Lux Lucet

Hillary Clinton

Eventful times these are. So much so that there’s far more to write about than I could ever hope to adequately address. But hey, there’s no harm in trying. So, let’s get started…

Crooked Hillary

I hardly know where to begin when it comes to Mrs. Clinton. She’s an obvious felon. And the best any normal person with her legal baggage could hope for would be a not-too-harsh plea bargain. But when it comes to the preternaturally impervious Hillary Clinton, well, that’s a different story.

One of the most offensive aspects of contemporary American society is the two-tiered justice system. Ordinary Americans can have their lives ruined by a single drug-related felony, while the masters of the universe – or perhaps in Hillary’s case I should say mistress of the universe – can commit all manner of crimes and be rewarded with the highest office in the land.

And almost as if she were going out of the way to rub people’s noses in it, we get a report this past week that four years worth of emails between Hillary and her chief of IT Bryan Pagliano have turned up…..drum roll please…missing! Oh, what a shock!

If you haven’t followed the Clinton email scandal closely, Bryan Pagliano, Clinton’s chief of IT while she was Secretary of State, was the guy who set up the unsecured server on which Hillary stored highly sensitive State Department emails, an act that she undoubtedly knew was illegal. And emails aside, just the act of setting up the server was a felony. As former CIA Officer Scott Uehlinger put it, “The fact that she set up a private server, in and of itself, means she is guilty of a felony right there.”

Nixon only had an 18 minute gap, and that was enough to bring him down. Hillary? She’s got a four year gap. But hardly anyone in the mainstream press cares. As Investors Business Daily reported, “This kind of behavior would normally light a fire under law enforcement – and the press – since these things usually smack of a cover-up. But the mainstream press is asleep at the switch…” Former Department of Justice official Dan Metcalfe commented, “The whole thing stinks to high heavens.”

It’s a good thing that I’m not one of those tinfoil hat wearing wackadoos. Because if I were, I might just begin to think that the Deep State was behind the push for our first woman president…and now that I mention it…

The Deep State

Have you ever wondered why it is elections seem to effect so little change? Senators representatives and presidents come and go. The party in power changes. But the trajectory of our nation remains largely the same. Deficits grow, big government gets bigger, the surveillance state becomes ever more insidious, while old wars continue and new ones are started.

Lord willing, I hope to publish a full review an important, recently published book that sheds light on this disturbing trend. The book, written by veteran Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren, goes by the rather ominous title The Deep State.  For now, the following will have to do.

Lofgren contends that, “The Deep state is the story of our time,” and defines it thus,

I use the term to mean a hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with only limited reference to the consent of the governed as normally expressed through elections (The Deep State, 5).

Lofgren contends that the official government – Congress, the president, etc. – is only nominally in charge, while real power is exercised behind the scenes by wealthy, well-connected, unelected power brokers.

I am of the opinion that Lofgren is right in his contention. Observation supports his thesis. For example, almost no one supported the 2008 bail-out of the financial system. TARP may have been the least popular piece of legislation ever. But Congress passed it anyway.

But even more powerful than citing anecdotes is the fact that a Christian understanding of political theory would predict the rise Deep State. After all, the notion that government is the servant of the people is a distinctly Christian idea based on Jesus’ teachings about the proper behavior of those in authority, “If anyone desires to be first, he shall be last of all and servant of all” (Mark 9:35). This is the Christian ideal for anyone in a position of power over others. And it should come as a surprise to no one that, as our nation more and more has turned its back on God, our government has come more and more to resemble a crass tyranny where rulers lord it over the people.

See this video for Ron Paul’s interview with the author of The Deep State.

https://youtu.be/39DxGw7ut90

Peddling Fiction

Remember Obama’s line in this year’s State of the Union address, the one where he accused those who dared criticize his economic policies of “peddling fiction”? Well, if this be peddling fiction, let us make the most of it!

Although the stock market has staged a massive resurgence over the past three months, many important economic indicators continue to flash red, warning that, not only is a recession in the offing, but that it may, in fact, already be here.

Consider the following:

• Zack’s investment research reported in December 2015, “Mining and equipment behemoth, Caterpillar Inc. reported an 11% decline in its global retail sales for the three months ended Nov 2015. The company, which is considered to be the bellwether of economic activities [emphasis mine], is going through a rough patch with sales declining for 36 consecutive months due to a crash in commodity prices, soft mining demand and a slowdown in China.” For the first quarter of 2016, Caterpillar again had poor results, with Business Insider
  reporting that the company’s earnings for the period were, “weaker than forecast,” and that it had, “lowered its expectations for the rest of the year.”
  
• Citit released the following ominous warning about the state of the global economy, “In particular, none of the structural headwinds that seem to have plagued the global economy in recent years (a mix of excessive indebtedness, deteriorating demographics, rising political uncertainty as well as the end of the China growth miracle and the commodity supercycle) have been resolved.”
  
• Billionaire hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller was asked at a recent conference for specific investment recommendations. His reply? “The conference wants a specific recommendation from me? Get out of the stock market isn’t clear enough?” Speaking of the current financial system, another investment superstar, Carl Icahn, remarked. “I do believe in general that there will be a day of reckoning.”
  

In the opinion of this author, the world’s dollar based, debt backed, fiat currency ponzi scheme of a financial system is living on borrowed time. It’s a house build on sand waiting for a storm.

But you’ll never hear this from the mainstream press, which is all too happy to play the echo-chamber for Obama and his merry band of central bankers at the Federal Reserve. Instead of warning people to take cover, all they can do is incessantly jabber on about “recovery, recovery, recovery.”

Well, there is no recovery.

But it is truly amazing the extent to which most people in the world of business and finance are willing to drink the Kool Aid peddled by the powers that be. Take, for example, this article from today on CNBC that reported, “After posting their steepest quarterly same-store sales declines since the recession, management at both Kohl’s and Macy’s said they were scratching their heads over the disconnect between the improving economy [emphasis mine], and a pullback in traffic and spending at their stores in the first quarter.”

The obvious answer, that the economy is not improving but instead getting worse, seems never to cross their minds.

I don’t know if mainstream financial journalism, what David Stockman has deemed “bubblevision”, is any more putrid than the rest of the mainstream media, but, good grief, it’s really hard to take.

Antichrist Dropping in the Polls

It’s hardly worth getting too excited one way or the other about popularity polls. But I must confess to indulging in a certain amount of schadenfreude at the expense of the Vatican any time I see the pope’s poll numbers tank. According to Breitbart, “The immense popularity enjoyed by Pope Francis ever since his election in 2013 has precipitated sharply during the past year, and he no longer ranks among the top ten most admired men in the world.”

Things are so bad that the current occupant of the seat of Antichrist gets no respect at all, not even from his own countrymen. As the Breitbart article goes on to report, the pontiff ranks fourth in hearts of his fellow Argentineans, behind the Dalai Lama and two professional soccer players.

It would seem the Bishop of Rome has turned into a pontifical version Rodney Dangerfield. Who knew?