Combine all these factors and the result is a potentially volatile mixture awaiting a catalyst.
In the past, I reckoned the odds of America experiencing a revolution akin to France 1789 were low due to the different political, economic and cultural conditions present then and now, but recently I’ve considered the possibility that America’s extremes of wealth, income and power inequality are a powder keg awaiting ignition.
By French-Style Revolution I don’t mean a violent overthrow of the ruling elite as much as a tumultuous reset of how resources and power are distributed. Systems become vulnerable to such resets when they become highly asymmetrical in how they distribute resources and power, and rigid in their defense of the extreme inequality of the distribution.
The fundamental source of democracy’s stability is the dynamic competition of various interests and the dynamic equilibrium of the three branches of the state each balancing the others by restraining the dominance of any one branch or interest.
But extremes of inequality undermine this stability, as the wealthiest elites now bring such a preponderance of wealth to bear that each of the three branches of the state are now beholden to the interests of the few, leaving little recourse to the many.
When the agenda and narratives have been shaped by the wealthiest elites’ foundations, think tanks, corporate PR and lobbyists, then electing different representatives has little effect on the power structure.
The masses can still influence cultural / social policies by voting in a liberal or conservative slate, but the distribution of wealth, power and resources remains unchanged.
As wealth and power are concentrated into ever fewer hands, the mythology of broad-based access to prosperity has vastly expanded the pool of second-tier elites who feel entitled (via implicit promises made by the system) to their fair share of income, wealth and power–financial security and political agency, i.e. a say in public decisions.
These second-tier elites are primarily university graduates and the offspring of upper-middle class households who have been led to expect a secure slot in the upper reaches of the economy or state is a birthright gained by their education and class.
That there are no longer enough slots for this class means those left out constitute the raw material of a potently dissatisfied and potentially angry political class. Historian Peter Turchin presents this as the result of the overproduction of elites, a dynamic he has traced back to previous eras of tumultuous upheaval.
Another common factor driving the masses to revolt is when the essentials of life are no longer affordable or available in sufficient quantity. Historian David Hackett Fischer has documented the perilous impact of inflation, i.e. the collapse of the purchasing power of wages.
Yet another potentially explosive factor is the supreme confidence of the wealthiest elites that the system they rule could ever turn against them or crumble beneath their feet–in a word, a hubris as extreme as their wealth and power. The resignation of the masses and the ease of distracting them with ginned-up controversies and crises and consumerist novelties has fed elite confidence that their supremacy is unassailable.
This hubris leads to the elite becoming tone-deaf to their own excesses and the instability their excesses are generating within the system, an instability that’s currently hidden beneath the resignation and distraction of the masses and the mute frustration of the second-tier elites facing lifetimes of insecurity.
Another factor is the promises made by the state generations ago can no longer be met without creating new money on a scale that guarantees destabilizing inflation. This new money is issued as Treasury bonds which are purchased for income by the wealthy, further exacerbating wealth and income inequality.
The power elite are incapable of demanding sacrifices of the wealthy as the prime directive of the status quo is to defend the current asymmetry of wealth and power. This undermines the collective consensus needed to take the collective action needed to reset the system.
Combine all these factors and the result is a potentially volatile mixture awaiting a catalyst. The confidence of the status quo that it is essentially omnipotent (the Federal Reserve will always save us, etc.) and eternal is itself a factor in the mix.
The key factor is the rigidity or flexibility of the power structure. If the structure is incapable of resetting to a more flexible, symmetric distribution of power as resources, it will come apart as pressures mount.
The NDAA includes a provision to extend Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence, which allows mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. US government agencies portray the law as designed to target foreigners outside of the US, but it allows the collection of any communications they have with Americans, including emails and text messages.
Section 702 was due to expire at the end of this year, but the NDAA extends it to April 19, 2024. According to Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), the House only needed 143 votes to strip the extension out of the NDAA, but only 118 House members voted “nay,” including 73 Republicans and 45 Democrats.
“Here are the 118 Representatives who voted to protect your right to privacy. (Nay to FISA warrantless surveillance as part of NDAA),” Massie wrote on X with a picture of the roll call. “We lost but it was close. We needed 143 votes (1/3) to stop FISA since they suspended the rules to bring it to the floor.”
The mammoth $886 billion NDAA is $28 billion more than what was approved last year. President Biden is seeking another $111 billion to fund military aid for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan on top of regular military spending, but Republicans are holding out until Democrats agree to a deal on significant changes to border policies.
The new NDAA includes several amendments to fund the US and allied military buildup in the Indo-Pacific that’s aimed at China. One amendment allows the Pentagon to transfer three nuclear-powered Virginia-class submarines to Australia as part of the AUKUS military pact the US, Britain, and Australia signed in 2021 to prepare for a future war with China.
Does anyone really believe that the renunciation of massive, sustained stimulus of speculation in housing would leave housing valuations unchanged because valuations are solely the result of “shortages”?
Let’s begin by stipulating that speculation (i.e. gambling) is part of human nature. The role of regulations and policy is to limit the damage that gambling inevitably inflicts when “sure things” cliff-dive into losses.
In other words, where the speculative frenzy and money flows matters. When the South Sea Bubble expanded circa 1713-1720, this flood tide of speculative capital did not distort the cost of shelter and bread in England; it was limited to a purely financial marketplace of shares in the company. When the bubble imploded in 1720, the losses fell mostly on wealthy investors like Isaac Newton.
The same can be said of the speculative mania of the dot-com era: the bubble and collapse were limited to the tech sector and those participating in the sector and the speculative frenzy. The cost of rent and bread did not double due to the speculative bubble’s inflation or bursting.
In contrast, when speculation floods into shelter / housing, it fatally distorts the cost of housing non-speculators must pay. I say fatally because shelter, along with food, energy and water (the FEW resources), are essential to life. These are not discretionary things we can decide not to have. When the price of essentials soars due to speculation that only rewards the speculators at the expense of non-speculators, the fuse of social disorder is lit.
Anyone who believes policies that encourage the wealthy to hoard housing to the point that the bottom 80% (or the bottom 95% in some areas) cannot afford to buy a home are just peachy is overdosing Delusionol. The social consequences are severe and uncontainable once the worm turns.
Exhibit #1 in Shelter Becoming a Speculative Asset is a modest house in the San Francisco Bay Area that sold for $135,000 in mid-1996. By modest I mean small, old, and on a small lot in a neighborhood of other small lots and homes. (A screenshot of the Zillow history is below.)
Today the home’s value is estimated to be about ten times higher: $1.35 million. Let’s do some basic math to understand just how distorted this market has become.
The median household income in 1996 was about $39,000. For a house costing $135,000, this represents 3.5 ratio of income to housing, well within the traditional ratio of 4 to 1 (4 X income = cost of the home).
Median household income has almost doubled to $75,000, roughly in line with inflation according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. According to the BLS, the house that cost $135,000 in July 1996 would now cost $264,000 when adjusted for inflation, and the $39,000 median income would be $76,000.
Let’s say the house appreciated above the rate of inflation to $300,000 today. That’s still within the 4 to 1 ratio of income to house cost (4 X $75,000 = $300,000.) So even though the house rose 2.2X in cost, it would still be affordable to a median household.
At a value of $1.35 million, a household would need to make $337,500 annually–an income that is in the top 5% of households–to buy the house today. In other words, an income that is 4.5 times the median household income is the minimum needed to buy this modest house.
The house is now worth 4.5 times what it would have been worth if it had appreciated well above inflation.
The conventional argument holds that this four-fold increase in housing costs is due solely to a shortage of housing. Let’s consider some data before concluding this is the only dynamic in play.
Chart #1: Case Shiller housing index: this chart shows two massive housing bubbles in the past 20 years.
Chart #2: Federal Reserve’s purchases of mortgage backed securities (MBS) to goose the housing market. The “housing shortage” argument claims the unprecedented Fed purchases of trillions of dollars of MBS is not correlated to the housing bubble, but this claim makes no sense: dropping mortgage rates to unprecedented lows while soaking up trillions of dollars in securitized mortgages was like injecting speculative crack cocaine into the housing market. Gosh, how did we survive without the Fed buying $2.5 trillion in mortgages?
Chart #3: the current housing bubble compared to the 2000-2006 housing bubble: today’s bubble is even more extreme than housing bubble #1.
Chart #4: housing per capita (per person) has reached a new high: if there’s such a severe shortage of housing, how can the housing per capita be at an all-time high? Population rose 4 million in the past 4 years while 5 million housing units were added–plus a pig-in-a-python of housing in the pipeline.
Chart #5: household net worth is $50 trillion above trend, the direct result of massive monetary and fiscal stimulus. Tens of trillions of dollars were borrowed into existence and pumped into so-called risk assets–assets such as housing that the wealthy buy for speculative appreciation.
Chart #6: total debt–private and public–soared from $20 trillion in 1996 to $95 trillion now. Is it merely coincidental that this is $55 trillion above the trendline of inflation, which would have placed total debt at $40 trillion today?
Chart #7: net worth of the top 1% households, which soared from 23% of all net worth to 32%: this 9% gain in the percentage of all household net worth represents a gain of $14 trillion above and beyond the $28.7 trillion in gains registered by the 23% they owned in 1990.
1990 total net worth: $21 trillion, 23% = $4.8 trillion; 2023 total net worth: $146 trillion, 23% = $33.5 trillion; $33.5 trillion – $4.8 trillion = $28.7 trillion.
This unprecedented bubble in housing valuations is due not to shortages but to decades of massive financial stimulus that incentivized speculative capital to flood into housing as a low-risk way to skim stupendous gains for creating zero gains in productivity. If you doubt this, then run this scenario and tell us what happens:
The Fed dumps its entire portfolio of mortgage backed securities and stipulates it will never buy any again. It also renounces all the other stimulus gimmicks that incentivized expansions of debt and speculation.
Does anyone really believe that the renunciation of massive, sustained stimulus of speculation in housing would leave housing valuations unchanged because valuations are solely the result of “shortages”? If so, there’s a little shack under the Brooklyn Bridge I’ll let you have for a couple of million. I’m sure the Airbnb rent will mint you millions.
My intention is not to slam Noah Smith or Derek Thompson. I follow their work and gain value from their analysis.
The point I want to make is we only manage what we measure, and the reliance on statistics that are overly broad and easily distorted/gamed leads to generalizations that ignore consequential cause and effect: we are fooled by overly broad and easily distorted/gamed statistics and enlightened by looking at what is not measured or measured inadequately.
The consensus holds that inflation is declining rapidly and unemployment remains low, so the economy is doing great. Please glance at Chart #1 below to see what enthuses the mainstream: the unemployment rate is near historic lows.
But this measure leaves out a great deal of consequential factors. It’s well-known that the unemployment rate is distorted / gamed by leaving out everyone who is in the workforce but not “actively seeking work.” So what does this official unemployment rate actually measure? Not the percentage of the workforce that has a job.
Nor does it measure underemployment–those working far below their potential–or job insecurity or the percentage of workers being pushed into burnout–all consequential reflections of the real economy. All of these are potentially causal factors in why US productivity has fallen so dramatically.
And speaking of productivity, that’s the ultimate source of prosperity–not speculative bubbles or debt-binging. If productivity is tanking, eventually there are negative economic consequences that will be distributed to some segments of the populace, very likely asymmetrically.
Such a broad-brush measure also ignores the consequences of demographics. Please glance at chart #2 below, of the 55 and over population and workforce. Note that virtually all the 20+ million jobs the US economy added in the past two decades are in this older workforce, which is of course steaming steadily into retirement, even as the percentage of this cohort who continues working has soared.
In other words, virtually all the job growth is the result of older workers working longer. Yes, 70 is the new 50, but try doing the same work at 70 that you did when you were 50. Sure, some people forego retirement because they love their work so much, but we don’t measure how many are still working because they have to for pressing financial reasons.
Have you observed the age of service workers and skilled workers recently? Do you reckon they really love working at Burger King so much that they’re doing it for enjoyment?
What if we measured financial pressures and job insecurity rather than risibly bogus “unemployment”? Would the economy still look so wonderful and resilient?
Chart #3 shows that virtually all the population growth ahead is in the cohort of older workers 65+ years old heading into retirement. So the workforce is rapidly aging and the unspoken / unexamined assumption is tens of millions of new workers will enter the workforce with the same skills, motivation, dedication and values as the tens of millions retiring.
But the demographics simply don’t support this breezy assumption.
Now glance at chart #4 which depicts the extraordinary rise in the number of workers who are now disabled. The causes of this are being debated (the pandemic obviously plays a role), but 2.5 million workers leaving the workforce in a few years is something that could be consequential if the trend continues. An assumption that this is a one-off is baseless until proven otherwise.
Once again, demographics, productivity and factors such as disability and burnout are not part of the unemployment, GDP and inflation measures currently being touted as proof of economic nirvana.
How do we measure the “inflation”–i.e. a loss of purchasing power–when appliances that lasted 20 years a generation ago now break down in 5 years? Where does that 75% decline in utility and durability show up in the official inflation data? How about the tools that once lasted a lifetime now breaking after a few years?
It’s been estimated that America’s food has lost 30% of its nutritive value in the past few decades. Protein per gram has dropped, trace nutrients have dropped, and so on. Rather than pursue sustainably nutrient-rich soil, Big Ag has maximized profits by dumping natural-gas-derived chemical fertilizers on depleted soil to boost production of nutrient-poor, tasteless “product.” A product deemed “organic” offers no guarantee that the soil isn’t depleted of nutrients.
Could this decline have anything to do with the American populace’s increasingly poor health? Nobody knows because these massive declines in quality and value aren’t measured and are certainly not part of the risibly bogus measures of unemployment, GDP and inflation.
The official inflation rate ignores the multi-decade decline in the purchasing power of wages. Rents have soared 25% in a few years, and economists are looking at 5% increases in wages and worrying about the potential inflationary impact of workers’ wages not keeping up with real-world inflation.
Cheerleading economists and pundits never mention the $50 trillion siphoned from labor by capital over the past 45 years. They also don’t mention the rising trend of loading more work on employees rather than hire more employees, or as a response to not being able to find qualified new hires.
Funny how rosy the picture can be tinted when all the consequential forces are ignored. But this studied ignorance characterizes the American elite, who delight in whining about airfares and travel delays, and finding someone to fix their pool pump. I address our Terminally Stratified Society here:
This protected elite don’t have to put up with the crapified goods and services which generate their capital gains and income. Their wealth and income enable their detachment from the crapified economy the bottom 90% experience. Their experience of the bottom 90% is as service workers, delivery people, etc. who serve their entitled tastes.
Correspondent Tomasz G. provided a telling excerpt from Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island:
“… the rich certainly like the company of the rich, no doubt it calms them, it’s nice for them to meet beings subject to the same torments as they are, and who seem to form a relationship with them that is not totally about money; it’s nice for them to convince themselves that the human species is not uniquely made up of predators and parasites… “
As correspondent Ryan R. observed, America’s privileged elites“were born on third, stole home (via asset inflation) and still think they hit that home run.”
We know who the parasites are, but economists and pundits are safely blind to America’s neofeudal aristocracy. After all, who butters the bread of economists and pundits?
Is it unsurprising there are no measures of neofeudalism or elite privilege? As for the incredible concentration of wealth in the top tiers and the resulting decline in the bottom 90%’s share of the nation’s wealth–nothing to see here, just globalization and financialization doing their thing. What matters is booking my next flight to yet another conference of economists and pundits where we nod our heads and dare not admit all the conferences are nothing but echo chambers of the privileged elites.
Cheerleading economists and pundits completely ignore the consequences of the system being rigged to favor capital and the already-wealthy who were given the means to buy assets back when they were cheap and affordable to the middle-class. Now that the system generates speculative credit-asset bubbles to create “the wealth effect,” assets such as homes in desirable regions are out of reach of the bottom 90%.
Please study the six charts below of wealth inequality. Try not to laugh out loud when you see that the top 1% reckon that “coming from a wealthy family” has near-zero impact on “getting ahead in America.”
Also note the steady decline in the middle class percentage of national wealth, and how the middle class’s share only rises when the credit-asset bubbles that have enriched the top 10% deflate, a bubble-pop that never lasts longer than a few months thanks to the policies that favor the already-rich at the expense of those who don’t own stocks, rental properties, municipal bonds, etc.
Economists and pundits steer well clear of the eventual social and political consequences of America’s entrenched neofeudal wealth-income inequality. That this neofeudal configuration is inherently destabilizing–never mind, we don’t measure that, look at the wunnerful unemployment and inflation charts!
Lastly, consider the skyrocketing federal debt in terms of how many jobs are created in the era of soaring federal spending and debt. (Charts courtesy of CH / Economica) Debt doesn’t matter to economists and pundits, and neither does its diminishing effect on GDP and employment. The same can be said of total debt (public and private), which is skyrocketing (last chart): diminishing returns writ large as higher interest rates are embedded in the policy excesses and neofeudal structure of the past 45 years.
In essence, nothing that is consequential is properly quantified, so the pundit class keeps insisting everything is wunnerful and is mystified why people are so foolishly dissatisfied with our wunnerful economy. The reason why people are not buying the fantasyland story is they have to live and work in the crapified real economy, as serfs serving the economist-punditry-elite aristocracy.
If we want to avoid being led astray by misleading measures, we must seek enlightenment in what isn’t being measured or is cast aside as inconvenient to the “economy is wunnerful” party line.
“I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.”
H.L. Mencken
Throughout our history, and today, little, if any defense of this country or its people, has been necessary or warranted. The true enemy of the people of America is, and has always been, its own government. The real enemies are most all the politicians, regardless of party, the courts, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, the IRS, the entire military industrial complex, and in general, the federal and state police forces. In other words, all the ruling class and it pawns in government, its enforcers, and all their institutions and bureaucracies, are the real threat to this populace and its natural freedoms. The ludicrous notion of national defense, and that government forces actually “defend the country,” is an outright lie; propagandized by the State and its mouthpieces in media, simply as a way to gain great power in order to own and control society.
Many will take offence to these statements, mostly due to the fact that since birth, they have been inundated and indoctrinated by false ‘authority’ figures, to believe that they cannot survive and prosper without restrictive laws and rule, and worthless government schooling, all kept in check by severe coercive State prosecution. They are taught (schooled) to abandon their individuality in favor of the so-called ‘greater good’ of a collective society, to depend on and trust others in power to protect and sustain them and their families throughout their lives. This breeds only ignorance and passivity in the face of State terror. Independence, a supposed hallmark of this nation-state and its residents, is literally vilified, and even prohibited in many instances, causing personal sovereignty to be discarded in the name of unified slavery.
We live in a country that has warred aggressively against fictitious enemies, meaning without cause or necessity, more than any other country on earth. It is stated, and supported, that the United States has been at war for at least 93% of its entire existence. I firmly believe this number to be much higher, and with proper consideration, it is likely closer to 100%. If one is to determine the actual damage done, the actual harm due to direct war, proxy war, what is insanely considered ‘collateral damage,’ what is the horrid long term cost to human life in the aftermath of this terror, the total number of causalities, including the dead, would be tens if not hundreds of millions of innocent people. But what is sold to the wrongly named ‘public, is that this country is and has been the savior of ‘democracy,’ a completely evil and failed ideology, which is a gross lie beyond the imagination of any sane and thinking human being.
Yes, the truth hurts, but without acceptance of truth, what is left is a deceitful lie; a manufactured myth so atrocious as to have caused an entire nation’s abhorrent and hostile policies to be supported by the masses to such an extent, as to have caused the most broad-based, aggressive, and egregious destruction of humanity in history. This should be the epitaph upon the death of this empire.
At this time in our lives, aggressive war by this government and all who support its heinous deeds, has graduated from its main objective of slaughtering innocent men, women, and children, in addition to the other devastation, in other countries most everywhere on earth, to include the entirety of this country’s population as well. The major war currently is against all of us who live and work in the U.S. by those who continue to claim to be our protectors. This contradiction is absurd, but is still little understood by the average American, as can be evidenced by the terroristic treatment inflicted, and with little if any resistance, on this society these past few years.
At a time when this country and the world are steeped in madness and hate, more and more atrocities continue to take place, with almost zero empathy evident by the political class. The last evil ‘ruler,’ just one among all, ‘chosen’ by the ‘people,’ was Biden, and this was his response to the State’s complicit murder of those in Lahaina just recently, after a very suspicious and devastating fire had destroyed an entire town and its residents. He had the audacity to offer these poor people who lost everything, including many family members, a one-time $700 payment per household. This was in the midst of giving over $200 million more to Ukraine’s political criminals recently, with plans to give many more billions; this after more than $113 billion has already been paid to enrich the newly rich politicians in Ukraine. (Apparently, blackmail garners payment more than actual need of Americans) This alone should be enough for everyone in this country to grasp how little this government cares about its own, and how worthless all in the governing system have become. To depend on, or trust this scum to defend you from harm, is asinine beyond explanation.
Who will defend you from harm? Who will defend you from foreign invasion, although that has never once happened in this country’s history, not even including the pre-planned setup called the Pearl Harbor attack? Who will defend you from hyper-inflation and the resulting extreme prices for goods? Who will defend you from mass censorship and constant surveillance? Who will defend you from food shortages, energy shutdowns, and extensive restrictions on all transactions and travel? Who will defend your children from the consuming perversion being forced on them at every opportunity with this government’s blessing? Who will defend you from aggression and tyranny? Who will defend you from yourself?
It will never be the evil State that defends you, nor will it be its ‘national defense systems,’ its enforcers in the military and police, the politicians, the banking cartels, the large corporate monsters, or any government at any level. There is only one legitimate defense, and that is self-defense. Only you, each of you, has the ability and desire to defend himself. No other and no State entity can or will ever be your savior. Until that is accepted, expect total serfdom to become your voluntarily accepted way of life.
Much more tyranny is coming. Lockdowns, fake ‘viruses,’ bioweapons, threats and totalitarian measures based on bogus ‘climate change, central bank digital currency, social credit restrictions, more inflation, destruction of money, health mandates, curfews, travel shutdowns, food shortages, transhuman promotion, among many other atrocities, including perpetual war.
National defense is an outright lie, and can never protect you, it can only harm you. There is but one enemy, and that enemy is the State! There is but one defense against this demon called government, and that is when individuals, or individuals working together en masse, abolish all rule. The responsibility for you is you, and any dependence on government whatsoever can only lead to despair, hopelessness, disaster, and enslavement. Defend yourself from this evil State, and break the chains that bind you.
“Every government is run by liars. Nothing they say should be believed.”
“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
How many times in our lives has it been said or thought that things could not get worse, weirder, more absurd, more dangerous, more immoral, more brutal, more controlling, more restrictive, more perverted, more murderous, or more insane? Can those thoughts even be considered in this day and age of complete and total lunacy? What has happened to mankind, and can it all be blamed on brainwashing and indoctrination by the ruling class over the rest of society? I firmly believe that the causes for the inconceivable problems we see today, go much deeper than just blame on invited masters, and begin at the core of the psyche of humanity. If this is so, the struggle for man’s attempts to regain his sanity, morality, and freedom, are fully dependent on a large swath of society changing dramatically from one of total dependence and expectation of rule, to one of individual worth, and a mandatory acceptance of personal responsibility so overwhelming, as to lead to the total destruction of the State.
You might scoff at such a pronouncement as this, but at this stage of tyranny, indifference, and complete loss of integrity by the masses, nothing short of an absolute and unconditional reshaping of society will suffice in order to eliminate the threat of the extinction of humanity as we know it. We are teetering on the precipice of annihilation, and false hopes or prayers will never be enough to restore this so-called ‘civilization.’ Apathy is our enemy, and can only lead to an enslaved society at the hands of technocratic rulers.
Many might expect the State to implode given the pace of this takeover plot and reshaping of nation states, but what would take the place of the current systems should the weakest fall? Could that be the planned outcome, as with many failed State systems, a global restructuring by the strongest and most brutal countries, just as is the WEF plan indicates, would have a clear advantage in its new world order creation attempt? A transformation is necessary, but that transformation needs to be geared toward a Stateless structure created by individuals, instead of any new political governing scheme.
Real intelligence and critical thinking on this earth are missing in action, and what is disguised as intelligence is rarely ever anything other than State agenda-driven propaganda and lies. This is why what passes for ‘news’ is so unbelievably inaccurate, entirely incorrect, and child-like in nature. That is all that is necessary these days to fool the bulk of society. In other words, thinking is no longer required, as the masses have been conditioned and brainwashed to accept almost any claptrap being spewed by the rulers, fake ‘scientists,’ medical profession, politicians, government, and certainly the media circus made up of State sanctioning whores.
Any who still have the ability to think rationally and intelligently, go through each day in wonder at the wild, insane, and obscene things being reported to the mainstream population; that largest segment of society totally blinded by ignorance, apathy, and in many cases, stupidity. These attitudes make for easy fodder to feed the hopeless, gullible, and compliant sheep, and are in turn, allowing this heinous State to continue its march toward a globalized world run by the very few.
The completely bogus idea of human-caused ‘global warming’ and fake ‘climate change,’ is now taking shape as the primary reasoning for control over everything and everybody on earth by the technocrats. This ‘climate’ agenda will now be pursued until the end of life as we know it. It is not at the margin any longer, nor is it anymore hidden. Idiotic headlines concerning so-called weather terror, are expanding by the moment. Sensationalism can now be used universally, as one after another fake disaster looms according to these fraudulent so-called ‘scientists’ and imposters called ‘experts.’
Everything is on the table as extreme warmongers like to claim, but since this war is against all of us, this term takes on a new meaning. Completely asinine headlines continue, as now new and improved fear porn coming from the talking heads of the idiotic and imbecilic mainstream media abound, going so far as to label their fake paranoid ‘global warming’ nonsense as “global boiling.’
But there is so much more happening, as a myriad of false threats is ever upon us, or so the talking heads will claim. New plagues, diseases, ‘viruses,’ killer ticks, (if existent, they were likely to have been purposely created by the military) war threats, and especially ‘climate change’ absurdity. Climate and weather have become totally weaponized, and will be used to control life at most every level now and in the future.
Never forget the non-existent ‘covid pandemic’ lie. It will be revamped, whether as something the same or similar, or some new and approved killer on the loose; so scary as to drive everyone inside, supposedly away from the maddening crowd. Beware the ‘virus’ and emergency hype, as it will never end so long as the masses comply with rule, and obey as slaves.
Perusing just a few ‘news’ feeds will inundate the mind with nonsense, but most see these claims as real or possible; all without any legitimate accompanying evidence. The insane Trump saga leads the way of course, as this stupidity is followed by both sides of the political scam, which helps to keep most of the country at each other’s throats. But there is so much more. The banking sector is bankrupt, and personal and business accounts of many are being closed. Pensions and retirement funds are also being threatened. Cyber attacks are affecting large swaths of this country, and air travel is becoming impossible to deal with at times. The trans scam is continuing and will likely escalate after government schools open up this fall. More UFO reporting is being pursued every week, stores are closing nationwide, inflation is rampant, and the Ukraine false-flag war continues.
Incandescent lightbulbs have been banned, gas stoves and water heaters are targeted as well. There are more bank failures, more trucking company failures, savings are depleted, setting the stage for the digitization of America. CBDC trial and implementation will continue, and widespread default fears are increasing. Interest rates are still rising, as the U.S. credit rating has been downgraded.
The destruction of our world is upon us, as the crumbling of all that is natural and sane is being allowed to take place right before our eyes. All the things mentioned here are not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination, as so many things are going awry in broad daylight, all with little notice by the sheeplike masses. Dependency and indifference are our mortal enemies, We are living in a madhouse; a world at great odds with all sanity, and one that has become indifferent and morally bankrupt. This is not the way forward, but the way to hell on earth.
Finding the individual inside, taking solace in self, and abandoning the State is a better way.
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”
Economic issues are some of the most politically abused issues often because the data politicians exploit is easy to present out of context. The vast majority of the public doesn’t spend their time immersed in the intricacies of monetary policy, unemployment stats and the processes of inflation vs deflation. They hear a soundbite on the news or social media once in a while, assume it must be true and then go on with their day.
This is how economic crisis events always seem to take the population by surprise – The establishment tells people all is well and no one questions the narrative in the face of numerous warning signs. Sometimes, the populace continues to believe that everything is fine despite the financial framework burning down around them, all because the “experts” continue to convince them that recovery is “right around the corner.”
There are numerous incentives for government officials and mainstream economists to mislead the citizenry with tales of imminent prosperity in the midst of instability. Primarily, the goal is to keep the middle-class population as docile as possible so that they don’t revolt until it’s too late (the middle class being predominantly conservative, and the greatest threat to any corrupt regime). Understand that economics is the root of power, and economic perception is the key to influencing the masses.
Hidden Indicators And Rampant Money Printing
The reality is that the US was hurtling towards stagflationary disaster ever since the crash of 2008, when Barack Obama and Joe Biden (with the help of the Federal Reserve) oversaw the near doubling of the national debt from $10 trillion to almost $20 trillion – The most egregious abuse of monetary policy that the US had ever seen.
And, keep in mind this was only the officially reported cash. Because of pressure brought by people like Ron Paul in 2011, the government was forced to pursue a limited audit of the Federal Reserve bailouts at that time. This revealed at least $16 trillion created from nothing by the Fed to prop up the failing system.
In 2006, right before the derivatives collapse, the Federal Reserve conveniently and abruptly ended their M3 money supply report. They now only report the M2 money supply, which does not include the vast assets held in corporate coffers, large time deposits in banks, institutional money market funds, short-term repurchase agreements (repo), and larger liquid assets. It was as if they knew an inflationary event was about to take place and they needed to obscure the evidence.
In other words, in economics there is the “official government data” and then there is the REAL data, which is sometimes so hidden it is impossible to quantify.
Even if we only go by the M2 report, the money supply skyrocketed starting in 2020, and rose exponentially through 2021 and 2022 – It jumped by 40% in only two years. This is why the cost of most necessities has risen 25% or more.
I’m sure most readers have noticed that inflation is not going away despite Joe Biden’s claims that he has “cut inflation in half” under his “Bidenomics” plan. This is because inflation is cumulative. The CPI might fluctuate, but the effects of inflation remain as prices tend to increase and stay high perpetually.
There Is No Such Thing As “Bidenomics”
The supposed financial progress that Biden is trying to take credit for has nothing to do with Biden’s policies. Not a thing. Unless, of course, you count market manipulation as a positive.
For example, the reduction in CPI is directly related to the continuous interest rate hikes of the Federal Reserve, which Biden has zero control over. The Fed is autonomous and makes its decisions independent of the White House or government. This is a fact openly admitted by former chairman Alan Greenspan. When the fed raises rates, debt becomes more expensive, lending slows down and thus the economy slows down.
One of the only ways that Biden can influence CPI is through artificial deflation of energy prices. The Biden Administration has been dumping US strategic oil reserves on the market for the past year as a means to suppress oil prices, thereby directly and indirectly keeping the CPI numbers down. This is not progress, it’s economic fraud.
The misuse of stats extends to other sectors, such as Biden’s attempt to take credit for the recent reduction in the US deficit. Again, this has nothing to do with Biden; the Fed’s interest rate hikes make it more expensive for the government to take on debt, therefore, debt spending drops.
It’s also not a situation that signals a recovery in the economy – The Fed continues to hike rates supposedly to stall inflation, but higher rates in a debt heavy environment lead to inevitable deflationary upheaval. As I predicted a year ago, the Fed is continuing to increase interest rates until this happens.
Employment Miracle Or Employment Scam?
This issue has been brought up by many analysts but I’ll touch on it again here because Biden is relentless in his falsehoods when it comes to employment data. FACT: 72% of all “new jobs” Biden takes credit for were originally lost during the pandemic lockdowns. The very lockdowns which Democrats avidly enforced and tried to keep in place perpetually. You can’t take credit for “creating” jobs that you are responsible for destroying.
In terms of higher labor demand, the pressure is in low wage service sector jobs and these are the majority of jobs added since Biden took office. And, this rush into retail/service was purchased with $8 trillion+ in covid stimulus cash along with a moratorium on rent and student loan payments. That much extra money in circulation buys at least a few years of consumer spending, propping up jobs numbers.
Throughout history, such gains from inflationary actions and government interventions are always short term, and they always end with a dramatic plunge in employment once the effects subside.
Biden’s Fake Manufacturing Boom
Biden has recently touted a jump in US manufacturing as the latest achievement of Bidenomics, but like every other claim he makes, you have to look at the context. These are not free market manufacturing facilities built according to market demand. Rather, Biden is pumping billions of taxpayer dollars into green tech, once again artificially engineering a “manufacturing boom” through government subsidies for products that have limited demand.
Biden wants to rig the demand, too, by enforcing climate laws which make gas, oil and coal sources too expensive and solar panels and wind turbines cheaper by comparison. For example, Biden is increasing costs for oil and gas exploration on federal lands, while greatly lowering the prices for building solar farms on federal lands. In other words, the government uses your money to create factories for green tech and then creates laws which force people to use that green tech.
In the meantime, Joe’s manufacturing “boom” paid for with tax dollars also comes at the cost of America’s oil, gas and coal industries, not to mention less energy freedom for the general public. It’s socialism, not a revolution in domestic manufacturing.
For Biden, The Key Is To Create As Many Government Cash Injections As Possible Until 2025
You want to know why Democrats are so angry that the Supreme Court blocked Biden’s plan to make taxpayers cover student loan debts? It’s not because they care about naive college kids who paid too much money for garbage degrees – It’s because student debt relief would immediately add trillions more in spending in the short term to the US economy.
An interesting side effect of the college loan moratorium is the surprising credit boost – As soon as college loan payments were put on hold, millions of former students had their credit ratings increase by default. Meaning, they could now hike their credit limits and spend MORE money they don’t have. It’s an incredibly sneaky way to artificially prop up the system WITHOUT using direct stimulus measures that rely on the central bank. This false boost will disappear by October of this year.
Biden’s constant attempts to introduce infrastructure programs are another way the government can create the illusion of recovery by using debt spending as a means to mitigate the signals of greater fiscal decline. Without Fed stimulus it’s the only option Biden has, and as rates rise it becomes costly.
The bottom line is this – The US economy is on a short timetable as long as the Fed continues to raise interest rates into weakness as a means to suppress inflation. As we witnessed in the spring, higher rates are already breaking the back of mid-tier banks across the western world and the Fed’s backstop funds are only enough to stall the debt crisis for a time. I continue to predict that once the Fed Funds Rate is raised to 6% or more, we will once again see a banking calamity similar to the 2008 crash, but this time if the Fed steps in with a bailout hyperinflation will be the immediate result.
Bidenomics is a sham in every respect. Anything that could be considered an economic improvement is due to the Federal Reserve playing the odds with interest rates. A massive 40% increase in the money supply sure helps in obscuring fiscal weakness as well. Luckily, nearly 60% of Americans in recent polls say they aren’t buying the Bidenomics fairytale – They see the dangers around them every day.
The covid event was a catalyst that revealed all the weaknesses of the US system that many of us in alternative economics have been warning about for years. And now it seems as if the establishment is trying to drag things along for just a little while longer. The reason why is up for speculation, but the fact remains that a broken structure cannot be propped up with stop gaps. I’m doubtful that Biden will be able to ride the wave created by covid stimulus until the end of 2024. Something has to give.
“Trust the experts,” we are constantly being told, whatever the topic of discussion. The problem with this advice is that the so-called “experts” are frequently wrong, sometimes as a result of plain incompetence and other times because it is their function to propagandize rather than to educate.
For instance, I got my start doing citizen journalism speaking out against the US government’s planned war on Iraq. In 2002 and early 2003, the government claimed that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, active weapons manufacturing programs, and an active nuclear program aimed at producing a nuclear bomb. Mainstream media outlets like the New York Times uncritically parroted the government’s claims. All the “expert” analysts and commentators towed the official line.
When I would point out to people that there was no credible evidence to support the government’s claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and that the documentary record rather indicated that Iraq had been disarmed of the weapons it produced during the 1980s with the support of the US government, I was frequently confronted with the idea that we should trust the expert intelligence analysts because surely government policymakers must have classified information supporting their case that they just couldn’t share with the public.
Later, when the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) issued its official report acknowledging that Iraq had indeed been disarmed by UN inspectors by 1991 and never restarted its weapons programs, a whole new propaganda narrative was developed to whitewash how the US government lied to the American people and the world. We were then fed the myth that there had been an “intelligence failure”, the truth being that the government had successfully waged a disinformation campaign against the public for the purpose of manufacturing consent for an illegal war of aggression that left Iraq devastated, with negative ripple effects throughout the Middle East, including the war’s precipitation of the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
Another example is the housing bubble that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis. The mainstream “experts” insisted that there was no bubble, that the economy was rolling along nicely. Right up to the bubble’s peak, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke refused to see it. In the New York Times, throughout the 2000s, Keynesian economist Paul Krugman lauded the Fed’s inflationary monetary policy that was the principal cause of the housing bubble only to ludicrously blame the bubble on the forces of the free market after it burst.
Meanwhile, free market economists schooled in the ideas of Austrian economics, so called because its founders and early luminaries hailed from Austria, were accurately warning how the Fed’s policy of maintaining artificially low interest rates—meaning rates below where they would otherwise be if determined by the market rather than by a roomful of policymakers—was fueling a housing bubble that would cause economic devastation when it inevitably burst. Congressman Ron Paul famously warned about this as early as 2001, yet we were consistently told by the mainstream “experts” that we shouldn’t listen to him or other advocates of liberty in the marketplace.
The preposterousness of the mainstream narrative was so overwhelming, it prompted me to write a book titled Ron Paul vs. Paul Krugman: Austrian vs. Keynesian Economics in the Financial Crisis, which ended up getting a rave review by none other than Barron’s. Gene Epstein, the former Economics and Books editor for Barron’s said of it:
Any work of economics that can make you laugh is at least worth a look. If in less than 100 pages it also informs you about a subject of great importance, it might just qualify as a must-read. Jeremy Hammond, a political journalist self-taught in economics and a writer of rare skill, has produced such a book…. This short work conveys more insight into the causes and cures of business cycles than most textbooks, and more about the recent business cycle than most volumes of much greater length.
Once again, we could see that there is a whole class of “experts” whose primary function was not to truly educate us about how the economy functions but to manufacture consent for the existence of central banking—the Fed being a government-legislated private monopoly over the currency supply.
That episode also once again illustrates how any non-expert willing to commit the time to self-education can easily see through the lies and deceptions propagated by the “experts”.
Arguably, there is no more perfect example of how the “experts” get things completely wrong than the governmental responses to the COVID‑19 pandemic. While I and others fervently opposed the lockdown measures from the start on the grounds that they would do more harm than good, the thought-controlling media insisted that we must trust the government’s “experts” like Dr. Anthony Fauci. We should “follow the science” we were told, while Fauci claimed to be science incarnate, deeming himself beyond reproach by proclaiming that to criticize him was to attack science itself.
While all the “experts” in the so-called “public health” establishment were proclaiming that widespread acceptance of the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines would end the pandemic by conferring herd immunity, dissident voices like my own were being censored for telling the truth that there was no scientific evidence that the vaccines would induce durable sterilizing immunity that would prevent infection and transmission of the virus.
I was also warning since very early into the mass vaccination campaign that the policy goal of getting everyone vaccinated could prolong the pandemic and worsen outcomes in the long-term because of the immunologic phenomenon of “original antigenic sin” and the opportunity cost of superior natural immunity. These warnings, too, proved prescient as we now know from the available scientific evidence that the mRNA COVID‑19 vaccines do result in an “immune imprinting” so that vaccinated individuals are stuck generating a suboptimal immune response to circulating SARS‑CoV‑2 variants.
After it became obvious from the data that the vaccines failed to prevent infection and transmission of the virus, the media went so far in their efforts to defend the criminal regime of lockdowns and coerced mass vaccination by gaslighting us and absurdly denying that the COVID‑19 vaccines were sold to the public on the basis of lies.
We’re also supposed to trust doctors, but my own household’s experience with the medical establishment led us to the opposite conclusion. The doctors were not just unhelpful; they were less than useless. Especially in my wife’s case, listening to them caused more harm than good. In fact, it wasn’t until we learned to stop listening to the doctors and started trusting our own judgment that my wife and I both found a path to healing from the respective health problems we used to have (leaky gut in my case and mercury toxicity from dental amalgams in my wife’s).
Throughout the time that I was seeking help from the so-called “health care” system, I was repeatedly confronted by doctors whose ignorance was matched only by their arrogance and condescension. I ultimately bypassed the doctors by researching our symptoms directly in the medical literature; we diagnosed ourselves and successfully treated the root cause of our respective symptoms (taking steps to heal my gut and getting the mercury fillings safely removed followed by a two-year mercury detox regimen, respectively).
The supposed “experts” with an “MD” after their name were far more interested in lazily pushing pharmaceutical products on us to treat symptoms than in doing their job to try to figure out what the root cause was, much less in figuring out treatments aimed at addressing the underlying cause.
So, the next time you hear someone telling you to place your trust in the “experts”, emphasize the foolishness of placing blind faith in supposed authorities in lieu of doing one’s own research and thinking for oneself, and remind the person how the “experts” are frequently nothing more than professional propagandists serving a given political or financial agenda.
After the Crash 