It’s as if we’re coming up out of a long sleep, at first blinking vaguely and trying to understand what we’re waking up to; but it’s oh so hard and complicated, and so easy to just fall back to sleep. But those who want to wake us up get more and more brilliant at describing the actual reality of what we’re waking up to, and do so in more and more shocking ways, so that, eventually, we can’t help but begin to understand the actual dynamic patterns that the millions of quickly dissolving details coalesce into; can’t help but get a real sense of the BIG PICTURE, to the point where all our senses are humming, our minds are churning, our hearts are opening, and we can’t, we just can’t fall back to sleep again. Next step. Get out of bed. Connect with others. Act.

Here are two terrific linguistic inventions, one structural and the other metaphorical, that both sound the alarm and yell, WAKE UP!

Structural, Jon Rappoport: elucidates the nasty difference between capitalism and “meta-capitalism.”

Big Money: pump and dump as a way of life

Excerpts:

Let’s start with the analogy of the stock market. To boil it down, here is how the game is played by insiders:

They acquire many, many shares of a stock and then they push the price up, up, up, and then they create a top, crash it, sending the stock price off a cliff to a dismal bottom.

They profit greatly on the way up (pump), and then, selling short (dump), they pile up more profits on the way down.

Getting away with it is like having a license to print money.

But this single pump and dump doesn’t have to be the end of the game. As the crashed stock creeps along a new discouraging bottom, the insiders quietly buy it again, preparing for a repeat cycle—up, up, up, top, top, top, crash, crash, crash, down, down, down.

Now imagine this pump and dump strategy applied to companies. Better yet, imagine it applied to a number of companies within a given industry all at once.

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What I’m describing in this article could be called meta-capitalism. That’s my name for it. Capitalism is merely the voluntary exchange of money for non-harmful goods and services. But at the meta-level, you have predators, on their perches, looking down at the marketplace and devising concealed ways to manipulate the global flows of money and assets.

This is the game. No-limit holdem, where the banks and the Fed Reserve and the federal government and the mega-corporations are the house casino and decide, at any given moment, how much money they want to invent, show, hide, collect, transfer, and pay out.

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Metaphorical, Dmitri Orlov: describes how the sentient, sluggish, stupid, dense, and ultimately, FAKE financial “black hole” sucks it all up, as long as we let it.

The Care and Feeding of a Financial Black Hole

Excerpts:

In the United States, so far the black hole has been sucking in individual families (although it does sometimes suck in entire cities, like Detroit, Michigan, or Bakersfield, California, or Camden, New Jersey). With the help of the fraudulent mortgage racket, it sucks in houses, and spits them out again encumbered with bad debt. With the help of the medical industry, it sucks in sick people and spits them out again, bankrupt. With the help of the higher education racket, it sucks in hopeful young people, and spits them out as graduates, with worthless degrees and saddled with mountainous student debt. With the help of the military-industrial complex, it sucks in just about anything and spits out corpses, invalids, environmental damage, terrorists and global instability. And so on.

But the black hole can also suck in entire countries. Right now it’s busy trying to suck in Greece, but it’s having a hard time with it, because Greece is, of all things, a democracy. This has the black hole’s puppets in quite a state at the moment, and starting to clamor for “regime change” in Greece, so that Greece can be made to capitulate before the black hole gets hungry.

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This one will be interesting to watch. If the black hole does succeed in sucking in Greece, then which country is next? Will it be Italy, Spain or Portugal? And, as that process continues, at what point will enough people say that enough is enough? Because when they do, the black hole will shrivel up. It’s not a real black hole that’s made up of incredibly dense matter—so dense that its gravitational field traps even light. It’s a fake black hole, made up of everyone’s combined greed. It has greed at its core, and fear all around it, and it sustains itself by feeding on fear.