National Debt

As President Obama prepares to unleash his final State Of The Union speech, The White House has conveniently focused attention on the following six "success stories": The Economy (record low number of men in workforce), The Climate (too hot for retail, too cold for construction), Foreign Policy (bwuahahaha), Health Care (record number of Americans cutting back to afford medical costs), and Social Progress (record high racial tensions, police state, surveillance state,  and record low trust in government). But apart from that, Americans have The Kardashians, iGadgets, record levels of syphillis, and, of course, a record surge in national debt during any President's "reign."

The state of our nation under Obama has become more bureaucratic, more debt-ridden, more violent, more militarized, more fascist, more lawless, more invasive, more corrupt, more untrustworthy, more mired in war, and more unresponsive to the wishes and needs of the electorate. Most of all, the government, already diabolical and manipulative to the nth degree, has mastered the art of "do what I say and not what I do" hypocrisy.

When will we know that the United States is really close to “normalizing interest rates”? The U.S. dollar will no longer exist, and (hopefully) neither will the Federal Reserve – the entity which promised to “protect” that dollar.

Taking away from the government its power of compelling the citizenry to accept money that it monopolistically controls and abuses may serve as an important legal and economic change to force the government and those who live at its spending trough to face the reality of the welfare state’s ideological and fiscal bankruptcy before it is too late to avert a complete collapse of the society.

"In March, I introduced a federal budget amendment that would impose a temporary surtax to pay for our military operations against ISIS. When the Senate reconvenes in 2016, I again plan to explore this option."

The $1.15 trillion spending bill passed by Congress last Friday and quickly signed by President Obama is just the latest triumph in the plutocratic management of politics that has accelerated since 9/11...proof that Washington can work. Mainstream media didn’t stop to ask: “Yes, but work for whom?” Instead, the anchors acted as amplifiers for official spin - repeating the mantra-of-the-hour that while this is not “a perfect bill,” it does a lot of good things. “But for whom? At what price?” went unasked. Secrecy today. Secrecy tomorrow. Secrecy forever. They are determined that we not know who owns them.

James Madison, the father of the Constitution, put it best: “Take alarm,” he warned, “at the first experiment with liberties.” Anyone with even a casual knowledge about current events knows that the first experiment on our freedoms happened long ago. Worse, we have not heeded the warnings of Madison and those like him who understood that if you give the government an inch, they will take a mile. Unfortunately, the government has not only taken a mile, they have taken mile after mile after mile after mile with seemingly no end in sight for their power grabs. All of the signs point to something nasty up ahead.

Even though the odds are never in our favor, there is still hope. Not everyone has to make the extreme sacrifice in order to contribute to the revolution. There are thousands of small acts which will weaken the establishment: "Don’t be a slave to debt. Live beneath your means and accumulate some physical silver and gold. Don’t vote for candidates selected by the vested interests. Spread the message of liberty and freedom to anyone who will listen. Think critically. Do not trust your government. Prepare for the inevitable collapse of this rotten, fetid, corrupt paradigm."

Because we squandered our opportunity to correct our own problems, our problems shall be our legacy. It’s wretched how dumb we are in our greed to have everything right now in the cheapest way possible and how willing we are to force the debts of that consumption upon our grandchildren and to pretend that won’t hurt them. We live in economic denial.

101 years after the Christmas truces along the Western Front there is still no peace on earth. And the long suffering American taxpayers, who foot the massive bills generated by the War Party’s demented and destructive policies, have no clue that Imperial Washington is the principal reason.

The world didn’t completely fall apart in 2015, but it is undeniable that an immense amount of damage was done to the U.S. economy. So don’t be fooled by all the happy talk coming from Barack Obama and the mainstream media.  When you look at the cold, hard numbers, they tell a completely different story.  The following are 58 facts about the U.S. economy from 2015 that are almost too crazy to believe...

Yahoo’s annual Christmas party this year was a Roaring 20s / Great Gatsby theme, complete with champagne towers and a vintage Rolls Royce. The party itself, right down to the theme, was a symbol of waste, indulgence, and excess; it reported costly between $7 and $10 million to stage. The good old days are long gone. This is no longer a company that can afford such largess. And everyone seems to realize it... except Yahoo. Frankly, this seems like the perfect metaphor for the United States of America.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s seminal masterpiece Crime and Punishment is often thought of as one of the longest classics at more than 200,000 words. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2016, which was signed into law on Friday, is nearly twice as long. At 887 pages, the bill allocates $1.15 trillion in war and discretionary spending for fiscal year 2016 which began almost three months ago. (That’s an average of $1.3 billion in spending PER PAGE of the bill.) In making it public law, President Obama has effectively signed the death warrant of the US government’s finances.

"The key to understand the situation here is that this is not normalizing, and we don’t have a precedent. We really don’t. We’re kind of all being soothed and reassured by the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and the financial authorities that we’ve been down this path before, we’ve been down it many times, more often than not we’ve had rising markets as a result and, really, there’s nothing to worry about. The issue with that is there are many things this time that are entirely different..."

China did everything it could to prevent a collapse and it still happened.  How do you think other countries will do?