The full phrase is girding your loins with truth and putting on a breastplate of righteousness before going into battle for a just cause. That sounds like good advice to me; we're going to be standing in the full brunt of a storm of truthiness in the near future as TPTB and media elites 'splain to all the Little People why we can't have nice things like healthcare and retirement with dignity. Trump isn't even inaugurated and they are already chomping at the bit to get the scissors to snip the safety nets into little bits.

Why am I mounting the horse to ride to all the Middlesex village and farms this morning to sound the alarm to the country folk, "The deficit cutters are coming! The deficit cutters are coming!"? Because the first light just went on in the old church belfry.

I watch Morning Joe most mornings. Why do I torture myself like this? Because this is the most prominent daily show that focuses almost exclusively on politics and where the media elites and politicians of the right (in other words Democrats and Republicans) meet to discuss life in the bubble. This is where the talking points are tried out and where you can watch the party lines be altered as a response to public reaction and polls and whatnot.

And this week was the unveiling of the knives coming out for Social Security and Medicare. Ringmaster Joe S, who remained mostly silent on "entitlement reform" during the election after years of blowing this trumpet, just picked it up again and promotes this ad nauseum regardless of whatever topic is on the table. One guest yesterday morning (sorry, was in the other room and didn't see who it was) went ahead after his lead and just outlined the goals: raise retirement age, alter CPI, and means test Medicare.

This agenda which we have seen time and time again, could have come right out of any right wing think tank as well as any bi-partisan panel made up of Republicans and the DINOs who are dying to work with them to cut the nets. The Millennials should be on double red alert about this, because they as per usual will be the ones to really feel the shaft. Entitlement cutting is always couched in terms of leaving current or near future benefit recipients out of the picture as a precaution to keeping all the angry blue hairs who vote regularly and religiously out of the street.

This gameplan is also always couched as an economic necessity which is complete and utter BS. The next segment of private industry that needs a bailout will get it. The next war that "needs" to be fought on whatever pretext will be funded. The only funds the politicians always have difficulty in finding in the Federal sofa cushions is money that flows directly as a citizen benefit without going through a sieve of profit-taking crony capitalists who horn in on the action through some form of privatization.

Don't buy into the bs and try to help everyone around you not to buy into it as well. The United States is not a business and it is not a household budget - it is a sovereign nation (a least for the time being) with a fiat currency which has shown an amazing capacity to create and recycle money to those entities it deems meriting of such actions, like, oh, say Wall Street in the meltdown. (29 Trillion dollars according to L Randall Wray over a period of years. The Feds 29 Trillion Dollar bailout)

So stay alert, my friends. As this wealth transfer commences, there will be those few journalists and economists who will write about the shaftathon by TPTB. We will have to educate one another about the fallacies being promoted and we will have to share information and use social media wisely in order to deploy shame as our most powerful weapon. Education and shaming worked to turn back chained CPI and it worked in derailing the TPP. Our politicians don’t have any problem in screwing us on a regular basis in the normal order of things as long as everyone can maintain the pretense that they don’t know that we know we are being screwed. Once that cover is blown, game over.