|
The Food and Drug Administration has just approved the Pfizer covid shot, paving the way for the roll-out of vaccine mandates across the public and private sector. Will there be push-back? Also today, the FBI shoots down Jan 6th "insurrection" myth and former head of CIA and NSA calls for unvaccinated Trump supporters to be sent to Afghanistan to be killed...
Since Nixon's detachment of the dollar from gold, fiat money has been a decades long failure. It has financed overwhelming government interventions, both at home and abroad. A government that can lean on The Fed to counterfeit money is a government that is financially unrestrained by the people. Reforms are coming as the monetary failure reaches a crescendo.
The mask debate is again raging in the US, and again it is becoming a political football. Red state governors are attacked in the mainstream media for not re-imposing mask mandates while blue state governors where cases are increasing get a pass. So what's it all about? Public health? Also today - the California recall is becoming a referendum on masks and mandates. Finally - should we import thousands of Afghans?
The lightening-fast Taliban takeover of Afghanistan has left billions of dollars of US weapons scattered around the country for the taking. And this doesn't just mean rifles or handguns. After 20 years of fighting them, the US has turned into the Taliban's biggest weapons supplier. But the US arms merchants got paid...
There was much to approve of in President Biden's speech explaining his decision to pull out of Afghanistan...and a few yellow flags of caution. We'll discuss the good and the bad. Also today: beware of new and dangerous legislation introduced in Congress. New Zealand madness. And more...
By Ron Paul
This weekend the US experienced another “Saigon moment,” this time in Afghanistan. After a 20 year war that drained trillions from Americans’ pockets, the capital of Afghanistan fell without a fight. The corrupt Potemkin regime that the US had been propping up for two decades and the Afghan military that we had spent billions training just melted away. The rush is on now to find somebody to blame for the chaos in Afghanistan. Many of the “experts” doing the finger-pointing are the ones most to blame. Politicians and pundits who played cheerleader for this war for two decades are now rushing to blame President Biden for finally getting the US out. Where were they when succeeding presidents continued to add troops and expand the mission in Afghanistan? The US war on Afghanistan was not lost yesterday in Kabul. It was lost the moment it shifted from a limited mission to apprehend those who planned the attack on 9/11 to an exercise in regime change and nation-building. Immediately after the 9/11 attacks I proposed that we issue letters of marque and reprisal to bring those responsible to justice. But such a limited and targeted response to the attack was ridiculed at the time. How could the US war machine and all its allied profiteers make their billions if we didn’t put on a massive war? So who is to blame for the scenes from Afghanistan this weekend? There is plenty to go around. Congress has kicked the can down the road for 20 years, continuing to fund the Afghan war long after even they understood that there was no point to the US occupation. There were some efforts by some Members to end the war, but most, on a bipartisan basis, just went along to get along. The generals and other high-ranking military officers lied to their commander-in-chief and to the American people for years about progress in Afghanistan. The same is true for the US intelligence agencies. Unless there is a major purge of those who lied and misled, we can count on these disasters to continue until the last US dollar goes up in smoke. The military industrial complex spent 20 years on the gravy train with the Afghanistan war. They built missiles, they built tanks, they built aircraft and helicopters. They hired armies of lobbyists and think tank writers to continue the lie that was making them rich. They wrapped their graft up in the American flag, but they are the opposite of patriots. The mainstream media has uncritically repeated the propaganda of the military and political leaders about Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and all the other pointless US interventions. Many of these outlets are owned by defense industry-connected companies. The corruption is deep. American citizens must also share some blame. Until more Americans rise up and demand a pro-America, non-interventionist foreign policy they will continue to get fleeced by war profiteers. Political control in Afghanistan has returned to the people who fought against those they viewed as occupiers and for what they viewed as their homeland. That is the real lesson, but don’t expect it to be understood in Washington. War is too profitable and political leaders are too cowardly to go against the tide. But the lesson is clear for anyone wishing to see it: the US global military empire is a grave threat to the United States and its future. 
By Chris Rossini
As each day passes, the picture gets clearer and clearer, and the authoritarian narrative continues to fall apart. As of August 2021: - The vaccinated can give Covid to other vaccinated individuals. - The vaccinated can give Covid to unvaccinated individuals too. - The unvaccinated can give Covid to vaccinated. - The unvaccinated can give Covid to the unvaccinated. In other words, we're back to the state of affairs where anyone can spread Covid to anyone else. And yet, the propaganda is that everyone must FEAR and shame the unvaccinated! No one is told to fear or shame the vaccinated, even though you can catch Covid from them too. No...only the unvaccinated are supposed to feel the needless pressure. Logically, one can see that this makes no sense. But political and economic agendas are not about logic. They're about emotion and impulses, not truth. Agendas survive by jamming certain narratives (as false as they may be) through every official and crony megaphone throughout society. And then, repeating it, over and over. But let's think about these unvaccinated people, who are supposedly the cause of all the world's ills... What have they actually done? Did the unvaccinated scare the pants off of everyone, over a virus with a 99.7% (and higher) survival rate? No. The unvaccinated didn't do that. What about the tests (that don't work as advertised)? No again. How about the masks (that don't work as advertised)? No, politicians did these things. How about the lockdowns (that didn't work), and that harmed countless economic, emotional, and physical lives? What about the "vaccines" (that didn't work as advertised)? No and no...Can't blame the unvaccinated. So it seems that we have bigger troublemakers in our midst than those who refuse to have a foreign substance jammed into their bloodstreams without their consent. At first, the vaccines were sold as a panacea. I know people who took the shots. They acted very differently right away. In their minds, they were in the clear. But now we find out, that's not the case at all. They're not in the clear. Then the vaccines were sold as a way to get the wretched masks off of our faces. But once again, that promise was broken too. Now everyone is told to put the masks on again, even if they got the shots. The vaccines were sold as a way to get "freedom back." It's as if government's role is to hijack your freedom and then bribe it back to you. That doesn't sound like anything that can be read in the Declaration of Independence or U.S. Constitution, does it? Well, many received the vaccines believing they'd get their "freedom back" and, lo and behold, that promise was broken too. Today, we're seeing "third doses" being "approved." We're also hearing from Dr. Fauci that you can't rule out "booster shots" indefinitely!!! Now the tyrannical idea of "vaccine passports" being something that ONLY the unvaccinated should worry about turns out to be false. The idea of vaccine passports are terrible FOR EVERYONE! No one gets off the hook. Why? Because being "fully vaccinated" is morphing into something that is no longer fixed. It's turning into a constantly moving target. If that ends up being the case, then the term "fully vaccinated" is just a mirage. It has lost its meaning. You're only "fully vaccinated" until your next dose is "approved." Which means...keeping tyrannical passports "up to date" will necessarily be a moving target too! Let's say that it plays out this way, and we get to the 4th, 5th ... 10th, 15th shots? What if you don't want to be on this subscription plan? Too bad!...There's no going back now. Once the "passport system" is in place, there will be no Customer Service numbers to call to cancel. You want to eat out? Go to a concert? Go to a ballgame? You'll need to get that 5th (or 10th, or 15th) shot. So it doesn't matter if today (right now) you did or didn't get the shots. It is in your best interest to passionately oppose "vaccine passports." This is not something that will just be used against "the other guy." It will be used against you ... and once you're trapped, you're trapped. Speak out! Never let it be said that you remained silent when so many important chips were sitting in the middle of the table.
The race is on to blame Biden for the dramatic fall of Saigon...er...Kabul over the weekend. Politicos who've been most responsible for the 20 year disaster continuing are now pointing fingers elsewhere. The truth is there is plenty of blame to go around...but will we finally learn the lessons? Also today, new threats according to Homeland Security...you'll never guess what they are?
By David Stockman
It is perhaps fitting that on the 50th anniversary of Richard Nixon’s dirty deed in August 1971, the US Senate saw fit to pass a budget resolution that will add $3.5 trillion of additional girth to the nation’s already bloated and unaffordable Welfare State. As Forbes properly noted, The Senate on Wednesday set the stage for the biggest expansion of the federal social safety net since the advent of modern-day food stamps, Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s, approving a blueprint for a massive $3.5 trillion budget bill aimed at “restoring the middle class” through a slew of government initiatives – including universal preschool, tuition-free community college and a new federal health program – while combating climate change and hiking taxes for the ultra-wealthy. We make the connection between the Senate’s latest welfare bonanza and Tricky Dick’s severing of the dollar’s link to gold because on that fundamental matter, Alan Greenspan was actually correct. We are speaking, of course, of the Greenspan of 1966 before he fell off the wagon in pursuit of government power, position, praise and pelf. In his seminal but now forgotten speech called “Gold and Economic Freedom”, the proto-Maestro observed, In the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation There is no safe store of value……The financial policy of the welfare state requires that there be no way for the owners of wealth to protect themselves. This is the shabby secret of the welfare statists’ tirades against gold. Deficit spending is simply a scheme for the confiscation of wealth. Gold stands in the way of this insidious process. It stands as a protector of property rights. If one grasps this, one has no difficulty in understanding the statists’ antagonism toward the gold standard. We have bolded the deficit spending part because it has been the lubricant that has enabled Washington to perennially dispense free stuff today while deferring the due bill to the bye-and-bye. Thus, when Greenspan spoke in 1966, the public debt was just $325 billion – virtually every penny of which had been incurred during wartime including LBJ’s Vietnam folly – and amounted to 40% of GDP. And that figure had been steadily falling from the WWII peak of 125%. No more. The public debt now standards at $28.1 trillion and 127% of GDP, and is rising at breakneck speed. After all, on the eve of the Great Recession just 14 year ago (Q4 2007) that ratio had clocked in at only 62.7% of GDP. While both today’s Warfare State and the Welfare State impose vastly excessive and unnecessary burdens on capitalist prosperity in America, it is the latter which has mushroomed since 1966 under the modern regime of chronic deficit finance. We think the very best way to demonstrate that proposition is to compare total government transfer payments to the aggregate wage and salary compensation earned by American workers. That’s because in an honest and sustainable fiscal regime the producers of income must necessarily pay the taxes to fund transfer payments to the non-workers. Alas, when Tricky Dick pulled the plug on sound money in 1971, there was only 15 cents of transfer payments at all levels of government for every dollar of wage and salary income. In money of the day, those figures were:
By the time Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, transfer payments were up to 20 cents on the dollar of wages and salaries, and by the time he had finished shrinking Big Government in 1988 that figure had been whittled back to, well, 19 cents. Thereafter, however, it was pretty much off to the races. Notwithstanding the economic boom of the 1990s, government transfer payment rose to $1.05 trillion by the year 2000 and represented 22 cents for every dollar of wage and salary earnings, which figure rose to 29 cents on the dollar by the time the big spenders of the George W Bush Administration left office in 2008. Yes, the Great Recession bailouts, Obamacare and endless fiscal stimmies enacted thereafter pushed the figure to 33.5 cents of transfer payments per dollar of earned income by the time Barry left office in 2016. But that was just the warm-up for the the Donald’s purported Covid fighting spend-a-thons during 2020. In fact, here are the figures that underlie the staggering 44.3 cents of transfer payments on the dollar of wages and salaries recorded during 2020.
Stated differently, the four-year gain in transfer payments of $1.46 trillion actually exceeded the $1.35 trillion gain in aggregate wages and salaries of 160 million working Americans. And yet there are still masses of delusional “conservatives” who think the Donald was actually a Republican! At the end of the day, Greenspan was right 55 years ago. Politicians and Keynesian economists alike hated the gold standard because it was the great disciplinary anchor that kept the expansionist impulses of the modern Welfare State at least reasonably in check. The irony, of course, is that it was actually Greenspan himself who pioneered monetary central planning when he redefined sound money to encompass monetizing Republican fiscal deficits. That ensured his stature as toast of the town in Washington, but it also paved the way for the Welfare State bacchanalia depicted in the chart below. Government Transfer Payments As % Of Wage And Salary Incomes, 1971-2020 
As it happened, there is a coda to the above which transpired in Q1 2021, and it is nearly too ugly to print. That is, thanks to the Donald’s parting gift in the Christmas Eve stimmies, which was then followed by Sleepy Joe’s $2.3 trillion so-called Covid relief bill in February, shooting the moon got an altogether new definition.
To wit, during Q1 2021 the annual rate of government transfer payments weighed in at $5.92 trillion, compared to wage and salary incomes of just $9.88 trillion. That’s right. Move over Chairman Xi Jinping! America just spent 60 cents on government transfer payments for every dollar of wage and salary income earned during the quarter. And yet….and yet. The fools in the Eccles Building who are monetizing this madness claim that all their lunatic money-pumping is having purely benign, nay, awesome effects, and that currently “elevated” inflation readings are only transitory. Right. The producer price index for finished goods – which embodies pricing pressures in the upstream pipeline – came in this morning at a sizzling 9.4% YoY rate for July. And truly, folks, that ain’t just transitory “base effects”. Here is the trend of the two-year stack on a per annum basis, which, again, averages out the current “elevated” readings with the swoon during last year’s lockdowns. Producer Prices Index for Finished Goods, Annual Increase Rate Of Two-Year Stack:
We are not quite sure how JayPoo and his clueless band of money-pumpers define an accelerating, as opposed to a transitory, trend. But we’d say the above is close enough for government work. Indeed, when it comes to their new-fangled inflation target of 2.00% “averaged over time”, you have to believe they are actually waiting for some kind of monetary Godot. The producer price index is now up by 16.7% since February 2016, which computes to 3.06% per annum. Needless to say, that ain’t price stability, and after 5.4 years running, it ain’t even a matter of averaging to 2.00% over time. 
What it actually amounts to is just more proof that Alan Greenspan got it right the first time when he averred back in 1966 that,
“in the absence of the gold standard, there is no way to protect savings from confiscation through inflation.” For want of doubt, here is the dollar’s purchasing power descent since August 1971. It’s worth just 15 cents today and that’s not transitory! Nor is it productive or equitable. The pro-inflation fools domiciled in the Eccles Building have much to answer for, but foremost is surely the screaming tyranny of a monetary regime that sacrifices the hard-earned wealth of savers and the purchasing power of workers in order to promote the dubious public good embodied in 2.00% inflation. Indeed, the essence of tyranny is the arbitrary and capricious deployment of state power, yet that’s exactly what inflation-targeting amounts to. Plain observation tells you that there is not a snowball’s chance in the hot place that rising prices, wages and costs will move together in exact lockstep – so the longer this foul regime goes on, the greater the social inequity which must inexorably ensue. Decline In Purchasing Power Of The Dollar Since Nixon Did The Dirty Deed In August 1971 
That much is stunningly evident in the chart below. Back in 1989 a newly arrived Greenspan apparently realized that dollar liabilities could be created at will and that the rest of the world would have no choice except to join the Fed’s inflationary caravan by scooping up excess dollars and replacing them with their own currency emissions.
That had the effect, of course, of exporting industrial production and importing goods deflation from China and other low wage venues. That was bad enough for ordinary main street workers and households, but it also wasn’t the half of it. What Greenspan and his heirs and assigns also accomplished was putting goods inflation on a temporary sabbatical, while permitting financial asset inflation to run wild. The chart below is the proof of the pudding and there is no other explanation for it than wanton monetary inflation by the central bank. To wit, in Q3 1989 the net worth of the top 1% stood at $4.891 trillion, which amounted to 6.3X the $737 billion net worth of the bottom 50% of US households. That was when the Fed’s balance sheet stood at about $300 billion and it had taken 75 years to get there from the time of the Fed’s opening in November 1914. Fast forward to the present and the Fed’s balance sheet is 28X larger at $8.3 trillion. Alas, there is absolutely no doubt as to who benefited from that massive monetary inflation. That is, the net worth of the top 1% is now $41.52 trillion, where it stands 16X larger than the $2.6 trillion of wealth held by the bottom 50% of households. The distribution of income and wealth, of course, should be strictly the business of the private market, not the machinations of the state. Then again, it wasn’t private capitalism which boosted the wealth ratio from 6.3X to 16X in barely three decades. That’s the insidious outcome of Tricky Dick’s Dirty Deed 50 years ago this week. Net Worth Of Top 1% Versus Bottom 50% Of US Households 
Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.
When everything (except infrastructure) is considered "infrastructure," politicians are basically saying that they're going to take your money, and they can make up any excuse that they want to do so. The role of government must be seriously reconsidered. We have deviated extremely far from the American government's original role of protecting individual liberty and keeping the peace.
|
Archives
December 2024
 
 
 
 
|
RSS Feed