Tag Archives: propaganda

Paul Craig Roberts: Without Truth, Government Becomes Totalitarian

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“THE conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” – Edward Bernays, the Godfather of Propaganda

It’s stunning to me the number of highly educated people I know who are blinded by the Orwellian fog that now engulfs the United States. Even if the Russian election meddling accusations were true, and there’s not been one shred of court-admissible evidence produced yet, so what? The U.S. interferes in elections and governments all over the world, including Russia. Thus is the power of propaganda. It’s difficult to know what’s real and what’s fiction because the accepted purveyors of “truth” and “news” have been captured by the political and corporate elitists, who use the traditional media outlets to advance their political and economic objectives.

“Today in America no member of the print and TV media or NPR dares to get within a hundred miles of the truth. It would be a career-ending event. Without a media dedicated to truth, there can be no control over government.” – Paul Craig Roberts. The following essay is a must-read from Paul Craig Roberts

On September 17, I posted my column, “Evidence is no longer a Western value.” I used as an example the blame that has been put on Russia for the shot down Malaysian airliner. No evidence whatsoever exists for the accusation, and massive evidence has been presented that the airliner was shot down by the neonazis that seized power as a result of the Washington-organized coup in Ukraine.

Blame was fixed on Russia not by any evidence but by continuous evidence-free accusations that began the moment the airliner was shot down. Anyone who asked for evidence was treated as a “Putin apologist.” This took evidence out of the picture.

Wherever we look in these times, we see evidence-free accusations established as absolute facts: Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction,” “Iranian nukes,” “Russian invasion of Ukraine,” the Trump/Putin conspiracy that stole the 2016 US presidential election, Syrian use of poison gas. Not a scrap of evidence exists for any of these accusations, but the truth of the accusations is established in many minds worldwide.

Science gave the world the principle of evidence-based fact, which did away with the burning of witches and political decisions based in superstitution. Truth became a force.

But truth can get in the way of agendas, and as elites recovered their power from the social, political, and economic reforms of a previous era, truth was divided into categories and cut so fine that it disappeared. For the elite truth became identical to their economic interests, and Identity Politics stripped truth of its universal meaning and reduced truth to self-pleading race and gender truth.

The result is that today truth is established not by evidence but by repetition of accusations and falsehoods.

This made it easy to destroy people and countries by lies alone. Who remembers Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the head of the International Monetary Fund and at the time the likely future president of France? Strauss-Kahn was out of step with Washington which wanted its puppet Sarkozy reelected. Strauss-Kahn came to New York and was accused by a hotel maid of sexual assault. He was arrested and jailed. The New York district attorney and media whores pronounced him guillty. Simultaneously, on cue, a French woman made the same claim. Case closed. No evidence. Just claims. Then it emerged that the hotel maid had just had very large sums of money far above her income level deposited to her bank account. Even more damning, it was revealed that Sarkozy knew of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest before the police announced it. The case fell apart, and the New York district attorney publicly apologized. But Strauss-Kahn had been forced to resign as Director of the IMF and was out of the French presidential election. So Washington won.

Today it is a common, routine tactic for both US political parties to produce a woman to bring accusations of sexual harassment, abuse, or assault against any heterosexual male appointee or nominee that either party regards to be out of step with its agenda. It happens so regularly that no sentinent person can possibly believe the woman. Sexual assault has been reduced to one of the dirty tricks of politics.

As hard as false accusations can be on individuals, they destroy entire countries. Just consider the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, currently Yemen, and Washington has not given up on the same fate for Syria and Iran. Based on nothing but Washington’s endlessly repeated false accusations, millions of peoples have been murdered, maimed, orphened, widowed, displaced, and sent as refugees overrunning Europe.

There is not a scrap of evidence anywhere that justifies Washington’s enormous crimes against humanity. Yet, these crimes that in a truth-conscious world would have resulted in several entire governments of the United States standing accused in the International Criminal Court, or the War Crimes Court, or whichever court, and perhaps in all of them, are ignored, because accusation alone against the destroyed countries and peoples sufficed to justify Washington’s war crimes against humanity.

What I have described is a truth-free world. There is no place for truth in the world that the West has created. The Western hostility to truth is overwhelming. As I write truth-tellers are being banned from Facebook, Twitter, and PayPal. Google makes their sites almost impossible to find. Throughout the Western World truth has been redefined as “Conspiracy Theory.”

Elites such as George Soros and innumerable tax-financed government agencies, such as the National Endowment for Democracy, spend taxpayers’ money discrediting those who tell the truth. Many in governments want truth-tellers locked up as enemies of the state, by which they mean “enemies of the self-interests of the ruling elites.”

You don’t need to believe me. Here are four books written by honorable persons, meticulously documented, full of evidence that make it clear that American elites have no respect whatsoever for truth. Truth is something that is in their way.

One of the books is Charlie Savage’s Takeover. Savage shows how Dick Cheney used the George W. Bush regime and 9/11 to destroy the separation of powers and the civil liberties in the US Constitution. When you read Savage’s book you will discover that the America that you think is here is not here. In its place is a dictatorship available to any president clever enough to use it. Savage’s book is one of the best pieces of investigative reporting that I have read.

The Roman system of government never recovered from Caesar crossing the Rubicon. I doubt that the US Constitution will ever recover from Dick Cheney.

Two of the books are by David Ray Griffin, one of the last and most determined of American protagonists for truth. In his book, Bush and Cheney: How They Ruined America and the World, Griffin makes, a decade after Savage, the same case against Dick Cheney. When two independently minded researchers reach the same conclusion, you can bet it is on the money. If the world survives Washington’s orchestrated conflict with Russia, Cheney will go down in history as the person who destroyed American constitutional government.

In this same book, Griffin also examines the official 9/11 story and exposes it as a total fabrication with no connection to any truth whatsoever. He takes up this case in his current, just released book with Elizabeth Woodworth, 9/11 Unmasked: An International Review Panel Investigation.

Anyone who is still brainwashed by the official 9/11 story can immediately free themselves from their deception by reading this book. There is no longer any doubt that 9/11 was an inside orchestrated event for the purpose of unleashing two decades, with more to come, of American aggression in the Middle East.

Griffin does not leave a single official statement about 9/11 standing as not a single official claim is based on any factual evidence whatsoever.

For seventeen years the world has been fed a pack of total lies based on nothing but accusations and in the face of massive evidence produced not by some collection of political hacks sitting as a 9/11 Commission, but by thousands of experts. Yet for seventeen years false accusations prevailed over heavily documented facts presented by disinterested experts called “conspiracy theorists” by those intent on covering up their crimes.

The fourth book is Mary Mapes’ Truth and Duty. Mary Mapes is the CBS producer whose team carefully prepared for Dan Rather the 60 Minutes report on George W. Bush’s failure to perform his Texas Air National Guard duty. Her story was absolutely correct, but she and Rather were destroyed by accusation alone. The Republicans set in attack mode the right-wing bloggers, and soon the official media joined in for the purpose of elevating their ratings at CBS’s expense.

CBS was vulnerable, because it was no longer independent but a part of Viacom’s empire. Mapes was already in trouble, because she had broken the Abu Ghraib torture story just at the moment that Bush and Cheney declared: “America doesn’t torture.” As the Cheney/Bush regime put pressure on Viacom, a corporate executive told Mapes: “You don’t have any idea how many millions of dollars Viacom is spending on lobbying in Wasington, and nothing you’ve done in the past year has helped.”

There you have it. The Viacom executives had no interest whatsoever in the truth, only in what advanced their lobbying interests in Washington. Mapes, a truth-teller had to go, and she did. And so did Dan Rather.

Ask yourselves where you can read articles like this. If you do not support the remaining portals of truth, you will find yourselves bound, like the Elven-kings, Dwarf-lords and Mortal Men in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, “in the darkness” by the elites ability to control the explanations that comprise your reality.

Retail Sales: Inflation Plus Extrapolation

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The footnotes are the most interesting section of every financial and economic reports.  They also happens to be least studied section of these reports.  Those who prepare these reports rely on this fact.

The monthly headline retail sales is based to a large extent on estimates, guesswork, invalid assumptions and statistical magic.  Examine the line-item details in this retail sales report link. Note the numerous lines for the May “estimate” that contain “(*).” Then scroll down to the footnotes.

“(*)” indicates, per the footnotes, that “advance estimates are not available for this kind of business.” Footnote 3 further explains that “Advance estimates are based on early reports obtained from a small number of firms…”.   In other words, a significant percentage of the retail sales are based on guesswork and inference.

Scroll further down the retail sales report and Table 2 shows the summary table (Table 2) which presents the month to month percentage change comparison for the latest month’s report.  The data in first four lines in this table is the data used for the headline reports.

Everyone uses these numbers, most without any knowledge whatsoever about the degree to which the data “behind” the numbers is comprised of highly questionable guesswork and unsubstantiated, if not entirely problematic, statistical inference and  adjustment calculus.

Additionally,  there’s a section in the report that explains methodology for the guesswork.  “Advance estimates are computed using a link relative estimator.”  A “link relative estimator” is a polite descriptor that basically means, “we assume that the historical growth rates implied by our historical reports can be applied to growth rate we assume in  this month from the previous month.”  On top of all of that, the Census Bureau then applies its nefarious “seasonal adjustment” factors to the data.  Keep in mind that a significant portion of the data is pulled out their ass.

All of this methodology is explained in further detail in the tabs on the main Monthly Retail Trade page of the Census Bureau. The information spread out in this section substantiates every assertion I have put forth above. It requires sifting through the “how data are collected,” “definitions” and “FAQs.”  I’m probably one of the few analysts curious enough to subject myself to this brain damage.

By the Census Bureau’s own trumped up numbers, most of the “gain” in retail sales from April to May, if indeed a bona fide gain occurred, was from gasoline and clothing inflation.   The numbers in the report are expressed in nominal terms.  They are not adjusted for the effects of price inflation.  Removing the effect of price inflation would yield the change in “unit” volume of retail sales.  This would be the number of true interest.

Finally, the estimated change in retail sales is not consistent with the patterns in consumer credit.  Based on the Fed’s consumer credit report, the use of revolving credit (credit cards, checking overdraft accounts, etc) has been contracting.  With the savings rate at an all-time low, the only way that retail sales unit volume could possibly increase is through the use of credit.  Thus, while guesswork and inflation is driving today’s headline report, in all likelihood unit volume of sales declined.  This latter assertion is indeed supported by recent manufacturing, factor order, durable goods and wage growth data.

U.S. Labor Market Reports: Someone Is Lying

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The propaganda laced with bold lies is enveloping the media. The JOLTS report (Job Openings and Labor Turnover)  released today alleges that the number of job openings in April hit a record.   Of course, the April number was based on large revisions to previous data.  The number reported is also “seasonally adjusted” and predicated on statistical inferences.   In fact, 6.7 million allegedly vacant jobs is not only an all-time high but it also exceeds the number of “unemployed” in the Government’s monthly employment “report.”

How do we know both the reported job vacancies and unemployed are an outright fabrication?  Because wages would be soaring.  It’s simple supply/demand economics.  According to the Government, the demand for employees far exceeds the supply of workers.  But if this were case, the price of workers would be rising quickly.  It’s not.

Last Friday the Government reported Friday morning that the economy added 223,000 jobs, exceeding the Wall St. estimate of 190k. I go from general indifference to outright disgust with the payroll report. But Friday’s report was jaw-dropping horrification. Early Monday before the report hit the tape, Trump – who was briefed on the numbers Thursday evening – tweeted that he was “looking forward to seeing the employment numbers at 8:30 a.m.” I assumed the day before that the report would be rigged, but that confirmed it.

Here’s the problem with the 3.8% narrative: a “tight” labor market at theoretic “full employment is not confirmed by the “price of labor” – i.e. wages.

A 4% unemployment rate is considered “full employment.” The alleged unemployment rate has been running at 4% or lower for several months. But this story-line is not confirmed by wage growth. If the economy were at full employment accompanied by a “tight labor market,” wages should be soaring. Not only is wage growth dropping toward zero, it’s lower than the average wage growth shown in the chart going back to 1998.

The numbers and narrative as presented by the Government are simply not credible. The BLS statisticians removed another 170k from the labor force. The number of working age people not counted as part of the labor rose to 95.92 million – an all-time high. The labor force participation rate is 62.7%. Outside of Sept 2015-November 2015, this is the lowest level for the labor force participation rate since February 1978. Back then most families had one wage-earner per household.

Additionally, there are 102 total working age people who are either unemployed (6.1 million) or “not in labor force” (95.9 million). That’s 31.3% of the total U.S. population (Census Bureau: 2017 U.S. population 325.7 million). Of the 155 million people reported to be employed, 27 million are part-time. This means 39.2% of the total U.S. population works full-time, assuming that number is remotely accurate. Good luck to the Government keeping the Social Security Trust funded…

As for the most glaringly fraudulent aspect of the report, the BLS reports that “retail trade” was the 2nd largest producer of jobs in May. How is that heavenly possible? Retail sales are sagging and serial bankruptcies in brick/mortar retailing are dumping retail labor onto the market. There are other glaring inconsistencies with economic reality on Main Street. One number, however, that might be realistic: Health care/social assistance is credited with providing 31.7k new jobs. That is possible because the category is primarily Government jobs.

One last point. The birth/death model – which is reported before seasonal adjustments – is credited with throwing in 215,000 jobs into the total pool, which is then statistically “adjusted.” The BLS statistical sausage grinder spit out 223k jobs, of which the Birth/Death model contributed the majority on a non-adjusted basis. It’s just not a credible statistic. As we know, the Govt uses the birth/death “model” as a “plug” to create jobs that exist only on paper.

The chart above is the employment-population ratio. It shows the number of people “employed” as a ratio of the total working-age population. Prior to the 2008 financial crisis, the current employment-population ratio is the lowest going back to 1985. The ratio appears currently to be peaking. As it turns out, the four previous peaks in this ratio were followed by an economic/financial crisis and a severe stock market sell-off. My guess is that you will not see this graphic presented on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg or any of the other mainstream financial media outlets.

Paul Craig Roberts: Make Believe America

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Americans live a never-never-land existance. The politicians and presstitutes make sure of that.

Consider something as simple as the unemployment rate. The US is said to have full employment with a January 2018 unemployment rate of 4.1 percent, down from 9.8 percent in January 2010 – BLS Statistics.

However, the low rate of unemployment is contradicted by the long-term decline in the labor force participation rate. After a long rise during the Reagan 1980s, the labor force participation rate peaked in January 1990 at 66.8 percent, more or less holding to that rate for another decade until 2001 when decline set in accelerating in September 2008.

Today the labor force participation rate is the lowest since February 1978, reversing all of the gains of the Reagan years.

Allegedly, the current unemployment rate of 4.1 percent is the result of the long recovery that allegedly began in June 2009. However, normally, employment opportunities created by economic recovery cause an increase in the labor force participation rate as people join the work force to take advantage of employment opportunities. A fall in the participation rate is associated with recession or stagnation, not with economic recovery.

How can this contradiction be reconciled? The answer lies in the measurement of unemployment. If you have not looked for a job in the last four weeks, you are not counted as being unemployed, because you are not counted as being part of the work force. When there are no jobs to be found, job seekers become discouraged and cease looking for jobs. In other words, the 4.1 percent unemployment rate does not count discouraged workers who cannot find jobs.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics has a second measure of unemployment that includes workers who have been discouraged and out of the labor force for less than one year. This rate of unemployment is 8.2 percent, double the 4.1 percent reported rate.

The US government no longer tracks unemployment among discouraged workers who have been out of the work force for more than one year. However, John Williams of shadowstats.com continues to estimate this rate and places it at 22 or 23 percent, a far cry from 4.1 percent.

In other words, the 4.1 percent unemployment rate does not count the unemployed who do show up in the declining labor force participation rate.

If the US had a print and TV media instead of the propaganda ministry that it has, the financial press would not tolerate the deception of the public about employment in America.

Junk economists, of which the US has an over-supply, claim that the decline in the labor force participation rate merely reflects people who prefer to live on welfare than to work for a living and the current generation of young people who prefer life at home with parents paying the bills. This explanation from junk economists does not explain why suddenly Americans discovered welfare and became lazy in 2001 and turned their back on job opportunities. The junk economists also do not explain why, if the economy is at full employment, competition for workers is not driving up wages.

The reason Americans cannot find jobs and have left the labor force is that US corporations have offshored millions of American jobs in order to raise profits, share prices, and executive bonuses by lowering labor costs. Many American industrial and manufacturing cities have been devastated by the relocation abroad of production for the American consumer market, by the movement abroad of IT and software engineering jobs, and by importing lower paid foreign workers on H1-B and other work visas to take the jobs of Americans. In my book, The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism, I give examples and document the devastating impact jobs offshoring has had on communities, cities, pension funds, and consumer purchasing power.

CLICK HERE TO READ THE REST:  PCR – MAKE BELIEVE AMERICA

Central Bank Intervention Slams Paper Gold

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This isn’t some trader’s “fat finger” accidentally overloading the sell button and pressing “sell.” This is unadulterated BIS/ECB/BoE/Fed sponsored market intervention:

At 4:01 EST, a paper gold nuclear bomb was detonated in the Comex Globex computer system. The graph above is just the August “front month” paper gold contract on the Comex. In that contract 1.49 million ozs of paper gold were dumped into the Comex electronic trading system. Zerohedge is attributing 1.88 million ozs. That would include the selling in all of the paper gold contract months.

But that’s not the entire amount of the paper hit. There would have been a large amount of LBMA gold forward paper gold contracts dumped in correlation with the Comex paper avalanche. ZH attributes $2.2 billion in paper gold dumped.  But the real number including LBMA forwards dumped was much larger.

“The mysterious plunge has the market spooked,” says some idiot named Bob Habercorn from RJO. This was not “mysterious.” It was intentional – a shock and awe market intervention that was intended to “spook” the market. That quote is from a Bloomberg report full of fake news (caution, this article contains fake news:  LINK).

The article claims that China bought less from Hong Kong in May. In fact, the amount of gold exported from Switzerland to India and Hong Kong was up 39% from April, according to Platts. Furthermore, we have no clue how much gold moves into China through Beijing and Shanghai, numbers which are intentionally hidden from the world.

Here’s the reason that today was selected by the BIS et al to attack gold in the paper market in an effort to scare the crap out of the market:

the day was well chosen as the Muslim world including Turkey was closed for the end of Ramadan as was India which has the amiable habit of observing the holidays of religious minorities. – from John Brimelow’s Gold Jottings

Two of the largest buyers of physical gold in the world right now, India + Turkey, were closed for the observance of a religious holiday. And Shanghai closed for the day 31 minutes before the paper dump.

4:00 a.m. EST is one of the slowest, lowest volume trading periods during any 24 hour period. Why would a seller of a large number of contracts sell at that time of day, when the largest buyers of what is being sold are not in the market at the time of the sale?

If it were merely a “fat finger” – the fake news narrative – then the mistake would have been immediately corrected and the price would have quickly recovered.  Anyone who buys the “fat finger” story is either tragically ignorant or hopelessly naive.

When India returns tonight to the market, I would expect gold to get a strong bid.  Indians have a habit of buying a lot more physically deliverable gold than they might have otherwise when the western Central Banks put gold “on sale” by lowering the price in the paper market.  I suspect Turkey and China will increase their appetite as well.

The mining stocks per the HUI barely acknowledge the artificial price take-down.  The HUI is down less that 1%.  In the past, on a day when gold was taken down to this degree, the HUI would have dropped at least 4-5%.   It’s almost as if mining stock traders are laughing at the latest Central Bank antics.  I know I am…

Fake News And Real Money

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But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over. Here, as so often in this world, persistence is the first and most important requirement for success. – Adolf Hitler

Propaganda, also known as “fake news,” has become the norm in mainstream media reporting. Somehow the idea of Russia hacking the DNC computers morphed into the generic, “Russia hacked the election.” Per Hitler’s formula, Hillary Clinton introduced the idea during one of the presidential debates and kept repeating it until the press seized it and ran all the way with to the end zone with “Trump is a Russian ally.” Now Congress is pre-occupied with the fraudulent charge that Russia is controlling U.S. politics. The whole spectacle is beyond idiotic.

In a similar manner, the reporting of economic statistics has become another tool of propaganda. The Government, as we all well know by now, spits out economic reports based on shoddy statistical samples that are seasonally adjusted. Then the data that is cooked for any specific month is annualized. While the result might not be too far off base for any specific month, the errors aggregate over time so that some statistics, like the GDP report, bear no resemblance to reality.

A great example of using propaganda to promote an idea is the continuous mantra coming from the National Association of Realtors that “low inventory” is hampering home sales. It’s an effective device to make the public think that a lack of homes for sale is the explanation for declining sales. It’s also a lie. Homebuilders are sitting on a record level of inventory. Flippers and investors bought 37% of all existing homes that traded in 2016. Many are sitting on homes they can’t sell for enough to cover their rehab expenses. The over $750,000 segment of the market is flooded with inventory.

The truth is that, if you examine the historical data in order to question the NAR’s assertions, the facts show that since 1999 – which is when the Fed began tracking existing home sales – relative inventory levels do not drive home sales:

In fact – if anything – there is an inverse correlation between inventory levels and home sales. In other words, since 1999, homes sales rise when inventories are low!

Thus propaganda is a tool used to manage public perception.  Unfortunately, a high percentage of the population only consumes headlines and sound-bytes.  It’s the perfect set-up for politicians to employ Hitler’s advice on administering propaganda.  The commonly accepted idea is, in fact, the opposite of the truth.

The commandeering of a country by elitists begins by eliminating real money and replacing it with a fraudulent fiat currency.  But the eastern hemisphere is moving in an opposite direction as the west.  As reproduced in The Daily Coin, Russia and China have quietly struck an agreement laying the groundwork to replace the U.S. dollar’s reserve status with a gold-backed currency system:   Moscow and Beijing join forces to bypass US dollar in world money market.    In today’s episode of the Shadow of Truth we discuss the decline of the United States and the advancement of the new superpower bloc emerging in the east.

Big Brother In America Is The Media

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Journalism and a free, open media is another “check and balance on the three branches of Government and we don’t have that check and balance anymore.” – Shadow of Truth

One of the hallmarks of a totalitarian political regime is control of the media. In 1996 president Bill Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996. This law, which was bought and paid for by corporate media lobbies, allowed big corporations to acquire and consolidate media outlets nationwide.

The 1996 law lifted the limit on the number of television and radio stations any one corporation could own. In 2003, the FCC voted to lift the ban on cross-ownership of newspapers and full-power broadcast stations that serviced the same community. This was the final nail in the coffin of free and competitive media and news-reporting in the U.S.

The 1996 Clinton law followed by the lifting of the cross-ownership ban enabled Corporate America to increase their monopoly on the flow of information in the U.S. and around the world. Now six corporations control well over 90% of all media in the U.S.: NewsCorp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS and Comcast.

“Wall Street slips on and geopolitical worries” (Reuters headline).   What does the Trump/Obama wiretapping squabble have to do with whether the stock market goes up or down? It has nothing to do with whether or not corporations can produce goods and services profitably. Too be sure the accusation of wiretapping and the possibility that the accusation is accurate is troublesome in and of itself.  But it has nothing to do with the fact that the stock market is currently the most overvalued in U.S. history.

The headlines, however  reflect the degree to which all media reporting in the U.S. is now under the control of Corporate America – a Corporate America that has assumed control of the political process and has become Orwell’s  Big Brother .

Most people associate the term “fascism” with an authoritarian and nationalistic political system. But it’s much more than that. Mussolini described “fascism” as the merger between Corporations and Government. The political system in the U.S. can easily be considered “fascist,” as Corporate America and Wall Street have used billions of dollars to take over the entire political process including all of the mainstream outlets of communication and news reporting.

The result is directly reflected in the nature of the 2016 presidential and congressional elections. The content of any news reporting is now a product of the material fed through the broadcast and print communication outlets controlled by six corporate monoliths and the Too Big To Fail banks that finance the system.

A good friend and colleague of the Shadow of Truth, John Titus, once quipped with regard to the public’s consumption and acceptance of anything reported as news, “put it on CNN and it’s true.” This statement succinctly summarizes the propaganda which supports the process by which the Government seeks to control the views and perceptions of the public at large.  In today’s Shadow of Truth podcast, we toss around that fact that the United States has become a Goebellsian “playground” and George Orwell’s nightmare:

No Really, The Russians Hacked Us

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Hillary and her supporters have vehemently asserted that “seventeen intelligence agencies” agree with the assessment that Russia hacked the election. It might be greater news to the American people to hear that there actually are seventeen such agencies out there. Perhaps Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Obama might explain exactly what they are beyond the CIA, the FBI, the DIA, the NSA, and DHS. Personally, I feel less secure knowing that there are so many additional surveillance services sifting through everybody’s digital debris trail.  – James Kunstler, “Deep State Blues”

The public voted with its wallet and truthseeking data reveals that in any election in which the growth in average household real disposable income is less than 3.1%, the incumbent party loses the White House.  The study goes back to the 1932 election.  Real disposable income growth was well below 3.1% in 2016 and the Democrats lost the White House.  It’s really as simple as that, for the most part.

In addition, enough of the voting public determined that, with the help of the Wikileak emails, Hillary Clinton could not be trusted.  In fact, the Wikileak oeuvre revealed that the entire Democratic Party was indefatigably corrupt.  At the root of this corruption is the Clinton Foundation.  But beyond that it was discovered that, among other atrocities, the DNC conspired to rig the Democratic Primary against Bernie Sanders and the current DNC Chairman, Donna Brazile, slipped debate questions to Hillary ahead of the debates.

The reaction to this by the mainstream media, largely conduits of pro-Clinton propaganda, the DNC and Hillary is to blame the Wikileak truth revelations on the Russians.  As a result, the generic fake news meme regarding the election results has turned into “the Russians hacked us.”

All this mind you in an utterly complete void of proof.  Where’s the proof?  None of Hillary’s supposed intelligence agencies can produce one shred of evidence that points to Russian email hacking.   Show us the money.  Please.   Lost in this entire Orwellian fog of lies is the bare truth, for all to see.  If the Wikileak emails revealed that the Democratic Party – led by Hillary Clinton – is profoundly corrupt to the core, what difference does it make from where the source of truth, the source of holy light, appeared?   

The truth is the enemy now.  Rather than fearing Russia, the public should be looking for reasons to not live in fear of the U.S. Government.

The same Orwellian fog has enveloped the gold and silver markets, especially as the facts apply to the massive demand for gold in the eastern hemisphere.  Mainstream western financial media has become flooded with highly misleading and outright fraudulent news stories about the precious metals markets.  In this latest episode of the Shadow of Truth, we dissect through we pull away the wizard’s curtain to shed light on the facts:

Fake News, Propaganda And False Flags

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The Fake News conspiracy is starting to lose steam.  It’s time to bury it completely. But this won’t happen because the “Fake News” narrative is another propaganda tool that is being used to distract the public’s attention from a collapsing economy and political system.

Paul Craig Roberts sent around an article that cites a former top NSA official who states explicitly that the NSA would have evidence of Russian influence on the election.  Apparently it has none:

If the idiots in the intelligence community expect us to believe them after all the crap they have told us (like WMD’s in Iraq and “no we don’t collect data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans”) then they need to give clear proof of what they say. So far, they have failed to prove anything.

Which suggests they don’t have proof and just want to war monger the US public into a second cold war with the Russians.

After all, there’s lots and lots of money in that for the military-industrial-intelligence-governmental complex of incestuous relationships

This article is a must-read:   No Evidence Russia Hacked The Election.

The Russian/Fake News narrative is designed to foment Cold War 2.0 with Russia.  Russia and China are working – understandably – to remove the dollar as the world’s sole reserve currency.   The only means by which the U.S. can try to stop this is military.   It’s beginning to escalate into a dangerous game.  Trump seems to be perpetuating it by rhetorically fanning the flames with China in the South China Sea.

When an Empire is collapsing, history tells us that the Government foments “patriotism” through the heavy application of propaganda that is used to support rampant imperialism.  This is where the U.S. is right now.

Of course, Trump’s motive for enabling the Fake News narrative to perpetuate is to distract attention from his cabinet appointments, which have a decided Big Oil and Big Bank flavor to them.  So much for draining the Swamp.

This chart from William Banzai is priceless:

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Guest Post: Here’s Why The Banksters Are In Trouble

Financial Markets, Housing Market, Market Manipulation, U.S. Economy, , , ,

If the Fed were to reverse the portion of its QE in which it injected trillions onto big bank balance sheets as well as fomented a mortgage/housing bubble, the Too Big To Fails – including Goldman Sachs – would collapse.  Make no mistake, it would ultimately prove to be a good thing.

However, there’s also a growing groundswell of grassroot Americans who have “woken up.”  Perhaps the only good attribute of the last election is that it hastened the rate of enlightenment.   Too be sure, the number of Americans who understand the difference between Truth and Propaganda has vastly increased.

A reader of this blog and subscriber to the Mining Stock and Short Seller Journals submitted this narrative of a recent “enlightenment” experience that occurred while on a routine visit to the local barber shop.  It’s worth perusing:

I’m almost speechless as a result of the experience I just had. I have just returned from getting a haircut at the local barbershop downtown. I was there along with the barber, a semi-retired gentleman who now drives a school bus part-time, and a local hay farmer. Our conversation was an absolute stunner, and provides very compelling (albeit admittedly anecdotal) evidence that the bankster elite are in BIG trouble.

Why?

Well, first of all, the barber (in his late 30s) was explaining for all of us how the big banks are in MAJOR trouble on account of (and I am quoting verbatim) “the trillions of dollars of complex derivatives they are holding that are going to implode as a result of the rapid rise in US treasury bond yields.”

The bus driver then explained to everyone how he is no longer keeping any more money in his checking account than he needs to cover outstanding checks; that otherwise he holds all of his money in cash at home. Why? Because he is afraid that, at some point in the very near future, “we’ll all wake up on a Monday morning to discover that a bank holiday has been declared, and none of us will be able to access our funds.”

Finally, the hay farmer told us all how, as a result of having an excellent harvest this year, he had opted to pay off, two years early, the loan on his new tractor. He explained how he had received a call from the bank holding the loan, and the loan officer had attempted to convince him to NOT pay off the loan yet, and even offered to refund twelve months of interest payments if he would simply carry the loan to full term. The farmer adamantly refused. His response to the bank officer? “I understand perfectly well why you want to keep this loan on your books for two more years: you are using my loan as collateral to borrow short and lend long to the tune of at least ten times my original loan balance, and if I pay off my loan early, my debt and your collateral will be extinguished at the same time, and you’ll have to come up with more collateral to back up loans you never should have made in the first place.”

I was stunned!

“… borrow short and lend long … if I pay off my loan early, my debt and your collateral will be extinguished … loans you never should have made in the first place.” WOW!

I sat there absolutely amazed at the relatively high level of understanding manifest by these “salt of the earth” types — and I realized the extent to which the global elite have grossly underestimated the common folk of this world. I am, at this moment, as hopeful for the future of America as I have been in many years.

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