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Silver Update 9/30/11 - Peak Silver

Half Hour to Health- Diabetes (part 1)

"Occupy Wall Street protesters driven by varying goals" -TINA SUSMAN, LOS ANGELES TIMES

TINA SUSMAN, LOS ANGELES TIMES

LOS ANGELES TIMES

SEPTEMBER 29, 2011

Michael Moore and Su­san Sarandon have dropped in. A seasoned diplomat dispens­es free advice. Support­ers send ev­ery­thing from boxes of food and clothes to Whole Foods gift cards. They even have their own app, for the legions of fans fol­lowing them on iPhones and Androids.

Nearly two weeks into a sit-in at a park in Manhattan's financial dis­trict, the "leader­less resistance move­ment" call­ing it­self Occu­py Wall Street is at a crossroads. The number of protesters on scene so far tops out at a few hun­dred, tiny by Athens or Cairo standards. But the traction they have gained from run-ins with po­lice, a live feed from their encamp­ment and celebrity vis­its is upping expectations. How about some spe­cif­ic de­mands, a long-term strategy, maybe even … office space?

So far the group, which generally de­fines it­self as anti-greed, has none of those.

"At a certain point, there's a valid crit­icism in people ask­ing, 'What are you do­ing here?'" protester Chris Biemer, 23, said on Wednesday, Day 11 of the demonstration. In an exchange that il­luminated one of the dilemmas that any move­ment for change faces in trying to sustain mo­mentum, Biemer and protester Victo­ria Sobel made it clear they had differ­ent vi­sions for Occu­py Wall Street.

             Biemer, who re­cently moved to New York from Florida with a degree in busi­ness admin­istration, says that ide­ally the group should team up with a nonprof­it orga­ni­zation and get office space.

"It's pos­sible to stay here for months or longer, but at some point we're go­ing to become a fix­ture," he said of their home in Zuccotti Park, a privately owned, publicly ac­cessible plaza dotted with trees and flower beds about midway be­tween the Stock Exchange and the for­mer World Trade Center site.

Sobel, who like Biemer serves on Occu­py Wall Street's finance committee, dis­agrees and said the group's strength lies in its ability to re­main high­ly vis­ible and in a place where anyone can vis­it and partic­ipate. The 21-year-old New York Uni­versity student happily reported Wednesday that bookshelves had been de­liv­ered to the UPS store where the group receives mail. They'll sit be­neath a tarp in the park, all part of Sobel's vi­sion to so­lidify the group's foothold.

"It's a mo­ment of clar­ifying for us," Sobel said, confident that as autumn's chill turns to winter's subfreezing tempera­tures, Occu­py Wall Street will stay put. "We'll layer," she said with a laugh, when asked how they'll man­age the cold.

The protest, which evolved from a network of individuals and groups galva­nized by the demonstrations in Egypt last winter, has moved far be­yond what it was on Sept. 17, when po­lice barricaded the streets out­side the Stock Exchange to pre­vent a march there to protest corporate greed. A map in Zuccotti Park pin­points scores of oth­er cities with Occu­py Wall Street events ei­ther under­way or planned, including sit-ins planned for Los An­ge­les on Sat­urday and Wash­ington on Oct. 6.

But its proximity to the re­al Wall Street and its se­ries of high-pro­file vis­itors have made the New York protest the focal point. So have inflammatory videos posted on­line that show a New York po­lice offi­cer us­ing pep­per spray on some protesters last Sat­urday.

Now, its settle­ment has gelled into an orga­nized community that hums along almost Zen-like, co­exis­t­ing with the city that rages around it and ignored by many ei­ther too busy or too uninter­ested to stop. Harried commuters seem to barely no­tice the mis­hmash of human­ity a few feet away as they rush down the sidewalks skirting the park.

       Tourists stroll in to snap pic­tures and read the protest signs scat­tered across the ground, then wander off to their next sightsee­ing stop. Exec­utives drop in on lunch breaks to talk politics and eco­nomics. Po­lice hang back on the sidewalks, and fol­low along when groups of protesters stage marches.

Protest numbers vary as people drift in and out of the park. Some live in the area and come by for a few hours each day or week. Oth­ers stay there around the clock, their sleeping bags, gui­tars and cloth­ing bun­dles spread on the ground. On Wednesday, they included a sleepy-eyed young man in a rum­pled T-shirt cuddling a pet rat, and a woman who pranced about in her under­wear.

There are committees, including one for finance, food and comfort, which en­sures that anyone who needs blan­kets, dry cloth­ing or perhaps a hug gets it. There are twice-dai­ly meetings called general as­semblies, where anyone can make a brief an­nounce­ment. The as­semblies draw ev­eryone togeth­er in a tight hud­dle. To avoid vio­lating a ban on bullhorns, the crowd obe­di­ently repeats in uni­son ev­ery phrase uttered by the main speaker, to en­sure ev­eryone hears.

Each morning, protesters stage a "morning bell march" through the neighbor­hood, to co­incide with the clang­ing at 9:30 a.m. of the bell that marks the start of trading at the Stock Exchange. Most days, a "clos­ing bell" march also takes place in the af­ter­noon.

On its website, Occu­py Wall Street de­scribes it­self as a "leader­less resistance move­ment" drawn from people of all backgrounds and po­lit­ical persua­sions.

"The one thing we all have in common is that we are the 99 per­cent that will no longer tol­erate the greed and corruption of the 1 per­cent," the website says. The posters in Zuccotti Park speak to the lack of a narrow platform: "End financial aid to Israel"; "End greed, end poverty, end war"; "No death penalty"; "Tired of racism."

Some support­ers of the premise wonder how far Occu­py Wall Street can go in galva­nizing oth­ers if it does not trans­late its anger into spe­cif­ic de­mands.

"I see some­thing beautiful here. I've nev­er had a more inter­est­ing po­lit­ical debate," said Carne Ross, a for­mer British diplomat who resigned in protest over the inva­sion of Iraq, and who now owns a consul­ting busi­ness in New York. But Ross, who stops by reg­ularly to        advise Occu­py Wall Street, said it needs "far broad­er out­reach" and a narrower message.

"They need to get a message to people who can't be here," Ross said.

"I'd pre­fer to see a list of de­mands," one fan wrote on the Occupation Wall Street Facebook page, echo­ing the concerns of a woman who tweet­ed some­thing similar to Moore as he did his MSNBC inter­view. She asked for "some spe­cif­ic, tan­gible goals."

Michael T. Heaney, a Uni­versity of Michigan po­lit­ical sci­ence pro­fessor who has stud­ied social protest move­ments, said such groups of­ten bump up against pressure to become more focused and to ei­ther build or join in­stitutions that can support them.

"What you're talking about is a degree of buying into a po­lit­ical system," Heaney said. "But the more you use tactics that we rec­ognize as getting you influ­ence, the more you buy into the system, and the more you buy into the system, the more you open your­self up to compro­mise."

In Occu­py Wall Street's case, Heaney said de­mands could be as vague as simply call­ing for financial bailout programs to apply to individuals rather than banks.

Most of those in Zuccotti Park, though, don't see the need for a change in tactics. At least not yet.

"There isn't a consol­idated message, and I don't think there needs to be," said Andrew Lynn, 34, who drove the three hours from his home in Troy, N.Y., to help the demonstrators' me­dia team.

On Wednesday, he hunched over a laptop sheltered from the clammy air by an umbrella. A generator rumbled be­side him, en­sur­ing the group's activ­ities con­tinued to stream live to au­di­ences.

Added Kobi Skolnick, a young Israeli American who by Wednesday was in his ninth day of partic­ipating in the protest: "I think the main thing we're do­ing is knocking on the walls of ignorance in this country so people wake up."

tina.susman­@latimes.com

Source: LOS ANGELES TIMES

                                                                                                                                

Carolyn Cole, Los Angeles Times

© Ongo Inc.

"17 Facts That Prove That The Average American Family Is Getting Absolutely Pulverized By This Economy" From the economic collapse blog

From: www.theeconomiccollapseblog.com

17 Facts That Prove That The Average American Family Is Getting Absolutely Pulverized By This Economy                            

                                                                                                                                                                         The truth is that American families are getting squeezed harder than they have been in ages.  The number of good jobs is declining, incomes are going down, and the cost of living just keeps going up.

How in the world does the average American family survive in this economy?  The median household income is a little bit less than $50,000 a year right now.  So let's call that about $4000 a month.  But before any of that money gets spent, you have to take out at least $1000 in taxes.  That leaves about $3000 a month to pay all the bills with.  With that $3000 you have to pay the mortgage (or rent), make the car payments, make the student loan payments, pay for power and water, pay for health insurance, pay for home insurance, pay for car insurance, pay the phone bill, pay the Internet bill and pay the cable bill.  On top of all that, every member of the family needs three meals a day and the cars need to be filled up with gasoline or they won't go anywhere.  Of course I haven't even mentioned expenses that don't happen every month such as car repairs or new shoes.  No wonder so many families are feeling so financially stressed!

The following are 17 facts that prove that the average American family is getting absolutely pulverized by this economy....

#1 The cost of a health insurance policy for the average American family rose by a whopping 9 percent last year.  According to a report put out by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust, the average family health insurance policy now costs over $15,000 a year.

How in the world can most families afford that?  Yes, in many cases employers are paying for at least a portion of that, but still that seems absolutely outrageous.

#2 Due to rising costs, a lot of employers are completely getting rid of health plans for their employees.  In fact, the percentage of Americans covered by employer-based health plans has fallen for 11 years in a row.

#3 The number of uninsured Americans continues to rise.  Things have gotten so bad that an all-time record 49.9 million Americans do not have any health insurance at all.

#4 At this point, most American families are tapped out financially.  According to the U.S. Labor Department, incomes and spending were both down for the second straight year in 2010.

#5 At the same time, the employment picture continues to look worse with each passing month.  According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of layoffs in the United States was up 14 percent in August.

#6 Even if you do have a job that doesn't mean that you are doing much more than surviving.  According to Paul Osterman, a professor of economics at MIT, approximately 20 percent of all employed Americans are making $10.65 an hour or less.

#7 The amount of debt that the average American family has piled up is absolutely staggering.  The median yearly wage in the United States is just$26,261, but the average American household is carrying $75,600 in debt.

#8 Consumer confidence is extremely low right now.  If the U.S. economy was in good shape, the Consumer Confidence Index would be up around 90.  Instead, it is sitting at 45.4.

#9 Nearly every recent survey shows that the American people are feeling really depressed about the economy right now.  In fact, one poll found that 80 percent of them believe that we are actually in a recession right now.

#10 Many consumers are seriously starting to cut back on spending again, and that is not a good sign for the U.S. economy.  According to one recent study, 40 percent of all Americans have cut back on their spending within the last 60 days.

#11 It certainly does not help that millions of good jobs have been shipped out of the country.  Sadly, the trend of offshoring our jobs is going to continue to accelerate if something is not done.  According to Professor Alan Blinder of Princeton University, 40 million more U.S. jobs could be sent offshore over the next two decades.

#12 There is a lot of fear in the workforce right now.  According to Gallup, 30 percent of all employed Americans are worried that they will be laid off soon.

#13 Today, there are 5.9 million Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 that are living with their parents.  That is putting an even greater strain on the budgets of many families.

#14 American families have gotten very accustomed to using plastic to pay for things.  Today, the average U.S. household has 13 different credit cards.

#15 Many American families are not making it at all in this economy.  Last year, 2.6 million more Americans dropped into poverty.  That was the largest increase that we have seen since the U.S. government began keeping statistics on this back in 1959.

#16 For many American families, living on food stamps has become a way of life.  Today, there are more than 45 million Americans on food stamps and we keep setting a brand new record almost every single month.

#17 Things have gotten so bad that many American families are selling off whatever they can in order to survive.  For example, down in Florida hundreds of people have been selling off their burial plots in an attempt to raise cash.  The following is an excerpt from a local news report about this new trend....

Sellers are posting online, using burial plot brokers, and also funeral homes to market the real estate. Some of those advertisements show single plots starting at about $1,000, while family plots can go for up to $50,000.

Most American families are living in a state of almost constant financial stress.  Way too many parents are spending way too many sleepless nights wondering how in the world they will be able to keep their heads above water for another month.

Very few families seem to have "extra money" for stuff these days.  Yeah, there are the "privileged few", but most people are really struggling to get by.

In America today, if you are able to keep your home from being foreclosed and you are able to put food on the table and clothes on the backs of your family then you are doing pretty good.

Sadly, as our current economic crisis deepens, the average American family is going to have an even more difficult time trying to survive financially.

So do you have any tips to share for how the average American family can survive in this very tough economy?  Please feel free to share your ideas and thoughts below....

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RT: "Bernanke admits jobs problem is a national crisis - and the FED can't do much"

From RT:

Published: 29 September, 2011, 22:11
Edited: 29 September, 2011, 22:11

 

Bernanke admits jobs problem is a national crisis - and the FED can't do much

The head of the Federal Reserve is saying that the United States is currently undergoing a “national crisis” due to the continuingly disappointing unemployment figures.

Speaking from Cleveland, Ohio this week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke fielded questions from a crowd and opened up on the critical situation that is continuing to impact millions of Americans.

"This unemployment situation we have, the jobs situation, is really a national crisis," Bernanke said from the InterContinental Hotel. "We've had now close to 10 percent unemployment for a number of years. Of the people who are unemployed, about 45 percent have been unemployed for six months or more.”

And while Bernanke acknowledged that the Fed has attempted to do what they can to correct the problem, he also said that only so much can be done on his side to switch things up.

"Monetary policy can do a lot but it's not a panacea. It can't solve all of the problems," Bernanke said on Wednesday.

Last week the Federal Reserve announced that they would begin a $400 billion program that would try to rejuvenate the economy by selling off short-term bond notes and exchange them for long term Treasuries, hoping investors will plop their money into riskier ventures. In a statement from that September 21 announcement, the Fed acknowledged the unemployment problem which has seen little change in past months."Recent indicators point to continuing weakness in overall labor market conditions, and the unemployment rate remains elevated," read a statement from the Fed.

Earlier this summer, Bernanke told reporters, "The economic healing will take a while, and there may be setbacks along the way."

Months later in Cleveland this week, Bernanke remains still unsure of what else the country can do to jump start jobs numbers. The number of unemployed Americans has remained at or above 9 percent almost every month since April 2009.

“This is unheard of," Bernanke said yesterday. "This has never happened in the post-war period in the United States. Those folks who have been out of work for six months or a year or two years – obviously they are losing the skills they had, their connections, their attachment to the labor force. Policies that could help them find work, train for work and retain their skills and to contribute to a productive society . . . that's another area where other parts of the government could contribute to help the economy recover."

Chairman Bernanke did not pinpoint a solution but tip-toed around the posturing in Congress that many say is keeping a concrete plan to save the economy and jump-start the jobs figures.

"We have a lot of problems both in terms of recovery and in terms of longer term growth. It's hard for me – I have to be non-partisan – it's hard for me to be very specific about individual actions. But there certainly are some areas where policymakers could contribute."

RT reported yesterday that in a provision in President Barack Obama’s American Jobs Act, Americans that are refused a job based on current employment status could file suit against would be employers. That provision, of course, would only become legalized if lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agree to approve the president’s legislation.

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BofA Plans $5 Monthly Fee for Some Debit-Cards By Hugh Son @Bloomberg

From Bloomberg:

BofA Plans $5 Monthly Fee for Some Debit-Cards

Thursday, September 29, 2011

By Hugh Son  

Bank of America Corp. (BAC), the biggest U.S. lender by assets, plans to announce a $5 monthly charge for some debit-card users to recoup revenue lost after new federal rules capped so-called swipe fees.

Customers with lower-tiered accounts, including the firm’s online-banking option, may start getting assessed the fee for debit-card purchases in January, said Anne Pace, a Bank of America spokeswoman. Users won’t be charged for cash-machine withdrawals, and clients with premium accounts including those linked to the Merrill Lynch brokerage aren’t affected, she said.

Bank of America, based in Charlotte, North Carolina, is joining rivals including JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Wells Fargo & Co. (WFC)and SunTrust Banks Inc. (STI) in rolling out new charges for debit- card users. The Federal Reserve’s rules limiting swipe fees, or interchange, take effect next month. Banking industry representatives have said the changes enrich merchants while penalizing lower-income consumers.

“One of the unintended consequences is that this would disproportionately harm lower-income individuals,” said Trish Wexler, a spokeswoman for the Electronic Payments Coalition, which represents banks and networks. “If you can’t afford $5 a month, you’re going to stop using your debit card.”

The Fed capped debit-card swipe fees at 21 cents starting Oct. 1. It will let issuers tack on five basis points, or 0.05 percent, of each transaction, or almost 2 cents based on the average debit purchase of $38, and a conditional 1-cent adjustment for lenders that follow fraud-prevention standards.

Dodd-Frank

The cap, mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act, replaces a formula that averages 1.14 percent of the purchase price, or about 44 cents. The limit may reduce annual revenue at the biggest U.S. banks by $8 billion, data compiled by Bloomberg Government show.

“The economics of offering a debit card have changed with recent regulations, and we’ve decided to introduce a monthly fee for customers who use their debit cards for purchases,” Pace said today in an interview.

Earlier this year, Bank of America introduced five new accounts where users pay fees unless they keep minimum balances, make regular deposits, use credit cards or take advantage of online services. The offerings are designed to reward clients who have multiple relationships with the bank.

$60 a Year

Only the top two tiers of accounts -- dubbed Premium and Platinum Privileges and requiring $20,000 and $50,000, respectively, in combined balances -- will be spared from the new debit fees, which could total $60 a year per customer, Pace said. Those with an existing account for college students called CampusEdge will also be exempt, she said.

Wells Fargo, the second-biggest debit-card issuer after Bank of America, is testing a $3 monthly debit-card fee in some markets, the lender said last month.

Meanwhile, Citigroup Inc. (C), the third-largest U.S. bank, said this month that it wouldn’t charge additional fees for debit-card use. Ally Financial Inc., formerly known as GMAC, also said it hasn’t increased fees.

“Unlike many of our competitors, we will not charge fees that discourage use or make it unreasonably expensive to take advantage of the tools and services that consumers say are important,” said Stephen Troutner, head of U.S. banking products for Citigroup.

Moves by banks to increase charges “speaks more to the nature of the card industry than to whether swipe-fee reform should have been passed,” Mallory Duncan, general counsel for theNational Retail Federation, said in a statement.

To contact the reporter on this story: Hugh Son in New York at hson1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dan Kraut at dkraut2@bloomberg.net

Click here to read more...

Buy Metals at Bargain Prices By Patrick A. Heller @numismaster.com

Buy Metals at Bargain Prices

By Patrick A. Heller September 27, 2011

From last Wednesday’s COMEX close into Asian market trading this Monday, the price of gold dropped more than 14 percent, its largest four-day price drop in the past 30 years. The price of silver tumbled more than 35 percent over the same period.

I am aware that gold and silver prices might fall by a noticeable percentage at any point, as that is an event that occurs from time to time. However, I was not looking for it to happen now and not to the extent that it occurred.

At any time it is a fair question to ask if gold and silver markets have peaked. Many customers are now asking me this question. Even more are asking me if these suddenly lower prices are a buying opportunity and if the bottoms have been reached. So, let’s look at these questions in terms of hard news and speculations about what might be going on.
Last Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee made its announcement at the end of its regularly scheduled two-day meeting. The most significant detail in its statement was that the Federal Reserve would be replacing $400 billion of shorter maturity (up to 3 years) U.S. Treasury debt with the same quantity of longer term issues (6 to 30 years maturity). While this shift to longer maturities had been anticipated, the announcement of simply replacing total debt without inflating the money supply (also known as quantitative easing) took analysts and investors by surprise. In the absence of a formal announcement of further inflation of the money supply, investors became even more nervous about further declines in stock prices.

Last Thursday, the COMEX announced an increase in margin requirements for leveraged gold and silver accounts. Increases in margin requirements make sense as prices are rising, as that helps keep the market in order, but it does not make sense when prices are falling. At the time of the announcement, the price of gold was already down more than 6 percent from its early September high. Silver was then down 20 percent from its late April high. Consequently, the margin hike was not done to maintain orderly markets. Instead, it was a deliberate move to help knock down gold and silver prices.

As stock market prices fell Thursday and Friday, some of the technical signals turned more negative than when Lehman Brothers failed in 2008. This could have led to a panicked exodus from U.S. stocks into other assets such as precious metals and other commodities.

The decline of gold and silver prices late last week almost certainly scared some investors away from pulling their holdings out of U.S. stocks. This investor fear that a “safe haven” asset might not really be safe was reinforced by the overall decline in a large number of commodity prices.

In early September, gold leases up to three months maturity turned to negative interest rates. That meant that a party leasing gold would not only not be charged any interest, the lender would actually pay money to a party borrowing the gold. Late last week, the six-month gold lease rate also turned negative. At the beginning of last week, the interest rates on silver leases up to three months maturity also turned negative. These are not normal market conditions. Typically over the years, negative lease rates have been tied into efforts to suppress gold and silver prices by artificially forcing physical metal onto the market. This gives the appearance (though not necessarily the reality) that there is more supply of physical metal, which intimidates potential gold and silver investors.

Earlier this month, Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann said, “It is an open secret that numerous European banks would not survive having to revalue sovereign debt held on the banking books at market levels.” Several of the major banks are literally on the brink of collapse if they had to absorb losses on the government debt they hold. European central banks have to do something to contain this massive problem, but they have not been able to agree on which measures to take. I’m sure more hard news will emerge in the coming weeks as to what transpired over the past few days to knock down gold and silver prices. Without knowing just what further information will come out, let me now speculate on other possible events that contributed to the decline in precious metals prices.

First, it is entirely possible that European central banks of nations in the eurozone could be liquidating some of their gold reserves as a desperate move to beef up their fiat currency reserves to stave off default on their debts. If this is happening to any degree, that could help explain the why short-term gold and silver lease rates have recently turned negative.

Second, it is possible that the U.S. government may have informed the Chinese government in advance that is was preparing a major intervention to suppress gold and silver prices and asked the Chinese to refrain from jumping in to purchase physical metals until the market had been pushed near the bottom.

Last week a longtime reliable source told me that there were massive quantities of Asian buy orders placed in the London market to execute if spot prices dropped to $1,760 all the way down to $1,715. I have every reason to believe that at least a sizable percentage of these buy orders may be have placed by the Chinese government as this would be consistent with their trading activity since 2003. If the Chinese were alerted that they could have the opportunity to purchase gold even cheaper than their standing buy orders, it would be reasonable for them to cooperate by putting their buy orders prices in the $1,700s.

Third, it is possible that the U.S. government may have directly intervened in suppressing prices, through one or more agencies that are not drawing close scrutiny from Congress or the public. The prime suspect would be the Exchange Stabilization Fund, which was established in 1934. The ESF is an emergency reserve, not subject to congressional oversight, normally used to intervene (manipulate) in foreign exchange markets. In 1970, its mandate was changed by Congress to allow the Secretary of the Treasury, with the approval of the President, to use funds in the ESF to “deal in gold, foreign exchange and other instruments of credit and securities.” Thus, it would be possible and legal for the U.S. government to surreptitiously manipulate the gold market. The reason I consider this to be a plausible reason that gold and silver prices were suppressed is that the major beneficiaries of lower prices would be the U.S. government, its trading partners and allies.

On the basis of the hard information available early this week, it is highly likely that gold and silver prices were pushed down rather than fell as a result of free market trading. As I prepare this Tuesday morning, the price of gold is already up more than 7 percent from the bottom it touched in Asian markets early Monday, and silver is up more than 25 percent. Investor sentiment is not that volatile. You just don’t have gold and silver plummet then quickly rebound by such large amounts. However, manipulated markets can be that volatile.

The enormous global financial problems have not been cured in the past few days, so there is no reason to anticipate that gold and silver prices have peaked. However, I now think it will it will take a few months more for gold and silver prices to reach far higher levels than I had previously forecast.

What that means is that I regard the current gold and silver prices to be a temporary bargain buying opportunity. Because of the significant decline, it may even be worth accelerating purchases if you are normally one who purchases over time using the dollar cost-averaging approach.

As prices dipped toward the end of last week, we saw a significant increase in trading activity by both buyers and sellers. The action in gold has roughly balanced, while there has been much stronger demand by people to buy silver rather than liquidate. Because of the volatility in the market, wholesalers are effectively using two-tier spot prices where they are a buyer at one number and a seller at a higher spot price. With such strong demand for physical silver, it looks like delivery times for some forms are already slowing down.



Written By Patrick A. Heller Click here for more...

The Long Conversation By Cognitive Dissonance @ZeroHedge

                               The Long Conversation

By Cognitive Dissonance

The Long Conversation

By

Cognitive Dissonance

It was during my preparation for the Roman Catholic Church’s rite of passage called Confirmation, the point where I commit to the present insanity because I have supposedly reached the age of consent, when I learned I had just blasphemed. This was a terrible state of affairs according to the nun who was presiding over my religious indoctrination. Back then, while the Priest may have been the anointed one and thus the public face of local parish power, the nuns ruled the roost and thus administered the religious training as well as its mind control counterpart, corporal punishment.

As the sister repeatedly slammed her heavy wooden ruler down on my knuckles, and the back of my hands quickly turned red and swollen in protest of another round of religious abuse, aside from the sharp pain what I really felt was deeply confused. What had I done to deserve another beating, aside from asking Sister Elizabeth a few innocent questions? As the other boy slaves watched in horror and fascination (the girls received their own special instruction two doors down) it would be nearly a decade before I fully recognized that logic and free thinking is the enemy of social conditioning and religious indoctrination.

Well north of forty years later I can still feel the psychological sting of that abuse as I revisit the incident in my mind and once again color outside society’s line. Pavlov would be proud to see that my conditioned response had been beaten so deep. But it’s not the individual beatings that have so much of an effect, but rather the cumulative piling on that reaches such depth. And therein lay the secret of their total control, for there appears nowhere to hide to escape the raining of their blows. This is their best and most effective lie. But it is still a lie nonetheless.

It was an innocent question really, and a tribute to its power and destabilizing logic that Sister Elizabeth turned bright red and immediately reached for her punishing stick. In my defense it was during that same week in American History class, the location where the state administered its own form of mind control and corporal punishment, where I learned how those filthy dirt-worshiping Indians (Sister Elizabeth’s words, not mine) honored dozens, even hundreds, of holy spirits. All I wanted to know was why we only had one. It seemed to me that we were getting the short end of the stick, the phrase my father liked to use when he applied his own punishing stick.

The Punishing Sticks

Can you hear them way off in the distance talking among themselves, the voices of the great spirits past, present and future, all speaking as one? I most certainly can and to be perfectly honest I always could. I just didn’t understand what it was I was listening to since the ability to decipher them had nearly been driven out of me ages ago. So I ignored them for as long as I could until finally I could no longer.

Once you let them in there is no turning back, and we all understand this as irrefutable fact. Once it is recognized, we can no longer deny our inner knowing. The voices might be faint and even a bit blurred, but still very understandable to those who care to listen. Or dare I say it, even to confer. In fact if you put your ear to the wind, close your eyes and settle your mind, you can hear them whispering to each other while beckoning us to rejoin them in our collective Long Conversation.

The thing about our shared insanity, the only honest way to properly describe the state of current affairs, is that the insanity will always insist it alone is perfectly sane and anything that tries to refute its supremacy is declared crazy and immediately purged. So it is not at all surprising that the dominate culture, the product of centuries of Delirium tremens, would beat its slaves to death and treat its enemies even worse rather than tolerate questions, let alone dissention. But there is real madness to the abusive methods the (religious) Empire employs, because what is really driven from us is our own innate and natural connection to The Long Conversation.

It really wasn’t my question that raised the hackles of old Sister Elizabeth, but rather the unspoken inquisition that sprang from the mouth of babes. Why was the Holy Spirit advocating death and destruction to those who did not embrace the one and only ‘God’, while the Native American Indians loved and honored Heaven and Earth and all its glorious creations? Why was the culture of insanity taking its marching orders from a holy homicidal maniac, while the filthy dirt-worshiping natives lived in relative peace and harmony and always tried to give back at least as much as they took?

These are ugly ego striping questions that could quickly destabilize an imperial empire and its enabling religion if they were ever allowed to fester, thus the reason for the liberal use of the ruler or rifle along with the threat of hell on Earth and eternal damnation.

See, it works like this. If we are to believe that we are not worthy, then we will allow ourselves to be judged not worthy, followed quickly by the willing surrender of our inner power to an external ‘authority’ who has been deemed supremely worthy by imperial or religious edict. But if we are to believe we are connected to everything and thus we as worthy as the mighty Oak or the industrious dung beetle, and certainly more worthy than any false external ‘authority’, there is no reason to surrender and thus we are uncontrollable. This is blasphemy pure and simple!

The Mighty Oak

By the time I reached walking away age and began my own search for meaning and connection, all that was left in my neck of the woods was cookie cutter religious doctrine and a brain washed state of artificially numbed elation. And this was well before the full impact of the drug called televised instant gratification had subdued and suborned a great nation.

Or at least that was what I had been told we were; a nation proud of its genocidal westward expansion that had now gone global. Convert those Godless heathens to the temple of self absorbed consumer consumption ecstasy or wipe them from the face of God’s little green Earth, ironically the very same little green Earth so loved by those Godless heathens.

For the dozens of now vanquished indigenous cultures, whose love and respect for all things nurturing and sustaining was a way of life, even this love of life wasn’t what terrified the war mongering nation(s). No, what really threatened the insanity was the revered and cherished internal communication the natives had with their spiritual forefathers, as well as those who would follow in their footsteps.

What could, would and still will topple the insanity was their Long Conversation, their spiritual connection that solidly anchored them to their own sanity. This was what condemned the millions of natives to their own eradication. If you can’t corrupt them by driving their sanity out, then just kill them all and be done with it.

If we are sane, we simply cannot destroy what we deeply love and respect. Nor can we destroy or even demean what we wish to pass to our children, concepts that would most definitely destroy the insanity if they were ever widely embraced. The holy madness needed divine justification in order to take by force all that it surveyed, and so anyone or anything that refuted insanity’s marching orders was labeled a blasphemy and a heretic, then promptly cut down past its roots, shock and awe scorched Earth style.  

Nothing, and I mean nothing, can be allowed to get in the way of the endless territorial expansion and locust like consumption of the mindlessly mad machine. Nothing will be allowed to resist the modern global Ponzi, especially a social and spiritual consciousness that speaks from the past andfuture to warn the present of the dangers of hubris, ego and homicidal insanity. This was and still is why The Long Conversation must be silenced. God forbid we actually listen to the only sane voices left, those found within our very own spiritual head.

Social conditioning tells us to ignore our inner knowing and accept the false external authority.

Of all the various forms of mind control witchcraft practiced by the unholy church/state alliance, by far the most destructive is the hijacking and subversion of our own spoken language. Simply put, just as we are what we eat, so do we think as we speak. So rather than removing ideologically unhealthy words from the spoken language and leaving a gap that would be noticed, all that needs to be done is to subvert or convert the true meaning. And before we know it we have spiritually lost people extolling the virtues of the National Security Endless War and Ponzi State. 

Trapped in an ideological hell by our very own language the few remaining free thinking deeply connected souls are forced to use the very vocabulary that enslaves us to wake us from our deep slumber. In effect we must use the very words that control us to free us, a nearly impossible task given the high hurdles we must overcome. Short of creating a new language, then widely distributing it via a hostile press and MSM, the only effective solution is for the population to reconnect to The Long Conversation.

Our powerful and supreme inner knowing has been carefully hidden from us for centuries, millennium even, primarily by diluted and dulled milquetoast words such as gut feeling, instinct, sixth sense or even faith and belief. Let us call it what it is, an inner knowing that squarely places the responsibility back upon our shoulders to right our own floundering ship. But even this is too great for our inflated and flattered egos to bear, so we eagerly grasp for the deflecting lie that it is all someone else’s mess to repair.

Of all the horrors perpetrated upon us by the machine and its sycophant henchmen, maybe the most frightening one of them all is the very instrument of our salvation, of our freedom, the one tool we can always access and is totally out of bounds to the insanity. I am of course speaking about freedom of choice, our unquestioned and inalienable right to become sane again, to break free from the madness machine and reclaim our own spiritual, emotional and ultimately physical sovereignty.

The seductive embrace of our collective insanity promises us all a softer easier way, an alternative path where we are told we can have our cake and eat it too. This is a bald faced lie, even if the machine consistently produces more cake as if by magic. It is a lie because that cake is not free, but instead derived from the sweat and tears of a less fortunate fellow slave caught up in the crushing gears of the grinding machine. Our Long Conversation with our inner knowing tells us this is a lie, that the lies of the insanity are self evident and thus brightly colored to enable us to abandon ourselves to the pleasure of the distraction. Let someone else pick up the tab. But soon enough it will be you and me who pays the freight.

If you understand what I am talking about with regard to The Long Conversation, about the whispering voices anchoring us to our own sanity, then we might even say that these spirits will do more than just whisper. If nothing else it is a comforting thought, that a power greater than us, thatour power has our back. It is precisely this thought that helps keep us sane. When we are connected to others, when we acknowledge that our actions affect more than just us, then and only then are we more likely to act sanely as we all share responsibility for the group as well as the individual.

09-29-2011

Cognitive Dissonance

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