"Washington D.C. First"
The bipartisan pledge to put America's elites before the people.
by Bill Bonner
"Great talker. Great liar."
~ An old proverb
Youghal, Ireland - "In 2021, we saw the tide turn. The Primary Trend had reversed…or so we thought. We guessed that “we will never see these highs (stock prices in real terms) again in our lifetimes.” It is now 3 years later and we still haven’t. The Dow still has 4,000 points between today’s level and a new all-time, inflation-adjusted high. Will it get there?
More about that, tomorrow. The subject today is lies…prevarications…falsehoods and counterfeits. They are such a big part of our lives – and the bulk of our public policies. They affect our livelihoods…and, obviously, our investments. They are responsible, we believe, for today’s high stock prices.
But the lies are so thick on the ground they go unobserved, like an average person in a crowd. A whole montage of fabrications makes most of them invisible. They blend in…they disguise and justify each other. And then, you can’t tell truth from lies. You see movement. You read the news. You hear one falsehood after another. Like a herd of zebras, it’s hard to separate them out.
A Creed of Lies: In the present national election, Donald Trump is supposed to be a ‘conservative.’ Joe Biden is supposed to be a ‘liberal.’ Both are imposters. The Donald is a crackpot strongman. Biden is a hack meddler. Neither has any set of principles or ideological bearings that could be called ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal.’ And for all the lip and calumnies they exchange, they share the same perverse gods. And a creed of lies. In the contest that most matters – the common man against a corrupt elite – they are both on the wrong side.
When Democrats and Republicans, almost unanimously, passed the CARES act in 2020…they gave themselves over to a debauch of fraud. There were 800 pages of it…which scarcely anyone read. There was money flowing almost everywhere, a flash-flood of made-up wealth – $2.2 trillion – that came as if, out of nowhere. Never before had the sluices of federal spending been open so wide…flushing away any residue of prudence and honesty as if they were empty plastic bottles on a rogue wave.
There was money for small businesses…money for big businesses…money for people with no business at all…people who had lost their jobs and people who never had them. There was some $25,000 worth of giveaways per family of four.
This cornucopia of pork and grift was Donald Trump’s handiwork, aided and abetted by a Democrat-controlled Congress. The theory of it was simple enough. The feds treated the Covid epidemic as if it were a natural disaster, like a fire that had swept over the nation, causing trillions in damages. (They did not mention that they had lit the flame themselves, with their State of Emergency declaration on March 13, 2020.) Then, with the generous sans souci of a bankrupt madman, they handed out money so the carpets could be replaced, the factories would be rebuilt, and people could stay home, sifting through the charred wreckage of their lives.
Faux Funds: But where would the money come from? The feds had saved nothing. The funds would have to be ‘printed up’ especially, for the occasion. Any dope could see that this was a scam. You can’t replace real wealth with pieces of paper. One is real; the other is fake. Real wealth is irreplaceable; when a house burns down, you cannot resurrect the house out of the ashes. You have to build a new one. That takes labor, skill, resources…and most important, time. Burn a house down in 2020 and you can rebuild it in 2021; but not without retarding the output slated for 2021 until 2022. Then, the work that would have been done in 2022 must be made up in 2023. Real losses are forever.
Trillions in new money was provided, but it couldn’t replace the goods, services, and incomes that lockdowns had destroyed. The result was predictable. More money. Fewer goods and services. Consumer prices would go up.
This preposterous mismanagement then created what Mr. Trump called ‘the greatest economy ever’ – which was another big lie. But by then, the elites had confected a fabulous, fatuous tower of fraud. People were so addled that they couldn’t tell fact from fiction.
There was no point in trying to ‘save money,’ said the politicians. Everybody knew the money was fake. Nor was there any point to balancing the budget, they added; federal spending exceeded federal tax receipts (not counting social security) every year since the Carter administration; this was no time to begin worrying about it.
This was another major lie. Between Trump’s CARES act, the follow-up Covid Relief Act, and Biden’s American Rescue Act, the Republic/Democratic duo added $6.5 trillion in new spending and $14 trillion to the nation’s debt during the course of their 8 years in office; it could have been stopped.
The Illusion of Choice - The feds also insisted that the money had to go out fast…even to people who really didn’t need it. This was an ‘emergency,’ they said. So, billionaires got PPP loans (which they didn’t have to pay back.) Ordinary employees earned twice as much from the feds’ supplemental unemployment payments as they had on the job.
But there was no real emergency. The Covid virus worked its way through the population, just as viruses always do. Government efforts had no measurable, unambiguous effect on the outcome. But wait, the extra spending would ‘stimulate’ the economy! That was bogus too. After so many years of deficits – each one intended to provide the ‘stimulus’ that the last one didn’t – the lie had been repeated so often it was taken as fact.
Lie after lie…fraud upon fraud…jackassery on top of jacked-up half-truths…. By then too, one of the biggest lies in the Land of the Free was that the two parties gave Americans a choice…that democracy allowed the ‘will of the people’ to prevail…and the wisdom of the masses – often late, but never wrong – would set things right. This was one of the biggest lies of all. By 1999, Republicans and Democrats had come to share a single bipartisan vision for the future of the country: Washington First!"
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