Poor Man Survival
Self Reliance tools
for independent minded people…
ISSN 2161-5543
A Digest of Urban Survival Resources
The Ruling
Elite & Today’s Election
Former
Congressman and Washington insider David Stockman, has warned that a Clinton
victory would be equally, if not more, disastrous [than a Trump victory] for
markets. He, like many others, expect that official investigations and new
disclosures from WikiLeaks would be non-stop under a Clinton administration.
For this reason and others, Stockman reasons that Congress “will become a
killing field” for anything Clinton tries to pass through Congress. He predicts
that “for six months, or even longer, there will be acrimony, there will be
brinkmanship, there will be paralysis.” This deadlock would prevent the federal
government from preventing the economy’s slide into an even deeper recession.
In addition, markets would likely be affected by the massive
backlash a Clinton win would generate from Trump supporters.
Though Tuesday’s
election may serve as the spark that ignites the next economic crisis, these
problems have been years in the making, largely because the damage done by the
2008 near-meltdown was never healed. The derivatives market, whose collapse in
2008 caused the worst
of the crisis, is now larger than
the world’s GDP and many major banks, including Germany’s
largest bank, are tumbling
to the point of near collapse. Stockman, who also worked for 20 years on Wall
Street and even served as a Congressman, says that the IRS’ drop in revenue is
the clearest indicator that markets are in grave danger. He explained that,
“The IRS said that last year revenue was up 1% and, in the last quarter, it was
down 4 percent. […] That means the work hours aren’t happening.” Stockman has previously
made the claim that unemployment in the US is actually around
42.9%. He further reasoned that the combination of a paralyzed congress, a
soon-to-expire debt ceiling, a central bank fresh out of
ammo, and a market that has shown few signs of life for 700 days
have made for a perfect storm for the US as well as the global economy.
Stockman ended his series of dire warnings by saying that the
future of Wall Street after the election will be like San Francisco’s
devastating 1906 earthquake. Stockman’s analysis is spot-on, our economy has
been inflated to unprecedented heights due, in part, to the irresponsible
monetary policy of privately-owned central banks. Even the Rothschilds
have warned that the “greatest monetary policy experiment in
history” will end in disaster. If Stockman is right, such a disaster could be
literally only days away.
The Ruling Elite Has
Lost the Consent of the Governed
Charles Hugh Smith
Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and
mainstream media cannot believe they have lost the consent of the governed.
Every ruling Elite needs the consent of the governed: even
autocracies, dictatorships and corporatocracies ultimately rule with the
consent, however grudging, of the governed.
The American ruling Elite has lost the consent of the governed.
This reality is being masked by the mainstream media, mouthpiece of the ruling
class, which is ceaselessly promoting two false narratives:
1.
The “great divide” in American politics is between left and
right, Democrat/Republican
2.
The ruling Elite has delivered “prosperity” not just to the
privileged few but to the unprivileged many they govern.
Both of these assertions are false. The Great Divide in America
is between the ruling Elite and the governed that the Elite has stripmined. The
ruling Elite is privileged and protected, the governed are unprivileged and
unprotected.
That’s the divide that counts and the divide that is finally
becoming visible to the marginalized, unprivileged class of debt-serfs.
The “prosperity” of the 21st century has flowed solely to the
ruling Elite and its army of technocrat toadies, factotums, flunkies,
apparatchiks and apologists.The Elite’s army of technocrats and its media
apologists have engineered and promoted an endless spew of ginned-up phony
statistics (the super-low unemployment rate, etc.) to create the illusion of
“growth” and “prosperity” that benefit everyone rather than just the top 5%.
The media is 100% committed to promoting these two false
narratives because the jig is up once the bottom 95% wake up to the reality
that the ruling Elite has been stripmining them for decades.
As I have tirelessly explained, the U.S. economy is not just neoliberal
(the code word for maximizing private gain by any means available, including
theft, fraud, embezzlement, political fixing, price-fixing, and so on). It is
neofeudal, meaning that it is structurally an updated version of Medieval
feudalism in which a top layer of financial-political nobility owns the engines
of wealth and governs the marginalized debt-serfs who toil to pay student
loans, auto loans, credit cards, mortgages and taxes — all of which benefit the
financiers and political grifters.
The media is in a self-referential frenzy to convince us the
decision of the century is between unrivaled political grifter Hillary Clinton
and financier-cowboy Donald Trump.
Both belong to the privileged ruling Elite: both have access to
cheap credit, insider information (information asymmetry) and political
influence.
The cold truth is the ruling Elite has shredded the social
contract by skimming the income/wealth of the unprivileged. The
fake-“progressive” pandering apologists of the ruling Elite — Robert Reich,
Paul Krugman and the rest of the Keynesian Cargo Cultists — turn a blind eye to
the suppression of dissent and the looting the bottom 95% because they have
cushy, protected positions as tenured faculty (or equivalent).
They cheerlead for more state-funded bread and circuses for the
marginalized rather than demand an end to exploitive privileges of the sort
they themselves enjoy.
Consider just three of the unsustainably costly broken systems
that enrich the privileged Elite by stripmining the unprivileged: healthcare
(a.k.a. Sickcare because sickness is profitable, prevention is unprofitable),
higher education and Imperial over-reach (the National Security State and its
partner the privately owned Military-Industrial Complex).
While the unprivileged and unprotected watch their healthcare
premiums and co-pays soar year after year, the CEOs of various sickcare cartels
skim off tens of millions of dollars annually in pay and stock options.
The system works great if you get a $20 million paycheck. If you
get a 30% increase in monthly premiums for fewer actual healthcare services —
the system is broken.
If you’re skimming $250,000 as under-assistant dean to the
provost for student services (or equivalent) plus gold-plated benefits, higher
education is working great.
If you’re a student burdened with tens of thousands of dollars
in student loan debt who is receiving a low-quality, essentially worthless
“education” from poorly paid graduate students (“adjuncts”) and a handful of
online courses that you could get for free or for a low cost outside the
university cartel — the system is broken.
If you exit the Pentagon, CIA, NSA, etc. at a cushy managerial
rank with a fat pension and lifetime benefits and are hired at a fat salary the
next day by a private “defense” contractor — the famous revolving door between
a bloated state and a bloated defense industry — the system works great.
If you joined the Armed Forces to escape rural poverty and
served at the point of the spear somewhere in the Imperial Project — your perspective
may well be considerably different.
Unfortunately for the ruling Elite and their army of engorged
enablers and apologists, they have already lost the consent of the governed.
They have bamboozled, conned and misled the bottom 95% for decades, but their
phony facade of political legitimacy and “the rising tide raises all boats” has
cracked wide open, and the machinery of oppression, looting and propaganda is
now visible to everyone who isn’t being paid to cover their eyes.
Brimming with hubris and self-importance, the ruling Elite and
mainstream media cannot believe they have lost the consent of the governed. The
disillusioned governed have not fully absorbed this epochal shift of the tides
yet, either.
They are aware of their own disillusionment and their own
declining financial security, but they have yet to grasp that they have,
beneath the surface of everyday life, already withdrawn their consent from a
self-serving, predatory, parasitic, greedy and ultimately self-destructive
ruling Elite.
Regards,
Charles Hugh Smith
Founder, Of Two Minds
Founder, Of Two Minds
Yours for another revolution,
Bruce ‘the Poor Man’
P.S.
You cannot defeat your enemies until you know who they are…and often, we
are the enemy!
Additional Resources
The Anatomy of a Breakdown
The Prepper’s Blueprint: The Step-By-Step Guide To Help You Through Any Disaster
Prepper’s Home Defense: Security Strategies to Protect Your Family by Any Means Necessary
Contact! A Tactical Manual for Post Collapse Survival
Arm Up System-Defense Without Regulation
PM’s Guide to Home Defense
It is a crazy world out there with plenty of violence and everyone knows you that under most circumstances, police usually arrive after the fact. Your rights to defend yourself are often under attack, even for non-lethal self-defense tools…Includes book and 3 bonus CD ROMS
http://www.bonanza.com/listings/Guide-to-Home-Defense-Arm-Up-System-Defense-W-out-Regulation-Bonuses/370808566
PM’s Guide to Home Defense
It is a crazy world out there with plenty of violence and everyone knows you that under most circumstances, police usually arrive after the fact. Your rights to defend yourself are often under attack, even for non-lethal self-defense tools…Includes book and 3 bonus CD ROMS
http://www.bonanza.com/listings/Guide-to-Home-Defense-Arm-Up-System-Defense-W-out-Regulation-Bonuses/370808566
{Note:
We also offer a Three Set CD-ROM-only version at a lesser price for
those with limited budgets]
Support our efforts by shopping my storefront…
A Smoking Frog Feature, Shallow Planet Production
1 comment:
No question about it-Stockman is spot on and he should know.
Post a Comment