Tag Archives: MSM

The War on Fake News

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By Anthony Freda

Source: Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox

As it becomes increasingly clear that yesterday’s conspiracy theories are today’s real news, the call to kill the messengers just gets more shrill and hysterical.

The attacks on free speech with high-tech censorship campaigns and old-fashioned hit pieces in the “War on Fake News” are massive and concerted.

The book burners are starting so many fires it’s impossible to stamp them all out.

What are the horrible thought crimes committed by the alternative press?

The new media has consistently exposed the lies and crimes of our corrupt and broken institutions.

Pioneers of alt media have passionately and convincingly made the case that The Patriot Act literally reversed the gains to human liberty codified in The Bill of Rights.

Independent media dismantled the lies that were presented as the pretexts to the invasion of Iraq. The same lies aggressively promoted by Bush, Hillary Clinton, CNN and The New York Times and that resulted in the death of a million people and global chaos. By contrast, how many people have died as a result of alternative media reports? The answer iszero.

The independent press interviewed NSA whistleblowers who accurately described how the U.S. government was illegally spying on its citizens and retaining our data, and how these whistleblowers were being persecuted by their own government for coming forward and refusing to break the law.

This was years before anyone heard of Edward Snowden.

Amazingly, there was very little interest in these bombshell allegations in the mainstream press.

It’s hard to believe now, but in those days, people who claimed the government was surveilling innocent citizens were dismissed as paranoid by the self-proclaimed arbiters of truth at the NYT and CNN.

Grassroots media detailed a decade ago how police forces all over America were becoming militarized and predicted that this dangerous trend would lead to racially charged conflict on the streets of the nation. What kooks!

We have also railed against; torture, needless wars, police brutality, government corruption, the two-party duopoly, the criminality of the banksters and the end of privacy.

Now the very same mainstream media hacks who promoted the lies that lead to war in Iraq and Syria and mindlessly regurgitate whichever talking point is uploaded onto their teleprompter are gleefully assassinating what they call “fake news” using edited tape and misleading hit-pieces.

While these discredited war cheerleaders lie about why our sons and daughters are sent to die, we are bravely exposing the fraudulent casus belli they traitorously and disgracefully promote.

While these corporate spokespeople work for the interests of the oil and drug companies and political forces that pay their salaries, we risk everything to expose the crimes and scams of these same broken institutions.

We have done a great public service by exposing the deceptive, psychological methods used by the ruling elite to warp historical narratives, manipulate patriotism and manufacture consent.

By helping people to recognize and suspend their belief in propaganda and therefore their own complicity in it, the alternative media is helping to create a public awareness to the tactics our enemies use to keep us divided, steal our rights and slaughter countless innocents all over the world.

I know it’s fun and easy to call us tin-foil-hat wearers, or whatever pejorative has been chosen for you today, but let’s be clear about whose dirty work some are doing. Ironically, many are using talking-points written by deep-state operatives to ridicule the idea that the deep-state exists at all!!

Alternative media is in direct competition with the mainstream media for revenue and the MSM want to control the information we are exposed to.

The MSM are waging a concerted demonization campaign aimed at destroying some of the dominant platforms exposing the lies and crimes of their corporate and deep-state masters and many are helping them do it.

The MSM is an enemy of the truth and of the people. Friends of mine have been accused of being Russian agents in The NYT because they simply told the truth about Clinton during the campaign.

The corporate press has gone from lying to the American people to lyingabout the American people.

Do we have the will and power to destroy our common enemy?

www.AnthonyFreda.com

It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society. -Jiddu Krishnamurti

 

Organized Chaos and Confusion as Political Control

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By Edward Curtin

Source: Dissident Voice

There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.

— Buffalo Springfield 1967

It’s not supposed to be clear, now or then.  If you’re confused by the news you’re hearing, you should be.  They want you to be.  They try to make you be.  But you don’t have to be.

Who are “they”?  They are the corporate mainstream media (MSM) that serve as mouthpieces for the power elites, who are connected through an intricate system of institutions and associations, both obvious and shadowy.  They run the show that the media produce for the masses.  To paraphrase the illustrious American propagandist, Edward Bernays: This is the engineering of the consent of the ignorant herd by the intelligent few.

That this has been going on for a long time should be obvious.  That such propaganda is surround-sound today is a fact.  It is total and non-stop.  Even its critics are often seduced as they are horrified.

But I utter the obvious to explore the obscure.  In particular, the ways the elites try to manage the public mind by confusing contradictions, half-truths, multiple and conflicting narratives, and revelations proffered to conceal more fundamental facts.

The basic way people’s thinking is controlled today is by confusing them and creating a perpetual state of mental vertigo.  Muddled and disordered by double-speak, illogical reporting, and a kaleidoscopic merry-go-round of conflicting reports, the average person is reduced to a mental mess.  “To the average man who tries to keep informed,” writes Jacques Ellul in Propaganda, “a world emerges that is astonishingly incoherent, absurd, and irrational, which changes rapidly and constantly for reasons he can’t understand.”

Take Donald Trump.  He is regularly castigated by the media for his endless stream of tweets and contradictory statements.  He is called a moron, mentally imbalanced, and a clown.  But what these critics fail to grasp is that he is beating them at their own game of sowing confusion.  He is our modern mythic Johnny Appleseed, wildly spewing seeds of bedlam to incite and confound.  He is no anomaly.  He has stepped out of our celebrity reality-TV screened world to carry on the media’s task of what Orwell said was a necessary task for the rulers in a totalitarian society: “to dislocate the sense of reality.”

The mainstream media do this daily.  Think of their reporting of some recent news and ask yourself what exactly have they said – Russia-gate, the Iran agreement, the Las Vegas massacre, Catalonia, health insurance, etc. Gibberish piled upon gibberish, that’s what they’ve said.  A salmagundi of contradictory verbiage that leaves a half-way sentient person shaking one’s head in astonishment.  Or leaves one baffled, devoid of any sense of the truth.

While the gross Harvey Weinstein, buddy to Democrat politicians who took large sums from his deep pockets, dominates the MSM’s spotlight, as if his exploits suddenly appeared out of nowhere, the U.S. war against Syria and so many other countries “isn’t happening,” as Harold Pinter put it in his Nobel acceptance speech when he said the systematic crimes of the United States have been disappeared behind “a highly successful act of hypnosis.” The nuclear threats to Russia and China aren’t happening.  It doesn’t matter right now anyway.  We might get back to that next week or next month, if we are finished with Weinstein by then or if Stephen Paddock’s autopsy report isn’t back from Stanford where they are studying his brain tissue to find the cause and manner of his death – you know what deep secrets brain tissue can reveal.  And yes, we will be exploring a question a brilliant reporter asked the Las Vegas authorities: “Do you think Paddock did it because he could?”

In 2003 the Bush administration blatantly lied about Saddam Hussein possessing weapons of mass destruction in order to wage a barbaric and criminal war against Iraq.  Then Obama glided in on the giddy fantasies of liberals, the same people who supported Clinton’s savaging of Serbia in 1999.  He smiled and smiled and spoke articulately about the need for war, drone assassinations, the bailing out of Wall Street and the big banks, the need to confront Russia over his own administration’s engineered Ukrainian coup, and a crackdown on whistleblowers. For decades the media echoed the blatant deceptions of these men.  From slick to obvious to slick went the propaganda.  And then the shock and awe of Mr. Trump’s election.  How to deal with one of their own, one spawned from the entertainment-media-news complex? Trump accused them of creating fake news.  He relentlessly attacked them, as if to say: you hypocrites; you accuse me of what you do.  Then he continued to tweet out his messages meant to confuse and inflame.  He continued to make statements that were then contradicted.  What were the poor media to do except one-up him.  This they have done.

We have now entered a new phase of propaganda where sowing mass confusion on every issue 24/7 is the method of choice.

But therein lies hope if we can grasp the meaning of Oscar Wilde’s paradoxical statement: “When both a speaker and an audience are confused, the speech is profound.”

Gurus of the progressive community . . . Chomsky and Goodman

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By Dave Alpert

Source: Intrepid Report

There was a time when I, like tens of thousands of my progressive partners, held Noam Chomsky and Amy Goodman in awe. After all, Amy informed us and Noam spoke for us, coherently explaining the issues. However, as I became more aware and more informed, I realized that there were great differences between their thinking and mine.

In many instances, our gurus spoke with forked tongue. Although Amy’s program Democracy Now! was informative, there were many areas of reporting that were out of bounds and were not reported on.

One could legitimately claim that reporters cannot report on everything and they would be right. But let us be honest. When 9/11 occurred, it was an historical event and an event that changed the course of history. Where was Amy? Relatively silent. She invited David Ray Griffin, who has written several books illustrating the lies and misdirections of the government’s narrative about that day, to Democracy Now! which one could claim was a significant journalistic move.

However, instead of interviewing him so that he could reveal to her listening audience the facts that he had accumulated that put into question the government’s explanations of that day, she paired him with a pro-government guest who spent the hour attacking Griffin personally and ignoring any of the data Griffin produced. It became a three-ring circus and helped sabotage any impetus the Truth Movement might have gained within the progressive community. Was that her goal? I’m not sure I can answer that but it was a successful strategy, progressives seemed reluctant to support the Truth Movement. The Movement was being portrayed as one in which there were marginal “conspiracy nuts” leading the charge and should be avoided.

Where was Noam Chomsky on this issue? Despite the significance of 9/11, Chomsky has remained relatively passive concerning this event.

During an interview on Democracy Now!, Noam Chomsky stated that he believes Osama bin Laden was probably behind the attacks of September 11, 2001. The statement was curious because in earlier interviews Chomsky described the evidence against bin Laden as thin to nonexistent, which was accurate and, no doubt, explains why the US Department of Justice never indicted bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks.

In two peer-reviewed papers published in 2008–2009, independent scientists reported finding residues of nanothermite, an incendiary, military level explosive which is capable of cutting through steel, in dust samples from the collapsed World Trade Center. The scientists also found tiny flakes of unexploded nanothermite.

How did this explosive material get into the dust at the WTC? Certainly, one could conclude that the explosives were used to bring down all three towers (WTC #7 collapsed later that day in free fall time despite the fact a plane never touched it).

This evidence of explosives coupled with the testimony of many New York City firemen, who claimed they heard a continuing series of explosions before the towers collapsed, and the testimony of Willie Rodriquez, a maintenance worker in the towers, who stated that there was an explosion in the sub-basement before any planes flew into the towers, make it clear that it was the explosives, not the planes that brought the towers down. The question now is, who planted these explosives in the three buildings that collapsed? It takes time to set up a controlled demolition which means the explosives had been placed in the buildings prior to 9/11. Does this sound like a conspiracy to anyone?

In response to a question at the University of Florida recently, Noam Chomsky claimed that there were only “a minuscule number of architects and engineers” who felt that the official account of WTC Building 7 should be treated with skepticism. Chomsky followed-up by saying, “a tiny number—a couple of them—are perfectly serious.” The reality is that close to 2,500 architects and engineers have expressed their doubts about the government’s explanation of how and why the towers fell. It doesn’t matter how many professionals or intellectuals are willing to admit it. The facts remain that the U.S. government’s account for the destruction of the WTC on 9/11 is purely false. There is no science behind the government’s explanation for WTC 7 or for the Twin Towers and everyone, including the government, admits that WTC Building 7 experienced free fall on 9/11. There is no explanation for that other than the use of explosives.

Also, Chomsky’s assumption that only a small number of architects and engineers have expressed support for the notion that the towers fell because of explosives planted in the buildings and that a much larger majority of architects and engineers have remained silent, is the argument of the absurd. It is equivalent to implying that if 10,000 New Yorkers claim the schools are substandard, because the rest of New Yorkers remain silent, the schools cannot be considered substandard.

Chomsky and Goodman are bright, knowledgeable, intelligent people. What has influenced them to avoid confronting the government regarding the events of 9/11?

The fact that 9/11 investigators had already presented substantial documented evidence for: prior warnings, Air Force stand-down, anomalous insider trading connected to the CIA, withdrawal of most of the U.S. fighter planes from the east coast to participate in military exercises on that particular day, cover-up of the domestic anthrax attacks, inconsistencies in identities and timelines of “hijackers” did not appear to influence either Amy or Noam.

Their influence on people who view themselves as progressive cannot be over estimated. When I began questioning the government’s role regarding 9/11, several of my friends responded to me negatively and said specifically that if my suspicions had any legitimacy, Chomsky and Goodman would be speaking out.

Ever since the events of 9/11, the American Left and even ultra-Left have been downright fanatical in combating notions that the U.S. government was complicit in the attacks or at least had foreknowledge of the events.

This kind of response from Chomsky regarding possible government conspiracies is not new. He still insists that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman in Dallas. Anyone who still supports the Warren Commission hoax after 50 years of countering proofs is either ill-informed, dumb, gullible, afraid to speak truths to power or a disinformation agent.

Michael Morrissey stated, in one of his articles, “Rethinking Chomsky,” in 1994, “we should be clear about the stand that ‘America’s leading intellectual dissident,’ as he is often called, has taken on the assassination. It is not significantly different from that of the Warren Commission or the majority of Establishment journalists and government apologists, and diametrically opposed to the view ‘widely held in the grassroots movements and among left intellectuals’ and in fact to the view of the majority of the population.”

Michael Parenti states, “Conspiracy is a legitimate concept in law: the collusion of two or more people pursuing illegal means to effect some illegal or immoral end. People go to jail for committing conspiratorial acts. Conspiracies are a matter of public record, and some are of real political significance. The Watergate break-in was a conspiracy, as was the Watergate cover-up, which led to Nixon’s downfall. Iran-contra was a conspiracy of immense scope, much of it still uncovered. The savings and loan scandal was described by the Justice Department as “a thousand conspiracies of fraud, theft, and bribery,” the greatest financial crime in history.”

However, the word conspiracy is often used by those in power, who have participated in a conspiracy to advance their own power and/or wealth, as a label to marginalize and neutralize those who seek to reveal the conspiracy. Thus we, as a society, have developed what Parenti calls conspiracy phobia.

The behavior of both Chomsky and Goodman have led me to conclude that they hesitate to see the conspiracies for fear that such acknowledgment would compromise their reputations. Either that or they are controlled by powerful people who censor their behavior. We cannot afford to accept what they say at face value.

Chomsky’s questionable political positioning is still evident today. On May 17, Chomsky appeared on Democracy Now! and was asked by Amy Goodman to speak on the Syrian crisis. Chomsky is a linguist and words are very meaningful to him. So what he said and how he said it is significant.

“It’s necessary to cut off the flow of arms, as much as possible, to everyone. That means to the vicious and brutal Assad regime, primarily Russia and Iran, to the monstrous ISIS, which has been getting support tacitly through Turkey, through—to the al-Nusra Front, which is hardly different, has just the—the al-Qaeda affiliate, technically broke from it, but actually the al-Qaeda affiliate, which is now planning its own—some sort of emirate, getting arms from our allies, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Our own—the CIA is arming them.”

I found it particularly informative that he describes Assad’s regime as vicious and brutal and places Russia and Iran right alongside ISIS.

If Assad’s government is really brutal and vicious, why did 86% of the Syrian people vote for him in the last election. Also, let it be clear that it was Russian’s entrance into the conflict last September that led to the retreat of ISIS from many cities and villages, a success that the U.S. had avoided for a year. Syrians who were freed from ISIS rule were openly happy to welcome Assad’s “brutal” army into their villages. Many Syrian refugees began returning to their homes.

Chomsky also managed to portray the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as terrorists in their conflict with Britain. He conveniently omitted the context for their behavior . . . the brutality of British rule against the Irish Catholics for hundreds of years.

Both Amy and Noam are extremely influential and have attained a degree of power amongst progressives. It is crucial that we remain aware of what they are telling us, how they are framing it, and what it is they are not telling us. Both seem to have provided, and continue to provide today, a cover from the left for the U.S.’s imperialist agenda.

Chomsky is called upon to address various issues periodically. Amy, on the other hand, is viewed every week, Monday through Friday. It is easy to identify her evolution into someone slightly to the left of MSNBC.

With the world collapsing around her, she offers relative silence on issues such as the U.S. supported takeover of the Ukrainian government by neo-Nazis, the surrounding of Russia by U.S. and NATO military forces, the threat of WW3 which would likely be a nuclear war, the Syrian crisis and the U.S. desire to overthrow Assad’s government, the humanitarian crisis in Libya, the coup to oust Dilma Rousseff from office in Brazil, the ongoing collapse of the Venezuelan economy and the threat to the Madero government (please note: both Rousseff and Madero are progressive thinkers—is the U.S. behind the collapse of their governments?). She does not address the continuous wars sponsored by the U.S. and NATO countries in their imperialistic ventures.

Instead, most of her time is spent covering the election and interviewing guests who have recently published books. Her program has mellowed. Most of her guests are establishment people, people MSNBC would not hesitate to have on. The radical view, the view that challenges the establishment, is no longer part of her coverage.

Amy’s audience expects to get the news coverage and the variety of views the MSM does not provide. Today’s Democracy Now! no longer provides that.

 

Dave Alpert has masters degrees in social work, educational administration, and psychology. He spent his career working with troubled inner city adolescents.

 

Markets Ignore Fundamentals And Chase Headlines Because They Are Dying

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

Normalcy bias is a rather horrifying thing. It is so frightening because it is so final; much like death, there is simply no coming back. Rather than a physical death, normalcy bias represents the death of reason and simple observation. It is the death of the mind and cognitive thought instead of the death of the body.

Ever since the derivatives collapse of 2008 the public has been regaled with wondrous stories of recovery in the mainstream to the point that such fantasies have become the “new normal”. These are grand tales of the daring heroics of central bankers who “saved us all” from impending collapse through gutsy monetary policy and no-holds-barred stimulus measures.

Alternative economists have not been so easy to dazzle. Most of us found that the recovery narrative lacked a certain something; namely hard data that took the wider picture into account. It seemed as though the mainstream media (MSM) as well as the establishment was attempting to cherry-pick certain numbers out of context while demanding we ignore all other factors as “unimportant.”

We just haven’t been buying into the magic show of the so called “professional economists” and the academics, and now that the real and very unstable fiscal reality of the world is bubbling to the surface, the general public will begin to see why we have been right all these years and the MSM has been utterly wrong.

Mainstream economists have done absolutely nothing in the way of investigative journalism and have instead joined a chorus cheerleading for the false narrative, singing a siren’s song of misinterpreted statistics and outright lies drawing the masses ever nearer to the deadly shoals of financial crisis.

Why do they do this? Are they part of some vast conspiracy to mislead the public?

Not necessarily. While central banks and governments have indeed been proven time and again to collude in efforts to cover up financial dangers, most economists in the media are simply greedy and ignorant. You have to remember, they have a considerable stake in this game.

Many mainstream economists tend to have sizable investment portfolios and they base their careers partly on the successes they garner in the annual profits they accumulate playing the equities roulette. They also have invested so much of their public image into their pro-market and recovery arguments that there is no going back. That is to say, they have a personal interest in using their positions in the media to engineer positive market psychology (if they are able) so that their portfolios remain profitable. Not to mention, their professional image is at stake if they ever acknowledge that they were wrong for so long about the underlying health of the real economy.

This atmosphere of deluded self interest also generates a cult-like collectivist attitude. There is a lot of mutual back scratching and mutual ego stroking in the MSM; a kind of inbred conduit of regurgitated arguments and unoriginal talking points, and people in the club rarely step out of line because they not only hurt their own investment future and career, they also hurt everyone in their professional circles.  Meaning, no more cocktail party invitations to the Forbes rumpus room…

This is not to say that I am excusing their self interested lies and disinformation. I think that many of these people should be tarred and feathered in a public square for attempting to dissuade the public from preparing in a practical way for severe economic instability. I do not think they see themselves as being responsible to the people who actually take their nonsense seriously and their attitude needs adjustment. I am only explaining how it is possible for an entire profession of supposed “experts” to be so wrong so often. Mainstream financial analysts WANT to believe their own lies as much as many in the public want to believe them.

Like I said, normalcy bias is a rather horrifying thing.

One of the root pieces of disinformation in the mainstream that feeds all other lies is the disinformation surrounding falling global demand. MSM pundits cannot and will never fully admit to the cold hard reality of collapsing demand within the global economy. If they are forced to admit to falling demand, then the facade of a steady or recovering U.S. economy crumbles.

I covered the facts behind falling global demand for raw goods and consumer goods last year in part one of my six-part article series, ‘One Last Look At The Real Economy Before It Implodes.’ The hard evidence and numbers I presented have only become more important in recent months.

For example, U.S. inventories are building and freight shipments are declining in the U.S. as retailers cite falling demand for goods as the primary culprit. Official retail sales numbers for the holiday season of 2015 have come in flat. When one takes into account real inflation in prices, consumer sales are actually far in the negative. According to the more accurate methods the U.S. government used to use in their calculations of CPI in the 1980’s, we are looking at annual price inflation rate of around 7%. Price inflation does not necessarily equal improved sales.

Energy usage has been crushed since 2008. Despite a growing population and supposedly a growing economic system, oil consumption in 2014 according to the World Economic Forum dropped to levels not seen since 1997.

This is the exact opposite of what should be happening and it is the opposite of mainstream projections for oil consumption made back in 2003. This is why inventories and storage for oil across the globe are reaching capacity in a manner never seen before. American demand for oil is not growing exponentially as expected because Americans cannot afford to support such growth anymore. Falling energy demand at these extreme levels is an undeniable indicator of a failing economic system.

Of course, mainstream economists in their desperation to keep market psychology rolling forward and the equities casino producing profits seek to spin this problem as an “oversupply” issue rather than a demand issue. And this is where the disparity in their arguments begins to bleed through.

Here is the problem presented in the mainstream; what came first, the chicken or the egg? Did falling demand lead to oversupply and thus a fall in prices? Or, is demand remaining steady and is overproduction the cause of falling prices?  Yes, let’s confuse the issue instead of looking at the obvious.

As already linked above, it was falling demand which came first in 2008, and demand which continues to fall in relation to past trends. Have producers failed to reduce oil production to match falling demand? Yes. But this does not change the fact that oil demand today is well below levels needed to sustain the kind of economic growth markets have come to expect. Mainstream economists attempt to distract by hyper-focusing on supply, or twisting the discussion into an either/or scenario. Either it is a supply problem, or it is a demand problem, and they assert it is only a supply problem. This is not reality.

In fact, both can and often do exist at the same time, though one problem usually feeds the other. Falling demand does tend to result in oversupply in any particular sector of the economy. The bottom line, however, is that in our current crisis demand is the driving force and supply is a secondary issue. Supply is NOT the driving force behind the volatility in oil markets. Period.

This same chicken and egg distraction rears its ugly head in discussions on shipping markets as well.

The mainstream claim that the historic implosion of the Baltic Dry Index is nothing more than a problem of “too many ships” operating in the cargo market has been throttled, dissected and debunked so many times that you would think that it is surely dead. But the lie just will not die.

Mainstream propaganda houses like The Economist and Forbes continue to produce articles on a regular basis which deny the issue of falling demand for raw goods and claim that oversupply of vessels is the root cause of the BDI losing around 98 percent of its value since its highs in 2008.

I haven’t seen any of these articles offer actual stats or evidence to back their claims that oversupply of ships is the culprit and that demand is not a legitimate issue. But beyond that, why does the mainstream seem so hell bent on dismissing the BDI as a reliable economic indicator? Well, because shipping rates fall when demand falls, thus, when the BDI falls, it signals a lack of global demand. This is a fact they refuse to accept. When the BDI falls by 98 percent since the 2008 highs preceding the derivatives crisis, this signals a disaster in the making.

So, let’s stamp out the “too many ships came first” disinformation once and for all, shall we?

Shipping companies like Maersk Lines have already publicly admitted that falling global demand is the core problem behind falling rates and that supply is a secondary driver. They view the current financial crisis to be “worse than 2008”.

The fact that the largest shipping company in the world is warning of falling demand does not seem to be having any effect on the mainstream talking heads, though.

So, what do major shipping companies do when demand is falling and too many ships are operating on the market? Do they field those ships anyway and drive rates down even further? No, that makes no sense.

What companies do is either leave ships idle in port or scrap them. According to BIMCO (Baltic And International Maritime Council), 2015 was the busiest year since 2012 for the scrapping of older ships to make way for new arrivals. This process of scrapping ships or storing them idle destroys the argument that too many ships are driving falling rates in the BDI. In fact, as chief shipping analyst Peter Sand of BIMCO stated last year:

“The increase in Capesize scrapping comes at a much needed time for the market. Looking at the development so far this year the fleet growth has actually been negative, with a reduction of 0.8 %.”

I hope the garbage peddlers at Forbes and The Economist caught that — NEGATIVE growth of ship supply, not massive over-growth of ship supply. The scrapping increase was also across the board for other models of ships, not just the Capsize, and the increase of cargo capacity by new ships has been negligible.  Yet, shipping rates continue to plummet to historical lows.  Only falling demand, as Maersk Lines admits, explains the crash of the BDI in light of this information.

China in particular has been offering considerable incentives to those companies that do scrap older ships, to the point that some are even scrapping semi-new ships in order to cash in.

Now, this is not to say there is not an “oversupply” of ships. There are indeed many ships within cargo fleets that are not in operation. But again, this is because demand has declined so completely that even with increased scrapping and idling, shipping companies cannot keep up.  Falling demand OCCURRED FIRST, and oversupply is nothing more than a symptom of this root problem.

So, mainstream hacks, can we please put the “too many ships” nonsense to rest and get on with a real discussion on obvious issues of demand?  Stop focusing on the symptoms and examine the cause for once.

These are just a few of the hundreds of fundamental problems plaguing the global economy today, and they are all problems that the mainstream continues to ignore or dismiss out of hand. Which brings us to the now accelerating volatility in stock markets.

Stock markets are crashing, there is no other way to paint it. They are crashing incrementally, but crashing nonetheless. When you have violent swings in equities and commodities between 5 percent and 10 percent a day, then something is very wrong with your economy and has been wrong for some time. If global consumption and demand were really steady or growing, then you would not see the kind of systemic backlash in the financial system that we are now seeing.  If companies listed on the Dow were making legitimate profits due to a healthy consumer base and enjoying solid expansion, stocks would not be increasingly volatile.  If investors and mainstream analysts actually looked at the real numbers in demand (among other things), then the strange behavior in markets would be easy for them to understand. They will not look at such numbers until it is too late.

Instead, markets have chosen to chase headlines, and here is where the ugly circle of normalcy bias and cognitive dissonance completes itself. There are no positive indicators within the fundamentals today to energize market faith or market investment. So, investors and algorithmic trading computers track news headlines instead. The MSM hacks now have the power (along with central banks and governments) to create massive stock rallies with one or two carefully placed news tags, such as “Russia To Discuss Oil Production Cuts With OPEC.”

Market speculators and trading computers jump on these headlines without verifying if they are true. In most cases, they end up being false or just hearsay from an “unnamed source.” And so, the markets then crash further down into the abyss, waiting for the next headline to bolster activity even for a day.

The sad truth is, if any of these headlines turned out to be legitimate, their effect would still be meaningless in the long run as the overwhelming weight of the fundamentals continues to topple poorly placed optimism. Now that the investment world no longer has the certainty of central bank intervention as a useful tool, they don’t know if bad news is good news or if good news is bad news. The fact that the system is moving into a death spiral without the psychological crutch of central bank stimulus measures should tell you all you need to know about the supposed recovery since 2008.

No society wants to admit economic failure or economic sabotage, and this is why the con-game is able to continue in the face of so much concrete truth. Ultimately, the market trends and economic trends will flow into the negative. In the meantime, expect massive market rallies, rallies which will then disintegrate in a matter of days. And, whatever happens, never take what mainstream economists say very seriously. They have failed the public for long enough.

So how should we “really” refer to these United States of America?

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By Dave Lefcourt

Source: OpEdNews.com

So how should we really refer to these United States of America? A banana republic? How about an oligarchic plutocracy? They both fit quite admirably with what we’ve become. Actually I prefer the more vernacular US of BS. Sure it’s crude, base, coarse and of course “politically incorrect” but take a close look at America.

In almost every area one can think of it’s pretty much the same. Truth and honesty is what we’re indoctrinated with, yet in reality we’re a country imbued with dishonesty and lying. Hell, even with little kids nowadays it’s the parents always yammering “good job” here and “good job” there. My god, leave the little tyke alone. He, she will get it together without the constant praising fearing without it he’ll somehow become a failure.

Think about it; from the way we conduct war to being held personally accountable, the “American Dream” to our “color blindness” on race, from “official” Washington to the “independent” MSM, and how it’s all dispensed to the people, it’s all the same BS.

We go to war to bring “freedom and democracy” to the people we invade and occupy. That’s how “dubya” Bush put it to the American people. We commit torture but call it “enhanced interrogation techniques”. We kill innocents in those wars but refer to it as “collateral damage”; come on.

This didn’t all begin with our latest wars against “terrorists”. In Viet Nam, it was the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Communists and every VC we killed were the “enemy” including women and children. “Winning” that war was calculated based on the number of “enemy” reported killed. Read Nick Turse’s, “Kill Anything That Moves” where “My Lai” wasn’t an aberration-as the Army said it was-but an everyday occurrence. Terrorists are just the latest manifestation of a contrived, mortal “enemy” we’re told we must fight.

Now everyone we kill are all called “terrorists”, insurgents, al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS. But of course our killing with drones and missile strikes isn’t “terrorism” it’s what; winning the “hearts and minds”?

Go back further to our wars and “diplomacy” with our own indigenous people. It was all part of what we were taught in our schools called, “Manifest Destiny”. Well that was manifested with every treaty “official” Washington brokered with the true natives of this country being broken. The indigenous know it and now live with the circumstances that was forcibly thrust upon them. Plundering, confiscating the land and what’s now called genocide was really what it was about. You know, “from sea to shining sea”.

As far as who is held to account for their actions today, it’s mostly the poor, black or brown, those profiled, harassed, rousted and often killed but rarely are the police held accountable for their actions.

In the Ferguson police killing of Michael Brown, the grand jury exonerated officer Darren Wilson even though one of those testifying had earlier admitted to prosecutor Bob McCulloch to not being at the scene-which he later publicly stated she “clearly wasn’t present at the scene”- yet he let the panel hear her false testimony and they subsequently voted to acquit Wilson. As for McCulloch I believe he remains as the prosecutor in Ferguson.

We’re supposed to be “color blind” when it comes to race and ethnicity and enforcing the law, yet it’s not just Ferguson where the injustice is occurring it’s a country wide phenomenon. Our largest minorities are those disproportionately incarcerated. Justice? What justice? And for whom?

The “American Dream…a hoax. “Work hard, get an education, get a good job, get married and own a big house”. Maybe that’s true for a handful but the reality for most college students is debt for life. There’s over a $trillion in college student debt with outrageous interest rates tacked on. Too many are working as bartenders and wait staff. They can’t find jobs in their area of study as outsourcing of jobs has become endemic.

As “Americans” we embrace “capitalism” and despise “socialism”. Yet when the financial “masters of the universe” and the big banks brought the financial system to its knees with its fraudulent excesses in 2008, they were “bailed” out by the FED and the US Treasury-and unlike college students now get $billions in FED loans at near zero interest rates. It was government “socialism” that came to the rescue keeping the vultures afloat but sold as a “bailout” to the public. As far as “accountability” for the fraud they committed, other than a few millions in fines-and always with the stipulation they admit no wrongdoing as part of the settlement- that were miniscule and insignificant compared to the billions they made with their financial scheming, it was simply a financial bump in the road. And most significantly none went to jail. How’s that for equal justice under the law!

Our “defense” industry, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman -the big five of the lot- are considered as “independent” corporations but they’re all pretty much owned by the Defense Department-formerly known as the “War Department” until changed after WWII-as the bulk of their earnings is from government spending called innocently as “fiscal” policy. Well that fiscal policy goes to the tune of a $trillion each year when all expenditures are considered i.e. armaments, over a 1000 military bases, wars and occupations, homeland security, NGO’s directly funded by the government, the NSA, CIA, independent contractors, NASA, the VA et al. All against “enemies” not really a threat but conjured up as so to the public to make them fearful so “official” Washington can justify the bloated, unnecessary expenditures.

Every other 1st world post industrialized country has public health insurance for all, in essence a single payer, Medicare type system run by the government. Accept for those 65 and older on Medicare in this country we now have “Obama” care, the Affordable Care Act system still leaves millions without health insurance. But it sure increased the “benefits” to the private health care behemoths, essentially a monopoly with no competition- whereby they divide the country into distinct areas so they don’t compete with each other, akin to the mafia, that is inefficient, has excessive overhead costs but sold as the best health system in the world while in actuality its 37th in the world in delivering health care. So to an imagined “good ole boy” who remarks, “We ain’t got no stinkin socialized medicine in this country. What are ya some kinda commie or somethin?” Ah, but I digress.

And lastly- there’s no way to elaborate on all the BS befouling America in such a short piece; just substitute your own; the crock is endless – there’s the corporate MSM. What may have been a time of an independent free press, naturally skeptical of government with investigative journalism unearthing official wrongdoing has descended into what can best be described as the “ministry of propaganda”, a compliant, complicit, enabling organ of the state.

It “informs” us alright but mostly with lies, distortions and misinformation rather than keeping the public informed with the truth as it really is, not some fictionalized version to keep it in good stead with “official” Washington.

But that corporate MSM fits in quite nicely with this pieces hypothesis, the US of BS.

And an increasingly dangerous one at that not only to others in the world but also for Americans.

But don’t tell that to most Americans, we’re still “the land of the free and the home of the brave” .

Yeah, BS to the very end.

About the Author:

Retired. The author of “DECEIT AND EXCESS IN AMERICA, HOW THE MONEYED INTERESTS HAVE STOLEN AMERICA AND HOW WE CAN GET IT BACK”, Authorhouse, 2009