UP!!! BZ, well done as always...
Posted on 02/22/2016 7:08:24 AM PST by Travis McGee
Hold tight, wait 'til the party's over.
Hold tight, we're in for nasty weather.
There has got to be a way
Burning down the house.
By now, it should be obvious to the observant that the 'scoundrels-looting-the-treasury' phase of our economic arc is about played out, and before the entire rotten financial edifice collapses, there will be a war ignited across Europe and the Middle East which will serve as a distraction for the masses, while the very worst of the scoundrels take to ground to wait for the smoke to clear before they emerge.
The gangsters actually directing the national governments that publicly front for their activities have nearly finished siphoning the remaining liquidity from the global financial system, leaving a hollow shell behind. The prostitutes who pose as our political leaders have been complicit at every step of the looting process. Now we are hearing the last wheezing notes of the calliope as the economic merry-go-round grinds to a halt. To borrow the expression from financial author Michael Hudson, the parasites have killed the host.
The world's central banks, an integral part of the current cabal of looters, are out of even pretend remedies. There is no more smoke behind the mirrors. The zero interest rate creation of digital money can increase paper valuations as assets are traded back and forth between patty-cake playing looters, but the injected thin-air money cannot boost actual increases in productivity or even spur meaningful consumer spending. A global contraction is underway, and neither tap-dancing television hacks nor phony Soviet-style statistical trickery can conceal the emerging reality. Slapping another layer of pretty wallpaper over rotten termite-infested walls with another round of debt creation will have no greater curative power than sticking smiley-face band-aids over cancerous lesions. Whether or not (and how) the bellwether Deutsche Bank goes Tango Uniform in the coming weeks will hold many clues.
The global economy has finally reached the end of John Maynard Keynes' famous long run, and while Keynes is indeed still dead, we who are still alive shall be left to harvest the bitter fruit of his profligate economic theories. We will test Ludwig Von Mises' famous observation: "There is no means of avoiding the final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as the result of voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion, or later as a final and total catastrophe of the currency system involved."
Perennially pandering politicians trapped in reelection cycles consistently voted for later, until now Von Mises' final catastrophe is at hand. As the economy contracts and family budgets are crushed, Americans will grow angrier and angrier. Anger will very likely carry a populist demagogue into the White House. Then the still outraged population will demand satisfactory answers delineating the causes of the unfolding financial disaster, and assigning blame. The demagogue in the White House will gladly lead the hunt for culprits and scapegoats, postponing the day of reckoning for his own handling of the economy. There will be congressional hearings and grand jury investigations. Special prosecutors will be named, and indictments handed down.
Imagine the gnawing fear that many financial scoundrels must feel when they contemplate a President Trump or Cruz naming a motivated legal pit bull like Mark Levin or Andrew C. McCarthy to be their attorney general, with clear marching orders to first sweep the cultural-Marxist social justice warriors from the DOJ, and second, to vigorously pursue all of the many accumulated cases that FBI Director Comey will hand over.
The stone wall of ideologically corrupt executive branch officials that Barack Obama erected to protect powerful Democrat insiders from prosecution will be demolished. Dormant scandals such Fast and Furious, with a Mexican body count in the hundreds, will be revisited. If there is no statue of limitations for simple murder, certainly there can be none for deliberate mass-murder as a secretly ordered national policy. Former Attorney General Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and many others could find themselves sentenced to long prison terms.
And there are many other wealthy, powerful and well-connected sleazebags with nefarious pasts who have a very strong motivation to torpedo the presidency of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. (Marco Rubio would bend as easily as a wet willow branch.) These crony-capitalist supposed financial wizards are accustomed to operating in the shadows, with secret allies backstopping their crooked moves in every department as they hop between Washington and Wall Street. But the curtain that shields them from investigation and prosecution could be torn away if either Trump or Cruz becomes the next president. For these as-yet-uncharged treasury looters, this is a nightmare scenario.
But before that final curtain is pulled back to expose the sins of the wizards, not only will they have absconded with the loot, leaving the stage bare, but the curtain, the stage set and the entire theater will be burned to the ground and scattered to the winds by war. It is a recurring pattern in history that well-timed wars are used to clear out the accumulated mountain ranges of crushing debt that can never be repaid, while at the same time burning all of the dodgy double-entry ledger books that could come back to haunt the malefactors – not to mention the estimated 600 trillion dollars worldwide in outstanding derivative contracts that are more likely to blow up like a financial hydrogen bomb than to ever be paid.
Now, in February 2016, it might seem as if the financial ship of state is chugging along tolerably well, with no insurmountable obstacles ahead, (but then, the same could have been said for most of the Titanic’s maiden voyage). Talk of icebergs ahead is dismissed as gloom and doom, but in fact, we are already far past the point where a change of captains can save the ship. At this late date, not one of the current farcical crop of conmen, cranks, commies, crooks, carnival barkers and comemierdas (ask a Cuban) can turn the ship sufficiently for it to miss the continent-wide iceberg ahead in its path. This is especially true when the ship's Keynesian operating principle holds that it must constantly increase its RPMs by more debt creation, or risk a complete loss of power.
But if feeding raw ether directly into the cylinders via quantitative easing can’t keep the engine turning, what can? When you hear discussion of "negative interest rates" and "bail-ins" (the government stealing money directly from your bank accounts to keep their merry-go-round spinning) you know that the game is nearly up. When you hear rumors of 500 Euro notes and 100 dollar bills being withdrawn from circulation by the central bankers, ostensibly in order to impede cash hoarding and curtail "black-market" (unmonitored) transactions, you can be sure that the game is nearly up. And when you read of countries abolishing cash and moving entirely to "digital money," you will know that the game is, in fact, conclusively over.
If the global economy was an after-hours poker game, now, or very soon, is when the lights would unexpectedly go out, followed by rapid pistol shots and the overturning of the table. Always ask: cui bono? Who benefits? Whose interests, at this point, would be served by overturning the global financial table, and burning down the house with a great war?
Europe is a powder keg today, with a million new male Muslim "refugees" of fighting age on hand just in time to conduct the coming Great European Jihad. If any person or group wanted a bloody conflict to break out across Europe, importing a vast army of angry future jihadists would be the most reliable means imaginable toward accomplishing that goal. Nobody should be allowed to pretend surprise at the enormous explosion which is about to occur in Europe. Peel away at the onion: who is paying for the invasion?
Well played, Forces of Darkness! Well played!
Not to be entirely outdone, there are U.S. Army military advisors not far across Ukraine from Putin's Russian armed forces. And just a short hop to the south, Russia and Turkey seem poised to go war over Syria. Iran looks to settle scores with their enemies in Saudi Arabia, Israel, and America, while designing nuclear warheads to sit atop its long-range missiles. North Korea is testing "satellites" to haul its existing nukes to target cities across oceans. China is militarizing its man-made "islands" in the South China Sea, claiming nearly every inch of that body of water, and the power to control who sails through it.
The next great war, begun largely to vaporize the world's irremediably corrupt financial ledgers and launch a new world economic order, will begin soon. But when? How soon? At the near end of the predictable, a terror attack worse than 9-11 in Europe or America could be enough to initiate the wider conflict, and such an attack could happen at any moment. At the longer end of the scale, I believe that if it appears that Donald Trump or Ted Cruz are likely to win the American presidential election, the war will probably begin before November. If either Trump or Cruz is actually elected, the war will certainly begin before the inauguration of the new president in 2017.
In the atomic age, nobody can say where such a war might lead, or how the nuclear threshold would remain uncrossed, but anybody must admit that such a war could spin far beyond imagination. At the very least, the ragged fault line running from Scandinavia to the Straits of Hormuz would rip wide open. With Europe and the Middle East wracked by war, it's difficult to imagine how the United States could sail untouched through the military and economic consequences of the catastrophe. Neutrality will not be an option when car bombs are exploding from Chicago to Rome.
All of America's many enemies have its electrical power grid on their high-priority target lists. Mutual Assured Destruction worked during the Cold War because ICBMs arrive with a known return address, ensuring swift retaliation in kind. A sustained cyber attack against the United States power grid, or even kinetic attacks by sleeper-cell commando teams already in place, is a virtual certainty in the event of a war in Europe and the Middle East. And if our grid is taken down, it's unlikely that we would ever definitively learn the true origin of the calamity.
And just as a war in Europe and the Middle East would obscure the sustained looting spree that had preceded it, a grid-down scenario in the USA could be used to mask other nefarious intentions. Any trained Marxist knows that before their socialist utopia can be built, the old structure must be smashed to rubble. This is Marxist Revolution 101.
The proto-Marxist Jacobins of the French Revolution put it this way: "Out of order, chaos." But first the Jacobins had to create the chaos, with an artificially engineered grain shortage leading to food riots, which they exploited for their revolutionary ends. Vladimir Lenin put it this way, when told that bread riots were breaking out in Russia: "The worse, the better." The better for creating the optimal revolutionary conditions. The Black Panthers, revolutionary Marxists of the 1960s, said, "Burn, baby, burn."
The currently existing social compact has to be burnt to the ground before the new world economic order can be built up from the ashes. This will be as true in 2017 as it was in 1917.
Please watch the short YouTube video called "Democide: Socialism, Tyranny, Guns and Freedom" to hear Barack Obama, in his own voice, explaining how important Marxism was to his political formation.
Watching this video can help you to understand just how far President Obama may be willing to go, in order to finish and permanently cement in place his declared goal of fundamentally transforming the United States.
You might also like to read my short story "What I Saw At The Coup", which describes one possible reaction to an attempted progressive putsch.
Matthew Bracken was born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1957, and attended the University of Virginia, where he received a BA in Russian Studies and was commissioned as a naval officer in 1979. Later in that year he graduated from Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training, and in 1983 he led a Naval Special Warfare detachment to Beirut, Lebanon. Since then he’s been a welder, boat builder, charter captain, ocean sailor, essayist and novelist. He lives in Florida. Links to his short stories and essays may be found at EnemiesForeignAndDomestic.com
“Donito Trumpolini as the least bad choice.”
Precisely how I look at it.
UP!!! BZ, well done as always...
Hopefully the table has a kerosene lamp on it and hay is spread all across the floor of the locked barn when it flips
Tyler Durden at Zero Hedge has had a sequence of articles about DB, who is THE biggest upside down counterparty on oil and gas hedges for the last couple years, combined with the FED/Office of the Comptroller of the Currency/Treasury telling major US banks to exit energy lending:
Banks and Energy Cos will both be all SHTF if there is no relief. I can assure you, not a single energy company in the world can make money at sub-$30 oil and sub $2 natural gas. JPM and WF are the biggest US lenders to go down. as for companies at risk - check out the blood on this list:
Note the $325 Billion worth of debt generating negative operating cash flow. Every unit of production means more cash lost.
Our Resident has almost tanked it all.
If we have elections at all. No electricity, no elections.
If that was their plan (I don’t think so) then good luck to them.
A plan to ride a tiger is not the same as riding a tiger.
If you have to choose between Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot or Mussolini, it’s a no-brainer.
Going to be an interesting year on many levels.
Indeed.
Rope is too expensive and it can only be used once. Saw a doc about hangin’ one time. La Guillotine is much more efficient - and thirsty!
Bump for later reading
This 1 takes the hummus:
http://www.infowars.com/video-obama-cracks-joke-about-scalias-death/
Stayin frosty from here on out.
True.
If there is an emergency which causes cancellation of the November elections, with Bath House continuing on, I'd like to see a military coup to depose him and try him for treason.
Whether or not the military leadership of this nation has been neutered and gutted already to the extent that such that a coup would even be possible - who knows.
Thank you for your essays.
bkmk for later read
My great-grandparents died in Europe in the 40s. The only thing of value they were able to get out of Germany was my great-grandfather's stamp collection. I have one third of it. I do not believe the other two-thirds survives.
ML/NJ
bkmk
If the electricity goes out as part of a war or for other reasons, every zip code will be involved in a fight for survival after 2 weeks.
Only when you can find a market do things like art or stamps have value.
Silver and gold coins for the interim. Almost always a market.
Storage food, bullets etc, always a market.
I would not be surprised. It sure looks like this is the path they have been following. I want to say the f-word now, but I won’t.
Can you imagine how furious Trump will be when he sees the full picture! He’s not going to make it easy and this is why there is such a panic in the globalist Establishment. They may try to kill him, but of all people, he might get them first. He’s a fighter and he knows the dark spirit of this thing.
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