FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH

Jim believes the worst is yet to come and paints a very frightening picture, like nothing most of us have ever seen. – Ilene

FOR WHAT IT’S WORTH 

Courtesy of Jim Quinn at The Burning Platform

Stephen Stills wrote the song For What It’s Worth in 1967. It was composed three years into the Second Turning, the Consciousness Revolution. The song has come to symbolize the turbulence, mistrust, rage, paranoia, anti-war spirit, and the anti-establishment mood of the 1960’s. An Awakening era has many parallels to a Crisis era at the outset. A traumatic event or events triggers the mood alteration in the country which sets the next twenty years in motion. In 1929 the stock market crash triggered a 17 year Crisis. In 1963, the assassination of John F. Kennedy triggered a 20 year Awakening. In 2005, the housing collapse has triggered the next American Crisis which we are living through today.

 

There is something happening here, and what it is ain’t exactly clear. The series of continuous crises caused by government actions has allowed the political class in conjunction with an oligopoly of bankers and mega-corporations to hijack the American Republic. The American public has allowed this to happen by being distracted by the imaginary differences between the Democratic and Republican parties. There is virtually no difference between these parties. Both parties have taken away American freedoms and liberties. The government has waged undeclared wars since the 1950’s, they have restricted freedom of speech, freedom to own a gun, freedom to healthcare, freedom to protest, and freedom to live our lives the way we choose.

Government used the 9/11 attack to create a new bureaucracy that can monitor citizens on an colossal and treacherous scale. The government used the financial crisis, which was caused by government policies, to strengthen their power over the financial industry, in order to advance their agenda of debt financed expansion of the corporate fascist state. This crisis will destroy 1,000 small banks and shift more authority to the ten mega-banks that control 75% of the U.S. market. Rather than letting two horribly run U.S. automakers (GM & Chrysler) go bankrupt, the U.S. government took them over, passed wasteful programs (Cash for Clunkers) to prop them up with taxpayer funds, and forced GMAC to continue to make bad auto loans with taxpayer funds. After decades of government manipulation and abuse of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, these two behemoths have lost $200 billion of taxpayer funds by backing loans to people who should not own homes. The takeover of the entire U.S. economy by the Federal government will be complete with the passage of the Democratic healthcare bill.

 

While Americans have been kept busy and amused by their accumulation of worldly possessions using their 15 credit cards and loans from the 10 mega-banks that control the country, the two party system has stolen their freedom and liberty. Representative from Texas Ron Paul described the charade in September 2008, just before the latest presidential election fraud. 

Pretending that a true difference exists between the two major candidates is a charade of great proportion. Many who help to perpetuate this myth are frequently unaware of what they are doing and believe that significant differences actually do exist. Indeed, on small points there is the appearance of a difference. The real issues, however, are buried in a barrage of miscellaneous nonsense and endless pontifications by robotic pundits hired to perpetuate the myth of a campaign of substance.

The truth is that our two-party system offers no real choice. The real goal of the campaign is to distract people from considering the real issues.

Influential forces, the media, the government, the privileged corporations and moneyed interests see to it that both party’s candidates are acceptable, regardless of the outcome, since they will still be in charge. It’s been that way for a long time. George Wallace was not the first to recognize that there’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.

 

Battle lines are being drawn. Since there are very few Americans left who experienced the last American Crisis from 1929 to 1946, the majority of Americans are being blindsided today. The housing collapse which began in 2005 was the spark that has ignited a Crisis that will conclude in glory or collapse. The non-thinking gullible masses believe the lies they are being fed by politicians, bankers and mainstream media. When the majority of Americans think the Gettysburg Address has something to do with the Post Office and don’t know the old dudes on the Nickel and Dime, you cannot expect them to recognize what awaits them based on history. The initial spark has triggered a chain reaction which has resulted in government actions which will create further emergencies. The known problems of unsustainable debt, civic rot, and global chaos have been festering for decades. They will now coalesce into a violent denouement. Strauss and Howe wrote their book, The Fourth Turning, in 1997. These are their chilling words describing the onset of the next Crisis:

It is unlikely that the catalyst will worsen into a full-fledged catastrophe, since the nation will probably find a way to avert the initial danger and stabilize the situation for awhile. The new mood and its jarring new problems will provide a natural end point for the Unraveling-era decline in civic confidence. As the Crisis catalyzes, these fears will rush to the surface, jagged and exposed. Distrustful of some things, individuals will feel that their survival requires them to distrust more things. This behavior could cascade into a sudden downward spiral, an implosion of societal trust.

If so, the implosion will strike the financial markets – and, with that, the economy. Aggressive individualism, institutional decay, and long-term pessimism can proceed only so far before a society loses the level of dependability needed to sustain the division of labor and long-term promises on which a market economy must rest. Through the Unraveling, people will have preferred the exciting if bewildering trend toward social complexity. But as the Crisis mood congeals, people will come to the jarring realization that they have grown helplessly dependent on a teetering edifice of anonymous transactions and paper guarantees. Many Americans won’t know where their savings are, who their employer is, what their pension is, or how their government works. The era will have left the financial world arbitraged and tentacled; Debtors won’t know who holds their notes, homeowners who owns their mortgages, and shareholders who runs their equities – and vice versa.

• As visionary Prophets replace Artists in elder-hood during a Crisis, they push to resolve ever-deepening moral choices, setting the stage for the secular goals of the young.
• As pragmatic Nomads replace Prophets in midlife during a Crisis, they apply toughness and resolution to defend society while safeguarding the interests of the young.
• As team working Heroes replace Nomads in young adulthood during a Crisis, they challenge the political failure of elder-led crusades, fueling a society-wide secular crisis.
• As Artists replace Heroes in childhood during a Crisis, they are overprotected at a time of political convulsion and adult self-sacrifice.

This generational transition is the reason for the mood shift that is occurring today. Those in power are getting nervous. The population didn’t act this way during the 1990’s. Town hall meetings were barely attended. No one called Congressmen’s offices or flooded their mailboxes with emails and faxes. Something is in the air, and those in power ignore it at their own risk. This country is about to explode and the intellectuals in the positions of authority and thought control are trying to apply reason and the usual mainstream media PR spin. They sit in their extravagant offices at polished mahogany desks on the 45th floor of their glittering office towers, eating gourmet meals in executive dining rooms, writing the pabulum that passes for journalism today and descending from upon high on the Sunday morning talk shows to grace us with their wisdom. The American people have had enough of their lies.

Simon Johnson in his article The Quiet Coup describes the raping of America by the ruling elitist bankers who now call the shots in Washington DC:

Elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits—such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998—were ignored or swept aside.

The American financial industry gained political power by amassing a kind of cultural capital—a belief system. Over the past decade, the attitude took hold that what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The banking-and-securities industry has become one of the top contributors to political campaigns, but at the peak of its influence, it did not have to buy favors the way, for example, the tobacco companies or military contractors might have to. Instead, it benefited from the fact that Washington insiders already believed that large financial institutions and free-flowing capital markets were crucial to America’s position in the world.

By now, the princes of the financial world have of course been stripped naked as leaders and strategists—at least in the eyes of most Americans. But as the months have rolled by, financial elites have continued to assume that their position as the economy’s favored children is safe, despite the wreckage they have caused.
 

 

The government response to the financial crisis guarantees that part two will be far worse than part one. The propping up of bankrupt banks, Keynesian stimulus measures, toothless regulatory legislation, new massive healthcare plans, and unprecedented levels of government debt will not solve a problem caused by excessive leverage in 10 Too Big To Fail financial firms and thirty years of debt financed spending splurge by mindless consumers. Simon Johnson clearly lays out how these actions will play a large role in this Crisis:

Our future could be one in which continued tumult feeds the looting of the financial system, and we talk more and more about exactly how our oligarchs became bandits and how the economy just can’t seem to get into gear.

The second scenario begins more bleakly, and might end that way too. But it does provide at least some hope that we’ll be shaken out of our torpor. It goes like this: the global economy continues to deteriorate, the banking system in east-central Europe collapses, and—because eastern Europe’s banks are mostly owned by western European banks—justifiable fears of government insolvency spread throughout the Continent. Creditors take further hits and confidence falls further. The Asian economies that export manufactured goods are devastated, and the commodity producers in Latin America and Africa are not much better off. A dramatic worsening of the global environment forces the U.S. economy, already staggering, down onto both knees. The baseline growth rates used in the administration’s current budget are increasingly seen as unrealistic, and the rosy “stress scenario” that the U.S. Treasury is currently using to evaluate banks’ balance sheets becomes a source of great embarrassment.

Under this kind of pressure, and faced with the prospect of a national and global collapse, minds may become more concentrated.

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances.

 

In a year of job losses, foreclosures and bag lunches, Americans have spent record-breaking amounts of money on guns and ammunition. The most obvious sign of their demand: empty ammunition shelves. At points during the past year, bullets have been selling faster than factories could make them. Gun owners have bought about 12 billion rounds of ammunition in the past year, industry officials estimate. That’s up from 7 billion to 10 billion in a normal year. In the 12 months since last October, gun shops sold enough bullets to give every American 38 of them.

"I think it’s Katrina. I think it’s terrorism. I think it’s crime. And I also think that it’s people worrying about [whether] they’ll be attacked by politicians," said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association. "They’re suspicious, and justifiably so." But the most recent FBI crime statistics, from 2008, showed that rates of violent crime were the lowest since 1989.

“I’ve often wondered what would have happened in Germany after Kristallnacht if every Jew had been armed. None were, of course, because strict gun control had been imposed shortly after Hitler came to power, and like good little lambs, the population complied with the law. Bills are being discussed about things like a national firearms registry, reinstituting the so-called “assault weapons” ban, requiring secure locks on all weapons, prohibiting the import of ammunition, and levying a substantial tax on ammunition, among other things. No outright prohibition, because they know that would catalyze gun owners. But they keep dialing up the pressure, moving toward a de facto ban.

I’ll guess there are at least two to three million Americans who adhere to a couple of succinct mottos: 1. You can have my gun when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers, and 2. It’s better to be tried by twelve than carried by six. This is a group that could catch fire at some point.”

Wars start for all kinds of reasons. But tough economic times probably rank number one as a cause. The 1930s were a natural overture for the ‘40s. Politicians like to find a foreign enemy to blame problems on. Theft of foreign resources can seem like a good idea. And part of the economic mythology fabricated by the malevolent and repeated by the ignorant is that WWII cured the last depression. Will there be another 9/11? It’s a good bet, but there’s no way it will involve airplanes; the 50,000 zombies employed by TSA serve absolutely no purpose except to accustom Americans to being treated like prisoners. One possibility is the surreptitious placement of one or more nuclear devices in U.S. cities. As Pakistan disintegrates, their nuclear arsenal may fall into quite irresponsible hands. Or, perhaps, devices could be procured in a number of ways from Russia, India, Israel, or North Korea. Another, much more likely scenario is a repetition of what happened in Mumbai recently. A small force of dedicated and well-armed operatives could create unbelievable havoc in a U.S. city or in several at once. And probably will. Americans just don’t appreciate how little people in the Islamic world like having aggressive, blue-eyed teenagers kick their doors down in the middle of the night, among other pranks.

  

Americans’ ignorance of history, ignorance of finance, ignorance of the Constitution, and dependence upon false hope has set them up for a big fall. We have an infinite capacity to take things for granted. We assume that when we slide our card in the ATM, cash will come out. We assume that when we pull into a gas station, we can easily put 40 gallons into our Hummers. We assume the money in our bank accounts is safe. We assume that when we flip the switch, light will magically appear. We assume that the $700 billion we spend annually on the military, will keep us safe. We assume that our government tells us the truth. When these assumptions all prove false in the next 15 years, the anger and disillusionment of the American people will overwhelm the ruling elite. The few thousand elitists that control the levers of power have used each false flag crisis for the last century to accumulate more power. Their decade’s long reign of terror is nearing its end. The overreach of the criminal banking syndicate, corrupt politicians, and the military industrial complex have bankrupted the nation. The huge entitlement over commitments, lack of energy policy, enormous debts, and imperial foreign policy will coalesce into the perfect Crisis storm.

   

“Decisive events will occur – events so vast, powerful, and unique that they lie beyond today’s wildest hypotheses. People will discover a hitherto unimagined capacity to fight and die, and to let their children fight and die, for a communal cause. The prospect for great civic achievement – or disintegration – will be high. New secessionist movements could spring from nowhere and achieve their ends with surprising speed. Even if the nation stays together, its geography could be fundamentally changed, its party structure altered, its Constitution and Bill of Rights amended beyond recognition. History offers even more sobering warnings: Armed confrontation usually occurs around the climax of the Crisis. If there is confrontation, it is likely to lead to war. This could be any kind of war – class war, sectional war, war against global anarchists or terrorists, or superpower war. If there is a war, it is likely to culminate in total war, fought until the losing side has been rendered nil – its will broken, territory taken, and leaders captured. And if there is total war, it is likely that the most destructive weapons available will be deployed.”

With or without war, American society will be transformed into something different. The emergent society may be something better, a nation that sustains the Framer’s vision with a robust new pride. Or it may be something unspeakably worse. The Fourth Turning will be a time of glory or ruin.

In 2025 America could be better than it is today, or worse or non-existent. This is why proclaiming the truth about how the ruling elite have hijacked America is so important. When civil unrest overtakes the nation there will be many who urge the American people to rally around a dictator or stronger Central Government. The message of the U.S. Constitution, freedom, liberty, and individual rights will compete for the minds and hearts with a message of fascism, State control central planning, and safety at the expense of freedom. The groundwork for victory needs to be laid today. We are living in times of universal deceit. It is essential that we prepare for the coming trials by using truth to defeat those who want to retain their ill-gotten control of this country. This is a battle for the soul of America. If we lose it could be a very different Amerika. Like-minded individuals who believe in the Framer’s vision will need to band together and fight for the Constitution. Are you ready to fight?

Join me at www.TheBurningPlatform.com to confront universal deceit.

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