Now that every monetary video game in America has been rigged to benefit the few at the expenditure of the lots of, trust and credibility has actually evaporated like an ice on a summertime day in Death Valley.
Here is America in a nutshell: we no longer resolve problems, we manipulate the story and after that declare the issue has been resolved. Really resolving problems is challenging and generally requires sacrifices that are proportional to one’s wealth and power. However because America’s elite are no longer going to compromise any of their huge power for the common excellent, sacrifice is out in America unless it can be disposed on wage earners. However unfortunately for America’s elite, four years of hidden-by-manipulation sacrifices have stripmined average wage earners, and so they no longer have anything delegated sacrifice.
Enter the Ministry of Adjustment, which adjusts the noticeable bits to align with the narrative that the issue has actually been fixed and the status quo is godlike in its technocratic powers. All this adjustment does not in fact resolve the problems, it merely conceals the decay behind gamed stats, monetary hoax and glossy PR. The issues fester until they break through the manipulated gloss and the public witnesses the breakdown of all the systems that existed as rock-solid and permanently.
Let’s take three core fields of manipulation: cost of living, Social Security and the stock exchange bubble. Each is a crucial signifier of the status quo functioning as promoted, and so manipulating them to fit the narrative is the elite’s prime directive. Goodness understands what would take place if individuals were exposed to the unmanipulated reality, but it would not be good for America’s self-serving power elite.
The expense of living– the Customer Price Index (CPI), a.k.a. inflation– is the most threadbare garbage heap of manipulation currently on screen. Totally 40% of the Index is based upon the opinion of random people rather than easily tabulated real-world information. I refer to the federal government’s comically goofy technique of reckoning the expense of housing: ask a random bunch of house owners what they guess they might rent their house for.
However wait, why not just tabulate the actual rents being paid? That data is easily available, and might be made apples-to-apples by using the methodology of the Case-Shiller real estate index, which is to track the cost data of the very same homes/ flats with time. This would offer reliable information on the real boost or decrease in rents being paid.
Gathering real real-world date is anathema due to the fact that then the CPI would be much higher and not so quickly manipulated. The exact same can be said of all the other tricks of manipulating the expense of living: seasonal changes (i.e., lop off price increases and associate the decrease to “seasonality”) and hedonic changes (i.e., after adjusting for the better stereo and the rear-view cam, today’s $40,000 cars and truck is arranged as “less expensive” than yesteryear’s $10,000 car of the very same size).
If these exact same changes were applied to the weight and height of individuals, a 6-foot high specific weighing 200 pounds would be “adjusted” to 6 inches in height and a weight of 2 pounds. This is a slight exaggeration but not by much, as today’s computation of costs are laughably understated in the CPI: today’s cars and trucks have not increased in cost at all according to the CPI, even as the number of work hours required to buy a brand-new car have increased– that is, when measured in buying power of earnings, vehicles are a lot more pricey now.
Then there’s health care, which is a weighted as light as a plume in the CPI. Healthcare– you understand, that sector which regularly bankrupts American families with bills in the tens of thousands?– is weighted as approximately equivalent to clothing. This is beyond absurd, but par for the CPI course of unlimited manipulations, all focused on lowering the CPI so the public can be lulled into a fairyland belief that inflation has been trifling for decades, even as their incomes purchase a 3rd less than they did a decade earlier.
Next up, the appalling adjustment of Social Security. The initial step is manipulating the CPI down so seniors’ annual increases can be held to near-zero (no much better brand name of cat food for you, senior citizens– tighten your budget if you want the lights to stay on).
The genuinely huge adjustment is the artifice that there is a legendary “trust fund” that we are drawing down to pay Social Security benefits. The trick was pulled decades ago, when Social Security taxes carried out in fact go into an independent firm account. President Johnson chose that he required all that “free money” to spend for his misadventure in Vietnam, so the Social Security account was integrated with the federal general fund, and an accounting gimmick was produced: a totally fake class of IOUs that were presented as a “trust fund”, IOUs without any marketable worth at all.
There is no trust fund. When Social Security runs a deficit, the Treasury obtains the cash in the very same method it borrows all the other trillions of dollars required to cover federal deficits. The money obtained to pay Social Security is borrowed exactly like the money required to pay the expense overruns on the F-35 airplane or the fraud-riddled costs for meds paid by Medicare.
It’s all smoke and mirrors and artful control, designed to serve the interests of those running the show. It’s the Big Con, intended to lull the general public into a false self-confidence in the status quo stories and technocratic magic.
Speaking of magic, look at how the stock exchange hits a low and after that roars greater the exact same day on a monthly basis. The “market” control is so obvious that Associate Powell of the Federal Reserve Politburo doesn’t even trouble describing it. The Politburo cronies just buy the dip, the Fed and its proxies (Blackrock, cough-cough) jam stocks higher and the Fed’s cronies pocket billions– as revealed on the chart below of the billionaires’ soaring Fed-generated wealth.
No wonder public rely on America’s self-serving organizations has actually cratered, and the reliability of the manipulators has been crushed. Now that every monetary game in America has been rigged to benefit the few at the cost of the numerous, trust and trustworthiness has actually evaporated like an ice cube on a summertime day in Death Valley.
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