Middle Class Dismissed

How Bad Can Things Get?

"The typical American household has made no preparation for anything but the state-debt-feudal Status Quo: they have essentially no food, cash or energy in reserve, leaving the household extremely vulnerable to the slightest disruptions in income, energy and food delivery. How bad can things get? I confess to following Andy Grove's dictum that 'only the paranoid survive.' Clearly, a healthy appreciation for risk and the benefits of advance planning should obstacles arise offers selective advantages. Even if 9 of 10 problems run into the ditch, it pays to look ahead and think about what responses are likely to be the lowest cost and most successful should any of the 10 reach us." Continue reading →

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An Important History Lesson: Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic

"Why did the German government not act to halt the inflation? It was a shaky, fragile government…More than inflation, the Germans feared unemployment. In 1919 the Communists had tried to take over, and severe unemployment might give the Communists another chance. The great German industrial combines — Krupp, Thysen, Farben, Stinnes — condoned the inflation and survived it well. A cheaper mark, they reasoned, would make German goods cheap and easy to export, and they needed the export earnings to buy raw materials abroad. Inflation kept everyone working. So the printing presses ran, and once they began to run, they were hard to stop." Continue reading →

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The Recession That Never Ended: 2008-2013 (and Counting)

"Huge leaps in the income and wealth of the top 5% mask the decline of income and wealth of the bottom 95%. Average all wealth and income and it appears that the economy is expanding to the benefit of all, when it fact only the top 5% have escaped the recession; the recession never ended for the bottom 95%. An even better way to create an illusory expansion is to simply not measure trends that would reveal a deepening recession. For example, what percentage of student loans are purposefully taken out as a substitute for income, i.e. used to pay basic living expenses rather than education?" Continue reading →

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As prices soar, Indians exchange gold for cash

"Jewellery associations in Hyderabad said with the single day surge of Rs 2,500, customers were coming in droves from early morning to take back cash in exchange for their gold jewellery. Already reeling under protests and strikes over the bifurcation issue, the sudden increase in gold price has come as a death blow to the jeweler shops in Seemandhra areas. Jeweler shop owners in Tirupati, Visakhapatnam and Vijayawada said their existence would be doubtful if the present stalemate continued any further. With gold prices increasing, enquiries for gold loans are also on the rise, said Nagaraju Rao, a manager with one of the outlets of Muthoot finance group." Continue reading →

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‘Robin Hood’ band of ‘left-wing activists’ nabs school supplies from shop

"A Robin Hood-style band of Spanish left-wing activists openly stole cart-loads of school supplies from a supermarket on Friday, promising to distribute them to needy children. More than 200 members of the Sindicato Andaluz de Trabajadores (Andalusian Union of Workers) emerged from a Carrefour supermarket in the southern city of Seville pushing about 10 shopping carts brimming with exercise books, pens, felt-tips and dictionaries. They loaded the back-to-school supplies into vans and left. School materials 'expropriated' this time would be given to needy families in the next few days, the union said in a statement, describing it as a 'symbolic act for equal opportunity'." Continue reading →

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It’s Official: New OVDP program designed for Swiss Banks

"The U.S. is clearly on a mission to confiscate assets throughout the world. In the beginning, there was OVDP for individuals. Now we have OVDP for banks. Coming soon, OVDP for financial advisors. Soon, we will all become Whistleblowers. The solution to this is for the U.S. to simply absorb all the other sovereign nations of the world. Once we become one country, there will be no more 'offshore accounts'. But, how would fines be imposed then? Conclusion and message to U.S. citizens abroad … You better enter OVDP before your bank does!" Continue reading →

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Fixing the fast-food strike

"If you are one of the concerned, caring, and vastly indignant activists behind this strike, I’m here to tell you that your social-justice problem has a simple solution. Take out a loan (or put together the money from your like-minded activist friends), buy a franchise from one of the chains, and hire workers at $15 an hour. There, that was simple, wasn’t it? You’ll make money hand over fist and demonstrate to all those eeevil corporations that they can too pay a 'just wage'; they just don’t want to because they’re greedy. The commercial landscape would be alive with virtuous workers’ collectives paying their members fat wages and thumbing their noses at top-hatted plutocrats. Why doesn’t this happen?" Continue reading →

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Obama executive order to kill 110-year-old Civilian Marksmanship Program

"The Civilian Marksmanship Program was administered by the United States Army from 1916 through 1996 when it was changed to the Corporation for the Promotion of Rifle Practice & Firearms Safety, a 501(c) (3) organization federally chartered by the U.S. Congress. There are no data indicating any of the weapons involved in homicide were imported surplus military rifles. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s homicide crime statistics, rifles accounted for only 323 deaths out of 12,664 homicides in 2011, the most recent data set provided by the FBI. The rifles that the Executive Order would affect are typically from U.S. allies and are pre-Vietnam era." Continue reading →

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Foreign Retirement Plans Seen Scrutinized in U.S. FATCA Effort

A U.S. tax crackdown is coming for foreign retirement plans. The U.S. has been pushing banks and individuals to report overseas assets, making it tougher to hide money abroad with new rules and penalties rolling out under the 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, known as Fatca. The next wave of scrutiny will cover retirement accounts, Bloomberg BNA reported. “The retirement community has been a little slower to catch up,” said Russell E. Hall, a senior consultant at Towers Watson. Foreign retirement plans generally must agree to report their U.S. account holders to avoid a 30 percent withholding tax on U.S.-sourced interest, dividends and proceeds from the sale of securities beginning July 1. Global companies with programs overseas will need to catalog their funded retirement plans to figure out which ones may be exempt, Hall said. Continue reading →

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The Trick to Suppressing Revolution: Keeping Debt/Tax Serfdom Bearable

"In a way, a belief in the value, transparency, trust and reciprocity of the System is like a religious belief. The converts, the true believers, are the ones who work like crazy for the company or the service. And when the veil of illusion is tugged from their eyes, then the Believer does a reversal, and becomes a devout non-believer in the System. He or she drops out, moves to a lower position, or 'retires' to some lower level of employment. At what point do people choose to opt out of debt/tax-serfdom? What triggers their decision to renounce debt, go off the financial grid, and escape serfdom by fashioning a low-cost lifestyle in the cash economy?" Continue reading →

Continue ReadingThe Trick to Suppressing Revolution: Keeping Debt/Tax Serfdom Bearable