Guest Post: Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion

Submitted by David DeGraw from Amped Status

Guest Post: Analysis of the Global Insurrection Against Neo-Liberal Economic Domination and the Coming American Rebellion – We Are Egypt [Revolution Roundup #3]

If you think what’s happening in Egypt won’t happen within
the United States, you’ve been watching too much TV. The statistics
speak for themselves.

In previous Revolution Roundups,
before we were knocked offline, we featured mass protests by the people
of Ireland, Italy, Britain, Austria, Greece, France and Portugal, as
the Global Insurrection contagion spread throughout Europe. And now, as
we have seen over the past month, North African and Middle Eastern
nations have joined the movement as the people of Egypt, Tunisia,
Jordan, Morocco, Gabon, Mauritania, Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, Palestine,
Iraq, Sudan and Algeria have taken to the streets en masse.

The connection between this latest round of uprisings and the prior
protests throughout Europe is one the mainstream media is not making. We
are witnessing a decentralized global rebellion against Neo-Liberal
economic imperialism. While each national uprising has its own internal
characteristics, each one, at its core, is about the rising costs of
living and lack of financial opportunity and security. Throughout the
world the situation is the same: increasing levels of unemployment and
poverty, as price inflation on food and basic necessities is soaring.

Whether national populations realize it or not, these uprisings are
against systemic global economic policies that are strategically
designed to exploit the working class, reduce living standards, increase
personal debt and create severe inequalities of wealth. These global
uprising, which have only just begun, are the first wave of the
inevitable reaction to the implementation of a centralized worldwide
Neo-Feudal economic order.

The global banking cartel, centered at the IMF, World Bank and
Federal Reserve, have paid off politicians and dictators the world over —
from Washington to Greece to Egypt. In country after country, they have
looted national economies at the expense of local populations,
consolidating wealth in unprecedented fashion – the top economic one-tenth of one percent
is currently holding over $40 trillion in investible wealth, not
counting an equally significant amount of wealth hidden in offshore
accounts.

IMF imperial operations designed to extract wealth and suppress
populations have been ongoing for decades. As anyone researching
economic imperialism will know, a centrally planned Neo-Liberal
aristocracy controls the global economy.

I: Centrally Planned Economic Repression

The IMF has a well-worn strategy that they use to conquer national
economies. As I warned four months ago, we have now progressed into Step
3.5: World Wide IMF Riots. Back in October, in a TV interview with Max Keiser, we discussed leaked World Bank documents that revealed the IMF’s strategy. I stated the following:

“They have a four-step strategy for destroying national
economies…. We are about to enter what they would call Step Three.
Step Three is when you’ve looted the economy and now food and basic
necessities all of a sudden become more expensive, harder to get to. And
then, Step 3.5 is when you get the riots. We are fastly approaching
that….

We are headed to, as the IMF said, and as they plan, Step 3.5: IMF Riots. That’s what’s coming…”

Fast-forward four months to today, and now we see country after
country rebelling against high food prices. Since our October interview,
food prices have spiked 15%. According to new World Bank data, since
June 2010, “Rising food have pushed about 44 million people into poverty in developing countries.”

As Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke announced another round of
Quantitative Easing (QE2), those of us paying attention knew that the
trigger had been pulled and Step Three had been executed. It was a
declaration of economic war, an economic death sentence for tens of
millions of people – deliberately devaluing the dollar and sparking
inflation in commodities/basic necessities. It was a vicious policy that
would impact people from Boston to Cairo.

When QE2 was announced, I warned: “Food and Gas Prices Will Skyrocket, The Federal Reserve Just Dropped An Economic Nuclear Bomb On Us.” I also wrote:
“The Federal Reserve is deliberately devaluing the dollar to enrich a
small group of a global bankers, which will cause significant harm to
the people of the United States and severe ramifications throughout the
world…. The Federal Reserve’s actions are already causing the price of
food and gas to increase and will cause hyperinflation on most basic
necessities.”

To be clear, there are several significant factors contributing to
rising food prices, such as extreme weather conditions, biofuel
production and Wall Street speculation;
but the Federal Reserve’s policies deliberately threw gasoline all
over those brush fires. QE2 was another economic napalm bomb from the
global banking cartel.

In a recent McClathy news article entitled, “Egypt’s unrest may have roots in food prices, US Fed policy,” Kevin Hall reports:

“‘The truth of the matter is that when the Federal
Reserve moved on the quantitative easing, it did export inflation to a
lot of these emerging markets…. There’s no doubt that one of the side
effects of the weak dollar and quantitative easing has been rising
commodity prices. It helped create this bullish environment for
commodities. This is a very delicate balancing act.’

It’s a view shared by Ed Yardeni, a veteran financial market analyst,
who reached a similar conclusion in a research note to investors…. He
joked that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke should be added to a list of
revolutionaries, since his quantitative easing policy, unveiled last
year in Wyoming, has provoked unrest and change in the developing world.

‘Since he first indicated his support for such a revolutionary
monetary change… the prices of corn, soybeans and wheat have risen 53
percent, 37 percent and 24.4 percent through Friday’s close,’ Yardeni
noted. ‘The price of crude oil rose 19.8 percent over this period from
$75.17 to $90.09 this (Monday) morning. Soaring food and fuel prices are
compounding anger attributable to widespread unemployment in the
countries currently experiencing riots.’”

The people throughout the Middle East and Northern Africa, on the
fringe of the Neo-Liberal economic empire and most vulnerable to the
Fed’s inflationary policies, are the first to rebel.

Before analyzing the situation within the US, let’s take a closer
look at the global Neo-Liberal economic policies that led to the
Egyptian and Tunisian revolts.

II :: Economic Imperialism: IMF Plunder of Egypt and Tunisia

In
the Middle East and North Africa populations are rising against their
local dictators. However, these “dictators” take orders from the IMF.

A report from the Center for Research on Globalization revealed some background and historical context:

“The Alliance between Global Capitalism and Arab Dictators

It is paramount to understand that the Arab dictators and tyrants
serve the interests of organized capital. This is their primary
function. They are elements of the global system formed by organized
capital.

Looking back, protests and riots started in 1977 against the regime
of Mohammed Anwar Al-Sadat, Mubarak’s predecessor. The causes of these
protests were the neo-liberal policies that the I.M.F. had handed down
to Sadat. The I.M.F. policies ended government subsidies on basic daily
commodities of life. Food prices jumped and Egyptians became hard-hit….

The Arab people grasp the fact that their ruling class and
governments are not only corrupt regimes, but also comprador elites,
namely the local representatives of foreign corporations, governments,
and interests…. In Egypt, Gamal Mubarak (who was being groomed by his
father for the presidency) worked for Bank of America.

In Tunisia, Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali was a military officer trained in
French and American military schools who, once in power, served U.S.
and French economic interests. In Lebanon, Fouad Siniora was a former
Citibank official before he became prime minister…. Within the corrupt
Palestinian Authority, Salam Fayyad worked for one of the banks forming
the U.S. Federal Reserve and the World Bank….

Moreover, almost all Arab finance ministers are affiliated to the
major global banking institutions. All of them also strictly adhere to
the Washington Consensus of the International Monetary Fund (I.M.F.) and
the World Bank…”

Samer Shehata, professor of Arab politics at Georgetown University, summed up the situation in Egypt and Tunisia:

“Beginning in 2004… Egypt began implementing economic
reforms called for by the IMF—or really forced on them by the IMF and
the World Bank… a new government was appointed, new ministers were
appointed, who believed wholeheartedly in the ideas of the IMF and the
World Bank. And they quite vigorously pursued these policies. And there
was at one level, at the level of macroeconomic indicators, statistics,
GDP growth rates, foreign direct investment and so on—Egypt seemed to be
a miracle. And this, of course, was the case with the Tunisian model
earlier. You’ll remember that Jacques Chirac called it the ‘economic
miracle,’ and it was the darling of the IMF and the World Bank, because
it implemented these types of reforms earlier. Well, of course, we saw
what happened in Tunisia. In Egypt, from 2004 until the present, the
government and its reforms were applauded in Washington by World Bank,
IMF and US officials…. Egypt received the top reformer award from the
IMF and the World Bank…”

Former Goldman Sachs executive Nomi Prins reveals more details:

The Egyptian Uprising Is a Direct Response to Ruthless Global Capitalism

“The revolution in Egypt is as much a rebellion against the painful
deterioration of economic conditions as it is about opposing a
dictator…. When people are facing a dim future, in a country hijacked by
a corrupt regime that destabilized its economy through what the CIA
termed, ‘aggressively pursuing economic reforms to attract foreign
investment’ (in other words, the privatization and sale of its country’s
financial system to international sharks), waiting doesn’t cut it….

Tunisia’s dismal economic environment was a direct result of its
increasingly ‘liberal’ policy toward foreign speculators. Of the five
countries covered by the World Bank’s, Investment Across Sectors
Indicator, Tunisia had the fewest limits on foreign investment…. Egypt
adopted a similar come-and-get-it policy, on steroids…. But, as we
learned in the U.S., what goes up with artificial helium plummets under
real gravity…. Not surprisingly, those foreign speculation strategies
didn’t bring less poverty or more jobs either. Indeed, the insatiable
hunt for great deals, whether by banks, hedge funds, or private equity
funds, as it inevitably does, had the opposite effect….

Ironically, the [Egyptian Ministry of Investment] brochure touted the
large college graduate population entering the job market each year —
325,000. The same graduates are the core of the current revolution. They
failed to find adequate jobs and are faced with an official
unemployment rate of just below 10 percent (though, similar to the U.S.,
that figure doesn’t account for underemployment, poor job quality or
long-term prospects)…. Meanwhile, 20 percent of Egypt lives in poverty…
For in the United States, economic statistics are no better. By certain
measures, like income inequality, they are worse than in Egypt.”

III :: US-Egypt Economic Parallels, Inequality & Poverty

Comparable economic statistics between the US and Egypt are facts that US mainstream media propagandists are not reporting.

Inequality of Wealth

Income inequality has reached a record level within Egypt, as Pat Garofalo explained:

“One of the driving factors behind the protests is the…
growing sense of inequality. ‘They’re all protesting about growing
inequalities…. The top of the pyramid was getting richer and richer,’
said Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies
in the Middle East.

As Yasser El-Shimy, former diplomatic attaché at the Egyptian
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, wrote in Foreign Policy, ‘income inequality
has reached levels not before seen in Egypt’s modern history.’”

As
the US mainstream media references the “oppressive” and “corrupt”
inequality of wealth throughout Egypt, the hypocrisy is shameful. The
inequality of wealth in the United States is currently the most severe
it has ever been. Gini coefficient ratings are a measure of a nation’s
inequality – the higher a nation scores, the more unequal the society
is. The US has a Gini coefficient rating of 45, compared to Egypt’s
34.4, Yemen’s 37 and Tunisia’s 40, making the US the most unequal,
“oppressive” and “corrupt” of the four.

As John Dewey once said, “There is no such thing as the liberty or
effective power of an individual, group, or class, except in relation to
the liberties, the effective powers, of other individuals, groups or
classes.”

Poverty

When well-paid “experts” in expensive suits sitting behind desks in
state of the art studios discuss the hardships of the Egyptian people,
something tells me that these pundits haven’t spent much time
interacting with tens of millions of people living in inner city America
– just because the mainstream media doesn’t cover them, doesn’t mean
they don’t exist. They exist in larger numbers in the US than they do
in most rebelling countries.

The rising price of food has played a pivotal role in sparking the
uprisings, food prices have a larger impact in countries like Egypt and
Tunisia, as they represent a more significant percentage of total
income. However, the overall costs of living in the US are significantly
higher. When these costs are factored in — medical expenses, housing,
transportation, education, etc. – the US poverty level of $22k per year,
for a family of four, is comparable to the poverty rate measure in
Egypt.

According to the CIA, the poverty rate
in Egypt is 20%. With a population size of 83 million people, this
would put 16.6 million Egyptians living in poverty. In the US, the
current poverty rate is 16.8%, with a population of 309 million, this puts 52 million Americans living below the poverty line.

When
you consider that the US has 52 million people currently living in
poverty, you realize, as shocking as it may sound, that we have a larger
number of desperate people in the US than rebelling populations in
countries throughout the Middle East and Europe. Overall, in comparison
to Egypt, the US population is obviously more geographically spread out,
but if you breakdown the demographics, many large US cities have a
poverty rate higher than the 20 percent rate in Egypt.

Consider that, according to low-ball government statistics, nine major US cities have a poverty rate over 25%.

IV :: Debt Slavery: Unemployed, Underemployed, Underpaid, In Debt

The unemployment rate in Egypt mirrors the unemployment rate in the
US, currently fluctuating between nine and ten percent, according to
government sources. The unemployment rate among recent graduates
attempting to enter the workforce also mirrors the crisis in the US. The
young unemployed and underemployed demographic has played a pivotal
role in leading the rebellion. Reporting for the Financial Times in an
article entitled, “At hand, an Arab awakening,” Roula Khalaf sums it up this way:

“In Egypt, as in Tunisia, the young people who initiated
the street campaigns were educated, internet-savvy activists with no
political affiliation. [Sound familiar?] After watching the fervour
unleashed in the past month, young Syrians, Bahrainis, Algerians and
even the quiescent Libyans are turning to Facebook and Twitter to call
for their own ‘day of rage’.

As Mr Khashoggi puts it: ‘The 25-year-old unemployed today has become the strong man.’”

A report from Business Week entitled, “The Youth Unemployment Bomb,” provides more detail:

“In Tunisia, the young people who helped bring down a
dictator are called hittistes—French-Arabic slang for those who lean
against the wall. Their counterparts in Egypt… are the shabab atileen,
unemployed youths… In Britain, they are NEETs – ‘not in education,
employment, or training.’ In Japan, they are freeters: an amalgam of the
English word freelance and the German word Arbeiter, or worker.
Spaniards call them mileuristas, meaning they earn no more than 1,000
euros a month. In the U.S., they’re ‘boomerang’ kids who move back home
after college because they can’t find work. Even fast-growing China… has
its ‘ant tribe’ – recent college graduates who crowd together in cheap
flats on the fringes of big cities because they can’t find well-paying
work.

In each of these nations, an economy that can’t generate enough jobs
to absorb its young people has created a lost generation of the
disaffected, unemployed, or underemployed—including growing numbers of
recent college graduates for whom the post-crash economy has little to
offer….

More common is the quiet desperation of a generation in ‘waithood,’
suspended short of fully employed adulthood. At 26, Sandy Brown of
Brooklyn, N.Y., is a college graduate and a mother of two who hasn’t
worked in seven months. ‘I used to be a manager at a Duane Reade in
Manhattan, but they laid me off. I’ve looked for work everywhere and I
can’t find anything,’ she says. ‘It’s like I got my diploma for
nothing.’”

The collapsing job market, declining wages, loss of benefits and
skyrocketing cost of education has created a “lost generation” of young
college graduates with little options and massive debt. When millions
of American students took out tens of thousands of dollars in student
loans to pay for an education which they assumed would give them the
skills needed to make a good living, they never imagined that they would
be either unemployed, working part-time, or making significantly less
than people in their chosen profession have traditionally made. The
majority of young workers in their twenties and early thirties have debt
that they will spend most of their life trying to pay back. They’ve
been sentenced to a life of…

Debt Slavery

Mike Whitney recently interviewed Alan Nasser on CounterPunch for a piece entitled, “The Student Loan Swindle.” Here’s an excerpt:

“MW: Is it possible to ‘walk away’ from a student loan and declare bankruptcy?

Alan Nasser: No, it’s not possible for student debtors to escape
financial devastation by declaring bankruptcy. This most fundamental of
consumer protections would have been available to student debtors were
it not for legislation explicitly designed to withhold a whole range of
basic protections from student borrowers. I’m not talking only about
bankruptcy protection, but also truth in lending requirements, statutes
of limitations, refinancing rights and even state usury laws – Congress
has rendered all these protections inapplicable to federally guaranteed
student loans. The same legislation also gave collection agencies
hitherto unimaginable powers, for example to garnish wages, tax returns,
Social Security benefits and – believe it or not – Disability income.

Twisting the knife, legislators made the suspension of state-issued
professional licenses, termination of public employment and denial of
security clearances legitimate measures to enable collection companies
to wring financial blood from bankrupt student-loan borrowers. Student
loan debt is the most punishable of all forms of debt – most of those
draconian measures are unavailable to credit card companies….

MW: Is it fair to say that the student loan industry is a scam
that targets borrowers who will never be able to repay their debts? Are
these students like the people who were seduced into taking out subprime
loans? How much money is involved and how much of that money is either
presently in default or headed for default?

Alan Nasser: It’s as fair as fair can be. First, the student loan
industry is huge – a large majority of students from every type of
school are in debt. Debt is held by 62 percent of students enrolled at
public colleges and universities, 72 percent at private non-profit
schools and 96 percent at private, for-profit (‘proprietary’) schools.
It was announced last summer that total student loan debt, at $830
billion, now exceeds total US credit card debt, which is itself bloated
to the bubble level of $827 billion. And student loan debt is growing at
the rate of $90 billion a year.”

These
students weren’t expecting an economic crisis to occur, and, unlike the
banks that lent them the money, they’re not getting a bailout. Also
factor in that the overwhelming majority of new jobs, the few that are
being added, are either part-time, temporary or in low paying fields
without health or retirement benefits. Mix all of this together, and
you have a vicious cycle with devastating consequences.

Given the size of this segment of the population, carrying this much
debt, at such a young age, with limited prospects, you can feel the
winds of revolution blowing.

Contrary to all the propaganda you hear from the mainstream media and
politicians, the economy is still shedding jobs at a staggering pace.
ZeroHedge recently featured a report entitled, “Just How Ugly Is The Truth Of America’s Unemployment” by economist David Rosenberg:

“It is laughable that everyone believes the labor market
in the U.S.A. is improving.… The data from the Household survey are
truly insane. The labor force has plunged an epic 764k in the past two
months. The level of unemployment has collapsed 1.2 million, which has
never happened before. People not counted in the labor force soared 753k
in the past two months.

These numbers are simply off the charts and likely reflect the
throngs of unemployed people starting to lose their extended benefits
and no longer continuing their job search (for the two-thirds of them
not finding a new job). These folks either go on welfare or they rely on
their spouse or other family members or friends for support….

Of all the analysis we saw over the weekend, the only one that made any sense was the editorial by Bob Herbert:

‘The policy makers don’t tell us that most of the new
jobs being created in such meager numbers are, in fact, poor ones, with
lousy pay and few or no benefits. What we hear is what the data zealots
pump out week after week, that the market is up, retail sales are
strong, Wall Street salaries and bonuses are streaking, as always, to
the moon, and that businesses are sitting on mountains of cash. So all
must be right with the world.

Jobs? Well, the less said the better.

What’s really happening, of course, is the same thing that’s been
happening in this country for the longest time — the folks at the top
are doing fabulously well and they are not interested in the least in
spreading the wealth around.

The people running the country — the ones with the real clout,
whether Democrats or Republicans — are all part of this power elite.
Ordinary people may be struggling, but both the Obama administration and
the Republican Party leadership are down on their knees, slavishly
kissing the rings of the financial and corporate kingpins.’

… the civilian population rose 1.872 million last year. At the same
time, the labor force fell 167k. Those not in the labor force soared
2.094 million. Just in January, we saw 319,000 people drop out of the
work force. These numbers are incredible. This is a highly dysfunctional
labor market. People are falling through the cracks at an alarming rate
as they come off their extended jobless benefits….”

In the US, we have over six million people who have now been
unemployed for over six months, the highest total we have ever had.
Factoring long-term unemployed and part-time workers looking for
full-time work in to the total unemployment count, we now have over 30
million Americans in need of employment.

V :: The American Dream Foreclosed Upon

The foreclosure crisis in the United States, which has already
affected over seven million people since the crisis began, is not
slowing down, it’s accelerating. Economist Joseph Stiglitz recently
predicated another two million foreclosures in 2011. David Walsh sums up the growing crisis:

Nearly 30 percent of US homeowners now ‘underwater’

“Year over year, home values were down 5.9 percent nationally, and
have fallen 27 percent since their peak in June 2006. The total value
of US single-family homes fell a staggering $798 billion in 2010’s
fourth quarter, and for the entire year, more than $2 trillion….

The number of US homeowners ‘underwater,’ i.e., owing more than their
homes were worth, at the end of 2010, jumped to 27 percent, up from
23.2 percent in the third quarter…. ‘The rate of homes selling for a
loss reached a new peak in December, with more than one-third (34.1
percent) selling for a loss. The rate of homes sold for a loss has
increased steadily for the past six months.’ Some 15.7 million
homeowners had negative equity at the end of the fourth quarter, in
households home to more than 40 million people.

The massive number of those underwater will ‘surely lead to higher
foreclosure rates soon,’ notes CNNMoney…. Economist Joseph Stiglitz,
speaking at a conference in Mauritius February 9, predicted that another
2 million foreclosures would take place in the US in 2011, adding to
the 7 million already recorded since the financial meltdown of 2008.

Banks repossessed 1 million homes in 2010, and this year is expected
to be bleaker. Approximately 5 million borrowers are at least two months
behind in their mortgage payments.”

VI :: A Recipe For Revolution: Tax Breaks for the Rich, Budget Cuts for the Poor

Let’s recap the statistics: we have 59 million people without
healthcare, 52 million in poverty, 44 million on food stamps, 30 million
in need of work, seven million foreclosed upon and five million homes
over two months late in their mortgage payments. Meanwhile, all new
political policies and proposals on the table, on the state and federal
level, are committed to major cuts in social services. In a sign of
what’s to come, Obama’s first disclosed spending cut targets the poor.
As Salon recently reported:

New Obama strategy: Beat up poor people

“To prove it is ‘serious’ about the deficit, the White House proposes
cutting a program that helps pay heating bills. The Obama
administration… will propose big cuts to a program that provides energy
assistance to poor people when it unveils its suggested 2012 budget.
‘The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP… would see
funding drop by about $2.5 billion from an authorized 2009 total of $5.1
billion.’

The news is generating a lot of outrage… in large part because of a
paragraph that suggests that the White House wants to gain political
advantage from being seen as tough on the most vulnerable Americans —
people who can’t afford heating oil during cold winters…. If the White
House wants to convince Americans that it is serious about budget
discipline, it should do so by ‘going after powerful vested interests
rather than those least able to defend themselves within the political
arena.’ The White House could redouble its efforts to cut oil company
subsidies or repeal tax cuts for the rich, for example.”

As The Independent reported,
“Obama to set out painful budget plans for austerity in America.
Americans are about to get a first glimpse of what tight-fisted federal
government looks like with President Barack Obama releasing an
austerity-tinged draft budget.”

In a report we featured on the AmpedStatus Hot List with the headline, “US Democracy Crushed By Economic Elite,” Bob Herbert sums it up:

“One state after another is reporting that it cannot pay
its bills. Public employees across the country are walking the plank by
the tens of thousands. Camden, N.J., a stricken city with a serious
crime problem, laid off nearly half of its police force. Medicaid, the
program that provides health benefits to the poor, is under savage
assault from nearly all quarters.

The poor, who are suffering from an all-out depression, are never
heard from. In terms of their clout, they might as well not exist. The
Obama forces reportedly want to raise a billion dollars or more for the
president’s re-election bid. Politicians in search of that kind of cash
won’t be talking much about the wants and needs of the poor. They’ll be
genuflecting before the very rich.”

Austerity measures and draconian cuts to the social safety net are
occurring just after passing hundreds of billions of dollars in tax
breaks to multi-millionaires and billionaires. On the state level, the
Center on Budget and Policy Priorities released a report
revealing, “Thirty-one states have released their initial budget
proposals for fiscal year 2012 (which begins July 1 in most states),
and, for the fourth year in a row, these budgets propose deep cuts in
education, health care, and other important public services…”

After committing trillions of dollars to bailing out the big banks,
the Federal Reserve and government officials have now made it clear that
the states will not receive the same treatment. In fact, the bailed
out players on Wall Street, who have taken our tax dollars and given
themselves all-time record-breaking bonuses, are looking to cash in on
the suffering of states across the country. As Lynn Parramore recently put it:

Crank Up the Casino! Hedge Funds to Short American States and Cities

“The looming possibility of municipal defaults, which some say could
total hundreds of billions of dollars, is causing grave concern. Hedge
funds are also deeply concerned about America’s municipal debt crisis.
They worry about how to best profit from it.

The Wizards of Wall Street have looked over the catastrophe of
cash-strapped America and found it good for business. In their corporate
laboratories, they are working furiously to whip up wondrous new
financial products that will allow them to reap millions from misery.
You might think that after plunging the country into said Recession with
their fancy financial products, these Wizards might feel a little
indelicate about gearing up for a game of shorting a community near you.
Clearly you don’t know Wall Street. The Financial Times reports that
once-boring muni bonds are suddenly sexy.”

Speaking of reaping millions from misery, the food stamp racket pays
off just as well as the war racket. The economic parasites profit off of food stamps:

Food Stamps: JPMorgan & Banking Industry Profit From Misery

“JPMorgan’s division that makes food stamp debit cards made $5.47
billion in net revenue in 2010. As the head of this division,
Christopher Paton, says, ‘This business is a very important business to
JPMorgan in terms of its size and scale.’ According to the company’s
most recent quarterly filing with the SEC, the Treasury & Securities
Services segment, which is the division that includes the food stamp
business, was up 2% in the last three months of last quarter and brought
in $5.47 billion in net revenue for most of 2010.”

Republicans and Democrats, along with their Wall Street masters, are
so arrogant, deluded with wealth, completely lacking perspective,
shortsighted and, quite frankly, ignorant.

As the economic top one-tenth of one percent has more wealth than
they have ever had, the middle class is quickly disappearing and poverty
is soaring. As politicians ignore the needs of the suffering masses in
favor of a Kleptocratic Oligarchy, which operates above the law, it is
only a matter of time before an uprising takes hold.

After analyzing societal and economic indicators within the US, in
comparison to rebelling countries, it is not a matter of whether people
will revolt or not, it’s a matter of when.

There are two significant differences between the United States and other rebelling nations:

1) The US has a much more powerful, sophisticated and
omnipresent propaganda media system to keep the populace suppressed –
isolated and confused.

2) The US keeps 52 million people temporarily pacified in anti-poverty programs by giving them food stamps, unemployment benefits or other forms of life-sustaining government assistance.

Both of these differences are temporary, and not in any way
sustainable. The safety nets here are unraveling and cuts in vital
social services will be implemented just as millions more will need
them. At the same time, food stamps and other forms of limited
government assistance will be worth less and less as food and gas prices
continue to rise.

Rising commodity prices will push the 239 million
Americans currently living paycheck to paycheck over the edge. Also
factor in healthcare costs, which have been skyrocketing even faster.
On a personal level, my health insurance provider just notified me that
my family has to pay 45% more for coverage – and we already had the
world’s most expensive healthcare system. For my wife, one child and
myself, we will now have to pay over $1100 per month for a basic health
insurance plan.

There are currently 59 million Americans who don’t even have healthcare insurance. The health system has become vintage Grapes of Wrath, as have most aspects of the centrally planned system of economic despotism that we live under.

Add all of these factors together and you have a recipe for
revolution. The mainstream propaganda news outlets and “Reality” TV soma
will only keep people at bay for so long. The propaganda system
collapses when people can’t afford to eat. Americans may be late to the
party, but once one city revolts, the dominos will fall and a wave of
protest will sweep through the country like a tsunami.

The only questions are: when will it happen, and how it will begin?

VII :: “Hungry People Don’t Stay Hungry For Long”

Food
prices have been a leading indicator for rebellion thus far. Given the
Federal Reserve’s commitment to driving food prices higher, as a matter
of policy, and the government’s commitment to cutting assistance
programs, people lining up at Wal-Mart on the last day of the month,
waiting for the clock to strike midnight so they can buy their family
milk and bread on their food stamp debit card, seem to be the most
likely to rebel first.

As food prices increase, food stamps are obviously going to buy you
less food. On top of that, as food prices escalate, millions more will
need food assistance, right at the point when the current safety net can
least afford it.

Let’s analyze the most recent food stamp data to see how America’s inevitable revolution may begin.

With 43.6 million Americans currently relying on food stamps, there
are 13 states with over a million people already on food stamps:

· Texas 3,925,119 (number of people on food stamps) — 15.6% (of state population)
· California 3,521,881 — 9.5%
· Florida 2,994,413 — 15.9%
· New York 2,934,493 — 15.1%
· Michigan 1,920,330 – 19.4%
· Ohio 1,772,608 — 15.4%
· Georgia 1,732,865 — 17.9%
· Illinois 1,732,169 — 13.5%
· Pennsylvania 1,673,714 — 13.2%
· North Carolina 1,531,255 — 16.1%
· Tennessee 1,264,407 — 19.9%
· Arizona 1,050,181 — 16.4%
· Washington 1,019,791 — 15.2%

States with over 18% of the population on food stamps:

· Mississippi 612,889 — 20.7%
· Tennessee 1,264,407 — 19.9%
· Oregon 749,498 — 19.6%
· Michigan 1,920,330 — 19.4%
· New Mexico 399,454 — 19.4%
· Louisiana 866,905 — 19.1%
· West Virginia 345,683 — 18.7%
· Kentucky 813,041 — 18.7%
· Maine 241,117 — 18.2%
· South Carolina 839,109 — 18.1%
· Alabama 863,606 — 18.1%

In our nation’s capital, the District of Columbia, there are 131,611
people on food stamps, which is a stunning 21.9% of the population.

As mentioned before, cities with a poverty rate over 25% – Detroit
36%, Cleveland 35%, Buffalo 29%, Milwaukee 28%, St. Louis 27%, Miami
27%, Memphis 26%, Cincinnati 26% and Philadelphia 25% – are also highly
vulnerable to revolt.

VIII :: The Empire State Rebellion

Given all the data, due to New York’s geographical lay out,
population size and proximity to power, it is a prime candidate for
insurrection. There are currently 2.9 million people living in New York
that are on food stamps, which is equivalent to the entire population
of Manhattan. Just imagine three million people flooding into lower
Manhattan. Imagine if three million people decided to take a 15-30
minute subway ride down to the Financial District and camped out from
Wall Street to the NY Fed, spilling over to the corporate offices of JP
Morgan, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley and Bank
of America.

Perhaps
the one million people on food stamps from New Jersey and Connecticut
will make a short trip into lower Manhattan as well, four million strong
shutting down lower Manhattan, the economic capital of the world.

How would that play out in the global media?

One million people gathering in Cairo, Egypt sent shock waves
throughout the world, and rightfully so, but just wait until millions of
Americans begin flooding the streets. The revolution contagion will
spread throughout the world like a category five hurricane.

“The civilization may still seem brilliant because it possesses an outward front,
the work of a long past, but is in reality an edifice crumbling to ruin
and destined to fall in at the first storm.”
– Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind

IX :: The Battle in Madison: A Sign of Things to Come

While bloated federal and state spending has grown to staggering
levels of debt, and demands immediate attention, any cut in spending or
attempts to reduce the deficit must first come at the expense of the
organized criminal class that has looted the national economy. Any cuts
that happen before that need to be understood as an escalation and
extension of the attacks on the American people.

While continuing their attacks on American small businesses and
private-sector workers, the global financial elite are now stepping up
their attacks on public workers. In this context, the Wisconsin state
government attacks against the state teachers’ union doesn’t have
anything to do with the old Democrat Vs. Republican divide and conquer
debates of the past. This is about people fighting back against their
economic oppressors. In Egypt, Mubarak was the Neo-Liberal
Aristocracy’s local enforcer. In Wisconsin, Scott Walker is the
Neo-Liberal Aristocracy’s local enforcer.

This battle in Madison, Wisconsin, between the American people and
the global financial elite, represents the opening salvo, the awakening
of an American resistance movement and a sign of what’s to come.

In a report entitled, “Wisconsin governor threatens to call National
Guard on state workers,” Andre Damon explains the situation:

“Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, announced an
assault against state…. Walker’s proposal, which he said would quickly
pass in the state legislature, drastically limits collective bargaining,
removing the right of unions to negotiate pensions, retirement and
benefits….

When asked by a reporter what will happen if workers resist, Walker
replied that he would call out the National Guard. He said that the
National Guard is ‘prepared … for whatever the governor, their
commander-in-chief, might call for … I am fully prepared for whatever
may happen.’

Walker’s proposal allows state authorities to arbitrarily fire
workers who ‘participate in an organized action to stop or slow work,’
or who ‘are absent for three days without approval of the employer,’
according to the governor’s press release.”

Democracy Now pointed out:

“… the governor’s actions could have national
ramifications: ‘If Governor Walker pulls this off… if he takes down one
of the strongest and most effective teachers’ unions, WEAC, in the
country, then we really are going to see this sweep across the United
States.’”

As a recent Washington Post report summed it up:

Workers toppled a dictator in Egypt, but might be silenced in Wisconsin

“In Egypt, workers are having a revolutionary February. In the United
States, by contrast, February is shaping up as the cruelest month
workers have known in decades.

The
coup de grace that toppled Hosni Mubarak came after tens of thousands
of Egyptian workers went on strike beginning last Tuesday. By Friday,
when Egypt’s military leaders apparently decided that unrest had reached
the point where Mubarak had to go, the Egyptians who operate the Suez
Canal and their fellow workers in steel, textile and bottling factories;
in hospitals, museums and schools; and those who drive buses and trains
had left their jobs to protest their conditions of employment and
governance. As Jim Hoagland noted in The Post, Egypt was barreling down
the path that Poland, East Germany and the Philippines had taken, the
path where workers join student protesters in the streets and jointly
sweep away an authoritarian regime.

But even as workers were helping topple the regime in Cairo, one
state government in particular was moving to topple workers’
organizations here in the United States…. Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s new
Republican governor, proposed taking away most collective bargaining
rights of public employees. Under his legislation… the unions
representing teachers, sanitation workers, doctors and nurses at public
hospitals, and a host of other public employees, would lose the right to
bargain over health coverage, pensions and other benefits. (To make his
proposal more politically palatable, the governor exempted from his hit
list the unions representing firefighters and police.)….

[Those who] often profess admiration for foreign workers’ bravery in
protesting and undermining authoritarian regimes. Letting workers
exercise their rights at home, however, threatens to undermine some of
our own regimes, and shouldn’t be permitted. Now that Wisconsin’s
governor has given the Guard its marching orders, we can discern a new
pattern of global repressive solidarity emerging – from the chastened
pharaoh of the Middle East to the cheesehead pharaoh of the Middle
West.”

Part Two :: The Most Repressive Regime: US Police State

X :: Torture: Made in the USA

It is extremely hypocritical when well-paid mainstream “news” people
talk about how repressive and barbaric the Mubarak regime is in Egypt.
Once again, I doubt they’ve been to inner city America recently.

If you want to report on Egypt participating in torture, it is vital
to point out where they were getting their weapons, training and funding
from. Who paid them to commit horrific crimes against humanity? Look
in the mirror US taxpayers; you may not like what you see.

WikiLeaks revealed information on a US-Egyptian torture program:

WikiLeaks Docs: Torture-Linked Egyptian Police Trained in U.S.

“Newly released classified U.S. diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks have
shed more light on the key U.S. support for human rights abuses under
Mubarak’s regime in Egypt. The cables show Egyptian secret police
received training at the FBI’s facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as
U.S. diplomats in Egypt sent dispatches alleging extensive abuse under
their watch.

Coincidentally, Quantico also hosts the military base where alleged
WikiLeaks whistleblower U.S. Army Private Bradley Manning is being held
in solitary confinement.

A cable from October 2009 cites allegations from ‘credible’ sources
that some prisoners were tortured ‘with electric shocks and sleep
deprivation to reduce them to a ‘zombie state.’ One cable from November
2007 shows then-FBI deputy director John Pistole praised the head of
Egypt’s secret police for ‘excellent and strong’ cooperation between the
two agencies. Pistole currently heads the Transportation Security
Administration in the United States.”

America the beautiful… The Transportation Security Administration,
from electric shocks, sleep deprivation and zombie states in Egypt, to
cancer causing, civil liberty-destroying Naked Scanners at an airport
near you.

XI :: American Gulag: World’s Largest Prison Complex

If you want to report on Egypt putting their citizens in prison,
again, the hypocrisy is astonishing. The US, by far, has more of its
citizens in prison than any other nation on earth. China, with a billion
citizens, doesn’t imprison as many people as the US, with only 309
million American citizens. The US per capita statistics are 700 per 100,000
citizens. In comparison, China has 110 per 100,000. In the Middle East,
the repressive regime in Saudi Arabia imprisons 45 per 100,000. US per
capita levels are equivalent to the darkest days of the Soviet Gulag.

The majority of prisoners are locked up for non-violent crimes, with
tens of thousands in Supermax cells. In addition to the heinous torture
programs that the US government has carried out in Abu Ghraib, Bagram
and Gitmo, we have our own solitary confinement torture programs for
Americans in Supermax Units throughout the country. As Jim Ridgeway
from Solitary Watch explains:

“Solitary confinement has grown dramatically in the past
two decades. Today, at least 25,000 prisoners are being held in
long-term lockdown in the nation’s ‘supermax’ facilities; some 50,000 to
80,000 more are held in isolation in ‘administrative segregation’ or
‘special housing’ units at other facilities. In other words, on any
given day, as many as 100,000 people are living in solitary confinement
in America’s prisons. This widespread practice has received scant media
attention, and has yet to find a place in the public discourse or on
political platforms.”

The US prison industry is thriving and expecting major growth over
the next few years. A report from the Hartford Advocate titled “Incarceration Nation”
revealed, “A new prison opens every week somewhere in America.” If you
want to report on the brutal suppression of citizens, consider that
somewhere in America, every week, a new prison is being built to
literally “house the poor.”

A Boston Globe article by James Carroll shined a light on our repressive regime:

“… as federal corrections budgets increased by $19
billion, money for housing was cut by $17 billion, ‘effectively making
the construction of prisons the nation’s main housing program for the
poor.’ State budgets took their cues from Washington in a new but
unspoken national consensus: poverty itself was criminalized. Although
‘law and order’ was taken to be a Republican mantra, this phenomenon was
fully bipartisan.”

Again, just because you don’t hear this reported on TV, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

XII :: Loss of Civil Liberties

In addition to the record-breaking imprisonment of the American
population, since 9/11 our civil liberties have been violated in
unprecedented fashion. Tom Burghardt, in an article entitled, “American
Police State: FBI Abuses Reveals Contempt for Political Rights, Civil
Liberties,” summed up a new report
from the Electronic Frontier Foundation “documenting the lawless,
constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a
decade:”

“As mass revolt spreads across Egypt and the Middle East
and citizens there demand jobs, civil liberties and an end to police
state abuses from repressive, U.S.-backed torture regimes, the Obama
administration and their congressional allies aim to expand one right
here at home.

Last week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) released an
explosive new report documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone
under construction in America for nearly a decade. That report,
‘Patterns of Misconduct: FBI Intelligence Violations from 2001-2008,’
reveals that the domestic political intelligence apparat spearheaded by
the Federal Bureau of Investigation, continues to systematically violate
the rights of American citizens and legal residents….

According to EFF, more than 2,500 documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act revealed that:

* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI reported to the IOB approximately 800
violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing
intelligence investigations, although this number likely significantly
under-represents the number of violations that actually occurred.

* From 2001 to 2008, the FBI investigated, at minimum, 7000 potential
violations of laws, Executive Orders, or other regulations governing
intelligence investigations.

* Based on the proportion of violations reported to the IOB and the
FBI’s own statements regarding the number of NSL [National Security
Letter] violations that occurred, the actual number of violations that
may have occurred from 2001 to 2008 could approach 40,000 possible
violations of law, Executive Order, or other regulations governing
intelligence investigations.

But FBI lawbreaking didn’t stop there. Citing internal documents, EFF
revealed that the Bureau also ‘engaged in a number of flagrant legal
violations’ that included, ‘submitting false or inaccurate declarations
to courts,’ ‘using improper evidence to obtain federal grand jury
subpoenas’ and ‘accessing password protected documents without a
warrant.’

In other words, in order to illegally spy on Americans and haul
political dissidents before Star Chamber-style grand juries, the FBI
routinely committed perjury and did so with absolute impunity.

Reviewing the more than 2,500 documents EFF analysts averred that
they had ‘uncovered alarming trends in the Bureau’s intelligence
investigation practices’ and that the ‘documents suggest the FBI’s
intelligence investigations have compromised the civil liberties of
American citizens far more frequently, and to a greater extent, than was
previously assumed.’”

XIII :: Internet Crackdown

When the Egyptian regime shut down the Internet, they did so by using
American made technology. Having been knocked offline here at
AmpedStatus.com, we have firsthand experience in what it feels like to
have your ability to communicate and First Amendment rights stripped
away. We still don’t know who was behind the attacks on our website,
but the situation in Egypt was an interesting case study. As it turned
out, Obama’s new Chief of Staff, Bill Daley’s company provided the
technology used to shut down the Internet in Egypt. No, I’m not
referring to JP Morgan, it was the other company Bill Daley was a board
member of up until last month, Boeing.

As media reform organization Free Press revealed:

“The Mubarak regime shut down Internet and cell phone
communications before launching a violent crackdown against political
protesters.

Free Press has discovered that an American company — Boeing-owned
Narus of Sunnyvale, CA — had sold Egypt [Telecom Egypt, the state-run
Internet service provider] ‘Deep Packet Inspection’ (DPI) equipment that
can be used to help the regime track, target and crush political
dissent over the Internet and mobile phones. Narus is selling this
spying technology to other regimes with deplorable human rights records.

The power to control the Internet and the resulting harm to democracy
are so disturbing that the threshold for using DPI must be very high.
That’s why, before DPI becomes more widely used around the world and at
home, the U.S. government must establish clear and legitimate criteria
for preventing the use of such surveillance and control technology.”

It is probably just be an odd coincidence, but it was soon after we published the following report that we were knocked offline:

Obama Renews Commitment to Complete Destruction of the Middle Class – Meet the New Economic Death Squad

“….
Boeing certainly does love Wall Street. For those of you out of the
loop, you may not recall that the most powerful and destructive WMD that
Boeing executives ever helped develop was the CDO, that’s a
Collateralized Debt (Damage) Obligation. Do you remember Edward Liddy?
Liddy and Bill Daley were both Boeing board members, before Liddy
temporarily moved to Goldman Sachs where he oversaw their Audit
Committee. Liddy was the person who had the most knowledge of Goldman’s
CDO exposure insured through, what was that company’s name?… Oh, AIG.
Yeah, that was it. Then, Hank ‘Pentagon-Watergate-Goldman’ Paulson
unilaterally made Liddy the CEO of AIG, before teaming up with Tim
‘Kissinger-Rubin-Summers-IMF’ Geithner to flush $183 billion tax dollars
down the ‘too big to fail’ drain. And then… after the government was
finished pumping our tax dollars to financial terrorists through the AIG
SPV, Liddy scurried back to the board of Boeing where he could have
cocktails with his ole pal Billy-Boy Daley. Yep, Goldman, JP Morgan,
Boeing and the destruction of the US economy, birds of a feather…”

Within an hour of publishing that report, our site was knocked offline.

Something that has become very clear to me: when you accurately
criticize the most powerful people, most people will ignore you, except
the people who have the most power. They notice right away, and they
let you know about it.

As I said, this is all probably just a coincidence.

However, this tangled web of interests between the Pentagon, Wall
Street and the White House is fully exposed, yet again, with Obama’s
special envoy to Egypt, Frank Wisner Jr.

Wisner has just as many conflicts of interest as Bill Daley and
Edward Liddy. Some reports have mentioned that Wisner was biased
toward supporting the Mubarak regime because he is a longtime friend of
Mubarak, and worked for a law firm that represented the regime, Patton
Boggs. But that’s only part of the story. Wisner, like Bill Daley, is a
Council on Foreign Relations member. He is the son of legendary CIA propaganda expert Frank Wisner Sr., who created and ran Operation Mockingbird.
For those of you who haven’t heard of Frank Wisner Sr., he used to
report on “his ‘mighty Wurlitzer,’ on which he could play any propaganda
tune.”

Frank Jr. was also a board member of Enron, up until its collapse, and like Edward Liddy, he also worked for AIG, from 1997 until 2009.
Wisner oversaw two of the greatest corporate catastrophes in American
history, back to back. Given his track record, Barack “mighty
Wurlitzer” Obama must have thought he was the perfect guy for a
collapsing corporate puppet regime in Egypt. Wisner is a disaster
capitalism expert, right up there with Edward Liddy and Chief of Staff
Bill Daley. Birds of a feather…

XIV :: Silencing Dissent

The recent internal emails from cyber-security firm HB Gary, released
by WikiLeaks, exposing online campaigns to crackdown on critical
journalists, reveals some of the other common methods used by the
financial elite, like the Chamber of Commerce and Bank of America, to
target and silence political adversaries.

As one of the targets of the revealed campaign, Brad Friedman reported:

US Chamber of Commerce Thugs Used ‘Terror Tools’ for
Disinfo Scheme Targeting Me, My Family, Other Progressive U.S. Citizens,
Groups

“The US Chamber of Commerce, the most powerful Rightwing lobbying
group in the country, was revealed to have been working with their law
firm and a number of private cyber security and intelligence firms to
target progressive organizations, journalists and citizens who they felt
were in opposition to their political activism, tactics and points of
view.”

Glenn Greenwald, a journalist who was a constitutional law and civil
rights litigator, was also a target of these planned attacks. In a report on the campaign to smear and discredit him, he focused on how common these illegal attacks are:

The leaked campaign to attack WikiLeaks and its supporters

“The real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and
unrestrained the unified axis of government and corporate power is. As
creepy and odious as this is, there’s nothing unusual about these kinds
of smear campaigns. The only unusual aspect here is that we happened to
learn about it this time because of Anonymous’ hacking. That a similar
scheme was quickly discovered by ThinkProgress demonstrates how common
this behavior is. The very idea of trying to threaten the careers of
journalists and activists to punish and deter their advocacy is
self-evidently pernicious; that it’s being so freely and casually
proposed to groups as powerful as the Bank of America, the Chamber of
Commerce, and the DOJ-recommended Hunton & Williams demonstrates how
common this is. “

Greenwald later added:

“Given the players involved and the facts that continue
to emerge — this story is far too significant to allow to die due to
lack of attention…. As the episode… demonstrates, simply relying on the
voluntary statements of the corporations involved ensures that the
actual facts will remain concealed if not actively distorted…. Entities
of this type routinely engage in conduct like this with impunity, and
the serendipity that led to their exposure in this case should be seized
to impose some accountability… that these firms felt so free to propose
these schemes in writing and, at least from what is known, not a single
person raised any objection at all — underscores how common this
behavior is.”

Dylan Ratigan recently interviewed Glenn Greenwald and they summed up the situation, here’s a brief excerpt:

DYLAN: Am I correct in understanding that substantial,
legitimate, serious, powerful private security firms were pitching Bank
of America and the Chamber of Commerce a campaign for which they would
be paid money, in which they would assassinate the reputations and
intimidate and threaten the well-being of targeted private individuals.
Is that true?

GLENN: Yes, the journalists, activists, political groups, and the like.

DYLAN: Whoever it may be. And that the law firm that brought these
private security firms in was recommended by the U.S. Department of
Justice. So it’s on a recommendation from the DOJ that private and
substantial security firms are being brought in to pitch smear and
intimidation campaigns against those who support transparency in
information. Fair?

GLENN: Yes, exactly….

DYLAN: … they were saying, ‘You pay me money and those who are
validating the efforts of WikiLeaks or the efforts of transparency,
period, in the modern information world, we will threaten their careers
such that they’ll give up the cause, if you pay us.’

GLENN: Right. ‘We’ll investigate them. We’ll find out dirt on them.
We will destroy their reputation using all kinds of schemes and
techniques.’

DYLAN: And this came out through another leak which is the ironic twist…

GLENN: Well, one ironic twist is that it came out through a leak and
the other ironic twist is that these are internet security firms that
held their expertise in providing internet security and yet their e-mail
system was hacked.

XV :: Protected By Anonymous

Propaganda doesn’t work as well when you have the Internet, a
cyberspace Underground Railroad, a form of mass communication that
allows citizens to interact without corporate gatekeepers effectively
censoring critical thought. All of these attacks show the desperation
of the ruling class, in attempting to maintain an obsolete propaganda
system. Just look at how common and accepted unlawful practices have
become in pursuit of their goals.

It
is a strategic imperative that we protect Internet freedom from the
forces of media concentration and censorship. Organizations such as
WikiLeaks and Anonymous are playing a critical role in exposing
information and protecting those who are critical of the most powerful
and corrupt elements within society.

Part 3: Bring the Tyrants Down

Henry David Thoreau, On the Duty of Civil Disobedience:

“All people recognize the right of revolution; that is,
the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when
its tyranny or its inefficiency is great and unendurable. And oppression
and robbery are organized, I say; let us not have such a machine any
longer. I think that it is not too soon for honest people to rebel and
revolutionize.”

XVI :: The Denial of Wealth

As I wrote in The Economic Elite Vs. The People:

“When you take the time to research and analyze the
wealth that has gone to the economic top one percent, you begin to
realize just how much we have been robbed. Trillions upon trillions of
dollars that could make the lives of all hard-working Americans much
easier have been strategically funneled into the coffers of the Economic
Elite. The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite’s power.
An entire generation of massive wealth creation has been strategically
withheld from 99% of the US population.”

In a new report entitled, “Nine Pictures of the Extreme Income/Wealth Gap,” Dave Johnson helps make the point:

“Many people don’t understand our country’s problem of
concentration of income and wealth because they don’t see it. People
just don’t understand how much wealth there is at the top now. The
wealth at the top is so extreme that it is beyond most people’s ability
to comprehend. If people understood just how concentrated wealth has
become in our country and the effect it has on our politics, our
democracy and our people, they would demand our politicians do something
about it….

Top 1% owns more than 90% of us combined….

400 people have as much wealth as half of our population.”

XVII :: Economic Death Squad

A report entitled, “Grapes of Wrath – 2011,” presents a challenge to us:

“The American people have a choice…. The current path,
forged by a minority of privileged wealthy elite, will lead to the
destruction of this country and misery on an unprecedented scale…. Are
you prepared to incur the wrath of the vested interests and meet their
lies and propaganda with the fury of your own wrath in search for the
truth? These men are sure you don’t have the courage, fortitude and
wrath to defeat them.”

In an article and video entitled, “The Wall Street Economic Death Squad,” as I reported back in October, 2009:

“We need to focus our strategy on the small group of men
who carried out the financial coup. These 13 men played leading roles in
first crashing the economy, and then stealing trillions in taxpayer
funds. Some of them are now calling the shots and running the government
to insure that their obscene profits keep pouring into their coffers.

Know Our Enemies, EHMs – Meet The Wall Street Economic Death Squad:

Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Robert Rubin, Larry
Summers, Alan Greenspan, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, John Mack, Vikram
Pandit, John Thain, Hank Greenberg, Ken Lewis.

These men ‘presided over the largest transfer of wealth in history,
from the working class to the flamboyant super rich.’ What these men
have done is obscene. After crashing the economy, trillions, literally
trillions of dollars have been funneled into the pockets of a select
few, in secrecy, while billions of people suffer in poverty, billions
suffer to survive. This small tight-knit Wall Street cadre has committed
a crime against humanity.”

Ralph J. Dolan, writing on Dissident Voice, declares, “Bring the Tyrants Down!”

“… while we’re observing these historic events in Egypt
we might take a lesson in justice. We might come to our senses and
freeze the assets of Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman Sachs, Vikram Pandit of
Citigroup, Brian Moynihan of Bank of America, Jamie Dimon of J.P.
Morgan Chase and John Strumpf of Wells Fargo – for starters. Then we
could go after the other major players in orchestrating the financial
meltdown – Timothy Geithner, Henry Paulson, Ben Bernanke, Lawrence
Summers, Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, etc.

These guys who waltz away with billions in profits while they create
misery and dislocation for many millions of struggling working people
are beneath contempt….

We seem ready to kneel at the feet and kiss the hands of those who would rob us blind.

Enough! Let us bring these tyrants down!”

If Egyptians can seize the assets of a dictator like Mubarak, why can’t we seize the assets of Jamie Dimon and Llyod Blankfein?

A new report from Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone harshly sums up Banana Republic USA:

“A former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off
his beer. ‘Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to jail,’ he said.
‘That’s your whole story right there. Hell, you don’t even have to write
the rest of it. Just write that.’ I put down my notebook. ‘Just that?’
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Everything’s fucked up, and nobody goes to
jail. You can end the piece right there.’

Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and
cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that
involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed
securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar to
even the most casual Middle American news consumer: companies like AIG,
Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America and
Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate
fraud and theft.”

Once again, veteran financial journalist Paul B. Farrell hits the
nail on the head. Writing for Market Watch, Farrell doesn’t pull any
punches in summing up what needs to be done, and it can’t be said enough:

Fed Dictator Bernanke Needs To Be Toppled

“Fed
boss Ben Bernanke is the most dangerous human on earth, far more
dangerous than Hosni Mubarak, Egypt’s 30-year dictator, ever was.
Bernanke rules a monetary dictatorship… But this reign of economic
terror will end. Just as Mubarak was blind to the economic needs of the
masses and democratic reforms, Bernanke is blind to the easy-money
legacy that’s set the stage for revolution, turning the rich into super
rich while the middle class stagnates and peanuts trickle down to the
poor.”

You can’t sentence the overwhelming majority of the population to
slow death through economic policy and expect to get away with it.

While one-tenth of one percent of the population rolls
around in obscene wealth, they may want to take a look outside of their
groupthink short-sighted delusional perspective and notice the outside
world. You cannot ignore the suffering of the masses. They will show up
at your doorstep next.

I hear footsteps…

XVIII :: 99.9% Vs. 0.1%

Egypt exposed the power that the people have. One million Egyptians
proved that you can shut down a powerful regime through a mass
demonstration of non-violent force. Here in the US, according to public
opinion polls, 75-80% of the population believes the government doesn’t
have the consent of the governed.

The mainstream media leaves Americans feeling isolated and powerless
to create change, but in reality, average Americans have all the power
that they need to end the economic suffering and injustices that they
endure. The overwhelming majority of people feel powerless to create
change, if they would just realize that they are the overwhelming
majority, we would have the change we so desperately need.

As I’ve written in the past:

“To those Americans who feel powerless to change things, I
say that your feelings are only a result of your induced delusion. You
have become so propagandized that you do not even understand the
significant position that you are in…. We are still a mass of people who
have the power to change the course of history…. we are 99.9% of the US
population, and they are only 0.1%.

If we fight, we win!”

The people of Tunisia and Egypt has shown us the way. People are
rising up throughout the world against the exact same people who looted
America. The economic central planners that have launched an economic
war on Americans, are also plundering the rest of the global economy
with devastating consequences for 99.9 percent of the global population.

As John Pilger points out:

The Egyptian Revolt Is Coming Home

“The uprising in Egypt is our theatre of the possible. It is what
people across the world have struggled for and their thought controllers
have feared…. Across the world, public awareness is rising and
bypassing them. In Washington and London, the regimes are fragile and
barely democratic. Having long burned down societies abroad, they are
now doing something similar at home, with lies and without a mandate. To
their victims, the resistance in Cairo’s Liberation Square must seem an
inspiration.”

We are, as fate has it, the most power group of people on the planet.
The sooner a critical mass can understand this, and the urgency of the
moment, the better chance we have of solving this crisis through
non-violent means. When the aware but passive realize that they too will
face increasingly harsh consequences, that’s when we will have a chance
to fix things. Until then, the hole gets deeper by the day.

As nations continue to fall to internal revolt, the more covert and
militaristic elements of power will move to the fore. In a world of
collapsing economies, limited resources and extreme weather, it appears
we are on a road to worldwide war.
As the people of Egypt have demonstrated, the non-violent movement has
to assert itself before the situation gets so dire that outbreaks of
violence will be commonplace, thus insuring a further, much harsher
crackdown, police state and Neo-Feudal economic order.

As Chris Hedges makes clear:

“The longer we believe in the fiction that we are
included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations
pillage the country without the threat of rebellion….

No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its
extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to
encounter resistance….

All centralized power, once restraints and regulations are abolished,
once it is no longer accountable to citizens, knows no limit to
internal and external plunder. The corporate state, which has
emasculated our government, is creating a new form of feudalism, a world
of masters and serfs.”

If we do not stand and rebel now, devastating consequences are sure
to drastically lower our living standards within the near future. If we
rise, people across the globe will continue to rise.

“We must conclude that a changeover is imminent and
ineluctable in the co-opted cast who serve the interests of domination,
and above all manage the protection of that domination. In such an
affair, innovation will surely not be displayed [in the mainstream
media]. It appears instead like lightening, which we only know when it
strikes.”
– Guy DeBord

When revolution returns to America, the point won’t be to take down a
figure head puppet politician like Mubarak or Obama, mere public
relations moves will not suffice. We will take down the system behind
them. We will take down the global banks, break them up, end the
campaign finance racket, end closed-door lobbying, end the system of
political bribery, end the two-party oligarchy, remove puppet judges who
voted for unlimited spending by private economic elites, end corporate
welfare and the various financial rackets which loot national wealth at
the expense of the people.

“All countries are basically social arrangements,
accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and
even sacred they may seem at any one time,
in fact they are all artificial and temporary.”
– Strobe Talbott

We must enact common sense polices to deter organized corruption.
The devil is always in the details, so rain RICO laws down upon them.

They shall reap what they sow.

Their day of reckoning is fast approaching.

Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said, “I believe that banking
institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”

As Jefferson rightfully declared, “Every generation needs a new revolution.”

Great ready… here it comes.

As a wise man once said,

“Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains
to earth like dew
Which in sleep
had fallen on you
Ye are many
they are few”

Comments

[Jerome Lester H...]

Here you can buy American made work boots. A little higher priced than the typical Chinese made boots found in shoe stores but way higher quality and worth the extra cost. A typical pair of Chinese made boots costs $60-$100 and lasts me about one year. I bought a pair of Justin boots here over two years ago and they are still holding up quite well and I will get at least another year out of them. Cost - $164.95. I also used to buy Hanes socks which would wear out after six months of use. I started buying Thorlo socks which are American made. Cost about $12.00 for one pair of socks. I bought eight pair and they are still like new after two years of daily use. So in the end I save money by buying American. The higher initial cost is offset by the quality which requires that I replenish at a lesser rate than inferior imported goods.

http://www.americanmadeworkboots.com/

 http://www.americanmadeworkboots.com/justinwb465.html

http://www.thorlo.com/

[Rick64]

 More importantly you aren't supporting oppressive regimes that let corporations exploit the their workers and resources.

[Kayman]

Jerome

Now don't be telling Chinese Wallmart that quality matters as much as price.

American goods = Oats

Chinese goods = Oats after processing thru the horse.

I've said this before, we have had rampant inflation for at least 10 years.

Every consumer good has been cheapened down so that it no longer lasts.

Take your socks.  If American socks last 3 years and Chinese socks last 6 months (my experience) then the Chinese price is 6 TIMES the American price.

And you get to go back to the store again and again, wasting time and resources.

So, who are the fools in this "outsourcing is keeping inflation down BULLSHIT" ?

[pods]

Absolutely correct Kayman, outsourcing was just the lastest way of covering over our rampant inflation.
In the 70s, it was the 2 earner household.  That ended probably in the early 90s recession.  

Wage arbitration by outsourcing  (and H1B insourcing) is the last ditch effort to keep the ponzi going.  

Now we are fast approaching raw money printing (as we speak roughly 10% of GDP).  Final phase will be supranational currency with oodles of debt to the IMF.

pods

[moneymutt]

so true, great comment

[kaiserhoff]

Sunshine, there is some merit in your remarks, but consider the incentives. 

There is no reason for a young person to consider a career in anything other than government or health care.  Wages and benefits are not just higher, they are a multiple of anything else.  That way lies poverty,... and madness.

[ZakuKommander]

Workers demonizing workers, calling teachers, policemen, firemen, etc. "parasites."  How easily you succumbed to the gameplan of the elites.

[Michael]

You forgot scum sucking leaches.

[tamboo]

THE BIOLOGICAL JEW by Eustace Mullins

“Although I have passed beyond any possible deleterious effect which the Jewish parasite or the shabez goi could have upon me, I know the hopelessness of the life of my people. I was freed from this paralysis, which the Jew inflects upon the healthy members of a host nation, in two ways, first, through my life in art, and second, through my life in Christ.” ~Eustice Mullins

http://www.radicalpress.com/?page_id=1244

[thefatasswilly]

Christians are so stupid.

Christ was a Jew. Christianity is the Jewish slave race.

[Lord Koos]

Where does this bullshit meme come from... teachers in private schools make much better pay that public school teachers.  Then of course it depends how much you value the people that teach and watch your kids for 6 hours a day.

[Cow]

Teachers in private schools where I live make LESS than public schools because they don't have to put up with the bullshit.

[Freddie]

Vietnam War = JFK/LBJ's War.

[Kayman]

Don't forget the French and Eisenhower.

[prophet_banker]

gggod good job, this chart of fed ownership is what sparks epiphanies;

http://www.lawfulpath.com/ref/federal_reserve.shtml

[StychoKiller]

ALL of these Arab revolutions might well be US Military Psy-ops:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/black-ops-how-hbgary-wro...

Depending on your level of paranoia.

Time to add some more layers to my tin-foil beanie...

[tellsometruth]

sell your friends on bartering and start using silver as a means of exchange now, it will on ly increase the cirrculation in your communities...a long with truth

[Econolingus]

Yeah, that'll work.  I keep chickens; can't wait offer eggs down at the local Safeway for a roll of paper towels and loaf of bread.

Holding  small denomination PM coins, but until/unless we see TOTAL monetary systemic breakdown, I'm not giving up any of that stash; I get paid in FRNs, and FRNs are what I will use to exchange for real, material goods.

[Bruin4]

I'm in.

[Sad Sufi]

Great post: broadly ties together many sources, is hard hitting.  Thanks!!

[Brokenarrow]

Fuck yeah! I would give up a life of happiness and prosperity to see the banks in their primary habitat under ten feet of water. We all know where that is. And, btw, they are hading out time like lunch to anyone who would oppose them.

[Belrev]

IMF is jews. Bank of International Settlements is jews. US FED is jews. Bank of England is jews. Hedge Funds are jews. Should this globalization crap collapse for real, an actual not concocted Holocaust will come to fruition. History has a funny way of punishing arrogant khazarian tribe time and time again.

[sabra1]

hey! you forgot one! Jesus is a jew! he's the biggie, don't you think? i guess not!

[Belrev]

who cares about jesus. the world is changing.

[Michael]

Yeshua is an Essene, the most nobelist of Yehudah, not of Pharisees or Sadducees.

Jews didn't come into existence till the 8th century AD in Khazaria.

[ik999]

subhanallah

I love this website

[Michael]

You got that brother.

What comes around, goes around.

[prophet_banker]

can't blame the many for the crimes of the few, seek prosecution, not persecution.  The Victim religion of holocaustianity paradigm is promoted by identifying race 1st, name 2nd.  Always go with Name !st

[InconvenientCou...]

fucking worm. Someone's always threatening your birthright and you have divine blessing to win it back somehow. Same shit different century.

parasites using religion for this purpose are the worst of the worst. They are easy to fuck with though. When you run across this type of person in life, you'll see what I mean. A few words here and there is all it takes. LOL

[Lizabth]

Have to take issue with the public union bit. These pampered gov't union chumps are not brave insurrectionists. They are generally paunchy, poorly-performing gov't functionaries, who are very cozy with politicians.

In WI, the brave insurrectionists are those folk who threw OUT on their kiesters the 'progressive' pols, 'friends' of bankrupting public unions. They are nothing more than banksters, writ small.

The brave in WI is the mom, working a couple of jobs with no health insurance, who has to continually feed the maw of these gov't enablers through taxation and whose child STILL gets a crappy education because these gov't workers, by and large, SUCK at their jobs. And there is no consequence.

To equate these greedy, rapacious gov't union folk in WI with brave souls across the world fighting for their very lives is asinine. They are part and parcel of the very damn system you rightly decry as wrecking the country. Sheesh!

BTW: disclosure: we are a lower-middle class working family, just about to be 'let go' from our main wage earner's job. We've paid our health insurance, we've funded our pensions, and we privately educate our kids due to these idiotic teachers screaming all the time about how bad they have it. We don't want our children 'educated' by the likes of them.

[Bad Asset]

The current average teacher pay for the WI elementary school I went to is $60,000 per teacher, plus a $25,000 to $35,000 fringe benefit plan.  And how many months of out the year do they work?

[WeimarRepublican]

That would be considered very high in Sweden (where I live). Here they make around $41,000 (or about $32,000 after taxes). According to The Economist, a Big Mac costs ~70% more here as well... so your teachers are living as kings. LOL

[Freddie]

+1

Also what is the percentage of students in the 8th grade in WI that cannot read?  30%?  Yeah we need to spend more on these corrupt teachers unions.  They all get expensive diploma mill MA's and even more bogus PhDs.  Paid for by taxpayers.  What a sick joke.

[StychoKiller]

Check out: "Some Lessons from the Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto, found in "Everything You Know is Wrong",
ISBN 978-1-56731-637-7, pgs 274-287

Teaching reedin'&ritin' is of secondary importance.

[nmewn]

One + one Sty.

Everything they thought they knew about it's purpose, is in fact wrong.

[Cow]

"Stupid in America" by John Stossel

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoTQAdomYMs

[lynnybee]

it ain't the teachers, BAD ASSET ! ......... the teachers are the least of your worries !   besides, how much would they have to pay YOU to walk into a classroom of 32 ill-behaved kids from the ghettos, half of them probably carry knives ! .........

maybe WALL ST. would like to reduce their management fees of those pension funds from 15% down to 8% ..... that sure would help those pension funds !   didn't Wall St. dump a bunch of worthless paper onto those pension funds ... ... ?

[Bad Asset]

ghettos?  I'm pretty sure the elementary school I attended was in one of the safest school districts in WI.  $60k a year, $30k in benenfits, home by 3:30pm and the summers off?  I'm starting to rethink my employment. 

The teachers in the "ghettos" of WI ... mainly just Milwaukee, get paid even more.

[Sad Sufi]

I am sorry you have had a bad experience with public school teachers. Most teachers, in my experience are dedicated and hard working.

Unions are part of what gave us the middle class of the last century. Imagine the wages at large without the support of unions.  Job wage declines and lack of work can be traced to the gutting of the manufacturing in the US, which started with "free trade."  Don't let the banksters turn you against your fellow workers.

With respect, SS

[three chord sloth]

Private sector unions and public sector unions are two different beasts. Please stop trying to jam that square peg into that round hole... it doesn't fit.

[three chord sloth]

Exactly, Lizabth. That is where he completely lost it.

Government workers are the dogs of the oligarchy. Period. So sorry if that hurts anybody's feeling, or shatters anyone's self image, but it's true.

A nation where the public workers are better paid than the private is a slave nation. They are part of the coerced economy, not the free and voluntary, and the coerced economy is the sandbox of the plutocracy. The public workers want, need, and openly advocate for the Leviathan State.

They will protect and defend the system because they need the system... they cannot replace their income in our atrophied private sector, and that makes them desperate and owned. Government property. They are a cog in the command and control mechanism of our toxic elites.

It is impossible to control, assess, and contain the government when directly dependent upon the government. A government check is still among the most corrupting, yet enticing, methods of control yet invented.

Put simply, independence requires independence... no big surprise there.

[philgramm]

Governments recognize that they are leeching from the private sector.  Government needs slaves on its side. This is the reason why the public sector of our economy has been growing ever since the first day of our country's inception.  The public sector will continue to grow until this government implodes (like all governments in history).  The question is Will we replace it with another set of rulers or will we truly be free?"  Practical Anarchy.

www.c4ss.org

[Michael]

At the very least, we can actually see on TV who the government worker parasite leaches are, sucking the life blood out of the non-public union private sector workers.

[lynnybee]

CORRECT !  YOU WIN !   your comment was the correct answer .    the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT has to be cut well over 1/2 ......... remember JAMES TRAFICANT ?   look him up on YOUTUBE in his great interviews with ALEX JONES .... GET RID of the ENERGY DEPARTMENT !    30 years ago the ENERGY DEPARTMENT was supposed to get us off our oil dependence ..... that was a total failure / we're more dependent than ever .    GOVERNMENTS EXIST FOR THEMSELVES / GOVERNMENTS ARE DESIGNED TO DRAIN WEALTH FROM THEIR CITIZENS & TRANSFER THAT WEALTH TO THE GOVERNMENT & THEIR CRONIES .    There's no other way, we must go into revolution / it might even come down to outright not paying taxes & crash this system.     .... prediction for 2012 , many go underground & start working for "money under the table."  

[nmewn]

You, sir or madam, are so dead on I predict at least 26 junks in your future ;-)

[three chord sloth]

Heh.

I wear the junks with pride. Sadly, many in here rail against the controlling, lying, Leviathan State and fake fiat currency, then adopt a worldview (the entitlement state) that makes both inevitable.

[StychoKiller]

I'm guessing that you'll probably want to see:

http://www.atlasshruggedpart1.com/

Our work or your guns:  Choose one, you can't have both.

[nmewn]

"I wear the junks with pride."

Badges of Honor my brother.

[JW n FL]

I did it!

[Sad Sufi]

Just remember that the public workers of today gained their pensions by negotiating no pay raises for years, while those in the private sector, working in finance, real estate, and insurance, were seeing increased wages.  Public workers are not greedy as a whole.  They want job security and a decent wage.  Is that wrong?

And don't forget that because private wages have gone down, does not justify tearing away the rights of those workers that still have them.

[Sad Sufi]

And I agree that as states go bankrupt, the pain must be shared by state workers.  Union busting is not needed however.

[philgramm]

No interest in busting unions as a whole.............just the public ones.  

[Michael]

Eviscerate the power of the public sector unions!

It's a conflict of interest as Judge Andrew Neapolitan explains.

[Harmonious_Diss...]

Hey! Michael,

Please cut & paste some jew things here, your comment is incomplete without something about joos, also something about 1000 year old racial tribalism?  Thanks!

[cranky-old-geezer]

"And don't forget that because private wages have gone down, does not justify tearing away the rights of those workers that still have them."

RIGHTS?

WHAT FUCKING RIGHTS?

God I'll be glad when you lazy delusional public parasites end up on the street.  Then you can talk about your "rights".

[Sad Sufi]

I am lazy, but I don't know about the rest of your angry projections on me.

[piceridu]

http://www.californiacenterforpublicpolicy.com/Reforming-Public-Employee-Compensation-Pensions.pdf

You need to read this!

[lynnybee]

dear SAD SUFI ..... that was an excellent comment.   i'd forgotten all about that !   they DID give up wages for benefits !   I remember that fiasco.    Now, it's conveniently forgotten.   Since the private sector was descimated by WALL ST. policy over the past 20 years, people started flocking to the public sector, it was a perceived "safe haven", a chance to have a decent paycheck & security in their pensioned old - age.    Now, TPTB want to take that away, too !    They've destroyed the private sector employees & are moving on to the public sector employees !  ............. someone, somewhere just wants all Americans to be poor.  

I'm beat., this thread has overwhelmed me.   TPTB love to see Americans fighting amongst themselves.......... that way, the true target of rage just watched the chaos.

[Guy Fawkes Mulder]

Have to take issue with the public union bit. These pampered gov't union chumps are not brave insurrectionists. They are generally paunchy, poorly-performing gov't functionaries, who are very cozy with politicians.

In WI, the brave insurrectionists are those folk who threw OUT on their kiesters the 'progressive' pols, 'friends' of bankrupting public unions. They are nothing more than banksters, writ small.

The brave in WI is the mom, working a couple of jobs with no health insurance, who has to continually feed the maw of these gov't enablers through taxation and whose child STILL gets a crappy education because these gov't workers, by and large, SUCK at their jobs. And there is no consequence.

To equate these greedy, rapacious gov't union folk in WI with brave souls across the world fighting for their very lives is asinine. They are part and parcel of the very damn system you rightly decry as wrecking the country. Sheesh!

BTW: disclosure: we are a lower-middle class working family, just about to be 'let go' from our main wage earner's job. We've paid our health insurance, we've funded our pensions, and we privately educate our kids due to these idiotic teachers screaming all the time about how bad they have it. We don't want our children 'educated' by the likes of them.

Exactly, Lizabth. That is where he completely lost it.

Government workers are the dogs of the oligarchy. Period. So sorry if that hurts anybody's feeling, or shatters anyone's self image, but it's true.

And as Malek put it:

As somebody succinctly put it:

For one thing, people in Madison are fighting over money that doesn’t exist.

I'd agree that when people only protest when it's their bank accounts, their livelihood, their local economy at stake, then they are rotten hypocrites, and nothing they say can wipe that away. Especially baby boomers when it comes to their retirements, when they never tried hard enough to "fight for justice" before. And especially when it's some public "educators".

All powerful points in any argument against the protestors. Now I'm going to argue (slightly) in their favor.

The orignal post is by David DeGraw... who seems to be agitating for the "simple" solution that the >99% of the population oppressed by the <1% "economic elite" can organize on common ground. As he put it in an interview I recall: "We are 99 percent of the population, if we could get our act together, we can take back our country; we can restore rule of law."

And that "if" is the whole problem. We seem to never get our act together. We see other people's hypocrisy and we don't help them. We don't see our own, and when the day comes that we call for help, no one will help us.

I guess not everyone will make it through the coming crises alive. I guess retiring public "servants" who were lied to and who believed the lies their whole life are going to be in a world of hurt, if they were banking on the U.S. Federal Corporation to actually fund their retirement under the current paradigm.

But what I've learned from thinking of putting the "99% Movement" concept into practice is that we have to see the common ground as well as the differences.

No one has the right to demand of any of you here that you be taxed to pay for people you despise. But do you really despise the deceived working class more than The Bernank? More than the IMF / BIS vampire squids? Don't you have just a little more in common with the people in this Wisconsin protest than you might have thought at first glance?

I got no golden solutions for you or for them to believe in, yet.

But I'm warning you that "divide and conquer" is the greatest weapon the media, military, intelligence, and finance oligarchs have, because we give into it without even knowing it. They can be as passive as a J6P on his couch with a beer and we will all be out fighting with each other over ideologies and our favorite shades of "justice".

Ok... </rant>... I'll just leave you with this link... it's David DeGraw on "Divide and Conquer":

http://ampedstatus.org/overcoming-divide-and-conquer-strategies-99-9-of-the-us-population-should-support-the-public-unions-fight-against-occupying-economic-imperialists

[Sad Sufi]

Indeed!!

Here's an Al Jazeera article re the sublimation of law and order, and governance, by Wall Street, which is another facet to support your view.  Maybe we can all agree on this?

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/02/2011226131635826806...

[Unlawful Justice]

+1984  

The 99% movement is spot on!  Yea!

[Peace is the x-axis]

Excellent, inspired, insightful rant.  Hear! hear!

[Rodent Freikorps]

+1776 and a big bag of chips, Sloth.

You rock.

[AnAnonymous]

A nation where the public workers are better paid than the private is a slave nation. They are part of the coerced economy, not the free and voluntary, and the coerced economy is the sandbox of the plutocracy. The public workers want, need, and openly advocate for the Leviathan State.

What stupidity. Were the men patrolling slave plantations during the War against the King of England part of the government state? Public  workers?

US citizens cant even come to terms with their own history. Have always the need to craft fantasy to invent stuff.

Present days: the US derives its money from its military hegemony over the world. In the US, the private sector is the one leeching the public sector.

Storytell better stories...

[John Wilmot]

You're correct about the basis for the American economy: consumption funded with debt, possible because of the reserve currency status of the dollar, which exists because of the outcome of WWII and the creation of the empire.

But, as for the rest of your comment, not even a little bit. The public sector by definition produces nothing and exists parasitically on the production of the private sector.

And what in the hell are you talking about regarding the Revolutionairy War?

[DiverCity]

.

[Things that go bump]

Yes, their benefits are over-generous and can't be afforded, but I'm in Minnesota and I'm thinking of joining them because at least they are doing something besides running thier mouths and it is the sort of something that, if it catches on, will ultimately bring this mother down.  I don't think tptb are ready for this yet.  Not here.  

[StychoKiller]

Try and get them to focus on the Bankster(s) behind the throne(s)!

[JR]

Thanks to the Lord for your comments.  Any freedom loving American who compares the union circle of Wisconsin’s in-your-face self-servers with the brave young men rushing the barricades tonight in Tripoli should hang his head in shame.

[Econolingus]

Amen, sister.  I have five different friends who are either teachers or children/siblings/spouses of teachers.  Here are two things they share in common:

1.  All teachers in question are top performers (as measured by both administrative and student review);

2.  All are anti-union and anti-tenure.

Now, why would that be?

[pazmaker]

+1000 lizabth and wear your junks as a badge of honor!

[moneymutt]

okay, if you want to put teachers in order of being screwed in this country, yes they rank higher than most private workers, and cops rank higher than teachers, a lot of them get 90 percent of their salary in retirement from age 50 on....but look at the freaking big picture....when we had a surplus, a decent economy and oil was $20 barrel, W said we should cut taxes for rich, and we did...Now 10 years later, after starting 2 foreign wars, fighting war on terrorism, running up much more national debt due to decade of deficits, and then encountering the worst recession since the '30s.... we still have to have same tax cuts for rich? Given all we face we can't go back to the tax rates during the Reagan, Bush Sr. or Clinton years? So rich, during two wars and great recession, are not asked for small sacrifice of being taxed like they were in the 80s, but teachers and other workers must face pay cuts and layoffs? Really? Any workers doing slightly better than other workers must take it on the chin in these tough times, but never the rich are asked? Given the money the FED is throwing around via their discount window, we regular working folks are truly fighting over scraps.

In fact, state and local govt did something stupid, they spent money they did not have, essentially deficit spent, by not funding the pension promises they made at the time they were getting the work/services from the worker. Instead they just put off the costs to another day. That was pretty stupid, but consider how many state and local govts are MORE solvent than the banks/Wall Street were in 2008.

When banks did stupid things or simply got crushed by a bad economy like the local govts are now, our FED, our money was used to rescue the bank, in record flash time, $700  billion dollars, voila. Now banks collapsing would have been hard on economy but so is state and local govts going broke. But there is not rescue for the stupid for state and local govts. So once again, rich always get rescued, there is always money for them, but regular folks always must take it on the chin, tighten belt, and there is no resuce for us.

[overmedicatedun...]

Moneymutt, I take it you are a teacher?

perhaps you should stand back and look at the destruction of private sector..thru clinton's and GOP supported nafta free trade and open illegal immigration.(those and so many other gov giveaways to off shore banks and business) .

think what that has done to those who paid the taxes you consider too low.

[nmewn]

"think what that has done to those who paid the taxes you consider too low."

Exactly so.

A trillion dollar "shovel ready jobs stimulus" that was nothing but a debt cash injection from the feds to themselves & state employees over the objections of every taxpayer who was sane.

Earth to moonbats...I'm not obligated to repay any of your debt creation.

It's never enough...hell itself could freeze over with a mile thick ice cap and I would still hear squawking about how we are not spending enough money on "education" when 2/3 of Wisconsin eighth graders can't read proficiently at their grade level.

To which some lame ass public "skuul" teacher from Wisconsin will respond with "well, Wisconsin's is better than the rest of the country"...to which the appropriate response would be...so the rest of the public school districts around the entire country sucks even more than yours?

Fantastic.

I could pull my fucking hair out sometimes.

[John Wilmot]

First, public education has been a 100% unmitigated disaster from start to finish - it has been a deliberate and successful attempt to dumb-down and propagandize the population.

Arguing about public teacher pay is somewhat beside the point - there ought not be any public teachers, not beyond elementary school anyway for basic literacy.

As with so many, you think the solution to our debt problems is higher tax. We do not have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem. Is teacher pay a fairly small part of the problem, certainly. But it's a part nonetheless.

...while I'm on the subject, the current and all previous administrators of the Federal Dep. of Education should be indicted for child abuse: by statute, I don't think it would fly, but it would send a nice message

[Kayman]

Lizabth

You are not alone. Government, Government unions, the Corporate Cartel, and the Criminal Banking Cartel.  ALL PARASITES.

Trouble is, none of them recognize they have killed the host.

[JW n FL]

XII :: Loss of Civil Liberties

In addition to the record-breaking imprisonment of the American population, since 9/11 our civil liberties have been violated in unprecedented fashion. Tom Burghardt, in an article entitled, “American Police State: FBI Abuses Reveals Contempt for Political Rights, Civil Liberties,” summed up a new report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation “documenting the lawless, constitutional-free zone under construction in America for nearly a decade:”

****** “These delegations or grants of power authorize the President to meet the

problems of governing effectively in times of crisis. Under the powers delegated by

such statutes, the President may seize property, organize and control the means of

production, seize commodities, assign military forces abroad, institute martial law,

seize and control all transportation and communication, regulate the operation of

private enterprise, restrict travel, and, in a variety of ways, control the lives of United

States citizens.” ******

http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/98-505.pdf

This document is a .GOV document given to Congress.

Here is a recent discussion of the SWEEPING Powers Granted!!! The President and Obama did NOTHING to restore normal power to the 3 BRANCHES!!! 3 not just the Executive Branch... NOTHING!!!

 Is the State of Emergency Superseding our Constitution? Address to the Commonwealth Club, San Francisco, November 23, 2010 

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=22089

[Dr. Porkchop]

I watched the elections happen in your country and never had any doubt that whichever democrat won, none of those new found powers would be rolled back.

[ft65]

JW n FL / GLP ^TrInItY^

We know the freedoms you believe in by looking at a place very dear to you... http://www.godlikeproductions.com/forum1/message1366548/pg1

To save people clicking on the link:

First the definition of the word "culling":

Culling is the process of removing animals from a group based on specific criteria. This is done in order to either reinforce certain desirable characteristics or to remove certain undesirable characteristics from the group. ... The bottom line is if we don't do some culling from time to time on this website (GLP) it will grow too big and get away from the original intent...

We must take steps to exclude these groups and individuals from participating on this website (GLP) or they will poison the entire group here.

[StychoKiller]

So, a website that caters to conspiracy theories is suffering from an embarassment of material?  Culling will just guarantee another, more potent conspiracy theory!  Gud Luk wit dat! :>D

[buzzsaw99]

GLP is a conspiracy within a conspiracy. No tinfoil hatter worth his salt would ever step foot in that place.

[Bananamerican]

"The denial of wealth is the key to the Economic Elite’s power."

That jibes with my own intuition of demonic greed/materialism....it's not about having the most toys...it's about controlling OTHER PEOPLE'S ability to EAT.

Parasitoids

[Xkwisetly Paneful]

Where obesity is the biggest health care cost.

They could reset everything back to zero and in time the same people are going to win and the same will lose every time.

Despite the whining and protests to the contrary.

[Kayman]

The guy that can control the market by buying political whores to stifle free competition will win.

Try going to the discount window to get some free money with your fries.

[StychoKiller]

"Power is not the means to an end Winston, it is the end itself!" -- 1984

[philgramm]

I hate to break it to this fella but a revolution in America is a long ways away.  What we see in Wisconsin is a bunch of people of begging for some scraps.  We in America have been dumbed down with public education.  We believe that voting is the answer.  Our representatives are supposed to represent our interests, right?  So is it a contract? Nope.  What are the consequences if they don't represent our interests?  They get voted out but not before they have found a nice cush job lobbying for a company seeking gov't welfare.  Bring in the next "representative".  rinse, repeat.  

Stop voting and recognize the system for what it is.  It is your enslavement.  This oppressive gov't continues on because millions continue to vote.  Any vote in an election is a vote IN FAVOR of this oppressive system.  

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbp6umQT58A

[StychoKiller]

After all, there are alternatives:

http://pixel420.com/pixel420/stateless/

Educate the Ignorati by passing it on...

[DeweyLeon]

TPTB are so good at dividing us, if we could all only see that we have a common enemy.

No left vs right, no religious vs humanists, no union vs non-union

Only bankers against us all!

[Dr. Porkchop]

Up vs. down is what it is.

[Hacksaw]

No it's inside vs outside.

[Peace is the x-axis]

Well said DeweyLeon. It is indeed "bankers against us all".

So... let's all become our own bankers.  Then, there'll never be a need for bankers.

Impossible?  I think not -

http://theblissfulignoramus.com/reflections/the-peoples-nwo-every-man-hi...

[Greenhead]

I am calling bullshit on this article.  Not saying there aren't some good points but is sounds like a lot of "hate the rich" propaganda that feeds the entitlement mentality.  We shouldn't have ever had as many people on foodstamps, wic, section 8, etc., etc., etc. bur we did.  It is a culture thing, every person who wanted security was willing to give up liberty and become dependent on the hand of the master for their sustenance.  And now we have a huge segment of Americans who are scared out of their minds because we never asked them to take care of themselves.

I am not talking about the sick, lame, insane and very old.  I am talking about sound of body and mind who want "someone" to give them a job.  Really?  How about creating a job?  O, wait, school sucked, it wasn't interesting, important or cool.  Yes, we need to have compassion but resort to blaming "the elite", whoever they may be, is nuts. 

Yes, the FED is ruining the country by virtue of allowing the federal government to operate free from real fiscal accountability.  Yes, bailing out the banks was absolutely the actions of the system protecting the system at the expense of the people.  But then, how many folks think the FED is really Federal? 

How about a little introspection and accoutability?  How about let's stop trying to create this story about the evil masters who control the universe and who want to enslave you.  How about we understand they are people, yes, smart people, but still, they are trying to protect the status quo and they too are fearful.  How about we quit trying to create these bugaboos and deal with the issues.  God bless the Irish who said "enough"! and voted the jerks out of office who agreed to absorb the losses and not require the bondholders and investors to take the hit.  We could use a little of that in this country.

[Guy Fawkes Mulder]

How about let's stop trying to create this story about the evil masters who control the universe and who want to enslave you.

How is that a story that we try to create? They do want to enslave you and they do want global control for today, with "the universe" tomorrow.

These guys are like rapists in the family. Sure we won't just throw out the molester and then be healthy again. And I agree that entitlements are not a wholly good idea, especially when the money to fund them is backed by unpayable Ponzi debt.

But come on, man. These are issues; this article is not about bugaboos. We have to throw these rapists out before the word "rich" even can have a legitimate meaning again.

edit:

God bless the Irish who said "enough"! and voted the jerks out of office who agreed to absorb the losses and not require the bondholders and investors to take the hit.  We could use a little of that in this country.

AGREED.

[malek]

As somebody succinctly put it: For one thing, people in Madison are fighting over money that doesn’t exist.

[Rusty Shorts]

 - thank you malek

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2R2KXNQR1M

[Freddie]

+1

Well they think it exists and if they can only fleece the taxpayers and the private sector just a bit more.

[malek]

Oops, duplicate

[JW n FL]

VII :: “Hungry People Don’t Stay Hungry For Long”

Food prices have been a leading indicator for rebellion thus far. Given the Federal Reserve’s commitment to driving food prices higher, as a matter of policy, and the government’s commitment to cutting assistance programs, people lining up at Wal-Mart on the last day of the month, waiting for the clock to strike midnight so they can buy their family milk and bread on their food stamp debit card, seem to be the most likely to rebel first.

As food prices increase, food stamps are obviously going to buy you less food. On top of that, as food prices escalate, millions more will need food assistance, right at the point when the current safety net can least afford it.

Let’s analyze the most recent food stamp data to see how America’s inevitable revolution may begin.

With 43.6 million Americans currently relying on food stamps, there are 13 states with over a million people already on food stamps:

· Texas 3,925,119 (number of people on food stamps) — 15.6% (of state population)
· California 3,521,881 — 9.5%
· Florida 2,994,413 — 15.9%
· New York 2,934,493 — 15.1%
· Michigan 1,920,330 – 19.4%
· Ohio 1,772,608 — 15.4%
· Georgia 1,732,865 — 17.9%
· Illinois 1,732,169 — 13.5%
· Pennsylvania 1,673,714 — 13.2%
· North Carolina 1,531,255 — 16.1%
· Tennessee 1,264,407 — 19.9%
· Arizona 1,050,181 — 16.4%
· Washington 1,019,791 — 15.2%

States with over 18% of the population on food stamps:

· Mississippi 612,889 — 20.7%
· Tennessee 1,264,407 — 19.9%
· Oregon 749,498 — 19.6%
· Michigan 1,920,330 — 19.4%
· New Mexico 399,454 — 19.4%
· Louisiana 866,905 — 19.1%
· West Virginia 345,683 — 18.7%
· Kentucky 813,041 — 18.7%
· Maine 241,117 — 18.2%
· South Carolina 839,109 — 18.1%
· Alabama 863,606 — 18.1%

The costs of Food Stamps… NOTHING!!! As compared to what the Treasury GIVES AWAY to Wall Street EVERYWEEK!!!!

http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/annual.htm

http://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/tot_operation_schedule.html

NOTHING!!! It is NOTHING COMPARED to what the Treasury GIVES AWAY!!!

[Hacksaw]

I've got one for you JW. In 2007 the top 20% in America had 93% of the financial wealth. Now think about that, they had 93% of the financial wealth and wrecked the economy trying to get the other 7%. It's all the teachers fault, what a bunch of morons. You idiots who shill for the banksters, the con men in the financial services industry and their stooges in the goobermint deserve what you have coming.

[ft65]

JW n FL / GLP ^TrInItY

So, do you believe in collectivism or free enterprise? Your constant flip-flop double think here on this comments section is astounding. Is they running HB Gary project from Eglin?

[StychoKiller]

Keep asking questions, just don't expect an answer!  I suggest you supply some links on what you're talkin' about here...

[ft65]

Stychokiller, you did ask!

JW n FL (AKA ^TrInItY^ @ GLP) has a colorful history. Quite why he's posting here when he has his own grubby forum, is beyond me. He will recognise these words here: http://www.alien-earth.org/forum/message.php?message=78508&mpage=1&showd...

Elaine,

Here is the deal. It's going to cost me several thousand dollars to file a federal lawsuit against you which I am prepared to do now. We have you on multiple civil infractions including breach of our original contract. We have had all the evidence prepared and our law firm has informed us that we WILL win, but it is not a monetary gain that I am looking for.

I will pay you $5,000 for your domain name & forum code (as is), provided you will sign a nondisclosure / non-compete and agree not to run or participate at the moderator / admin / anything but normal user level on any Internet forum for the period of 3 years from date of our agreement.

This is cheaper for me this way and you actually get to walk away with some cash rather than a big fat judgment hanging over your head for the rest of your life and having the outcome being ultimately the same anyway.

If you disclose the contents of this email to ANYONE the deal is off and I WILL file suit against you in federal court next week. If you make this deal and I find out later that you told / collaborated with others concerning this arrangement prior to making the deal I WILL sue you for breach of contract.

This is between you and me only. This is a legitimate and ONE TIME offer.

Consider it carefully, ^TrInItY^

(owner) www.GodlikeProductions.com

Nice!

[JW n FL]

I have told you time and time again... if you would like to know who I am... ask.

but becuase you are a coward... you refuse to ask, becuase you may then be asked the same question?

I promise you, that I am not going to ask who you are... becuase it doesnt matter, you are no one, nothing.

So, if you want to know who I am... like I have said 100 times before... ask me you fucking Coward.

P.S. if you think this is who I am... you are going to be heart broken. http://www.youtube.com/user/GodlikeProductions

lots of German.. so the Jew hater is trying real hard this time... http://headkeys.com/godlikeproductions.com

here you idiot... the fact that you could not provide this to yourself, speaks to just what a useless piece of shit you reall are... but alas, my service to the community of less fortunates never ends.

http://www.sunbiz.org/scripts/cordet.exe?action=DETFIL&inq_doc_number=P00000017126&inq_came_from=OFFFWD&cor_web_names_seq_number=0001&names_name_ind=P&ret_names_cor_number=&ret_cor_web_names_seq_number=&ret_names_name_ind=&ret_names_comp_name=&ret_names_filing_type=&ret_cor_web_princ_seq=&ret_princ_comp_name=LUCASJASON&ret_princ_type=

Detail by Officer/Registered Agent Name Florida Profit Corporation TRINITY ACQUISITIONS INC. Filing Information Document Number P00000017126 FEI/EIN Number 593651515 Date Filed 02/14/2000 State FL Status INACTIVE Last Event ADMIN DISSOLUTION FOR ANNUAL REPORT Event Date Filed 09/16/2005 Event Effective Date NONE Principal Address POST OFFICE BOX 344
SHALIMAR FL 32579-0330 Mailing Address POST OFFICE BOX 344
SHALIMAR FL 32579-0330 Registered Agent Name & Address COTTON & GATES, P.A.
3 PLEW AVE
SHALIMAR FL 32579 US Name Changed: 04/18/2001 Address Changed: 04/18/2001 Officer/Director Detail Name & Address Title PD LUCAS, JASON
POST OFFICE BOX 344
SHALIMAR FL 32579-0330 Annual Reports Report Year Filed Date 2002 08/01/2002 2003 09/10/2003 2004 06/30/2004 Document Images 06/30/2004 -- ANNUAL REPORT 09/10/2003 -- ANNUAL REPORT 08/01/2002 -- ANNUAL REPORT 04/18/2001 -- ANNUAL REPORT 02/14/2000 -- Domestic Profit

[sudzee]

Every last nickle of ones presumed wealth should be withdrawn from banks and financial markets monday morning. A massive bank run is all that stands between the oppressors and the oppressed. Now is a great time as the gov't will have to shut down this week. Politicians at all levels are puppets of the bankers. Fiat is how the population is kept under control. Take away their means of control and bankers become zero in one day.    

[Things that go bump]

A national strike will also be required.  Removing our money from the banks will not be enough.  We have to withhold our labor and our taxes. Relief from oppression is not going to come without substantial sacrifice on our part.  

[Econolingus]

Yawn.

Civil disobedience won't work this time.

Real change the system, requires actual sacrifice, and it has always been that way.  Until the outraged masses actually undertake outraged behavior and escalate to physical violence while risking physical well-being, nothing changes. 

If I have to wait for you to wake me up when you are marching in the street, face-to-face with heavily armed riot-police, then I suspect I'll be sleeping a very long time.

[JW n FL]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyzoNCJvy4c

most people here are old Hippy's who want to have a sit in and talk about it for another 40 fucking years...

[ft65]

JW n FL / GLP ^TrInItY^

I prefer "jaw, jaw not war, war" so what's your solution? A short person with a gun?

http://img412.imageshack.us/img412/892/gunze.jpg

[UP4Liberty]

Has anyone heard the most recent Jim Rickards interview at King World News?

He is actually discussing the possibility of "expropriation"...

http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/Broadcast/Entries/2011/2/26_Jim_R...

How can we escape this monster?  Is there anyway to protect our property rights from our government?

Does anyone in this community know how to protect one's assets from seizure by the federal government?

Help!

[Sad Sufi]

Not listened to latest JR interview yet, but in reply to your question, here are some solutions people talk about:

foreign held real estate

foreign held gold

foreign held bank accounts

all are legal, if done legally!  It is the way the rich hedge their bets.

[gwar5]

Gov.com has new rules on the foreign assets, accounts, including property.

Says must be reported if any over $50K.

I'm keeping all mine below that until I find out more.

[gwar5]

Yes, that was an good interview by Rickards on KWN. The IMF peices are coming together for a new WRC and phasing out the USD. They now have the nuts and bolts and are implementing. On schedule.

---Why not remove some USD out of the banking system and safely store it and get some physical gold and silver? And have a stash of cash in other good currencies, like Canadian, Aussie, and Swiss francs  or the strong and rising SDR currencies for giggles.

---If you have an IRA or 401K, I would also suggest a self-directed IRA whereby you have your own custodian -- can buy foreign property and other hard assets and investments without penalty, etc. There are rules, so be familiar. Google self directed IRA and there is a selection of these cottage industry companies that do it. (IRS approved, all legal, all legit, but banks won't tell you about it.) They'll walk you through it and set you up for about $2000. Minimal annual fees. Some transaction fees, shop it around a little. Can be done in just a couple of weeks.

From there you can even buy things like foreclosure property, farmland for lease, foreign property, a business, back into equities, or the Bunny Ranch in Nevada, pretty much anything considered an investment except crap like baseball cards, antique furniture, etc.

Use your imagination after that and good luck. It's not unimaginable to think our government would nationalize everyone's IRAs and 401Ks. But is much harder for them to grab a rental condo or vineyard in Peru with a good lien on it than to hit the debit button on the USD value of what will be left of your GLD and SPY ETF holdings in two years.

I'm not sure about the 401K, I've always been self employed. But it doesn't have to be either or -- you can still have your old IRA account open and functioning and have both; just siphon off to the new IRA custodian  what you want or need, just like another broker account, eg. If you're reading KWN and ZH then you're way ahead of the game, but you better hurry and Git R Dun. Good luck.

[Weimar Ben Bernanke]

We are not Egypt,more likely Yugoslavia. The nation is far too divided in political,ethnic,class,economical,regional lines. the people will never rise up to overthrow the central government. The nation will end up like the USSR after it collased or Yugoslavia. Divided in different republics and nations. It will be bloody of course. And to those who think the federal government can just declare martial law in any scenario(economical collapse,major natural diaster etc). Your wrong. The federal would have a hard time implementing it because it would be a logistan and manpwer nightmare. If there is a major crisis that sends the entire country into chaos, it would highly unlikely that the U.S. military will be able to enforce a lock-down of the entire nation.

Even if the military manages to acquire all 1.5 million reserves and utilize 1 million of it's total 1.5 million personnel in the Navy, Army, Marines, Air Force and Coast Guard, it would struggle to control 308-310 million citizens in a land mass of 9,161,966 sq km.

You can confirm these numbers by looking at the U.S. Census or CIA World fact book.
Now you can say " Don't forget about the? millions of Militarized Local and State police."

    First of all, American law enforcement numbers are not as strong as some of you think. According to the BLS (bureau of Labor Statistics), there were only 883,600 law enforcement personnel in 2008. And that was before the financial collapse and subsequent layoffs in local departments across the nation. The number included detectives, managers, police and sheriff's patrol officers.

So when you add the 2,500,000 soldiers and the 883,000 law enforcement, you have a force of 3.3 million agents. This is less than one percent of America's highly-armed population. Most of these agents will be working logistics and support for handling prisoners, transportation, intelligence and supply. But this isn't even the biggest problem.

The police are used to dealing with people who are afraid of them and have something to lose. In a collapse scenario, the rioters will lack both characteristics. And the military will be poorly suited to police a populace that is desperation for resources. If the soldiers became violent against the population, they could divide the armed forces and spark a civil war. Moreover, Iraq and Afghanistan has shown us that the U.S. military is not invisible and that guerrilla warfare tactics can be deployed successfully against a high-tech army. It would be very difficult for the U.S. military to successfully implement martial law throughout the entire country at any given time. This would mean that they would have to secure hundred of thousands of neighborhoods, while securing all major airports, power stations, communication towers, water facilities, nuclear power plants, military bases, food distribution center, grocery stores, government official buildings and highways while keeping everyone in their homes after 6pm.

Bringing in foreign troops would problematic, because if the U.S. is in a panic, wouldn't the other countries that are so heavily tied to America also have their own problems. Plus, we know how well foreign occupations went in Afghanistan, Vietnam and Iraq.

In conclusion, a military lock-down of the entire country at any given time would be impossible with the assistance of foreign troops. Adding foreign troops would increase the manpower, but severely damage the credibility of the force. Such a situation would encourage more violence against the martial law force. The U.S. government may attempt to lock the country down, but it would end in failure and possibility set the stage for a civil war. The nation will probably end up like Pkistan today,Yugoslavia,or Colombia back in the 80s.

[spinone]

They would only have to take care of strategic points - checkpoints into and out of cities, power stations, water plants, highways, gas depots, food warehouses.  And dont forget that helicopters and radios are a great force multiplier, and they have lots of those. 

If they control the distribution of food, fuel, electricity, water and traffic, thats that.  All they would have to do is start using live ammunition, and 99% of people will back down.  It would be hellish, and the outcome far fom certain.

Lets hope it never gets to that.

[Weimar Ben Bernanke]

It depends who follow these orders. Many sheriffs in Texas,Arizona,Montana,Idaho,Colrado,Florods etc are tired of Washington's bluff so they will not come to work. Also if live ammo is used against the people as I stated before it would divided the armed forces and cause a civil war. Just like Libya where there are soldiers who would gladly follwo order to kill their fellow citizen,there are those who would back down and defect. There is 225,500 km of railways,6,506,204 of roadway,15,079 airports,300,000 gas stations,1,075 Walmart discount stores, 2,256 Supercenters, 579 Sam’s Clubs and 113 Neighborhood Markets in the United States,555 Costco loactions, and about 22,000 incorporated places in the US(cities,towns and villages). It would be a logistical and manpower diaster. And Plus what if two,or five states refused to use their National guard to help the fed? 

[Econolingus]

100% BS.

A.  You will never see a mass up-rising in the US of more than a very small percent of the population.  Research the Revolution, and you will see that the actual % of citizens under arms was tiny.  You will not see 10% in any organized rebellion, much less 308 million citizens needing to be controlled.

B.  Even if your fantasy scenario played out, there's no chance the majority of soldiers would take up arms against the populace.  this is for two reasons: 1) most American front-line personnel are from lower  or lower-middle class backgrounds--they are more simpatico with your supposed rebels then with the power elite; 2) most are pure mercenaries.  With the exception of some gun-drunk southern white boys, most military personnel took the job because it was better than the alternative. 

[JW n FL]

"gun-drunk southern white boys"

are not going to fire on family... nor will those same Marines you look down your nose at... have a problem with killing any brass that orders them to fire on family / extended family / citizen of the US.

[ft65]

JW n FL / ^TrInItY^ you're probably right!

I'd be more worried when these  guys get started:

http://img412.imageshack.us/img412/892/gunze.jpg

It's alright for the armed militia!

[Bob]

Problem is that the toadies of TPTB have invested massive resources into derailing the opposition in the good old divide and conquer.  Look at all the morons who can't stop themselves from pronouncing every force with any real potential for revolt as "socialists."  Alot of these soldiers are going to genuinely believe that they're shooting at communists and fighting to preserve the "American Way." 

[Maos Dog]

LOL!!!!!

With the exception of some gun-drunk southern white boys

You do know that "Gun drunk southern white boys" make up 40% of the armed services right?

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/08/who-serves-in-the-us-mi...

[Bob]

Indeed.  And those families--and many like them--are absolutely invested in the Imperialist brand of "Freedom."  Just slap a flag on it and they seem ready to buy anything.

God knows they have far greater potential . . . whether they're ready to recalibrate remains to be seen. 

[sudzee]

Silver bullets and golden daggers bitchez.

[Malachi Constant]

We are about to enter what they would call Step Three.

Question: What is Step Four?

On a related note, as long as mere mortals like me are using (1) money issued by IMF to (2) buy goods and services peddled by IMF at (3) IMF-approved prices, we are not leaving this fight alive. I guess we'll have to throw out the window a lot of things at once, not just paper money, most importantly education. Also, for those of us in the IT, it's probably high time to learn a skill or two that would be applicable both 1,000 years ago and 1,000 in the future.

[StychoKiller]

There might be a big future in gunsmithing...

[spinone]

What has gotten into these people?  Will they just keep pumping our oil, shipping us cheap plastic crap and being poor and opressed, please?!

[snowball777]

Daily bread?

[JW n FL]

rolled outa my chair laughing!!!!

[JR]

“The Global financial elite are now stepping up their attacks on public workers.” – DeGraw

This is an unbelievable travesty of the truth.

Public workers are the arm of the global financial elite.  These investment bankers have established puppet governments from Cairo to Washington DC. 

Big Government is their every day servant—government money, government schools, government propaganda…

The protests in Egypt were against a puppet government; the protest in Madison, Wisconsin is against a puppet government. And the puppet government is represented by public workers who say to the taxpayers who provide their salaries and benefits: Don’t tell us what to do, don’t tell us what we will teach your children, we will tell you what you will pay us, and we will accept no interference from you.

I agree there is a revolution coming to America, but it’s not going to be the teachers and public service unions revolting, it’s going to be the taxpayers revolting against an elite ruling system that has caused government to become not an aid to man but an enemy.

Never mind that the Department of Education reports than only 32 percent of Wisconsin’s eighth-graders read at the “proficient” level, despite a doubling in education spending between 1998 and 2009 -- the reading rates have not gone up even 1 percentage point.

[Bob]

Good luck with those taxpayers siding with capital against the labor scapegoat of the elite.  Tea Party anti-government nonsense gets a whole lot of air play, since those pawns have been so briliantly coopted by the elite, but we'll see what kind of people actually hit the street. 

[Kayman]

Well said JR.

[Xkwisetly Paneful]

It is neo marxism.

Here is a pretty good quote from Jefferson.

"We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty or profusion and servitude. If we run into such debt, as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our calling and our creeds...[we will] have no time to think, no means of calling our miss-managers to account but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow-sufferers... And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for[ another]... till the bulk of society is reduced to be mere automatons of misery... And the fore-horse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression "

[Xkwisetly Paneful]

It was so silly of the elite to allow anyone who can make an X to borrow as much capital as they wanted at historically low rates of interest.

They must have missed the manifesto that capital is opportunity and providing it to anyone for the price of lint undermines their power.

The winners end up paying all the vig anyway not the losers.

Would be why i would ballpark it at 60% pay no federal income tax in 2010 with another 17% working for some form of government,

leaves 23% footing the entire billl which seems about right.

[reader2010]

It's not gonna happen in our life time. Most Americans don't have a clue or don't want to know because they don't even have fucking brains that can conduct reasonings no more, while there are many FEMA camps ready for those truly awakened. 

[somethingelse]

"every tool is a weapon if you hold it right"    -Ani DiFranco song "IQ"

Facebook could be the weaponized tool to wake the passive masses

here like elsewhere

[StychoKiller]

Just keep your eyes peeled (and your brainz sharp!) for Psy-ops:

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/02/black-ops-how-hbgary-wro...

[Huck T]

You say you want a revolution

Well, you know

[reader2010]

LEONARD COHEN -

Democracy ( is coming to the U.S.A.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yML6zzqFQzY

I'm sentimental,

if you know what I mean

I love the country but I can't stand the scene.

[Oh regional Indian]

What a thesis. Unfortunately, this revolution will be televised, marginalized and neutralized.

Or people have to come up with a better plan than food, guns, ammo beeeecheese!

The tools of communication currently used to "bring down" governments are controlled by? Exactly.

Who owns the largest munitions/weapons etc. factories in the world? Exactly.

List is long.

The wise would "really" prepare.

ORI

http://aadivaahan.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/wisdom-for-warriors-7/

[Ima anal sphincter]

Cutting torch. Watching a radio or TV tower fall might be pretty spectacular.

The power is in the numbers. If just 10 million marched on Washington and instead of just carrying signs, they (we) marched right into the WH, CONgress, and SC, CIA,etc... and said "YOUR FIRED - LEAVE NOW" we could take it back without any blood being spilled. Of course, the other option is to carry something that is slightly heavier than a sign. The number of totally outraged people grows daily. At some point, the see-saw will shift, instead of us eating their shit, they'll get to eat ours. Then it will be time to "deal" with the bankers.

[JW n FL]

I am happy to move some things around in my schedule, to make time whenever you have time to get things done.

[Papi_Al-Mahdi]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_liberty

[JW n FL]

NICE!!!!!! I will have a new pic up soon...

Good Luck and God Bless!!!

[ft65]

Quoting JW n FL,

>NICE!!!!!! I will have a new pic up soon...

I'll make an offering I know how much you like guns...:

http://img412.imageshack.us/img412/892/gunze.jpg

Is anyone minding the (GLP) store at the moment?

[Bob]

There were well over a million people demonstrating in state Capitals on behalf of labor yesterday . . . and this is just the very, very beginning. 

Watch labor lead the way here, just as they did in the twenties and thirties.

[yabyum]

Bob, +1. You are either for the people who get up and work in the morning, or the bankerz. Your choice

[Calmyourself]

Government Labor lead the way to what exactly a permanent slave state where I am hitched to their unaffordable plow?  Labor in the twenties and thirties was a different animal a private animal.  My Grandfather could decide for himself whether to patronize a business, union or not, where is my choice with a Government union in charge Bob?

[Bob]

I think the commentor above you sums it up well. 

[Peace is the x-axis]

"Or people have to come up with a better plan than food, guns, ammo beeeecheese!"

Stop using their currency. Each start producing our own. Debt and interest free -

http://theblissfulignoramus.com/reflections/the-peoples-nwo-every-man-hi...

[Bob]

Hell yeah.  The harder they push it, the harder they will fall. 

[Xkwisetly Paneful]

It isn't neo liberalism with the US federal government being the single largest:

employer,

real property owner,

renter,

landlord,

borrower,

lender,

40%+ of commerce involves the FED.

It is classic neo marxism, long past neo liberalism.

It is an abominable joke, takes 10 people just to deal with the red tape to create 1 job and yet they howl about Chinese labor and pollution laws as if they matter. Minimum 22% of anything produced in this country is taxes-long past neo liberalism, the current failure wasn't a failure of capitalism it was a failure of liberalism,

the banks and insurance companies are amongst the most heavily regulated in the world with amongst the highest reserves and it didn't matter.  Every added beaurocrat makes every other one that much less accountable and of course the liberals have replaced personal accountability and responsibility with governmental accountability and responsibility. Theoretical academic rule the roost over actual accomplished professionals. From the revolving door justice system to the watered down education the idea of achievement has been replaced with corruption and cronyism to the nth degree.