Category Archives: Social Engineering

Bull or Bear? The Ultimate Source of Market Instability

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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.

The GATHERING Storm in Ukraine Spells Doom for the West

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Photo by by Adam Brummett

By Col. Douglas MacGregor

Source: Information Clearing House

The crisis of American national power has begun. America’s economy is tipping over, and Western financial markets are quietly panicking. Imperiled by rising interest rates, mortgage-backed securities and U.S. Treasuries are losing their value. The market’s proverbial “vibes”—feelings, emotions, beliefs, and psychological penchants—suggest a dark turn is underway inside the American economy.

American national power is measured as much by American military capability as by economic potential and performance. The growing realization that American and European military-industrial capacity cannot keep up with Ukrainian demands for ammunition and equipment is an ominous signal to send during a proxy war that Washington insists its Ukrainian surrogate is winning.

Russian economy-of-force operations in southern Ukraine appear to have successfully ground down attacking Ukrainian forces with the minimal expenditure of Russian lives and resources. While Russia’s implementation of attrition warfare worked brilliantly, Russia mobilized its reserves of men and equipment to field a force that is several magnitudes larger and significantly more lethal than it was a year ago.

Russia’s massive arsenal of artillery systems including rockets, missiles, and drones linked to overhead surveillance platforms converted Ukrainian soldiers fighting to retain the northern edge of the Donbas into pop-up targets. How many Ukrainian soldiers have died is unknown, but one recent estimate wagers between 150,000-200,000 Ukrainians have been killed in action since the war began, while another estimates about 250,000.

Given the glaring weakness of NATO members’ ground, air, and air defense forces, an unwanted war with Russia could easily bring hundreds of thousands of Russian Troops to the Polish border, NATO’s Eastern Frontier. This is not an outcome Washington promised its European allies, but it’s now a real possibility.

In contrast to the Soviet Union’s hamfisted and ideologically driven foreign policymaking and execution, contemporary Russia has skillfully cultivated support for its cause in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. The fact that the West’s economic sanctions damaged the U.S. and European economies while turning the Russian ruble into one of the international system’s strongest currencies has hardly enhanced Washington’s global standing.

Biden’s policy of forcibly pushing NATO to Russia’s borders forged a strong commonality of security and trade interests between Moscow and Beijing that is attracting strategic partners in South Asia like India, and partners like Brazil in Latin America. The global economic implications for the emerging Russo-Chinese axis and their planned industrial revolution for some 3.9 billion people in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are profound.

In sum, Washington’s military strategy to weaken, isolate, or even destroy Russia is a colossal failure and the failure puts Washington’s proxy war with Russia on a truly dangerous path. To press on, undeterred in the face of Ukraine’s descent into oblivion, ignores three metastasizing threats: 1. Persistently high inflation and rising interest rates that signal economic weakness. (The first American bank failure since 2020 is a reminder of U.S. financial fragility.) 2. The threat to stability and prosperity inside European societies already reeling from several waves of unwanted refugees/migrants. 3. The threat of a wider European war.

Inside presidential administrations, there are always competing factions urging the president to adopt a particular course of action. Observers on the outside seldom know with certainty which faction exerts the most influence, but there are figures in the Biden administration seeking an off-ramp from involvement in Ukraine. Even Secretary of State Antony Blinken, a rabid supporter of the proxy war with Moscow, recognizes that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s demand that the West help him recapture Crimea is a red line for Putin that might lead to a dramatic escalation from Moscow.

Backing down from the Biden administration’s malignant and asinine demands for a humiliating Russian withdrawal from eastern Ukraine before peace talks can convene is a step Washington refuses to take. Yet it must be taken. The higher interest rates rise, and the more Washington spends at home and abroad to prosecute the war in Ukraine, the closer American society moves toward internal political and social turmoil. These are dangerous conditions for any republic.

From all the wreckage and confusion of the last two years, there emerges one undeniable truth. Most Americans are right to be distrustful of and dissatisfied with their government. President Biden comes across as a cardboard cut-out, a stand-in for ideological fanatics in his administration, people that see executive power as the means to silence political opposition and retain permanent control of the federal government.

Americans are not fools. They know that members of Congress flagrantly trade stocks based on inside information, creating conflicts of interest that would land most citizens in jail. They also know that since 1965 Washington led them into a series of failed military interventions that severely weakened American political, economic, and military power.

Far too many Americans believe they have had no real national leadership since January 21, 2021. It is high time the Biden administration found an off-ramp designed to extricate Washington, D.C., from its proxy Ukrainian war against Russia. It will not be easy. Liberal internationalism or, in its modern guise, “moralizing globalism,” makes prudent diplomacy arduous, but now is the time. In Eastern Europe, the spring rains present both Russian and Ukrainian ground forces with a sea of mud that severely impedes movement. But the Russian High Command is preparing to ensure that when the ground dries and Russian ground forces attack, the operations will achieve an unambiguous decision, making it clear that Washington and its supporters have no chance to rescue the dying regime in Kiev. From then on, negotiations will be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

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

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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.

How Mainstream Media Becomes Controlled

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Most people think of money and agenda, and that’s part of the picture, but there’s one incredibly common factor most don’t consider: access. Let’s explore Kim Iverson’s Dershowitz interview.

By Joe Martino

Source: The Pulse

In personal development, one can’t change something about themselves until they are first made aware of the pattern or problem they are experiencing. Once they know, steps can be taken to adjust, better themselves, or grow beyond the problem.

The same can be said for how our society functions. After all, we as individuals are a microcosm of our collective story.

In that sense, I am a strong believer that if we don’t have an understanding of how our world works, then we don’t stand a chance in making it a better place as we don’t know what problem we are solving.

The first step towards uncovering truth is being able to re-examine our positions and embrace uncertainty.

Propaganda Produces Narrative

In my previous piece on propaganda I talked about how governments distribute a “story” or “narrative” about current events to rally the public behind an idea. It’s through this propaganda that people believe something about how the world works, even if it’s not at all true.

Mainstream media is the mouthpiece that connects government to the people. It has incredible power in shaping public opinion, and governments and powerful people know this.

The is how the masses come to believe they live in a democracy, that government is doing their best to fight enemies. Or that government is keeping people safe through their authoritarian actions, and attempting to create wellness in society. Don’t question government or else you’re a conspiracy theorist.

This narrative is all told through mainstream media. Control mainstream media and you control the masses’ perception.

Controlling Mainstream Media

There are many ways in which mainstream media can be controlled. A common belief is that newsroom directors are constantly getting phone calls from government people telling them not to run certain stories.

This may be true for a small portion of MAJOR stories as we saw with the government program Project Mockingbird.

A 1991 a declassified document from the CIA archives shows the Central Intelligence Agency had a close relationship with mainstream media and academia.

The document states that the CIA task force “now has relationships with reporters from every major wire service, newspaper, news weekly, and television network in the nation,” and that “this has helped us turn some ‘intelligence failure’ stories into ‘intelligence success” stories,’ and has contributed to the accuracy of countless others.”

It admits the agency had “persuaded reporters to postpone, change, hold, or even scrap stories that could have adversely affected national security interests or jeopardized sources and methods.”

We learned through COVID that this sort of thing does still happen, especially with major stories. But for the most part this isn’t how media is controlled in my opinion.

One other common idea is that “all of the journalists at The New York Times or CBC know they are lying.” I don’t think this is true.

Most of these people fully believe in what they publish, and are more so regulated by a news culture and environment that is built around avoiding certain conclusions. They also tend to perform unbalanced investigation into certain subjects.

Part of how news culture is built, and what stops journalists from following their gut, is the fear of the loss of access.

What is Access?

Access is simple: a news outlet can gain access to certain individuals like politicians, powerful business people, or celebrities based on their reputation and knowledge that they won’t “cross the line” or surprise guests.

In this case “the line” is asking tough questions or holding people accountable. Cross the line, and word gets out that powerful people shouldn’t associate with those brands as readily.

Imagine during the Freedom Convoy if the CBC decided they were going to ask Justin Trudeau very tough questions about his abuse of power, lies, and hatred he was disseminating towards unvaccinated people.

You can bet that the CBC would be fearful Trudeau’s admin would give them less access to early stories, updates, interviews and so on if they don’t “play ball” with Trudeau.

If the CBC doesn’t play ball, they will be late on stories, their competition will get things first and the CBC would be playing catch up all the time. This is bad for business.

Access is directly tied to the profitability of many news organizations. Thus, it becomes a race to the bottom dynamic of kissing the ass of those in power and not upsetting them so you can compete amongst other news organizations to get access to stories and interviews first – or even at all.

A Prime Example

This concept is well demonstrated in a recent interview Kim Iverson conducted with Alan Dershowitz on her show. To note, Iverson’s program is independent, and not considered mainstream media.

Iverson interviewed Dershowitz about Trump’s looming arrest. During the interview, she also asked him about his ties to Epstein and whether or not Epstein had ties to Mossad.

Dershowitz went on to provide short, weak answers to the questions, but eventually became annoyed with Iverson questioning him about Epstein.

Dershowitz said:

“Are you used to having people come on your show to talk about one subject, and then sandbagging them on another subject without any warning? It’s nice to know you do that. I have nothing to hide, and I’m happy to talk about any of this, but I’m used to more ethical journalism.”

Iverson goes on to state that her team notified the people who booked Dershowitz onto the show that she would ask about Epstein.

Dershowitz said they never told him, and ended the interview by saying,

“[…] it’s the last time you’ll have me on your show, so take advantage of it.”

Iverson went on to provide proof that Dershowitz’s team was notified about upcoming Epstein questions.

Iverson asked Dershowitz tough questions that were significantly less “soft ball” than what he would get from mainstream media. He was also less prepared to tailor his answers perfectly because of an internal team mistake.

As a result, he won’t go on her show again. She lost access to him, and this message could spread throughout, causing her to lose access to others as well.

Simply put, the game is rigged. Play ball in the way powerful people want you to or you don’t get to play.

Put another way, ask tough questions that are “out of bounds” in authoritarian culture and you’ll stop getting interviews. Why then would someone ask tough questions?

But this instance also reveals something important: powerful people know the questions first before they appear on news shows. Does this make sense? Does this create the opportunity for true and honest answers?

Is real journalism even being done by mainstream outlets?

The Purpose of Media is Largely Lost, But Slowly Repairing

All of us who wonder why certain questions aren’t asked by mainstream journalists even when they are strikingly obvious, should consider the concept of access.

Every person listed on Epstein’s flight log could have been asked to explain themselves by The New York Times or Washington Post, but they weren’t. Because that’s not allowed.

However those organizations can forgo good journalistic practices to push COVID fear and propaganda all day long, because that will only gain them more access in the end.

Thus, mainstream media is controlled by the threat of losing access.

Does it make sense that a person should know all of the questions they are going to be asked before coming on a show? Does it make sense that they should be allowed to fully prepare those answers? Doesn’t that give a deep opportunity to deceive?

Why is this accepted as “ethical journalism” when in reality it can protect powerful people?

A Way Forward

This is why I believe we must point out the ways in which mainstream media has no incentive to tell the truth, and point out the ways in which mainstream journalism works.

We must also illustrate the ways in which the mainstream media is obviously wrong or misleading on certain subjects.

It is often too difficult to prove EXACTLY what is true, because that can be incredibly hard to know, but to critique the MSM in ways that reveal their deception can help people begin granting less legitimacy to MSM, and start embracing more uncertainty.

I do believe more and more people are seeing how corrupt mainstream media is, and perhaps we are getting closer to a tipping point. As a result, even The New York Times is trying to convince their audience they are ‘independent journalism.’

Journalistic Malpractice on Trial: What the Dominion Voting System Tells Us About How the Media Sacrificed their Credibility to Partisan Falsehoods

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By Nolan Higdon

Source: Project Censored

“This is direct evidence of knowing falsity” exclaimed RonNell Anderson Jones, Professor of Law at the University of Utah, in a February 2023 interview with Jon Stewart. Jones noted that in most defamation cases “the likelihood that you will find evidence of them [news outlets] saying, ‘We know this is a lie and we would like to move forward with it anyway is deeply unlikely.’” However, in the case of Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News, “the filing contains just this trove of evidence of emails and text messages and internal memos that are ‘rare’ both in terms of the ‘volume of the evidence and as to the directness of the evidence.’” This sentiment was echoed by Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe who noted, “I have never seen a defamation case with such overwhelming proof that the defendant admitted in writing that it was making up fake information in order to increase its viewership and its revenues.”

In the $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit, Dominion Voting Systems accuses Fox News Channel of falsely reporting that Dominion’s voting machines fraudulently delivered victory to Joe Biden in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Court documents attained by other media outlets reveal that hosts and other high-ranking Fox News Channel officials – including the Chairman and CEO of Fox’s parent company News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch – knew these reports were false, but aired them because they were more concerned with confirming their audience’s belief that Donald Trump won the election.

The evidence presented in the court documents speaks to the journalistic malpractice that plagues the cable news industry. Journalistic malpractice refers to professional journalists who privilege ideological bias and profits over truth in their reporting. Fox News Channel is patient zero for the plague of journalistic malpractice. It was created in 1996 by Rupert Murdoch and the late Roger Ailes, a media consultant for several Republican presidents, as a political project to sell conservative culture and policy to the American public with pro-conservative propaganda disguised as journalism. For example, Fox News Channel has

  • falsely claimed that other media outlets did not cover the conservative Tea Party rallies;
  • utilized videos out of context to inflate the perceived size of conservative protests;
  • labeled former President Barack Obama a racist;
  • declared Osama bin Laden as a John Kerry supporter;
  • perpetuated discredited reports on the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq;
  • introduced digitally altered photos to fabricate Black Lives Matter violence and make New York Timesreporters appear to be revolting.   

Liberals were right to assert that such chicanery was propaganda, not journalism. But before liberal readers scold Fox News viewers, they should remind themselves that the plague of journalistic malpractice has also infected the liberal leaning cable networks such as CNN and MSNBC. Researchers and scholars have noted that the advent of cable and then the internet saw news media outlets shift from attaining the largest audience possible to focusing on a more specific or narrow demographic of the audience. While Fox News Channel sought to cater to Republican Party voting viewers, CNN and MSNBC did the same for Democratic Party voters. This gave the Democratic Party influence over programming that was tantamount to what the Republican Party long enjoyed at Fox.

When Senator U.S. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential bid posed a threat to their desired candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, leaders from the Democratic Party admitted they worked to undermine his campaign. Pro-Democratic party outlets like MSNBC and CNN aided in this effort by

  • creating an unfavorable debate schedule;
  • giving Clinton twice as much and more favorable coverage;
  • publishing 16 negative articles about Sanders in Washington Post (owned by major Democratic Party funder Jeff Bezos) in 16 hours;
  • ghost editing previous news articles to diminish Sanders’ quarter century of accomplishments;
  • inviting his opponent’s surrogates to attack his character under the auspices of being objective journalists.

Their smear of Sanders continued in 2020 when

  • the Democratic Party-leaning news outlets misled the public about Sanders’ polling numbers;
  • CNN’s Abby Phillips drew gasps for ignoring Sanders’ claim that he never said a “woman could not be president;”
  • James Carville on MSNBC made the baseless claim that Russia was supporting Sanders;
  • MSNBC’s Chris Matthews compared Sander’s primary victories to the Nazi’s defeat of the French, an unfortunate comparison as Sanders’ family was murdered in the holocaust.

Journalistic malpractice also plagued Covid-19 coverage. Starting in 2020, CNN’s Chris Cuomo utilized his platform – with the approval of CNN leadership – to host his brother, then New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. The jovial segments seemed like campaign advertisements as Chris treated Andrew as the anti-thesis to then President Trump: a competent executive who took decisive action to address the Covid-19 pandemic. Although, the Democratic versus Republican framing attracted partisan audiences, in reality, Andrew Cuomo and Trump were all too similar: both concealed the actual number of Covid-19 deaths in their jurisdiction, both put patients at risk with kickbacks to industry partners, and both utilized media contacts to stifle press reports about their alleged sexual crimes.

The partisan falsehoods in cable news includes the production of powerful, long- running false stories designed to convince their audiences that the other party is wrong and crazy. For years now, conservatives and Fox News Channel perpetuated the baseless Qanon conspiracy, which alleges that a cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles – mainly in the Democratic Party – runs global affairs but Trump will break up the conspiracy. The absurdity of this conspiracy is tantamount to liberal leaning news media’s reporting on Russiagate, which sought to discredit Republicans. Since 2016, Russiagate – the story that Russia meddled in and influenced the outcome of the U.S. election in 2016, had direct connections to Donald Trump and his associates, and worked to help defeat Hillary Clinton for the presidency – was perpetuated by a series of false stories from Democratic Party-friendly media including

  • Russia hacking a Vermont power plant;
  • putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan;
  • shifting election outcomes around the world;
  • turning Trump into an asset since 1987;
  • labeling the Hunter Biden laptop story as fake news.

Conservatives rightly see this reporting and believe liberals are insane.

Both factions need to look in a mirror. While audiences can clearly see the insanity in other networks’ viewers, they rarely seem to see it in themselves. Indeed, in the same week that CNN and others were having a schadenfreude moment over the Dominion v. Fox case, they hosted a commentator on the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio without disclosing that he had lobbied for the train company Norfolk Southern. This example of hypocrisy and journalistic malpractice is not only costly to CNN’s credibility, but our democracy as well.   

Without a robust media system that privileges truth over preaching to the choir, the public will have endless debates devoid of facts on key issues such as critical race theory, vaccine efficacy, the origins of the COVID-19 virus, climate change, transgender issues, Ukraine, mysterious balloons, and more. Democratic discourse will be reduced to seeing Republicans as MAGA-hat wearing, blue lives matter-flag waving, gun nuts, and Democrats as medical mask wearing, “this house cares about everything” front-lawn sign adorning, professional victims and virtue signalers. These caricatures have never really been accurate, but as long as the nation is infected with the plague of journalist malpractice they will surely be perpetuated.

While the courts are unlikely to deliver solace from political party propaganda disguised as journalism, they have provided some wisdom. Both Rachel Maddow and Tucker Carlson of MSNBC and Fox News Channel respectively, have been brought to court for spreading false information and were exonerated because the judges concluded that no reasonable person would believe either of them were telling the truth. That is good advice, and viewers would be wise to remember it every time they consider watching cable news.

Send in the Clowns

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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.

A Fed-Issued Digital Currency: The Mark of the Beast

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A Fed-issued digital currency would be no more in our interests than the current dollar system.

By Jeremy R. Hammond

Source: Jeremy R. Hammond Blog

China’s ‘Social Credit’ System

“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” — Revelation 13:16-17

In China, as you have likely heard, the government has been experimenting with a “social credit” system aimed at giving politicians even greater control over people’s behavior. China was, of course, also the country whose authoritarian “lockdown” response to the outbreak of SARS‑CoV‑2—the coronavirus that causes COVID‑19 and was likely engineered in a Chinese lab with US government funding—was pointed to as a model for the rest of the world to follow by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The WHO has since been aiming to acquire even more centralized global authority to issue diktats in the event of another pandemic, such as implementation of “lockdown” measures that might include travel restrictions, prevention of employment, and vaccine mandates or passport systems.

As of December 2020, around the time of the initial outbreak of the virus in Wuhan, China, social credit laws and regulations had been implemented in an estimated 80 percent of the country.

Naturally, the system is characterized by its proponents as a benevolent means to reward socially responsible people while denying privileges to unsavory and untrustworthy characters and businesses. But you and I both recognize the grave threat posed by politicians wielding this type of power and control over the population. It is an obvious threat to privacy and liberty.

The people of China regrettably but unsurprisingly appear to have welcomed this system, although the perception of public approval might be largely an artifact of people being afraid to publicly criticize the system lest their names be placed on one of the government’s “blacklists”.

As with any law or government policy, we should view it through the lens of how such power could be used as opposed to how politicians say they intend to use it.

A glimpse of how it could be used is the city of Rongcheng’s prohibition on “spreading harmful information”, violations of which could result in subtraction of points off residents’ social credit scores.

Such prohibitions must be seen in light of how governments are in the habit of interpreting “harmful information” as any information that does not align with the adopted political agenda. In the US during the COVID‑19 pandemic, there has been no greater purveyor of misinformation than the US government itself.

According to MIT Technology Review, the central government actually pressed the city to scale back the threat to individual liberty posed by its social credit system, such as enabling residents to opt-out. “The Chinese government did emphasize that all social-credit-related punishment has to adhere to existing laws,” the Review states, “but laws themselves can be unjust in the first place.”

The takeaway from that article is that “the social credit system does not (yet) exemplify abuse of advanced technologies like artificial intelligence”. But that’s no reason for the citizenry to consent to the implementation of systems that are conducive to extreme governmental abuses of authority.

A July 2019 article in Wired magazine related the example of Liu Hu, a journalist who was arrested, fined, and blacklisted, reportedly for writing about censorship and government corruption. He found himself on a “List of Dishonest Persons Subject to Enforcement by the Supreme People’s Court as ‘not qualified’ to buy a plane ticket, and banned from travelling some train lines, buying property, or taking out a loan.”

A more recent Newsweek article appropriately describes the system this way:

On an individual level, the government seeks to instill in the public an increased sense of morality to discourage everything from fraud and plagiarism to counterfeit goods and petty crime. But a system to make individual actions more transparent would necessitate the creation of tools to monitor all aspects of life. Social control, if not the original aim, could be an inevitable consequence, researchers say.

. . . While China’s vision of the system has yet to emerge as a dystopian tool for control driven by big data, there are real concerns about the way personal information is to be collected and processed to create social credit profiles, which could have lasting implications for individuals.

An untrustworthy government has no place dictating to its citizens what types of behaviors should be regarded as creating or breaking trust.

Human Rights Watch provides the example of lawyer Li Xioaolin, who was denied a plane ticket home while away on a work trip inside China because his name was on a blacklist of “untrustworthy” people in relation to a years-old court-related issue that he thought he had resolved.

According to Human Rights Watch, journalist Liu Hu was punished not for criticizing the government and exposing corruption but for having offered an apology that the government deemed “insincere” after losing a defamation case for publishing an article alleging that someone was an extortionist. Still, the organization notes, in both cases, “penalties were exacted in wildly arbitrary and unaccountable manners.” Additionally, “the courts failed to notify them, leaving them no chance to contest their treatment.”

According to the human rights organization, between 2013 and 2017, the Chinese government imposed more than seven million punishments to people for failing to carry out local court orders, which punishments have included publicly naming and shaming individuals and barring them from flights and trains.

After experiencing the totalitarianism of the disastrously harmful lockdown regimes and the accompanying efforts to coerce the population into accepting COVID‑19 vaccines and to censor truths countering the government’s incessant lies (I was permanently banned from LinkedIn, for example, for accurately reporting that the CDC’s claim that COVID‑19 vaccines provide greater protection against SARS‑CoV‑2 infection than natural immunity was a bald-faced lie), it should not be too difficult to imagine such a system being dangerously used to silence critics and punish dissenters so that whatever ruling regime can continue its crimes against humanity unobstructed.

The idea of a “social credit” score, of course, is inherently tied to the idea of central banking. In the US, the central bank is the Federal Reserve, a government-legislated private monopoly over the supply of currency. Increasingly, there is talk of a central bank digital currency, heightening concerns about the government having the means to exercise power over us and control our behavior.

“Project Hamilton”

As an example of how the Fed is exploring the idea of adopting a digital currency, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has teamed up with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston under the appropriately named “Project Hamilton”.

Alexander Hamilton, of course, was instrumental in the adoption of central banking by the US government, famously at odds with Thomas Jefferson, who rightly opposed the idea and warned about the dangers inherent in such an institution. Jefferson appeared to hold the view that the means of exchange and interest rates ought to be determined by the market as opposed to being determined by fiat by a roomful of central planners.

Jefferson accurately foresaw how the government would use the central bank to pay for its spending as an alternative to raising taxes directly, and how the debt that would consequently be incurred by this uncontrolled spending would ultimately be borne by future generations.

In a letter to John Wayles Eppes in 1813, for example, Jefferson wrote:

I have said that the taxes should be continued by annual or biennial re-enactments; because a constant hold, by the nation, of the strings of the public purse, is a salutary restraint, from which an honest government ought not to wish, nor a corrupt one to be permitted, to be free. No tax should ever be yielded for longer than that of the Congress granting it, except when pledged for the reimbursement of a loan.

. . . Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs. . . . Treasury bills, bottomed on taxes, bearing, or not bearing interest, as may be found necessary, thrown into circulation, will take the place of so much gold & silver, which last, when crouded, will find an efflux into other countries, and thus keep the quantum of medium at its salutary level.

In a letter to John Taylor in 1816, Jefferson described central banking as rightly “reprobated” and as “a blot left in all our constitutions, which, if not covered, will end in their destruction”. He wrote, “And I sincerely believe with you, that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; & that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale”.

Jefferson viewed the federal government as having no authority to institute a central banking system. As he wrote in 1791, “The incorporation of a bank, and the powers assumed by this bill, have not, in my opinion, been delegated to the United States, by the Constitution.”

The stated aim of Project Hamilton “is to investigate the technical feasibility of a general purpose central bank digital currency (CBDC) that could be used by an economy the size of the United States and to gain a hands-on understanding of a CBDC’s technical challenges, opportunities, risks, and tradeoffs.”

The project is part of MIT’s “Digital Currency Initiative”, which is aimed at bringing minds together “to conduct the research necessary to support the development of digital currency and blockchain technology.”

The aim of the collaboration with the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston has been “to develop a hypothetical CBDC.” MIT describes the possibility of a “central-bank-issued digital currency” as “a unique opportunity to address challenges in our existing payments system and design an economy that is more resilient, participatory, and open.”

We can reasonably assume that Thomas Jefferson, were he alive today, would disagree and view the idea as anathema to both a sound economy and a free society.

Noting that it was Alexander Hamilton “who laid the foundation for a U.S. central bank”, a project white paper published in February 2022 concluded that it is “critical” for research to continue for “achieving goals for a CBDC.” That is, it is not a question of whether the Fed should adopt a digital currency but how and when.

Biden’s Executive Order and Project Lithium

In January 2022, the Federal Reserve Board of Governors similarly published a paper titled “Money and Payments: The U.S. Dollar in the Age of Digital Transformation”, the aim of which was “to foster a broad and transparent public dialogue about CBDCs in general, and about the potential benefits and risks of a U.S. CBDC.”

Then in March 2022 President Joe Biden signed an “Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets”, which declares the supposed need for the US government to “regulate” digital assets, including for the purpose of preventing circumvention of its sanctions regimes—in which context we might remember the US government’s criminal sanctions regime against Iraq in the 1990s and how Secretary of State Madeleine Albright insisted that the “price” of half-a-million dead Iraqi children was “worth it”.

The executive order, number 14067, describes how the government has an interest in maintaining the US dollar’s “central role” in “the global financial system”, which refers to the use of the dollar as a reserve currency. To that end, the order states, the Biden administration “places the highest urgency on research and development efforts into the potential design and deployment options of a United States CBDC.”

The White House is intent on determining what actions would be required to launch such a currency “if doing so is deemed to be in the national interest”. Of course, as the example of half a million excess childhood deaths in Iraq due to sanctions once again illustrates, determining just what is in the “national interest” is not a task that government policymakers seem particularly good at.

The lockdown measures, which utterly failed to project those at highest risk from COVID-19 while causing devastating harms globally, are another useful example of the ineptitude of policymakers when it comes to making decision that are in our best interests.

Following Biden’s executive order, in April 2022, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced “the development of the first prototype to explore how a CBDC might operate”. This endeavor was given the name “Project Lithium”, on which the DTCC is collaborating with The Digital Dollar Project (DDP), an organization that advocates US leadership “in advancing a CBDC” and encourages the executive branch of government “to support appropriate legislation” to authorize further research and development of such a currency.

The DDP published a white paper in May 2020 concluding that the US government “should, and must, take a leadership role in this new wave of digital innovation” and preserve the dollar’s role as “the world’s primary reserve currency” by working toward “the launch of a tokenized digital dollar”.

End the Fed!

Naturally, advocates of a central bank digital currency describe the aims of such a development as benign, just as the Federal Reserve system was originally established on the pretext that having a more centrally controlled economy would benefit all.

In truth, the Federal Reserve system serves the interests of the financially and political elite at the expense of the rest of us. Central banking itself, whatever the form of currency issued, is harmful to the economy because central banks essentially exist to effect a transfer of wealth upward. Schools of economic thought like Keynesianism and Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), which I like to refer to as “Keynesianism 2.0”, exist to justify the existence of central banks.

The Fed, a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply, enables the government to spend on whatever, including endless wars (euphemistically called “defense” spending), but the means of paying for it all, the creation of “money” out of thin air, results in upward wealth transfer. The elite classes who receive the newly created dollars first are able to spend it for purchasing assets prior to the resulting devaluation that manifests in the form of higher prices for goods and services.

Monetary inflation robs us of our purchasing power and so serves as a hidden tax. It also causes widespread malinvestment and major economic distortions like the housing bubble that burst in 2007 and precipitated the 2008 financial crisis, not to mention the current housing bubble and general asset inflation. (For more on that, see my book Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis.)

We are meant to believe we need centralized control over the currency supply for economic growth, but central banks instead serve to impede real economic growth in favor of enabling the government’s endlessly wasteful and harmful spending.

The chief appeal of a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin is that it is a decentralized medium of exchange that serves to compete with central-bank-issued currency and potentially enables people to opt-out of the exploitative dollar system. The idea of a “legal tender” digital currency in the hands of the bankers and politicians is anathema to the whole concept of a peer-to-peer electronic cash system.

One might argue that the replacement of print dollars with a centrally controlled cryptocurrency is just a natural evolution from the current system, in which exchange of actual cash is becoming less frequent and most transactions occur digitally anyway. We should keep up with the times and adapt to advancements in technology, the argument goes.

However, this overlooks the more fundamental issue that we should not have central banks in the first place. The way I see it, the movement towards replacing the US dollar with a Fed-issued cryptocurrency is far from benign. We have seen in the past few years just how far government policymakers are willing to go to exercise authoritarian control over us.

To illustrate, remember how businesses deemed “non-essential” were shut down by clueless bureaucrats under threat of punishment, and how coercive measures including mandates and travel restrictions were used to get people to accept COVID‑19 vaccinations?

With the World Economic Forum (WEF) having announced its “Great Reset” agenda, which ties directly into the global mass vaccination agenda, the advocates of greater centralized control over society do not deserve the benefit of our doubt about their intentions. It would be naïve to think that if the authoritarians in government had even greater means to penalize citizens for disobedience to the regime that they would not attempt to use it. It is safer to assume that if they can utilize a digital currency to control our behavior, they will.

It seems therefore imperative to oppose a centralized digital currency, but we also need to go further than that and oppose the existence of the Federal Reserve altogether. Whatever the form of currency, centralized economic planning is an abomination and anathema to the principle of a free market.

“And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.” — Revelation 18:4

How Covid lockdowns primed the current financial crisis

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By Christian Parenti

Source: The Grayzone

The lockdowns and the stimulus required to keep the economy alive helped drive inflation. Then the Fed jacked up interest rates. And all hell broke loose.

On Friday March 10th, 2023, Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) died of Covid. Alright, it’s a little more complicated than that, but Covid lockdowns followed by massive government stimulus were a critical – and massively under-acknowledged – factor in propelling the bank’s demise.

At the heart of the crisis is the gigantic pile of low-interest debt that was issued during the height of the pandemic. While private-sector pandemic-era debt like corporate bonds also soared, US government debt like Treasury bonds piled up.

In a nutshell, during the pandemic the government issued enormous amounts of extremely low interest government debt — about $4.2 trillion of it. But now interest rates, including on government debt, are higher than they have been in 15 years and investors are dumping their old low-interest debt. As they dump, the resale price of the old debt goes down. The more it declines, the more investors want to dump. And thus, a panic is born. 

To understand the problem fully, the question of US government debt has to be put into its larger context, which is: the pandemic response as a whole.

When news of the Covid virus first broke in December 2019, the 2 Year Treasury bond was being offered at 1.64% interest; the 10 year was at about 1.80%, and the resale value of such bonds on secondary markets was strong. Then, in March 2020, as Covid cases and deaths spiked, the US began to shutter its economy with panicked lockdowns that were supposed to “flatten the curve” or slow the spread of the virus and thus protect the hospitals. But Covid was politicized and the lockdowns were extended.  

As the lockdowns dragged on, the US economy began to collapse, shrinking at a record-shattering annualized rate of 31.4% during the second quarter of fiscal year 2020.

To avoid total economic devastation, the federal government began massive debt-financed spending. In March 2020, Trump signed into law the $2.2 trillion economic stimulus bill the CARES Act, or Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security. Then, in March 2021, Biden signed the American Rescue Plan Act which contained $1.9 trillion more in Covid relief. Finally, in April 2021, another trillion or so of Covid relief arrived in the Consolidated Appropriations Act. 

Thanks to these laws, every industry and most people received public money. There was increased and extended unemployment payments, as well as the so-called “stimmy checks” or stimulus payments to everyone earning under $75,000 a year (about half the population). The Paycheck Protection Program spent almost a trillion dollars. The Provider Relief Fund doled out $178 billion to the healthcare system. 

All this debt spending kept millions of people in their homes, and helped feed, employ, and care for millions more. The measures allowed hundreds of thousands of businesses to stay afloat even as many thousands of others went under. The impact of the spending on Americans’ well-being was generally positive. For a moment, the US child poverty rate was cut in half, falling to 5.2%. 

But the economically destructive lockdowns were not necessary and did not work. Covid fanatics maintain that the lockdowns were unavoidable because the virus is so deadly. That, however, is uninformed. Last year I explained in detail how the Lockdown Left got the Covid crisis wrong. Not a single critic has challenged any of the facts I presented so there is little point in rehashing them all here. 

Those who advocated an alternative to ham-fisted lockdowns, like the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for “focused protection” of vulnerable groups like the elderly, were viciously targeted in a reputation destruction campaign covertly orchestrated by former NIH director Francis Collins and de facto Covid czar Anthony Fauci. Never mind that the document’s authors were three eminently qualified scientists: Sunetra Gupta, professor of Theoretical Epidemiology at Oxford University; Jay Bhattacharya, professor of medicine at Stanford; and Martin Kulldorff, formerly a professor of medicine and biostatistics at Harvard. They were portrayed as far-right cranks who were almost eager to see millions die. But now, they have been vindicated.

Ultimately, the federal government spent $4.2 trillion propping up the economy that it was simultaneously choking to death with lockdowns. These two contradictory pressures laid the groundwork for the recent bank failures. Government mandated lockdowns hit the economy like a body blow. Factories closed, small businesses went under, ports and logistic hubs reduced operations, and about 2 million mostly older workers simply resigned. But at the same time, the federal government injected vast amounts of purchasing power into the economy, thus boosting consumption.

These two, contradictory government moves imposed almost unbearable pressure on supply chains. As shortages mounted, prices began to surge. Put simply: lockdowns plus stimulus equaled inflation.

Consider just one of the most important bottlenecks in the whole economy. During lockdown, many commercial driving license schools were closed. This helped create a shortage of about 80,000 truckers. If trucks do not roll supplies run low and prices go up.

At first, the official line on inflation – parroted by the Lockdown Left – maintained that inflation was “transitory.” But it was not. Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 while wage growth lagged at about 5%. In April 2020 during the worst of the lockdown, the Federal Reserve’s Federal Funds Rate sank to 0.5%. By February 2022, it had only risen to 0.8%.  

Meanwhile, inflation was surging. By February 2022, inflation had reached 7.9%. Only then did the Fed, in an effort to tamp down prices, begin raising interest rates at the fastest pace rate in its history. The federal Funds rate was around 4.57% when SVB went under. Perhaps a massive wave of taxation could have soaked up enough liquidity to have helped cool prices, but that was a political impossibility. The more politically palatable response in Washington was for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates. 

Herein lies the problem. During the height of the lockdowns, banks bought up enormous amounts of government debt. As the Wall Street Journal put it: “U.S. banks are suffering the aftereffects of a Covid-era deposit boom that left them awash in cash that they needed to put to work. Domestic deposits at federally insured banks rose 38% from the end of 2019 to the end of 2021, FDIC data show. Over the same period, total loans rose 7%, leaving many institutions with large amounts of cash to deploy in securities as interest rates were near record lows.” Awash in deposits with not enough demand for loans, the banks bought US government securities. Their purchases surged 53% between 2019 and the end of 2021, to a total of $4.58 trillion, according to Fed data reported by the Wall Street Journal.

Because so much debt was being issued, it carried super-low interest rates. For example, on July 27, 2020, the 10 Year Treasury was offered at an annual interest rate of only 0.55%. This is fine if you are the borrower of money, but if you are the lender (that is to say, a bank giving the federal government money in exchange for a Treasury bond), it means your income stream will be reduced to a mere trickle. If inflation rises, it essentially disappears. 

As the yield on new government debt reached toward 5% and inflation hung stubbornly at around 6.4%, all of that old, low-interest, pandemic-era debt started to look like garbage and banks began unloading it. The more that banks dumped old debt, the less value that debt had on resale markets. The lower its resale value, the more the banks wanted to dump it. SVB lost almost $2 billion selling off Government securities. And when they announced the loss, their stock price plunged by 60%. 

At the same time, many of SVB’s clients were withdrawing money. This was in part because rising interest rates made borrowing new money more expensive and thus incentivized the use of savings in day-to-day business operations. Also, higher inflation and higher interest rates made low-earning bank deposits less attractive and compelled depositors to redeploy their surplus capital towards higher-earning investments. So, just as SVB needed cash, deposits were evaporating.

By the end of the week of March 10, the four biggest banks in the United States had lost $51 billion because of their panicked dumping of pandemic-era debt. Right after SVB was taken under government control, state regulators closed the New York-based Signature Bank. Before the weekend was over the Federal Reserve announced the creation of a new lending facility that would ensure that “banks have the ability to meet the needs of all their depositors.” Furthermore, the Fed said it was “prepared to address any liquidity pressures that may arise.”

It would seem that the federal government is ready to execute another de facto partial nationalization of US banking, just as they did in 2008 via emergency “cash injections” and then the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP). In this current crisis, banks can avoid losses on their low-interest debt if they do not sell it before its maturity. For that to happen, the banks need money. The Fed has said it will pour enormous amounts of money into the banks while all of the relevant officials have proclaimed that the banking system will somehow pay for this. All of this will almost certainly mean even more government debt will be issued. 

Already, interest payments on the federal debt are one of the largest single items in the US budget – set to reach $400 billion this year. That is almost half as much as the grotesquely overdeveloped military budget. By comparison, federal spending on housing is only $78 billion.

Shoring up the banking system is necessary because if it collapses, the whole economy goes with it. At least in the short term, Americans are hostages of the US financial system. But government intervention without any new regulations and taxes upon the financial sector will likely mean more inflation and a bigger financial bubble. By refusing to properly tax the top 1%, the federal government also commits itself to more austerity for the many and more welfare for the rich, because rising government debt means a rising portion of our taxes must go toward interest payments. 

This system of crisis-prone, hyper-financialized capitalism seems ever more like a junkie. If it doesn’t get its regular fix of public sector help, it will simply collapse and die. 

Even if the federal government can stanch the current crisis, the pandemic debt story is global and very likely to cause trouble for some time to come. As a 2021 report by the World Bank put it: “The debt buildup during the pandemic-induced global recession of 2020 was the largest in several decades. This was true for all types of debt—total, government, and private debt; and advanced-economy and EMDE [emerging market and developing economy] debt; external and domestic debt. In 2020, total global debt reached 263 percent of GDP and global government debt 99 percent of GDP, their highest levels in half a century.” 

The US intelligentsia and its media elites are finally beginning to reckon with the impact of misguided and authoritarian lockdowns on student learning and the psychological and physical health of millions. But in all the discussion of the current bank runs, the pivotal role of lockdowns in priming the crisis remains overlooked.