If the U.S. economy really is improving, then why are big U.S. retailers permanently shutting down thousands of stores? The “retail apocalypse” that I have written about so frequently appears to be accelerating.
As you will see below, major U.S. retailers have announced that they are closing more than 6,000 locations, but economic conditions in this country are still fairly stable. So if this is happening already, what are things going to look like once the next recession strikes?
Derrick Broze breaks down how two international trade deals threaten national sovereignty and could potentially harm various individual freedoms from Internet free speech to gun rights, all without any input from the public or their supposed representatives in government because they're secret. This is exactly how corporations usurp lawmaking authority from individual nations. How is this still conspiracy theory?
All problems, all crises, have at least one solution, if not many solutions. There is no such thing as an unwinnable scenario. Some may not be smart enough or courageous enough to see it, but the solution is always there, waiting to be discovered. The only fight that cannot be won is the fight in which the enemy makes all the rules and we foolishly abide by those rules. Life is not a game of chess, and a man can choose to be more than a pawn anytime he has the guts to do so.
In the past, I have likened the liberty movement to a rebellion against not just tyrants but the game itself - a group of people willing to walk away from the chess board and make their own rules. I stand by that assertion. However, simply walking away is not enough; we must also be willing to take actions that will destroy the game entirely.
In order to accomplish this task, any rebellion against corruption of power must be self-critical - more self-critical of its own weaknesses than opposing propagandists could ever be. Most of our problems as a society are being caused by a relatively small number of elitists, but we will never be able to undo these problems without understanding our weaknesses as much as the enemy’s weaknesses. In this final installment of my six-part series, I will talk about REAL solutions to the inevitable economic implosion in front of us, but I will also discuss the shortcomings of the liberty movement as an obstacle to the success of those solutions.
Last week we reported that a Citigroup economist said that we need to abolish currency like the U.S. dollar, or at the very least, tax those who possess it.
The whole idea made no sense, unless of course you are a big government stooge whose end-game is complete control over people's assets and a desire to track the purchasing activities of consumers.
Now, a new report from Paul Joseph Watson at Infowars.com suggests that this may well be the goal. It turns out that it’s not just Citigroup who wants cash to be banned.
There’s “free trade.” There’s “fair trade.” And then there’s what’s really happening.
The realities of globalization have made the price of labor somewhere between rock bottom and worthless.
Since the days of NAFTA, the WTO and a flood of cheap Chinese goods, major corporations – American-based and all the rest — have offshored production, taking advantage of virtual slave labor and the only edge that this kind of competition brings.
But now, American companies are taking advantage of something better than low-wage offshore labor – straightforward prison labor may be the best of both worlds for mega-corporations.
Earlier this week Michael Snyder warned that the bottom of our food chain is going through a catastrophic collapse with sea creatures dying in absolutely massive numbers. The cause of the problem is a mystery to scientists who claim that they can’t pinpoint how or why it’s happening.
What’s worse, the collapse of sea life in the Pacific Ocean isn’t something that will affect us several decades into the future. The implications are being seen right now, as evidenced by an emergency closure of fisheries along the West coast this week.
As everyone knows by now, the Federal Reserve’s main tool in economic warfare has become hyper low interest rates and, thus, extremely cheap money for large institutions vis-à-vis the controversial reign of QE – quantitative easing.
Now, the how-low-can-you-go climate has created negative interest rates, meaning not only that many investments carry no return but that many deposits cost money.
Well-known Citigroup economist William Buiter says the solution to this backwards market is to rein in the appeal of normal currencies like cash – because it is “causing problems” for central bank manipulation:
Get ready for another major worldwide credit crunch. Today, the entire global financial system resembles a colossal spiral of debt. Just about all economic activity involves the flow of credit in some way, and so the only way to have “economic growth” is to introduce even more debt into the system.
When the system started to fail back in 2008, global authorities responded by pumping this debt spiral back up and getting it to spin even faster than ever. If you can believe it, the total amount of global debt has risen by $35 trillion since the last crisis.
Unfortunately, any system based on debt is going to break down eventually, and there are signs that it is starting to happen once again.
Since I began writing analysis for the liberty movement more than eight years ago, I have always said that we will know when the endgame of the globalists is upon us when the criminals come out into the light of day and admit to their crimes. At that moment, it will be because they no longer fear either the repercussions or their plans being obstructed.
As I plan to show in this installment of my series on the hidden fiscal collapse of America, the endgame has indeed arrived. At the very least, the international elites seem to think success is within their grasp, for they now openly expose their own criminality. But they do so in a way that attempts to divert blame or to rationalize their actions as being for the “greater good.”
There have been a lot of theories about what could happen when Smart Meters (SMs) are tampered with and customers receive “false-reading, tampered-with” utility bills—water, gas, or electric—when hackers access the porous microwave networks that transmit in-the-house information that electric SMs constantly collect, then radio-transmit via microwaves back to utilities home offices.
That’s not some “pie-in-the-sky” theory; it’s of great concern to security experts!
According to Sally Ward-Foxton of Crosstalk (Oct. 2012)
But this increasing ‘digitalisation’ also adds a lot more opportunities for tampering with the meters in some way, resulting in security vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities obviously need to be considered before introduction of the smart meters to make sure everyone is paying their way when it comes to electricity.
Have tamper-proof-security-measures been instituted by utility companies?
The very same people that caused the last economic crisishave created a 278 TRILLION dollar derivatives time bomb that could go off at any moment. When this absolutely colossal bubble does implode, we are going to be faced with the worst economic crash in the history of the United States.
During the last financial crisis, our politicians promised us that they would make sure that “too big to fail” would never be a problem again. Instead, as you will see below, those banks have actually gotten far larger since then. So now we really can’t afford for them to fail.
The six banks that I am talking about are JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. When you add up all of their exposure to derivatives, it comes to a grand total of more than 278 trillion dollars. But when you add up all of the assets of all six banks combined, it only comes to a grand total of about 9.8 trillion dollars. In other words, these “too big to fail” banks have exposure to derivatives that is more than 28 times greater than their total assets. This is complete and utter insanity, and yet nobody seems too alarmed about it. For the moment, those banks are still making lots of money and funding the campaigns of our most prominent politicians. Right now there is no incentive for them to stop their incredibly reckless gambling so they are just going to keep on doing it.
Theories are flying after Walmart stores around the country suddenly announced that they were closing down for six months to deal with "plumbing" issues.
Now that California’s drought has entered its fourth year, Governor Jerry Brown is finally cracking down on state municipalities, and is trying to get them cut back at least 25% of their water usage.
With the threat of water shortages looming, many residents are quick to point fingers at California’s agricultural industry. What, with almond growers sucking up 1.1 trilliongallons of water a year, and the beef industry using 106 gallons of water for every ounce of meat, it looks like many Californians are ready to throw both small farmers and Big Ag under the bus.
However, this state’s water problems aren’t just relegated to agriculture.
Did you know that the number of publicly traded companies declaring bankruptcy has reached a five-year high? And did you know that Chinese exports are absolutely collapsing and that Chinese economic growth in 2014 was the weakest in over 20 years?
Even though things may seem to be okay on the surface for the global economy at the moment, that does not mean that big trouble is not percolating just under the surface.
On Wednesday, investors cheered as stocks soared to new highs, but almost all of the economic news coming in from around the planet has been bad.
In the first three installments of this series, we examined the realities behind supply and demand, unemployment and personal debt, and national debt. As has been proven in each consecutive article with ample evidence, mainstream establishment numbers are, for the most part, utter garbage. They are not legitimate. They are meaningless.
The figures and stats that do have some truth to them are so obscured from the public view and unreported by the media that they may as well be state secrets. The average person has no clue of their existence because his primary sources of information are establishment-dominated. Even MSM talking heads and economic “analysts” are so mesmerized by the false version of the economic world that they have no point of reference when suddenly confronted with singular facts. Some people call this catastrophic behavior a “positive feedback loop.” It is a mainstream echo chamber that has become a financial tomb.
Now that I have covered the lies within our economy that I can prove absolutely, it is time to move on to the lies that are more difficult to pin down. These lies often slip past our investigations because the hard data that could be used to expose them is simply not available to the general public. In fact, much of the data is not even available to government officials. I am, of course, talking about the hard data behind the activities of central banks across the globe — the International Monetary Fund, the Bank for International Settlements and the Federal Reserve in particular. In this installment, we will explore the purpose of these lies; to hide the imminent destruction of our currency — by hook, by crook and by fiat.
A coalition of major business groups is urging Stephen Harper to take a “leadership role” in completing the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Dan Dicks of Press For Truth breaks down the latest news on the TPP front.
There is an unprecedented reset coming to world financial markets, and if you’ve been paying attention it’s impossible to ignore the signs. In fact mega-investment funds, governments and central banks have been secretly buying up and storing physical gold in anticipation of an event that will leave the U.S. dollar effectively worthless and governments around the world angling for a new global currency mechanism, according to mining executive Keith Neumeyer.
But before the reset can happen Neumeyer, who recently founded First Mining Finance and has partnered with billionaire alternative asset investors like Eric Sprott and Rick Rule, says that foreign creditors must first deleverage their U.S. dollar debt, a move that is happening right now and is evidenced by the recent strength of the U.S. dollar.
Once these U.S. debt holders unwind their positions, however, the dollar will be allowed to crash and we should prepare for a total financial, economic and monetary realignment.
For ages, those who were too poverty-stricken to pay judgments and other outstanding debts were locked up, and forced to work it off under prison labor, along with the cost of incarceration.
But it fell out of fashion, and became an unlawful and unconstitutional form of punishment in the U.S. back in the 1830s, as well as in most other countries. The 14th Amendment strengthened equal protection under law, that is until recent decades. With new found economic pressures and plenty of new fines and offenses, debtors’ prisons are back.
And it is a harsh reality for thousands of struggling Americans. Many more could join them if they aren’t careful.
Derrick discusses Samuel E. Konkin III and his philosophy of Agorism -- the ideology which asserts that Liberty occurs in the real world in practice as Counter-Economics. Watch the video below for an introduction.
If you think the jobs market and larger economy are bad now, just wait for the future.
In the future, virtually everyone you know may be on the dole.
There are a lots of projections and scenarios about what to expect as technology advances to practically unimaginable heights.
Already many human jobs are being displaced by computers, and most trends point to a rise of automated assembly lines, computer-run logistics and services and robots to do jobs humans did before that.
By Michael Snyder
