As a student of conspiracy theory, American fundamentalism and propaganda, this was right up my alley. I'd like to point out some themes in the article that jumped out at me when I read it.

1) Alex Jones-style conspiracy-theorist assertions that the masses are sheep, controlled by a dark elite. Examples include phrases such as "The masses have been incessantly conditioned", "The lie was sold easily", "popular delusion", "paper currencies managed by corrupt men", "the mainstream media’s 'chicken little' warnings", "policymakers and financial elites navigate the ship of state to their benefit, not yours," and so on.

2) The related, conspiracy-theorist assertion that the outsiders are stupid, and only those "in the know" are smart and have access to the "real truth". Examples in this article include "peoples’ misunderstanding of gold", "the desires, actions and reactions of humanity do not change", and "The lie was sold easily to, and embraced wholeheartedly by, a populace that delighted in the underlying subtext that one could really get something for nothing."

3) A millenarian-style catastrophism. Examples include "actions or pursuits, no matter how reckless or patently unsustainable", "Unfortunately for the Nation as an entity, these crises will continue", and "the magnitude of the problems facing America are so immense and intractable".

I've found believable long-gold analyses that pretty much state the same conclusions - go to the biiwii.com blog to read a good long-gold analyst, for example - but they're more convincing to me because they don't write screeds that sound like the propaganda of 911 Truthers.

What's happening is, a perfectly legitimate economic discourse about inflation and the future of gold has been commandeered by a right-wing group with an ulterior political agenda. Note the appearance of phrases like "Union pension funds (think militant voting bloc)", "Medicare/Medicaid is insolvent", and the underhanded suggestion that the US budget deficits are the fault of someone other than Bush (by pointing out they're "projected into the future", leaving out the fact that they only started after Clinton left office).

The thesis presented isn't that you should invest in gold - what they're really saying is you should overthrow Obama and replace him with the party that got you into this fiscal mess in the first place. (Well... Clinton's elimination of banking regulations is also to blame.) And then you can bust the unions, eliminate medicare and that weakling abortion of a health-care plan that Obama tried for a year to kill, and turn your back on the "temporal and frivolous" in favour of the "timeless" - most likely, the Fundamentalist/Charismatic formulation of God.

(As an aside, it seems this article didn't have a problem with printing trillions of $$ to fight losing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now ask yourself: who doesn't have a problem with printing trillions to fight losing wars? You? The other slaves of the corporate dictatorship? Or the shadowy elite that this writer supposedly is against?)

When an article is written in such a way to suggest that people are stupid and controlled by a shadowy elite, who are leading us to a new Armageddon, the alarm bells should go off in your head. Yes, the people are stupid, sure - but so are the bankers and the politicians who they own. Really, they're all just as bad, but some have more power than others. There's no deep, dark conspiracy - people just get greedier and greedier until the overleveraging and printing of money (mostly done by the banking system, not by any national bank) brings the whole edifice crashing down.

This writer, however, like so many others, is just hijacking economic analysis to get you to vote Tea Party.