The past two days of ongoing metals oppression convinced me to write. This continuing government-conducted fraud and corruption is really getting irritating, and it tells an ominous tale.

Is it any wonder that we witness endless versions of “Extend and Pretend”? That we witness endless strangulation of the truth, such as is represented by free metals prices? That the nation is drowning in propaganda and lies so thick they could double the mass of our oceans?

They are going to keep this fraud going as long as they can, because every single day represents $2,800,000,000.00 in looted profits. The Middle Class has no idea what has been done to it. This is what has been done to it.

I believe that Yellen went to the White House to inform Obama and team that the Fed is witnessing a quiet, steady bank run taking place in the U.S. The Fed is worried about the fact that the people are apparently starting to figure out how totally corrupt the monetary and financial systems have become, and are now taking action to financially protect themselves.

The Fed is seeing bank balances being exchanged for cash and metals. Trotting out Summers and Draghi to demonize cash ($100s and Euro 500s) backfired; savvy people said to themselves, “If the government, banker shills (e.g., Summers; Peter Sands (author of the Harvard “ban cash” paper; etc.) and bankers are saying “A,” the truth must be “Z,” and we better get some of our money out of the banks, before the bail-ins that have been legalized and formalized are actually implemented.”

The establishment desperately needs to go to a cashless system, in order to effect the bail-in agenda, gain full-spectrum control over financial assets, and implement the IMF-proposed wealth tax, among other gambits, but they need more time to implement this. They must get non-cash payment devices into the hands of every citizen before going live with the cashless regime, but they are not there yet. However, their progress to date has been prodigious.

For example, most welfare benefits (e.g., Food Stamps, etc.) are now electronic, via EBT cards. And Social Security recipients must have bank accounts for direct deposits (to which a Debit Card can be appended); if they don’t, then receive their benefits via a “Treasury Direct” Master Card debit card. In just these two above categories, more than 110,000,000 people now have electronic payment cards. Add to this at least another 160,000,000 “banked” citizens, and as we can see, they are moving swiftly toward the goal of universal electronic payment capability among the populace. The infrastructure is largely in place, and progress from here will accelerate.

The day after the Yellen/Obama/Biden meeting, metals were slammed. Yes, this happens on a regular basis, but the timing was interesting nonetheless.

As we all know, over the past several days there has been a spate of stories about how counterfeit precious metals coins are “flooding the market.” These stories admonish citizens not to “waste their money” on “worthless” counterfeit coins, and make it sound as if the average citizen could never in a million years figure out how to distinguish a counterfeit coin from a genuine one. Message: Precious metals are extremely dangerous and you should keep your money in the bank, where it is safe.

Given that the vast preponderance of American citizens have never even touched a gold coin, let alone owned one, the propagandists are feeding on ignorance and naivete. It is easy to scare people away from something they know nothing about, and fear might hurt them. Just look at the Mark Dice video where he offers poor, clueless, “Everyman” citizens a choice between a free chocolate bar or a free 10 ounce silver bar: they literally recoil from the silver, as if it might attack them.

This kind of propaganda is just one part of the overall campaign to demonize metals and attempt to counteract the slow bleed of money out of the banks. We know for a fact that physical metals sales are at all time highs, both here and internationally. Bank cash withdrawal data is much harder for “outsiders” to obtain, but the banks, the Fed and the Treasury see this information instantaneously. Cash withdrawal data are the absolute last thing banks want people to have visibility into, because bank runs are, first and foremost, psychological phenomena.

Aware citizens have seen numerous news stories by now about bail-ins, and have also registered what the Cypriots and Greeks have endured. No rational person wants that kind of theft to occur to them, so the obvious human reaction is to go get some money from one’s bank account … particularly given that one’s funds now earn nothing sitting in the bank and given that the law is now crystal clear that depositors are subordinated creditors who will be the last people in line to see their own money, if any of it still exists after the banks are done helping themselves to it during a bail-in event.

Some people might object by saying, “The average person has no idea about bank bail ins,” but we’re not talking about the average person. The statistics are clear that the average person doesn’t have any money any longer, so they won’t care about something that bears no relationship to them, such as bail-ins. Recent estimates are that 65% of the people don’t have a spare $1,000 at this time. What we are talking about are the people who do have some money, and such people are likely to be aware of and sensitive to what is happening with bail-in legislation, Greece, Cyprus, Wall Street corruption, the theft of their savings, and the like. They weren’t able to save money by being financially stupid.

I could give you many more data points, but they all tell the same story. Money is on the move, out of the banks. The Fed and Treasury are extremely concerned about this, and are doing everything they can to stem the tide. They fully intend to expropriate a portion of this money, just to keep the government’s lights burning (the IMF Wealth Tax is not some theoretical notion; it is a plan), so they cannot allow it to get loose. The recent escalation in metals oppression is no surprise.

(By the way, I specialize in a research technique called Inferential Analytics. It is a very rigorous and accurate predictive technique that is based upon fundamental principles relating to Human Action, and something I have developed over many years. I use it in my private work, but someday might take it mainstream. The forecasts generated by Inferential Analytics at this time are beyond sobering, and that’s putting it mildly.)

One other thing: The Fed and Treasury have detailed visibility into funds flows (wires, checks, credit card transactions, etc.) to metals wholesalers (e.g., Apmex, CNT, and all the other Mint-authorized distributors), and downstream from there to the leading national retailers such as Monex, etc. (PM ads by such national retailers run all day long on media outlets like Fox. The retailers are clearly succeeding; if they were not, they would pull their ads. But we see the opposite: an increase in these ads). Additionally, the monetary authorities have direct visibility into eBay’s PM sales, which are significant. They are looking at these data and realizing there is a serious problem of money “disappearing” into metals, their worst nightmare, and into cash, their second worst nightmare.

It is likely that the anti-PM propaganda is going to intensify, and people will need to understand why it is happening in order to withstand and repel it. If there is no successful rebuttal of the propaganda, then the establishment will progressively poison the people’s minds about PMs, as a precursor to using some kind of pretext to prohibit its private ownership altogether, once again. So I do believe that this is an important matter, because we are looking at a full-scale effort to destroy one of the last and most fundamental bastions of freedom, financial freedom. If the people do not understand why metals are constantly demonized by the establishment, or the purpose of the ongoing price oppression, then they will fail to understand the importance of this battle, and how absolutely vital to their overall, and not just financial freedom the ability to own metals is to them.

Stewart Dougherty: I am a Harvard MBA, and Inferential Analytics leverages quantitative and qualitative techniques that I learned both in my education, and during a 30+ year business career. I am semi-retired, but have never worked harder in my life. About six years ago, I wrote several articles that were picked up by 24hgold, MarketOracle, Lew Rockwell, Goldseek and numerous other Internet publishers followed even by some magazines.