As the editor of the Silver Bear Cafe, I spend most of my time researching current events. I explore the markets, the economic war that is being waged on the middle class, precious metals, the Federal Reserve, energy, and how to go about surviving financially. In this weekly column I will attempt to condense the week's events and examine how the news might affect your pocketbook. JSB

Financial Markets

Our Government finances itself through the collection of taxes, (which basically go to pay the interest on the national debt), and the sale of treasury instruments, (i.e., bonds, bills, notes), which are effectively IOUs from "We the People". In its first term, the G. W. Bush administration increased the Federal debt by $2.2 trillion. Congress raised the Treasury debt ceiling three times, by $450 billion in 2002, by $984 billion in 2003, and by another $800 billion on November 19, 2004, to $8 trillion 184 billion. Between 2006 and 2011, Obama increased the debt by another $5 trillion. The ready willingness, of the members of the House and Senate, to finance such deficits is a clear indication of the political and ideological makeup of most members of Congress.

More disturbing is the fact that the voting public continues to re-elect these bozos in the glaring face of fiscal insanity. The wars are obviously a ruse to convert the national debt into vast wealth for the elitists. Please understand that there is no way that fiscal responsibility, a by-product of a gold backed currency, could ever provide for the reckless levels of debt that the American people, and their descendents, are currently being shackled to.

All the people in the world that hold Federal Reserve Notes are being fleeced. That's usually an occurrence reserved for sheep. How apropos. But, so long as crazy foreigners continued to loan us more of their "funny money" to fight these wars, the game could go on. It has now reached the point where foreigners have finally wised up to the insane nature of our economic policies and have ceased buying our IOUs. The Federal Reserve has stepped up and is currently buying one trillion dollars worth of government debt per year. Where does all that money come from? Well, out of thin air, of course. Ben "Breakneck" Bernanke and the Federal Reserve have created the mother of all bubbles, the bond bubble, and it's about to pop. There can only be one outcome from a situation where money is invented out of nothing to pay debts. When the bough breaks...

From Paul B. Farrell:

A warning: InvestmentNews wants to make damn sure its readers, the 90,000 professional financial advisers who rely on the timeliness and accuracy of every INews forecast, understand: "What will your clients' portfolios look like when the bond bomb goes off?" Get it? Not "if" but "when" that happens.

Yes, they do expect the bond bomb to explode and are publishing "a special report on the impending crisis in the bond market."

Yes, you heard them. "Tick, Tick ... Boom!" Wake up, it's an "impending crisis," and it lies dead ahead. And to punctuate the message, InvestmentNews added a photo of an alarm clock with huge bells, wired to rolled-up bonds looking like a stack of dynamite sticks. "Tick, Tick ... Boom!"

InvestmentNews is not staffed by a bunch of alarmists. Quite the opposite — it's conservative, trustworthy and methodical. The publication knows that the 90,000 registered investment advisers who rely on it are, in turn, responsible for advising millions of Americans and managing trillions of dollars' worth of retirement assets. Yes, the audience demands reliable forecasts.

So listen closely, and we'll summarize Andrew Osterland's lead article, "Fear Rising With Rates," along with an interview with bond king Bill Gross. And INews editorials on "repositioning client money" with "strategies for rising rates." And a couple of opposing portfolio suggestions: "The case for, and against, stocks."

The bull says we're on the verge of an even bigger run-up. The bear warns that if your goal is to avoid losses, stay out of equities altogether.

Either way, the INews report reads like a Stephen King story, and in the background you hear the ticking ... ticking ... louder ... and louder ... "

On the Economic War Front

One of the more astounding aspects of the slow motion economic train wreck that continues to unfold, right in front of our eyes, is the vast number of our "fellow citizens" that fail to see it, at all.

It doesn't seem to matter to most Americans that their lifestyles have been maliciously eroded, at an ever accelerating rate, for the past twelve years. We have now reached the point of crisis and overt collapse, and they still don't get it. It seems like most have already submitted and been assimilated by the collective.

Assimilate into what? The answer to that question provides the source of the problem. Instead of calling it the "the Dark Side", let's just call it "the BORG". The forced assimilation of all cultures, into one culture, rings of Star Trek.

The Borg are without question one of the most fearsome and relentless forces in the Milky Way galaxy. A massive society of cybernetic automatons abducted and assimilated from thousands of species, the Borg Collective is intent on achieving "perfection" by spreading its influence into every corner of space, consuming technologies and individuals without conscience, obliterating entire civilizations in its wake. And it has a particular interest in incorporating the human race into its "Hive." - Captain Jean Luc Picard, U.S.S. Enterprise-D

Who is doing the forcing? Certainly not you, or me. No, it is the work of the Collectivists, the One Worlders, the New World Order. Their quest for world domination, which is, by the way, all Yin and no Yang, has unbalanced the world, and all its inhabitants as well. The forced cultural diversification of our country has rendered us tribal-less. Forced cultural diversification is the scourge of individualism as it strips us of our tribal vitality. It is designed to cause the gradual elimination of all Collectivist opposition. We, as a group, have lost concern for tribal nurturing. We, as individuals, are losing our support groups. Without our support groups, we are alone and helpless. We have been unknowingly led away from any rational balance. Yang should be our focus. Survival is the most Yang thing we can attempt. "Resistance is futile", is the message from "the BORG".

From Brandon Smith:

Preparation for disaster, whether natural or man-made, should be as vital as any ideal found in the various practices of religion and spiritualism. Preparedness should be treated with reverence, discipline and duty. The drive for preparation should be seated in the very heart of humanity. As individuals and as a society, we should hold preparedness dear, for it is an expression of the desire for survival and the key to maintaining our inherent freedoms. Without self-sufficiency, we set ourselves up for endless failure and enslavement.

Preparedness must be approached with passionate resolve; otherwise, there is no point. Halfhearted survivalists are just as likely, if not more likely, to get themselves killed as the average oblivious urbanite and suburbanite. Unfortunately, even in the liberty movement, I have come across many halfhearted and lazy survivalists who would rather hope for the best than prepare for the worst.

The primary issue has always been one of "distraction." Even those who are fully informed of the very real and immediate dangers to our economy and our Nation as a whole find it difficult not to get wrapped up in the concerns of the old America. Mind-numbing job environments, superficial family dramas, television hypnosis, Facebook narcissism, consumer addictions, improving one's perceived social status: all of these things waste precious time in our daily lives, making us weak and sapping our resiliency. They encourage us toward apathy. Always, we are telling ourselves: "I did nothing today, but tomorrow will be different."

I hear many excuses and conflicts in my work as an economic analyst and preparedness adviser. Some come from people who are already in the liberty movement and should know better. Others come from people who for one reason or another seek to dissuade us from personal preparation. Here are just a handful of the many irrational arguments against survival planning that I am confronted with on a daily basis.

Precious Metals

One of the most important aspects of your financial survival concerns your understanding of the nature of money. If you believe that precious metals do not constitute "money", you have been misled. If you have been misled, who misled you? Why? And "What's wrong with this picture"?

What is money? The whole point of money is suppose to be the provision of a convenient and liquid medium that can be exchanged for less liquid value. It is a go between. One strives to accumulate money so it can be exchanged for something else.

In our illustrious history, we humans have tried everything from salt to sardines as a medium of exchange, but nothing has seemed to work as well as gold and silver. A person bringing a relatively illiquid item to market could swap it for gold or silver, secure in the knowledge that the metal would retain its value for as long as he chose to hold it and would be accepted as payment for anything he wanted when he chose to spend it.

The condition that your gold and silver will retain its value for as long as you chose to hold it is the most valuable characteristic of the "barbarous relics", and provides the fodder for me to champion the cause of precious metals ownership, and for my ensuing attack on the debasement of the American dollar.

Man has an innate desire to obtain and own gold and silver. That we seek to possess precious metals seems as naturally entrenched in our collective psychic as any other instinct. The possession of wealth, in the form of gold and silver, has always represented power and control. There is nothing wrong or unnatural to desire power and control. The power to control one's destiny through the accumulation of wealth is not only natural, it is healthy. This natural desire is the basis of our capitalistic system. The gold standard, as prescribed by our Constitution, is "the Law" that insures that the "power and control" that is provided by wealth, cannot be abused. Those who would seek to abuse the power of wealth would consequently have to break "the Law." "The Law" has been broken.

In 1792 the U. S. Coinage Act was passed by Congress. It invoked the death penalty for anyone debasing money and provided for a U.S. Mint where silver dollars were coined along with gold coins beginning in 1794. The text of Coinage Act of 1792 states: “The Dollar or Unit shall be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current,” that is, running in the market, “to wit, three hundred and seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver.”

To repeat, A“dollar” is a silver coin containing three hundred and seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver — and it cannot be changed by constitutional amendment, definitionally, any more than the term “year” can.

Fiat money, (money not backed by anything), was something so abhorrent to our Founding Fathers that they didn't even discuss it as an option. The Constitutional gold standard provided that the Country's citizens could not be robbed by means of inflation.

People, the world over, are beginning to wake up to the wholesale theft that has been, and continues to go on. Cyprus was definitely a wake-up call. How much longer will the Darkside be able to continue to suppress the price of silver, and through that suppression, be able to go on robbing us?

From Byron King:

Did you hear the U.S. Mint just ran out of silver? In mid-January, the Mint suspended sale of the 2013 run of its popular U.S. “Eagles.”

The new silver Eagles sold out fast. They went on sale, and buyers bought everything they could lay hands on. Within days, the shelves at the Mint were stripped bare. It’s not the first time that this has happened.

The Mint quickly announced that it’s obtaining new supplies of silver. It will stamp out more Eagle coins. There will be more to buy, or so they say. And yet… people in the silver markets are squirming — and I’ll tell you more about that, below.

Right now, silver sells for $31.50 per ounce, give or take. That’s if you can find somebody to sell you their silver at that price. If you’re a normal, everyday retail buyer, good luck trying.

Let’s say you want to buy some silver. You call up one of those companies that advertise on the radio and find out that there’s a markup to $40 or more for 1-ounce bullion coins. That’s if they have any to sell to the likes of you. After all, are you a big wheeler-dealer?

If you want the fancy versions of silver coins — “uncirculated” and “proof” specimens — the price is twice (or more) the posting for basic metal.

The bottom line is that silver is hard to get. You have to plan ahead to obtain the metal, and even the U.S. Mint gets its numbers wrong, now and again.

From what I’m seeing — and I’ll explain this, below — one of these days, the Mint might not simply resume sales so quickly. It won’t have the basic metal. And I suspect we’re going to see silver prices move much higher.

Energy

There is more horrible news out of Fukushima. This comes as no surprise. I have been predicting this outcome since the onset of the tsunami. Listening to the presstitutes will always end up badly as their entire mission entails obscuring the truth. Just as the Deepwater Horizon spill has yet to be contained, in the Gulf of Mexico, the bulk of the horrific damage by seeping radiation at Fukushima has yet to be realized. Consequently, "Tokyo is all aglow".

From Washington's Blog:

Worse Than Ever?

Nuclear expert Arnie Gundersen said today that the containment vessel at Fukushima reactor 2 has a large crack in it. Reactors 1, 2 and 3 all exploded.

BBC reports today:

They know very little about what's going on inside Reactors 1, 2, and 3 [...] They don't really know what the state of the reactor core is.

Indeed, there is no containment at Fukushima.

Large quantities of radiation are still leaking into the Pacific Ocean. And see this.

The operator of the Fukushima plants says it’s “impossible” to keep storing radioactive water in tanks, and Tepco will need to intentionally dump it into the ocean.

The area around Fukushima has become so contaminated that even the trees are radioactive.

And Tokyo is almost as irradiated as Fukushima.

American sailors were exposed to massive doses of radiation. Conditions were so bad that they considered suicide. Many of these good men and women are now really sick.  More here, here and here. (But both the Japanese and American governments have abandoned them.)

Tepco might not even meaningfully start working to decommission the plants until the radiation level drops … decades from now (Or until the technology exists to clean it up.)

It has now been officially admitted that the accident was caused by collusion between the government and nuclear industry.

The Fed

The Silver Bear Cafe is the only alternative news and information web site. that I am aware of, that has, as one of its six forums, one completely dedicated to slamming the Federal Reserve on a daily basis. I have managed to find one article a day, six times a week, for the last ten years, that exposes this criminal banking cartel for what it is. The Federal Reserve was behind the sovereign meltdowns in Europe, working at the behest of JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs as well as the current robbery in Cyprus. The Federal Reserve is, in my humble opinion, public enemy number one.

From John Rubino:

In Niall Ferguson's Civilization: The West and the Rest, he presents a list of institutional arrangements that turned a bunch of ignorant, "malodorous" Europeans into the world’s dominant culture in the space of a couple of centuries. One of those institutional arrangements was property rights. That is, when something is yours it's yours, not the king's or the clergy's or the local lord's. A contract, once agreed to, is sacred before the law and is enforced by the powers-that-be.

This institution hasn't always been perfectly respected, of course, but in the West’s more successful capitalist democracies it has been solid enough to allow citizens to work, save, create and innovate, reasonably secure in the knowledge that they'll get to keep most of what they earn and all that they save.

The centrality of property rights is why Cyprus is sending shock waves through the global financial system. Smaller than Greece, difficult for most Europeans (and for virtually any American) to locate on a map, this pretty little island (the home, I just discovered, of Mt. Olympus) was the scene of an attempted crime that, had it succeeded, would have produced bank runs in a dozen countries and pretty much vaporized the financial systems of Italy, Greece, and maybe Spain.

As everyone knows by now, the European Union, in return for a rounding-error-tiny bailout of 10 billion euros, coerced Cyprus' leaders into trying to confiscate 6% – 10% of every local bank account. Universal outrage stopped the theft in its tracks, but not before the world got a glimpse of their leaders' true natures. To "the Troika" what's theirs is theirs and what's yours is theirs, and quaint concepts like private property are always subordinate to the maintenance of power.

This isn't the first assault on property rights since the financial system seized up in 2009. In the US, contracts governing bond seniority were abrogated when General Motors went bankrupt. A case could also be made that the US bank bailouts were a blatant theft of taxpayer cash — and that inflation itself violates property rights by secretly stealing savers' wealth.

Financial Survival

As the editor of the Silver Bear Cafe, I try to focus on the ramifications of world events. I try to understand how what's going on now will affect your pocketbook next week, next month, next year. It is my sole intent to help you consider the possibilities which will, in turn, help you prepare for your financial future.

I have received quite a few emails in response to my recent article, "Light a Candle". In that article I suggested that, as a result of a pandemic national apathy, "the Game" was overwhelmingly in the control of "the Dark Side". I posed a question near the end;

"What purpose would a revolution serve. Who among us has a solution?"

That line was meant to challenge the sensibilities of the readers and perhaps invoke some attention to the situation and bring some of the problems to light. Problems are like vampires. They don't like the light.

A good portion of the emails I received conveyed a frustration borne from my appraisal of the current state of the world, and my seeming lack of a solution.

I try and stay focused on financial and economic issues. It is always frustrating when I attempt to delve into political issues because:

1. I believe that by dividing the voters through the current two party system, "the Dark Side" has successfully herded the great majority of American voters to a place where they expend their energies in fighting over questions of no importance. The candidates are both "Demopublicans", intent on furthering the agenda of their "puppet masters".
   
   
2. Unless a great number of Americans wake up to the realities of the situation and assume the responsibility of "spreading the word", no significant political changes will occur.

There may be a solution to the potentially devastating onslaught of the evil forces of "the Dark Side", but it will involve an uncharacteristic response from "We the People", the vast majority of which will vote for a Demopublican. Everyone who emailed me seemed to understand the folly of voting for a Demopublican. So what else is new?

I, of course, believe that a solution exists, but it will require the here-to-fore missing superhuman effort of all you "enlightened" folks out there who agree with my prognosis, but have yet to do anything about it. It will require a unified application of energies, the likes of which have not been mustered since the revolution.

To quote a paragraph from a recent Bill Bonner editorial;

"In the investment markets, a man gets what he deserves. But in politics, he gets what his idiot neighbor deserves. And one thing you can count on is that the guy next door will vote for a man who at least appears to be as dull and stupid as he is. The reason for that is very simple. The mediocre, lumpenvoter believes his opinions are better than those of anyone else. He looks for his own stupid face reflected in the views of his political leaders. Someone who has actually thought deeply about issues is not only alien to him, but offensive. The complexities and ironies of the situation bewilder and annoy him. So, he turns for comfort and assurance to the simple-minded candidate with the simple-minded opinions."

Editors note: For more of Mr. Bonner's insights please visit the Daily Reckoning.com.

From Brandon Smith:

Years ago while writing for Neithercorp Press I penned an article entitled "One Day Soon, We'll All Be Homegrown Terrorists".  In that piece I described a not so far off future in which martial law, economic collapse, and the destruction of civil liberties stood imminent.  I related my views on the propaganda rhetoric of the SPLC, and how they were using false association to tie liberty groups to any deviant organization they could think of, including racists and domestic terrorists, in order to condition the American public to react to our message with immediate contempt. 

It became clear to me then that the SPLC, which had become the propaganda wing of the widely reviled Department Of Homeland Security, was helping set the stage for a paradigm shift in the U.S.  This shift would obviously include economic and social disruption, as well as political turmoil beyond anything our nation has seen for over 150 years.  But most importantly, it would pave the way for certain elements of the American populace, namely those who are awake, aware, and outspoken, to be labeled "enemy combatants" dangerous to the state.

Though posing as an anti-racist monitoring institution, the SPLC's primary concern has never been the KKK or "White Identity".  Rather, the SPLC's job has been and always will be to marginalize and defame those who stand against centralized federal power, regardless of how corrupt that power has become.  They are not anti-racists, or liberals, or concerned citizens; they are STATISTS, who only care about maintaining the superiority of a government that has been bought and paid for many times over by a gaggle of international financiers with delusions of godhood.    

The SPLC, of course, has so far utterly failed in their efforts to stop the rise of Constitutional activists.  By their own admission, "patriot groups" have expanded exponentially since 2008, and continue to develop freely even in the face of wildly absurd character attacks taken from the amoral (immoral) guidebook of Saul Alinsky himself.  The truth, once realized, is difficult if not impossible to stop.

Unfortunately, the establishment understands this as well…

Given a few more years, the Liberty Movement will indeed prevail in the struggle for the "infowar".  Naysayers who claimed we were merely an ineffective and irrelevant peripheral of society are now faced with a strong and growing minority which has the power to swing state and local elections, as we did in 2012, simply by refusing to vote for oath breaking Republicans, sending the message that if the Republican party ever wants to win again, they had better run honest Constitutionalists.  Those who claimed our message was "insane conspiracy theory" must now explain the indefinite detention and rendition provisions of the NDAA, the government approved unleashing of 30,000 surveillance drones in American skies, the Obama Administration's assassination list which includes U.S. citizens, and the push for gun registration and confiscation which is already beginning to take place in some states.

How did we know what was coming?  Was it intuition or lucky conjecture?  Neither.  All we had to do was look at the trends of the day and use logic to discern the most likely outcome.

Our concerns, which were once called "fringe", are now going mainstream.  We were right, they were wrong.  Though, I wish we had been wrong…

Just as the public is on a shrinking timeline, so are the elites.  For every burst forward in our efforts to wake up the population to the loss of their freedoms and heritage, they must speed up their plans to gain economic and political supremacy.  The harder you pull on the ends of a frayed rope in opposite directions, the sooner it is going to snap.

You must first realize that there are, present in our lives, enemies. You must then know who those enemies are and act accordingly.

Eliminate as much debt as possible, especially “variable rate” debt, such as credit cards and lines of credit. Interest rates will be rising, so the elimination of debt offers a “real return” of escaping rising rates by creditors.

Get some control over some fresh water.

If you are depending on Social Security, stop.

Follow the course opposite to custom and you will almost always do well...

Its not what you don't know that will screw you up, it's what you know that is wrong. The spin you hear from the mainstream media is intended to mislead you. Open your eyes and face the future. If you leave your head in the sand and ignore it, you are only leaving your butt exposed for the world to kick. This all may sound like gloom and doom, but when you get a handle on what is going to happen, you will have a future filled with opportunity. Fortune favors the Informed.

More next week...

May the Great Spirit be with you always,

Johnny Silver Bear
Chief cook and bottle washer, The Silver Bear Cafe

Disclaimer

All statements and expressions are the sole opinions of the editor and are subject to change without notice. A profile, description, or other mention of a company in the newsletter is neither an offer nor solicitation to buy or sell any securities mentioned. While we believe all sources of information to be factual and reliable, in no way do we represent or guarantee the accuracy thereof, nor the statements made herein. The staff of Silver Bear Cafe are not registered investment advisors and do not purport to offer personalized investment related advice. The publisher, editor, staff, or anyone associated with, or associated to the Silver Bear Cafe may own securities mentioned in this newsletter and may buy or sell securities without notice.