Tag Archives: Scams

Everything’s Fixed–Except What’s Broken, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on October 12, 2022 | 2 comments

There are a lot of rigged systems and scams out there. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Everything’s fixed except what’s no longer profitable to plunder. Underfunded, ignored, mismanaged by incompetents, it breaks.

Everything’s fixed–except what’s broken. Hmm. Maybe we need to read that again.

Everything’s fixed means it’s been “fixed” like a game or match has been fixed–rigged to benefit insiders while the unwary onlookers and punters have been led to believe that it’s “fair and open.” That con job is the critical cover to cloak the fix/rigging.

If a market or regulatory system can’t be rigged to benefit insiders, then it’s broken because if it isn’t profitable for insiders, it’s neglected until it breaks.

It’s rather ironic, isn’t it? If you want a system to semi-function as advertised, it has be rigged to benefit insiders, as only then do insiders and major players devote enough attention and resources to keep it stumbling along, much as an organism is kept alive so parasites can continue feasting on it.

These zombie-systems rigged to benefit insiders only serve the public in a cursory, minimal-effort fashion. These systems excel at recruiting naive idealists who actually believe in the purported purpose of the organization: public service, education, quality products and services, etc.

These idealists soon lose their naivete as the learn that all that “serve the public” rah-rah is a PR facade to cover the expert pillage by insiders.

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Posted in Collapse, Crime, Economy, Financial markets, Government, Politics

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A Nation of Imposters, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on October 23, 2021 | Leave a comment

Scams and phoniness are the orders of the day. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

That’s how we’ve become a nation of imposters: our imposter stock market hits a new high and the imposters cheer because it proves the scam is still working.

You’ve read the warnings about the proliferating imposter scams: scammers posing as “officials”, representatives of utilities or “a close friend of a family member” all exploit the fast-draining reservoir of trust in America to extract financial information out of the unwary marks.

I’m not sure what’s more remarkable: the depths of scammer perversity or the fact that some people can still be conned by claims of authority or friendship. Most are seniors, of course, as the elderly still retain an easy-to-scam trust in institutions and officialdom as a holdover from an era before trust was unraveled by wholesale self-serving deception.

The deeper problem is that America is now a nation of imposters. Everything that is presented as august and trustworthy is an imposter organization designed to enrich the few at the expense of the many via deception and the cloaking of self-serving skims and scams.

A useful tool to uncloaking imposters is to ask: cui bono, to whose benefit? Take the nation’s central bank, the Federal Reserve. It claims to be serving the public and the common good, but who actually benefits from its policies?

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Posted in Banking, Business, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Financial markets, Government, Horseshit, Investing, Politics, Propaganda

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Beware the Rise of Scamerica, by Robert E. Wright

Posted on May 21, 2021 | 1 comment

Counterintuitively to those who think of government as some sort of font of morality, the more the government, the more the scams. From Robert E. Wright at aier.org:

Scams, frauds, flim flams, and grifts are nothing new to America. In fact, confidence games were old hat when Clifton Wooldridge published his 1906 classic, The Grafters of America: Who They Are and How They Work, which describes common cons in fin de siecle Chicago. The recent death of notorious investment scamster Bernie Madoff should remind Americans that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

As America descends into policy disarray, the scamming of others is increasing. Wire fraud is rampant, as is the impersonation of government workers, apparently because Americans now expect government officials to accost them for quick cash at least occasionally. I focus here on a much more insidious type of scam that also seems to be on the rise, something that I will politely refer to as “substandard work,” but that in informal adult conversation usually goes by a fecal four-letter word followed by “job.”

Much of the substandard work being conducted across the country right now ultimately is the government’s fault, specifically a set of policies seemingly deliberately designed to induce Americans not to work: extra unemployment pay; major school systems remaining virtual until fall; bizarre summer camp masking requirements. The first entices lower income people to stay out of the labor market and the latter two make parents think twice, or thrice, about returning to work.

As a result, many usually reliable businesses cannot find any workers, much less good ones. Robin Jones, a regional manager for a major fast food chain in the Upper Midwest, recently told me that April and May of this year have been the tightest labor market he can remember in his 43-year restaurant career, which includes stints in Arkansas, Missouri, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming. His back is giving out because his desk job has turned into a role as a stopgap line worker in the cheap taco wars. While he does what he can, he is only one man. The extreme dearth of workers means much longer wait times than usual and substandard service overall.

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Posted in Business, Crime, Governments, Labor, Politics, Propaganda

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The Most Hopeful Scenario for 2021, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on December 29, 2020 | Leave a comment

That scenario has about a .0000001% chance of happening. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Choose wisely, America, or the options for a positive outcome will vanish like mist in Death Valley on a clear July afternoon.

From the point of view of evolution, the most hopeful scenario for 2021 is the sudden and complete collapse of everything that is obsolete, inefficient, ineffective and sclerotic. When obsolete systems and entities pass away quickly, the cost and pain are processed and absorbed quickly as well: enterprises go bankrupt and their assets are liquidated, failed ventures close, and schemes that didn’t yield the desired benefits are scrapped.

This is the evolutionary process. Whatever has lost its selective advantages will succumb to selective pressures and fade away.

The problem arises when self-serving insiders siphon resources to keep their obsolete, inefficient, ineffective and sclerotic gravy-train protected from selective pressures. Keeping a terminally ill human alive is an analogy: it’s possible to extend the life of a terminally ill person at enormous expense and effort, but the patient isn’t restored to their previous health or vigor–that is no longer even a possibility. They are no longer their previous self, and this is why people choose to avoid extraordinary interventions in their final phase of life.

Economically obsolete / terminal entities, on the other hand, always choose extraordinary monetary interventions to keep their gravy-train alive, even if they bleed the rest of the economy dry in the process.

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Posted in Business, Collapse, Crime, Cronyism, Economy, Governments, Morality, Society

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Mad As Hell, by Chris Martenson

Posted on January 15, 2017 | Leave a comment

Chris Martenson channels his “inner crank” towards the economic scams that permeate so much of American life. From Martenson at peakprosperity.com:

Fair warning, my family just received a 61.5% increase in our healthcare insurance premium of 2017, on top of last year’s 24.8% increase, so I am quite annoyed at the moment. For my non-US readers, perhaps what follows will interest you as a means of understanding how and why Donald Trump came to be elected President. I am going to be channeling some of my inner crank today.

If you want to understand why Trump won the recent US presidential election, you can’t overlook the economic data. If you do, his victory may look mighty confusing, alarming even. But once you understand the degree to which the average US family and the entire Gen-X and Millennial generations are being completely hosed economically, everything starts to take shape.

As most struggling Americans can tell you, household income has gone nowhere for more than 20 years:

This multi-decade burden of “running ever faster just to stay in the same place” is what led many US voters to reject Hillary Clinton, the establishment candidate, and instead roll the dice on the iconoclast promising to upend the system.

But if Trump’s plan to “make America great again” means a return to the 1980s and 1990s when median real incomes climbed smartly, he’s not going to be able to pull that rabbit out of the hat, I’m afraid. None of the conditions in place then are with us today including cheap, abundant energy (remember, oil was $10 a barrel in 1998); not to mention that we were riding the tailwinds produced by all of the gains from the early, explosive stage of the technology and internet revolutions.

To continue reading: Mad As Hell

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Posted in Business, Economy, Government, Medicine

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