End Game - Would US Police/Troops Fire Upon US Citizens?

This is the first in an occasional series examining the end of the American Empire and the global shock waves it will produce. Contrary to popular belief I suspect the unraveling will take place over many years, decades even, with sudden plunges and slow partial recoveries aka dead cat bounces. I call this series of examinations “End Game”.



I would wager that the vast majority of people reading this essay have already come to their own conclusion regarding the answer to the title’s query. Certainly you may have several qualifiers and stipulations with which you framed your answer and maybe even a few facts and proofs ready for quick rebuttal if challenged. But my own experience with explosive questions such as this is that there are few who have not already formed an opinion on the matter. If you have not you would be the exception to the rule.

And at this point in the meltdown it would be fair to say there are no correct or incorrect answers to be found, only supposition, assumption and what I expect will be full throated argument to follow in the comment section. May I suggest that whatever answer you’ve come up with wasn’t necessarily arrived at through careful deliberation or contemplation, but rather as an integral part of your overall belief system? And while you may consider all that you believe to be valid and fact based, for all people other than possibly the sociopaths walking among us this is far from the case.

Personally I find that sitting down and writing about a subject forces me to push through all the fuzzy logic and tenuous connections that make up my system of beliefs. For most of us what we think we know or believe is similar to a loosely connected debris field of facts, thoughts, myths, hopes and desires floating on the mind’s surface. Only in this case there really isn’t much mixing or removal of the thought debris by intellectual wave action, just a lifelong rearrangement of the floating deck chairs. When strong emotions are brought into the mix, it’s like a hurricane came through and made an even bigger mess of things.

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Drunken Ben Bernanke Tells Everyone At Neighborhood Bar How Screwed U.S. Economy Really Is

SEWARD, NE—Claiming he wasn't afraid to let everyone in attendance know about "the real mess we're in," Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke reportedly got drunk Tuesday and told everyone at Elwood's Corner Tavern about how absolutely fucked the U.S. economy actually is.

Bernanke, who sources confirmed was "totally sloshed," arrived at the drinking establishment at approximately 5:30 p.m., ensconced himself upon a bar stool, and consumed several bottles of Miller High Life and a half-dozen shots of whiskey while loudly proclaiming to any patron who would listen that the economic outlook was "pretty goddamned awful if you want the God's honest truth."

"Look, they don't want anyone except for the Washington, D.C. bigwigs to know how bad shit really is," said Bernanke, slurring his words as he spoke. "Mounting debt exacerbated—and not relieved—by unchecked consumption, spiraling interest rates, and the grim realities of an inevitable worldwide energy crisis are projected to leave our entire economy in the shitter for, like, a generation, man, I'm telling you."



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Here’s some context:
- In October 2007, some 27 million Americans were on food stamps.
- A year later, October 2008, the number had reached nearly 31 million.
- By October 2009, the number was approaching more than 37 million.
- Last October saw the program increase to 43 million.
- By the end of May, 45,753,078 Americans were dependent on food stamps.

So how much money in food stamps do they get?
- An eligible individual gets $200 a month in food stamps – in the form of a debit card that can be used at supermarkets and stores to buy authorized food.
- A two-person household gets $367 a month.
- A three-person household gets $526 a month.
- And a four-person household gets $668 a month.

Global stock markets tumbled Friday amid fears the U.S. may be heading back into recession and Europe's debt crisis is worsening. The sell-off follows the biggest one-day points decline on Wall Street since the 2008 financial crisis.

The Fall of the Midwest Economic Model

President Obama has kicked off a three-day bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, where the corn is high and at least some factories are spewing smoke. He's holding town-hall meetings on the economy, putting the unemployed back to work and "growing wages for everyone." He won these Midwestern states handily in 2008, but he's not taking anything for granted these days. The Midwest is the region with the largest number of target states. The president's latest Gallup job approval there is 39%, the same as the nation as a whole.

To understand the political economy of the Midwest, it helps to put it in historic perspective. Originally the Midwest's economy was built on its farms, then later on its factories. The long farm-to-factory migration lasted from roughly 1890 to 1970. At the end of that period, when I was working on the first edition of "The Almanac of American Politics," it seemed there were two models for the U.S. future. One was the Michigan model, which prevailed in the industrial Midwest and the factory towns of the Great Plains. The other was the Texas model, which prevailed in most of the South and Southwest.

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13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV NONFARM PAYROLLS +120,000 (CONSENSUS +122,000) VS OCT +100,000 (PREV +80,000), SEPT +210,000 (PREV +158,000)
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-US NOV PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS +140,000 (CONS +140,000), OCT +117,000 (PREV +104,000)
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV GOVERNMENT JOBS -20,000 VS OCT -17,000 (PREV -24,000)
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV JOBLESS RATE 8.6 PCT (CONSENSUS 9.0 PCT) VS OCT 9.0 PCT (PREV 9.0 PCT)
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV JOBLESS RATE LOWEST SINCE MATCHING 8.6 PCT IN MARCH 2009
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION RATE 64.0 PCT IN NOV VS 64.2 PCT IN OCT
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV AVERAGE HOURLY EARNINGS ALL PRIVATE WORKERS -0.1 PCT (CONS +0.2 PCT) VS OCT +0.3 PCT (PREV +0.2 PCT), TO $23.18 VS OCT $23.20; NOV YEAR-ON-YEAR EARNINGS +1.8 PCT
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV AVERAGE WORKWK ALL PRIVATE WORKERS 34.3 HRS (CONS 34.3 PCT) VS OCT 34.3 HRS (PREV 34.3),
bnpp_gasoline: 13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV NONFARM PAYROLLS +120,000 (CONSENSUS +122,000) VS OCT +100,000 (PREV +80,000), SEPT +210,000 (PREV +158,000)
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-US NOV PRIVATE SECTOR JOBS +140,000 (CONS +140,000), OCT +117,000 (PREV +104,000)
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV GOVERNMENT JOBS -20,000 VS OCT -17,000 (PREV -24,000)
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV JOBLESS RATE 8.6 PCT (CONSENSUS 9.0 PCT) VS OCT 9.0 PCT (PREV 9.0 PCT)
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV JOBLESS RATE LOWEST SINCE MATCHING 8.6 PCT IN MARCH 2009
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. LABOR FORCE PARTICIPATION RATE 64.0 PCT IN NOV VS 64.2 PCT IN OCT
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV AVERAGE HOURLY EARNINGS ALL PRIVATE WORKERS -0.1 PCT (CONS +0.2 PCT) VS OCT +0.3 PCT (PREV +0.2 PCT), TO $23.18 VS OCT $23.20; NOV YEAR-ON-YEAR EARNINGS +1.8 PCT
13:30 02Dec11 RTRS-U.S. NOV AVERAGE WORKWK ALL PRIVATE WORKERS 34.3 HRS (CONS 34.3 PCT) VS OCT 34.3 HRS (PREV 34.3)

The USDA is notoriously secretive about who receives its money, relying on weak legal reasoning, said Steve Ellis of the watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

"USDA hides behind a specious proprietary data argument: The public doesn't want to know internal business decisions or information about specific individuals' finances," he said. "The USDA sees retailers, junk food manufacturers and the big ag lobby as their customers, rather than the taxpayer."

The agency also has no idea what type of food the benefits are buying, even though the combination of universal bar codes and benefit cards makes that entirely feasible.
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Told that the newspaper would not pay, the CFO's office then said that only JP Morgan, to which it contracted out operations, had access to the store totals and that the office had never looked at them. After six months of the local government attempting to extract the information from JP Morgan, the District finally said that releasing the information would be illegal.

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When you think of food stamp usage you rarely think about big financial profits. Yet some businesses are managing to get a big piece of the food stamp pie. Last year alone the government spent a record $78 billion in food stamps. This is a large amount of money and this is why you might notice more EBT signs if you ever pay attention when you are driving around. The money when broken down by the 46 million Americans receiving this aid is not much but actually speaks to the underlying bifurcated nature of our economy. Many are stuck below poverty status and many in the middle class simply struggle to get by. The Congressional Budget Office projects that food stamp usage will be high deep into 2015. Let us examine where this money is actually going.

High usage of food stamps well into 2015

It is hard to call it a recovery when projections from the government are showing high food stamp usage well into 2015. In fact, the projection shows that in 2015 the government will spend $80 billion on food stamps:

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