How Do You Unmanipulate A Manipulated Economy?

“Breaking the stranglehold of vested interests is the essential step to rebuilding an economy that isn’t totally dependent on manipulated money and statistics.” – C H Smith

CharlesHughSmithThe word manipulated has the sour taste of officially sanctioned distortion in service of an Elite’s interests. At a minimum, manipulation smacks of intent to defraud. If there is no intent to defraud or mislead, then what’s the purpose of manipulating statistics, media coverage and official narratives?

As a result, the unsavory reality of our massively manipulated economy is masked by insipid words such as stimulus, easing and investing in our future–as if borrowing and squandering trillions of dollars to further enrich the few at the expense of the many is anything but blatant grift, fraud and embezzlement of taxpayer funds.

Regardless of what slippery words are deployed to mask the manipulation, it doesn’t change the reality that the U.S. economy remains a manipulated mess that is dependent on monetary and statistical manipulation. If you doubt the economy is dependent on monetary and statistical manipulation, then ask yourself what will happen to the economy should the Federal Reserve’s zero-interest rate policy (ZIRP) be rescinded, and interest rates return to historic norms.

Ask yourself what happens if the Federal government actually declared the increase in public debt as the true measure of fiscal deficits rather than the ginned-up deficit number–a number that is much less than the actual deficit reflected in the annual increase in public debt.

Ask yourself what the gross domestic product (GDP) would be if hedonic adjustments and other flim-flam were eliminated from the calculation. Continue reading

How To Heal The World By Truly Loving Yourself

EarthHeartSkyWhat does it really mean when you hear someone say “I love myself”?  I would venture to guess that most people who say it don’t truly know what this means.  I believe that loving yourself happens when life puts you in situations that bring up the parts of you that you don’t like, and you are willing to be with those parts with compassion and mercy.  This is not what we usually do.   We meet them with fear, judgment, anger and resistance.  We want these uncomfortable parts to go away because we were never shown how to meet them with our heart. This resistance creates war inside of us, and I believe this is the reason there is so much pain and suffering on the planet.

A woman in one of my awakening groups travels all over the world.  She goes with a tour company that takes small groups off the beaten path where one can truly experience life.  On her recent trip to Guatemala City, they were taken into a garbage dump where 80,000 adults and children live in shanties, making their living by sifting through the garbage.  Some women have been trained to sell beautiful handmade bracelets and for every bracelet you buy, you keep a woman out of the garbage dump for 10 days.

When my friend came back from her trip, she gave us each a bracelet and shared her experience, Many times it was hard for her to speak through her tears because her heart had been so cracked open.  She would say over and over again, “What should I do?  Should I give them all my money?  Should I move there?  I don’t know what to do.”   I told her to listen to what was calling her, but to also know that the most powerful thing that all of us can do to help others is to fall in love with ourselves.  That is, fall in love with all the parts that we don’t like.  Why is that so powerful?  Because when we heal the war inside of us, we are healing the planet. Continue reading

Whiplash!

“Each producer has a slightly different reason to continue pumping flat out. A lot has been said about the US and Saudi Arabia colluding to drive down the price of oil. But the collusion theory can be sliced away with Occam’s Razor, since they would be expected to behave exactly the same even without colluding.” – D Orlov

PutinObamaCartoonOver the course of 2014 the prices the world pays for crude oil have tumbled from over $125 per barrel to around $45 per barrel now, and could easily drop further before heading much higher before collapsing again before spiking again. You get the idea. In the end, the wild whipsawing of the oil market, and the even wilder whipsawing of financial markets, currencies and the rolling bankruptcies of energy companies, then the entities that financed them, then national defaults of the countries that backed these entities, will in due course cause industrial economies to collapse. And without a functioning industrial economy crude oil would be reclassified as toxic waste. But that is still two or three decades off in the future.

In the meantime, the much lower prices of oil have priced most of the producers of unconventional oil out of the market. Recall that conventional oil (the cheap-to-produce kind that comes gushing out of vertical wells drilled not too deep down into dry ground) peaked in 2005 and has been declining ever since. The production of unconventional oil, including offshore drilling, tar sands, hydrofracturing to produce shale oil and other expensive techniques, was lavishly financed in order to make up for the shortfall. But at the moment most unconventional oil costs more to produce than it can be sold for. This means that entire countries, including Venezuela’s heavy oil (which requires upgrading before it will flow), offshore production in the Gulf of Mexico (Mexico and US), Norway and Nigeria, Canadian tar sands and, of course, shale oil in the US. All of these producers are now burning money as well as much of the oil they produce, and if the low oil prices persist, will be forced to shut down. Continue reading