"Relax. They're not going to kill us. They're going to
TRY and kill us. And that is a very different thing. "
- Steve Voake, "The Dreamwalker's Child"
○
"You cannot kill me here. Bring your soldiers, your death, your disease, your collapsed economy because it doesn't matter, I have nothing left to lose and you cannot kill me here. Bring the tears of orphans and the wails of a mother's loss, bring your Jesus on a cross, bring your hate and bitterness and long working hours, bring your empty wallets and love long since gone but you cannot kill me here. Bring your sneers, your snide remarks and friendships never felt, your letters never sent, your kisses never kissed, cigarettes smoked to the bone and cancer killing fears but you cannot kill me here. For I may fall and I may fail but I will stand again each time and you will find no satisfaction. Because you cannot kill me here."
"Assassination of John F. Kennedy, mortal shooting of John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, as he rode in a motorcade in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. His accused killer was Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who had embraced Marxism and defected for a time to the Soviet Union. Oswald never stood trial for murder."
"Excerpt: "America’s Brobdingnagian $1.3 trillion national security budget thrives on manufactured threats and falsely demonized foes. And nothing could be more demonstrative of that proposition than the utter villainy which emanated from the NATO summit in Vilnius.
For crying out loud. Since the Munich Security Conference in 2007, the man (Putin) has said over and over, and then over again, that Ukraine’s ascension to NATO is an absolute red line. And anyone with their head screwed on right would have no trouble accepting that declaration by answering one simple question. To wit, how would Washington react if Russia put missiles and nukes in Mexico, or Cuba, or Nicaragua, or Granada or Venezuela or even Tierra Del Fuego?
Of course, President John F. Kennedy resolved that matter 61 years ago. Yet the whole Vilnius confab amounts to a wink and nod pageant telling the world that exactly what JFK said could not stand on our own doorstep back then, in fact, must stand on Russia’s now. One day soon the Great Hegemon on the Potomac will plant US/NATO missiles 40 minutes from the Kremlin and the purported “aggressor” domiciled there needs to shut-up and eat his geopolitical spinach.
Holy moly. The very idea is an affront to rationality and is a reckless invitation to permanent friction between two nations holding upwards of 12,000 nukes between them. Yet the miscreants gathered in Vilnius left no room for doubt in their declaration:
"Ukraine’s future is in NATO. We reaffirm the commitment we made at the 2008 Summit in Bucharest that Ukraine will become a member of NATO, and today we recognize that Ukraine’s path to full Euro-Atlantic integration has moved beyond the need for the Membership Action Plan. Ukraine has become increasingly interoperable and politically integrated with the Alliance, and has made substantial progress on its reform path."
So the question recurs. How in the whole fricking big wide world would adding the parts and pieces of Novorossiya, Poland, Lithuania, Rumania, the Cossack Hetmanates, the Crimean Khanate, the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria and many other historical footnotes that were slapped together by the Soviet Tyrants after 1920 to form the current unnatural borders of Ukraine contribute to the Homeland Security of America, way over here on the far sides of the Atlantic and Pacific moats?
The answer of course is that it contributes nothing, as in nichts, nada and nugatory. NATO isn’t about security, collective or otherwise, anyway. It’s an utterly vestigial relic of the Cold War that was stood-up to contain a totalitarian Soviet Empire which was armed to the teeth, but which has long since disappeared into the dustbin of history. So George Bush the Elder should have parachuted into the Ramstein Germany air base in 1991, declared victory and dismantled NATO then and there.
As it has transpired, however, the bloated now 31-nation NATO of today has actually become an enemy of peace and security. That’s because it exists mainly as a marketing forum for western arms manufacturers and a think tank for generating phony threats and scary stories designed to keep military budgets amply stocked with fiscal wherewithal and vastly over-sized military establishments well provisioned with missions, mandates, war games and busy work."
"We are getting hit with more crime every day. Mass groups are taking over shopping malls. People are street racing at a record pace. And now people are committing major felonies to defraud auto dealerships out of cars."
“This voter is not convinced by virtues or statistics.
He is convinced by dreams, visions, stories and jokes.”
- Curtis Yarvin
"Draw back from the scene and understand that the sheer heaping-up of procedural legal bullshit in the various sham court cases against candidate Donald Trump is largely an attempt to confound, mystify, and preoccupy the public while the great scaffold of our national life collapses. The news 0 both legacy and alt - will be dominated day after day by analyses of every move and counter-move through endless thickets of courtroom minutiae while the US economy crashes and burns, residual wealth is confiscated, and the American social order turns into something like fiery goo.
By November of 2024, somebody will be elected president, or no one will be. At this point, it is probably down to an election that more than half the country won’t believe in, or no election at all due to civil chaos so extreme it will make the 1861 weeks of secession look as tame as a middle school fire drill. Beyond the hamstringing and hog-tying of their chief adversary, the Democratic Party lawfare necromancers have set up the gameboard with surpassing precision so that their opponents will never be able to win another election. Yet, they are so self-satisfied as to apparently think no one noticed. (We’ll be coming for you, eventually, Marc Elias.)
As to the parsing out of all those bogus charges against Mr. Trump, consider that we now live in a culture of no truth, only battling portfolios of narrative spin, at least according to the Marxian wokesters who have seized the machinery of law, so, there, with a snap of your fingers goes jurisprudence - as in: I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, blah blah…. The joke is on you. There is no truth, anymore, so stop insisting that there is anything like it to determine, except whatever outcome the Party of Chaos seeks.
The suspended animation of August with its sand castles, lobster rolls, and care-free cocktail cruises will soon yield to the season of hurricanes, financial fiascos, momentous military movements, and reversals of political fortune. What, for instance, becomes of “Joe Biden,” the fictitious president, and that claque of grift-bedizened relatives around him? I’ll tell you one thing: no way is this fellow running for reelection, and the mighty pretense around that hallucination makes idiots of everyone on cable TV news. Somebody has already slipped Ol’ “Joe” the black spot. Dr. Jill has crawled into a bottle. The “Big Guy” is just sulking now, drowning his sorrows in ice cream - but his fate hangs there above the Rehoboth dunes like an ominous black sea-bird suspended on an ill wind, mocking him. You have finally screwed the pooch, Joey, it cries… caw caw caw….
We are thus close to the moment when impeachment can no longer be dodged. The reams of Biden family bank records that Mr. Comer of Kentucky has unearthed hither and yon, plus deal memoranda, video and audio recordings of dark confabs, and hundreds of tell-tale emails are of a different evidentiary nature than the roster of hypothetical thought crimes confabulated by Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, and Fani T. Willis. Personally, I would like, at least, to see impeachment hearings where all that hard evidence of Biden family bribery is methodically laid out for The New York Times and CNN to ignore. It will look like a game of chicken for a few days, but then the party honchos will “sadly” order Ol’ Joe to step aside before that grim spectacle goes too far.
The Ukraine War will then be Kamala Harris’s to lose - depend on it - though nobody will care. I have a feeling that Barack Obama will not be able to… how shall we say… work with her. All that cackling must conceal an inner vacancy so vast that Judge Crater, DB Cooper, and the brigantine Mary Celeste might be roaming around in there, along with Amelia Earhart, Jimmy Hoffa, and the Lost Colony of Roanoke. And I cringe to imagine the meetings with Kamala where Susan Rice, Lisa Monaco, and Torie Nuland try to tell the poor simp what to do. It will look like one of those girlie beat-downs on an Oakland street-corner.
Anyway, by that time the stock markets will be all a’crumble, all those Vanguard retirement funds will wash-up like so many writhing grunions on Cabrillo Beach, and your local bank will cap withdrawals at $500 a few weeks before executing the long-rumored bail-ins. At that magic moment, the Democratic Party will have everything it has wished for.
Of course, I can’t say the melodrama will play out exactly like that, in that sequence. But expect trouble in September. Expect disorder like you’ve never imagined. Think about retrieving whatever cash you have in the bank. Consider arming yourself for safety’s sake, if you live in a part of the country that allows it. Or maybe even if you live in the other parts. Lay in some beans and rice and some batteries. Buckle your mental seat belt. When August is over, it’s going to be a bumpy ride."
91 Trump Felonies, NATO Ukraine Disaster, Murdered Suddenly
by Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.com
"There are now 4 separate cases and a total of 91 felonies charged to President Donald J. Trump. It has become a ridiculous cartoon prosecution of the former President that is anything but funny. It shows a complete desperation of the Deep State to stop Donald Trump and “We the People.”
This is an attack on the First Amendment that makes it illegal to contest and protest obvious election fraud. Meanwhile, the President that many say was cheated in has seen zero charges, even though House GOP members have released proof Joe Biden and family have gotten at least $20 million in illegal cash. It’s 91 to 0 and Biden is winning - so far.
From the beginning, I said the Ukraine war was going to be a disaster and the so-called sanctions were going to “backfire.” According to a new report, the U.S. has gotten nearly $6 trillion poorer and Russia has gotten about $600 billion richer. This has become a NATO Ukraine disaster, and now they are talking about giving land for peace. Can peace come before NATO starts a nuclear war? Let’s hope so.
Another week and more CV19 bioweapon/vax murders. These people are young and “died suddenly” for no apparent reason. You don’t die suddenly at 38 years old for some unexplained reason, but that is exactly what happened to Broadway star Chris Peluso. When is the mass awakening to the CV19 death and disability program going to happen? Not soon enough. We really should start calling this phenomenon “Murdered Suddenly.”
A tale of woe and the forgotten class of American workers...
By Bill Bonner
"I've been sellin' my soul, workin' all day,
Overtime hours for bullshit pay,
So I can sit out here and waste my life away
Drag back home and drown my troubles away.
It's a damn shame what the world's gotten to,
For people like me and people like you.
Wish I could just wake up and it not be true,
But it is, oh, it is.
Livin' in the new world
With an old soul,
These rich men north of Richmond
Lord knows they all just wanna have total control
Wanna know what you think, wanna know what you do,
And they don't think you know, but I know that you do,
'Cause your dollar ain't shit and it's taxed to no end
'Cause of rich men north of Richmond..."
~ Oliver Anthony
Youghal, Ireland - "First, a news flash: our legendary Doom Index has turned suddenly and decisively down – more so than in 2020. What that means, we don’t know…but we’ll find out. Dan will have more details later this week. Back to the ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’…
Increasingly Insufferable: Virginia used to be a ‘southern’ state. But today, north of Richmond, is the red, white, and blue of the US federal government…reaching down to Fredericksburg…with the military industrial/spook complex concentrated around the northern suburbs of Washington, DC.
The rich men north of Richmond are a fabulous race of super-achievers. After subduing the South, they fanned out – Nicaragua…Panama…Cuba…the Philippines…France…and they kept going until they had troops all over the world. They built factories to turn out automobiles and tanks. They built big cities – New York, Gary, San Francisco. They made movies, sang songs and got rich.
But in 1913, they set up the Fed…and the IRS. Then, in 1971, they changed the dollar to make it easier for them to get even richer. And over time, they became more and more insufferable.
Why do US soldiers still camp in South Korea, Japan and Germany – not to mention Niger and the Gulf of Guinea, you might ask? Why does the president of the US, on his own say-so, tell us with whom we can trade and with whom we cannot? Why can’t we say what we really think without getting canceled or charged with a ‘hate crime.’ It’s because the rich men north of Richmond ‘just wanna have total control.’
They created the US empire, with its $33 trillion in debt…its 200,000 pages of regulations…its lobbyists, politicians, grifters, scoundrels and hacks…it perennial, losing wars…its vast, clunky bureaucracy…its incompetent experts…its giveaway programs…unbalanced budgets…claptrap theories…and worthless campaigns against drugs, poverty and free speech.
“Bullsh*t Pay”: For most people, the federal government is a terrible burden, a scam and a shame. But it works well for the people north of Richmond. Just look at the big, new sparkling office buildings along the beltway…and the many new McMansions in McLean or Falls Church.
But away from the centers of power, things are not so sweet. Real wages, south of Richmond, have not increased significantly since 1975, nearly 50 years ago. And today, many…if not most…Americans work for “bullsh*t pay” going further and further into debt. The total amount of credit card debt outstanding bounded over $1 trillion for the first time last week. And the interest rate rose over 20%. How much is left? How do they pay the rent?
The Wall Street Journal reports: "The U.S. has seen a record increase in homeless people this year as the Covid-19 pandemic fades, according to a Wall Street Journal review of data from around the country. The data so far this year are up roughly 11% from 2022, a sharp jump that would represent by far the biggest recorded increase since the government started tracking comparable numbers in 2007. The next highest increase was a 2.7% jump in 2019, excluding an artificially high increase last year caused by pandemic counting interruptions."
Deaths of Despair: And here’s Joseph Stiglitz describing the grim lives of half the country: "Families in the bottom 50 percent hardly have the cash reserves to meet an emergency. Newspapers are replete with stories of those for whom the breakdown of a car or an illness starts a downward spiral from which they never recover.
… U.S. life expectancy, exceptionally low to begin with, is experiencing sustained declines. This in spite of the marvels of medical science, many advances of which occur right here in America and which are made readily available to the rich. Economist Ann Case and 2015 Nobel laureate in economics Angus Deaton describe one of the main causes of rising morbidity—the increase in alcoholism, drug overdoses and suicides—as “deaths of despair” by those who have given up hope."
The Associated Press adds the latest numbers: "About 49,500 people took their own lives last year in the U.S., the highest number ever, according to new government data posted Thursday. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which posted the numbers, has not yet calculated a suicide rate for the year, but available data suggests suicides are more common in the U.S. than at any time since the dawn of World War II."
“There’s something wrong. The number should not be going up,” said Christina Wilbur, a 45-year-old Florida woman whose son shot himself to death last year. Yes, there’s something wrong. A “bi-partisan stench” is coming from the Potomac, says Spectator magazine, with “plenty of blame to go around.”
Or, as Glenn Greenwald puts it: "The relevant metric now isn't left versus right. It's anti-establishment versus pro-establishment. Namely, do you think the loss of trust that these institutions of authority have suffered is valid or not? Do you think that they deserve the contempt in which they are held by a large portion of the population? I believe it's absolutely justified to hold them in contempt... That's the fundamental distinction that defines our political spectrum more than old definitions of left versus right."
Yes…Oliver Anthony is right. It’s the ‘rich men north of Richmond’ who threaten us all. More to come…"
"In 2021 we had record savings of over $2 trillion. I believe that this was just stimulus checks that haven’t been unloaded yet. All of this money is now gone. They’re telling us that the savings rate is at an all time low and that people only have $500 million left."
"As inflation and many other factors continue to raise prices at the grocery stores, we are at Target to check out all of their store brand grocery options. Some of these items we show are not only a cheaper option, but good quality as well!"
"Restaurant prices are still rising all across the United States, and even your regular coffee order at Starbucks is going to get more expensive in the coming weeks. According to a new report, this is the fifth time Starbucks is raising menu prices in two years. The coffee house chain is also implementing “additional pricing actions” that can result in extra fees for some beverages as it attempts to boost its bottom line in the second half of 2023. Many consumers have already started to notice price changes in their area recently, and while some complain about yet another spike in menu costs, the company is seeing profits go through the roof. The controversial pricing strategy is being followed by multiple fast food and restaurant chains right now as they prepare for a consumer recession and introduce their final price hikes before the economy starts to crater again.
Food industry analysts with NBS revealed that over the past couple of years, Starbucks products faced price hikes of 20% to 30%. And according to the international company's second-quarter financial report, it looks like lattes aren't going to cost less any time soon. The last price increase announced by Starbucks dates to May 6, when it passed along a 20-cent hike on the cost of several beverages. So far this year, it raised prices by an average of 70 cents. In a recent interview, new CEO Laxman Narashiman said Starbucks price increases will moderate from now on. Thankfully, this means that they may not be as high as before. But the bad news is that they’re still happening.
Its latest earnings report cited higher operating expenses such as the rising cost of food, labor, and packaging as a reason why it will raise prices once more in 2023. However, the company’s announcement was met with criticism after people pointed out the decline in global coffee bean prices and other commodities in the past few months.
The company’s earnings report reveals that price increases drove net revenues up 15% year-over-year to a record $8.1 billion in 2022. The coffee house chain reported a 31% increase in profits in the past three months. According to historian Andy Lewis, Starbucks' explanation for the impending price increases amounts to nothing more than "word salad to hide corporate greed." On a similar note, the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen responded with outrage to Starbucks increasing prices for the fifth time after giving its CEO a nearly 40% raise last year. "Corporations are jacking up prices on consumers and using concerns about a recession as cover to do so," he wrote.
At this moment, many big names in the restaurant industry are doing the same as Starbucks.Part of those added costs may indeed be unnecessary considering how much these companies are making. But the reality is that they can feel that much harder times are ahead of us and they’re trying to better position themselves to fight the recession that is starting to unfold. The restaurant business is the first to go down when a major economic downturn hits. That’s what happened during the pandemic when thousands of locations were shut down due to collapsing sales. A similar fate seems to approaching us, and those who didn’t come up with a plan won’t survive the storm."
"In "Savitri" by Sri Aurobindo, Savitri discovers that her love, Satyavan has only one year left to live. She must decide whether or not she will stay with him in the emerald forest or search for a new love. But another answer came, and she outwitted death itself."
“About 70 million light-years distant, gorgeous spiral galaxy NGC 289 is larger than our own Milky Way. Seen nearly face-on, its bright core and colorful central disk give way to remarkably faint, bluish spiral arms. The extensive arms sweep well over 100 thousand light-years from the galaxy's center.
At the lower right in this sharp, telescopic galaxy portrait the main spiral arm seems to encounter a small, fuzzy elliptical companion galaxy interacting with enormous NGC 289. Of course spiky stars are in the foreground of the scene. They lie within the Milky Way toward the southern constellation Sculptor.”
“I’m sure I have referenced here before the poems of Grace Schulman, she who inhabits that sweet melancholy place between “the necessity and impossibility of belief.” Between, too, the necessity and impossibility of love.
Belief and love. They have so much in common, yet are as distinct as self and other. How strange that two people can hitch their lives together, on a whim, say, or wild intuition, knowing little if nothing about the other’s hiddenness, about things that even the other does not fully understand and couldn’t articulate even if he did. Blind, deaf, dumb, they leap into the future, hoping to fly, and, for a moment, soaring, like Icarus, sunward. The necessity of wax. The impossibility of wax. We “fall” in love, they say. Schulman: “We slog. We tramp the road of possibility. Give me your arm.”
“Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him – his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition – no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him - neither name nor money to bequeath – a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here! Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game? That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “Tomorrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.”
“My task, which I am trying to achieve, is by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel; it is, before all, to make you see. That and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm, all you demand – and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”
"Nebraska congressman, Don Bacon was just informed that the CCP had infiltrated his office. They were spying on his telephone and his emails. This needs to stop. We can’t have China doing this anymore."
“One could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."
"In this video, renowned trend forecaster Gerald Celente shares his invaluable insights on the current economic landscape. Brace yourself for an eye-opening discussion as Celente delves into his predictions on an impending market crash and bank bust. As the founder of Trends Research Institute, Celente has a proven track record of anticipating major economic shifts. His analyses have been sought after by leading corporations and financial institutions worldwide. With his expertise, he provides an intriguing glimpse into the future of global markets. During this captivating interview, Celente reveals the underlying factors that contribute to the potential market crash and bank bust."
"Egon von Greyerz (EvG) stores gold for clients at the biggest private gold vault in the world buried deep in the Swiss Alps. EvG is a financial and precious metals expert. EvG is a former Swiss banker and an expert in risk. He says the risk in the global markets has never been this high.
EvG explains, “Credit has increased dramatically through derivatives. All instruments being issued now by banks, pension funds, stock funds, it’s all synthetic. There is no real underlying payments in anything almost. Therefore, my estimate for derivatives would be at least $2 quadrillion, and I think that is probably conservative. Then, we have debt on top of that of $300 trillion, and we also have a couple hundred trillion dollars of unfunded liabilities. So, we are talking about $2.5 quadrillion, and that’s with a global GDP of $80 trillion. So, there is a disaster waiting to happen, and especially because all this created money has created no value whatsoever. I always knew this would collapse, and it’s taken longer than I expected, but I think we are at the end of a major era.
These derivatives, at some point in the coming few years, will actually turn into debt. Central banks will have to cover all the outstanding liabilities of the commercial banks as we are seeing now with Credit Suisse, Bank of England and etc. This is going to happen across the board. Whether it’s called derivatives or called debt, as far as I am concerned, it’s the same thing. It will have the same effect on the world financial system, which will be disastrous, of course.”
EvG says the derivative markets were simply a way for financial institutions to carry debt and not show it on their balance sheets. In the end, everything will balance out. EvG goes on to say, “Nobody can repay the debt, and they can’t even pay interest. So, therefore, when the debt implodes, so will the assets that were financed by this debt. So, both sides of the balance sheet have to come down. Whether it comes down by 50%, 75% or 90%, I don’t know. All I think about is risk, and the financial system will not survive in its present form. Central banks only use one kind of medicine, and that is more printed money. Now, you are getting negative returns on printed money. So, that is not going to save anything.
Sadly we are looking at a situation when this system will start to implode. The rich are still rich, but the poor are really poor. Overall in the UK, Germany and most European countries, people don’t have enough money to live. This is a human disaster already. With food costs going up 25% and energy going up the same and gasoline, interest rates and rents, people don’t have enough money, and that is happening now. It’s a human disaster of mega proportions. It’s so sad, and governments will have no chance of doing anything about it.”
In closing, EvG says, “This is why it is getting closer for implosion because the whole system can’t take this. The risk is increasing exponentially. So, I think people should be prepared. Most asset markets have lost money, and it is going to get worse.” There is much more in the 43-minute interview.
"There are two great financial gurus out there. One is Grant Cardone. He’s a brilliant salesman and a real estate guru. The other is Dave Ramsey. Dave Ramsey believes that you should save and build wealth, slow and steady. Grant Cardone steps forward and says “you don’t need savings.“
“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy."
~ Alexander Fraser Tyler (15 October 1747 – 5 January 1813)
Youghal, Ireland - "Politics…geopolitics…megapolitics…B.S., theft and murder. But now, they come at us hard and fast. In Argentina politics is front and center – along with an historic test of democracy itself. In Ukraine, the geo-political ‘game’ brings joy to a few…profits to some…and misery to many. And in the US itself, megapolitics sink the empire. Today, we look at politics…in the land of the gauchos. We admit a prejudice. We have a special affection for Argentina and live there part of the year. And what a learning experience! Every dopey policy…every jackass program – the Argentines have tried them all.
Democracy: Testing, Testing…Yesterday came news that the peso is plummeting again, the dollar is soaring, and the central bank raised its lending rate to 118%! But it is still behind the actual inflation rate, believed to be around 120%. What’s new? Inflation is a very old story. It’s how the elite transfer power and money to themselves – beyond what they can get from taxation and borrowing. But since inflation so obviously harms the common man…and since it is the common man who ultimately prevails in an election…democracy requires a level of fraud not normally seen in a monarchy or an autocracy. And now, in Argentina, we are witnessing an important test.
We know inflation can be stopped. Paul Volcker did it in 1980. But Volcker was not elected. Inflation peaked at only at 13%. And the national debt was less than $1 trillion. Even then, it was a close call. Volcker pushed the key Fed rate up to 20%. Politicians and activists howled. They called for his head and burned an effigy of him on the Capitol steps. They said he was ruining the economy. Ronald Reagan had just been elected; he had a few years before he had to face the voters again. He stuck with Volcker and the job got done.
Today, that scenario is almost unimaginable. The national debt is almost $33 trillion. Households, businesses, investors, and the government itself – all are hooked on cheap money. And neither major candidate for president – Biden nor Trump – favors a return to balanced budgets or ‘hard’ money. Thank God, the masses are so easy to bamboozle. They think inflation is caused by capitalist ‘greed’ or ‘supply chain disruptions’ or foreign suppliers – the Chinese!
Burning Down the Bank: But after many years, these miscues lose their appeal…and voters begin to suspect that it is the politicians themselves who are to blame. Then, a ‘vote the bums out’ movement takes hold…and enterprising politicians promise reform. Usually, the ‘reform’ candidate is just another bamboozler. But the voters can’t tell the difference. Donald J. Trump, for example, is no real reformer. But he plays one on TV and that is enough for many voters.
Real reformers, on the other hand, pose a threat to the Elite Establishment. In Niger, the elected president seems to have threatened the power of the military. So, the generals locked him up. And in Pakistan, here’s the latest. The Cradle:
"In a striking judicial development on 5 August, a court in Islamabad handed down a significant verdict against former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan. The court found him guilty of a serious lapse in his responsibilities, specifically his failure to report the sale of state gifts on his income tax and asset declaration forms. Consequently, the popular politician and former cricket star was sentenced to three years in prison and, notably, was further disqualified from seeking public office for a minimum period of five years."
Cometh Javier Milei in Argentina. He has 5 dogs named after economists. He used to play guitar in a rock ‘n’ roll band. And now he delivers fiery speeches, proposing to burn down the central bank and do away with the peso altogether.
A Fruitful Alliance: We have a financial research business in Buenos Aires. There, as here, we publish ideas and opinions that are out of step with the mainstream press. When he was just beginning his long-shot campaign, Milei contacted us. We – our local CEO – introduced him to former Argentine president, Mauricio Macri. It now looks like a fruitful alliance.
Milei proposes to do away with welfare, streamline the military and cut government spending to an affordable level – the very opposite of what the masses generally favor. And yet, in the primary election on Sunday, he stunned observers with a victory. TIME: "Far-right populist Javier Milei rocked Argentina’s political establishment Sunday by emerging as the biggest vote-getter in primary elections to choose presidential candidates for the October general election in a nation battered by economic woes.
Milei, an admirer of former U.S. President Donald Trump, says Argentina’s Central Bank should be abolished, thinks climate change is a lie, characterizes sex education as a ploy to destroy the family, believes the sale of human organs should be legal and wants to make it easier to own handguns.
With around 92% of polling locations reporting, Milei had around 30% of the total vote, according to official results. The candidates in the main opposition coalition, United for Change, were at 28% and the current governing coalition, Union for the Homeland, had 27%. Celebrating in his election headquarters, Milei vowed to bring “an end to the parasitic, corrupt and useless political caste that exists in this country.” “Today we took the first step toward the reconstruction of Argentina,” he said. “A different Argentina is impossible with the same people as always.” Whoa!
It was just a primary. And veteran politicians, their pet reporters and their hit men have ways of sidelining real reformers. But the election is worth watching. The masses usually want something-for-nothing. Politicians who promise to deliver it get elected. Those who tell the truth are defeated. Or worse. Can a popular democracy ever escape the trap described by Mr. Tyler, above? We’ll find out."
