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Always Attack the Wrong Country
By Dmitry Orlov
Source: Club Orlov
There are numerous tactics available to those who aim to make problems worse while pretending to solve them, but misdirection is always a favorite. The reason to want to make problems worse is that problems are profitable—for someone. And the reason to pretend to be solving them is that causing problems, then making them worse, makes those who profit from them look bad.
In the international arena, this type of misdirection tends to take on a farcical aspect. The ones profiting from the world’s problems are the members of the US foreign policy and military establishments, the defense contractors and the politicians around the world, and especially in the EU, who have been bought off by them. Their tactic of misdirection is conditioned by a certain quirk of the American public, which is that it doesn’t concern itself too much with the rest of the world. The average member of the American public has no idea where various countries are, can’t tell Sweden from Switzerland, thinks that Iran is full of Arabs and can’t distinguish any of the countries that end in -stan. And so a handy trick has evolved, which amounts to the following dictum: “Always attack the wrong country.”
Need some examples? After 9/11, which, according to the official story (which is probably nonsense) was carried out by “suicide bombers” (some of them, amusingly, still alive today) who were mostly from Saudi Arabia, the US chose to retaliate by attacking Saudi ArabiaAfghanistan and Iraq.
When Arab Spring erupted (because a heat wave in Russia drove up wheat prices) the obvious place to concentrate efforts, to avoid a seriously bad outcome for the region, was Egypt—the most populous Arab country and an anchor for the entire region. And so the US and NATO decided to attack EgyptLibya.
When things went south in the Ukraine, whose vacillating government couldn’t make up its mind whether it wanted to remain within the Customs Union with Russia, its traditional trading partner, or to gamble on signing an agreement with the EU based on vague (and since then broken) promises of economic cooperation, the obvious place to go and try to fix things was the Ukraine. And so the US and the EU decided fix the UkraineRussia, even though Russia is not particularly broken. Russia was not amused; nor is it a country to be trifled with, and so in response the Russians inflicted some serious pain on the Washington establishmentfarmers within the EU.
Who was at fault exceedingly clear once the Ukrainians that managed to get into power (including some very nasty neo-Nazis) started to violate the rights of Ukraine’s Russian-speaking majority, including staging some massacres, in turn causing a large chunk of it to hold referendums and vote to secede. (Perhaps you didn’t know this, but the majority of the people in the Ukraine are Russian-speakers, and there is just one city of any size—Lvov—that is mostly Ukrainian-speaking. Mind you, I find Ukrainian to be very cute and it makes me smile whenever I hear it. I don’t bother speaking it, though, because any Ukrainian with an IQ above bathwater temperature understands Russian.) And so the US and the EU decided to fix things by continuing to put pressure on the UkraineRussia.
When Russia started insisting on a political rather than a military resolution to the crisis in the Ukraine, and helped negotiate the Minsk agreements together with the Ukraine, France and Germany, a similar thing happened. These agreements obligated the Ukrainian government to pass constitutional reforms to grant autonomy to its Russian regions in the east. The Ukrainian government refused to abide by these agreements. As a result, the US and the EU decided to put pressure on the UkrainianRussian government.
When a nasty terrorist group calling itself ISIS and composed of Islamic Salafi/Takfiri extremists started to seize power in large parts of Iraq, and then spread to Syria, something had to be done about it. These extremists were being financed by Turkey (which is still buying oil from them and sheltering them on its territory) and Saudi Arabia. And so the US and NATO decided to put some pressure on Turkey and Saudi ArabiaSyria.
In response to all this foolishness, Russia up and decided to actually go and fix something that was broken: Syria. And now Syria is on the mend, and members the misdirectorate in Washington are left scratching their heads.
So far so good. But this method of pretending to be solving problems by making them worse has some definite downsides.
For one thing, eventually even the dimmest, most geographically challenged bulbs in the general population start to get a clue, and then they start refusing to vote for the establishment candidates. Then it becomes hard to continue with the misdirecting because the people doing the misdirecting are voted out, and (horror of horrors!) somebody who might actually try to fix a problem or two might get voted in.
For another, continually making problems worse by attacking the wrong country tends to eventually make the sheer number problems get completely out of hand. Take the recent massive terror attack in Brussels, down the road from NATO headquarters, for which ISIS took credit. Recently, Europe has been experiencing a large-scale influx of people from the Middle East and North Africa, who have been forced to flee their native lands because of all the previous acts of misdirection, and a fair number of these people are ISIS terrorists. And so, to protect itself, NATO is planning to fight ISIS in EuropeSyria. Also, it is well known that the influx into Europe has been orchestrated by Turkey. In response, the EU has decided to put pressure ongive billions of euros to Turkey and tell Turkey that it is welcome to join the EU.
Lastly, this pattern has an overall momentum that, over time, becomes harder and harder to break. It starts out as just one group of plutocrats doing incredibly vile, underhanded but profitable things; later on, an even bigger group of plutocrats is doing equally vile but now completely idiotic, self-defeating, embarrassing things; and right near the end a really huge group of plutocrats is doing things that are absolutely suicidal—but they can’t stop themselves. You should be able to decide for yourselves when that point in time arrives, but I doubt that it is too far in the future.
Hillary Clinton’s Business of Corporate Shilling & War Making
Source: Media Roots
As the circus of the 2016 presidential election grinds on, Hillary Clinton has posited herself as the candidate of the people. But not many “candidates of the people” have vacation homes in the Hamptons that cost $200,000 per month, or hang out with the world’s billionaires.
It’s hard to know who she is really–while once being a proponent of Donald Trump type positions, like building a wall at the Mexican border, supporting torture, and opposing same-sex marriage until 2013, today she presents herself as the anti-Trump, anti-Republican candidate.
There’s been a lot of outrage about the impression that the establishment has already anointed her as the Democratic nominee, and has carved out her path to the presidency.
But like in 2008, her guaranteed seat on the throne is being derailed by the unpredictable moods of the masses, and millions of young progressive voters. She continues to play her shape shifting game, morphing her positions to try to capture the support for her opponent, but the real Hillary is still inside.
In fact, every layer of Hillary’s career shows why, far from being a candidate of the people, she’s the top pick by corporations to do the real job of any US president: CEO of the Empire.
Digging deep into Hillary’s connections to Wall Street, Abby Martin reveals how the Clinton’s multi-million-dollar political machine operates. This episode of The Empire Files chronicles the Clinton’s rise to power in the 90s on a right-wing agenda, the Clinton Foundation’s revolving door with Gulf state monarchies, corporations and the world’s biggest financial institutions, and the establishment of the hyper-aggressive “Hillary Doctrine” while Secretary of State.
Terror Cells
Ain’t no cure for dystopian biology
By Barbara Ehrenreich
Source: The Baffler
At around the turn of the millennium, some disturbing findings surfaced in the biomedical literature. Macrophages—immune cells whose function is to attack and kill microbes and other threats to the body—do not gather at tumor sites to destroy cancer cells, as had been optimistically imagined. Instead, they encourage the cancer cells to continue their mad reproductive rampage. Frances Balkwill, the British cell biologist who performed some of the key studies of treasonous immune cell behavior, described her colleagues in the field as being “horrified.”
By and large, medical science continues to present a happy face to the public. Self-help books and websites go right on advising cancer patients to boost their immune systems in order to combat the disease; patients should eat right and cultivate a supposedly immune-boosting “positive attitude.” Better yet, they are urged to “visualize” the successful destruction of cancer cells by the body’s immune cells, following guidelines such as:
• Cancer cells are weak and confused, and should be imagined as something that can fall apart like ground hamburger.
• There is an army of different kinds of white blood cells that can overwhelm the cancer cells.
• White blood cells are aggressive and want to seek out and attack the cancer cells.
At a more respectable level of discourse, Harvard physician Jerome Groopman wrote an entire 2012 New Yorker article on scientific attempts to enlist the immune system against cancer—without ever once mentioning that certain types of immune cells have a tendency to go over to the other side.
But the evidence for immune cell collusion with cancer keeps piling up. Macrophages supply cancer cells with chemical growth factors and help build the new blood vessels required by a growing tumor. So intimately are they involved with the deadly progress of cancer that they can account for up to 50 percent of a tumor’s mass. Macrophages also appear to be necessary if the cancer is to progress to its deadliest phase, metastasis. When cancerous mice were treated to eliminate all their macrophages, their tumors stopped metastasizing.
A May 2014 paper in the journal Cancer Cell offers a chilling account of the macrophage–cancer cell interaction. Macrophages are among the most mobile cells in the body, capable of moving through the bloodstream or creeping, like amoebae, by extending pseudopods and pulling themselves along. When macrophages encounter breast cancer cells, they do not do what we would like them to do, which is to attack and engulf the “enemy.” Instead, the Cancer Cell article suggests, the macrophages release a growth factor that encourages the cancer cells to elongate themselves into a mobile, invasive form poised for metastasis. These elongated cancer cells, in turn, release a chemical that further activates the macrophages—leading to the release of more growth factor, and so on. A positive feedback loop is established. Or, to put it more colorfully, the macrophages and cancer cells seem to excite one another to the point where the cancer cells are pumped up and ready to set out from the breast in search of fresh lebensraum—in the lungs, for example, or the liver or brain.
You will find little of this drama in the article itself, and not only because it is a scientific paper that happens to have seventeen coauthors. Their data focuses entirely on the chemical exchange between the two types of cells—which is a little like describing a human flirtation entirely in terms of hormones and pheromones. But what goes on among the living cells in the body? How many cells (macrophages and cancer cells) are required before the positive feedback loop can take off? Do the macrophages and cancer cells actually touch one another, perhaps briefly fusing cell membranes, or do the chemical messages they exchange travel through the intercellular matrix? And then there are the deeper, perhaps unanswerable, questions, like what’s in this for the macrophages, which by enabling metastasis seal their own doom? Or for that matter, what’s in it for the cancer cells, which will die along with the organism they destroy?
Kill, Eat, Repeat
If science seems to balk at the behavior of individual cells (and small groups of cells), this is because twentieth-century biology, in its reductionist zeal, tended to zip right past cells to get to the more glamorous molecular level. Cancer research came to focus on the DNA mutations that predispose cells to a career of selfish reproduction. Immunology downplayed macrophages in favor of an obsession with antibodies—the protein molecules that can mark a “foreign” cell, like a microbe, for destruction—although it is chiefly macrophages that do the destroying. My first thesis advisor at Rockefeller University won a Nobel Prize for elucidating the structure of antibody molecules. My second thesis advisor got far less recognition, and a much smaller lab, for his work on how macrophages kill and digest their prey.
Part of the appeal of molecules over cells is that molecules can be collected in test tubes like any nonliving chemical, stored in a refrigerator, and analyzed at leisure by the usual chemical methods. Cells can be pulverized and fractionated into their constituent molecules, of course, but living cells have to be observed with the patience of an ethnologist studying chimpanzee behavior in the wild. After months of biochemical studies of macrophages, I once had a chance to see a living one under a phase contrast microscope and was surprised, in my naïveté, to find that it was moving, its surface rippling and corrugating like that of a sea anemone. The cells of our body are analogs of, and evolutionary descendants of, the unicellular creatures that preceded multicellular life and, in a sense, are tiny animals themselves.
Only very recently, new techniques in microscopy have made it possible to track the behavior of individual cells in living tissue, and the resulting images reveal striking degrees of individuality. If you calculate the bulk average of movements within a sample group of cells, most cells turn out to be going their own way, on paths far from the average. Cancer cells within a tumor exhibit “extreme diversity.” NK, or “natural killer,” cells, which, like macrophages, attack targets like microbes, do not always kill. A 2013 article reports that about half of the NK cells sit out the fight, leaving a minority of them to become what their human observers call “serial killers.”
Individual cells have no mental life—no thoughts or feelings—at least none that we can imagine, if only because they lack nervous systems. But macrophages and NK cells are capable of “memory,” or different responses to stimuli they have encountered before. Risking anthropomorphism, scientists now speak of “decision-making” by individual cells such as macrophages. The cells sniff the chemicals in their microenvironment, seem to weigh their options, and then decide whether to attack or withdraw, move forward or remain where they are. As one science news site put it:
Cells are constantly making decisions about what to do, where to go or when to divide. Many of these decisions are hard-wired in our DNA or strictly controlled by external signals and stimuli. Others, though, seem to be made autonomously by individual cells.
Just a decade ago, any talk about cellular “decision-making” would have been taken for whimsy. Cells, as we knew them then, were programmed both genetically and epigenetically (through chemical modifications to DNA occurring during development) to perform their functions in the body. Heart cells beat, intestinal cells secrete digestive enzymes, nerve cells conduct electrical signals, etc.—and those that falter at their tasks obligingly commit suicide through a process called apoptosis. Furthermore, most body cells, most of the time, are fixed in place by glue-like attachments to other cells. Individual cells have no decisions to make, we used to think, because they have no choice but to serve the organism by tirelessly carrying out their assigned roles.
But that old deterministic model of cell behavior offered little insight into cellular rebellions such as cancer. Many cells may be exposed to a carcinogen, but only some turn into cancer cells, and of those, only a fraction go on to a career of metastasis. “Decisions” are made. As for macrophages, collusion with cancer cells is only one of the ways they can undermine the organism. Overly ambitious macrophages play a central role in autoimmune diseases and the many inflammatory ailments, like arthritis, that plague the elderly. In coronary artery disease, macrophages pile up on the arterial walls, where they fatten themselves on lipids until there is no space in the artery for blood to flow through. The macrophages are doing what comes naturally to them: eating. Unfortunately, there is no central authority to tell them to desist lest the whole multicellular contraption that is the body come to grief.
As an analogy to the erratic immune system (which includes macrophages, NK cells, and a host of other cell types, including antibody-producing lymphocytes), biology teachers often invoke the military. Any human society within a spear’s throw of potential enemies needs some kind of defensive force—minimally, an armed group who can defend against invaders. But there are risks to maintaining a garrison: the warriors may get greedy and turn against their own people, demanding ever more food and other resources. Similarly, in the case of the body, without immune cells we would be helpless in the face of invading microbes. With them, we face the possibility of insurrection and self-inflicted death.
Dystopian Biology
It is disconcerting to think of the biological self, or body, as a collection of tiny selves. The image that comes to mind is the grotesque portrait of a super-sized king in the frontispiece of Hobbes’s Leviathan: on close inspection, the king turns out to be composed of hundreds of little people crowded into his arms and torso. Hobbes’s point was that human societies need autocratic leaders; otherwise they risk degenerating into a “war of all against all.” But no “king” rules the body. Despite, or sometimes because of, all the communications—chemical and electrical—that connect the tissues and cells of the body, chaos can always break out.
It would be nice to think that the brain, with which we do our thinking, is a more tightly disciplined place, set off as it is from the turmoil of the body by the blood–brain barrier, like a computer kept in a dust-free, air-conditioned room. But living brain cells are not entirely predictable. The glial cells that support and nourish neurons can become cancerous (as, more rarely, can neurons themselves). Then too, the brain has its own army of macrophages, or microglia as they are called, and overactive microglia can, like macrophages in other parts of the body, create damaging inflammations, leading to neurodegenerative diseases. Bizarrely enough, new research this year shows that breast cancer cells sometimes “disguise” themselves as neurons, penetrate the blood–brain barrier, and start fresh tumors in the brain. If individual cells have functions, they do not always seem to know it.
It took science until 2012 to officially acknowledge that nonhuman animals possess feelings and consciousness. It may take a bit longer for biology to admit that the cells in our bodies are not simply automata, that they possess, if not consciousness, at least some sort of agency. As recently as 2008, an article on the confusing taxonomy of macrophages proposed that a new, “more informative” classification “should be based on the fundamental macrophage functions,” which are defined as “host defence, wound healing and immune regulation.” What about macrophages’ role in abetting cancer—or in instigating life-threatening inflammatory diseases? What “functions” do these activities represent? The “wisdom of the body,” which supposedly keeps the body unified as a single sustainable organism, does not always apply at the microscopic level, where an individual cell can sabotage the entire operation.
Natural selection should weed out cellular traitors, you might think, since people who are vulnerable to cancer, autoimmune diseases, and pathological inflammation—at least at early ages—are less likely to reproduce. The truth is, though, that we do not know for sure what natural selection means at the cellular level. Often, when a person with cancer is subjected to chemotherapy, some of the cancer cells survive through what can only be called natural selection. A victory at the cellular level may mean defeat for the organism.
This is madness, of course. But then, who are we, as human beings, to be appalled by the irresponsible “decisions” of our body’s cells? We too are biological organisms, supposedly doing our best to survive and promote the survival of our kin. And we too, like rogue cells in our bodies, can be murderous, suicidal, and systematically destructive of our physical habitats. We, of all creatures, should appreciate the perversity, as well as the clockwork precision, of biology.
Saturday Matinee: Bangkok Loco
“Bangkok Loco” (2004) is a surreal Thai musical comedy (and feature film debut) from director Pornchai Hongrattanaporn. Actor/musician Krissada Terrence stars as Bay, a 70’s era drum prodigy with special skills taught to him by a monk. After getting framed for a murder, he becomes a fugitive but is aided by friend and fellow drummer Ton (Nountaka Warawanitchanoun). Together, they struggle to evade police, clear his name and win a climactic drum duel against “Devil’s Drums Master” Mr. David (Rang Sabian).
Watch the full film with English subtitles here. (May not stream on some portable devices.)
Is the US Economy Heading for Recession?
This past week the U.S. government announced the country’s economy rose in the January-March 2016 at a mere 0.5 percent annual growth rate. Since the U.S., unlike other countries, estimates its GDP based on annual rates, that means for the first quarter 2016 the U.S. economy grew by barely 0.1 percent over the previous quarter in late 2015.
Growth this slow indicates the US economy may have “slipped into ‘stall speed’, that is, growth so weak that the economy loses enough momentum and slides into recession”, according to economists at JPMorgan Chase.
Has the U.S. economy therefore come to a halt the past three months? If so, what are the consequences for a global economy already progressively slowing? What will an apparently stagnating US economy mean for Japan, already experiencing its fifth recession since 2008? For Europe, stuck in a long term chronic stagnation? And for emerging market economies, struggling with collapsing commodity prices and currencies, rising unemployment, and long term capital flight trends? Once heralded as the only bright spot in the global economy, the US economy now appears to have joined the slowing global trend.
Some Interesting Trends
Last quarter’s 0.5 percent U.S. GDP may indicate the nation’s economy is even weaker than it appears. The economy of the United States’ recent 0.5 percent growth rate is the latest in a steady declining U.S. GDP growth trend over the past year. In the previous fourth quarter 2015, the US economy grew 1.4 percent, which was down from the preceding quarter’s growth of 2 percent and before that 3.9 percent. So the U.S. economy appears to be slowing rapidly over the past year.
Over an even longer period of more than eight years, since the previous peak growth in late 2007, the U.S. economy has grown by a cumulative total of only 10.1 percent. That’s a paltry annual growth of only 1.2 percent a year on average for the past 8+ years.
But even those figures are overestimated. In 2013, the U.S. redefined the way it estimated GDP, adding categories like R&D expenses and other intangibles that artificially boosted U.S. GDP estimates simply by redefining it. That “economic growth by redefinition” raised GDP by around 0.3 percent annually, and in dollar terms by roughly US$500 billion annually. So the real U.S. GDP may be actually growing by less than 1 percent on average per year since 2007; and during the most recent quarter, January-March 2016, the economy may not have grown at all, but may have stagnated, collapse, and come to a halt.
Behind the Wizard’s Curtain
The media and press like to define recessions as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Actually, U.S. economists tasked with declaring when a recession has begun or has ended don’t rely totally on GDP estimates, which are notoriously inaccurate and have become increasingly so, given U.S. and other governments’ penchant for changing how they define GDP.
Redefining GDP to boost the appearance of growth is not just a problem in the US in recent years. For example, there are few independent research sources that think China is growing at its officially announced 6.8 percent GDP rate. To note but a couple, both Capital Economics and Lombard Street research estimate that China’s GDP is growing at only around 4-4.5 percent based on close examination of other indicators like electricity usage, power generation, local transport volumes, and so forth. In recent years India officially nearly doubled its GDP overnight by redefining it. So did Nigeria. India bank researchers, whom this writer has talked to, say they have a rule of thumb: take the official government GDP rate and half it and that’s probably close to India’s actual GDP. In Europe, a number of economies, including Britain, which have been desperate to raise their GDP in recent years, now include drug smuggling and prostitution services in their estimates of GDP. How they come up with such estimates and the pricing of such services is, of course, interesting.
Not satisfied with the media-press definition of a recession as two consecutive quarters of negative GDP, US economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, who are tasked with declaring the beginning and end of a recession, look at various economic indicators — like industrial production, retail sales, exports-import trends, and other sources. A recession may occur in just one quarter; or may require more than two.
Looking at these other indicators for this past January-March 2016 period, the US economy appears even more likely headed for a recession and sooner rather than later.
US industrial production (manufacturing, mining and utilities) declined at an annual rate of -2.2 percent this past quarter, after having declined -3.3 percent the preceding quarter. Industrial production has fallen six of the last seven months. US industrial capacity is now at its lowest point since 2010.
Business investment is another trouble spot. Investment in business structures fell by -10.7 percent and investment in new equipment by -8.6 percent, the latter the biggest drop since the 2007-09 recession. Business inventories rose barely, by the smallest amount in two years, continuing a slowing trend of the past nine months.
And what about consumption, which constitutes about two thirds of the total US economy? US consumer spending has been growing at an average monthly rate of only 0.1 percent. Retail sales, the largest element of consumer spending, has fallen every month on average during the quarter. After having sustained retail sales in previous years, auto sales, a large component of retail sales, declined for the second consecutive quarter during the January-March period. The outlook for U.S. consumer spending recovery is also not too bright. A recent Gallup poll reported that 60 percent of those interviewed indicated the U.S. economy was “getting worse.” Reflecting the poor demand for consumer goods, U.S. consumer prices now hover on the brink of deflation, falling at an average monthly rate of -0.1 percent for the quarter.
Exports are declining, residential housing construction recently plummeted. In other words, not many of the economic indicators that comprise GDP show a promising picture. GDP should probably be even lower than the recently reported 0.5 percent annual and 0.1 percent quarter to quarter growth rates. The U.S. economy has obviously “stalled.” But it’s not the first time. In fact, it’s the fifth time it has since the official end of the last recession in June 2009.
What’s a Relapse?
The performance of the US economy this past January-March, a trend that appears is continuing into April, represents what this writer has called an ‘economic relapse’. A relapse is a collapse of economic growth for a single quarter, to near zero or even negative growth.
The U.S. economy has experienced now five such single quarter relapses since the 2007-09 recession was officially declared over. The economy collapsed to 0.1 percent in early 2011, to 0.2 percent in late 2012, declined again by -2.2 percent in 2014 and collapsed to 0.2 percent in 2015.
Relapses are the consequence of “epic” recessions such as occurred in 2007-09, which are typically characterized by short, shallow recoveries that slip repeatedly into periodic bouts of renewed stagnation. They are the result of near total reliance on central bank monetary policies that are designed to boost stock, bond and other financial markets — and thus the incomes of rich investors — but which fail to generate a sustained real economic recovery. Fiscal policies designed to stimulate consumption and good paying jobs are rejected. That almost perfectly describes U.S. economic policy the past eight years.
Politicians Wearing Rose-Colored Glasses
Despite the facts, U.S. government politicians and Federal Reserve bank officials continue to run around declaring that the U.S. economy is performing well. They like to cite the 200,000 jobs allegedly created in recent months. But a closer examination shows the jobs being created are part time, temp, contract, low paid, no benefit service jobs. Jobs that generate no overall wage increase for the economy and no real income gains for working people.
Young workers 30 years old or less are especially hard hit by this “‘well performing US economy.” A recent study by the Center for American Progress, for example, showed that 30 year old workers earn today the same pay, adjusted for inflation, that 30 year olds earned back in 1984.
Despite all that, President Obama continues to tour the country complaining that he doesn’t get enough credit for bringing the US back from the worst recession since the 1930s depression. He should tell that to the millions of millennial young workers, with low paid crappy service jobs, with no medical insurance, having to live at home with relatives because they can’t afford to rent an apartment, loaded with debt and with no prospects for meaningful change on the horizon. No wonder they’re rallying around Bernie Sanders, who continues to capture 85 percent of their votes in the presidential primaries. Obama (and Hillary) will have a hard time convincing them “all is well” — and an even harder time getting them to vote Democrat in the coming election in November.
Jack Rasmus is author of the recent, 2016 book “Systemic Fragility in the Global Economy,” by Clarity Press, soon translated into a Chinese edition, and the forthcoming June 2016 book, “Looting Greece: The Emerging New
How Do You Know When Your Society Is In The Midst Of Collapse?
By Brandon Smith
Source: Activist Post
As economic turmoil worldwide becomes increasingly apparent, I have been receiving messages from readers expressing some concerns on the public “perception” of collapse. That is to say, there are questions on the average person’s concept of collapse versus the reality of collapse. This is a vital issue that I have discussed briefly in the past, but it deserves a more in-depth analysis.
What is collapse? How do we define it? And, are some of the notions of collapse in the public consciousness completely wrong?
It’s funny, because skeptics opposed to the idea of a U.S. collapse in particular will most often retort with a question they think I cannot or will not answer – “So, Mr. Smith, when specifically is this supposed collapse going to take place? What day and time?”
My response has always been – “We’re in the middle of a collapse right now; you really can’t see it right in front of your sneering face?”
The reason these people are incapable of grasping this kind of answer is in large part due to the popular mainstream conceptions of systemic collapse. These are conceptions that are for the most part delusional and not in line with the facts. The public idea of collapse comes predominantly from Hollywood, and not from personal experience. For the masses (and some preppers, unfortunately), a collapse is an “event” that happens visibly and usually swiftly. You wake up one morning and behold; the television and phones don’t work anymore and zombies are at your doorstep! Yes, it’s childish and cartoonish, but anything less than a Walking Dead/Mad Max scenario and many people act as if all other threats are benign.
This is the driving reason why many Americans are absolutely oblivious to the economic instability that is rampant and blatant within our system the past few months. They might see the same signals that alternative analysts see, but these signals do not register in their brains as dangers.
Look at it this way; say you told a person their whole life that a tiger is a 10-foot tall behemoth with four heads that breathes fire while urinating flesh-rending acid. Say you make movies and TV shows about it and they never have any experience to the contrary. When they finally come across a real tiger, they might try to pet the damn thing instead of running in terror or searching for a means of defense.
To use another vicious animal analogy, when I encounter skeptics with false assumptions of what a collapse actually is, I am often reminded of that woman in Anchorage, Alaska who jumped an enclosure fence at the zoo to get a closer picture of Binky the polar bear. These people have been made so inept when it comes to identifying threats that they will continue arguing with you as the animal takes a football-sized bite out of their meaty thigh.
So what is the root of the problem beyond Hollywood fantasies? Well, the problem is that social and economic collapse is not a singular event, it is a PROCESS. Collapse is a series of events that sometimes span years. Each event increases in volatility over the last event, but as time goes on these events tend to condition the masses. The public develops a normalcy bias towards crisis (like the old “frog in a boiling pot” analogy). They lose all sense of what a healthy system looks like.
It is not uncommon for a society to wade through almost a decade or more of violent decline before finally acknowledging the system is imploding on a fundamental level. It is also not uncommon for societies to endure years of abuse by corrupt governments before either organizing effectively to rebel, or caving in and submitting to totalitarianism.
But how does one recognize a failing system? How does a person know if they are in the middle of a collapse rather than on the “verge” of collapse? Here are some signals I have derived from research of various breakdowns in modern nations and why they indicate we are experiencing collapse right now…
The Criminals Openly Admit To Their Crimes
The surest way to know if your society is in the midst of disintegration is to see if the criminals who created the instability in the first place are openly discussing a collapse scenario or warning that one is imminent.
A year ago, central bankers presented little more than a chorus of recovery propaganda. Today, not so much. The Royal Bank of Scotland is now warning investors to “sell everything” ahead of a “cataclysmic” year in markets.
The Federal Reserve’s Richard Fisher has admitted that the Fed “frontloaded” (manipulated) stock markets into a bubble and that payment is about to come due in the form of severe economic volatility (up to 20% crash in equities).
The Bank for International Settlements, the central bank of central banks, has a track record of warning the public about collapse conditions – right before they happen, leaving little or no time for people to prepare. They have followed their habit by warning in September and December that a Fed rate hike would “shatter” the uneasy calm in markets.
The former Chief Economist of the BIS now says the economy is in worse shape than it was in 2008 and is headed for a larger fall.
What happened between last year and this year and why are these internationalists suddenly so forthcoming about our economic reality? The fact that central bankers are the cause of our current collapse leads me to believe that such admissions are designed to deflect guilt. If they put out a few warnings now, they can then later claim they are prognosticators rather than culprits, and that they were trying to “help us.” Beyond that, the reality is that our situation was just as dire in 2014/2015 as it is today; the difference is that now we are about to enter a new phase in the ongoing collapse, a much more detrimental phase, but still a phase of a breakdown that has been progressing since at least 2008.
The Fundamentals Break Through The Manipulation Barrier
Governments and central banks do not have the capacity to artificially create demand for goods or a supply of well-paying jobs in a crashing economy. What they can do, though, is hide the visible problems in supply and demand with false numbers.
I examined such false economic statistics in great detail last year in a six-part series titled “One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes.” I will not cover them all again here. I would only point out that recently the fundamentals of supply and demand have begun to break through the deceit of manipulated numbers, and this is a sign that the collapse is about to move from one stage to the next.
With global shipping and trucking freight in steep decline, with retail inventories in stasis and current oil consumption falling to levels not seen since 1997 despite a larger population, the mainstream can no longer deny that consumer demand is crumbling. If demand is falling dramatically, then the financial system is in the middle of falling dramatically; there is simply no way around this truth.
Stocks And Commodities Become Violently Erratic
Let’s be clear, if stock markets represent anything at all, they are merely lagging indicators of economic instability. Stock markets are NOT predictive indicators of anything useful. Therefore, any person who does nothing but track equities each day is going to be completely oblivious to the bigger picture behind the economy until it is too late. They will be so mesmerized by the green numbers and red numbers and lines on minute-to-minute graphs that they will lose all sense of reality.
Violent swings in stocks are a sign of a financial system that is at the middle or end of the collapse process, not the beginning.
It is also important to note that extreme shifts in stocks and commodity values to the upside are just as much a signal of instability as shifts to the downside. For instance, if you witnessed the recent 9% explosion in oil markets and thought to yourself “Ah, the markets are being stabilized again and nothing is different this time…”, then you are an idiot.
Of course, the next day oil markets lost almost all of the gains they made the day before. And this is how markets behave when they are about to die; they expand and implode chaotically each day on nothing more that meaningless news headlines rather than hard data. This heart attack in equities inevitably trends downwards as the weeks and months pass. Keep in mind, equities are down nearly 10% from their recent highs, and oil is down approximately 50% in the past six months. Every time there is a dead cat bounce in stocks skeptics come out of the woodwork to call alternative analysts “doomers”, yet they are nowhere to be found when markets come crashing back down. They are not looking at the overall trend because their short attention spans hinder them. Again, extreme swings in markets, whether up or down, are a sign of progressing collapse.
Deterioration Of Cultural Values, Heritage And Identity
I have written extensively over the years about the Cloward-Piven strategy; a strategy used by collectivists to destabilize social systems by dumping overt numbers of foreign immigrants into the population without demand for integration. This process has been obvious in the U.S. and Europe for quite some time, but only now is it peaking to the point that collapse is seen as an inevitable result by the public. Europe is worse off than the U.S. in this regard as millions upon millions of Muslim immigrants are injected into the EU’s already dying body; immigrants that intend to transplant their culture from their own failed societies rather than adopting the values and principles of the societies that have invited them in.
Natural-born Americans and legal immigrants with aspiration of integration appear to be fighting back against the Cloward-Piven strategy with some success by holding onto traditional American values despite being labeled “barbarians” and “racists.” Illegal immigration, though, is still completely unchecked.
In the EU, the long campaign of cultural Marxism has made natural-born Europeans perhaps the most self-hating people on the planet as well as the most passive and weak. Organized opposition to massive immigration programs in the EU should have taken place years ago. Now it is far too late, and the European system is finishing a social implosion which should have already been obvious to average citizens.
Open Discussion Of Totalitarian Measures
When corrupt leadership moves from quiet totalitarianism to more open totalitarianism, your society is in the FINAL stages of collapse, not the beginning of a collapse. The U.S. in particular has been slowly strangled with subversive legal directives and political policies ever since the so called “War on Terror” began. However, there are now multiple signals of a much deeper and open tyranny in the works.
A few recent examples stand out, including Barack Obama’s insistence that the office of the president has the legal authority to issues executive orders that affect constitutional protections such as the 2nd Amendment. As many liberty movement activists are aware, there is absolutely no constitutional precedent for the use of executive orders and such powers are not mentioned anywhere in the document. They were simply created out of thin air to be used by the federal government and sometimes state governments to supersede normal checks and balances.
While numerous presidents have issued executive orders, including some that were outright tyrannical, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s unconstitutional internment of Japanese Americans into concentration camps, George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been the most subversive in their bypassing of the Constitution. Obama, in particular, has tried to hide the number of executive actions he has taken by issuing hundreds of “presidential memorandums,” which are basically the same dirty play by another name.
These actions have been progressively setting the stage for the removal of checks and balances entirely in the name of crisis management. They are so broad in their nature and vague in their definitions and applications that they could be interpreted by federal authorities to mean just about anything in any given situation.
If executive actions are not scary enough, corrupt politicians are now becoming blunt in their demands for dominance. Two Republican Senators, Mitch McConnel and Lindsay Graham, are calling for unlimited AUMF-style (authorization of use of military force) war powers to be given to the president. Such powers would allow the president to project U.S. military forces anywhere in the world for any reason without review or time limits. This includes the use of military forces on U.S. soil.
The rationale for this is, of course, the threat of ISIS. The same group of terrorists the U.S. government helped to create.
And finally, if you want perhaps the most nonchalant admission of future tyranny in recent days, check out former General Wesley Clark’s call for “disloyal” Americans to be placed in internment camps through the duration of the war on terror, a war that could ostensibly go on forever.
One could argue that all of these measures are meant only to deter “Islamic extremism.” I would point out that government officials could have stemmed that tide at any time by enforcing existing immigration laws, or, by stopping all immigration for a period of years until the problem is handled. Instead, they have allowed open borders to remain, and have even imported potential terrorists while focusing Department of Homeland Security efforts more on evil white guys with guns.
If we accept the violation of the constitutional rights of any group of citizens, if we allow the concept of “thought crime” to become commonplace, then we leave the door open to the violation of our own rights someday. And that is how tyrants trick populations through incremental collapse; by applying despotism to a claimed dangerous minority, then expanding it to everyone else.
America is sitting near the end of the spectrum in terms of economic collapse and in the middle of the spectrum in terms of social collapse. While more violent events are certainly gestating and are likely to be triggered in the near term, we should not overlook the reality that collapse is happening in stages all around us. This process gives us at least some time. All is not lost yet, and the steps we take to organize and prepare today will affect how the collapse process unfolds tomorrow. People who continue to ignore the outright evidence of collapse based on false assumptions of what collapse should look like are only preventing themselves from taking proper action until it is too late. Make no mistake, our system is dying. We cannot allow our false perceptions of this death to cloud the reality of it, or our response to it.
You can read more from Brandon Smith at his site Alt-Market.com. If you would like to support the publishing of articles like the one you have just read, visit our donations page here. We greatly appreciate your patronage. You can contact Brandon Smith at: brandon@alt-market.com
After the Crash 