It’s time we all apologized to our neighborhood conspiracy theorists.

 They were right all along. Everything in the world really is being controlled and manipulated. They just had the groups wrong.

     The Bilberberg Group? Noobs. The Trilateral Commission? Posers. The Freemasons? Wannabe’s.

 Don’t believe me? Then you aren’t keeping track of the financial news, because it is all written down in court records.

 Here is a list of seven global markets that are proven to have been controlled.

 Everything from the food you eat to your credit card statement to the gas in your car to the budget of the city you live in. There literally is no free market setting prices on anything, but don’t blame governments for it.

   Even Congress doesn’t want us to know the details of the Drone War.

 The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday rejected 15 to 5 what supporters call a “modest” proposal to require that the Obama administration publicly report those killed by U.S. drone strikes overseas.

 Why would they not want us to know how many “enemies” we killed, unless there is something about this War on Some Terror that we wouldn’t approve of?

 Fortunately there is enough information out there that we can piece together an approximate picture of what is happening.

 A friend once told me that the wealthy elite didn’t want to just “roll back” the New Deal, they wanted to roll back the entire 20th Century. His point was that all the social gains of the 20th Century were granted to us in order to combat global communism, and that with the collapse of communism the wealthy elite is going it take it all back.

  I didn’t fully appreciate his sentiments until recently.

  The recent upsurge in global piracy seems strange and exotic in today’s world, but in fact it is rather appropriate in the full context of national events.

  Below is a list of trends which show the 21st Century is going to look a lot more like the 19th Century than the 20th Century.

Big Labor

 Can we finally stop saying “Big Labor”? Last year labor union membership had shrunk to 11.8% of the total workforce and only 6.6% of the private sector.

  You have to go all the way back to 1900 to find such a small union footprint in the private sector.

The New Asylums

 50 years ago people were horrified that the mentally ill were being “warehoused” in mental institutions. So the government turned the mentally ill out to live in the street. Now we have come full circle and the mentally ill are being warehoused again, but this time in dangerous prisons.

 The most vulnerable in our society have been completely abandoned by our society.

It appears that the lessons in humanity that people learned 150 years ago have been forgotten.

The country’s three biggest jail systems-Cook County, in Illinois; Los Angeles County; and New York City-are on the front lines. With more than 11,000 prisoners under treatment on any given day, they represent by far the largest mental-health treatment facilities in the country. By comparison, the three largest state-run mental hospitals have a combined 4,000 beds.

  “In every city and state I have visited, the jails have become the de facto mental institutions,” says Esteban Gonzalez, president of the American Jail Association, an organization for jail employees…

  Two centuries ago, reformers were disturbed to find large numbers of the mentally ill in jails, paving the way for the development of state-run institutions.

  Those days have returned.

  You are starting to see a lot of news articles talking about “reshoring”.

 “There is evidence here of reshoring because of transportation costs and lead times,” Mr Bergmann said. “The global supply chain allows you to chase lower cost of labour, but the total costs are reflected in the decision on where you produce for a given geography.”

 The decline of the American middle class have finally reached the point that American workers can compete against Chinese peasants. Victory is in sight!

 With any luck our corporate masters will soon be installing suicide nets outside our factories.

  What nation can intentionally target children for death and still expect the world to love us? Didn’t we used to denounce the Soviet Union for this stuff?

“In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”

 – Lt Col Marion Carrington, Marine Corp Times

 It sort of puts those school shooting deaths in perspective, doesn’t it? Our lack of respect for the lives of children overseas will eventually come home.

  While the mythology that America has the highest standard of living is beginning to die its long-overdue death, most Americans still honestly believe that their country is the most free in the world.

  When Bush told us that “they hate us for our freedom” what was most stunning was that the news media, and many citizens, simply accepted it as a fact.

 It’s an important myth, because if you believe your country defends liberty and freedom then you can justify all sorts of horrible things done in the name of your country.

  What is money? Specifically, how is it created?

It’s an amazing thing. We obsess over it. We sacrifice for it. We debase ourselves for it. We spend our lives trying to acquire as much of it as possible, and yet not one in ten people can accurately tell you how it is created. Most people don’t even care how it is created, because getting it is all that matters.

  If an alien landed here they would consider this behavior irrational to the point of insanity. And they would be correct.

  Many people view the Federal Reserve’s role in monetary policy as an unqualified good. If there isn’t enough money in the economy, or if there is too much debt or deflation, then the Fed should print money until both situations are fixed.

  Simple.

 But it isn’t that simple.

Monetary policy is a zero-sum game. It’s much like Isaac Newton’s 3rd law of motion: for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  Not only do many people fail to understand that, they are also under false impressions of what the reactions are and who they effect.

  A lot of people who are hoping that once Obama gets re-elected that he will prosecute the criminals on Wall Street who currently blatantly flaunt the law.

  I hate to shatter naive illusions, but if Obama was ever going to be serious about cracking down on white-collar crime and the rape of the working class he would have already started.

 However, some of you might not be discouraged so easily. For those people I would like to point out that next Wednesday is the 5-year anniversary of the two major Bear Stearns hedge funds filing for bankruptcy. This immediately ended the housing bubble and triggered a credit crunch that eventually led to Lehman Brothers going under and the global economic crisis that is with us today.

 So what has that got to do with prosecuting the criminals on Wall Street? Because the SEC has a 5 year statute of limitations for financial fraud.

  What is a criminal enterprise? According to the FBI, a criminal enterprise is:

 a group of individuals with an identified hierarchy, or comparable structure, engaged in significant criminal activity. These organizations often engage in multiple criminal activities and have extensive supporting networks…

 The FBI defines organized crime as any group having some manner of a formalized structure and whose primary objective is to obtain money through illegal activities.

  So have the big banks engaged in multiple criminal activities whose primary objective is to obtain money through illegal activities?

 Consider just the past month:

  Elinor Ostrom, the only woman to ever win the Nobel Prize for Economics, died last month and we are all poorer because of it. She was a trailblazer in the field of economics, yet her findings have been largely ignored by politicians, policy makers, and the financial media. Few economists have ever even heard of her.

 Why is that? Because her conclusions don’t help the cause of large corporations, governments, the wealthy and powerful.

 She was Elinor Ostrom, a professor of political science at Indiana University, who devoted much of her career to combing the world looking for examples where people had developed ways of regulating their use of common resources without resort to either private property rights or government intervention.

 In these days of environmental destruction and economic distress caused by rapacious corporations, we need people like Elinor Ostrom shining a light on alternative economic theories more than ever.