THE DAILY BELL: SIGNS (LITERALLY) THAT THE SHUTDOWN WAS THEATER

October 22, 2013 By Joseph P. Farrell

As you know folks, the Daily Bell is back, with a new look, but continuing the same analysis of what it calls “dominant social memes”. And, in this instance, it’s back with a provocative confirmation of my own views that the recent government shutdown hysteria was, at some level at least, theater, with the Tea Party, the President, the Speaker, and the Senate Majority Leader each playing Oscar winning roles as they ratcheted up the shrill rhetoric to new high frequency shrieks. It was good, and distracting.
But why would the Bell suggest that it was all theater? What were the signs?
The signs of theater were, quite literally, the signs.
You know, the signs that were professionally made, and which magically appeared on the barricades that equally magically appeared at national parks and memorials while government goons prohibited World War Two veterans from visiting the memorial they helped to build:
Who Is Really Destabilizing the Dollar
I hope you caught it, but in case you didn’t here it is again:

“And then there is this, regarding the recent US government shutdown:
I”n less than 8 hours of the shutdown, miraculously, professionally printed 3X4 foot signs appeared all over the country in the tens of thousands saying “this [park, facility, etc. with custom logos] closed due to government shutdown.”
“There has not been a government shutdown in 17 years. These signs were designed, specifications were determined, signs were then requisitioned, bids were posted and vetted, government contracts were awarded. The materials were then ordered and the signs manufactured then distributed [by] U.S. Mails [sic] or [another method].
“This shutdown was orchestrated and planned well in advance at least 6-8 months ago. Millions of tax dollars were appropriated and spent in this process. There is a paper trail a mile long leading directly to the White House.
“It’s hard to determine the source of this statement and we have no idea if it is accurate or even insightful, but into the hopper it goes.” (Emphasis in the original)

Whatever one makes of it, the signs had to be made, contracted for, and that would take at least some degree of lead time, before “the show began.” And that means, it was theater. One heard little, if anything, about this on the major lamestream media in the USA.
And if it was theater, then that means that all that “principled” opposition one was treated to from the Tea Party and its leaders was every bit as much theater too.
What was the theater for?
Let’s indulge in some high octane speculation.  It was for the purpose of convincing the American people that their leadership is ineluctably corrupt and incompetent, and that the institutions of government are no longer capable of addressing the now enormous problems facing the country. I agree with the first two, and strongly dissent from the last. If there are incompetent and corrupt leaders, it is because they are mirrors of their real masters: the super-rich and the corporations and banking institutions they control.
What are we to make of it? Well, even the Daily Bell is having difficulty pinning down a scenario:

“Why would Anglosphere elites want to weaken the dollar? Because they are getting ready to try to substitute a more globalized currency? When we read the IBT article excerpted above, we find this:
“As the first step in creating a de-Americanised world, all nations must try to shape an international system that respects the sovereignty of all nations and ensures the US keeps out of the domestic affairs of others, Xinhua said.
“The developing and emerging market economies need to have more say in major international financial institutions including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, so that they could better reflect the transformations of the global economic and political landscape,” the editorial says.
“It also called for an end to the use of the US dollar as the international reserve currency, a step that would ensure the international community could maintain a safe distance from the side-effects of domestic political turmoil in the United States.
“Look, we can’t prove it … can’t touch it … can’t feel it as a tangible object. But like the sudden eruption of fracking (which may or may not be a long-term viable technology but, it can be argued, is destabilizing the Petrodollar) to the selected targeting of BRIC countries via Snowden’s evidence to the current “shutdown” of the US government, we find a pattern that we can easily characterize as “directed.”
“The IMF and World Bank in particular are elite facilities. The idea that communist China wants “more say” in it is certainly a bit strange. Anyway, weren’t the BRICs going to create their own mini-IMF?
“Are US and British elites conspiring to weaken the world’s dollar reserve currency in order to substitute a more global currency like Keynes’s bancor? We can’t say for certain, of course, but if top men have set out to deliberately destabilize the dollar, that’s big news with tremendous ramifications.
“The dollar was in fairly good shape, post-Bill Clinton … for a monopoly fiat-currency, anyway. George Bush’s deliberate wars and grandiose domestic schemes further destabilized it. Barack Obama has doubled and trebled the damage.”

I have been suggesting that at least part of this scenario is because there is a quiet “retrenchment” into North America taking place, in part an elite-driven one. Such a retrenchment would be consistent with a plan to destabilize the US dollar to the point it is no longer practical as an international reserve currency. It would, however, also be consistent with a scenario that viewed all these machinations, not as the ineluctable plan of a single unified elite at the top of the western system, but rather, as the manifestations of serious infighting between them.  If the latter, then I am bold to suggest that there are indicators of such infighting, as Europe, long a preserve of one of those bankster dynasties, has increasingly distanced itself from the USA, and aligned with either Russia or China, the two senior powers in the BRICSA bloc, and as the American component of that “Anglosphere” has apparently been quietly driving the development of American energy sources, pulling capital, and, in my word, “retrenching.” There are, of course, the “footnote exceptions” to these two broad patterns.  One thing remains a constant, however, and that is, we can expect a replay of the recent theater, whether in the form of even more shrill hysteria between the Dummycrook and Republithug wings of America’s dominant political party and class(note the singular), or a theater of brinksmanship and mock concessions (“bi-partisanship” is the conventional buzz-word).

This of course suggests that the recent movements of opposition and protest, Tea Party and truckers converging on the District of  Corruption, are really targeting the wrong people and places. And we saw, of course, how the Occupy Wall Street movement was coopted early on by left-wing radicals with the predictable result that it lost its credibility with mainstream America. Nonetheless, people are increasingly aware that the source of the log-jams really isn’t in DC… it’s elsewhere.

But the signs themselves remain as a little-noticed, and big unanswered question, about the recent show.

Read more: THE DAILY BELL: SIGNS (LITERALLY) THAT THE SHUTDOWN WAS THEATER