A Disintegrative Winter: The Debt and Anti-Status Quo Super-Cycle Has Turned

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With this list of manifestations in hand, we can practically write the headlines for 2017-2025 in advance.
How would you describe the social mood of the nation and world? Would anti-Establishment, anti-status quo, and anti-globalization be a good start? How about choking on fast-rising debt? Would stagnant growth, stagnant wages be a fair description? Or how about rising wealth/income inequality? Wouldn’t rising disunity and political polarization be accurate? These are all characteristics of the long-wave social-economic cycle that is entering the disintegrative (winter) phase. Souring social mood, loss of purchasing power, stagnating wages, rising inequality, devaluing currencies, rising debt, political polarization and elite disunity are all manifestations of this phase.

This post was published at Charles Hugh Smith on SUNDAY, DECEMBER 04, 2016.

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And Then There Was One

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So much has changed in just the 8 months since April 25, 2016, when this “White House Photo” of the day was taken.
As Will Jordan notes, the photo showed a meeting of the world’s top political leaders, President Barack Obama talking with European leaders before their meeting in Hannover, Germany.
From left: British Prime Minister David Cameron, the President, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Francois Hollande, and Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi.
As of this evening, of the five, just one remains on the global political scene. The real question is for how much longer.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Dec 4, 2016.

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“Pizzagate” Explodes After Man Arrested In Comet Restaurant Shooting

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.@DCPoliceDept press release on arrest of Edgar Maddison Welch, 28, of Salisbury, NC for assault w/dangerous weapon at Comet restaurant. pic.twitter.com/IkSJUeHM2y
— Deputy Mayor Donahue (@SafeDC) December 5, 2016

Pizzagate took a turn for the even more bizarre on Sunday, as a man with an assault rifle walked into Comet Ping Pong to “self-investigate” the Baltimore, Maryland, pizza parlor that internet conspiracy theorists say is at the center of an international child sex ring run by prominent Democrats. 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch, of Salisbury, N. C., reportedly fired the rifle at least once inside the restaurant but no one was injured.
As HeatSt.com reports, Washington, D. C., police arrested the man Sunday afternoon, after restaurant employees saw a man, described as being in his early 20s and carrying an ‘assault rifle,’ work his way through the dining room and then attempt to enter the staff work area at the back of the building.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Dec 4, 2016.

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Baltimore Cops Ask For Help After 73-Year-Old Man Stabbed To Death In Broad Daylight

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Seeking help from the public in identifying the killer, Baltimore police released a video Saturday of the murder of an elderly man who was stabbed to death by a young Black male in broad daylight on a main Baltimore highway Friday afternoon.
The video shows the elderly man standing on a sidewalk holding a cane and carrying a package exchanging words with a young Black male wearing a hoodie.


This post was published at Zero Hedge on Dec 4, 2016.

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Inauguration Day Is Still A Long Way Off: ‘Never Underestimate A Marxist With A Billion Dollars And An Army Of Oligarchs To Lean On’

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Many things have been happening in this ‘transition period’ that point to one grim fact: Trump hasn’t sworn into office as president yet. As a matter of fact, things are happening that may very well derail that inauguration. There’s an old Irish expression: ‘There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip,’ and there’s quite a few slippery deeds in the works in particular that bear mentioning. January 20, 2017 is still a long way off, and Obama isn’t done just yet.
From an international perspective, something very heinous happened in the dead of night just a little more than a week ago. The House of Representatives passed a resolution, H. R. 5732, in a special session that included the suspension of normal rules. Suspensions are characteristically used for bills that are not controversial. H. R. 5732 is as controversial as they come: it holds the Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act of 2016, with Sec. 303 holding the provision for the establishment of a no-fly zone over Syria.
The H. R. was introduced by Eliot Engel of New York (how surprising), and not only does the no-fly zone apply to Syrian planes in their own airspace, but also raises the prospect of engagements between U. S. and Russian aircraft. Trump’s ‘reset’ with Russia doesn’t occur until January 20, and there’s still a lot of time in between now and then.

This post was published at shtfplan on December 4th, 2016.

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To Donald Trump: National Security Memorandum Number One

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The title of this Memorandum is: Medically Caused Death in America.
As President-elect, you’ve stated you’re going to reorganize the FDA so the agency makes faster approvals of new drugs.
This is exactly the wrong approach, and I’ll show you why. In fact, for decades the FDA has been destroying and endangering huge numbers of American lives. Their approach is simple: they approve drugs that maim and kill people, and they claim those drugs are safe.
In this enterprise, the FDA is in the pocket of large pharmaceutical companies.
This is a national security matter, on its face. And it must be dealt with in that fashion.
Here is the evidence…
ONE: On July 26, 2000, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a review by Dr. Barbara Starfield, a revered public-health expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. Titled ‘Is US Health Really the Best in the World?’, Starfield concluded that the US medical system kills 225,000 Americans a year. 106,000 deaths result from FDA-approved drugs. The other 119,000 deaths result from mistreatment and errors in hospitals.
Focusing on the medical-drug deaths, you can extrapolate the numbers for a decade: a million deaths.

This post was published at Jon Rappoport on December 4, 2016.

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U.S. Denies Permit Needed To Complete Dakota Access Pipeline

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I'm in tears. Standing Rock Sioux statement on today's developments. #NoDAPL #StandingRock pic.twitter.com/87NggewKeE
— Kelly Hayes (@MsKellyMHayes) December 4, 2016

After months of protests by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North Dakota, among others, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers today effectively shut down the project by refusing to approve the last remaining permit required to complete a segment running under Lake Oahe. Per Reuters, the permit denial was heavily celebrated by protesters in Cannon Ball, North Dakota but means that Energy Transfer Partners will have to go back to the drawing board to identify a new route for the last segment of the 1,172 mile pipeline that is largely already complete.
The U. S. Army Corps of Engineers said on Sunday it turned down a permit for a controversial pipeline project running through North Dakota, in a victory for Native Americans and climate activists who have protested against the project for several months.
A celebration erupted at the main protest camp in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, where the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and others have been protesting the 1,172-mile (1,885-km) Dakota Access Pipeline for months.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Dec 4, 2016.

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The ONLY Strategy That Makes Sense FOR YOU

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The election is over, and the naming of most of Trump’s cabinet is as well. Among the most-important to you as a US Citizen are:
Mnuchin, Treasury. Not only is a former squid (Goldman Sachs) he was responsible for “rescuing” IndyMac after it blew up and in the process of “rescuing” it siphoned off about a billion of FDIC funds for himself and his private equity buddies while foreclosing on thousands of homeowners, most in California, and many under dubious circumstances (e.g. by refusing to participate in modification programs or obfuscating response so as to cause people to miss deadlines.) I grant you that a huge percentage of those who got foreclosed on were not blameless and many in fact were chasing the impossible — and thus deserved what happened. Nonetheless Mnuchin is not an outsider and has drained taxpayer funds for his own benefit. Price, HHS. Price has a long record of how he “sees” health care reform (read: removal of Obamacare.) Obamacare must go away but what Price wants to do, including block granting Medicaid, will not only fail to stop the destruction of the health care system and the federal budget it will accelerate it. For all the horrors of Obamacare (and there are many) there have been winners — Obama bought two years of very slow expense growth in Medicare and Medicaid with it (out of a 30 year trend!), which is not enough to matter but it is what it is. It also provided a lot of people with health care they wouldn’t have otherwise gotten, albeit through slight of hand and destruction of the tax base (the subsidies are likely why tax growth last year was 0.5%, by the way.) Price’s ideas on this matter are essentially indistinguishable from Paul Ryan’s, and I’ve critiqued both in the past. Ross, Commerce. Wilbur Ross is one of the few with a reasonable mind in my opinion. He is an advocate for tariffs and getting rid of bad trade deals. This is good. What I haven’t heard, however, is the phrase “wage and environmental parity tariffs.” But Wilbur might come to see this, as his mind is open to the idea.

This post was published at Market-Ticker on 2016-12-04 17.

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