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Today former Assistant U.S. Treasury Secretary, Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, issued an ominous warning for what promises to be a very dangerous 2017.

King World News - Lies, Propaganda And What Is Really Going To Shock The World Western Media’s Giant Propaganda Machine
(King World News) Dr. Paul Craig Roberts: Bannon is correct that the US media—indeed, the entire Western print and TV media—is nothing but a propaganda machine for the ruling elite. The presstitutes are devoid of integrity, moral conscience, and respect for truth. https://www.rt.com/usa/375271-bannon-trump-media-cnn/ Read the comments in which morons define freedom of the press as the freedom to lie to the public…

Paul Craig Roberts continues: “Who else but the despicable Western media justified the enormous war crimes committed against millions of peoples by the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes in nine countries—Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Yemen, Syria, Somalia, Palestine, and the Russian areas of Ukraine?

King World News - Paul Craig Roberts - Corruption, Propaganda And Why The U.S. Government Won't Answer My Letter

Who else but the despicable Western media justified the domestic police states that have been erected in the Western world in the name of the “war on terror”?

Along with the war criminals that comprised the Clinton, Bush, and Obama regimes, the Western media should be tried for their complicity in the massive crimes against humanity.

Gorbachev’s Warns “The World Is Preparing For War”
The Western media’s effort to sustain the high level of tension between the West and Russia is a danger to all mankind, a direct threat to life on earth. Gorbachev’s warnings are correct. http://time.com/4645442/gorbachev-putin-trump/?xid=time_socialflow_facebook Yet presstitutes declare that if Trump lifts the sanctions it proves that Trump is a Russian agent. It is paradoxical that the Democrats and the liberal-progressive-left are mobilizing the anti-war movement to oppose Trump’s anti-war policy!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2017’s Real Milestone (Or Why Interest Rates Can Never Go Back To Normal)

January 25, 2017

2017’s Real Milestone (Or Why Interest Rates Can Never Go Back To Normal)

Forget about NAFTA or OPEC or TPP or crowd size or hand size or any other acronym or stat or concept that obsesses the financial press these days. Only two numbers actually matter.

The first is $20 trillion, which is the level the US federal debt will exceed sometime around June of this year. Here’s the current total as measured by the US Debt Clock:

To put $20 trillion into perspective, it’s about $160,000 per US taxpayer, and exists in addition to the mortgage, credit card, auto, and student debt that our hypothetical taxpayer probably carries. It is in short, way too much for the average wage slave to manage without some kind of existential crisis.

It’s also way more than it used to be. During his tenure, president George W. Bush (2000 – 2008) nearly doubled the government’s debt, which is to say his administration borrowed as much as all its predecessors from Washington through Clinton combined. At the time this seemed like a never-to-be-duplicated feat of governmental profligacy. But the very next administration topped it, taking the federal debt from $10 trillion to the soon-to-be-achieved $20 trillion. And the incoming administration apparently sees no problem with continuing the pattern.

The other meaningful number is 6.620. That’s the average interest rate the US government paid on its various debts in 2000, the year before the great monetary experiment of QE, ZIRP and all the rest began. When talking heads at the Fed and elsewhere refer to “normalizing” interest rates they’re proposing a return to this 6% average rate.

But of course the last time that rate prevailed our debts were just a little lower. Run the numbers on today’s obligations and you get, well, let’s see:

$20 trillion x 6% = $1.2 trillion a year in interest expense. To put that in perspective…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2017: The Year When the World Economy Starts Coming Apart

January 11, 2017

2017: The Year When the World Economy Starts Coming Apart

Some people would argue that 2016 was the year that the world economy started to come apart, with the passage of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Whether or not the “coming apart” process started in 2016, in my opinion we are going to see many more steps in this direction in 2017. Let me explain a few of the things I see.

[1] Many economies have collapsed in the past. The world economy is very close to the turning point where collapse starts in earnest.

Figure 1

The history of previous civilizations rising and eventually collapsing is well documented.(See, for example, Secular Cycles.)

To start a new cycle, a group of people would find a new way of doing things that allowed more food and energy production (for instance, they might add irrigation, or cut down trees for more land for agriculture). For a while, the economy would expand, but eventually a mismatch would arise between resources and population. Either resources would fall too low (perhaps because of erosion or salt deposits in the soil), or population would rise too high relative to resources, or both.

Even as resources per capita began falling, economies would continue to have overhead expenses, such as the need to pay high-level officials and to fund armies. These overhead costs could not easily be reduced, and might, in fact, grow as the government attempted to work around problems. Collapse occurred because, as resources per capita fell (for example, farms shrank in size), the earnings of workers tended to fall. At the same time, the need for taxes to cover what I am calling overhead expenses tended to grow. Tax rates became too high for workers to earn an adequate living, net of taxes. In some cases, workers succumbed to epidemics because of poor diets. Or governments would collapse, from lack of adequate tax revenue to support them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Forecast 2017: The Wheels Finally Come Off

January 2, 2017

Forecast 2017: The Wheels Finally Come Off

“There is no other endeavor in which men and women of enormous intellectual power have shown total disregard for higher-order reasoning than monetary policy.
— David Collum

American Notes

Apart from all the ill-feeling about the election, one constant ‘out there’ since November 8 is the Ayn Randian rapture that infects the money scene. Wall Street and big business believe that the country has passed through a magic portal into a new age of heroic businessmen-warriors (Trump, Rex T, Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, et. al.) who will go forth creating untold wealth from super-savvy deal-making that un-does all the self-defeating malarkey of the detested Deep State technocratic regulation regime of recent years. The main signs in the sky, they say, are the virile near-penetration of the Dow Jones 20,000-point maidenhead and the rocket ride of Ole King Dollar to supremacy of the global currency-space.

I hate to pound sleet on this manic parade, but, to put it gently, mob psychology is outrunning both experience and reality. Let’s offer a few hypotheses regarding this supposed coming Trumptopian nirvana.

The current narrative weaves an expectation that manufacturing industry will return to the USA complete with all the 1962-vintage societal benefits of great-paying blue collar jobs, plus an orgy of infrastructure-building. I think both ideas are flawed, even allowing for good intentions. For one thing, most of the factories are either standing in ruin or scraped off the landscape. So, it’s not like we’re going to reactivate some mothballed sleeping giant of productive capacity. New state-of-the-art factories would require an Everest of private capital investment that is simply impossible to manifest in a system that is already leveraged up to its eyeballs.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

As We Enter 2017, Keep The Big Picture In Mind

December 31, 2016

As We Enter 2017, Keep The Big Picture In Mind

The new era of adjustment has only just begun

A big, gigantic, heart-felt Thank You! to everyone who supported this website and our activities in 2016!

Really. Thank you.

We did a lot of great things in 2016 in terms of reaching new audiences and extending our message into new places.

While I am constantly driven to do more, and achieve more, this is a great time of the year to look back and ask how we did. It bears repeating that Adam and I are a two man shop, with awesome direct support from Jeanine Dargis and Les Pierce (Saxplayer00o1) with the Daily Digest, Jason Wiskerchen on content loading, and a different Jason as moderator. All in all a very small team given what we accomplish, our global reach, and the sheer variety of things that we also accomplish that are largely out-of-sight (and out-of-mind) for most people.

On that last point, Adam recently brought some of those behind-the-scenes efforts to light in the post title Shifting Into Higher Gear. Thank you to everyone that took the time to appreciate our efforts to make the site run faster, better, smoother. We do it all in the interest of serving you better and reaching more people.

Our mission is to create a world worth inheriting, and we do that by educating, informing and activating people to first understand the world’s various problems and predicaments, and then doing something about them.

In 2016, we were very busy spreading the messages of the Three E’s (economy, energy & environment) and being emissaries for the twin ideas that big changes are coming and that we can do something to prepare for them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Great Causes, a Sea of Debt and the 2017 Recession

September 23, 2016

Great Causes, a Sea of Debt and the 2017 Recession

Great Cause

NORMANDY, FRANCE – We continue our work with the bomb squad. Myth disposal is dangerous work: People love their myths more than they love life itself. They may kill for money. But they die for their religions, their governments, their clans… and their ideas.

Famous French hippie and author Voltaire. He wears the same sardonic grin in every painting, whether he’s depicted at a young or an old age, doesn’t matter. His real name was François-Marie Arouet; he adopted the pen name Voltaire (one of 178 different ones he used) after spending 11 months incarcerated in a windowless cell in the Bastille, following the publication of a satirical verse in which he insinuated that the French regent practiced incest with his own daughter. Said regent was the infamous Duc d’Orleans, who shortly thereafter conspired with John Law to utterly ruin the country’s currency and economy in an early central banking experiment. Voltaire’s decision to insult him in advance reveals his excellent foresight and character judgment. The aristocracy was never sure whether it should fear Voltaire for his anti-authoritarian streak, or love him for his wit.

Some people think that even an idea as abstract as “freedom of speech” is worth dying for. It was Voltaire who said: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

Most people jump onboard the train of a Great Cause with enthusiasm and conviction. But many have the good sense to hop off quietly before their lives are in real danger. We suspect that Mr. Voltaire would have done the same.

That’s why the deadliest myths are those that you can ride along with at no personal risk. Foreign wars, for example, are always a favorite.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

2016 – the BIG SHIFT

January 1, 2016

2016 – the BIG SHIFT

As we close 2015 and begin a new year, the markets generally closed flat to neutral with a warning that as we approach the political year from hell being 2017, this is by no means going to be a walk through the park. We are more likely than not going to see some trends conclude in 2016 and others perform a false move the scare the hell out of everyone. Nevertheless, the stars may not be aligning, but the markets appear to be setting the stage to align for the BIG SHIFT.

What does the BIG SHIFT mean? It means that as we face a meltdown in Socialism which has taken hold of Western Governments destroying our underlying democratic foundations, ALL assets must prepare for the HEDGE against government.

Relationships are NEVER constant, yet the TV analysis touts fixed concepts that people then believe. At first, many will buy or sell based upon such unfounded beliefs and assumptions. When we examine them in detail, they fall to the ground into dust.

Europe is operating under a dictatorship and has lost any possible right to exercise a democratic process to remove the three members of the Troika since not a single one stands for any election. Lagarde is of the IMF and is not even appointed the head of the IMF exclusively by Europeans. She was a personal friend of Obama. Draghi is ex-Goldman Sachs. Once a member of Goldman, you never leave. The EU Parliament has no validity since the Commission is not bound by their vote. The people of European nations have absolutely no means to reclaim their sovereignty by any method other than force. And to prevent that, the EU Commission wants to create its own army.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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