Category Archives: Oligarchy

Bull or Bear? The Ultimate Source of Market Instability

Posted on by
Reply

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Market commentators tend to focus on Bulls and Bears and Federal Reserve policies as drivers of stock market gyrations, but there’s a far more profound dynamic working beneath these veneers: the forces of adaptation and evolution transforming the economy and society as conditions change.

While the general expectation is that the post-Covid economy “should” revert to the stability of 2019, this ignores what was already unraveling in 2019. The global economy experienced fundamental shifts in technology, production, energy, capital flows, labor, currencies and geopolitics in the past 25 years, and all these forces are not just in motion but accelerating in ways that are destabilizing the status quo.

The necessity of adaptation and evolution can be summed up very simply: adapt or die. This is the natural state not just of Nature and species but of systems such as societies and economies. Those which cling on to failing models stagnate and decay, while those which embrace dissent, transparency and a constant churn of experimentation and trial-and-error will adapt and evolve and emerge stronger and more adaptable.

The US economy went through a comparable period of instability and forced adaptation in the 1970s, a dynamic I explored in The Forgotten History of the 1970s (January 13, 2023). Everyone benefiting from the status quo arrangements fought the much-needed changes tooth and nail, and so progress was uneven. Transitioning to a more efficient and responsive industrial base required tremendous capital investments and scaling up new technologies.

The transition is more costly and takes more time than we would like; the 1970s transition took about a decade. We can anticipate a similar scale of capital investment and time will be needed for this structural adaptation.

As the chart below illustrates, the 1970s was characterized by high inflation and big swings up and down in the stock market. Successful adaptations generated hope for quick recovery, while lagging adaptations tempered the hope with painful realities.

Again, it is likely that the decade ahead will track this same general dynamic of big swings generated by hope that the worst is over and the realities that progress is only partial and instability still reigns.

Everyone wants a trend they can trade for effortless gains. That may no longer be realistic.

Don’t Believe Anything – But Recognize the Verge of a New Dark Age

Posted on by
2

By Phil Butler

Source: New Eastern Outlook

A decade ago, discovering every significant media outlet in the western world as tabloid news would have been inconceivable. Well, the unbelievable is all around us pounding pure lies into our brains on behalf of people eviler than Emperor Caligula. Just Google Putin, Russia, or even China, and with some effort, you’ll see what I mean.

In the mainstream, your average American gets, President Joe Biden is some kind of Dwight Eisenhower or Harry Truman figure. A man who cannot find his way off a stage or navigate the White House lawn is somehow a fit chess competitor for Vladimir Putin. The latest snafu is about his visit with Ukraine’s Zelensky a day before Putin spoke about a new phase of Russian policy. The CNN headline read “Biden’s Ukraine visit upstages Putin and leaves Moscow’s military pundits raging.” As an American who served his country in the military and other capacities, it’s sickening. Get this.

These media outlets and the Neocons have Americans believing a Chinese weather balloon that blew off course was gathering vital US nuclear missile silo intel. And Joe Biden waited until it flew all the way across the country before launching a multi-million-dollar F-22 strike to kill the spy machine. Days later, US fighter pilots shot down UFOs over Alaska. The only positive note after that was the Internet memes poking fun at the senile President and our goofball policies. Oh, but there’s more, oh so much more.

The New York Times and the rest are providing pushback on the Biden-authorized Nord Stream sabotage reported by one of the world’s most respected investigative journalists, Seymour Hersh. The guy who uncovered the My Lai massacre and its cover-up during the Vietnam War, key facts on Watergate, CIA domestic spy, and a lot more busted the Biden administration for using Navy Seals to detonate undersea charges dooming a Russia to Germany gas pipeline. The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist’s revelations should have caused a media frenzy, a UN summit, and a NATO emergency meeting. But the people in charge can’t have that. The story of the decade so far is being slid under the rug. The reason why is explained in something Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said recently:

“In many cases, ruling elites in unfriendly countries do not act of their free will, but only because they must show solidarity within their block. NATO and the EU enforce heavy-handed discipline on their members at the initiative of an aggressive minority.”

“How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline” should be a reason for Biden’s impeachment hearings to be planned. The Germans should be banning US military personnel from their borders. And the Russians should probably go ahead and declare war when it all pans out true. We have this from Hersh’s sources and research:

“Last June, the Navy divers, operating under cover of the highly publicized NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with knowledge of the operational planning.”

The pipelines, which supplied Germany and much of Europe with cheap gas to run industry and fueled the lives of millions, were sabotaged without so much as a mention of the plan to America’s lawmakers. Hersh went on to describe how Biden, Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland, and Anthony Blinken were key conspirators in the illegal plan to undermine a NATO ally just to get to Putin and Russia. Biden had announced months before, after a meeting with Germany’s Scholz, that if Russia invaded Ukraine, “there would be no pipeline.”

Of course, Biden and his scandalous minions knew Russia had to act to prevent further NATO shenanigans in Ukraine, as we learned from the revelations of former German Chancellor Angela Merkel about the Minsk accords being a ruse. Talk about world-class liars and thugs. America’s leadership makes the worst Israeli mafioso seem harmless as Mickey Mouse. These people will get our world blown up.

Now Biden, Zelensky, all the EU criminals, and even exiled Putin enemy and Russian mafioso Mikhail Borisovich Khodorkovsky have been seen at the Munich Security Council predicting Putin’s demise—some more. Once we’d have thought US presidents, New York Times publishers, and killer thugs kicked from Russia like bullying kids from the schoolyard would be strange bedfellows. But this Biden administration has to be the most corrupt bunch since the days of Al Capone and Lucky Luciano.

Get this, one of the men involved in the Hunter Biden laptop affair, Prof. Gal Luft, is now in leg irons in a Cyprus jail awaiting extradition to the US for, you won’t believe it, being an arms dealer. Luft had helped the FBI and other agencies with highly incriminating facts about Hunter Biden, and now he’s on a path like Jeffrey Epstein or Julian Assange. Hanged by the neck, or something like that. Oh, and congressional investigators are asking who paid millions of dollars for Hunter Biden’s art? The lunacy goes on, and on, and on.

I’ll leave off with the European Parliament bosses blocking public scrutiny of Ursula von der Leyen over a Pfizer contract she clearly benefitted from. And Pfizer gate is not the EU President’s only worry. She’s now pledged another €1 billion for Ukraine’s fast recovery. That is, if there is a Ukraine to rebuild once western weapons and mercenaries force the Russians to obliterate the country just to keep NATO and bio-weapons labs out. For me, it now seems obvious why the liberal world order has gone all in with this proxy war against Russia. If the citizens of our countries ever find out what their leaders have really done, there will be public hangings Mussolini style across the NATO cabal.

So, forget the tabloids except to use reverse psychology for understanding the news. If the White House says we did not blow up Nord Stream, you can bet your last dollar we did. Think about our track record, America’s I mean. Our leaders operate like very drunken Roman senators, and our military operates as if Hannibal were commanding the armed forces of every third-world country. We even have officials swearing that Putin does not have any nuclear weapons. No really. This is where we are with detente in the 21st century, on the verge of a new Dark Ages.

Send in the Clowns

Posted on by
3

Yellen and Garland perform back-to-back surprise visits to Ukraine

By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

Sometimes I think that the script being used by the Biden Administration to manage its foreign and national security policies has been written by George Orwell, though I am not sure if it based on 1984 or Animal Farm. Maybe it is a combination of the two. Either way, it would help explain why there is something seriously wrong here. For example, at the end of February Congress, confronted by a debt ceiling, began discussing cutting Medicare and Social Security while more recently a banking sector crisis seems to be developing so Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen decided to go off doing photo-ops in Kiev embracing Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky shortly after handing him the keys to the US economy. She explained to Zelensky how the White House had approved an additional $12 billion in aid to Ukraine during the previous week, including $2 billion for the military and $10 billion to support Zelensky’s government and other infrastructure needs. The US Treasury is now de facto the source of the Ukraine government’s entire annual budget. In addition, Yellen described glowingly how the Treasury and State Departments will implement a new round of sanctions against more than 200 entities and individuals with ties to Russia’s military, high-technology industries, and its metals and mining sectors. The US Department of Commerce is also enforcing export restrictions on materials and technology, including semiconductors, sold by American companies to customers in Russia and China.

In defense of her grand mission, Yellen penned an op-ed for the always compliant New York Times explaining the importance of Ukraine to the United States. She wrote how in Ukraine “…Russia’s barbaric attacks continue — but Kyiv stands strong and free. Ukraine’s heroic resistance is the direct product of the courage and resilience of Ukraine’s military, leadership and people. But President Volodymyr Zelensky and the Ukrainians would be the first to admit that they can’t do this alone — and that international support is crucial to sustaining their resistance. I’m in Kyiv to reaffirm our unwavering support of the Ukrainian people. Mr. Putin is counting on our global coalition’s resolve to wane, which he thinks will give him the upper hand in the war. But he is wrong. As President Biden said here last week, America will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes… Ukrainians are fighting for their lives on the front lines of the free world. Today, and every day, they deserve America’s unyielding support.”

The Yellen op-ed drones on with a lie so large that it is astonishing that the New York Times would even print it: “When confronted with scenes of brutality and oppression, Americans have always been quick to stand up and do the right thing. Our strength as a nation comes from our commitment to our ideals — and our capacity to see in others the same desires that animated our own struggles for freedom and justice.” But then she tops that with assurances from “President Zelensky, [who] has pledged to use these funds in the ‘most responsible way.’ We welcome this commitment, as well as his longstanding agenda to strengthen good governance in Ukraine.” Huh?

And here is Yellen’s version of “Why We Fight!”: “Our support is motivated, first and foremost, by a moral duty to come to the aid of a people under attack. We also know that, as President Zelensky has said, our assistance is not charity. It’s an investment in ‘global security and democracy.’ Let’s look at the strategic impact of our support for Ukraine so far. Mr. Putin’s war poses a direct threat to European security, as well as to the laws and values that underpin the rules-based international system.”

So, Americans have a “moral duty” apparently up to and including sending their sons and daughters to die supporting Ukraine. And ah yes, it’s all about the “free” world, democracy and the notorious rules based international system! Has anyone yet cited Hegel’s observation that the President Joe Biden Administration’s foreign policy has already “repeated itself, first as a tragedy in Afghanistan, second as a farce”? Meanwhile one suspects Zelensky was laughing all the way to the bank as Yellen disappeared over the horizon to come up with the cash, as that old expression goes, and he probably already has one of his buddies shopping for a new villa on the French Riviera to supplement his other real estate! But wait! The story became even more exciting the following week, involving another visit to Mr. Z by America’s nearly invisible Attorney General Merrick Garland, a man who can literally look Z in the eye as they are both very short. Garland is generally engaged in chasing white supremacists and requiring all new FBI hires to learn all about how to identify and pursue antisemites, but he has made two trips to Kiev to meet mano-a-mano with the brave olive drab t-shirt clad warrior who is already being beatified as the twenty-first century’s Winston Churchill.

Garland was in town to do the other thing the engages his sense of law and order, which is to set up a tribunal to arrest, prosecute and punish Russian war criminals after Ukraine emerges triumphant from its conflict with the unimaginably evil President Vladimir Putin. It would be modeled on the Nuremberg Tribunals that tried leading Nazis after the Second World War, and Garland has cited his family’s escape from the so-called holocaust to explain why he is intent on personally being involved in delivering what he describes as “justice.” A Justice Department spokeswoman described Garland’s mission as being in Kiev to personally “reaffirm America’s commitment to help hold Russia responsible for war crimes committed in its unjust and unprovoked invasion against its sovereign neighbor.”

Garland had several meetings with President Volodymyr Zelensky and foreign law enforcement officials including Ukrainian Prosecutor General Andriy Kostin while attending what was billed as the “United for Justice Conference.” Zelensky elaborated that the purpose of the conference was to hold Russia’s leadership accountable for the alleged atrocities carried out by its army. “The main issue of all these meetings is accountability,” he said. The US Justice Department is reportedly actively engaged in the gathering of evidence to indict the Russians. During Garland’s first visit to Ukraine in June 2022 he announced the appointment of Eli Rosenbaum, an Office of Special Investigations prosecutor best known for going after former Nazis, to direct American efforts to identify and track Russian war criminals.

Garland laid it on thick, as was expected from someone responsible for prosecuting the rest of the world when it steps out of line. He told his hosts that “Just over twelve months ago, invading Russian forces began committing atrocities at the largest scale in any armed conflict since the Second World War. We are here today in Ukraine to speak clearly, and with one voice: the perpetrators of those crimes will not get away with them. In addition to our work in partnership with Ukraine and the international community, the United States has also opened criminal investigations into war crimes in Ukraine that may violate US law.” He concluded by throwing out the complete bullshit party line much beloved by Joe Biden and Tony Blinken, that “The United States recognizes that what happens here in Ukraine will have a direct impact on the strength of our own democracy.”

Of course, there is more than a little bit of irony in all this, not to mention top level hypocrisy, as the United States has killed more people directly or indirectly while committing more crimes against humanity dished out in various ways over the past twenty years than any other country, except, predictably, Israel, which currently is committing crimes against humanity on a nearly daily basis. Curiously, however, the normally tone-deaf White House and Pentagon seem to understand, on a certain level, that opening up Pandora’s box might not be a good idea when it comes to war crimes. Last week Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin refused to share US information on alleged Russian crimes with the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague. The Pentagon is blocking the Biden administration from sharing evidence with the ICC collected by American intelligence agencies regarding Russian activities in Ukraine because helping the court investigate Russians might set a precedent that could help pave the way for it to prosecute Americans. Washington does not recognize the ICC, fearing that it might well seek to examine the sorry record of US military crimes in Asia and Africa. Israel similarly does to recognize the court for roughly the same reason.

So here we are, two top level officials from the Biden regime sneak into Kiev to give an arch crook money and unlimited moral support, together with a pledge that more cash is on the way as are arms and war crimes tribunals await those nasty Russians. And guess what? It is all packaged as being good for America! This sounds like a song that was sung previously in places like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and it was a tissue of lies then just as it is now. Yellen ought to have stayed home to tend to the banking system and should be giving the billions of dollars earmarked for Zelensky back to the American people. If Garland wants to investigate anyone it should be the Pentagon, the intelligence agencies, and Congress. And yes, his own FBI! And don’t forget how the Bidens and Clintons became multi-millionaires! And then there is the destruction of Nord Stream. Funny how every time one turns over a rock in and around the US government something really smelly surfaces.

Ukraine is America’s Afghanistan More Than Russia’s

Posted on by
2

By Peter Van Buren

Source: We Meant Well

The thinking in Washington goes like this: for the “low cost” of Ukrainian lives and some American dollars, the West can end Putin’s strategic threat to the United States. No Americans are dying. It’s not like Iraq or Afghanistan ’01-’21. This is post-modern, something new, a clean great power war, Jackson Pollack for war. Getting a lot of foreign policy mojo at little cost. It’s almost as if we should have though of this sooner.

Um, we did. It didn’t work out past the short run and there’s the message. Welcome to Afghanistan 1980’s edition with the U.S. playing both the American and the Soviet roles.

At first glance it seems all that familiar. Russia invades a neighboring country who was more or less just minding its own business. Russia’s goals are the same, to push out its borders in the face of what it perceives as Western encroachment on the one hand, and world domination on the other. The early Russian battlefield successes break down, and the U.S. sees an opportunity to bleed the Russians at someone else’s bodily expense. “We’ll fight to the last Afghani” is the slogan of the day.

The CIA, via our snake-like “ally” in Pakistan, floods Afghanistan with money and weapons. The tools are different but the effect is the same: supply just enough firepower to keep the bear tied down and bleeding but not enough to kill him and God forbid, end the war which is so profitable — lots of dead Russkies and zero Americans killed (OK, maybe a few, but they are the use-and-forget types of foreign policy, CIA paramilitary and Special Forces, so no fair counting them.) And ironic historical bonus: in both Afghanistan 1980s and Ukraine, some of the money spent is Saudi. See the bothersome thread yet?

Leaving aside some big differences that enabled initial successes in Afghanistan, chief among which is the long supply lines versus Ukraine’s border situation, let’s look at what followed early days.

Though NATO countries and others sent small numbers of troops and material to Afghanistan, the U.S. has gone out of its way to make Ukraine look like a NATO show when it is not. Washington supposedly declared support for Ukraine to preserve and empower NATO (despite the fact that Ukraine was not a member.) Yet, to keep Germany on sides in the Russian-Ukraine war, Washington (allegedly) conducted a covert attack on Germany’s critical civilian infrastructure that will have lasting, negative consequences for the German economy. Seymour Hersh reported the Nord Stream pipeline connecting cheap Russian natural gas to Europe via Germany was sabotaged by the United States. An act of war. The destruction of an ally’s critical infrastructure, and no doubt a brush back pitch carefully communicated to the Germans alongside a stern warning to stay put on sanctions against energy trade with Russia. It’s a helluva thing, blowing up the pipeline to force Germany to color inside the lines NATO (actually the U.S.) laid out. This, in addition to the U.S. treating NATO countries as convenient supply dumps and little more, shows that NATO will emerge from Ukraine broken. One does also wonder if the future of Europe is at stake why the greatest concern is expressed in Washington and not Bonn or Paris.

As with Afghanistan, there are questions if we Americans will ever be able to leave, about whether Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn” rules applies — you break it, you bought it. President Zelensky, portrayed in the West as a cross between Churchill and Bono, in actuality was a comedian and TV producer who won the 2019 Ukrainian presidential election. Zelensky’s popularity was due in part to his anti-establishment image and promises to fight corruption and improve the economy. He was also aided by his portrayal of a fictional president in a popular TV show, which helped to increase his name recognition and appeal to young voters.

Zelensky was preceded by the Ukrainian Revolution, also known as the Euromaidan Revolution, which began in late 2013 as a series of protests in response to then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to reject an association agreement with the European Union and instead pursue closer ties with Russia. The protests grew in size and intensity, with demonstrators occupying the central Maidan Nezalezhnosti square in Kiev, demanding Yanukovych’s resignation and new elections. In February 2014, the situation escalated when Yanukovych’s security forces cracked down on protesters, resulting in violent clashes that left dozens dead. This led to Yanukovych fleeing the country and a new government being formed in Ukraine. The revolution also sparked tensions with Russia, which subsequently annexed Crimea and supported separatists in eastern Ukraine. None of those problems goes away even if the Russia army retreats to its pre-invasion borders. The notion that there is nothing going on here except a rough land grab by a power-made Putin is shallow and incomplete.

What’s left are concerns about the level of corruption in Ukraine, and the U.S.’s role in addressing it. Despite the U.S. providing significant financial aid to Ukraine, there have been reports of corruption and mismanagement of funds. Some have argued that the U.S. has not done enough to address these issues, and has instead turned a blind eye in order to maintain its strategic interests in the region. America’s history with pouring nearly unlimited arms and money into a developing nation and corruption is not a good one (see either Afghanistan, 1980s or ’01 onward.) Corruption can only get worse.

A great fear in Afghanistan was arms proliferation, weapons moving off the battlefield into the wrong hands. Whether that be a container of rifles or the latest anti-aircraft systems, an awful lot of weapons are loose in Ukraine. In the case of Afghanistan, the real fear was for Stinger missiles, capable of shooting down modern aircraft, ending up in terrorist hands. The U.S. has been chasing these missiles through the world’s arms bazaars ever since, right into the Consulate in Benghazi. It is worse in Ukraine. America’s top-of-the-line air defense tools are being employed against Russian and Iranian air assets. What would those countries pay for the telemetry data of a shoot down, never mind actual hardware to reverse engineer and program against? There are no doubt Russian, Chinese, Iranian and other intelligence agencies on the ground in Ukraine with suitcases full of money trying to buy up what they can. Another cost of war.

It is also hard to see the end game as the demise of Putin. This would mean the strategy is not fight until the last Afghani/Ukrainian but to fight until the last Russian. The plan is for that final straw to break, that last Russian death, to trigger some sort of overthrow of Putin. But by whom? Trading Putin for a Russian-military lead government seems a small gain. Look what happened the last time Russia went through a radical change of government — we got Putin. In Afghanistan, it was the Taliban x 2.

History suggests the U.S. will lose in a variety of ways in Ukraine, with the added question of who will follow Putin and what might make that guy a more copacetic leader towards the United States. As one pundit put it, it is like watching someone play Risk drunk.

The Devil’s Milkshake

Posted on by
1

The water’s just fine!

By Tarence Ray

Source: The Baffler

YOU’VE SEEN IT BEFORE. An industrial disaster poisons a town’s food or water supply. Residents get angry. Public officials try to dispel that anger through a public act of self-sacrifice, of reassurance. They convene a press conference, whereupon some hapless courtier brings forth a chalice of the supposedly poisoned material. And then, in front of God and the television cameras, the public official imbibes.

Examples from recent history abound. In 2019, former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe ate possibly irradiated rice balls from Fukushima to demonstrate the progress made toward rebuilding the prefecture since its 2011 nuclear meltdown. In 2013, former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper claimed he drank fracking fluid to assuage his constituents’ concerns around natural gas drilling. (Not “tasty,” he said.) And, most famous of all, in 2016 Barack Obama took a sip of (filtered) water from the lead-poisoned water supply of Flint, Michigan, to prove it was safe. (“This is not a stunt,” he noted of the stunt.)

Officials are already lining up to drink the forbidden poison issuing from East Palestine, Ohio. When a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed there earlier this month, producing an airborne toxic event of hazardous chemicals, concerns about the water inevitably arose. Enter one Troy Nehls, a Republican congressman from Texas, who became the first intrepid soul through the breach. On February 16, Nehls—who was inexplicably in Ohio, some fourteen hundred miles away from his district—posted a video to Twitter to get word out that the water was safe. To prove it, Nehls slurped it up. This was promptly followed by a video from Ohio lieutenant governor Jon Husted, wherein a group of public officials huddled together and threw back shots of supposed tap water like they were freshman college students out on the town.

But Nehls and Husted were just the undercard features. On February 21, following reports that Norfolk Southern had funded preliminary tests declaring the water totally safe, Ohio’s Republican governor Mike DeWine and a merry caravan, including an EPA official and a congressman, stalked around East Palestine with news cameras, gamely drinking from residents’ taps. (“That’s good,” the EPA official gushed. “That’s really cold coming from the tap.”) The photos and videos from this danse macabre mirrored Husted’s, but on a grander scale—half a dozen people standing around, toasting and clashing cups together like they were at a medieval banquet. If these dizzying trends hold, it’s probably a matter of time before Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, or even President Biden, follows suit.

Years ago, I surveyed the literature looking for a name or term to describe this phenomenon of consuming potentially tainted materials. After all, it seemed to be increasing in frequency, and I’d even started witnessing it at the level of local politics. But if there was a name, I couldn’t find it. So I gave it one: the Devil’s Milkshake.

The Devil’s Milkshake is bipartisan. Neither Democrats nor Republicans hold monopoly on it. Which means it can be multiple things, depending on who wields it. To some, it’s cynical political theater, meant to make the politician look invincible and brave. To others, it can be a genuine—yet transparently phony—attempt at showing solidarity. And to others still, it abets a kind of mass hysteria, in which public officials feel increasingly pressured to outdo each other for attention and admiration.

The Devil’s Milkshake can also be an effective way for a public official to shirk any commitment to doing something about the conditions that gave rise to the disaster in the first place. One time I was at a town hall in Martin County, Kentucky, where the water system has been degraded by years of coal mining, corruption, and neglect. Residents were getting sick, and they’d convened the town hall to demand action from the local government. But instead of committing to any substantive action, one local official ran to the front of the hall and demanded a glass of that sweet local tap, so he could drink it right there on the spot, and thus prove that nothing needed changing. A few awkward minutes passed, wherein the crowd grew uncomfortable with the prospect of witnessing a man poison himself in public. So they talked the official down. To this day, Martin County’s water is still unsafe to drink.

It’s likely the Devil’s Milkshake is a modern phenomenon. After all, medieval rulers used to employ taste testers precisely in order to avoid being poisoned. But historical examples are nonetheless difficult to track down because the phenomenon has been heretofore unnamed. So I’ve had to crowdsource its history. It’s clear, reviewing this data, that public officials have had to tweak, refine, and workshop the spectacle; it developed over time through a process of trial and error.

A PhD student at Indiana University, Justin Hawkins, sent me what is perhaps the earliest historical example. In the 1850s, New York City was in the middle of an adulterated milk scandal. Across the country, thousands of infants were dying every year from milk cut with “swill”—excess mash from nearby distilleries, whitened with plaster and drained of nutrients. Tammany Hall sent an Alderman named Michael Tuomey to investigate. But Tuomey vigorously defended the dairy owners and their milk supply. While visiting one dairy, Tuomey threw back some whiskey with the farmers, concluded the milk was perfectly safe, and slandered anyone who thought otherwise as “prejudice[d].” But, as Hawkins points out, it’s unclear whether or not Tuomey’s stunt was performed before a crowd. This highlights a crucial ingredient in the Devil’s Milkshake formula: for it to be a proper Devil’s Milkshake, it must be performed in public, or at least in front of cameras.

The second criteria of the Devil’s Milkshake is that one must actually go through with it. This example came to me by way of a researcher friend, Jack Norton. It’s the story of New York governor Hugh Carey who, in 1981, volunteered to drink a big glass of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, from a contaminated state office building in order “to satisfy the unions” that the building was safe. Carey, however, was warned that doing so might actually make him sick, and so he reportedly did not follow through. He nonetheless displayed a curious willingness to put his body on the line for the sake of scoring political points.

Occasionally, the Devil’s Milkshake can be fobbed off on the inferiors or family members of the elected official trying to harness its powers. To illustrate this, we turn to our cousins across the pond. In 1990, four years after the fatal mad cow disease was discovered in Britain’s beef supply, the nation’s agriculture minister, John Selwymn Gummer, carted his four-year-old daughter before news cameras and tried to feed her an “absolutely delicious” hamburger. Six years later, researchers confirmed humans could be infected with the degenerative neurological disease—and in 2007, the daughter of a Gummer family friend died of it. Perhaps Gummer’s logic was that of a hostage taker: if his audience saw his craven recklessness, they, too, might be willing to put their lives on the line to make beef sales go up.

But perhaps the grimmest example of the Devil’s Milkshake is that of Peruvian president Alberto Fujimori and his fisheries minister, Felix Alberto Canal Torres. This story was sent to me by Twitter user @JimmyFalunGong. In 1991, cholera was spreading throughout Peru by way of raw fish, resulting in massive profit losses to the Peruvian fishing industry. In order to get the industry back on its feet, President Fujimori and Minister Torres chowed down on some raw fish live on television, hoping to encourage the public to do the same. Unfortunately, the epidemic wore on for months, eventually killing over three thousand people, and Minister Torres reportedly wound up hospitalized with cholera, no doubt acquired from the raw fish.  

The Gummer and Fujimori-Torres debacles show that, from the very beginning, the Devil’s Milkshake was always just that: a deal with the devil. A gamble. One that, if successful, could pay enormous dividends. But, if unsuccessful, could be very embarrassing. Perhaps that’s why nowadays, the Devil’s Milkshake is most likely just a stage trick. When that aide brings out the chalice, whatever’s inside almost certainly isn’t poison. It’s something harmless that is meant to look poisonous. (Someone on Twitter even pointed out that the officials taking shots of East Palestine’s water in lieutenant Governor Husted’s video had neglected to hide their bottle of Smart Water.) Besides, even if President Obama really did drink lead-poisoned water in Flint, his stunt missed the point: prolonged, chronic exposure is what leads to severe impairment, not a single sip. Race, class, and geography are the major determinants of environmental harm. Most people know this, which is why many Flint residents viewed Obama’s theatrics with skepticism.

Yet I would argue that leaders like President Obama are, like the constituents they seek to deceive, fully aware of this structural truth. It’s what makes the Devil’s Milkshake so strange. The stunt seems to be a tacit acknowledgement by the ruling class that they know the general public doesn’t trust them. (Only 19 percent of Americans believe they can trust the government “most of the time.”) Its recent proliferation must be seen as proof of a ruling class desperate to uphold the illusion of democracy. It is the last gasp of a dying order, drinking and eating its way to the grave, restrained or unwilling to fix anything, and thus doomed to play act a fantasy before klieg lights and newscasters. The dizzying amount of Devil’s Milkshake footage issuing from East Palestine only proves their desperation: these people could not be more unlike you. In fact, the only thing you have left in common with them is the fact that they, too, still have to eat food and drink water to stay alive. That’s it. The Devil’s Milkshake is a measure of the gaping chasm between you and them.

The sad thing is that, sometimes, the water or food in question is actually safe to consume. Watersheds can be hard to wrap your head around. A lot of hysterical and paranoid information leeched into the ether following the East Palestine toxic event. People upstream from the Ohio River worried that they, too, were at risk of exposure. Were boil water advisories fifty miles southeast in Pittsburgh related to the derailment—even though local officials said otherwise? Were birds dying in Kentucky because of the crash? All these places probably are under threat, but from other things entirely: chemical plants, microplastics, algae blooms, air pollution, you name it.

The public has by now seen so many of these large-scale pollution events that they well understand no one will be held accountable; that the clean-up will be, at best, half-assed; and that we’re just going to bide our time until the next one occurs. (Indeed, in the weeks since the East Palestine incident, a commercial tanker truck full of chemicals crashed outside Tucson, killing the driver and releasing a plume of nitric acid into the air; a train derailed in Texas, killing one; another train carrying coal derailed in Nebraska; and on and on.) People, naturally, have lost trust in their leaders to keep them safe. No amount of poisonous water consumed by governors, congressmen, or EPA officials will restore that trust.

This is why the Devil’s Milkshake is ultimately an insult to your intelligence. The point isn’t to give you actionable information about what’s going on. If it was, public officials would just do that, instead of histrionically parading around in front of the cameras to show off the sacrifice they’re making. Nor is the point to rebuild trust in institutions. After all, these figures could just fix the problems, and make our natural and infrastructural environments responsive to crises and safe to navigate.

No, the point of the Devil’s Milkshake is to arrest further complaint. To recycle anger back into “acceptable” forms of discourse and mechanisms of accountability. To move on, forget it ever happened. It’s almost as if, through this act of symbolic consumption, a public official telegraphs their willingness to die for corporate America’s sins. That, because they’re willing to literally metabolize the issue, it’s been addressed, processed, and fixed.

The problem with this is that no one ever forgets. People remember it all. Not just the fear and terror of seeing a black pillar of smoke towering over their community. Not just the health scares and medical bills, the family members and friends and pets dying before their time. Not just the agonizing mystery of it all, of wondering which recent toxic event is responsible for their debilitating sickness, or if they’re crazy for even having that thought.

They’ll also remember the most terrifying, mind-bending thing of all: that their leaders sacrificed them at the almighty altar of profit, and then mocked them for daring to question it. They’ll wake up in the middle of the night, their minds retracing the choreographed ritual of power known as the Devil’s Milkshake, their gleeful leaders sending up veritable toasts to the fact they were getting away with it all. And this remembering brings on a final realization: that the next time may be even worse.

Silicon Valley Bank Crisis: The Liquidity Crunch We Predicted Has Now Begun

Posted on by
Reply
A worker, middle, tells customers that the Silicon Valley Bank headquarters is closed on Friday, March 10, 2023, in Santa Clara, California. Silicon Valley Bank was shut down on Friday morning by California regulators and was put in control of the U.S. Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images/TNS)

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

There has been an avalanche of information and numerous theories circulating the past few days about the fate of a bank in California know as SVB (Silicon Valley Bank). SVB was the 16th largest bank in the US until it abruptly failed and went into insolvency on March 10th. The impetus for the collapse of the bank is tied to a $2 billion liquidity loss on bond sales which caused the institution’s stock value to plummet over 60%, triggering a bank run by customers fearful of losing some or most of their deposits.

There are many fine articles out there covering the details of the SVB situation, but what I want to talk about more is the root of it all. The bank’s shortfalls are not really the cause of the crisis, they are a symptom of a wider liquidity drought that I predicted here at Alt-Market months ago, including the timing of the event.

First, though, let’s discuss the core issue, which is fiscal tightening and the Federal Reserve. In my article ‘The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error’, published in December of 2021, I noted that the Fed was on a clear path towards tightening into economic weakness, very similar to what they did in the early 1980s during the stagflation era and also somewhat similar to what they did at the onset of the Great Depression. Former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke even openly admitted that the Fed caused the depression to spiral out of control due to their tightening policies.

In that same article I discussed the “yield curve” being a red flag for an incoming crisis:

“…The central bank is the largest investor in US bonds. If the Fed raises interest rates into weakness and tapers asset purchases, then we may see a repeat of 2018 when the yield curve started to flatten. This means that short term treasury bonds will end up with the same yield as long term bonds and investment in long term bonds will fall.”

As of this past week the yield curve has been inverted, signaling a potential liquidity crunch. Both Jerome Powell (Fed Charman) and Janet Yellen (Treasury Secretary) have indicated that tightening policies will continue and that reducing inflation to 2% is the goal. Given the many trillions of dollars the Fed has pumped into the financial system in the past decade as well as the overall weakness of general economy, it would not take much QT to crush credit markets and by extension stock markets.

As I also noted in 2021:

“We are now at that stage again where price inflation tied to money printing is clashing with the stock market’s complete reliance on stimulus to stay afloat. There are some that continue to claim the Fed will never sacrifice the markets by tapering. I say the Fed does not actually care, it is only waiting for the right time to pull the plug on the US economy.”

But is that time now?  I expanded on this analysis in my article ‘Major Economic Contraction Coming In 2023 – Followed By Even More Inflation’, published in December of 2022. I noted that:

“This is the situation we are currently in today as 2022 comes to a close. The Fed is in the midst of a rather aggressive rate hike program in a “fight” against the stagflationary crisis that they created through years of fiat stimulus measures. The problem is that the higher interest rates are not bringing prices down, nor are they really slowing stock market speculation. Easy money has been too entrenched for far too long, which means a hard landing is the most likely scenario.”

I continued:

“In the early 2000s the Fed had been engaged in artificially low interest rates which inflated the housing and derivatives bubble. In 2004, they shifted into a tightening process. Rates in 2004 were at 1% and by 2006 they rose to over 5%. This is when cracks began to appear in the credit structure, with 4.5% – 5.5% being the magic cutoff point before debt became too expensive for the system to continue the charade. By 2007/2008 the nation witnessed an exponential implosion of credit…”

Finally, I made my prediction for March/April of 2023:

“Since nothing was actually fixed by the Fed back then, I will continue to use the 5% funds rate as a marker for when we will see another major contraction…The 1% excise tax added on top of a 5% Fed funds rate creates a 6% millstone on any money borrowed to finance future buybacks. This cost is going to be far too high and buybacks will falter. Meaning, stock markets will also stop, and drop. It will likely take two or three months before the tax and the rate hikes create a visible effect on markets. This would put our time frame for contraction around March or April of 2023.”

We are now in the middle of March and it appears that the first signs of liquidity crisis are bubbling to the surface with the insolvency of SVB and the shuttering of another institution in New York called Signature Bank.

Everything is tied back to liquidity. With higher rates, banks are hard-pressed to borrow from the Fed and companies are hard-pressed to borrow from banks. This means companies that were hiding financial weakness and exposure to bad investments using easy credit no longer have that option. They won’t be able to artificially support operations that are not profitable, they will have to abandon stock buybacks that make their shares appear valuable and they will have to initiate mass layoffs in order to protect their bottom line.

SVB is not quite Bear Stearns, but it is likely a canary in the coal mine, telling us what is about to happen on a wider scale. Many of their depositors were founded in venture capital fueled by easy credit, not to mention all the ESG related companies dependent on woke loans. That money is gone – It’s dead. Those businesses are quietly but quickly crumbling which also conjured a black hole for deposits within SVB. It’s a terribly destructive cycle. Surely, there are numerous other banks in the US in the same exact position.

I believe this is just the beginning of a liquidity and credit crisis that will combine with overt inflation to produce perhaps the biggest economic crash America has ever seen. SVB’s failure may not be THE initiator, only one among many. I suspect that in this scenario larger US banks may avoid the kind of credit crash that we saw with Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers in 2008. But, contagion could still strike multiple mid-sized banks and the effects could be similar in a short period of time.

With all the news flooding the wire on SVB it’s easy to forget that all of this boils down to a single vital issue: The Fed’s stimulus measures created an economy utterly addicted to easy and cheap liquidity. Now, they have taken that easy money away. In light of the SVB crash, will the central bank reverse course on tightening, or will they continue forward and risk contagion?

For now, Janet Yellen and the Fed have implemented a limited backstop and a guarantee on deposits at SVB and Signature. This will theoretically prevent a “haircut” on depositor accounts and lure retail investors with dreams of endless stimulus.  It is a half-measure, though – Central bankers have to at least look like they are trying. 

SVB’s assets sit at around $200 billion and Signature’s assets are around $100 billion, but what about interbank exposure and what about the wider implications?  How many banks are barely scraping by to meet their liquidity obligations, and how many companies have evaporating deposits?  The backstop will do nothing to prevent a major contagion.

There are many financial tricks that might slow the pace of a credit crash, but not by much.  And, here’s the kicker – Unlike in 2008, the Fed has created a situation in which there is no escape. If they do pivot and return to systemic bailouts, stagflation will skyrocket even more. If they don’t use QE, then banks crash, companies crash and even bonds become untenable, which puts the world reserve status of the Dollar under threat. What does that lead to? More stagflation. In either case, rapidly rising prices on most necessities will be the consequence.

How long will this process take? It all depends on how the Fed responds. They might be able to drag the crash out for a few months with various stop-gaps. If they go back to stimulus then the banks will be saved along with equities (for a while) but rising inflation will suffocate consumers in the span of a year and companies will still falter. My gut tells me that they will rely on contained interventions but will not reverse rate hikes as many analysts seem to expect.

The Fed will goose markets up at times using jawboning and false hopes of a return to aggressive QE or near-zero rates, but ultimately the trend of credit markets and stocks will be steady and downward.  Like a brush fire in a wind storm, once the flames are sparked there is no way to put things back the way they were.  If their goal was in fact a liquidity crunch, well, mission accomplished.  They have created that exact scenario.  Read my articles linked above to understand why they might do this deliberately.

In the meantime, it appears that my predictions on timing are correct so far. We will have to wait and see what happens in the coming weeks. I will keep readers apprised of events as new details unfold.  The situation is rapidly evolving.

East Palestine, Ohio and the Oligarchy

Posted on by
Reply

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

A freight train derailment brought environmental catastrophe to a small Ohio town. While the circumstances are somewhat unique, events followed a predictable pattern in a country run by and for the ruling class.

The U.S. is an oligarchy. Stating this fact explains events that may seem mysterious if this simple truth is not spelled out. The ruling class are fully in control and ensure that their needs are met. They disregard the public good and any claims of democracy are easily exposed as a cruel hoax. Americans have no representation in congress or the white house and the corporate media are also part of the oligarchic class. They expose nothing that their partners in crime want to hide. Governmental action and inaction if the wake of a freight train derailment exemplify all of these dynamics.

On February 3, 2023 a 150-car Norfolk Southern freight train derailed in East Palestine, Ohio near the Pennsylvania border. Twenty of those cars were carrying chemicals such as vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylene glycol, isobutylene, and ethylhexyl acrylate. One doesn’t need to be a scientist to figure out that none of these should be in the air or water.

Despite photographic and video evidence of an environmental catastrophe, the accident initially received little media attention. Nothing is covered unless the Biden administration wants it to be and East Palestine didn’t make the cut when there was war propaganda about Ukraine to stir up. In addition, Biden had already made clear that the railroads are in the class of corporate untouchables who are to be placated. They are among those who were promised that “nothing would fundamentally change” and he kept his promise to them by giving the derailment little attention. However he did give these corporations all the attention they demanded. 

When railroad unions rejected a contract that didn’t include paid sick leave provisions the Biden administration forbade them to strike. There was a phony show among “progressives” about having made a good deal but they were lying. Barack Obama excluded the railroads from a requirement that federal contractors provide paid sick leave. Biden could have issued an executive order changing that policy. But he had no intention of doing anything that might upset the oligarchs, and the Democratic Party succeeded in presenting a false narrative.

Pete Buttigieg is Secretary of the Department of Transportation (DOT), and is responsible for overseeing railroad safety. But he has made it clear that he follows his boss’s dictate to change nothing that would upset their oligarchic bosses.

As DOT Secretary, Buttigieg has the ability to regulate corporations such as airlines in regard to their public service. When a series of Southwest airlines snafus left thousands of passengers stranded during the holiday season, Buttigieg made a great show of saying his hands were tied. Of course he is the one person who can direct the airlines or levy large fines. Buttigieg was a no-show when the people needed him to act.

It took Buttigieg three weeks to show up in East Palestine and he only did so after Donald Trump visited. The town residents may have been better off without him. When he arrived he whined about railroad companies, “fighting us every time we try to do a regulation.” It is hard to believe that Buttigieg makes any effort to fight back when corporate chieftains tell him what to do.

The duopoly worked together to cover up their mess. Ohio’s republican governor Mike DeWine and Biden’s EPA Administrator Michael Regan took a page out of Barack Obama’s Flint, Michigan book by dramatically drinking East Palestine water . Fortunately the U.S. still has plenty of lawyers, and one of many lawsuits filed in recent days specifically names the stunt as having made a “mockery of Ohio citizens.”

The back and forth over freight train regulations isn’t complicated. Trump undid regulations that Obama enacted but Biden didn’t undo what Trump had done. But even worse, regulations currently on the books allowed Norfolk Souther to get away with not labeling the train as carrying hazardous materials because it also carried wheat and vegetables. All over the country trains go through residential areas carrying hazardous materials but the law doesn’t require anyone to be informed of the dangers. And yes, the oligarchs like it that way.

The Biden administration is siding with Norfolk Southern in a case before the Supreme Court . A worker claims to have developed cancer as a result of exposure to carcinogens without having had the proper protective equipment. Norfolk Southern wants to restrict plaintiffs from choosing the venue in which they file suits, a practice known as forum shopping. Corporations are the biggest proponents of forum shopping, for themselves, but want to restrict where they can be sued. The Biden administration filed a brief in favor of Norfolk Southern. It doesn’t matter if the presidents are democrats or republicans, at the end of the day they end up doing what the oligarchs want.

Next year in 2024 the people will be subjected to the quadrennial political hoax, i.e., a presidential election. Let’s tell the truth before the theater begins anew. The power doesn’t rest with the presidency. It rests with the people who do the presidential hiring, and they don’t care about railroad workers or any other workers or people who have hazardous chemicals traveling through their communities. Should an accident happen, their hirelings will just drink water for the camera.

A Nanny State Idiocracy: When the Government Thinks It Knows Best

Posted on by
2

By John & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Whether the mask is labeled fascism, democracy, or dictatorship of the proletariat, our great adversary remains the apparatus—the bureaucracy, the police, the military.”—Simone Weil, French philosopher

It’s hard to say whether we’re dealing with a kleptocracy (a government ruled by thieves), a kakistocracy (a government run by unprincipled career politicians, corporations and thieves that panders to the worst vices in our nature and has little regard for the rights of American citizens), or if we’ve gone straight to an idiocracy. 

For instance, an animal welfare bill introduced in the Florida state legislature would ban the sale of rabbits in March and April, prohibit cat owners from declawing their pets, make it illegal for dogs to stick their heads out of car windows, force owners to place dogs in a harness or in a pet seatbelt when traveling in a car, and require police to create a public list of convicted animal abusers.

A Massachusetts law prohibits drivers from letting their cars idle for more than five minutes on penalty of a $100 fine ($500 for repeat offenders), even in the winter. You can also be fined $20 or a month in jail for scaring pigeons.

This overbearing Nanny State despotism is what happens when government representatives (those elected and appointed to work for us) adopt the authoritarian notion that the government knows best and therefore must control, regulate and dictate almost everything about the citizenry’s public, private and professional lives.

The government’s bureaucratic attempts at muscle-flexing by way of overregulation and overcriminalization have reached such outrageous limits that federal and state governments now require on penalty of a fine that individuals apply for permission before they can grow exotic orchids, host elaborate dinner parties, gather friends in one’s home for Bible studies, give coffee to the homeless, let their kids manage a lemonade stand, keep chickens as pets, or braid someone’s hair, as ludicrous as that may seem.

Consider, for example, that businesses in California were ordered to designate an area of the children’s toy aisle “gender-neutral” or face a fine, whether or not the toys sold are traditionally marketed to girls or boys such as Barbies and Hot Wheels. California schools are prohibited from allowing students to access websites, novels or religious works that reflect negatively on gays. And while Californians are free to have sex with whomever they choose (because that’s none of the government’s business), removing a condom during sex without consent could make you liable for general, special and punitive damages.

It’s getting worse.

Almost every aspect of American life today—especially if it is work-related—is subject to this kind of heightened scrutiny and ham-fisted control, whether you’re talking about aspiring “bakers, braiders, casket makers, florists, veterinary masseuses, tour guides, taxi drivers, eyebrow threaders, teeth whiteners, and more.”

For instance, whereas 70 years ago, one out of every 20 U.S. jobs required a state license, today, almost 1 in 3 American occupations requires a license.

The problem of overregulation has become so bad that, as one analyst notes, “getting a license to style hair in Washington takes more instructional time than becoming an emergency medical technician or a firefighter.”

This is what happens when bureaucrats run the show, and the rule of law becomes little more than a cattle prod for forcing the citizenry to march in lockstep with the government.

Overregulation is just the other side of the coin to overcriminalization, that phenomenon in which everything is rendered illegal and everyone becomes a lawbreaker.

As policy analyst Michael Van Beek warns, the problem with overcriminalization is that there are so many laws at the federal, state and local levels—that we can’t possibly know them all.

“It’s also impossible to enforce all these laws. Instead, law enforcement officials must choose which ones are important and which are not. The result is that they pick the laws Americans really must follow, because they’re the ones deciding which laws really matter,” concludes Van Beek. “Federal, state and local regulations — rules created by unelected government bureaucrats — carry the same force of law and can turn you into a criminal if you violate any one of them… if we violate these rules, we could be prosecuted as criminals. No matter how antiquated or ridiculous, they still carry the full force of the law. By letting so many of these sit around, just waiting to be used against us, we increase the power of law enforcement, which has lots of options to charge people with legal and regulatory violations.”

This is the police state’s superpower: it has been vested with the authority to make our lives a bureaucratic hell.

That explains how a fisherman can be saddled with 20 years’ jail time for throwing fish that were too small back into the water. Or why police arrested a 90-year-old man for violating an ordinance that prohibits feeding the homeless in public unless portable toilets are also made available.

The laws can get downright silly. For instance, you could also find yourself passing time in a Florida slammer for such inane activities as singing in a public place while wearing a swimsuit, breaking more than three dishes per day, farting in a public place after 6 pm on a Thursday, and skateboarding without a license.

However, the consequences are all too serious for those whose lives become grist for the police state’s mill. A few years back, police raided barber shops in minority communities, resulting in barbers being handcuffed in front of customers, and their shops searched without warrants. All of this was purportedly done in an effort to make sure that the barbers’ licensing paperwork was up to snuff.

In this way, America has gone from being a beacon of freedom to a locked down nation. And “we the people,” sold on the idea that safety, security and material comforts are preferable to freedom, have allowed the government to pave over the Constitution in order to erect a concentration camp.

We labor today under the weight of countless tyrannies, large and small, carried out in the so-called name of the national good by an elite class of governmental and corporate officials who are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

We increasingly find ourselves badgered, bullied and browbeaten into bearing the brunt of their arrogance, paying the price for their greed, suffering the backlash for their militarism, agonizing as a result of their inaction, feigning ignorance about their backroom dealings, overlooking their incompetence, turning a blind eye to their misdeeds, cowering from their heavy-handed tactics, and blindly hoping for change that never comes. 

The overt signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government (and its corporate partners in crime) are all around us: censorship, criminalizing, shadow banning and de-platforming of individuals who express ideas that are politically incorrect or unpopular; warrantless surveillance of Americans’ movements and communications; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; community-wide lockdowns and health mandates that strip Americans of their freedom of movement and bodily integrity; armed drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that spy on, collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Yet as egregious as these incursions on our rights may be, it’s the endless, petty tyrannies—the heavy-handed, punitive-laden dictates inflicted by a self-righteous, Big-Brother-Knows-Best bureaucracy on an overtaxed, overregulated, and underrepresented populace—that illustrate so clearly the degree to which “we the people” are viewed as incapable of common sense, moral judgment, fairness, and intelligence, not to mention lacking a basic understanding of how to stay alive, raise a family, or be part of a functioning community.

In exchange for the promise of an end to global pandemics, lower taxes, lower crime rates, safe streets, safe schools, blight-free neighborhoods, and readily accessible technology, health care, water, food and power, we’ve opened the door to lockdowns, militarized police, government surveillance, asset forfeiture, school zero tolerance policies, license plate readers, red light cameras, SWAT team raids, health care mandates, overcriminalization, overregulation and government corruption.

In the end, such bargains always turn sour.

We relied on the government to help us safely navigate national emergencies (terrorism, natural disasters, global pandemics, etc.) only to find ourselves forced to relinquish our freedoms on the altar of national security, yet we’re no safer (or healthier) than before.

We asked our lawmakers to be tough on crime, and we’ve been saddled with an abundance of laws that criminalize almost every aspect of our lives. So far, we’re up to 4500 criminal laws and 300,000 criminal regulations that result in average Americans unknowingly engaging in criminal acts at least three times a day. For instance, the family of an 11-year-old girl was issued a $535 fine for violating the Federal Migratory Bird Act after the young girl rescued a baby woodpecker from predatory cats.

We wanted criminals taken off the streets, and we didn’t want to have to pay for their incarceration. What we’ve gotten is a nation that boasts the highest incarceration rate in the world, with more than 2.3 million people locked up, many of them doing time for relatively minor, nonviolent crimes, and a private prison industry fueling the drive for more inmates, who are forced to provide corporations with cheap labor.

A special report by CNBC breaks down the national numbers:

One out of 100 American adults is behind bars — while a stunning one out of 32 is on probation, parole or in prison. This reliance on mass incarceration has created a thriving prison economy. The states and the federal government spend about $74 billion a year on corrections, and nearly 800,000 people work in the industry.

We wanted law enforcement agencies to have the necessary resources to fight the nation’s wars on terror, crime and drugs. What we got instead were militarized police decked out with M-16 rifles, grenade launchers, silencers, battle tanks and hollow point bullets—gear designed for the battlefield, more than 80,000 SWAT team raids carried out every year (many for routine police tasks, resulting in losses of life and property), and profit-driven schemes that add to the government’s largesse such as asset forfeiture, where police seize property from “suspected criminals.”

According to the Washington Post, these funds have been used to buy guns, armored cars, electronic surveillance gear, “luxury vehicles, travel and a clown named Sparkles.” Police seminars advise officers to use their “department wish list when deciding which assets to seize” and, in particular, go after flat screen TVs, cash and nice cars.

In Florida, where police are no strangers to asset forfeiture, Florida police have been carrying out “reverse” sting operations, where they pose as drug dealers to lure buyers with promises of cheap cocaine, then bust them, and seize their cash and cars. Over the course of a year, police in one small Florida town seized close to $6 million using these entrapment schemes.

We fell for the government’s promise of safer roads, only to find ourselves caught in a tangle of profit-driven red light cameras, which ticket unsuspecting drivers in the so-called name of road safety while ostensibly fattening the coffers of local and state governments. Despite widespread public opposition, corruption and systemic malfunctions, these cameras—used in 24 states and Washington, DC—are particularly popular with municipalities, which look to them as an easy means of extra cash.

One small Florida town, population 8,000, generates a million dollars a year in fines from these cameras. Building on the profit-incentive schemes, the cameras’ manufacturers are also pushing speed cameras and school bus cameras, both of which result in heft fines for violators who speed or try to go around school buses.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is what happens when the American people get duped, deceived, double-crossed, cheated, lied to, swindled and conned into believing that the government and its army of bureaucrats—the people we appointed to safeguard our freedoms—actually have our best interests at heart.

The problem with these devil’s bargains is that there is always a catch, always a price to pay for whatever it is we valued so highly as to barter away our most precious possessions.

We’ve bartered away our right to self-governance, self-defense, privacy, autonomy and that most important right of all: the right to tell the government to “leave me the hell alone.”