2 vote, members of the Charlottesville City Council adopted a resolution drafted by The Rutherford Institute which urges the Virginia General Assembly to prevent police agencies from utilizing drones outfitted with anti-personnel devices such as tasers and tear gas and prohibit the government from using data recorded via police spy drones in criminal prosecutions. In so doing, Charlottesville has become the first city in the country to limit the use of police spy drones, providing momentum and inspiration for other cities across the country to follow suit.

The passage of the resolution, which also places a two-year moratorium on the use of drones within city limits, coincides with a Department of Justice memo leaked to the media which outlines the Obama administration's rationale for assassinating U.S. citizens via drone strike. With at least 30,000 drones expected to occupy U.S. airspace by 2020, John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute, has called on government officials at the local, state, and federal level to do their part to safeguard Americans against the use of drones by police. Rutherford Institute attorneys have drafted and made available to the public language that can be adopted at all levels of government in order to address concerns being raised about the threats posed by drones to citizens' privacy."

When was the last time that a civil liberty issue developed an alliance of purpose to oppose the despotism of the totalitarian murder regime?

The Judge Napolitano YouTube: Killing Americans with Drones is Nowhere Justifiable Under The Constitution, goes unheeded as the country sinks into a zombie trance of public acquiescence. The compliant society is rooted in denial and disbelief.

Even so, some of the more perceptive state legislatures are waking up to the danger of domestic drone operations. Texas "Anti Drone" Laws Would be Toughest in USA, and "prohibit federal law enforcement or federal officials from flying drones over Texas to spy on random citizens. Only individuals who are suspected with reasonable cause could be the target of drone surveillance, and only with a warrant issued by a judge of an open and public court."

Politico details, "Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell has not decided whether he will sign a bill barring state and local agencies from using drones for two years — the first legislation of its kind in the country that passed through the state’s General Assembly Tuesday with bipartisan support."

The National Defense Authorization Act is the latest unconstitutional measure that targets domestic citizens for punitive punishment. Due process, now reduced to "Due or Die" is the harbinger of the use of domestic drone capitulation. What will it take to awaken submissive citizens that the capability of foreign deployed drones easily can be weaponized for local operations?

The Obama administration has demonstrated an eagerness to trump up a bogus domestic terrorist threat that requires a surrender of our Bill of Rights. Reaper drones are a much greater peril than just a violation of privacy. A technology that is rapidly expanding and designed to militarize the police state into a killing field of reputed rebellious Americans - violates true national security.

"Making warfare more convenient and less emotionally taxing" is the direct opposite of the horror of battle. When a false flag surgical strike targets your location and your person, it will not be an episode in a computer simulation.

STATISM - Facts versus Illusions

All Is Well 02-06-13 Jim Quinn of The Burning Platform blog, via ZH

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

I woke up this past Saturday morning and opened my local paper to find out that all was well. An Associated Press article declared a healthy jobs market, fantastic auto sales, a surging housing market, and a stock market rocketing to new all-time highs. What’s not to love? If the mainstream media says the economy is as good as new, it must be so. Why should we let facts get in the way of a good storyline? The stock market has surged to 2007 highs, so the country’s employment situation must be strong.

..........

It comes down to this. The monied interests, high financiers, corporate interests, captured politicians, government apparatchiks, and corporate media have a vested interest in maintaining the corrupt and destructive status quo. They have become rich and powerful through their manipulation of the currency, ravenous sacking of the national wealth, destruction of the working middle class, and ability to use mass media propaganda to convince the willfully ignorant masses to learn to love their debt servitude. Our once proud, liberty minded, self-sufficient nation of freedom loving individuals has devolved into a kleptocracy,  where a small cadre of powerful men run the show solely to increase the personal wealth and political power of officials and the ruling class at the expense of the wider population. They are essentially running a state sponsored embezzlement and Ponzi scheme to pillage the wealth of the dumbed down, sedated, technologically distracted masses. Our entire system has been captured and we are entering the final stages of decay and ultimately a day of reckoning where the guilty and innocent alike will suffer the awful consequences of currency collapse, death and destruction on a wide scale, and likely civil and world war.

 “The Fed is now engaged in a control fraud, and what appears to be racketeering in conjunction with a few big investment banks. They may have entered into it with good intentions, but they seem to have been turned towards deceit and corruption. This is not an historical event, but an ongoing theft in conjunction with a number of Wall Street banks, and politicians whom they have paid off through a corrupt system of campaign financing and influence peddling. This is nothing new in history if one reads the un-sanitized version. But people never think it can happen today, that somehow yesterday things were different, as if one is looking at some distant, foreign land. This is a facet of the illusion of general progress.

We are now in the cover-up stage of a scandal, similar to Watergate when the White House was stone-walling. The difference is that the corruption and capture of the government is much more pervasive now, and includes a significant portion of the mainstream media, so meaningful reform is difficult. Most of what has transpired so far has been designed to distract and placate the people in their righteous anger. The Fed deceives the Congress and the public, turns a blind eye to glaring conflicts of interest, and is essentially debasing the currency while transferring the wealth of the nation to their cronies. And still the regulators do not enforce the laws they have, and Washington drags its feet while accepting buckets of cash from the perpetrators.” – Jesse

The entire system is corrupt to its core. Both political parties, regulatory agencies, Wall Street, the Federal Reserve, and mainstream media are participants in this enormous fraud. They grow more desperate and bold by the day. The lies, misinformation and propaganda being spewed on a daily basis become more outrageous and audacious. They are using the Big Lie method on a grand scale. They frantically need to lure the muppets into the stock market and the housing market to keep the game going a little longer. You can sense we are reaching a tipping point. The system they have created is mathematically unsustainable. Therefore, it will not be sustained. The world is going mad. Governments across the globe are all trying to out debase each other. Austerity and inflation for the peasants and caviar and champagne for the Davos class is the chosen path. All is not well. Ben Bernanke and the oligarchs running the show will be immortalized in history books forever when this farce comes to a spectacular conclusion.   

 “If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error.” – John Kenneth Galbraith

STATISM - The Reality of It & Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz's Girlfriend Has A Damning Theory About The Young Reddit Co-Founder's Suicide 02-05-13 BI

LINCHPIN THEORY - Collectivism, Centralization, Technocracy, Slavery, Moral Relativism, and False-Flag Dupery

The Linchpin Lie: How Global Collapse Will Be Sold To The Masses 01-31-13 Brandon Smith of Alt-Market blog via ZH

In our modern world there exist certain institutions of power.  Not government committees, alphabet agencies, corporate lobbies, or even standard military organizations; no, these are the mere “middle-men” of power.  The errand boys.  The well paid hitmen of the global mafia.  They are not the strategists or the decision makers. 

Instead, I speak of institutions which introduce the newest paradigms.  Who write the propaganda.  Who issue the orders from on high.  I speak of the hubs of elitism which have initiated nearly every policy mechanism of our government for the past several decades.  I am talking about the Council On Foreign Relations, the Tavistock Institute, the Heritage Foundation (a socialist organization posing as conservative), the Bilderberg Group, as well as the corporate foils that they use to enact globalization, such as Monsanto, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, the Carlyle Group, etc.

Many of these organizations and corporations operate a revolving door within the U.S. government.  Monsanto has champions, like Donald Rumsfeld who was on the board of directors of its Searle Pharmaceuticals branch, who later went on to help the company force numerous dangerous products including Aspartame through the FDA.  Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan have a veritable merry-go-round of corrupt banking agents which are appointed to important White House and Treasury positions on a regular basis REGARDLESS of which party happens to be in office.  Most prominent politicians are all members of the Council on Foreign Relations, an organization which has openly admitted on multiple occasions that their goal is the destruction of U.S. sovereignty and the formation of a “one world government” or “supranational union” (their words, not mine).

However, one organization seems to rear its ugly head at the forefront of the most sweeping mass propaganda operations of our time, and has been linked to the creation of the most atrocious military methodologies, including the use of false flag events.  I am of course referring to the Rand Corporation, a California based “think tank” whose influence reaches into nearly every sphere of our society, from politics, to war, to entertainment. 

The Rand Corporation deals in what I would call “absolute gray”.  The goal of the group from its very inception was to promote a social atmosphere of moral ambiguity in the name of personal and national priority.  They did this first through the creation of “Rational Choice Theory”; a theory which prescribes that when making any choice, an individual (or government) must act as if balancing costs against benefits to arrive at an action that maximizes personal advantage.  Basically, the ends justify the means, and moral conscience is not a factor to be taken seriously if one wishes to be successful. 

Hilariously, rational choice theory has been attacked in the past by pro-socialist (collectivist) critics as “extreme individualism”; a philosophy which gives us license to be as “self serving” as possible while feeling patriotic at the same time.  In reality, the socialists should have been applauding Rand Corporation all along. 

What Rand had done through its propaganda war against the American people was to infuse the exact culture of selfishness needed to push the U.S. towards the socialist ideal.  At the onset of any communist or national socialist society (sorry socialists, but they do indeed come from the same collectivist mindset), the masses are first convinced to hand over ultimate power to the establishment in order to safeguard THEMSELVES, not others.  That is to say, the common collectivist man chooses to hand over his freedoms and participate in totalitarianism not because he wants what is best for the world, but because he wants what is best for himself, and he believes servitude to the system will get him what he wants with as little private sacrifice as possible (you know, except for his soul…). 

The psychologist Carl Jung notes in his observations of collectivism in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia that most citizens of those nations did not necessarily want the formation of a tyrannical oligarchy, but, they went along with it anyway because they feared for their own comfort and livelihoods.  Many a German supported the Third Reich simply because they did not want to lose a cushy job, or a steady paycheck, or they liked that the “trains ran on time”.  Socialism is by far the most selfish movement in history, despite the fact that they claim to do what they do “for the greater good of the greater number”.

Rand also used Rational Choice Theory as a means to remove questions of principle from the debate over social progress.  Rational Choice propaganda commonly presents the target audience with a false conundrum.  A perfect example would be the hardcore propaganda based television show ‘24’ starring Kiefer Sutherland, in which a government “anti-terrorism” agent is faced with a controlled choice scenario in nearly every episode.  This choice almost always ends with the agent being forced to set aside his morals and conscience to torture, kill, and destroy without mercy, or, allow millions of innocents to die if he does not.

Of course, the real world does not work this way.  Life is not a chess game.   Avenues to resolution of any crisis are limited only by our imagination and intelligence, not to mention the immense number of choices that could be made to defuse a crisis before it develops.  Yet, Rand would like you to believe that we (and those in government) are required to become monstrous in order to survive.  That we should be willing to forgo conscience and justice now for the promise of peace and tranquility later.

This is the age old strategy of Centralization; to remove all choices within a system, by force or manipulation, until the masses think they have nothing left but the choices the elites give them.  It is the bread and butter of elitist institutions like Rand Corporation, and is at the core of the push for globalization.

In my studies on the developing economic disaster (or economic recovery depending on who you talk to) I have come across a particular methodology many times which set off my analyst alarm (or spidey-sense, if you will).  This latest methodology, called “Linchpin Theory”, revolves around the work of John Casti, a Ph.D. from USC, “complexity scientist” and “systems theorist”, a Futurist, and most notably, a former employee of Rand Corporation:

http://www.viennareview.net/vienna-review-book-reviews/book-reviews/john-casti-an-optimist-of-the-apocalypse

Casti introduces his idea of “Linchpin Theory” in his book “X-Events:  The Collapse Of Everything”, and what I found most immediately striking about the idea of “Linchpin Events” was how they offered perfect scapegoat scenarios for catastrophes that are engineered by the establishment. 

Linchpin Theory argues that overt social, political, and technological “complexity” is to blame for the most destructive events in modern human history, and it is indeed an enticing suggestion for those who are uneducated and unaware of the behind the scenes mechanics of world events.  Casti would like you to believe that political and social tides are unguided and chaotic; that all is random, and disaster is a product of “chance” trigger events that occur at the height of a malfunctioning and over-complicated system.

What he fails to mention, and what he should well know being a member of Rand, is that global events do not evolve in a vacuum.  There have always been those groups who see themselves as the “select”, and who aspire to mold the future to there personal vision of Utopia.  It has been openly admitted in myriad official observations on historical events that such groups have had a direct hand in the advent of particular conflicts.  

For instance, Casti would call the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria an “X-event”, or linchpin, leading to the outbreak of WWI, when historical fact recalls that particular crisis was carefully constructed with the specific mind to involve the U.S.

Norman Dodd, former director of the Committee to Investigate Tax Exempt Foundations of the U.S. House of Representatives, testified that the Committee was invited to study the minutes of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace as part of the Committee's investigation. The Committee stated:

"The trustees of the Foundation brought up a single question.  If it is desirable to alter the life of an entire people, is there any means more efficient than war.... They discussed this question... for a year and came up with an answer: There are no known means more efficient than war, assuming the objective is altering the life of an entire people.  That leads them to a question: How do we involve the United States in a war.  This was in 1909."

So, long before the advent of Ferdinand’s assassination, plans were being set in motion by globalist interests to draw the U.S. into a large scale conflict in order to “alter the life, or thinking, of the entire culture”.  When a group of people set out to direct thinking and opportunity towards a particular outcome, and the end result is a culmination of that outcome, it is obviously not coincidence, and it is definitely not providence.  It can only be called subversive design. 

In the economic arena, one might say that the collapse of Lehman Bros. was the “linchpin” that triggered the landslide in the derivatives market which is still going on to this day.  However, the derivatives market bubble was a carefully constructed house of cards, deliberately created with the help of multiple agencies and institutions.  The private Federal Reserve had to artificially lower interest rates and inject trillions upon trillions into the housing market, the international banks had to invest those trillions into mortgages that they KNEW were toxic and likely never to be repaid.  The Federal Government had to allow those mortgages to then be chopped up into derivatives and resold on the open market.  The ratings agencies had to examine those derivatives and obviously defunct mortgages and then stamp them AAA.  The SEC had to ignore the massive fraud being done in broad daylight while sweeping thousands of formal complaints and whistle blowers under the rug.

This was not some “random” event caused by uncontrolled “complexity”.  This was engineered complexity with a devious purpose.  The creation of the derivatives collapse was done with foreknowledge, at least by some.  Goldman Sachs was caught red handed betting against their OWN derivatives instruments!  Meaning they knew exactly what was about to happen in the market they helped build!  This is called Conspiracy…

One might attribute Casti’s idea to a sincere belief in chaos, and a lack of insight into the nature of globalism as a brand of religion.  However, in his first and as far as I can tell only interview with Coast To Coast Radio, Casti promotes catastrophic “X-Events” as a “good thing” for humanity, right in line with the Rand Corporation ideology.  Casti, being a futurist and elitist, sees the ideas of the past as obsolete when confronted with the technological advancements of the modern world, and so, describes X-event moments as a kind of evolutionary “kickstart”, knocking us out of our old and barbaric philosophies of living and forcing us, through trial by fire, to adapt to a more streamlined culture.  The linchpin event is, to summarize Casti’s position, a culture’s way of “punishing itself” for settling too comfortably into its own heritage and traditions.  In other words, WE will supposedly be to blame for the next great apocalypse, not the elites…  

I might suggest that Casti's attitude seems to be one of general indifference to human suffering in the wake of his "X-Events", and that he would not necessarily be opposed to the deaths of millions if it caused the "advancement" of humanity towards a particular ideology.  His concept of "advancement" and ours are likely very different, though.  I suspect that he is well aware that X-Events are actually tools at the disposal of elitists to generate the "evolution" he so desires, and that evolution includes a collectivist result.

With almost every major economy on the globe on the verge of collapse and most now desperately inflating, taxing, or outright stealing in order to hide their situation, with multiple tinderbox environments being facilitated in the Pacific with China, North Korea, and Japan, and in the Middle East and Africa with Egypt, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Mali, etc., there is no doubt that we are living in a linchpin-rich era.  It is inevitable that one or more of these explosive tension points will erupt and cause a chain reaction around the planet.  The linchpin and the chain reaction will become the focus of our epoch, rather than the men who made them possible in the first place.

Strangely, Casti’s theory was even recently featured in an episode of the ABC mystery/drama show “Castle”, called “Linchpin” (what else?), in which a writer turned detective uncovers a plot by a “shadow group” to use the research of the innocent Dr. Nelson Blakely (apparently based on Casti) to initiate a collapse of the U.S. economy by assassinating the ten-year-old daughter of a prominent Chinese businessman, triggering a dump of U.S. Treasuries by China and fomenting WWIII:

http://www.alterna-tv.com/castle/xevents.htm

Now, I think anyone with any sense can see where this is going.  Casti and Rand Corporation are giving us a glimpse into the future of propaganda.  This is what will be written in our children’s history books if the globalists have their way. The fact that Linchpin Theory is featured in a primetime television show at all is a testament to Rand Corporation’s influence in the media.  But, as for the wider picture, are the trigger points around us really just a product of complex coincidence? 

Not a chance. 

Each major global hot-spot today can easily be linked back to the designs of international corporate and banking interests and the puppet governments they use as messengers.  Casti claims that “X-events” and “linchpins” cannot be accurately predicted, but it would seem that they can certainly be purposely instigated. 

The globalists have stretched the whole of the world thin.  They have removed almost every pillar of support from the edifice around us, and like a giant game of Jenga, are waiting forX-Events the final piece to be removed, causing the teetering structure to crumble.  Once this calamity occurs, they will call it a random act of fate, or a mathematical inevitability of an overly complex system.  They will say that they are not to blame.  That we were in the midst of “recovery”.  That they could not have seen it coming.

Their solution will be predictable.  They will state that in order to avoid such future destruction, the global framework must be “simplified”, and what better way to simplify the world than to end national sovereignty, dissolve all borders, and centralize nation states under a single economic and political ideal? 

Is it the Hegelian Dialectic all over again?  Yes.  Is it old hat feudalism and distraction?  Yes.  But, I have to hand it to Casti and Rand Corporation; they certainly have refined the argument for collectivism, centralization, technocracy, slavery, moral relativism, and false-flag dupery down to a near science…

DHS - Now a "Brown Shirt' Quasi Military Organization

Department of Homeland Security to Purchase 7,000 "Assault Weapons" 01-28-13 Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog via ZH

The hypocrisy of the government knows no bounds.  I have said repeatedly, and continue to say, that I am against all gun control at the moment because our government is extremely violent and not only do I not expect it to protect the American people in general, I believe it is far more concerned with protecting the status quo from the people.  It has become crystal clear that the political and financial oligarchs are quite intentionally attempting to disarm the populace while arming themselves to the teeth in anticipation of some horrible economic event they know is inevitable.  From the Blaze:

The Department of Homeland Security is seeking to acquire 7,000 5.56x45mm NATO “personal defense weapons” (PDW) — also known as “assault weapons” when owned by civilians. The solicitation, originally posted on June 7, 2012, comes to light as the Obama administration is calling for a ban on semi-automatic rifles and high capacity magazines.

Citing a General Service Administration (GSA) request for proposal (RFP), Steve McGough of RadioViceOnline.com reports that DHS is asking for the 7,000 “select-fire” firearms because they are “suitable for personal defense use in close quarters.” The term select-fire means the weapon can be both semi-automatic and automatic. Civilians are prohibited from obtaining these kinds of weapons.

That being said, it is reasonable for the Department of Homeland Security to request these rifles as they are indeed effective personal defense weapons. The agency is tasked with keeping Americans safe from those who wish to do the country harm, and its officials should be equipped with all the tools they need to do so effectively.

See the meme being pushed here?  These guys want the entire population completely domesticated.  They want us to depend on the government for food.  For healthcare.  For self-defense.  Two sets of laws.  One for the “rulers” and one for the “ruled.”  This is the opposite of how things function in a free society.

I am sorry, but unless you think the DHS is preparing for an invasion by Al Qaeda, it is quite clear these weapons are being bought for future use against the citizenry of the United States.  The writing on the wall couldn’t be clearer.

Full article here.

RULE OF LAW - Used to Stop Dissent & Government Exposure

Scam Complete: The US Government Takes A Page From Diocletian’s Book... 01-25-13 Simon Black of Sovereign Man blog via ZH

Early in the 4th century, Emperor Diocletian issued an infamous decree to control spiraling wages and prices in the rapidly deteriorating Roman Empire.

As part of his edict, Diocletian commanded that any merchant or customer caught violating the new price structures would be put to death.

This is an important lesson from history, and a trend that has been repeated numerous times. When nations are in terminal economic decline, governments will stop at nothing to keep the party going just a little bit longer.

I thought of Diocletian’s desperation a few days ago when I read about the recent sanctions imposed on US rating agency Egan-Jones. It’s a similar story–

For years, major rating agencies (S&P, Moody’s, and Fitch) have championed the outright fraud of our financial system by pinning pristine credit ratings on insolvent governments and their heavily inflated currencies.

In doing so, the rating agencies are effectively claiming that the greatest debtor that has ever existed in the history of the world is nearly ‘risk-free’.

Clearly this is a ridiculous assertion. With a debt level over 100% of GDP, the US is so broke that the government must borrow money just to pay interest on the money it’s already borrowed. They’ve lost over a trillion dollars a year since 2008, yet they still spend money on things like drones and body scanners. It’s crazy.

As with any good scam, the government must maintain public confidence.  The moment someone says ‘the Emperor has no clothes,’ that shallow, fragile confidence will come crashing down and expose the scam. Dissent must be vigorously and swiftly pursued.

So when S&P finally downgraded the US one notch in August 2011, the SEC and Justice Department announced that S&P was under investigation, just two weeks later.

Egan-Jones, a smaller rating agency, has been even more aggressive, downgrading the US credit rating three times in 18 months. And while the federal government may not have imposed Diocletian’s death penalty, they are just as willing to squash dissent.

In a country that churns out thousands of pages of new regulations each week, it’s easy to find a reason to go after someone. As you read this letter, in fact, you are probably in violation of at least a dozen regulatory offenses.

In the case of Egan-Jones, the SEC brought administrative action against the agency within two weeks of their second downgrade. And a few days ago, the case was settled.

I’m sure you have already guessed the ending: Egan-Jones is banned from for the next 18 months from rating US government debt. They’ve effectively been silenced from telling the truth.

The lesson here is obvious. Just as in Roman times, bankrupt nations today will stop at nothing to keep up the scam just a little bit longer.

Given that all this is happening at a time when Congress is voting to suspend the debt ceiling entirely, these actions are the clearest sign yet of just how desperate the government has become.

Could the warning signs be any more obvious?

CIVIC RESPONSIBILITY - Decay Accelerates

EXCERPTED FROM: Apparitions in the Fog 01-23-13Washington's Blog - Jim Quinn

Civic Decay Accelerates

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

The liberal minded Op-Ed writers that decry the incivility of dialogue today once again show their ignorance for or contempt for American history. They call for compromise and coming together. They should see Spielberg’s Lincoln to understand the uncompromising nature of Fourth Turnings and how conflicts are resolved. They should watch documentary film of Dresden, Hiroshima, and Guadalcanal during World War II. Compromise and civility do not compute during a Fourth Turning. It is compromise that has brought us to this point. Avoiding tough decisions and delaying action occur during the Unraveling. We’ve known the entitlement issues confronting our nation for over a decade and chose to do nothing. The time for delay and inaction is long gone. The pressing issues of the day will be resolved through collapse, confrontation and bloodshed. It’s the way it has always been done and the way it shall be. The current conflict over banning guns is just a symptom of a bigger disease. Government, at the behest of the owners, has been steadily assuming more power and control over the everyday lives of citizens who just want to be left to live their lives. Government has used propaganda, fear and misinformation to convince large swaths of the populace to voluntarily sacrifice their freedom and liberty for the promise of safety and security. Warrantless surveillance, imprisonment without charges, molestation by TSA agents, military exercises in cities, drones in our skies, cameras watching our every move, overseas torture, undeclared wars, cyber-attacks on sovereign countries, and now the threat of disarmament of the people have all contributed to the darkening skies above. A harsh winter lies ahead.

Civic decay is being driven by two main thrusts.

• Lack of jobs and
• destruction of middle class wealth

.. by the oligarchs is resulting in the anger and dismay overwhelming the country. The chart below reveals the truth about our economy and the fraudulent nature of BLS reported data, skewed to paint a false picture. The 25 to 54 year old age bracket captures Americans in their peak earnings years. In 2007 this age bracket had 83% of its members in the labor force and 100.5 million of them employed. Today, according to the BLS, only 81.4% are in the labor force and there are 6.3 million less employed. The BLS has the gall to report that since 2009, even though the number of employed people in this age bracket has declined by 1 million, the number of unemployed people has dropped by 1.5 million people. To report this drivel is beyond laughable. The horrific labor market situation is confirmed by the fact that despite a 3.6 million person increase in this age demographic since 2000, there are 7.8 million more people not employed.

The reduced earnings and savings of the people in this demographic is having profound and long-lasting impact on our society. Household formation, retirement savings, tax revenues, and self-worth are all negatively impacted. The mood of desperation and anger is materializing in this age bracket. The resentment of these people when they see the well-heeled Wall Street set reaping stock market gains and bonuses while they make do on food stamps, extended unemployment and the charity of friends and family is palpable. More than 100% of the employment gains since 2010 have gone to those over the age of 55, further embittering the 25 to 54 workers.

There is boiling anger beneath the thin veneer of civility between Millenials, GenXers, and Boomers.

The chasm between the ultra-rich and the masses widens by the day and is leading to a seething animosity. The country has lost 2.4 million construction jobs and 2 million manufacturing jobs since 2007, but we’ve added 250,000 fry cook jobs and 440,000 University of Phoenix jobs stimulated by $500 billion in student loans. The complete transformation of a producing society to a consumption society has been accomplished.

When the average person sees Wall Street bankers not only walk away unscathed from the crisis they aided, abetted and created through their fraudulent inducements and documentation, but be further enriched at taxpayer expense, their hatred and disgust with high financers like Corzine, Dimon and Blankfein burns white hot. The mainstream media propaganda machine tries to convince the average Joe that stock market highs and record corporate profits are beneficial to him, even though the gains and profits have been spurred by zero interest rates, fraudulent accounting and outsourcing their jobs to third world slave labor factories.

• A critical thinking human being (this rules out 95% of the adult population) might question how corporate profits could surpass pre-collapse levels when the economy has remained stagnant.

Shockingly, the entire profit surge was driven by Wall Street. Accounting entries relieving billions of loan loss reserves, earning hundreds of millions in risk free interest courtesy of Bernanke, and falsely valuing your loan portfolio can do wonders for profits.

• We’ve added 6.9 million finance jobs in the last 20 years as this industry has sucked the lifeblood out of our nation.
• A country that allows bankers to syphon off 35% of all the profits in the country without producing any benefits to society is destined to fail, with the dire consequences that follow.

My civic decay expectations for 2013 are as follows:

• Progressive’s attempt to distract the masses from our worsening economic situation with their assault on the 2nd Amendment will fail. Congress will pass no new restrictions on gun ownership and 2013 will see the highest level of gun sales in history.
• The deepening recession, higher taxes on small businesses and middle class, along with Obamacare mandates will lead to rising unemployment and rising anger with the failed economic policies of the last four years. Protests and rallies will begin to burgeon.
• The number of people on food stamps will reach 50 million and the number of people on SSDI will reach 11 million. Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, and Jeff Immelt will compensate themselves to the tune of $100 million. CNBC will proclaim an economic recovery based on these facts.
• The drought will continue in 2013 resulting in higher food prices, ethanol prices, and shipping costs, as transporting goods on the Mississippi River will become further restricted. The misery index for the average American family will reach new highs.
• There will be assassination attempts on political and business leaders as retribution for their actions during and after the financial crisis.
• The revelation of more fraud in the financial sector will result in an outcry from the public for justice. Prosecutions will be pursued by State’s attorney generals, as Holder has been captured by Wall Street.
• The deepening pension crisis in the states will lead to more state worker layoffs and more confrontation between governors attempting to balance budgets and government worker unions. There will be more municipal bankruptcies.
• The gun issue will further enflame talk of state secession. The red state/blue state divide will grow ever wider. The MSM will aggravate the divisions with vitriolic propaganda.
• The government will accelerate their surveillance efforts and renew their attempt to monitor, control, and censor the internet. This will result in increased cyber-attacks on government and corporate computer networks in retaliation.

“The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…” – Winston Churchill

STATISM - How You Orchestrate the Remove of the Second Ammendment

Every night I watch drug ad after drug ad on TV. I don't ever recall seeing a gun ad on TV? Are they banned?

So, who do the media have allegiance to and therefore how will the news be spun? To simply report the following facts would cause the networks significant negative pressures from their paying customers. You don't bite the hand that feeds you.

The network lawyers would likely strongly advise this not to be reported becuase they would likely be sued by the drug companies for various legal reasons. So even if the networks wanted to reprot this they would drop it. This is why so many journalists quit.

THE POLITICAL SOLUTION TO THE ABOVE IS TO BAN GUNS?

• SEEN TO BE DOING SOMETHING
• MAJOR PHARMACEUTICAL CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTIONS ARE NOT IMPACTED
• MEDIA SUPPORT IS NOT JEPORDIZED
• PUBLIC SUPPORT IS ON YOUR SIDE ('BAND WAGON APPEAL)
• ALLOWS THE ADVANCEMENT OF A POLICE STATE FOR PUBLIC SECURITY

Further Reading: Prominent rifle manufacturer killed in mysterious car crash days after posting psych drug link to school shooters

SPENDING CUTS - The Political Shell Game

Fiscal Farce, Failure, Fantasy & Fornication – 01-18-13 The Burning Platform

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

The chart above reveals a few truths:

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

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

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

It would be a self-inflicted wound on the economy. It would slow down our growth, might tip us into recession. And ironically it would probably increase our deficit. So to even entertain the idea of this happening, of the United States of America not paying its bills, is irresponsible. It’s absurd. Republicans in Congress have two choices here. They can act responsibly, and pay America’s bills, or they can act irresponsibly and put America through another economic crisis. But they will not collect a ransom in exchange for not crashing the American economy.” – President Barack Obama – January 14, 2022

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

The Senate had to abide by the common sense budgeting principle of balancing expenses and revenues. But we must remember that the more we depend on foreign nations to lend us money, the more our economic security is tied to the whims of foreign leaders whose interests might not be aligned with ours. Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘‘the buck stops here.’’ Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better. I therefore intend to oppose the effort to increase America’s debt limit.” – Senator Barack Obama – March 16, 2021

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

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

STATISM - The Institutionalization of Tyranny

The Institutionalization of Tyranny 01-18-13 Paul Craig Roberts Institute for Political Economy

Republicans and conservative Americans are still fighting Big Government in its welfare state form. Apparently, they have never heard of the militarized police state form of Big Government, or, if they have, they are comfortable with it and have no objection.

• Big Government in its welfare state form,
• Big Government in its militarized police state form

Republicans, including those in the House and Senate, are content for Big Government to:

• Initiate wars without a declaration of war or even Congress’ assent, and
• To murder with drones citizens of countries with which Washington is not at war.
• That federal “security” agencies spy on American citizens without warrants and record every email, Internet site visited, Facebook posting, cell phone call, and credit card purchase. Republicans in Congress even voted to fund the massive structure in Utah in which this information is stored.

.....

The institutionalization of tyranny is the achievement of the Bush/Obama regimes of the 21st century.

This, and not the Great Society, is the decisive break from the American tradition. The Bush Republicans demolished almost all of the constitutional protections of liberty erected by the Founding Fathers.

The Obama Democrats codified Bush’s dismantling of the Constitution and removed the protection afforded to citizens from being murdered by the government without due process.

One decade was time enough for two presidents to make Americans the least free people of any developed country, indeed, perhaps of any country. In what other country or countries does the chief executive officer have the right to murder citizens without due process?

It turns one’s stomach to listen to conservatives bemoan the destruction of liberty by compassion while they institutionalize

• Torture,
• Indefinite detention in violation of habeas corpus,
• Murder of citizens on suspicion and unproven accusation alone,
• Complete and total violation of privacy,
• Interference with the right to travel by unaccountable “no-fly” lists and highway check points,
• The brutalization of citizens and those exercising their right to protest by police, frame-ups of critics, and narrow the bounds of free speech.

In AMERIKA today only the executive branch of the federal government has any privacy. The privacy is institutional, not personal – witness the fate of CIA director Petraeus. While the executive branch destroys the privacy of every one else, it insists on its own privilege of privacy. National security is invoked to shield the executive branch from its criminal actions. Federal prosecutors actually conduct trials in which the evidence against defendants is classified and withheld from defendants’ attorneys. Attorneys such as Lynne Stewart have been imprisoned for not following orders from federal prosecutors to violate the attorney-client privilege.

Conservatives accept the monstrous police state that has been erected, because they think it makes them safe from “Muslim terrorism.” They haven’t the wits to see that they are now open to terrorism by the government.

BRADLEY MANNING

Consider, for example, the case of Bradley Manning. He is accused of leaking confidential information that reveals US government war crimes despite the fact that it is the responsibility of every soldier to reveal war crimes. Virtually every one of Manning’s constitutional rights has been violated by the US government. He has been tortured. In an effort to coerce Manning into admitting trumped-up charges and implicating WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange, Manning had his right to a speedy trial violated by nearly three years of pre-trial custody and repeated trial delays by government prosecutors. And now the judge, Col. Denise Lind, who comes across as a member of the prosecution rather than an impartial judge, has ruled that Manning cannot use as evidence the government’s own reports that the leaked information did not harm national security. Lind has also thrown out the legal principle of mens rea by ruling that Manning’s motive for leaking information about US war crimes cannot be presented as evidence in his trial.

MENS REA

Mens rea says that a crime requires criminal intent. By discarding this legal principle, Lind has prevented Manning from showing that his motive was to do his duty under the military code and reveal evidence of war crimes. This allows prosecutors to turn a dutiful act into the crime of aiding the enemy by revealing classified information.

Of course, nothing that Manning allegedly revealed helped the enemy in any way as the enemy, having suffered the war crimes, was already aware of them.

Obama Democrats are no more disturbed than conservative Republicans that a dutiful American soldier is being prosecuted because he has a moral conscience. In Manning’s trial, the government’s definition of victory has nothing whatsoever to do with justice prevailing. For Washington, victory means

stamping out moral conscience and protecting a corrupt government from public exposure of its war crimes.

STATISM - A 98-minute Documentary Film of 23 Leading Economic Voices

FILM: The Four Horsement

A new 98-minute documentary of 23 leading economic voices explaining how:

banking/financial elite transfer trillions of dollars to themselves through privilege of creating what we use for money as debt that they make out of nothing, and then using this debt-money to earn interest and gamble.

Four Horsemen is the debut feature from director Ross Ashcroft which reveals the fundamental flaws in the economic system which have brought our civilization to the brink of disaster. 23 leading thinkers –frustrated at the failure of their respective disciplines – break their silence to explain how the world really works. The film pulls no punches in describing the consequences of continued inaction – but its message is one of hope. If more people can equip themselves with a better understanding of how the world really works, then the systems and structures that condemn billions to poverty or chronic insecurity can at last be overturned. Solutions to the multiple crises facing humanity have never been more urgent, but equally, the conditions for change have never been more favourable.

 

“That rare kind of film which is capable of changing one’s perspective on the entire world.”
- Lucy Purdy, Sublime Magazine

“Director Ross Ashcroft uncovers the systemic, legalised corruption of governments and the banking system enabling the rich to get richer while the majority of the world lives in abject poverty – waiting for the magic of ‘trickle down’ economics to take effect.”
- Rachel Surgeoner, Little White Lies

“Four Horsemen is a breathtakingly composed jeremiad against the folly of Neo-classical economics and the threats it represents to all we should hold dear.”
- Harold Crooks,  The Corporation (Co-Director) and Surviving Progress (Co-Director/Co-Writer)

“Ashcroft does not try to shock us into his view by an over-reliance on footage of terrorist attacks or starving African children … [he] shows great intention in this documentary, which is one of the clearest and most demystifying attempts at guiding us through the alien landscape of economics. Four Horsemen answers the fundamental questions, and raises some complex ones, inspiring us to go out and further understand this crazy system we’re stuck in.”
- Robert Zak,  Best For Film

“Four Horsemen could be part of a new global manifesto for a desperately needed new world. Watch it and make up your own mind if you want to be part of it”
- Caspar Walsh – Positive News

“Using some of the brightest thinkers of our age, [Four Horsemen] considers where we are today and how we got there. It considers the failings of the economic system and how this has turned our democracies into plutocracies. It does not hark back to some mythical golden age, but considers how FD Roosevelt acted when faced with a similar crisis, and laments the fact our politicians today do not have the same vision to do the same.” 
- Dan Carrier, Camden New Journal  

“It’s Inside Job with bells on, and a frequently compelling thesis thanks to Ashcroft’s crack team of talking heads – economists, whistleblowers and Noam Chomsky, all talking with candour and clarity.”
- Total Film

“Four Horsemen is an important film because it presents a sober picture of what is wrong in a non-hysterical way and will ignite a debate about what can be done to create a fairer, less dysfunctional world.”
- Marcus Chown, New Scientist 

“The refreshing thing about this film is that Ross Ashcroft also takes the viewer on a broader journey, linking in terrorism, global warming and poverty along with world finances to present a troubling picture of the world today.”
- Mark Adams, Chief Film Critic Screen International

“The independent production collates 23 key figures from finance, journalism, activisism and politics – plus Noam Chomsky – to examine how we got into this financial state, while blasting modern economic theories. Trust us, it’s not as dry as it looks on paper – think Senna-like riveting.”
- Becky Reed, DIY 

“Ashcroft keenly rejects amorality and apathy alike, and he may be the first documentarist working in this field to elicit viable solutions from his interviewees, rather than baleful shrugs: you can’t fail to emerge better informed, and better prepared to make the kinds of changes and perception shifts we need to make if we are to move forward from here. Despite the doom laden title, this is a hugely encouraging watch.”
- Mike McCahill, Cinesthesiac  

HUMOR - It can only be FUNNY IF there is some degree of broadly recognizable TRUTH in it

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

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

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

YOU MAY FIND THIS VIDEO OFFENSIVE.
PAY PARTICULAR ATTENTION TO HOW THE AUDIENCE REACTS - They sense the TRUTH

STATISM IS SLAVERY

GUN CONTROL - More Going On Here than Gun Control

Obama proposed 23 "gun controling" executive actions, which do little to actually control guns - that part falls to Congress, where the proposal will be promptly killed - but which will add some $4.5 billion to US spending, and which will "push for further action on his health care law, including insisting on the kind of mental health coverage states must provide under their Medicaid programs."

The breakdown of the spending is as follows, per Weekly Standard:

• $4 billion for the president’s proposal “to help keep 15,000 cops on the streets in cities and towns across the country.” (That is roughly $266,000 per police officer.)
• $20 million to “give states stronger incentives to make [relevant] data available [for background checks] … “$50 million for this purpose in FY2014”
• “$14 million to help train 14,000 more police officers and other public and private personnel to respond to active shooter situations.”
• “$10 million for the Centers for Disease Control to conduct further research, including investigating the relationship between video games, media images, and violence.”
• $20 million to expand the National Violent Death Reporting System.
• $150 million to “put up to 1,000 new school resource officers and school counselors on the job.”

What can one say: politics, fully, theatrically and embarrassingly "endorsed" by the children sitting behind the president.

MODERN PROPAGANDA - Movies

The CIA and Other Government Agencies Dominate Movies and Television 01-16-13 Washington's Blog

MODERN PROPAGANDA - Video Games

Government Pushes Propaganda Through Video Games 01-17-13 Washington's Blog

STATISM - Constitution in Peril

The following from Brandon Smith of Alt-Market blog via ZH has been 'rebuilt' and modified by GordonTLong.com Original: Where Does The Hatred Of Constitutionalism Come From?

Most of us know about the suggestions by media entities and political opportunists (including Joe Biden) for Barack Obama to bypass congress and the Constitution, implementing possible gun restriction, registration, and confiscation through “executive order” like a common dictator.  There is an obviously brash and violent effort amongst political players today to mold our government into a godlike entity.

"The Constitution of the United States is an undeniably powerful document.  So powerful in fact, that it took establishment elitists with aspirations of globalized governance over a century to diminish the American people’s connection to it.  It’s been a long time coming, but in the new millennium, there is now indeed a subsection of the masses that not only have no relationship to our founding roots, they actually despise those of us who do!

There are a number of reasons for this dangerous development in our culture: 

• A public school system that rarely if ever teaches children about the revolution, the founders, constitutional liberty, or the virtues of individualism in general. 
• A mainstream media apparatus that has regurgitated endless anti-constitutional shlock for decades, attacking any person or group that presents a freedom oriented view. 
• A governmental structure that has become so corrupt, so openly criminal, that they ignore all aspects of constitutional law without regard, rarely feeling the need to explain themselves. 

As a people, we are surrounded daily by the low droning wash-talk of denigration and disdain for our principled foundations.  The wretched ghosts of collectivism and tyranny mumble in our ears from birth to death.  It’s truly a miracle that every man and woman in this nation has not succumbed to the mind numbing hypnotism…

However, our propaganda soaked environment is not the ONLY cause of our self destructive society; many people are themselves to blame.  Severe character flaws and psychological imbalances have left some open to suggestion, manipulation, and fraud.  Their hatred, though fueled in part by the socialization of the establishment, is still theirs to own.

The brutal ignorance on display in mainstream circles against the liberty-minded needs to be addressed.  In my view, the American public is being conditioned to see us as a convenient “enemy” which they can use to project all their internal grief and woe.  Our country is on the verge of collapse, economically, politically, and philosophically. 

Corporatized elements of our government and the financial high priests of the international banking sector are behind this calamity, and of course, they don’t plan to take responsibility. 

Who better to demonize as the catalyst for all the pain that is coming than the only people who have the awareness and the means to stand against the catastrophe?    

There is no doubt in my mind that a great conflict is near, between those of us who value liberty and constitutional protections, and those who would destroy them.  This battle is unlikely to be solved with words.  The anti-constitutionalist rhetoric is becoming so ruthless, so malicious, that it can only lead to a hardening of our own hearts, and an equally forceful response."

THE RULE OF CONSTITUTIONAL LAW

The Constitution is not just a legal document; it is also an emotional and spiritual document.  If one does not have a relationship with his own conscience and the concept of natural law, then he will discover little in the founding ideals of America that he agrees with.  Some people (usually corrupt politicians and judges) see the law as a weapon to be used against their ideological opponents, whereas constitutionalists see the law as a shield to protect us from such despots.  The Constitution and the Bill Of Rights are both designed to protect our Absolute Freedoms.  That is, freedoms that are inborn and which no person or government is qualified to give as a gift, or take as if they are a privilege.

Nothing angers those who seek power more than a legal framework which they are not allowed to touch, or shift, or “tweak” to suit their private ambitions.      

Constitutional protections are not meant to be subject to the “buts” and “what ifs” common in the lesser legal world.  They are not open to debate.  Our rights are not subject to the demands of the so-called “majority”.  Our rights are eternal, and unchangeable.  Anti-constitutionalists attempt to work around the absolutes of the document by implementing subversive law backed by flawed logic.  But, a law which destroys previous constitutional rights is not a law which any individual American is required to follow.  Even an amendment that undermines our civil liberties is not legally binding.  The freedoms put forth in the Constitution and the Bill Of Rights are SET IN STONE (and this includes the right to bear arms in common use of the military of our day).  They cannot be undone without destroying the very fabric of the republic.

INDIVIDUALISM versus FOLLOWING

Some people are predisposed to be followers.  They do not want to take responsibility for their futures or even their own actions.  They do not like questions.  They do not like dilemmas.  They want to be left to wallow in their own private prisons, where they are comfortably enslaved.

Constitutionalists are predominantly individualists.  We do not cater to collectivist fairy tales.  We do not seek to roll with the tide just for the sake of finding our “place” within the machine.  We do not care about “fitting in” with the mainstream.  This is often confounding and infuriating to those who have labored their whole lives to please “the group”.  They accuse us of being “isolationists” in response.  What they do not comprehend is that illusion and delusion have isolated THEM, while the truth has brought constitutionalists together. 

An ACTIVIST QUOTE:

I remember participating in an End The Fed rally in Pittsburgh in early 2008 which was, like most activist rallies, meant to expose the uneducated public to ideas they may not have heard before.  I found it interesting that around a quarter of the people who strolled by our picket line automatically sneered, as if by reflex, even though they had probably never heard our position, or even heard of the Fed.  It dawned on me that they were not angered by our political or economic views.  Instead they were angered by the mere fact that we were there.  We were vocal, and defiant, and a disruption to their daily robot-like routine.  They hated us because we were ruining their fantasy of disconnectedness. 

CANCER OF "POLITICAL CORRECTNESS"

For the past few decades our society has become engrossed with the idea of “proper language and behavior”.  Of course, their idea of “proper” usually involves ignoring the reality of a thing.  For a Constitutionalist, a spade is a spade.  They don’t bother with superficial niceties that get in the way of legitimate debate or legitimate change.  They are not “pleasant” and tolerant with those who would kill their freedoms.  They do not pull punches. They are direct, and sometimes, brutal in our analysis. 

In some parts of the Western world (especially the UK) language has become a game, a game of self censorship and deceit.  This game has made its way to the United States in recent years, and Constitutionalists don’t play.  They understand that every overtly collectivist society begins with the fear of open expression.  And so, our blunt honesty rattles those invested in the 'Politically Correct' culture.  Their ultimate and ideal revenge would be to see Constituionalists painted as social malcontents; like people who smoke in public, or wear a mullet…

COLLECTIVISM

Most people who seek to deny and destroy constitutional liberties tend to lean towards a collectivist philosophy. They are usually socialist, or a variation (Marxist, Fascist), and can be professed members of either major political party. Collectivists understand one thing very clearly; an America without the Constitution is destined to become a centralized country.

CONSTITUTIONALISM

There has never been and there will never be a better method of law and governance than that method which defends the individualism and freedom of the people.  The most fantastic of human accomplishments, in technology as well as in philosophy, spring from the nurturing waters of liberty.  Free minds and hearts create.  They refuse to be contained, and the Constitution gives us license to ensure that they will never be contained, even to the point of revolution. 

... the principles of the Constitution are not something we grasp at all times, but rather, something to which we aspire to, and grow into as our nation matures. They require patience, and wisdom. They force us to question our own “brilliance”, and our own egos. They anchor us, preventing us from being swept away in the storms of fear.

To deny constitutionalism, is to endorse oppression. 

Constitutionalists LOVE liberty and the mechanics of freedom.  They love the values of a sovereign republic and the opportunities that such a system provides when collectivists are removed from the picture.  There is no question or doubt in their minds; they would fight and die to protect the pillars of the Constitution. 

When confronted with this kind of passion, the average person is shocked and sometimes appalled.  The idea of unshakable will is frightening to them.  They are so used to compromising in every aspect of their lives that when they run into an uncompromising man, they reel in horror. 

That which they see as “fanaticism” is instead an excitement, a boundless joy, a fervent desire to protect something universal and precious.  What they see as “extreme”, Constitutionalists see as essential.

RULE OF LAW - Being Called IntRULE OF LAW - Being Called Into Questiono Question

Is American Justice Dead? 01-10-13 David Galland, Casey Researchvia ZH

Every nation-state has a body of laws woven into the fabric of society. As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has commented on extensively, the stronger the rule of law, the stronger the economy.

And by "stronger" laws, I mean laws that are impervious to tampering for personal or political gains. The connection between a sound judiciary and economic health is readily comprehensible, except maybe to a politician... businesses and individuals are far more likely to invest capital in a country with understandable laws that are impartially and universally enforced than if the opposite condition exists.

That's because the lack of a consistent body of law breeds uncertainty and adds a huge element of risk for entrepreneurs. That is the case here in Argentina, where hardly a week goes by without La Presidenta and her meddlesome comrades cooking up some new hurdle for businesses to overcome.

Which brings me back to the matter at hand – American justice on a slippery slope.

Few recent cases make the contention clearer than the announcement last week by the US Justice Department that it had settled its case against HSBC for acting as the bag men for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels. The fine, $1.9 billion, amounts to about five weeks of revenue for the bank.

And that was pretty much it.

Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine, who can run hot or cold when it comes to reporting, in my opinion, nails his column on the verdict, which you can read here.

The basic setup is that for years, at the highest levels of HSBC, the bank worked hand in glove with the drug cartels to launder their money. So smooth was their relationship that the drug gangs used special cardboard boxes for them to fill with cash – boxes that were designed to fit easily through the teller windows of the HSBC branches in Mexico.

Now, don't get me wrong – I am 100% against the so-called "War on Drugs." That there are hundreds of thousands of Americans in prison for the "crime" of voluntarily ingesting recreational drugs, or providing said drugs in a rare free-market transaction (there's a willing buyer and a willing seller and no regulations – at least none that anyone pays any attention to), is an abomination.

And so it is that the US has the highest prison population in the world, and by a wide margin: on a per-capita basis, it is 33% higher than the closest contender, Russia.

If you take into account everyone under "correctional supervision," 3.1% of the US population is either in jail or on probation (for blacks, it's a stunning 9.2%). According to Human Rights Watch, since 1980 the number of people in US jails for drug charges has increased twelvefold.

Yet, the money men for the murderous cartels that supply the stuff – the sort of fat-cat villains that serve as the centerpiece of every James Bond movie – get off with a hand slap.

How is this possible? The answer is that, just like the much-maligned "banana republic," the judicial system in the Anglo-Saxon world has been bifurcated into two systems – one for the politically favored and the other for the rest of us.

In the case of HSBC, the rationale for management being spared even a criminal trial, let alone years behind bars, is that the bank is too big to fail. And that should anyone within the bank be collared for their colossal crimes, it could provide the trigger for the widespread collapse of the global financial system.

To which an Anglo-Saxon from the UK might retort, "Bollocks!" This is rather a case of the politically connected and their equally politically connected, high-priced law firms twisting the judicial system to their purposes.

Another recent case is that of the LIBOR fixing scandal.

As you know, in this case a group of banks clearly conspired to rig the rates on the interest-rate index used to underpin over $300 trillion in loans. As the scandal was revealed, it was also revealed that top tax dodger and now US Treasury Secretary Tim "Timmy" Geithner was aware of the rigging as far back as at least 2007 when operating the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Yet Geithner's elevated position in the Obama administration meant that this inconvenient revelation quietly faded into nothingness. As did the clear implication that if Geithner knew about it, so did untold scores of others at the Fed and other institutions at the time.

Meanwhile, back in the present, instead of rounding up the heads of these institutions, it was announced this week that a handful of floor traders – the ever useful minions – have been fingered to take the fall. For the sake of the public show, I suspect the fall will be pretty hard.

Hell, the last time I checked, even Jon Corzine, who as a former senator and governor of New Jersey is the über-insider, is still a free man despite being the lead actor in the bankruptcy of MF Global and the subsequent looting of billions in customer funds. No one, except maybe Corzine himself, thinks that he isn't criminally complicit, yet, at this writing, there isn't even a hint he'll be prosecuted.

As David Webb has so thoroughly documented, a spate of cases over the last decade has set a clear precedent that financial institutions – at least those of a size to count with the political class – are pretty much free to lie, cheat, misrepresent, and even use their clients' funds to trade for their own book.

And if things go wrong, they can pass the losses on to the clients, or in the case of Corzine simply shrug his Savile Row-clad shoulders, and feign ignorance about where said funds went.

It Goes On… and On…

And the conniving and criminality doesn't stop at the judiciary but has infested pretty much every corner of the government.

A personal recent favorite was Hillary Clinton's oh-so-convenient bout of fainting that kept her from testifying about the truly bizarre attack on the Benghazi consulate, thereby skipping the direct damage to her career that would have resulted from having to answer the unanswerable in front of television cameras.

Then there's the sweetheart deal embedded in the soon-to-be-updated federal regulations related to mortgages. Given all the abuses leading up to the housing crash, John Q. might posit that there will be strong teeth in these new regulations. Sure, there's a couple – but lookie what else is in the new regs; this from the New York Times…

As regulators complete new mortgage rules, banks are about to get a significant advantage: protection against homeowner lawsuits.

The rules are meant to help bolster the housing market. By shielding banks from potential litigation, policy makers contend that the industry will have a powerful incentive to make higher-quality home loans.

But some banking and housing specialists worry that borrowers are losing a critical safeguard. Industries rarely get broad protection from consumer lawsuits, and banks would seem unlikely candidates given the range of abuses revealed during the housing bust.

Mind-boggling.

Skipping across the pond, we have the truly incredible case of Julian Assange, who is now a prisoner, surrounded by upwards of 100 police officers, in the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he's been seeking asylum.

At one point, a senior British official suggested they were seriously considering throwing hundreds of years of diplomatic precedent out of the window by storming the embassy to get their man.

Yet his purported crime, having consensual sex with two different women without a condom (in one case, he had one, but it apparently broke) would, at most, be treated as a minor offense in pretty much any court, in pretty much every country in the world. Unless, of course, he knew he had AIDS and was deliberately trying to transmit it, which he wasn't.

Do your own research, and maybe you'll draw a different conclusion – here's one fairly thorough story on the charges against Assange – but that the UK government is willing to spend untold sums of money it can't afford keeping him penned up in the Ecuadorian embassy smacks of collusion and corruption.

What's really going on, of course, is that Assange's WikiLeaks organization embarrassed the power elite by doing what the media no longer does – getting to the truth, in this case releasing a stash of embarrassing diplomatic cables.

While Assange is fighting the good fight, it's a fight against entrenched political interests, and so it's a losing battle. Aided by the corrupt judiciary or, failing that, the malleable military, it's just a matter of time before he ends up in a cell next to Bradley Manning whose tortured corpus is now on trial for giving up state secrets that were really not all that secret.

In economic policy, too, the evidence of two different systems is glaring. Look no further than the Fed's recent decision to light the afterburners on over a trillion in new money creation each year.

Whom does such a policy help? The politicians, of course, by allowing them to claim they "fixed" the economy that they broke in the first place… when all they are really doing is replacing the capital formation and spending of a healthy private sector with the polluted effluence of government disbursements.

Whom does such a policy hurt? The population at large, by eroding the value of everything they own and eviscerating their ability to earn money on their money through a free market in interest rates… all the while fostering yet more malinvestment in the Potemkin villages of an uneconomic solar industry, electric cars, high-speed trains, etc.

Make no mistake, the Fed and the government are keenly aware of the damaging consequences of their actions – but, out of self-interest, take those actions nonetheless.

The enviro-socialists that have bought their way into the corridors of power provide another array of examples, using laughably bad science and arbitrary rulings to disadvantage key sectors of the economy such as energy and mining.

There is little question that the vast majority of the public is ignorant or apathetic, or both, to the pervasive corruption of the political classes and their financiers.

But even if they were paying attention and outraged, the fact of the matter is that things have degraded to the point where there is next to nothing John Q. can do about it. Sure, you can write your Congressman; just be sure to be extra polite, or your letter will end up in the hands of zee Homeland Security.

Ditto if you write angry emails and send them to all your friends. Just don't make the mistake of thinking there is still such a thing as privacy or the right of free speech in the Anglosphere.

And heavens forbid you try to organize a physical protest. Next thing you know, you'll end up wearing a pair of these bad boys coming to your friendly police officer's belt soon.

(Not only do these next-gen cuffs restrain you, but they allow the arresting officer to remotely deliver electric shocks and, if that doesn't do the trick, even inject drugs into you.)

Of course, if your company or industry wants to fight it out in the courts, you have to be ready and able to spend millions in legal fees fighting a government with unlimited funds (provided, of course, by your taxes and money borrowed from the Chinese or ginned up by the Fed).

What I'm trying to say is that, regardless of what the popular corruption indexes show – and those are typically based on fairly suspect surveys on matters such as transparency in corporate reporting or whether bribes are required to do business – when you take into account the systematic skewing of the judicial and electoral systems to favor the entrenched politicos and their friends in high places, the level of corruption in the Anglosphere would make an African despot blush.

It's not an accident that the Republicans and the Democrats, two sides of the same coin despite all the rhetoric, are never remotely at risk of losing their collective grip on power – the system has been carefully and thoroughly rigged to prevent that from happening.

Logically, if there is virtually nothing the public at large can do about the rigged game they are forced to live with, then it comes down to decisions we make as individuals.

Some general approaches for your consideration.

1. Suck it up. The Stoic approach is to recognize there are certain things you can't do anything about, so put the hypocrisy and self-dealing of officialdom and their enablers out of mind and live your life the best you know how.

1. Profit from it. While it may seem counterintuitive, the more challenging the environment for business creation, the more money an especially hard-charging entrepreneur can make. This is why Asian shop owners open up in ghettos and why the margins for "war profiteers" are so high – because they literally have to risk life and limb to collect them.

   A successful acquaintance recently told me that, as the head of the Argentine branch of a major international electronics brand, his division was regularly able to pull down margins in excess of 40% while his counterparts in less volatile political environments were happy with less than 10%.

   It just takes an extra measure of patience and fortitude to overcome the challenges that scare less determined individuals away.

1. Move West… or South, but probably not North. A combination of #1 and 2 above, the brave minority might want to consider taking the show on the road.

1. If you can't beat them, join them. As Doug Casey has often pointed out, the effect of Pareto's Law operating over time on the large democracies has resulted in the worst sort of people controlling the levers of government at the federal, state and local level. If you happen to be a sociopath with control issues, then you might want to hop on the gravy train and worm your way into government, or into one of the many parasitic enterprises sucking the life from the body politic.

1. Go outlaw. Yesterday, a flash mob gathered in the southern Argentine city of Bariloche for the sole purpose of looting a large store of electronics, food and booze, and sundry other items that will make the Christmas holidays all the more festive.

   When I heard of the incident, I mentioned to my wife that this could very well be the proverbial first shot in the breakdown of civil society in cities around the world. And sure enough, as I was writing, the news broke that spontaneous mobs have formed in a number of cities around Argentina for the sole purpose of looting stores.

   This is precisely the sort of thing one can expect in an economy laid low by political corruption, malfeasance and self-serving meddling. When people lose hope, and lose faith that the judicial system will protect them from the entrenched interests, then it is well within the range of some of those people to just say screw it and go outlaw.

I could be wrong, but I think what happened in Bariloche yesterday has the potential to be just as seminal as the self-immolation in Tunisia that set off the Arab Spring.

The implications of mobs deciding to come together to just take what they want are potentially huge. In the Anglo-Saxon world, it could provide exactly the excuse needed to bring down the stainless-steel curtain built with hundreds of billions of homeland security expenditures over the past decade.

In fact, while I am probably overstating it, the action of the mob in Bariloche yesterday could be the missing link between Neil Howe's Third and Fourth Turning, ushering in the next and most troubled era.

It's ironic that it's happening in here in my new retreat in Argentina, but it's of no personal import because our new hometown of Cafayate is rural, small and very successful, and the sort of place where everyone knows everyone else. And, besides, there are no large supermarkets to raid.

In addition, despite the dark era of military rule (or perhaps because of it), Argentina is not a violent culture, and the big cities are few and far between. The same can't be said of places like Chicago and Detroit, where flash mobs have been increasingly cropping up with the primary intention of committing violence.

How fast and how far things will spread from here is only a matter of conjecture, but the range of possibilities is wide.

Regardless of whether the rule of law continues to be diminished through the acts of corrupt politicians or a mob – or through the militarized arm of the politicos trying to control the mob – I fear the knock-on consequences on the economy and on society at large.

I really don't want to be a Chicken Little, but taking some basic precautions to protect yourself and your assets is only commonsense at this juncture

STATISM - How Indoctrination Occurs

The 9 Step Process Bankers Use to Force Global Slavery Upon Humanity 01-09-13 smartknowledgeuvia ZH

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free."- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Below is the nine step process bankers have used to enslave us all with nary a peep of resistance until recent times. Hopefully recognition of this process can help us to free ourselves from the grip of bankers that wish to financially destroy us all.

(1) Teach lies as truth like “markets are free” and “we need to spread democracy to the rest of the world.” Plant agent provocateurs in all movements of resistance like OWS to discredit these movements whenever possible.

Bankers teach lies like “free markets exist” throughout all business curricula taught in the institutional academic system. When Central Banks set artificial interest rates, this means the free market is not setting interest rates. Bankers are rigging stock markets, real estate markets, currency markets, and commodity markets all for their benefit only and to the detriment of all other humans on our planet. Furthermore, if you study democratic principles and whether governments that claim to be democracies actually abide by these principles, you will discover that most every “democratic” government operates on a fascist platform and not a democratic one. Stating that a free market co-exists in a country in which a Central Bank retains the monopolistic power to set interest rates is as impossible a relationship as the physics maxim that states two objects cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

Furthermore, bankers use the lies they teach in school to further other lies like the existence of Capitalism. Without free markets, Capitalism cannot exist. If free markets do not exist anywhere in the world because Central Banks, and not the free market, set interest rates, then by logic, Capitalism cannot exist. Yet, I’ve met brainwashed subjects at Occupy Wall Street protests in Hong Kong that argued that the basis of people’s economic suffering today is Capitalism and that Communism is the answer to the world’s economic problems. This false belief also allows wretched misanthropes like former Fed Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to deflect blame away from himself and write stupid articles full of lies like ”Don’t Blame Capitalism For All This Income Inequality”, an article in which he argues that capitalism and free markets should not be blamed for today’s global economic inequities between the bankers and the “have nots”. This typical reverse psychology ploy is one that banksters are notoriously fond of. By stating that you shouldn’t blame “capitalism and free markets” for global economic failures, Greenspan knows that since people don’t trust him, that they will fall into his trap and believe the opposite of what he says – that capitalism and free markets are responsible for the creation of massive global income inequities today even though neither “capitalism” in its purest sense nor “free markets” exist anywhere in the world. These clever psychological ploys also allow Greenspan to write the lie-filled article, “Fed Didn’t Cause the Housing Bubble”, and still have a large percentage of the masses gobble up and digest this disinformation without question like it was their daily breakfast cereal.

(2) Commandeer and effectively take over all control of global governments, mass media, state police, and federal military elements to suppress truth from reaching the masses.

Simon Johnson wrote about how bankers have taken over governments in his excellent article "The Quiet Coup".  These two excellent articles, here and here, explain how banks directed state police and government surveillance agencies to crush all dissent and opposition to their criminal activities. The fact that state police and government agencies bowed down to the bankers like subservient servants proves that these countries in which such incidences are taking place have long been far more fascist than democratic. Mussolini or Pinochet could not have asked for better cooperation and greater obedience from state police and government surveillance agencies than the bankers received.

(3) Take over the education system, design it to dumb down instead of enlighten the masses, and export this model to the rest of the world.

Western bankers have funded and exported to the rest of the world an institutional academic system that serves as a behavior modifaction camp responsible for dumbing down young adults and turning them into obedient, non-thinking worker bees. This is how you create a New World Order in which just a few thousand bankers can capably control 7 billion people and keep them in line and obedient at all times. See here for more information.

Bankers and industrialists like the Rockefellers and the Carnegies financed the development of our global education system during the American Industrial Revolution, and thus were able to promote the lies they wanted the masses to embrace such as the myth that America experienced a “revolution” in 1776 and that US President Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in 1863. The bankers were always happy to give the colonialists the illusion of gained “freedom” as an outcome of the “revolutionary” war in exchange for maintaining their control over the newly formed republic’s monetary supply. Thus, the Rothschild banking family quickly established the Bank of the United States (which has since become the US Federal Reserve today) through their colonialist agents in the United States in 1791. When this bank’s charter expired in 1811, Nathan Rothschild of the Bank of England and the Rothschild banking clan declared a grave warning: “Either the application for the renewal of the charter is granted, or the United States will find itself involved in a most disastrous war.” When US Congress chose not to renew the bank's charter, Nathan Rothschild responded, “Teach these impudent Americans a lesson. Bring them back to Colonial status.”

Even though African Americans were given their physical freedom in 1863, they were never granted their financial freedom by the bankers. How does Lincoln end slavery in America with his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation when just 50 years later, the bankers financially enslaved everyone with the founding of the US Federal Reserve. To declare that Abraham Lincoln ended “slavery” in America in 1863 is as big a myth as the lie that Columbus “discovered” a land called America. How does one “discover” a land that had already been inhabited for hundreds of years by millions of Indians? Furthermore, Columbus wasn’t even the first European to arrive in America as Vikings had beat him to this feat by hundreds of years. A.M. Reeves, N.L. Beamish and R.B. Anderson’s The Norse Discovery of America documented in great detail the epic and ferocious battles between the Vikings and the Native inhabitants of Vinland (the Viking word for America) as far back as the 10th century, about 500 years before Columbus stumbled upon America. So how did Lincoln end slavery and how did Columbus discover America? The answer to both questions is that they did not. The end of physical enslavement was merely transformed into a new kind of slavery - financial and mental enslavement. After the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Warburgs, JP Morgan, etc. were able to form the US Federal Reserve in 1913, bankers extended their financial slavery empire over not only blacks, but also over whites, over Asians, and over Latinos, extending their empire of slavery all over the world. Thus slavery was never eradicated in 1863.

(4) Teach young adults that a tax on tea and a tax on stamps caused the American colonialists to hate the British monarchy and triggered a successful revolt in 1776, when it was the debt enslavement component of the monetary system and the bankers’ system of theft through numerous taxes that truly caused the revolt.

Benjamin Franklin desired that the colonies issue their own debt-free, interest-free money called Colonial Scrip. As I’ve explained in (3), the Colonialists lost this battle and thus, there was never a successful “revolution” against the bankers in 1776 though bankers have ensured, through control of our education system, that they teach the lie in all American schools today that America gained its independence on July 4, 1776. Just to make sure all Americans believe this, we celebrate this faux Independence Day every year as a national holiday. If Americans learned that the people truly lost the Revolutionary War in 1776, this might incite another revolution today. This is why the bankers teach the lie of the people winning the Revolutionary War in all American schools.

(5) Learn from the mistakes of Kings by hiding the robberies of citizens’ money and disguising this robbery as a silent tax called “inflation”. Transform the violent method of tax collection that lead to the beheading of past members of nobility during Medieval times into a passive method of automatic deductions from paychecks.

Bankers studied previous Kings’ taxation system such as Great Britain’s King George’s system and his use of armed soldiers to collect these taxes. In 1765, King George sent 40,000 armed troops to assure collection of taxes from his subjects and he forced the colonists to also provide living quarters and food to his troops or risk being shot and killed. Bankers studied this method and learned that this type of violent armed method of collecting taxes would always lead to violent insurrection and revolt. Thus bankers learned how to steal our money today in a passive manner that is not nearly as offensive as the method employed by previous Kings throughout history.

Today, all of us still provide the money for the living quarters of bankers and provide all the money to feed the bankers but we do not realize it. The bankers have employed the exact same system of robbery that King George instituted against the American colonialists that infuriated them, but were clever enough to change the method by which they execute their brazen theft and extortion. Today bankers extort money from all of us through automatic deductions from each pay check so that there is no need to send armed soldiers to collect taxes from those that might resist this scam. Furthermore, they deliberately devalue money and rob every single human on the planet through the implementation of a “silent tax” called inflation.

(6) Engage in huge disinformation and propaganda campaigns to convince citizens in every country that income tax is not flat out robbery and not equivalent to King George’s act of sending 40,000 soldiers to force colonists to turn their hard-earned money over to him.

Bankers have successfully sold this lie by misinforming us and telling us that we receive benefits from our income tax payments and that it would be “unpatriotic” to even think for a second to not pay our income taxes to the bankers. In fact, the reality unearthed by the Grace Commission report in January, 1984, under US President Ronald Reagan is this: "100% of what is collected [in income taxes] is absorbed solely by interest on the Federal Debt and by Federal Government contributions to transfer payments. In other words, all individual income tax revenues are gone before one nickel is spent on the services taxpayers expect from government." What are transfer payments? Payments for programs like welfare but also payments for programs like the massive 2008 $850 billion banker bailout program. Who receives interest payments on the Federal Debt? 100% of interest payments on the Federal Debt are directly funneled into the private banking accounts of the private banking families that own the Federal Reserve. So who is receiving nearly 100% of all income tax payments of all citizens in every country in the world? The answer is that nearly 100% of our income tax payments are transferred to just a few powerful private banking families. In fact, the Grace Commission report even hinted that the government performed studies to determine the outer limits of income taxation that they could get away with before it would trigger a revolt among the taxed citizenry.

(7) Sell concepts like “nationalism”, and incite religious-based and race-based hate to divide and conquer people from uniting against a segment of society (bankers) that commits a long list of atrocities that would have landed anyone else in jail centuries ago.

Bankers have been able to convince many blacks to blindly and stupidly support President Obama just because he is black and to falsely call anyone that also doesn’t support Obama a “racist”. Bankers have been able to convince many Jews to blindly and stupidly support Zionist agendas and cowardly and falsely accuse those that don’t support Zionist agendas of being an anti-semite. Bankers have been able to convince many people to blindly and stupidly support false wars and government agendas and label anyone that does not also support these items as “unpatriotic”, “un-American” or “un-whatever-country-you-are-from.”

Yes, bankers are behind all these hate-filled campaigns because they know that they can successfully divide and conquer the masses and if they do so, that a divided opposition will never be able to defeat them. They have also used their puppet Presidents and Prime Ministers to often perform favors for police and the military, such as increasing their pay and benefits, to falsely gain the loyalty and protection of those elements of society that should be most opposed to them. Bankers have taken their cue from big druglords and underworld crime bosses that have used these same tactics to gain the protection and loyalty of their communities. In Philadelphia, mobster Joey Merlino used to give away turkeys to housing project residents every Thanksgiving and throw Christmas parties for the homeless to gain the loyalty of people in his community despite his murderous ways. In the more expansive criminal drug underworld, ex-cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar was, and still is, considered a hero among many of the poor in Colombia for all the jobs he provided for them, not to mention all of his charity. In Mexico, the most violent druglord today, “El Chapo” Guzman, is often also viewed as a modern-day “Robin Hood” and a hero by the poor in Mexico and is afforded loyalty and protection among many of the poor for his many acts of benevolence for the poor.

However, it is a huge mistake of morality to overlook the massive crimes of our political and financial leaders for their “fake” charity work as it is a huge mistake of the poor to adore violent murderous druglords just because they make their lives better while they destroy the lives of millions. This very selfish attitude of “I don’t care what my leader does as long as he helps me out” even if he’s destroying the lives of hundreds of thousands, or millions of other people, is the very tactic that bankers choose to employ to effectively divide and conquer people. Instead of being loyal to someone just because of his skin color, religion, nationality or race, we all need to abandon our pre-disposed affinities for people that look like us or share our belief systems, and instead, start looking at these situations strictly on the basis of morality. We need to ask ourselves not the questions of mindless robots but rather tough questions such as,”Is what my President or Prime Minister doing moral?” If so, then support him. If not, then do everything you can to get him out of office no matter your race. Ask, “Is what my government doing moral?” If so, then support it. If not, then stop the stupid and divisive ad-hominem attacks against dissenters by wrongly labeling them as “unpatriotic” no matter your nationality. Ask, “Is Israel acting morally?” If so, support this nation-state. If not, then stop supporting it immediately no matter your religion.

It really is that simple. For people that are open minded enough to learn the truth about the ulterior motives of why the same bankers (Rothschilds) that were integral in founding the US Federal Reserve also were very integral in founding, and funding, the creation of Israel, as well as the Bank of Israel, watch Chapter 26 at 1:10:28 at Chapter 29 at 1:19:27 of this video. Though there are many things in this video I don’t agree with, I believe that these two chapters provide a legitimate explanation of how bankers have used the religion dissension surrounding Israel as part of their divide and conquer campaign against the entire world. These two segments are very careful to make the distinction between humanitarian, compassionate, authentic Jews and their misanthropic, inauthentic Zionist counterparts. In fact, I believe that the distinction between truly religious Jews and their radical Zionist counterparts is very similar to the distinction between radical Muslims and religious, moral Muslims and radical Christians and religious, moral Christians.

There are those that continually smear all Jews for many of the world's financial problems and not only do I believe this tactic to be wrong but I also believe that anyone that uses this tactic falls right into the banker trap of their divide and conquer strategies. The banker-funded Zionists are the small faction of Jews and non-Jews (US Vice President Joe Biden is a self-proclaimed Zionist) that need to be investigated for creating global financial problems. Though this point is likely to generate the most hateful comments and unjustified criticism of any of the nine points of this article, consider this point. If you agree with the other eight points of this article, would it be worth the risk to discuss something entirely false as true, and that could potentially discredit the rest of this entire article? The answer, of course, is no. I only included this point after much careful research convinced me that the facts surrounding this point were well documented and because I believed that this point is crucial enough to include in the 9 main points of this article for anyone desiring to understand the truth about how bankers divide us and keep us from unifying against them. Consequently, please have an open enough mind to consider the possibility of the truth of this point as well and research the facts before you close your mind to a view that may differ from the one you currently hold.

(8) Falsely teach people that paper fiat currency and paper derivative products offered by bogus gold and silver derivative markets of the LBMA and COMEX are better stores of value and purchasing power than physical gold and physical silver, even though the below chart displays the incredible progression in the prices of gold and silver every year in USD since 2001.

The London price-fix of gold has risen for 13 straight years and silver has risen 11 out of the last 13 years. Thus, it is completely bizarre that the vast majority of the investing public are still scared off by declarations of banking shills and commercial banking investment advisers that tout global paper stocks such as Chipotle Grill, Facebook, and Bank of America as better investments than physical gold & silver, which they describe as “risky”. Volatile, yes. Risky, no.

Because of (1) through (8), most citizens, especially those that live in the West and have been subjected to generations of banker propaganda, have no understanding of the fact that downside volatility in gold and silver is introduced artificially through computer HFT (High Frequency Trading) algorithms and bear no reflection upon the reality of physical gold and physical silver supply-demand determinants. Because nearly 100% of the things bankers teach us in school and through the media about the global monetary system and financial markets is a lie, I see, time and time again, masses of people befuddled by gold and silver price movements to the downside that have no fundamental basis of explanation and that can only be explained by banker manipulative games. This occurs among those of us that have no understanding of points (1) through (7) of this article. Thus, to this date, shockingly most people have not taken advantage of the crystal clear gold and silver trend shown in the above timeline and have no idea that converting their fiat paper currencies or fiat GLD & SLV ETFs into real assets like physical gold and silver can serve as a very effective weapon to fight back against banker criminality. Though it makes no sense to put faith in a piece of paper that has almost no intrinsic value and is truly a barbarous relic and to forgo ownership of real hard assets like physical gold and physical gold, the majority of masses, due to internalization of steps (1) through (7), continue to ignore reality and logic. However, read this excerpt from the book The Golden Gift, to understand how converting paper fiat currency into real assets like physical gold and physical silver can help re-establish our economic freedoms and help cut our bondages of financial slavery imposed upon us by the bankers.

(9) Teach people that the law is the final word so that they believe that anything legal is moral and anything illegal is immoral. The bankers have flipped the paradigm of morality on its head by convincing people that anything legal is moral and anything illegal is immoral when in fact, many things they have legislated as illegal is still moral and many things they have legislated as legal is highly immoral.

If truly moral people ran the world, probably 50% of the things legislated as legal would become illegal and 50% of the things legislated as illegal would become legal overnight. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs & Crime 2012 World Drug Report, heroin, cocaine, and all other "illegal" drugs killed about 200,000 people last year. On the contrary, an estimated 100,000 to 450,000 deaths occur from "legal" prescription drugs every year in the United States alone, and in 2009, "legal" prescription drugs were responsible for 4.5 million hospital visits. However, due to a lack of focus by law enforcement agencies on "legal" drugs, accurate statistics of deaths from legal pills varies widely, and if I had to guess, I would say that the Big Pharma lobbyists do everything in their power to suppress the true number of deaths every year that occur globally due to their "legal" drugs. Thus, the War on Drugs is more about the parties that profit from it than about a sincere desire to abolish the murder and crime associated with it. There really should be a War on All Wars instead. Because of the creation of unthinking sheep that our education system produces, far too many people today react instinctively by thinking that anything illegal is wrong and that anything legal is right, thus diminishing their ability to recognize that our modern banking system amounts to a legalized institution of financial slavery.

As always, never believe anything printed or stated on TV “news” channels (especially CNN – just google “Amber Lyon” to understand why) unless you independently verify it yourself, including everything in this article. Unfortunately there are more lies than truth circulating among all mass media distribution channels today so nothing should be accepted at face value. You must verify everything yourself until you are satisfied that you have arrived at the truth. Uncover the truth, and when you do, do everything you can to spread the uncovered truth to the four corners of the earth. This is how we will regain our freedoms.

About the author: JS Kim is the founder and Managing Director of SmartKnowledgeU, a fiercely independent investment research & consulting firm that focuses on gold & silver as a means of resisting the tyranny of the global banking cartel and of restoring sound money that would lay the foundation for the reintroduction of sustainable, organic economic growth to the world. Follow him on twitter @smartknowledge, get his free newsletter available here, and read a free excerpt of his book The Golden Gift here.

Why we haven’t had a Revolution - The Age of Turbo-Paralysis

Revolution Vs "Turboparalysis" - The Real New Normal 01-08-13 Excerpted from Michael Lind, originally posted at The Spectator via ZH

The age of turboparalysis Why we haven’t had a revolution

More than half a decade has passed since the recession that triggered the financial panic and the Great Recession, but the condition of the world continues to be summed up by what The Spectator's Michael Lind calls ‘turboparalysis’ - a prolonged condition of furious motion without movement in any particular direction, a situation in which the engine roars and the wheels spin but the vehicle refuses to move.

...

The greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression might have been expected to produce revolutions in politics and the world of ideas alike. Outside of the Arab world, however, revolutions are hard to find. Mass unemployment and austerity policies have caused riots in Greece and Spain, but most developed nations are remarkably sedate.

...

By now one might have expected the emergence of innovative and taboo-breaking schools of thought seeking to account for and respond to the global crisis. But to date there is no insurgent political and intellectual left, nor a new right, for that matter.

But why hasn't this occurred?

Why has a global calamity produced so little political change and, at the same time, so little rethinking? Part of the answer, I think, has to do with the collapse of the two-way transmission belt that linked the public to the political elite.

...

But there is a deeper, structural reason for the persistence of turboparalysis. And that has to do with the power and wealth that incumbent elites accumulated during the decades of the global bubble economy.

How did they get that power?

In essence, the bubble economy was a dysfunctional marriage of export-driven economies like China, Japan and Germany and debt-addicted nations like the US and many of Germany’s European neighbours. As international trade imbalances built up, from the 1980s to the 2000s, so did the wealth and power of elites who profited from the system, from Chinese Communist princelings with a stake in overbuilt export industries to the financiers of Wall Street and the City of London.

And that broke...

A global economic system that relied on excessive borrowing by consumers, particularly in the US, was bound to grind to a halt when fearful consumers switched from borrowing to saving. But the crash was only the first stage of the adjustment. The second stage is rebalancing.

But...

these reform agendas, from the downsizing of the overbuilt industrial sectors of mercantilist Asian nations to the pruning of finance in the Anglo-American world, threaten the very interests that profited from the preceding bubble and now glare defensively at a changing world, like Fafnir crouched upon his hoard. In the US, the wealth of the bubble-swollen financial sector has been transmuted into political power via campaign contributions.

So why no uprising against the elites? THIS IS CRITICAL

For their part, the masses seldom unite against the classes in democracies because they are divided among themselves. When nations realise that they will be collectively poorer in the future than they had expected, the usual result is not solidarity but rather civil war, by means of ballots and sometimes bullets. Confronted by a crisis like the Great Recession, each section of society uses its political influence to try to maintain its share of the national wealth, while forcing the cost of economic adjustment to others. The rich try to shift adjustment costs to the middle class, who in turn try to pay for their own subsidies and entitlements by cutting the programmes of the poor.

But is it coming?

History is sobering, in this regard. The Great Recession, which continues despite a technical ‘recovery’, can be viewed as the third great economic collapse of the industrial era, following the ‘Long Depression’ of the 1870s-1890s and the Great Depression of the 1930s. The earlier two episodes of global economic crisis witnessed setbacks for liberalism, democracy and free trade and the flourishing of illiberal nationalism, racism, imperialism and beggar-thy-neighbour economics. While slow growth combined with national rivalries have not yet engendered anything like the autarkic economics of the earlier two crises, it would be premature to predict the survival of present levels of financial and economic integration in a world that wobbles between feeble recoveries and renewed recessions.

Nowhere is there greater potential for conflict than in the relationship between the two poles of the now-collapsed bubble economy — the US, which specialised in exporting debt to China, and China, which specialised in exporting manufactured goods to the US. Since the Great Recession began, American attitudes toward China have grown strikingly more negative.

Is war coming?

The last global depression was brought to an end by the second world war. This time a ‘hot’ war is extremely unlikely and a cold war merely possible. Nevertheless, geopolitics may do what domestic politics has failed so far to do and free the world’s leading countries from ongoing turboparalysis.

The various national systems from which today’s leading global elites benefit, from hyper-industrial Germany to financialised Britain, grew up under the Pax Americana of the late 20th century. The US offered free security, a global currency, and the world’s largest open consumer market to allies — and potential allies — who were encouraged to specialise in non-military roles including industrial production (first Japan and Germany, later China) or finance (Britain and the US). The world order that resulted was well suited to East Asian and German industrialists and American and British bankers.

But while the US will remain the leading global military power for some time, the Pax Americana cannot survive the disappearance of a common Soviet threat and the diffusion of wealth and power to rising giants like China, India and Brazil. If, as many believe, the US will adopt a policy of moderate inflation in the future to help melt away the icecap of its public and private debt, the dollar as a store of value will be less attractive to foreigners.

If not, then what?

In the long run, regional hegemons, including China and Germany, may be compelled to take on some of America’s duties, from bailing out bankrupt countries to providing regional security. But that would require their political elites to focus less on economic statistics and more on their people and the world. The equivalent in the US would be a rebalancing of economic power and prestige away from financiers towards others — perhaps leaders of the fracking-driven energy renaissance or advanced manufacturing.

In some form or another, profound shifts like these are coming, because, as Mrs Thatcher would have said, There Is No Alternative. Going back to the pre-2008 world is not an alternative. Neither is the present state of suspended animation in politics and policy.

Nothing lasts forever. At some point today’s extended intermission in domestic and world affairs will give way to a new act. But for now the vehicle remains stuck in the ditch, while the wheels continue furiously to spin. The age of turboparalysis goes on.

STATISM - Self Censorship of the Media

U.S. Government Using Terrorism Against the American People 01-07-13 George Washington Blog via ZH

We've documented that - by any measure - America is the largest sponsor of terrorism in the world.

But remember, terrorism is defined as:

The use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.

The American government has also been using violence and threats to intimidate and coerce the American public for political purposes.

For example, the U.S. government is doing the following things to terrorize the American public into docility and compliance:

• Labeling peaceful protest as terrorism

• Using homeland security laws to crush dissent

• Spying on all Americans

• Threatening to indefinitely detain American citizens without cause and without any due process

• Even threatening to kill any U.S. citizen on a whim

U.S. constitutional law has taught for hundreds of years that chilling the exercise of our liberties is as dangerous to freedom than directly suppressing them.

For example, as we've previously noted, reporters censor themselves:

Initially, there is tremendous self-censorship by journalists.

For example, several months after 9/11, famed news anchor Dan Rather told the BBC that American reporters were practicing “a form of self-censorship”:

There was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around peoples’ necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions…. And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism.

What we are talking about here – whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not – is a form of self-censorship.

Keith Olbermann agreed that there is self-censorship in the American media, and that:

You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble …. You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our …. system.

As former Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin wrote in 2006:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . .

There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.

If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.

I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter – whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or  whatever it is – out of the way.

Former Fox News reporters say the same thing.

Any reporters who don't censor themselves are harassed .  Whistleblowers are prosecuted ... or even tortured by the government.

The fact that the government is spying on all Americans - and using the information to launch political witch hunts - makes us all watch what we say, and makes us careful about who we talk to.  As the ACLU notes:

Peaceful protesters should not be treated as potential terrorists nor spied upon by federal government agents.  Not only is this a misuse of public funds that could be used to find real terrorists, it chills free speech activities and inhibits the public debate on important issues.

A federal judge found that the NDAA's provision allowing indefinite detention of Americans without due process has a "chilling effect" on free speech. And see this and this.

The threat of being labeled a terrorist certainly dissuades and chills our willingness to  exercise our rights.

Especially when power has become so concentrated that the same agency which spies on all Americans also decides who should be assassinated.

And fear of terror makes people docile and stupid ... and the government has intentionally whipped up an exaggerated hysteria of terror by "others" in order to scare the people.

The bottom line is that - like Stalin, Mao or Hitler - the U.S. government is using  violence and threats to intimidate and coerce its own people for political purposes ... to consolidate power and suppress dissent.

STATISM - Lessons of Argentina's "Estancias"

To better understand the situation today, a brief history of "the company store" may prove useful.

Here in Argentina, for example, much of the country used to be divided into large land holdings – estancias. While there was a central government of sorts, these estancias were of a size and the owners of sufficient wealth and political influence that, for all intents and purposes, they operated as autonomous states.

By tradition, these estancias established company stores on their land that provided the workers and their families with the basics of life. If for no other reason than geography, but also because the estancia owners banned competitors from setting up on their property, everyone who worked for these isolated estancias had no choice but to spend their money down at the company store.

The workers were paid relatively well on many of these estancias, but the prices of everything sold at the stores were also relatively high, making it hard for the workers to accumulate any significant savings.

The coup de grâce came on payday when the company store would roll out overpriced booze in abundance, encouraging a proper drink-up. Naturally, by the end of the payday weekend, the workers were tapped dry, leaving them no choice but to return to work, scraping by till the next payday on what meager savings might have remained. Or, lacking savings, to fall back on credit from the company store. When payday rolled around again, the cycle would repeat, effectively making the workers indentured servants.

This is the case with the state-dominated economy today. Other than a small percentage of the population who have managed to build enough wealth to break the cycle through diversified investment and income sources, the vast majority of the population lives pretty much hand to mouth.

Of the money you earn, close to a majority is now returned to the state in the form of taxes of all description (payroll, property, sales, income, etc., ad infinitum). Then, because it's a rigged game, just like the company store, the money you do manage is steadily debased.

And while the situation is bad, it hasn't yet gotten desperate. When the government begins to run out of other people's money in earnest, it will lay claim to your tax-deferred savings plans (if you are fortunate enough to have one). Perhaps not by outright confiscation, but almost certainly by requiring that some large part of it – or all of it – be replaced with the same Treasury I.O.U.s that now serve as collateral for the Social Security system.

If there is a sunny side of the street to all of this, that street is being strolled down by government pensioners whose $800 billion in annual payouts now represents about five and a half percent of the national economy.

(Click on image to enlarge)

Now, I wish I could leave you with a ray of hope about where things are headed, or why they are sure to turn around in our lifetimes. But, regrettably, short of a truly epic crash that causes everyone to rethink the wisdom of taking the path to yet more socialism, I just don't see it.

STATISM - Shifting Sentiment to Collectivism & Central Planning

Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. is chairman of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, editor of LewRockwell.com, and author of The Left, the Right, and the State. See Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.'s article archives.

Do you think ideas don't matter, that what people believe about themselves and their world has no real consequence? If so, the following will not bug you in the slightest.

A new BBC poll finds that only 11 percent of people questioned around the world — and 29,000 people were asked their opinions — think that free-market capitalism is a good thing. The rest believe in more government regulation. Only a small percentage of the world's population believes that capitalism works well and that more regulation will reduce efficiency.

One-quarter of those asked said that capitalism is "fatally flawed." In France, 43% believe this. In Mexico, it is 38%. A majority believes that government should rob the rich to give money to poor countries. In only one country, Turkey, did a majority say that less government is better.

It gets even worse. While most Europeans and Americans think it was a good thing for the Soviet Union to disintegrate, people in India, Indonesia, Ukraine, Pakistan, Russia, and Egypt mostly think it was a bad thing. Yes, you read that right: millions freed from socialist slavery — bad thing.

That news must lift the heart of every would-be despot the world over. And it comes as something of a shock twenty years after the collapse of socialism in Russia and Eastern Europe revealed what this system had created: backward societies with citizens who lived short and miserable lives. Then there is the China case, a country rescued from bloody barbarism under communism and transformed into a modern and prosperous country by capitalism.

What can we learn? Far from not having learned anything, people have largely forgotten the experience and have developed a love for the ancient fairy tale that all things can be fixed through collectivism and central planning.

As to those who would despair at this poll, consider that it might have been much worse were it not for the efforts of a relative handful of intellectuals who have fought against socialist theory for more than a century. It might have been 99% in support of socialist tyranny. So there is no sense in saying that these intellectual efforts are wasted.

Ideas also have a life of their own. They can lie in wait for decades or centuries and then one day, the whole of history turns on a dime. Especially these days, no effort goes to waste. Publications and essays, or any form of education, is immortalized, ready for the taking by a desperate world.

As for the opinion poll, we have no idea just how intensely these views are held or even what they mean. What, for example, is capitalism? Do people even know? Michael Moore doesn't know, else he wouldn't be calling bailouts for elite, Fed-connected financial firms a form of capitalism. Many other people reduce the term capitalism to "the system of economics in the United States." It is no more complicated than that. This is despite the reality that the United States has a comprehensive planning apparatus in place that is directly responsible for all our current economic troubles.

Now, let's take this further. Among the many people around the world who do not like the US empire, many believe they don't like capitalism either. If the US economy drags the world down into recession, that is a prime example of capitalism's failure. Even more preposterous, if you didn't like George W. Bush, his ways, and his cronies, and Obama is something of a relief, then you don't like capitalism and you do like socialism.

Another point of view misunderstands the idea of capitalism itself. It is not about creating economic structures that benefit capital at the expense of labor or culture or religion. It is about a system that protects the rights of everyone and serves the common good. Capitalism is just the name that happened to be identified with this system. If you want to call freedom a banana, fine, what matters is not words but ideas.

I do know that none of these messed-up definitions of capitalism follow. You know this too. But for the world at large, serious ideological analytics are not the animating force of daily life. Many people attach themselves to vague slogans.

Further, as Rothbard has forcefully argued, free-market capitalism serves no more than a symbolic purpose for the Republican Party and for conservatives. Economic liberty is the utopia that they keep promising to bring us, pending the higher priority of blowing up foreign peoples, jailing political dissidents, crushing the left wing on campus, and routing the Democrats.

Once all of this is done, they say, then they will get to the instituting of a free-market economic system. Of course, that day never arrives, and it is not supposed to. Capitalism serves the Republicans the way Communism served Stalin: a symbolic distraction to keep you hoping, voting, and coughing up money.

All of which leaves true capitalism — a product of the voluntary society and the sum total of all the exchanges and cooperative acts of people all over the world — with few actual intellectual defenders. They are growing, but the educational work we need to do is daunting, and we are facing the most powerful forces in the world.

There is nothing new in this. In the history of the world, freedom is the exception, not the rule. It must be fought for anew in every generation. Its enemies are everywhere, but the leading enemy is ignorance. For this reason, the main weapon we have at our disposal is education.

Education includes explaining that socialism is an unworkable idea. There is nothing better than Ludwig von Mises's 1922 book Socialism, a comprehensive presentation of the fallacy of the socialist idea. Another essential work is the Black Book of Communism. Here we have a wake-up call that shows that the dream of socialism is actually a bloody nightmare.

Then there is the issue of the positive case for capitalism. One can do no better than Mises's own Human Action, which is not likely to ever be surpassed as a treatise on the free economy. True, it is not for everyone. And that's fine. There are many primers out there too.

The fashion for socialism and the opposition to capitalism should alarm every lover of freedom the world over. We have our jobs cut out for us, but with numbers this bad, it is not difficult to make a difference. Every blow you can land for free markets helps protect freedom from its enemies.

STATISM - Fiat Money & Collective Corruption

Fiat Money and Collective Corruption Thorsten Polleit, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics

collective corruption— which is the logical result of government interventionism in the field of money production—can explain why public opinion accepts adherence to an economically and socially destructive fiat money regime. Collective corruption can explain why returning to sound money faces such high, perhaps insurmountable, hurdles once fiat money has been put into place.

How Fiat Currency Leads To 'Collective Corruption' 01-04-13 Zero Hedge

Ex-Barclays chief 'Austrian' economist Thorsten Polleit provides a few clarifying thoughts on the hyperinflatory endgame (and democracy-crushing impact) of the fiat currency environment. Critically, Polleit notes that fiat currency tends to result in "collective corruption" in societies, and how this then leads to hyperinflation, despite the dangers to society that hyperinflation always brings. Ring some bells? This brief interview (with more detailed article below) stretches from the development of the global fiat currency regimes over the last 40 years to the increasing levels of debt that may (just as Kyle Bass and others have noted) mark the terminal decline of the fiat regime and the self-serving majority electing themselves into a vicious circle. Mises noted:

"The masses... do not conceive any ideas, sound or unsound. They only choose between the ideologies developed by the intellectual leaders of mankind. But their choice is final and determines the course of events. If they prefer bad doctrines, nothing can prevent disaster." If these "uncommon men" become "court intellectuals," the door will be opened for effectively spreading of false theories, supporting government-friendly ideas."

Must watch.

Thorsten Polleit's excellent speech "What Do Bankers Know About Money And Banking" is also below: 

Thorsten Polleit, "What Do Bankers Know about Money & Banking", PFS 2012 from Property & Freedom Society on Vimeo.

qjae14_4_1

STATISM - The Nature of the State

One of the themes of Murray Rothbard’s writings on the nature of the state is that state power ultimately depends on the perpetuation of a body of beliefs and superstitions about the benevolence and necessity of the state, and the alleged evils of private property, free enterprise, individual liberty, and the civil society. Because the citizens always outnumber any ruling class by many orders of magnitude, they must somehow be made to acquiesce in the ruling class’s plundering of their society in the name of “progress,” “nationalism,” “the greater good,” “socialism,” or whatever.

Beatings, imprisonment, torture, and mass murder are time-tested tools of the state, but they can be very costly and can instigate a revolution. Therefore, relentless propaganda is often relied upon instead to secure the power and privileges of the state and statists.

Once the people of the Soviet empire finally understood that socialist propaganda was all a big lie, the regime was doomed. At that point it was always just a matter of how much beating, imprisonment, torture, and mass murder the thugs and criminals who ran the Soviet government could get away with to keep the system going.

American history is vastly different from the grotesque history of Soviet Russia, but in some ways it is similar. Until recently, there has never been much of a movement to bring full-fledged socialism to America. The ideological battle was not so much capitalism versus socialism but capitalism and freedom versus interventionism and paternalistic regulation and taxation. The interventionists eventually won out, so that today’s political/economic system (in the U.S. and in many other copycat countries) can be described as “participatory fascism,” to borrow a phrase used by Robert Higgs. It is a system of crony capitalism financed by a central bank, government borrowing, and pervasive taxation. It is a system that is of plutocratic elites, for plutocratic elites, and by plutocratic elites (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, the true founding father of this system). The massive welfare state is merely used to buy enough votes to maintain the “legitimacy” of the system.

Like Soviet socialism, this system is grounded on a particular ideology or collection of superstitions about the evils of private, competitive markets and the supposed benevolence and necessity of state intervention. The ideology is not socialism but goes under several different names, such as “economic nationalism” or “Hamiltonianism.”

STATISM - Our Enemy the "State"

What does one need to know about politics? In some ways, Nock has summed it all up in this astonishing book, the influence of which has grown every year since its publication.

Nock was a prominent essayist at the height of the New Deal. In 1935, hardly any public intellectuals were making much sense at all. They pushed socialism. They pushed fascism. Everyone had a plan. Hardly anyone considered the possibility that the state was not fixing society but destroying it bit by bit.

And so Albert Jay Nock came forward to write what needed to be written. And he ended up penning a classic of American political commentary, one that absolutely must be read by every student of economics and government.

Consider his opening two paragraphs:

If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance, and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social power.

It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

He praises the Articles of Confederation as the closest model of American freedom. And he blasts the men who hammered out the Constitution as nothing but usurpers engaged in a coup d'etat. Far from heralding the drafters, he exposes them as public creditors, land speculators, money lenders, and industrialists looking for privilege. They tossed out the Articles and used unscrupulous methods to ram the Constitution down the public's throat.

It was in this stage of American history, Nock says, that the state was unleashed. Next came the party system, and the dynamics of statism that causes "every intervention by the State" to enable another so that "the State stands ever ready and eager to make" interventions through deceit and lies.

One realizes many important points about Nock when reading this. First, he was brilliant, original, and courageous. Second, he hated politics -- indeed he hated politics so much that he wanted a society that was completely free of it. This is why he is often described as anarchist. Third, he surely was one of the great stylists of the English language in the history of 20th century writing.

Those who have read Nock know that there is something about his writing that tugs very deeply on one's conscience and soul. This book will linger in your mind as you read the daily headlines. He makes his points so well that they become unforgettable.

In so many ways, it is a tragedy that years have gone by when this book has been unavailable. But here it is again, just as hot, just a revealing, as it was in 1935. It is the ultimate handbook of the political dissident. If you aren't one yet, you may find that Nock is a very persuasive recruiter into his informed army that makes up the remnant who know.

STATISM - The Poltics of Obedience

"Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."

Etienne de la Boetie

States are more vulnerable than people think. They can collapse in an instant—when consent is withdrawn.

This is the thesis of this thrilling book. Murray Rothbard writes a classic introduction to one of the great political essays in the history of ideas.

In times when dictators the world over are falling from pressure from their own people, this book, written nearly 500 years ago, is truly the prophetic tract of our times.

Étienne de La Boétie was born in Sarlat, in the Périgord region of southwest France, in 1530, to an aristocratic family, and became a dear friend of Michel de Montaigne. But he ought to be remembered for this astonishingly important essay, one of the greatest in the history of political thought. It will shake the way you think of the state. His thesis and argument amount to the best answer to Machiavelli ever penned as well as one of the seminal essays in defense of liberty.

La Boétie's task is to investigate the nature of the state and its strange status as a tiny minority of the population that adheres to different rules from everyone else and claims the authority to rule everyone else, maintaining a monopoly on law. It strikes him as obviously implausible that such an institution has any staying power. It can be overthrown in an instant if people withdraw their consent.

He then investigates the mystery as to why people do not withdraw, given what is obvious to him that everyone would be better off without the state. This sends him on a speculative journey to investigate the power of propaganda, fear, and ideology in causing people to acquiesce in their own subjection. Is it cowardice? Perhaps. Habit and tradition. Perhaps. Perhaps it is ideological illusion and intellectual confusion.

La Boétie goes on to make a case as to why people ought to withdraw their consent immediately. He urges all people to rise up and cast off tyranny simply by refusing to concede that the state is in charge.

The tyrant has "nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you?"

Then these inspiring words: "Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces."

In all these areas, the author has anticipated Jefferson and Arendt, Gandhi and Spooner, and those who overthrew Soviet tyranny. The essay has profound relevance for understanding history and all our times.

As Rothbard writes in his spectacular introduction, "La Boetie's Discourse has a vital importance for the modern reader—an importance that goes beyond the sheer pleasure of reading a great and seminal work on political philosophy, or, for the libertarian, of reading the first libertarian political philosopher in the Western world. For La Boétie speaks most sharply to the problem which all libertarians—indeed, all opponents of despotism—find particularly difficult: the problem of strategy. Facing the devastating and seemingly overwhelming power of the modern State, how can a free and very different world be brought about? How in the world can we get from here to there, from a world of tyranny to a world of freedom? Precisely because of his abstract and timeless methodology, La Boétie offers vital insights into this eternal problem.

STATISM - The Underpinnings of the Road to Statism

Hey You 12-17-12 Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform

 Hey you, out there on the road
always doing what you’re told,
Can you help me?
Hey you, out there beyond the wall,
Breaking bottles in the hall,
Can you help me?
Hey you, don’t tell me there’s no hope at all
Together we stand, divided we fall.

Pink Floyd – Hey You

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

The world makes less sense every day.

• Little children are randomly slaughtered in their schoolrooms.
• Predator drones roam the skies over foreign countries exterminating bad guys, along with innocent women and children (collateral damage when it occurs in a foreign country).
• Drugged up mentally ill kids with no hope and no future live lives of secluded quiet desperation until they snap.
• Ignorant, government educated, welfare dependent drones with no self respect or respect for others, assault, kill and rob within their government created urban jungles.
• Sociopathic criminals who committed the largest financial crime in world history walk free and continue to occupy executive suites in luxury office towers in downtown NYC, collecting millions in bonuses as compensation for crushing the American middle class.  
• Academics, whose theories have been thoroughly disproven, continue to steer our economy into an iceberg while accelerating the money printing and debt issuance that will sink our ship of state.
• Corrupt, bought off politicians pander to the lowest common denominator as their votes are only dependent upon who contributed the most to their election campaigns, which never end.
• Delusional, materialistic, egocentric, math challenged consumers (formerly known as citizens) live for today, enslave themselves in debt, vote themselves more entitlements, and care not for future generations.

The alienation and isolation created by our sprawling, automobile dependent, technology obsessed, government controlled, debt financed society has spread like a cancerous tumor, slowly killing our country.

Pink Floyd released The Wall 33 years ago. It was a concept rock opera album that explored the issues of ababdonment, isolation, alienation, authoritarianism, the brutality of war, a tyrannical conformist educational system, and the walls individuals and society build to protect themselves from having to confront reality and deal with the consequences of their actions. I attended the Roger Waters Wall Concert this past summer at Citizens Bank Park with my three sons. Three decades later, the message is more powerful than ever. The government oppression and never ending wars waged by the American Empire around the world..

... have created a society built upon fear and loathing.

Roger Waters’ vision is colored by Orwell’s 1984 dystopian nightmare of lies, misinformation, propaganda and brutality. The missing piece, which Waters didn’t see coming in 1979, was

the ability of the oligarchs to use their control of the credit system to entrap the masses by convincing them to love their servitude and become so consumed with material possessions and the love of money that they would become nothing more than passive egotistical consumers.

Since 1979, Total Credit Market Debt in the United States has risen from $4.3 trillion to $55.3 trillion, a 1,286% increase in 33 years. Over this same time frame total wages and salaries have risen from $1.3 trillion to $6.9 trillion, a 531% increase. GDP has grown from $2.6 trillion to $15.8 trillion, a 608% increase. Luckily for the oligarchs, the math challenged masses don’t understand that 375% of the increase in GDP is strictly due to Federal Reserve created inflation, as the U.S. dollar has lost 68% of its purchasing power since 1979. This GDP growth was driven by debt, with consumer expenditures rising from 61% of GDP in 1979 to 71% of GDP today. In the one hundred years since the creation of the Federal Reserve the country’s population has tripled, while our public debt and unfunded liabilites have risen from $2 billion to over $200 trillion, a ten million percent increase. The masses have been programmed and conditioned to love their debt servitude and yearn for more debt to fix an economic system that collapsed due to excessive debt. The cadre of ruling elite are obliging by creating debt at hyperspeed levels. The corporate media, Wall Street shysters and low-life captured politicians assure the sheep-like masses that this is normal and beneficial to their interests, as the sheep are sheared and led to slaughter.

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

 “And always, everywhere, there would be the yelling or quietly authoritative hypnotists; and in the train of the ruling suggestion givers, always everywhere, the tribes of buffoons and hucksters, the professional liars, the purveyors of entertaining irrelevances. Conditioned from the cradle, unceasingly distracted, mesmerized systematically, their uniformed victims would go on obediently marching and countermarching, go on, always and everywhere, killing and dying with the perfect docility of trained poodles.” -  Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley and Edward Bernays realized in the 1920s that the utilization of conditioning and propaganda techniques could be used to control and manipulate the masses. Ivan Pavlov, the famous Russian physiologist, conducted the ground breaking work on conditional reflexes. Pavlov discovered that when a bell was rung in subsequent time with food being presented to a dog in consecutive sequences, the dog will initially salivate when the food is presented. The dog will later come to associate the ringing of the bell with the presentation of the food and salivate upon the ringing of the bell. To a critical thinking human being who questions authority, resists being told what they should think, and values their humanity, over what is crammed down their throat by government run schools and the corporate controlled media, the thought of being treated like a dog is revolting. But to people like Edward Bernays, who believed manipulation of the masses by an invisible contingent of intellectually superior men,

... conditioning the minds of the masses through propaganda was a necessity in a democratic society to keep the herd under control.

Just a cursory examination of our society reveals a population of salivating consumers (dogs) who can be stimulated to buy the latest iPhone or techno-gadget with a simple Madison Avenue advertising campaign (bell). Everyone has seen the videos of the masses lining up like cattle on Black Friday, stampeding through aisles, and fighting each other like their the entertainment at Michael Vick’s house on a Saturday night. All the mega-corporate retailers and the corporate media have to do is ring a bell (SALE) and the dogs start salivating. Product placement, Hollywood star endorsements and influential people using a product immediately convince the easily manipulated dogs to salivate and purchase the products. The difference is that these dogs have credit cards issued by the Wall Street banks and funded by the Federal Reserve with dollars created out of thin air.  We are inundated with millions of TV, newspaper, radio, billboard, and internet advertisements designed to make us salivate (spend). Huxley’s dystopian vision of a society whose economic values, in which individual happiness is defined as the ability to satisfy needs, and achievement as a society is equated with economic growth and prosperity, has come to full fruition. He never conceived of consumers having the ability to consume without even having the money to do so. The credit card became our form of Soma. The so called progressives point to our ever increasing “advancements” in technology as proof that our society is progressing. Huxley knew otherwise, decades before we reached this disgusting point in history:

“Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” -  Aldous Huxley

In reality our “technological progress” has done nothing more than create a humorless, shallow, superficial world of alienation and egocentric desires. Just as in Huxley’s Brave New World, science and technology have not been used to seek truth and advance our culture. They have been used by the State to sensor, control, and monitor the citizens. They use technology as a means to create electronic entertainment machines that generate both harmless leisure and the high levels of consumption and production that are the basis of societal stability and state designed happiness. When those in control talk about progress, they mean greater control over our lives. When the consumption of material goods isn’t enough to fill the holes within our souls, our owners are quick to prescribe a pill to smooth over those feelings of unease and discontent. In Huxley’s novel the population voluntarily consumes Soma to dispel any anxieties or negative emotion. The saying was, “One cubic centimeter cures ten gloomy sentiments.” In America the government controlled drug industry has thousands of pills to treat every ailment or unhappy thought that might ail you. Just don’t try and treat yourself with an unapproved natural or banned substance. The threat of imprisonment always lurks in the shadows. They just want us to be interchangeable bricks in the wall.

“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

 Hey you, out there in the cold
Getting lonely, getting old
Can you feel me?
Hey you, standing in the aisles
With itchy feet and fading smiles
Can you feel me?
Hey you, don’t help them to bury the light
Don’t give in without a fight.

Pink Floyd – Hey You

The tragic deaths of twenty children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut and the similar tragedies in Aurora, Columbine, Virginia Tech and Tucson are a reflection of the twisted society we’ve created.

The progressive control freak do-gooders that believe the government can solve all problems and improve our lives with another law or regulation, have as usual come to the wrong solution for the wrong problem.

Stricter gun control laws would not have averted this this tragedy. Connecticut has the 5th toughest gun restrictions in the country according to the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The guns were purchased legally by the mother of the killer. Mentally deranged people should not have access to guns, knives, automobiles, gasoline, or baseball bats. The real issue is not what he used to kill these innocent people, it’s what caused him to snap.

SOMA & THE 'PROZAC NATION'

Those in power want to divert the attention from this crucial question. In Huxley’s novel the characters do everything they can to avoid confronting the truth about their own lives. They try to alter reality by ingesting Soma, encouraged by the state as the ultimate form of willful self-delusion. Soma clouds the realities of the present and replaces them with happy hallucinations, and is thus a tool for promoting social stability. America has taken Huxley’s dystopian vision to an extreme. There are millions of children in this country being drugged on a daily basis to keep them under control. A majority of the mass murderers were taking psychotropic drugs, including the mentally deranged killer in Newtown. These killings are a result of the state sponsored drugging of children, a culture that promotes narcissism, broken families and our technologically enhanced suburban sprawl isolation from human relationships, love and compassion for others.

We glorify technology even though it encourages the building of brick walls, creating a self-imposed isolation from society.

• The traditional family unit has been discarded, with 50% of marriages ending in divorce and 43% of all children born out of wedlock.
• Millions of families are dysfunctional, with parents too busy with their careers and acquiring material possessions, to bother with raising their children in a loving nurturing way.
• One in ten American adults choose to escape their man made cells with prescription anti-depressants.
• Almost one in four women in their 40s and 50s are popping pills to escape their depressing lives.

Huxley envisioned a Soma Nation. America is a Prozac Nation. The wealthy think medicating their kids, spoiling them with toys, gadgets and cars, and occupying their days with organized sports and activities passes for involved parenting. Poor urban children are lucky if they ever lay eyes on their father. Ignorance, violence, and dependency are a given for most of these kids. And all of these children are matriculated into the government run schools whose sole purpose is to teach kids what to think, rather than how to think. Our owners need to keep us “happy” and focused on feelings, material possessions, and an infinite number of distractions, so they can retain control and continue their pillaging of the national wealth.

NOTE: INSERTION BY GORDONTLONG.COM not the author

Our leaders have attempted to design their own Brave New World, retaining control by making America’s citizens so contented and superficially fulfilled that they no longer care about their personal freedoms, liberties and civic responsibilities. The consequences of increasing state power are a loss of dignity, morals, values, and emotions. We are losing our humanity.

The society created by Bernays and his minions who occupy the executive suites in NYC and slither through the halls of Congress has been built upon destroying all human truths, such as love, friendship, community, and personal connections. Decades of media propaganda, public education mind control, and peddling of debt convinced the majority that happiness meant immediate gratification of our desires for food, sex, drugs, clothes, iGadgets, and all the other consumer crap made in corporate sponsored slave labor factories across Asia. These delusional hallucinations of happiness are the prison walls we’ve built brick by brick.

 “This concern with the basic condition of freedom — the absence of physical constraint — is unquestionably necessary, but is not all that is necessary. It is perfectly possible for a man to be out of prison and yet not free — to be under no physical constraint and yet to be a psychological captive, compelled to think, feel and act as the representatives of the national State, or of some private interest within the nation, want him to think, feel and act.” -  Aldous Huxley

It took the intellectuals and progressives that wield power across the land only moments to hijack the feelings of sorrow and pain sweeping the nation, to misdirect attention from the mental illnesses caused by the society they’ve created, towards the false storyline that gun violence is sweeping the land. In reality, violent crime has been falling for over a decade as gun sales have soared. The homicide rate in this country is the lowest since 1964, with the vast majority of homicides occurring in the urban kill zones created by the five decade long progressive war on poverty. The truth is of no interest to those brandishing power. After decades of conditioning, the masses are psychologically captive to the messages designed to make them salivate. They will be compelled to think, feel and act as instructed by the Alphas. There will be calls for more police, despite the fact that police rarely stop a crime. With all of their armaments, technology, high powered weaponry, and political clout, they can be counted on to arrive five minutes after the tragedy is over. But they are brilliant in luring clueless Muslim teenagers into terrorist plots, picking the target, providing the fake bombs, and taking credit for foiling the plots they created. More union police officers will increase our safety as much as more union teachers have made our kids smarter. This tragedy will be used by the propagandists to impose further restrictions upon those who choose personal responsibility and self-reliance over dependency and trust in the efficiency and fairness of our benevolent government overlords.

As the father of three sons I can’t imagine the pain, sorrow and emptiness the parents of these beautiful children must be experiencing. The grief is overwhelming.

• I mourn for the children and adults slaughtered by a mentally deranged young man created by our truly perverted culture of alienation.
• I mourn for the children being raised in a society run by evil psychopathic liars that use the power of propaganda and the tools of debt to control and manipulate its citizens.
• I mourn for unborn generations that will be forced to confront the dreadful depraved chaos created by our culture of egocentric greed and narcissism. The things we value in this culture – accumulating wealth, outward beauty, acquisition of material possessions, instant gratification, access to debt, government control, and curing our ills with drugs – are driving us insane.

Who is really abnormal in a profoundly abnormal society?

Believing that possessions, more laws or another medication will truly make us happy is insane.

Popping a pill, buying a new iPhone, or passing another law will not cure the disease that permeates this nation. We need to recapture the humanity, civic pride and self-responsibility that built this country. Only an awakened populace can change our course.

1. Huxley feared that our desires would ruin us.
2. Orwell was afraid that what we fear would ruin us.

The oligarchs have pushed the Huxley vision to its sustainable limit. The avarice and greed of these invisible power brokers has devoured the vast resources of the nation. These psychopaths weren’t satisfied with siphoning off most of the wealth of the country. They wanted it all and wrecked the global economy in their odious pursuit of mammon. We are now in the death throes of the most decadent, delusional, debt engendered era in the long history of mankind. Those in power realize it is slipping away. Their “solutions” reflect an air of desperation. Their propaganda efforts have been redoubled. As more middle class workers lose their jobs, more young people graduate from college with tens of thousands in student loan debt and a future of dramatically reduced expectations, and more people are driven beyond their breaking point, this materialistic shroud of happiness will be torn asunder. Anger is building like a lava dome within a volcano. A critical thinking minority are questioning the motives of those in power. The unsustainability of our economic paradigm is certain. The seeds of revolution are being sown. Our society is only fantasy. The wall is too high. It will be up to an irate tireless minority of freedom minded citizens to tear down the wall. The alternative is to allow the worms to eat into our brains. Each of us must answer a simple question. Are you just another brick in the wall?

But it was only fantasy.
The wall was too high,
As you can see.
No matter how he tried,
He could not break free.
And the worms ate into his brain.

Pink Floyd – Hey You

The oligarchs will not give up without a fight. Their realization that the Brave New World method of controlling the masses has run its course has convinced them to shift their methods towards Orwell’s 1984 tactics. In part two of this series – Mother Should I Trust the Government? - I’ll address how the use of fear, war, pain, and surveillance are becoming the new controlling method of the oligarchs.

STATISM - Trust in Government

MOTHER, SHOULD I TRUST THE GOVERNMENT? 01-01-13 Jim Quinn, The Burning Platform

Mother, do you think they’ll drop the bomb?
Mother, do you think they’ll like this song?
Mother, do you think they’ll try to break my balls?
Ooh ah,
Mother, should I build the wall?

Mother, should I run for president?
Mother, should I trust the government?
Mother, will they put me in the firing line?
Ooh ah,
Is it just a waste of time?

Pink Floyd – Mother

The lyrics to Mother had both a literal and figurative meaning for Roger Waters. He was literally describing his overprotective single mother (his father was killed in World War II) building walls to protect him from the outside world. The figurative meaning is Big Mother sending its boys off to war and using fear to control and manipulate the masses. At the time he wrote this song in 1979, the Soviet Union was thought to be at its peak of power and the Berlin Wall represented a boundary between good and evil. Nuclear war was still a looming fear. Waters has always had a dim view of totalitarian states and institutions (English schools). Having seen his Wall Tour performance this past summer at Citizens Bank Park with a diverse crowd of 40,000, ranging in age from senior citizens to teenagers, it seems this song has gained new meaning. He sang a duet with himself from 1980 projected on the Wall and when he sang the lyric, “Mother, should I trust the government?” the entire stadium responded in unison – NO!!! This revealed a truth that is not permitted to be discussed by the corporate mainstream media acting as a mouthpiece for the ruling class. A growing legion of citizens in this country does not trust the government. This is very perceptive on their part.

In part one of this two part series – Hey You – I examined how an invisible government of wealthy, power hungry men have utilized the propaganda techniques of Edward Bernays and lured the American people into a narcissistic, techno-gadget, debt based servitude. Over the last one hundred years they have created a totalitarian state built upon egotism, material goods, and fulfilling our desires through Wall Street peddled debt and mass consumerism. It has been an incredibly effective form of control that has convinced the masses to love their servitude. The ruling oligarchs correctly chose the painless, amusement saturated, soft totalitarianism of Huxley’s Brave New World over the fearful, pain inflicting, surveillance state, house of horrors detailed in Orwell’s 1984.

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

• The nefarious establishment of the Federal Reserve in 1913,
• launch of welfare programs in the 1930s,
• expansion of the entitlement state in the 1960s,
• creation of the credit card in 1970, mass media marketing propaganda, and the formation of an empire of debt laid the foundation for a society based on triviality, egotism, irrelevance and mass delusion.
• The conscious manipulation of the habits and opinions of the masses by an invisible government of powerful men using media propaganda and easy to access consumer credit has reached its mathematical limit.
• The oligarchs built a society dependent upon exponential growth. This unsustainable prototype began to show signs of strain in the 1990s.
• The powerful interests have been growing ever more desperate and blatantly obvious in their looting and pillaging of the debt bloated carcass of a country.
• They used their control of the political system to repeal Glass-Steagall, allowing the Wall Street banking cabal to become Too Big to Control.
• The oligarch puppets at the Wall Street controlled Federal Reserve did the bidding of their masters by reducing interest rates and expanding the money supply to create two epic bubbles.

The Dot.com bubble was created by Wall Street utilizing hype and misinformation to fleece millions into believing we had entered a new paradigm. The only people who got rich were the Wall Street hucksters, shysters and shills.

When the Dot.com bubble burst, Alan Greenspan came to the rescue, at the urging of Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman, by creating the largest banker made bubble in the history of the world. The combination of

1. Excessively low mortgage rates,
2. Complete lack of regulatory oversight by the Federal Reserve,
3. Control fraud committed by the Wall Street banks, and
4. Buying frenzy stirred up by the corporate MSM and NAR,

led to the biggest financial collapse since 1929.

The white collared psychopathic criminals on Wall Street reaped billions in profits, paid themselves millions in bonuses, and cost taxpayers trillions when it all blew up in 2008. The ruling elite have added $6 trillion to our national debt and their central banker has added another $2 trillion to our ultimate tab, while providing free money to their Wall Street bank owners. They realize their efforts to restart the exponential growth engine have failed.

• They gutted our productive manufacturing based economic system by shipping the blue collar jobs overseas to Chinese slave labor facilities,
• replaced workers with machines,
• stimulated consumption with unlimited distribution of high interest debt, and
• allowed conglomerates to drive small business owners out of business with their cheap foreign sourced goods, all in the name of capitalism.

The plan worked so well that

• real wages haven’t risen in 40 years,
• inflation has destroyed the purchasing power of the middle class,
• 47.7 million people are dependent on food stamps to survive, and
• the masses can’t even afford the cheap slave labor produced trinkets anymore.

There is too little cash, too few jobs, too much debt, too many takers, too few makers, too many bankers, too much delusion, and too few resources to sustain the unsustainable.

We have entered the end stages of a ravenous locust swarm. The fields have been stripped barren.

When the men in smoke filled rooms realized their soft totalitarianism was losing its grip on the oblivious, submissive, egoistical, distracted masses, they began phase two of their effort to retain their wealth, power and control. They began to institute Orwellian measures to strike fear into the populace.

Their illusion of control is dissipating and they are resorting to force in order to maintain hegemony.

It began with the immediate passage of the Orwellian Patriot Act one month after 9/11.

Did the corporate media question how a 363 page all-encompassing expansion of police state power was written in a few weeks after 9/11 and passed by October 26? They did not. The bill was pre-written and ready for instant implementation when the time was right. The Orwellian version of America was launched.

“If the ideology had been a lie, then they are not heroes and gods on earth, but monsters and criminals, and their life has been self-serving and meaningless, without significance and honor. And that is the credibility trap. It is the impulse for the leaders to keep doubling down in the hope of a win, until exhaustion and collapse.” – Jesse       

“Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.”  - Stanley Milgram – Obediance to Authority

Just as Edward Bernays knew the unruly masses could be manipulated by propaganda and molded to believe whatever the small group of intellectually superior men wanted them to believe, conditioning using fear and authoritarian methods have also been perfected by the ruling class. Doctor Stanley Milgram unwittingly provided the oligarchs with confirmation the average citizen could be ordered to do anything by invoking expertise and authority over their subjects. Milgram started his experiments in 1961, shortly after the trial of the World War II criminal Adolph Eichmann had begun. Eichmann’s defense that he was simply following orders when he exterminated millions of Jews roused Milgram’s interest. How could millions of Germans participate and condone such genocide? Milgram’s testing suggested that it could have been that the millions of accomplices were merely following orders, despite violating their deepest moral beliefs.

Writer Kendra Cherry describes the experiment:

The participants in the Milgram experiment were 40 men recruited using newspaper ads. Milgram developed an intimidating shock generator, with shock levels starting at 30 volts and increasing in 15-volt increments all the way up to 450 volts. The many switches were labeled with terms including “slight shock,” “moderate shock” and “danger: severe shock.” The final two switches were labeled simply with an ominous “XXX.”

Each participant took the role of a “teacher” who would then deliver a shock to the “student” every time an incorrect answer was produced. While the participant believed that he was delivering real shocks to the student, the student was actually a confederate in the experiment who was simply pretending to be shocked.

As the experiment progressed, the participant would hear the learner plead to be released or even complain about a heart condition. Once the 300-volt level had been reached, the learner banged on the wall and demanded to be released. Beyond this point, the learner became completely silent and refused to answer any more questions. The experimenter then instructed the participant to treat this silence as an incorrect response and deliver a further shock.

Most participants asked the experimenter whether they should continue. The experimenter issued a series of commands to prod the participant along:

• “Please continue.”

• “The experiment requires that you continue.”

• “It is absolutely essential that you continue.”

• “You have no other choice, you must go on.”

The level of shock that the participant was willing to deliver was used as the measure of obedience. How far do you think that most participants were willing to go? When Milgram posed this question to a group of Yale University students, it was predicted that no more than 3 out of 100 participants would deliver the maximum shock. In reality, 65% of the participants in Milgram’s study delivered the maximum shocks.

Of the 40 participants in the study, 26 delivered the maximum shocks while 14 stopped before reaching the highest levels. It is important to note that many of the subjects became extremely agitated, distraught and angry at the experimenter. Yet they continued to follow orders all the way to the end. Why did so many of the participants in this experiment perform a seemingly sadistic act on the instruction of an authority figure? According to Milgram, there are a number of situational factors that can explain such high levels of obedience:

• The physical presence of an authority figure dramatically increased compliance.

• The fact that the study was sponsored by Yale (a trusted and authoritative academic institution) led many participants to believe that the experiment must be safe.

• The selection of teacher and learner status seemed random.

• Participants assumed that the experimenter was a competent expert.

• The shocks were said to be painful, not dangerous.

The American people have been participants in their very own Milgram experiment being conducted by their government since 9/11. Since the passage of the Patriot Act, the government continues to demand that its citizens increase the voltage in the name of security. Since 2001, the Orwellian measures have included:

• Warrantless domestic surveillance.
• The ability to search telephone calls, emails, financial matters especially involving foreign individuals, and medical records for people who are “suspected” of endangering the country.
• Color coded risk levels designed to keep citizens fearful of non-existent terrorists.
• Pre-emptive invasion of foreign countries.
• Committing U.S. forces to war without a declaration of war by Congress as mandated in the U.S. Constitution.
• Assassination of people on presidential kill lists.
• Extermination of “suspected” enemies by predator drones.
• Camera systems monitoring the movements of Americans in cites and streets across the United States.
• Torture of detainees in camps outside of the United States.
• The authority to indefinitely detain America citizens without trial.
• Executive orders giving the President the ability to unilaterally disregard the U.S. Constitution and take control of private industries.
• Use of drones to monitor the activities of American citizens.
• Allowing the very bankers that destroyed the worldwide economic system to blackmail the American taxpayers into handing them $700 billion.
• Not prosecuting one Wall Street criminal after the largest Ponzi control fraud in the history of the world.
• Cameras and listening devices on public transit and other public locations.
• Military exercises conducted in U.S. cities in order to condition the masses.
• Attempts to control and censor the internet through the introduction of the SOPA bill.
• The use of tragic mass murders by mentally defective young men on psychotropic drugs to disregard the 2nd Amendment and disarm American citizens.
• TSA thugs molesting little old ladies and young children to desensitize citizens to gestapo like tactics and treat them like criminals.
• Government partnering with Facebook, Apple and other corporate entities to monitor, censor, and report the activities of citizens to the authorities.
• The use of public schools to teach children what to think rather than how to think. Thought control is vital to an agenda of keeping the masses fearful and pliable.
• Government agencies (FBI, ATF) creating terrorist plots, luring young dupes into the plots, providing fake explosives, and then announcing with great fanfare they have foiled a terrorist plot.
• “See something, Say something” government media campaign designed to make citizens paranoid and fearful.

Just as Milgram pondered how the German people could follow the orders of those in authority to slaughter millions, one must ponder how the American people have allowed those in power to strip us of our Constitutional freedoms and liberties in the name of safety and security. They have conditioned the masses to passively accept their fate by utilizing

1. Fear,
2. Authoritarian measures,
3. Thought control, and
4. Propaganda.

Human beings never change.

They have been driven by emotions throughout history –

1. fear,
2. greed,
3. love and
4. hate.

There will always be psychopathic men who seek

1. wealth,
2. power,
3. glory and
4. control.

It happened during the decline of the Roman Empire and it is happening today during the decline of the American Empire.

“A shocking crime was committed on the unscrupulous initiative of few individuals, with the blessing of more, and amid the passive acquiescence of all.” – Tacitus

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.” – George Orwell – 1984

What the average person can’t seem to process through their government public school educated non-critical thinking brains is that there are actually a small group of bankers, politicians, corporate executives, media magnets, and shadowy billionaires who call the shots in this country. They constitute Bernays’ invisible government, run the show, mold the minds, form the opinions, suggest the ideas, and create the reality for the masses because they believe they are intellectually superior. The left/right and Democrat/Republican discord is a planned diversion for the masses. The country has devolved into a corporate fascist warfare/welfare state. We are clearly moving in the direction of Orwell’s state in which government monitors and controls every aspect of human life to the extent that even having a disloyal thought will be against the law. The longer this is allowed to progress the more likely any effort to resist like Winston Smith will be met with brutal measures.

The parallels to Orwell dystopian nightmare state grow by the day. Those in control use technology to bombard Americans with psychological inducements designed to overwhelm the mind’s capability for autonomous thought. In Orwell’s 1984 the giant telescreen in every citizen’s room blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the failures and shortcomings of the Party appear to be triumphant successes. In Obama’s 2013 the 72 inch Chinese made HDTVs in every McMansion blasts a constant stream of propaganda designed to make the zombie-like occupants buy trinkets and gadgets with a thin piece of plastic and makes the failures in Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt and Libya appear to be triumphant successes. Our corporate/fascist party uses their control over the media message to indoctrinate and control the public mind through propaganda and repetitive messaging. In Orwell’s world, the Party undermines family structure by inducting children into an organization called the Junior Spies, which brainwashes and encourages them to spy on their parents and report any instance of disloyalty to the Party. In our world children are indoctrinated in government run public schools that fill their brains with government manufactured history, social engineering claptrap and what they should think, rather than how to think. The Orwellian Department of Homeland Security (Thought Police) instructs them to report anyone they think is suspicious with their “See something, Say something” campaign. Children are “encouraged” to re-educate their parents about green energy and global warming. Corporations fund schools to advertise their products within the hallways of learning. The outputs of this corporate/fascist partnership are non-critical thinking, functionally illiterate, willfully ignorant Proles who obey the Party and consume products as instructed.

In Orwell’s 1984 the Party keeps the population in a general state of exhaustion by making them work long grueling hours at government run agencies. This was designed to keep them from thinking or having the energy to resist. About one in six workers work for the government in the United States, with a substantial portion of private jobs dependent upon government largesse. The true distinction in our society can be seen in the income levels over decades of our own Inner Party, Outer Party and Proles.

The government educated masses were purposely not taught about the impact of Federal Reserve created inflation on their lives. Even using the government manipulated CPI, the real household incomes of the masses have barely risen in the last forty five years. Using a true measure of inflation, the real household incomes of the average family have fallen. In addition, prior to the 1980s those household incomes were predominantly provided with one parent working and the other raising the children. Today the vast majority of households require both parents to work in order to just tread water. Child rearing was delegated to the state and parents have been kept in a constant state of exhaustion, like hamsters in a cage on a spinning wheel. Household income was replaced by credit card debt, mortgage debt, auto debt, and student loan debt peddled by our very own Inner Party (Wall Street bankers). The Inner Party members have seen their incomes soar over the last four decades. This was not an accident.

As those at the top accumulate an ever increasing percentage of the national wealth, while consolidating their power through ever more sophisticated use of technology for surveillance, warfare, and financial theft; urban decay and blight spreads across the land. Totalitarian regimes are ferociously effective at augmenting their own power and wretchedly incompetent at providing for their citizens. Just as the London in Orwell’s dystopian world was a decrepit, rundown city in which buildings were crumbling, amenities such as elevators never worked, and basics such as electricity and plumbing were exceedingly undependable, the urban killing fields that are home to tens of millions in the United States are dangerous, disintegrating, hallowed out carcasses of once thriving metropolises. Hunger, poverty, crumbling infrastructure, and violence are the earmarks of society for the Proles. True unemployment exceeds 20%, with youth and minority unemployment exceeding 40%. There are 47.7 million Americans subsisting on food stamps (program administered by JP Morgan), accounting for 20% of all the households in the country.

The incompetency and mismanagement by our totalitarian governing body is evident for all to see, as bridges collapse, water mains burst, gas lines explode, mass transit shuts down and structures deteriorate due to decades of neglect. The priorities of those in power are clearly visible as they spend trillions on weapons used to attack sovereign countries, distribute billions in “aid” to foreign dictators, provide trillions to the criminal banking cabal on Wall Street, and devote billions to technology designed to monitor and control their citizens. Our entire rotting, fetid, bloated, corrupt society has about reached its limits. It is only a matter of time until it implodes like the former Soviet Union.

“Diminishing returns of ever-increasing complexity addressed with ever-more layers of complexity, larded with systematic lying based on mystifying, opaque jargon, sanctioned statistical misreporting, felonious cronyism, and scuttling of the rule of law. In short, the markets have been taken over in effect by a criminal racketeering syndicate. In doing this, so much resilience has been removed from these market structures that they are riddled with rot, like a mansion infested with carpenter ants.” – Jim Kunstler

Hush now baby, baby, don’t you cry.
Mamma’s gonna make all of your nightmares come true,
Mamma’s gonna put all of her fears into you,
Mamma’s gonna keep you right here, under her wing.

  She won’t let you fly, but she might let you sing,
Mamma’s gonna keep baby cozy and warm.
Oooh babe, Oooh babe, Oooh babe,
Of course Mamma’s gonna help build the wall.

Pink Floyd – Mother

The concepts of Doublethink and Newspeak are alive and well in our increasingly Orwellian society. The massive long-term campaign of large-scale psychological manipulation, described in detail by Edward Bernays in 1928, has succeeded in breaking down the capacity for independent thought by the masses. Those in control of the media have molded the minds of millions to believe anything the government tells them, even while possessing information that runs counter to what they are being told. On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, the government and their media propaganda mouthpieces had convinced 69% of the American public that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks, even though there wasn’t a shred of evidence to support that claim. The storyline of Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies in their incubators during the first Gulf War was another example of propaganda designed to manipulate public opinion. By controlling the media message, those in power control the present and can manipulate the past. The government controls the curriculum in public schools and writes our history to conform to whatever storyline that supports their agenda. With 20% of the adult population in this country functionally illiterate, the formulation of ideas or critical thought is virtually impossible for these people. This is exactly what is desired by the ruling class.

The outrageous example of Doublethink in Orwell’s 1984 occurs during the Hate Week rally.  The Party shifts its diplomatic allegiance, so the nation it has been at war with suddenly becomes its ally (Eurasia), and its former ally becomes its new enemy (Eastasia). When the Party speaker suddenly changes the nation he refers to as an enemy in the middle of his speech, the crowd accepts his words immediately, and is ashamed to find that it has made the wrong signs for the event. The American people have been programmed to accept the same logic from our leaders. Saddam Hussein was our ally when he was fighting our enemy Iran, who had been our ally ever since we had overthrown their democratically elected leader in the 1950s. Then he became our enemy for using weapons of mass destruction, provided to him by the U.S., on his own people and threatening our control over Middle Eastern oil. Osama bin Laden was our ally when he was fighting our mortal enemy, the Soviet Union. Then he became our mortal enemy because we refused to leave Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War. Ghadafi was our sworn enemy after blowing up an airliner filled with Americans, until he helped us after 9/11 and became an ally. Then he became an enemy again for fighting to maintain his dictatorship. Mubarak was an ally for decades as we provided him billions in military hardware so he could brutally maintain control. Then he became an enemy when we decided he was no longer of use. Do you get the picture?

Do you see any parallels between Orwell’s Ministry of Plenty (oversees economic shortages); the Ministry of Peace (wages war); the Ministry of Truth (conducts propaganda and historical revisionism); and the Ministry of Love (the center of the Party’s operations of torture and punishment) and our Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, Department of Education, and Department of Homeland Security?  

“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

So the oligarchs have utilized all the plays in Huxley’s playbook and are half way through Orwell’s playbook, but they are rapidly losing their credibility as a small minority of critical thinking people is using the internet to spread the truth and form phyles with like-minded citizens with similar values based on liberty and freedom. The political system is broken beyond repair as $2 billion was spent during this last “election” to maintain the status quo. The looting and pillaging of the middle class continues, while the poor are kept controlled, sedated and enslaved by entitlements, debt, drugs and prisons. The financial system is succumbing to the mountains of debt that have been accumulated trying to keep the game going. In the last ten years worldwide total credit market debt, on balance sheets, sovereign obligations, corporate debt, household debt – has grown from $80 trillion to just over $200 trillion. U.S. unfunded liabilities committed to by the politician parasites that pass for our representatives surpass $200 trillion. There are $1.2 quadrillion of interconnected derivatives outstanding in the world today, 20 times the size of the worldwide economy. The accumulation of worldwide debt, aging developed country populations, depletion of resources, perpetual war, financial fraud and rampant corruption are going to lead to a collapse of epic proportions. It may not happen in 2013, but it will happen within the next five years. Jesse explains why the status quo will never relinquish their power, illegally acquired wealth and control without a fight:

“A credibility trap is a condition wherein the financial, political and informational functions of a society have been compromised by corruption and fraud, so that the leadership cannot effectively reform, or even honestly address, the problems of that system without impairing and implicating, at least incidentally, a broad swath of the power structure, including them. The status quo tolerates the corruption and the fraud because they have profited at least indirectly from it, and would like to continue to do so. Even the impulse to reform within the power structure is susceptible to various forms of soft blackmail and coercion by the system that maintains and rewards.

And so a failed policy and its support system become self-sustaining, long after it is seen by objective observers to have failed. In its failure it is counterproductive, and an impediment to recovery in the real economy. Admitting failure is not an option for the thought leaders who receive their power from that system.  The continuity of the structural hierarchy must therefore be maintained at all costs, even to the point of becoming a painfully obvious hypocrisy.”

The people of this country must regain a sense of responsibility for their lives and the lives of future generations. Enough people need to perceive they are being manipulated, controlled and used by the thought leaders and awaken from their narcissistic materialistic debt financed lives. Our culture has failed. The animosity and anger in the country is beginning to bubble over. The masses are beginning to realize they have been screwed. They haven’t figured out who to blame because they are still trapped in the Republican/Democrat false dogma. There is one Party putting on a show, as displayed this week with the fiscal cliff farce, as the government controlled media proclaimed victory because the status quo was maintained, nothing was cut, and $4 trillion was added to the National Debt. More people need to question and challenge the authorities. We must cast aside our willful ignorance of facts and accept the consequences of decades of bad decisions and delusions of grandeur. More government is not the answer. We must break free of the conditioning and mind control used to make us love our servitude and trust those in power.

Kyle Bass recently revealed a fact about our government leaders:

“They’re not going to tell you that a collapse is coming. You’re going to have to see it for yourself. The government’s never going to tell you that it’s going to happen. These guys are never going to tell you the truth, because they can’t tell you the truth. Their job is to promote confidence, not to tell you the truth.”

We need more people to respond to Roger Waters’ question, “Mother, should I trust the government?” with this answer before we can begin to tear down the wall that seemed too high.

“During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.” – George Orwell