More shackles readied for deployment

Darth Summers made a speech on Nov. 8 to a gathering of economists at the IMF. My guess is that they had Darth (OK, Larry) give the speech because he doesn’t currently hold a position with any institution that could then be blamed and hated for the policy promoted in the speech. (Here’s the speech, though I don’t recommend it.) However, I think it wise to consider the speech an official announcement of the latest wicked that this way comes.

The policy is that savers will soon be hit with negative interest rates. Now Larry didn’t say this directly, he slithered around it and offered the “clear justification” for it. But in reviews of what his admirers called a “brilliant” speech, the admirers were quite clear in their understanding: negative interest rates…in cashless society! That was the full policy implication.

So people would have to pay the bank interest on their own savings. So if the negative interest rate were -3%, if you had $100 in your account, you’d have to pay the bank $3 in interest. And just in case anyone had any ideas of getting their savings out of the banks, well, get their savings out into what? In a cashless society, your money would simply be an electronic entry in an account. Getting your money “out” would mean spending it. Which is the problem that Summers and his fiends say they are trying to solve: how to get people to spend, spend, spend their money. They say there isn’t enough “aggregate demand.” Don’t have any money? Then borrow some, it’s really cheap. But in any case, spend!

Of course, this would also mean that when the government borrows money, the interest rate would be negative for them as well. The more money they borrowed, the more money they would collect as the lenders paid them interest!

Now it goes without saying, though I’ll say it anyway, that if you went to borrow some money, this negative interest rate thing would not apply to you. You’d still have to pay interest on your loan. This negative thing would only be for them, that is, the banks and governments. Oh, and large corporations, how could I leave them out. But not you or me. Whether borrower or lender be, either way, we’d have to pay. Know what the average interest rate consumers are paying on their $846 billion in outstanding credit card debt? 13%. Do you think the banks are going to give up that bonanza?

Now any rational person might think: They’ll never do it! Negative interest rates would wreck every pension fund in the world. And so they would: pension funds are all dependent on collecting interest to meet their future obligations. But too bad. If people can’t collect pensions, then they’ll have to stay in the workforce. And with all that competition for jobs, companies can pay lower and lower and lower wages. Why do you think they outsource work across the world! Do you think this paragraph goes to far? Then consider this: Collecting Donations For Wal-Mart Employees That Cannot Afford Thanksgiving Dinner?


So, they think that taxing people’s savings, both in their bank accounts and in their pensions, will get the economy on a sound footing again. Because that’s what these policies are, they are taxes, part paid to government and part to the banks. So why don’t they just say that? Two reasons: first, people tend to get angry about new taxes and they tend to vote out whoever levies new taxes; and, the group at the Summers speech are economists, and all economists know that raising taxes squelches economic growth. So they can’t call it a tax or everyone would point out that the policy is anti-growth. Which it is. But logic left the room of mainstream economics years ago. They maintain their lofty positions as Machiavelli advised: they serve their governing masters well. So these policies have nothing to do with logic. The governing masters keeping their power, that’s what it’s all about. And these economists know who spreads the caviar on their toast points. These policies are designed only to preserve the powermonger status quo.

Plus, they are fairly sure it will be a long time before the public catches on. They can just repeat over and over that this is for jobs and growth, and the majority, desperate for good news, will believe it. And in this ploy, the economists are likely correct. They have been engaged in multi-$trillion Quantitative Easing (money printing) for years and, according to a Reuters poll, three quarters of Americans don’t even know what QE is. And people weren’t asked to explain it, they were given a multiple choice question, so 20% could have answered correctly just by random choice!


So the economists of The Powers That Be figure they can obfuscate their way through just about anything.

So let’s get this straight. These thieves want to steal people’s savings and pensions. So that people must remain as wage slaves till they drop, filling a growing labor pool being paid wages that are declining in all of the developed economies. And they’ll be great fodder for the upcoming war economy, grateful for the opportunity to build weapons that kill in better and better ways. While the rich and powerful get more caviar, as shown on the chart below. The dark brown line is the average stock price of retail for the rich: Tiffany, Coach, and LVMH. Those stocks have risen 500% since their 2009 lows and are over 30% above their former peak in 2007. The blue line is Macy’s, Kohl’s, and JC Penney, where the disappearing middle class shops. Those stocks are up 100% since 2009 and are still 30% below their former peak in 2007:

QE effect on shoppers

That is a great demonstration of who is receiving all that newly printed money and who is not. These folks want more slaves. And the ability to bomb into chaos any region that does not offer up its people into the slave pool.

A Cycle that Says “Get Ready”

There haven’t been many posts here lately, in part because it looks to me like we are on the precipice of major changes. So I’ve been spending some time finalizing my own preparations in terms of food (backup supplies and the infrastructure for growing more), electricity, water, and so forth. (Hint, hint.) Many think (hope?) that The Powers That Were can keep this all going for years. With the clear acceleration of infighting among the elites, to me that seems like a very bad bet.

So I found this post from Deflation Land to be interesting in terms of us being right on the cusp of major changes:

     Why I stopped worrying and learned to love the currency collapse



“But if we return back another hundred years, we notice that the 18th Century ends in 1815 with the final defeat of Napoleon, that final project of the Enlightenment and of the French Revolution.  With the Congress of Vienna in 1814-1815, we have a new Europe along the lines of Metternich’s plan, and the 19th Century at last is here.

“In 1713 and 1714, we have the Treaties of Utrecht, Baden, and Rastatt, bringing an end to the era of Spain as a major power, and the rise of the Habsburgs.  Louis XIV dies in 1715, after reigning for 72 years.  The Baroque period is over, and we are now firmly in the 18th Century.

“We still live in the 20th Century…We still live in an era of Pax Americana, the old republic very much a strained and tired Empire now, with the U.S. Dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

“That is going to change.

“The next task for History is to dismantle the untenable structures and institutions put in place by late Modernity, which have been extended now as far as they can go. Our debt-based monetary system will collapse, our unbacked fiats will be worthless. The debts and unmeetable obligations will all default.

“There are ironies and great contradictions as the former home and hope of Liberty becomes viciously unfree and increasingly despotic. Our leaders no longer govern, but try instead to rule us — they are less legitimate with each passing day, their laws corrupt or worse. They are nearly finished, and will be swept away with the tide.

“Just as in 1914, the internationalist system will break down, dashing the hopes of the would-be first-world nations. We will probably have a pretty good war as well, or many local ones worldwide. These transitions tend to involve war.”

*  *  *  *  *

Combine the above with the Wheeler War Cycle and other war cycles discussed here, and it looks like our current faux stability–in which the gears of government and the economy grind on and on with little progress in any direction–will, within months, be a memory. The full Deflation Land article is here.

US Government shut down, except…


     Hagel Orders Civilian Pentagon Workers To Return to Work








In my view, this too will fail.















And Iran is an ally of China.









And included this sentence in the same article:






Pathetic Beating of War Drums


–1935, Major General Smedley Butler, War Is A Racket

Since the story broke around May 13 that the US Department of Justice collected the phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors for months in revenge for their printing a story about the CIA that the Administration did not like, the Administration has faced an avalanche of scandal. What did they expect? Directly attacking the press with a massive wiretapping operation? The press was rightly furious. Many boycotted the off-the-record press conference (how’s that for twisting language and taking oxymoronics to new depths, an “off-the-record press conference”!) held by Attorney General Eric Holder to explain how they really weren’t doing any harm with all those wiretaps. Sure.

They pushed the press too far. It inspired at least a small number of those who claim to be journalists to live up to their name and unleash the avalanche: the IRS targeting political enemies, the admission that the War on Terror is permanent, that Attorney General Eric Holder lied to Congress under oath, that the US collects millions of personal phone records from telecom companies, that they collect everyone’s internet activities shown here and here, that the US is drawing up a list of targets for cyber warfare, that the US “hacks everyone everywhere”, and so forth. What a month!!!

So now what do we get? The distraction supreme: War! They’ve conveniently and officially decided that Syria has used chemical weapons (“weapons of mass destruction”) and so now the public discussion will be: what weapons will be sent, where will warships be placed, how many “advisors” are needed, when will a no-fly zone be implemented, and so forth. Haven’t we seen this script before? Didn’t they actually make movie like that? A war would nicely dominate the news. The assumption is that people are stupid and they’ll forget about the illegalities and theft of freedoms from the previous paragraph, and they’ll allow the country to get sucked into yet another war.

Well, are we that stupid? Are we going to let them sucker us into another war that profits the very few and kills the many? In the name of the many? Paid for by the many?

Let’s review some history here. In 1935, the most decorated US war hero up to that time, Marine Corp Major General Smedley Butler, published the amazing pamphlet War Is a Racket, perhaps the best summary ever of what war is really for: Profit! They taught us all that in school, right? Sure.

As Butler predicted in 1935, they were preparing for war, which turned out to be World War 2. After that war, They saw that it would be impossible to keep up that level of intensity forever, so They came up with the Cold War and regional war. That keeps the weapons procurement process going big time for the defense companies, and keeping all those ships and jets and trucks running around the world at somewhere between 700 and 1,000 bases worldwide brings huge profits for the energy cartel.

They succeeded in having a very profitable regional war in Korea. Following that war, US President Eisenhower warned about a takeover by the military-industrial complex. But few listened.

Then They wanted a regional war in Viet Nam. John F. Kennedy resisted. So They assassinated him and soon after there were hundreds of thousands of well-armed troops fighting in Viet Nam. Martin Luther King caught on to their game and started including a lot of anti-war remarks in his speeches in 1968, so They assassinated him. Robert F Kennedy showed all signs of campaigning against war, so They killed him. So then the young people who were being sent to Viet Nam and whose friends were being sent to Viet Nam started protesting that war in earnest. The Woodstock concert in 1969 was the largest peace rally ever held. Since there was no police presence there, that concert proceeded peacefully. So in 1970 They killed some of the heroes of that concert like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. And They killed four war-protesting students at Kent State University. But people still protested until the US government couldn’t take it anymore and ended its involvement in Viet Nam in 1973.

Soon thereafter, They switched most of their attention on the Middle East. The money was flowing in from oil, so They armed everyone to the teeth. Arabs versus Jews, Sunnis versus Shiites, Muslims versus Christians, dictators versus democracies, wow, what an endless platform for weapons sales and continuous regional war, which they have now achieved.

The question for all of us is: if we let them create a larger war in Syria, clearly, won’t Iran be the next stop? And will the Iran war go beyond regional, will that one go nuclear, will that be World War 3?

Will They be satisfied with the steady profits from Their successful creation of continuous regional war, or are They greedy for something much larger?

Folks, our so-called leaders are not going to put a stop to this. They know that the leaders who tried to put a stop to it got killed for their efforts. So our “leaders” will either be the paid salespeople for war or they will stand aside and let others play that role. Either way, the political honchos are not going to stop this. People have to stop it. We have to stop it.

They know we can stop it. That’s why They have to resort to such elaborate hoaxes and false flag attacks to drag people into these wars. So let’s not fall for it. Let’s peacefully put a stop to it.

Beware the False Flag Attack

The Telegraph

What do Daniel Ellsberg, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former high-level CIA officers Robert David Steele and Michael Scheuer, Seymour Hersh, and the Brookings Institution have in common? All have warned of the possibility of a false flag attack staged by the US and/or Israel to make it look like Iran has attacked and killed US citizens. This is covered in its usual excellent way by Washington’s Blog: “What I Fear The Most Is a False Flag – Something Happening Where One of Our Ships Goes Down, Or … a Plane Goes Down, And of Course It HAD To Be The Iranians, You Know, For Sure, For Certain”

A false flag attack is a war operation carried out by a government against its own people but appearing to be carried out by another group or nation; or an attack about which a government knows in advance but which it allows to freely proceed to demonstrate the evil nature of an enemy it wishes to attack.  The World Trade Center attack on 9/11 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor are excellent examples of false flag attacks.  If there is anyone still left on the planet who thinks 9/11 was what the US government says it was, please see the following documentary aired recently on PBS: 9/11: Explosive Evidence — Experts Speak Out.

As the US marks its eleventh year of war in Afghanistan, where 2,000 US soldiers and far greater numbers of Afghanis and Pakistanis have died, many as “collateral damage” from unmanned drone attacks, we think it appropriate to sound the warning because we are convinced that the Powers That Be are aiming to ramp up war to a much greater level.

Why do we think that a large false flag attack is on the way?

To gain public support, large increases in war-making are typically preceded by a false flag attack that is devastating enough to be an emotional shock for in the citizenry. The shock makes people sitting ducks for war propaganda against the alleged perpetrators. People are confused by the shock and are then told precisely where to channel their rage, fear, dismay, etc.

Governments faced with insoluble financial predicaments often try big war as a way out. And many governments, including that of the USA, are in precisely such a predicament.

People and governments around the world are clearly on tenterhooks as shown by recent rioting in many countries, acrimonious borders disputes between Turkey and Syria, China and Japan, etc.

In a few days, the US will have three aircraft carrier groups in the waters off Iran.

And the war propaganda machine is in high gear, in both blatant and subtle ways. Here is a perfect example of the war propaganda machine in its more subtle form. This was the lead story on the front page in a recent USA Today: Defense cuts starting to pinch economy.

First, the idea that war helps the economy, propaganda that most of us were fed in school and which fallacy is still perpetuated by economists such as Paul Krugman, has been debunked by many. Washington’s Blog has covered this topic in great detail: Proof that War Is Bad for the Economy.

Second, while the US Department of Defense (DoD) and its military contractors claim defense spending is falling, others see it, well, otherwise.  Here’s the chart of US defense spending from wikipedia, not including black ops for which no budgets are published:

The bottom area is the budget for the DoD. Above that are other categories of defense-related expenditures that are not included in the formal DoD budget. Both the formal DoD budget and the combination of all expenditures have been rising strongly in unison, even while we have had a Nobel Peace Prize winning president. Also note that most numbers to the right of the vertical dotted line, numbers for the future, are projected to decline. But wikipedia has some honesty here. If go to detail page for this chart, you’ll see previous versions of this chart from prior years. In each of those previous charts, future expenditures were projected to drop. But they never did. When future becomes present, these expenditures always rise strongly. In other words, there are threats of defense expenditure cutbacks, but since the Clinton years, they have never materialized.

Third, whether or not war is good or bad for the economy is clearly a topic of debate. We think it is horrendous, but others claim it is good. So what USA Today is doing here is taking sides in a debate in what was printed as a Page 1 news story. This article is an editorial disguised as news. As such, it is a lie.

Fourth, how about a little common sense. The article, by linking military spending with the concept of a “good economy,” is telling you that war spending is good for you. Tell it to more than a hundred million people who died in wars in the last 100 years.

Fifth, how about some more common sense. The following countries each have one operational aircraft carrier: Russia, UK, France, India, China, and others. The US has eleven operational carriers and three more under construction. Can it really be “good for an economy” to spend trillions on hardware that is very rarely actually used, which is paraded around the world with an armada of other ships in what is called a “carrier group” devouring incredible amounts of fossil fuels, and which hardware is ultimately scrapped when it is deemed obsolete? Does the US really need eleven carrier groups?

This covers just the tiniest slice of the war propaganda machine. But you get the idea. We ask that whenever you hear a report about war, military spending, the countries that are said to be our enemies, weapons systems, or people who go off and get killed or maimed being characterized as heroes rather than as people who were duped by politicians, that you recall this little post and ask: What is really being said here? What is the real point? Who is the actual enemy?

Recommended: War Pigs – The Fall of a Global Empire

The is the first post in a series called “War is a Racket.”


In the first post on, we promised to talk about several cycles that are coming to a close in support of the major transition in progress. Jim Quinn of the website The Burning Platform is a leading proponent of one of the shorter of those cycles, one that lasts four generations, or approximately 80 years. This cycle was fully described in the book The Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe.

For this Memorial Day holiday in the USA, Jim has posted a great article on the USA’s dedication to war:


The full article is highly recommended, but for those who don’t have time for that, here are some quotes from that article:








