4 Mainstream Media Articles Mocking Gold That Should Make You Think

Killing off the only safe haven for assets by ad hominem attacks and naked shorts, the satanic network is doing everything possible to prevent people from the precaution of wealth preservation. THis is a most deadly and serious omen that indeed, something wicked this way comes.

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Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
For those of you who have been reading my stuff since all the way back to my Wall Street years at Sanford Bernstein, thanks for staying along for the ride. I appreciate your support immensely considering that I essentially no longer write about financial markets at all, and for many of you, that remains your profession and primary area of interest.
There are many reasons why I stopped commenting on markets, but the main reason is that I started to recognize I wasn’t getting it right. In fact, in some cases I was getting it spectacularly wrong. Whenever this happens, I try to isolate the problem and fix it. In this case there was no fix, because much of why I was no longer getting it right was rooted in the fact that my heart, soul and passion had moved onto other things. My interests had expanded, and I started a blog to express myself on myriad other matters I deemed important. Providing relevant market information needs intense focus, and my focus had shifted elsewhere. I recognized that I wasn’t intellectually interested enough in centrally planned markets to provide insightful analysis, and so I stopped.
This doesn’t mean I won’t start up again. When central planners do lose control, I may indeed become far more interested in opining on such matters. Time will tell. In the interim, financial markets do still play an important role in the bigger picture of social, political and economic trends I passionately care about. The stability and increase in financial assets (stocks and bonds) is of huge importance to the propaganda machine, in particular keeping the non-oligarchic, non-politically connected 1% in line and believing the hype (see: The Stock Market: Food Stamps for the 1%).
So while I won’t claim to know when the paradigm shift will begin in earnest, I do rely on people who have gotten macro forecasts right, and there is no one better than Martin Armstrong. Years ago, he was saying that nothing goes up in a straight line and that gold would experience a severe correction before beginning its real bull market. We are seeing his prediction unfold before our very eyes. What he also said is that as gold approached the $1,000 per/oz mark or even below, everyone would proclaim that “gold is dead” and start making comically bearish statements. In a nutshell, negative sentiment would plunge to levels not seen in years, if not more than a decade. We are starting to see this now.
Here are four mainstream media articles that provide some evidence we may be approaching a sentiment low. Some of them I’m sure you’ve seen, others perhaps not. What amazes me is how they’ve all come out within the last two weeks.
1) From the Wall Street Journal: Let’s Be Honest About Gold: It’s a Pet Rock 
Here are a few choice excerpts:

Gold is supposed to be a haven amid hard times and soft money. So why, even as Greece has defaulted, the euro has sunk against the dollar, and the Chinese stock market has stumbled, has gold been sitting there like a pet rock?

Many people may have bought gold for the wrong reasons: because of its glittering 18.7% average annual return between 2002 and 2011, because of its purportedly magical inflation-fighting properties, because it is supposed to shine in the darkest of days. But gold’s long-term returns are muted, it isn’t a panacea for inflation, and it does well in response to unexpected crises—but not long-simmering troubles like the Greek situation. And you will put lightning in a bottle before you figure out what gold is really worth.

With greenhorns in gold starting to figure all this out, the price has gotten tarnished. It is time to call owning gold what it is: an act of faith. As the Epistle to the Hebrews defined it forevermore, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Own gold if you feel you must, but admit honestly that you are relying on hope and imagination.

Recognize, too, that gold bugs—the people who believe in owning the yellow metal no matter what—often resemble the subjects of a laboratory experiment on the psychology of cognitive dissonance.

So, if buying gold is an act of faith, how much money should you put on the line?

Anything much above that is more than an act of faith; it is a leap in the dark. Not even gold’s glitter can change that.

Think about some of the words and phrases used in this WSJ article:

“Pet rock.”

“Greenhorns in gold (greenhorn means a person who lacks experience and knowledge).”

“It is time to call owning gold what it is: an act of faith.”

“Gold bugs often resemble the subjects of a laboratory experiment on the psychology of cognitive dissonance (this is actually true in many ways).”

Condescending as the entire article is to gold owners, he even goes so far to quote the Hebrew Bible!
Moving on.
2) From the Washington Post: Gold is Doomed

When you think about it, a bet on gold is really a bet that the people in charge don’t know what they’re doing. Policymakers missed yesterday’s financial crisis, so maybe they’re missing tomorrow’s inflation, too. That, at least, is what a cavalcade of charlatans, cranks, and armchair economists have been shouting for years now, from the penny ads that run on the bottom of websites — did you know that the $5 bill proves the stock market is on the cusp of crashing? — to Glenn Beck infomercials and even hedge fund conferences. Indeed, John Paulson, who made more fortunes than you can count betting against subprime, has been piling into gold for six years now, because he thinks “the consequences of printing money over time will be inflation.” They all do. Goldbugs act like the Federal Reserve’s public balance sheet is a secret only they have discovered, and that it’s only a matter of time until prices explode like they did in the 1970s United States, if not 1920s Germany.

But economists do, for the most part, know what they’re doing. Sure, they missed the crash coming in 2008, but that wasn’t because they didn’t understand how bank runs work. It was because they didn’t understand that unregulated lenders had become vulnerable to runs. And the economists who haven’t forgotten their history knew that this inflation fear mongering was all wrong too. Specifically, there’s a difference between the central bank buying bonds, a.k.a. printing money, when interest rates are zero and when they’re not. In the first case, money and short-term bonds both pay the same amount of interest — none — so, as Paul Krugman has explained over and over again, printing one to buy the other won’t change anything. Banks won’t lend out any new money, and will just sit on it as a store of value instead. That’s what happened when interest rates fell to zero in 2000s Japan, and it’s what is happening now in the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Europe.

It almost makes you feel bad for the goldbugs, until you remember that some substantial number of them are just trying to scare seniors out of their money. But the ones who aren’t really thought the 1970s showed that gold went up when inflation did, so the fact that gold was going up now meant inflation couldn’t be far behind. They didn’t understand that the price of gold doesn’t depend on how much inflation there is, but rather on how much inflation there is relative to interest rates. So now that rates are rising, gold, as you can see below, is falling. Wait a minute, rates are rising? Well, yes. The Federal Reserve hasn’t actually raised rates yet, but it has talked about it enough that markets have reacted as if it already did. That’s been enough to make real rates positive again.

While I agree that many gold bugs do deserve the criticism they get, it’s interesting to see the way in which the Washington Post demonizes them as:

“Just trying to scare seniors out of their money.” 

But the purpose of the above article is less about demonizing gold bugs, and more about praising the existing system of crank central planners that no one other than starry eyed pundits and thieving oligarchs actually support (see: “Revolution is Coming” – The Top 20 Responses to Jon Hilsenrath’s Idiotic WSJ Article).
Here are some examples:

But economists do, for the most part, know what they’re doing.

Paul Krugman has explained over and over again, printing one to buy the other won’t change anything. 

This story is far from over, as the Fed has yet to raise interest rates. Talk to me about victory when rates normalize.
Moving along to the next article:
3) From Bloomberg: Gold Is Only Going to Get Worse

The problem for gold isn’t just that prices are dropping. For many, the metal also has lost its charisma.

Prices will drop to $984 an ounce before January, according to the average estimate in a Bloomberg News survey of 16 analysts and traders. That would be the lowest since 2009 and a 10 percent retreat from Tuesday’s settlement. Speculators are shorting the metal for the first time since U.S. government data began in 2006, and holders of exchange-traded products are selling at the fastest pace in two years.

“Gold is out of fashion like flared trousers: no one wants it,” said Robin Bhar, an analyst at Societe Generale SA in London. “It’s not going to collapse, but we think it is going to be at a lower level in the not-too-distant future.”

“Gold is a weird relic of antiquity,” said Brian Barish, who helps oversee about $12.5 billion at Denver-based Cambiar Investors LLC. “It’s not a commodity that has much fundamental demand. It’s pretty, so people use it for jewelry. But it’s unlike iron ore or oil, or copper, or corn. There’s not specific end-use for it. People just like it, so it becomes a discussion about fervor.”

Let’s once again highlight some of the terminology used.

The metal also has lost its charisma

So now it’s magically turned into a human being as opposed to a pet rock.

Speculators are shorting the metal for the first time since U.S. government data began in 2006

“Gold is out of fashion like flared trousers: no one wants it.

“Gold is a weird relic of antiquity.”

Finally, for the last article. This one takes on more of the tone from the WSJ article, basically just calling gold buyers imbeciles.
4) From Market Watch: Two Reasons Why Gold May Plunge to $350 an Ounce.

CHAPEL HILL, N.C. (MarketWatch) — Gold bugs, who have just begun to digest bullion’s more than $100 drop over the past month, need to prepare for the possibility of an even bigger decline.
That, at least, is the forecast of Claude Erb, a former commodities manager at fund manager TCW Group, and co-author (with Campbell Harvey, a Duke University finance professor) of a mid-2012 study that forecast a plunging gold price. They deserve to be listened to, therefore, since — unlike many latter-day converts to the bearish thesis — they forecast a long-term gold bear market when it was only just beginning.

You might think that, with gold now trading more than $500 lower than when the study was released, Erb would declare victory and leave well enough alone. But Erb is doing nothing of the sort. Earlier this week, he told me that the gold community now needs to consider the distinct possibility that gold will trade for as low as $350 an ounce.

Erb uses the five well-know stages of grief to characterize where the gold market currently stands. Those stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, and he argues that the gold-bug community currently is in the “bargaining” stage.

Erb imagines them saying the functional equivalent of: “So long as gold stays above $1,000 an ounce, I’ll go to church every Sunday.”

Over shorter terms measured in years, according to their research, you must take seriously the possibility that gold won’t just drop below $1,000 an ounce but, eventually, to a far, far lower price as well.

Some choice quotes to think about:

The gold community now needs to consider the distinct possibility that gold will trade for as low as $350 an ounce.

Erb uses the five well-know stages of grief to characterize where the gold market currently stands.

“So long as gold stays above $1,000 an ounce, I’ll go to church every Sunday.”

This is pretty much peak condescension, and once again, notice the religious imagery.

Gold won’t just drop below $1,000 an ounce but, eventually, to a far, far lower price as well.

I didn’t write this article to “call the bottom in gold” or anything like that. I merely want to flag these four articles due to the hyperbolic nature of some of the statements made (they are exhibiting pretty much exactly the same behavior as the gold bugs they mock do). I do think that something is happening on the sentiment front that warrants we are closer to the bottom that the mid-stages of a bear market.
While I certainly accept that gold prices could fall further from here, I don’t think they will go anywhere near $350/oz, or $500/oz. If Claude Erb cares to make a public bet with me on that, he can find me here.

Dr. Kent Hovind - End Times Prophecy 7/25/2015

Michigan Martial Law Drills Prove 'If It Can Happen Here, It Can Happen Anywhere' - Exclusive New ANP Pictures Of West Virginia Military Movement

rginia Military Movement

By Stefan Stanford - All News Pipeline - Live Free Or Die 
Please email pictures, videos and news tips to allnewspipeline@inbox.com.
In the newly released video reports below, the 1st one from Jia Ireland via Facebook, we get an up-close-and-personal look at what our videographer herself calls 'martial law' drills in 'police state' Flint, Michigan. Complete with low flying helicopters, the sound of explosions and shooting in the background and an American populace looking on, partly stunned, the commentary given by Jia is quite priceless as she shares with us watching her country turning into something out of a war zone or a 3rd world country. Jia tells us, "if it can happen 'here', it can happen anywhere."
It certainly is happening everywhere as the additional videos and pictures below show, a militarized show of force across America weeks before Jade Helm 15 is officially launched. We have exclusive new pictures above and below sent to ANP by a reader in West Virginia of military vehicles being transported on flat bed trucks as well as the one seen above. Anyone have any idea what that vehicle is? The men seen with these vehicles in West Virginia were NOT wearing camo and were instead wearing black shirts and khaki pants; any significance to that?

The 3rd video below, an interesting one from hyungs, shows his own exclusive visit with a militarized unit in Flint, Michigan in which he gets an exclusive one-on-one interview with one of the Sergeants and takes the time to ask him about Jade Helm 15. Why does it seem like he's dodging the subject with his answers?

The 4th video shares a recent story from Intellihub via ANP friend Citizen of Gotham that shows what we're witnessing is a nationwide phenomenon and, judging by the increasing rates of these convoys and 'exercises' across America, having the US military in American cities, streets and skyways appears to be THE 'Summer of 15 TREND in America' as we prepare to officially kick off the summer of 2015 in less than 2 weeks. The final video is another on the Raider Focus military exercises in Pinon Colorado captured by the Fugazi Report.

In the 3rd video below at the 5 minute 30 second mark we learn that the reason this large group of soldiers has arrived at a park in Flint, Michigan is so they can be licensed to drive these monsterous vehicles in America; apparently a standard drivers license won't do? This however leads to the theory that there soon may be an awful lot of soldiers driving humvees and ACV's in Michigan...a whole lot of soldiers got off of the white bus carrying military together. Does America REALLY need all of these machines of war on American streets? At the 6 minute 45 second mark we get to hear a question and answer about Jade Helm 15. Pictures via hyungs.


The next picture below shows more of the Howitzer convoy which ANP reported upon being seen in Mississippi. This appears to be the same convoy and was seen in Indiana a day or so later.



In this 1st video, Jia Ireland shares with us what it means to her to live under martial law in Michigan. We get to hear the choppers and what sounds like a war going on in the city courtesy of the 'police state'.





Hyungs gives us a taste of militarized Michigan as well and gets a Jade Helm interview with a public servant.





This next video is a follow-up from the Fugazi Report showing Raider Focus in Colorado via dash cam.



The following pictures were sent to us by a reader in West Virginia. These were seen Ghent, West Virginia and according to our reader, the men seen with them had black shirts on with khaki colored pants. 










This monster was recently seen on a Texas highway.



Another picture from Hyungs and the 'drivers licensing drill' in Flint, Michigan. 

http://allnewspipeline.com/Michigan_Martial_Law_Drills_Happen_Here_Happen_Anywhere.php

Operation Jade Helm 15 Arizona 04/17; Assault Support Tactics in Urban Area

U.S. Marines Practice Controlling Angry Citizens Demanding Food & Water

They are gearing up for something very ugly here in Amerika

Alarming video footage from a U.S. Marines training drill which took place in Arizona last month shows armed troops chasing down unruly citizens inside a mock internment camp while role players chant for food and water. he exercise, which involved U.S. Marines from 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, took place on April 18 in Yuma, Arizona and revolved around “assault support tactics” training.\

The drill was part of, “standardized tactical training and certification of unit instructor qualifications to support Marine Aviation Training and Readiness,” according to the description accompanying the video.\


In plain English, the exercise was about subduing, arresting and incarcerating irate citizens during a martial law-style scenario. The Marines will undoubtedly claim that these exercises are to prepare for overseas combat and occupation missions, but U.S. Army manuals have made it clear that such operations also apply to the Continental United States (CONUS), and will be used against American citizens during a national emergency. Another video out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida which emerged in March also showed military and law enforcement practicing the internment of citizens during martial-law style training. marines “national guard” “u.s. marines” training sim simulation camp operation helicopter troops “u.s. army” forces prepare prepper “role play” drama guard security food water supplies control power survival secure battle fight surveillance 2015 2016 future “first aid” doctor bugout “emergency supplies” exercise food water wrestle game games “united states” usa america collapse usd dollar gold silver “savings account” debt “credit card” credit u.s. “stock market” “elite nwo agenda” collapse of america rothschild rothchilds end game fema camp id rfid chip cashless max keiser gerald celente demcad alex jones infowars max keiser jim rogers marc faber china russia ww3 false flag attack kemergency broadcast illuminati symbolism military industrial complex drone dji

In current military terminology, the “human domain” or “human domain analytics” refers to the “global understanding of anything associated with people.” There’s a legal infrastructure with things like the NDAA, there’s a technical infrastructure with things like the capability to do dragnet surveillance, and then of course there is going to be a military and law enforcement infrastructure, and those are merging.” Stacking Leonardo’s statement up against the Jade Helm map reveals the event to be much more than a basic training drill. Jade Helm is NOT a martial law takeover but it does prepare the military for civil unrest here in America But the collapse of our financial system, or hyperinflation of our currency, or a meltdown in US Treasuries is only the beginning. We know some or all of these events are all but a foregone conclusion. While it can’t be avoided on a national scale, there are advance preparations that individuals and their families can make to, at the very least, insulate themselves from the secondary event triggers. This includes storing essential physical goods and keeping them in your possession. Things like long-term food supplies, barterable goods, monetary goods, self defense armaments and having a well thought outpreparedness plan will, if nothing else, provide you with the means necessary to stay out of the way it all hits the fan.

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Movies, commercials, et al are these days, using martial law realities as thematic elements

Given the fact it takes years to script, develop, shoot, edit, and release a movie, then this means the current martial law realities we face this year in America were PLANNED WELL IN ADVANCE AND ARE NOT SOME ORGANIC EVENT THE GOVERNMENT IS RESPONDING TO.

Keep that in mind.

Everything has curfews, and restrictions, and troops, and ZOMBIES and this or that thing that is an element of martial law. We are being conditioned as that as a new normal.

And it means they want us to already accept the horrors of what that means. Countries that have had martial law as a reality like

El Salvador
Cambodia,
North Korea,
Vietnam,
Afghanistan
Iraq
Lebanon

have as realities, living conditions that remind one of Germany in WWII - bombed out, burned out cars, decimated neighborhoods, summary executions, and roaming death squads wearing uniforms and carrying automatic weapons.

The recent exposure of the nationwide Jade Helm 15 exercise has made many people suspicious, and with good reason.

Federal crisis exercises have a strange historical tendency to suddenly coincide with very real crisis events. We may know very little about Jade Helm beyond government admissions, claims and misdirections. But at the very least, we know what “JADE” is an acronym for: Joint Assistance for Deployment and Execution, a program designed to create action and deployment plans using computer models meant to speed up reaction times for military planners during a “crisis scenario.” 

911 had the exact same crisis exercise going on at the time

THE BOSTON BOMBING had the exact same crisis exercise going on at the time as the event!

SANDY HOOK had the exact same crisis exercise going on at the time as the event!

THE LONDON 7/7 BOMBINGS had the exact same crisis exercise going on at the time as the event!

THE MADRID TRAIN BOMBINGS had the exact same crisis exercise going on at the time as the event!

Martial Law and curfew in effect in Baltimore, test run for the summer

What Happens If You Defy Curfew: A Shocking 90-Second Clip From The Streets Of Baltimore...IN THE LAND OF LIBERTY

 

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
On Saturday night, a man whose name still seems to be unknown, came out in front of police past the official curfew. This is what happened next: HE WAS TASERED, SHOT, AND LEFT FOR DEAD.

As Mike noted previously, the situation in Baltimore is very serious and all Americans should be paying very close attention; but Baltimore is just a Microcosm of America.
Baltimore, Maryland is in many ways the perfect microcosm for these United States of America. If you still don’t get that, you’ll be in for a rude awakening in the years ahead.
A gradual erosion of the Constitution and the civil rights of the citizenry, the abuse of power by people in authority, perverse financial incentives that lead to horrible outcomes, zero accountability, and a ubiquitous surveillance state apparatus; Baltimore has it all. Yet all of these troubling traits have also come to characterize early 21st century America.
As tends to be the case, the populations that have been victimized the longest and most systemically — in Baltimore and across the U.S. — are the poor, weak and disenfranchised.  Like a cancer, corruption, theft, and blatant abuse of the citizenry by the powerful will spread and spread until it consumes everything unless the tumor is removed. It has now spread so deeply and so dangerously throughout American life, the general public will soon have no choice but to confront it and do something about it, or face a total extinction of opportunity and suffer the same desperate fate as the people out in the streets of Baltimore.
David Simon, creator of the excellent hit HBO series “The Wire,” recently sat down for an interview with former New York Times reporter Bill Keller to explain the situation in Baltimore as he sees it; its origins and what is needed to fix it. As you read, think about the many parallels to the U.S. economy in general; the endless criminal maneuverings within the centers of power in Washington D.C. and Wall Street, the forever spinning revolving door of corruption, the marauding gangs of cronies making impossibly large piles of money based on connections, fraud and rigged markets as opposed to adding value, the idiocy of the war on drugs, the fraudulent accounting, and the overbearing surveillance state. Increasingly, when America looks in the mirror Baltimore and Ferguson are staring right back. We just haven’t admitted it yet.
Now, from the Marshall Project:

Bill Keller: What do people outside the city need to understand about what’s going on there — the death of Freddie Gray and the response to it?

David Simon: I guess there’s an awful lot to understand and I’m not sure I understand all of it. The part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war — which Baltimore waged as aggressively as any American city — was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department. Probable cause was destroyed by the drug war.

Probable cause from a Baltimore police officer has always been a tenuous thing. It’s a tenuous thing anywhere, but in Baltimore, in these high crime, heavily policed areas, it was even worse. When I came on, there were jokes about, “You know what probable cause is on Edmondson Avenue? You roll by in your radio car and the guy looks at you for two seconds too long.” Probable cause was whatever you thought you could safely lie about when you got into district court.

Then at some point when cocaine hit and the city lost control of a lot of corners and the violence was ratcheted up, there was a real panic on the part of the government. And they basically decided that even that loose idea of what the Fourth Amendment was supposed to mean on a street level, even that was too much. Now all bets were off. Now you didn’t even need probable cause. The city council actually passed an ordinance that declared a certain amount of real estate to be drug-free zones. They literally declared maybe a quarter to a third of inner city Baltimore off-limits to its residents, and said that if you were loitering in those areas you were subject to arrest and search. Think about that for a moment: It was a permission for the police to become truly random and arbitrary and to clear streets any way they damn well wanted.

How does race figure into this? It’s a city with a black majority and now a black mayor and black police chief, a substantially black police force.

What did Tom Wolfe write about cops? They all become Irish? That’s a line in “Bonfire of the Vanities.” When Ed and I reported “The Corner,” it became clear that the most brutal cops in our sector of the Western District were black. The guys who would really kick your ass without thinking twice were black officers. If I had to guess and put a name on it, I’d say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism. I think the two agendas are inextricably linked, and where one picks up and the other ends is hard to say. But when you have African-American officers beating the dog-piss out of people they’re supposed to be policing, and there isn’t a white guy in the equation on a street level, it’s pretty remarkable. But in some ways they were empowered.

Back then, even before the advent of cell phones and digital cameras — which have been transforming in terms of documenting police violence — back then, you were much more vulnerable if you were white and you wanted to wail on somebody. You take out your nightstick and you’re white and you start hitting somebody, it has a completely different dynamic than if you were a black officer. It was simply safer to be brutal if you were black, and I didn’t know quite what to do with that fact other than report it. It was as disturbing a dynamic as I could imagine. Something had been removed from the equation that gave white officers — however brutal they wanted to be, or however brutal they thought the moment required — it gave them pause before pulling out a nightstick and going at it. Some African American officers seemed to feel no such pause.

This is another fascinating microcosm considering how Barack Obama has done absolutely nothing to help the black community or poor in this country. It took a black President to so shamelessly hand everything to a handful of oligarchs and further oppress black communities.

What the drug war did, though, was make this all a function of social control. This was simply about keeping the poor down, and that war footing has been an excuse for everybody to operate outside the realm of procedure and law.

“The drug war began it, certainly, but the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O’Malley.”

In case you aren’t aware, Martin O’Malley was the ambitious Mayor of Baltimore who had his eyes dead set on the Governor’s seat. So much so that he cooked the crime books of Baltimore to create a crime “miracle,” and destroyed city police work in the process. Mr. O’Malley has recently discussed possibly running against Hillary in the 2016 Democrat primary.

But that wasn’t enough. O’Malley needed to show crime reduction stats that were not only improbable, but unsustainable without manipulation. And so there were people from City Hall who walked over Norris and made it clear to the district commanders that crime was going to fall by some astonishing rates. Eventually, Norris got fed up with the interference from City Hall and walked, and then more malleable police commissioners followed, until indeed, the crime rate fell dramatically. On paper.

How? There were two initiatives. First, the department began sweeping the streets of the inner city, taking bodies on ridiculous humbles, mass arrests, sending thousands of people to city jail, hundreds every night, thousands in a month. They actually had police supervisors stationed with printed forms at the city jail – forms that said, essentially, you can go home now if you sign away any liability the city has for false arrest, or you can not sign the form and spend the weekend in jail until you see a court commissioner. And tens of thousands of people signed that form. 

Unsurprisingly, the rule of law often dies at the hands of an ambitious politician.

The situation you described has been around for a while. Do you have a sense of why the Freddie Gray death has been such a catalyst for the response we’ve seen in the last 48 hours?

Because the documented litany of police violence is now out in the open. There’s an actual theme here that’s being made evident by the digital revolution. It used to be our word against yours. It used to be said — correctly — that the patrolman on the beat on any American police force was the last perfect tyranny. Absent a herd of reliable witnesses, there were things he could do to deny you your freedom or kick your ass that were between him, you, and the street. The smartphone with its small, digital camera, is a revolution in civil liberties.

In these drug-saturated neighborhoods, they weren’t policing their post anymore, they weren’t policing real estate that they were protecting from crime. They weren’t nurturing informants, or learning how to properly investigate anything. There’s a real skill set to good police work. But no, they were just dragging the sidewalks, hunting stats, and these inner-city neighborhoods — which were indeed drug-saturated because that’s the only industry left — become just hunting grounds. They weren’t protecting anything. They weren’t serving anyone. They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy. The police aren’t looking to make friends, or informants, or learning how to write clean warrants or how to testify in court without perjuring themselves unnecessarily. There’s no incentive to get better as investigators, as cops. There’s no reason to solve crime. In the years they were behaving this way, locking up the entire world, the clearance rate for murder dove by 30 percent. The clearance rate for aggravated assault — every felony arrest rate – took a significant hit. Think about that. If crime is going down, and crime is going down, and if we have less murders than ever before and we have more homicide detectives assigned, and better evidentiary technologies to employ how is the clearance rate for homicide now 48 percent when it used to be 70 percent, or 75 percent?

Because the drug war made cops lazy and less competent?

How do you reward cops? Two ways: promotion and cash. That’s what rewards a cop. If you want to pay overtime pay for having police fill the jails with loitering arrests or simple drug possession or failure to yield, if you want to spend your municipal treasure rewarding that, well the cop who’s going to court 7 or 8 days a month — and court is always overtime pay — you’re going to damn near double your salary every month. On the other hand, the guy who actually goes to his post and investigates who’s burglarizing the homes, at the end of the month maybe he’s made one arrest. It may be the right arrest and one that makes his post safer, but he’s going to court one day and he’s out in two hours. So you fail to reward the cop who actually does police work. But worse, it’s time to make new sergeants or lieutenants, and so you look at the computer and say: Who’s doing the most work? And they say, man, this guy had 80 arrests last month, and this other guy’s only got one. Who do you think gets made sergeant? And then who trains the next generation of cops in how not to do police work? I’ve just described for you the culture of the Baltimore police department amid the deluge of the drug war, where actual investigation goes unrewarded and where rounding up bodies for street dealing, drug possession, loitering such – the easiest and most self-evident arrests a cop can make – is nonetheless the path to enlightenment and promotion and some additional pay. That’s what the drug war built, and that’s what Martin O’Malley affirmed when he sent so much of inner city Baltimore into the police wagons on a regular basis.

So much of what was said there characterizes the perverted culture in Washington D.C. and on Wall Street. People are financially incentivized to commit fraud, crime and deceive customers. Those people are then promoted and train the next class. And the beat goes on…

The second thing Marty did, in order to be governor, involves the stats themselves. In the beginning, under Norris, he did get a better brand of police work and we can credit a legitimate 12 to 15 percent decline in homicides. Again, that was a restoration of an investigative deterrent in the early years of that administration. But it wasn’t enough to declare a Baltimore Miracle, by any means.

What can you do? You can’t artificially lower the murder rate – how do you hide the bodies when it’s the state health department that controls the medical examiner’s office? But the other felony categories? Robbery, aggravated assault, rape? Christ, what they did with that stuff was jaw-dropping.

Now for the accounting fraud. Looks like Baltimore authorities learned well from Wall Street.

So they cooked the books.

Oh yeah. If you hit somebody with a bullet, that had to count. If they went to the hospital with a bullet in them, it probably had to count as an aggravated assault. But if someone just took a gun out and emptied the clip and didn’t hit anything or they didn’t know if you hit anything, suddenly that was a common assault or even an unfounded report. Armed robberies became larcenies if you only had a victim’s description of a gun, but not a recovered weapon. And it only gets worse as some district commanders began to curry favor with the mayoral aides who were sitting on the Comstat data. In the Southwest District, a victim would try to make an armed robbery complaint, saying , ‘I just got robbed, somebody pointed a gun at me,’ and what they would do is tell him, well, okay, we can take the report but the first thing we have to do is run you through the computer to see if there’s any paper on you. Wait, you’re doing a warrant check on me before I can report a robbery? Oh yeah, we gotta know who you are before we take a complaint. You and everyone you’re living with? What’s your address again? You still want to report that robbery?

They cooked their own books in remarkable ways. Guns disappeared from reports and armed robberies became larcenies. Deadly weapons were omitted from reports and aggravated assaults became common assaults. The Baltimore Sun did a fine job looking into the dramatic drop in rapes in the city. Turned out that regardless of how insistent the victims were that they had been raped, the incidents were being quietly unfounded. That tip of the iceberg was reported, but the rest of it, no. And yet there were many veteran commanders and supervisors who were disgusted, who would privately complain about what was happening. If you weren’t a journalist obliged to quote sources and instead, say, someone writing a fictional television drama, they’d share a beer and let you fill cocktail napkins with all the ways in which felonies disappeared in those years.

I mean, think about it. How does the homicide rate decline by 15 percent, while the agg assault rate falls by more than double that rate. Are all of Baltimore’s felons going to gun ranges in the county? Are they becoming better shots? Have the mortality rates for serious assault victims in Baltimore, Maryland suddenly doubled? Did they suddenly close the Hopkins and University emergency rooms and return trauma care to the dark ages? It makes no sense statistically until you realize that you can’t hide a murder, but you can make an attempted murder disappear in a heartbeat, no problem.

But these guys weren’t satisfied with just juking their own stats. No, the O’Malley administration also went back to the last year of the previous mayoralty and performed its own retroactive assessment of those felony totals, and guess what? It was determined from this special review that the preceding administration had underreported its own crime rate, which O’Malley rectified by upgrading a good chunk of misdemeanors into felonies to fatten up the Baltimore crime rate that he was inheriting. Get it? How better than to later claim a 30 or 40 percent reduction in crime than by first juking up your inherited rate as high as she’ll go. It really was that cynical an exercise.

So Martin O’Malley proclaims a Baltimore Miracle and moves to Annapolis. And tellingly, when his successor as mayor allows a new police commissioner to finally de-emphasize street sweeps and mass arrests and instead focus on gun crime, that’s when the murder rate really dives. That’s when violence really goes down. When a drug arrest or a street sweep is suddenly not the standard for police work, when violence itself is directly addressed, that’s when Baltimore makes some progress.
But nothing corrects the legacy of a police department in which the entire rank-and-file has been rewarded and affirmed for collecting bodies, for ignoring probable cause, for grabbing anyone they see for whatever reason. And so, fast forward to Sandtown and the Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray gives some Baltimore police the legal equivalent of looking at them a second or two too long. He runs, and so when he’s caught he takes an ass-kicking and then goes into the back of a wagon without so much as a nod to the Fourth Amendment.

So do you see how this ends or how it begins to turn around?

We end the drug war. I know I sound like a broken record, but we end the fucking drug war. The drug war gives everybody permission to do anything. It gives cops permission to stop anybody, to go in anyone’s pockets, to manufacture any lie when they get to district court. You sit in the district court in Baltimore and you hear, ‘Your Honor, he was walking out of the alley and I saw him lift up the glassine bag and tap it lightly.’ No fucking dope fiend in Baltimore has ever walked out of an alley displaying a glassine bag for all the world to see. But it keeps happening over and over in the Western District court. The drug war gives everybody permission. And if it were draconian and we were fixing anything that would be one thing, but it’s draconian and it’s a disaster.

This is true about the drug war, but even more true about the “war on terror.” Also endless, also used to justify anything.

Medicalize the problem, decriminalize — I don’t need drugs to be declared legal, but if a Baltimore State’s Attorney told all his assistant state’s attorneys today, from this moment on, we are not signing overtime slips for court pay for possession, for simple loitering in a drug-free zone, for loitering, for failure to obey, we’re not signing slips for that: Nobody gets paid for that bullshit, go out and do real police work. If that were to happen, then all at once, the standards for what constitutes a worthy arrest in Baltimore would significantly improve. Take away the actual incentive to do bad or useless police work, which is what the drug war has become.

So much of what’s been happening in Baltimore for decades is now also business as usual within the highest corridors of American power. As I’ve said time and time again, incentives are the key variable here. If you’re rewarded for fraud and white collar crime, you will get more of it. If you jail the perpetrators of it, you’ll get less of it. TBTF Wall Street execs and private equity guys don’t want to sit in a jail cell for a decade, believe me. They’d sell 50 Picassos and 30 sharks soaked in formaldehyde before that ever happened.
The sad part is we aren’t even trying to change the incentive structure of status quo criminality. This is because the current generation of power players were trained and molded by the same types before them. This is all they know. Money and power are their gods. Crime is their religion. We have no choice but to stop them.

 

PSA Contains Bizarre Subliminal Message About "Martial Law" APRIL 2015