"Back in the U.S.S.A."
The Soviet economy was largely fake, almost all of it controlled by
the Communist Party. Government deficits supported a bloated
military that looked powerful on paper but couldn't win a war.
by Bill Bonner
"The best government is a benevolent tyranny
tempered by an occasional assassination."
- Voltaire
Poitou, France - "There are the elites... and there are ‘the people.’ Yes, the rich are different. But it’s not just a matter of money, they also have power. It is as if they lived in ‘two separate countries,’ says Stephen Moore.
The elites live on the two coasts. They send their children to good schools and universities. They work in the ‘talking professions’; that is, they don’t sweat with hammers, drills, grills, machines or chemicals. Instead, they bend ideas, information and spreadsheets - as investors, lawyers, journalists, professors and managers. They earn more money. They live in bigger houses. But they weigh less, on average, than MAGA supporters... .and they wouldn’t be caught dead at a Trump rally. As socialite Ms. J. Gordon Douglas once put it, among the elite, ‘you can’t be too rich or too thin.’
The Rasmussen polling organization took their pulse at the end of last year, reporting the results in January. They defined the elite as having at least one postgraduate degree after graduating from an Ivy league college, $150,000-plus income, and living in a ‘dense urban area.’ This probably defines more of a super-elite than the top 20%... but it is something the rest of them can aspire to.
What did they find? Moore summarizes: "Nearly three-quarters of the elites surveyed believe they are better off now financially than they were when Joe Biden entered the White House. Less than 20% of ordinary Americans feel the same way....Elites are three times more likely than all Americans to say there is too much individual freedom in the country. Astonishingly, almost half of the elites and almost 6 of 10 ivy leaguers say there is too much freedom.
An astonishing 72% of the elites - including 81% of the elites who graduated from the top universities - favor banning gas cars. And majorities of elites would ban gas stoves, nonessential air travel, SUVs and private air conditioning.
Most elites think that teachers’ unions and school administrators should control the agenda of schools. Most mainstream Americans think that parents should make these decisions. Oh, and about three-quarters of these cultural elites are Biden supporters."
"You know, I've been around the ruling class all my life,
and I've been quite aware of their total contempt for the people of the country."
- Gore Vidal
Moore comments: "The snobs thumb their collective noses at the unrefined working-class Americans. The elites believe they are intellectually, culturally and morally superior to the working class and rural America… Crime, illegal immigration, inflation, fentanyl and factory closings aren't keeping the elite up at night because in their cocoons, they don't encounter these problems on a daily basis the way so many Americans do today. Not too many main street Americans are losing sleep about climate change or LGBTQ issues."
But the situation does not describe merely a political divide. It is not just a matter of Republicans versus Democrats... not a case of good guys versus bad guys. If you vote for Donald Trump you may think you will end the elites’ control. But that’s not how it works. If you rid yourself of one group... another will take its place. Like the poor, the elites will always be with us.
The coming election will make little difference... no matter which way it goes. Because both parties are frauds. They merely represent different aspects of elite America; neither represents ‘the people.’ Both have been corrupted by power and money; both have signed on to the important parts of elite agenda - more spending, more war, and more debt.
Both Republicans and Democrats have been suborned... neither dares oppose the powerful elites that support them. That’s why debt ‘ceilings’ never hold... budgets are never balanced... and US troops still lounge at more than seven hundred overseas bases – decades after the need for them disappeared.
Soviet America: Historian Niall Ferguson likens the US situation circa 2024 to a “late, Soviet America.” He notes that in 1990, observers were noticing a “ghastly and tragic... loss of morality” within the USSR. “Apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching,” were running wild. Nearly half the population thought that theirs was an “unjust society.” USSR leaders were old party hacks - Brezhnev, Kuznetsov, Andropov, Chernenko - or just ineffective.
The Soviet economy was largely fake... almost all of it directly or indirectly controlled by the Communist Party. The government ran chronic deficits... supporting a bloated military that looked powerful, on paper, but couldn’t win a war.
“Sound familiar?” asks Ferguson: "Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979."
We gave up trying to solve the nation’s problems a long time ago. Today, we merely try to anticipate them. It’s not the Democrats’ fault. Nor the Republicans’. Both are tools of degenerate elites, who are likely to drag the country further and further into debt, inflation... and war. Expect a long period of chaos - financial, political and social. And watch out for the guillotine."
But what the Elites everywhere have always forgotten, to their regret...
We are many, they are few.
