Author: Charles Hugh Smith

It’s time to start planning for what we’ll do when the current health care system implodes. As with many another complex, opaque systems in the U.S., only those toiling in the murky depths of the healthcare system know just how broken the entire system is. Only those dealing daily with the perverse incentives, the Kafkaesque procedures, the endlessly negative unintended consequences, the soul-deadening paper-shuffling, the myriad forms of fraud, the recalcitrant patients who don’t follow recommendations but demand to be magically returned to health anyway, and of course the hopelessness of the financial future of a system with runaway costs, … Continue reading →

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This is why the Deep State is fracturing: its narratives no longer align with the evidence. As this chart from Google Trends illustrates, interest in the Deep State has increased dramatically in 2017. The term/topic has clearly moved from the specialist realm to the mainstream. I’ve been writing about the Deep State, and specifically, the fractures in the Deep State, for years. Amusingly, now that “Progressives” have prostituted themselves to the Security Agencies and the Neocons/Neoliberals, they are busy denying the Deep State exists. For example, There is No Deep State (The New Yorker). In this risible view, there is no Deep State “conspiracy” … Continue reading →

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When something no longer works, it goes away: it costs more to maintain than its output is worth. The fragmentation of political consensus (i.e. the consent of the citizenry) is presented by the Powers That Be and their media servants as being a disaster.The implicit fear is real enough: how can we rule the entire nation-empire if it fragments? As I noted the other day, fragmentation terrifies the Establishment of racketeers and insiders, for when the centrally-enforced rentier skims and scams collapse, those who own and control the rentier skims, scams and rackets will lose the source of their wealth and power. To … Continue reading →

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The battle raging in the Deep State isn’t just a bureaucratic battle–it’s a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation. When do the unlimited powers of the Intelligence/Security agencies threaten America’s domestic and global national interests? The CIA and its political enablers claim the agency’s essentially unlimited powers, partially revealed by Wikileak’s Vault 7, pose no threat to America’s interests, since they are intended to “defend” American interests. This is the rationale presented by neocon CIA allies in both political parties: the CIA can’t possibly threaten America’s interests because the CIA defines America’s interests. This is the wormhole down which civil … Continue reading →

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Virtue-signaling doesn’t signal virtue–it signals decline and collapse. There are many reasons why Imperial Rome declined, but two primary causes that get relatively little attention are moral decay and soaring wealth inequality. The two are of course intimately connected: once the morals of the ruling Elites degrade, the status quo seeks to mask its self-serving rot behind high-minded “virtue-signaling” appeals to past glories and cost-free idealism. Virtue signaling is defined as “the conspicuous expression of moral values by an individual done primarily with the intent of enhancing that person’s standing within a social group,” “the practice of publicly expressing opinions or sentiments … Continue reading →

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Any currency is only truly “backed by gold” if it is convertible to gold. There is something intuitively appealing about the idea of a gold-backed currency –money backed by the tangible value of gold, i.e. “the gold standard.” Instead of intrinsically worthless paper money (fiat currency), gold-backed money would have real, enduring value–it would be “hard currency”, i.e. sound money, because it would be convertible to gold itself. Many proponents of sound money identify President Nixon’s ending of the U.S. dollar’s gold standard in 1971 as the cause of the nation’s financial decline. If our currency was still convertible to … Continue reading →

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Your skills, knowledge and social capital will emerge unscathed on the other side of the re-set wormhole. Your financial assets held in centrally controlled institutions will not. Longtime correspondent C.A. recently asked a question every American household should be asking: which assets are most likely to survive the “system re-set” that is now inevitable? It’s a question of great import because not all assets are equal in terms of survivability in crisis, when the rules change without advance notice. If you doubt the inevitability of a system implosion/re-set, please read Is America In A Bubble (And Can It Ever Return To “Normal”)? This brief … Continue reading →

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In this war of the rising and fading elites, there is no common ground or incentive to compromise. Historian Michael Grant identified profound political disunity in the ruling elite as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Grant described this dynamic in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire. The chapter titles of the book illuminate the complex causes of profound political disunity in the ruling elite: Current Prices on popular forms of Silver Bullion The Gulfs Between the Classes: a.k.a. soaring income/wealth inequality: check. The Credibility Gap: The Mainstream Media lauds itself and a … Continue reading →

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So when the protected class of well-paid institutional “progressives” speak darkly of “reversing 40 years of social progress,” what they’re really saying is we’re terrified that the bottom 95% might be waking up to our Great Con of identity politics and political correctness. To understand the Great Con of political correctness, we must first grasp the decline of the working class (self-described as “the middle class”), i.e. those who must sell their labor to earn their livelihood. Current Prices on popular forms of Silver Bullion Labor’s share of the national economy has been declining for 46 years: So where has … Continue reading →

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If you want to stop being played as a chump, turn off the CNN/MSM and disengage from the self-referential social media distraction. Let’s start by asking: if Trump had lost and his supporters had angrily taken to the streets, destroying private property and threatening police officers while proclaiming “not my president,” would the mainstream media have characterized the rioters differently than it has the pro-Clinton rioters? Any fair-minded observer knows the answer is yes: the CNN/MSM would have lambasted the “rioting deplorables” as “what’s wrong with America.” Substitution is a useful tool to expose bias. How come the CNN/mainstream corporate … Continue reading →

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President-Elect Trump, more policy tweaks, more promises of more government free money and more symbolic gestures won’t fix anything. Though I am just another powerless peon, I’d like to offer seven suggestions to President-Elect Trump and his transition team: 1. Make sure your administration is as diverse as America. No single act will give your enemies more ammo than populating your cabinet and administration with the Usual Suspects: Caucasian elites from Ivy League universities. These privileged “experts” have bankrupted the nation financially, morally and spiritually while enriching themselves and their privileged cronies. Populate your cabinet and administration with entrepreneurially minded, … Continue reading →

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Please read my election note at the end of the essay. There are many sources of rage: injustice, the destruction of truth, powerlessness. But if we had to identify the one key source of non-elite rage that cuts across all age, ethnicity, gender, and regional boundaries, it is this: The Ruling Elite is protected from the destructive consequences of its predatory dominance. We see this reality across the entire political, social and economic landscape. Myths, Misunderstandings and Outright lies about owning Gold. Are you at risk? If I had to pick one chart that illustrates the widening divide between the … Continue reading →

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Exposing the Clintons’ perfection of a corrupt political system won’t change the conditions and incentives that created the Clintons’ harvester of corruption. Let’s set aside Hillary Clinton as an individual and consider her as the perfection of a corrupt political system. As I noted yesterday, Politics As Usual Is Dead, and Hillary Clinton is the ultimate product of the political system that is disintegrating before our eyes. The corruption of pay-to-play and the commingling of public and private influence is not the failing of an individual–it is the logical conclusion of a thoroughly corrupt political system.  Given the incentives built … Continue reading →

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In terms of finance and communications, politics as usual–political candidates and narratives mandated by the parties’ Ruling Elites and the MSM–is dead. Hillary and Trump are symptoms of a fatal condition: politics, as it has been practiced for 70 years, is dead. As my friend G.F.B. observed, the key development was not the nomination of insider-Hillary or outsider-Trump–it was the enormous success of Bernie Sanders’ campaign, a campaign that arose outside a Democratic Party establishment that tried to suppress or destroy Sanders’ campaign at every turn, a campaign funded not by the Goldman Sachs of the world that funded Hillary … Continue reading →

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That few believe Mr. Market can possibly stumble only increases the odds of a stumble. You know how to get into crash positions, correct? Here’s your guide: Very few punters expect a real downturn here in stocks. The reasons for confidence are many: the Fed has our back, buy the dip has worked great and will continue to work great, the Fed won’t raise rates until December (if ever), the Powers That Be will keep the market aloft lest a plunging market upset the election of the status quo candidate, and so on. Current Prices on popular forms of Gold Bullion This … Continue reading →

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