- Paul Craig Roberts: "Is Washington The Most Corrupt Government In History?"
Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,
Robert Mueller, a former director of the FBI who is working as a special prosecutor “investigating” a contrived hoax designed by the military/security complex and the DNC to destroy the Trump presidency, has yet to produce a scrap of evidence that Russiagate is anything but orchestrated fake news.
As William Binney and other top experts have said, if there is evidence of Russiagate, the NSA would have it. No investigation would be necessary. So where is the evidence?
It is a revelation of how corrupt Washington is that a fake scandal is being investigated while a real scandal is not.
The fake scandal is Trump’s Russiagate.
The real scandal is Hillary Clinton’s uranium sale to Russia. No evidence for the former exists. Voluminous evidence for Hillary’s scandal lies in plain view.
Why are the clearly false charges against Trump being investigated and the clearly true charges against Hillary not being investigated? The answer is that Hillary with her hostility toward Russia and her denunciation of Russian President Putin as the “New Hitler” is not a threat to the budget and power of the US military/security complex, while Trump’s aim of normalizing relations with Russia would deprive the military/security complex of the “enemy” it requires to justify its massive budget and power.
Why hasn’t President Trump ordered the Justice Department to investigate Hillary? Is the answer that Trump is afraid the military/security complex will assassinate him? Why hasn’t the Justice Department undertaken the investigation on its own? Is the answer that Trump’s government is allied with his enemies?
How corrupt does Mueller have to be to agree to lead a fake investigation designed to overthrow the democratic election of the President of the United States? Why doesn’t Trump have Mueller and Comey arrested for sedition and conspiring to overthrow the president of the United States?
Why instead is Mueller expanding his investigation beyond his mandate and bringing charges against Manafort and others for decade-old under-reporting of income? Why instead is Congress harassing journalist Randy Credico for interviewing Julian Assange? How does an interview become part of the House Intelligence (sic) Committee’s investigation into “Russian active measures directed at the 2016 U.S. election?” There were no such active measures, but the uranium sale was real.
Why haven’t the media conglomerates that have produced presstitutes instead of journalists been broken up? Why can presstitutes lie 24/7, but a man can’t make a pass at a woman?
Once you begin asking questions, there is no end of them.
The failure of the US and European media is extreme.
The presstitutes never investigate real events.
The presstitutes never question inconsistencies in official stories. They never tie together loose ends. They simply read over and over the script handed to them until the official story that controls the explanation is driven into the public’s head.
Consider, for example, the Obama regime’s claim to have murdered Osama bin Laden in his “compound” in Abbottabad, Pakistan, next to a Pakistani military base. The official story had to be changed several times. The Obama regime claim that Obama and top government officials had watched the raid via cameras on the SEALs’ helmets had to be abandoned. There was no reason to withhold the filmed evidence, and of course there was no such evidence, so the initial claim to have watched the killing became a “miscommunication.” The staged photo of the top government officials watching the alleged live filming was never explained.
The entire story never made any sense: Osama, unarmed and defended only by his unarmed wife, was murdered in cold blood by a SEAL. What in the world for? Why murder rather than capture the “terrorist mastermind” from whom endless information could have been gained? Why forgo the political fanfare of parading Osama bin Laden before the world as a captive of the American superpower?
Why were no photographs taken? Why was Osama’s body dumped in the ocean. In other words, why was all the evidence destroyed and nothing saved to back up the story?
Why the fake story of Osama being given a sea burial from an aircraft carrier? Why was no media interested that the ship’s crew wrote home that no such burial took place?
Why was there no presstitute interest in the fact that the SEAL unit, from which the SEALs on the alleged raid on bin Laden’s compound were drawn, was loaded against regulations in one 50-year old Vietnam era helicopter and shot down in Afghanistan, with all lives lost? Why was there no presstitute interest in the parents of the SEALs complaints about inappropriate procedures that cost their sons’ lives and about fears expressed to them by sons that something was wrong and they felt endangered?
Did the SEAL unit have to be wiped out because the members were asking one another, “who was on that raid?” “Were you on the bin Laden raid?” When in fact no one was on the raid.
Why wasn’t Congress interested?
Why was the live Pakistani TV interview with an eye witness of the alleged raid on bin Laden’s compound not reported in the US media? The witness contradicted every aspect of the official story. And this was immediately after the event. There was no time for anyone to concoct an elaborate counter-story or motive to do so. Here is the interview, and here is a verified translation that confirms the accuracy of the English subscripts.
Osama bin Laden had been dead for a decade prior to the false claim that Navy SEALs murdered him in Pakistan in May 2011. Here are the obituaries from December 2001, and this one from Fox News.
Here is bin Laden’s last confirmed interview. He says he had nothing to do with 9/11. Why would a terrorist leader who succeed in humiliating “the world’s only superpower” fail to boost his movement by claiming credit?
Think about this. The bin Laden story, including 9/11, is fake from start to finish, but it is inscribed into encyclopedias, history books, and the public’s consciousness.
And this is just one example of the institutionalized mass lies concocted by Washington and the presstitutes and turned into truth. Washington’s self-serving control over explanations has removed Americans from reality and made them slaves to fake news.
So, how does democracy function when voters have no reliable information and, instead, are led into the agendas of the rulers by orchestrated events and fake news?
Where is there any evidence that the United States is a functioning democracy?
- Surveillance State: Stanford Researchers Use AI To Determine Neighborhood's Bias By Its Cars
A team of researchers at Stanford University have trained artificial intelligence algorithms to observe and study millions of images on Google Street View to determine how people vote by the make of their car. The algorithms were trained to recognize the make, model, and year of every car produced since 1990, in more than 50 million Google Street View images across 200 American cities.
The data on car types and location were then compared against the most comprehensive demographic database in use today, the American Community Survey, and against presidential election voting data to estimate demographic factors such as race, education, income and voter preferences, the Stanford News reported.
Fei-Fei Li, an associate professor of computer science at Stanford and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, led the team of researchers who published the study on Tuesday in the official journal of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and found a “simple linear relationship” between cars, demographics and political persuasion.
Li is an expert in computer vision and deep learning, a form of artificial intelligence in which she teaches algorithms to “recognize three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional images”. The algorithms were trained, but more importantly, they became self-aware combing through millions of images on Google Street View in identifying the political preference of a citizen through the car they owned.
“Using easily obtainable visual data, we can learn so much about our communities, on par with some information that takes billions of dollars to obtain via census surveys. More importantly, this research opens up more possibilities of virtually continuous study of our society using sometimes cheaply available visual data,” Li said.
According to the study: “If the number of sedans in a neighborhood is greater than the number of pickups, there is an 88 percent chance that the precinct will vote Democratic. Transpose those numbers to have more pickups than sedans and there is an 82 percent chance a precinct will vote Republican.
The algorithms worked day and night for two weeks and were able to probe through 50 million images creating 2,657 categories by make, model, and year. Standford News said that “a human working at a relatively high rate of six images a minute would need 15 years to complete the same task”.
Researchers believe their algorithm could be an inexpensive real time solution to the more costly demographic surveys. For example, the American Community Survey costs the U.S. more than $250 million per year a lag time between data collection and publication that could span 2-years. Li’s algorithm is a hopeful to replace the current surveys.
Not so fast, however said Timnit Gebru, first author of the paper and formerly a member of Li’s lab, who does not “see something like this replacing the American Community Survey, but as a supplement to keep the data up to date.” Gebru has high hopes for the technology of extracting critical information in the world around us on inexpensive platforms such as Google Street View.
“If you walk around a neighborhood looking at cars, the density of traffic sometimes tells you things as valuable as the types of cars you see on the streets. We can use all this information in our algorithms,” Gebru said. Li agreed, counterting that “It can help us understand how our society works, the things people need and how we can improve lives,” Li said. “There is great potential to use computer vision technology in a constructive and benevolent way.”
And while AI algos at an elite academic institution are mapping out the political preferences of each American by location, with what one hopes are ultimately benign intentions, one wonders what would happen if the data fell into the wrong hands, or if – gasp – the “election manipulating” Russians were to do a similar analysis using entirely publicly available data? Would America’s next president be an organgutan?
- Michael Hudson: America's Monetary Imperialism
Authored by Michael Hudson via Counterpunch.org,
In theory, the global financial system is supposed to help every country gain. Mainstream teaching of international finance, trade and “foreign aid” (defined simply as any government credit) depicts an almost utopian system uplifting all countries, not stripping their assets and imposing austerity.
The reality since World War I is that the United States has taken the lead in shaping the international financial system to promote gains for its own bankers, farm exporters, its oil and gas sector, and buyers of foreign resources – and most of all, to collect on debts owed to it.
Each time this global system has broken down over the past century, the major destabilizing force has been American over-reach and the drive by its bankers and bondholders for short-term gains. The dollar-centered financial system is leaving more industrial as well as Third World countries debt-strapped. Its three institutional pillars – the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank and World Trade Organization – have imposed monetary, fiscal and financial dependency, most recently by the post-Soviet Baltics, Greece and the rest of southern Europe. The resulting strains are now reaching the point where they are breaking apart the arrangements put in place after World War II.
The most destructive fiction of international finance is that all debts can be paid, and indeed should be paid, even when this tears economies apart by forcing them into austerity – to save bondholders, not labor and industry. Yet European countries, and especially Germany, have shied from pressing for a more balanced global economy that would foster growth for all countries and avoid the current economic slowdown and debt deflation.
Imposing Austerity on Germany After World War I
After World War I the U.S. Government deviated from what had been traditional European policy – forgiving military support costs among the victors. U.S. officials demanded payment for the arms shipped to its Allies in the years before America entered the Great War in 1917. The Allies turned to Germany for reparations to pay these debts. Headed by John Maynard Keynes, British diplomats sought to clean their hands of responsibility for the consequences by promising that all the money they received from Germany would simply be forwarded to the U.S. Treasury.
The sums were so unpayably high that Germany was driven into austerity and collapse. The nation suffered hyperinflation as the Reichsbank printed marks to throw onto the foreign exchange market. The currency declined, import prices soared, raising domestic prices as well. The debt deflation was much like that of Third World debtors a generation ago, and today’s southern European PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain).
In a pretense that the reparations and Inter-Ally debt tangle could be made solvent, a triangular flow of payments was facilitated by a convoluted U.S. easy-money policy. American investors sought high returns by buying German local bonds; German municipalities turned over the dollars they received to the Reichsbank for domestic currency; and the Reichsbank used this foreign exchange to pay reparations to Britain and other Allies, enabling these countries to pay the United States what it demanded.
But solutions based on attempts to keep debts of such magnitude in place by lending debtors the money to pay can only be temporary. The U.S. Federal Reserve sustained this triangular flow by holding down U.S. interest rates. This made it attractive for American investors to buy German municipal bonds and other high-yielding debts. It also deterred Wall Street from drawing funds away from Britain, which would have driven its economy deeper into austerity after the General Strike of 1926. But domestically, low U.S. interest rates and easy credit spurred a real estate bubble, followed by a stock market bubble that burst in 1929. The triangular flow of payments broke down in 1931, leaving a legacy of debt deflation burdening the U.S. and European economies. The Great Depression lasted until outbreak of World War II in 1939.
Planning for the postwar period took shape as the war neared its end. U.S. diplomats had learned an important lesson. This time there would be no arms debts or reparations. The global financial system would be stabilized – on the basis of gold, and on creditor-oriented rules. By the end of the 1940s the Untied States held some 75 percent of the world’s monetary gold stock. That established the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, freely convertible into gold at the 1933 parity of $35 an ounce.
It also implied that once again, as in the 1920s, European balance-of-payments deficits would have to be financed mainly by the United States. Recycling of official government credit was to be filtered via the IMF and World Bank, in which U.S. diplomats alone had veto power to reject policies they found not to be in their national interest. International financial “stability” thus became a global control mechanism – to maintain creditor-oriented rules centered in the United States.
To obtain gold or dollars as backing for their own domestic monetary systems, other countries had to follow the trade and investment rules laid down by the United States.
These rules called for relinquishing control over capital movements or restrictions on foreign takeovers of natural resources and the public domain as well as local industry and banking systems.
By 1950 the dollar-based global economic system had become increasingly untenable. Gold continued flowing to the United States, strengthening the dollar – until the Korean War reversed matters. From 1951 through 1971 the United States ran a deepening balance-of-payments deficit, which stemmed entirely from overseas military spending. (Private-sector trade and investment was steadily in balance.)
U.S. Treasury Debt Replaces the Gold Exchange Standard
The foreign military spending that helped return American gold to Europe became a flood as the Vietnam War spread across Asia after 1962. The Treasury kept the dollar’s exchange rate stable by selling gold via the London Gold Pool at $35 an ounce. Finally, in August 1971, President Nixon stopped the drain by closing the Gold Pool and halting gold convertibility of the dollar.
There was no plan for what would happen next. Most observers viewed cutting the dollar’s link to gold as a defeat for the United States. It certainly ended the postwar financial order as designed in 1944. But what happened next was just the reverse of a defeat. No longer able to buy gold after 1971 (without inciting strong U.S. disapproval), central banks found only one asset in which to hold their balance-of-payments surpluses: U.S. Treasury debt. These securities no longer were “as good as gold.” The United States issued them at will to finance soaring domestic budget deficits.
By shifting from gold to the dollars thrown off by the U.S. balance-of-payments deficit, the foundation of global monetary reserves came to be dominated by the U.S. military spending that continued to flood foreign central banks with surplus dollars. America’s balance-of-payments deficit thus supplied the dollars that financed its domestic budget deficits and bank credit creation – via foreign central banks recycling U.S. foreign spending back to the U.S. Treasury.
In effect, foreign countries have been taxed without representation over how their loans to the U.S. Government are employed. European central banks were not yet prepared to create their own sovereign wealth funds to invest their dollar inflows in foreign stocks or direct ownership of businesses. They simply used their trade and payments surpluses to finance the U.S. budget deficit. This enabled the Treasury to cut domestic tax rates, above all on the highest income brackets.
U.S. monetary imperialism confronted European and Asian central banks with a dilemma that remains today: If they do not turn around and buy dollar assets, their currencies will rise against the dollar. Buying U.S. Treasury securities is the only practical way to stabilize their exchange rates – and in so doing, to prevent their exports from rising in dollar terms and being priced out of dollar-area markets.
The system may have developed without foresight, but quickly became deliberate. My book Super Imperialism sold best in the Washington DC area, and I was given a large contract through the Hudson Institute to explain to the Defense Department exactly how this extractive financial system worked. I was brought to the White House to explain it, and U.S. geostrategists used my book as a how-to-do-it manual (not my original intention).
Attention soon focused on the oil-exporting countries. After the U.S. quadrupled its grain export prices shortly after the 1971 gold suspension, the oil-exporting countries quadrupled their oil prices. I was informed at a White House meeting that U.S. diplomats had let Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries know that they could charge as much as they wanted for their oil, but that the United States would treat it as an act of war not to keep their oil proceeds in U.S. dollar assets.
This was the point at which the international financial system became explicitly extractive. But it took until 2009, for the first attempt to withdraw from this system to occur. A conference was convened at Yekaterinburg, Russia, by the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). The alliance comprised Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kirghizstan and Uzbekistan, with observer status for Iran, India, Pakistan and Mongolia. U.S. officials asked to attend as observers, but their request was rejected.
The U.S. response has been to extend the new Cold War into the financial sector, rewriting the rules of international finance to benefit the United States and its satellites – and to deter countries from seeking to break free from America’s financial free ride.
The IMF Changes Its Rules to Isolate Russia and China
Aiming to isolate Russia and China, the Obama Administration’s confrontational diplomacy has drawn the Bretton Woods institutions more tightly under US/NATO control. In so doing, it is disrupting the linkages put in place after World War II.
The U.S. plan was to hurt Russia’s economy so much that it would be ripe for regime change (“color revolution”). But the effect was to drive it eastward, away from Western Europe to consolidate its long-term relations with China and Central Asia. Pressing Europe to shift its oil and gas purchases to U.S. allies, U.S. sanctions have disrupted German and other European trade and investment with Russia and China. It also has meant lost opportunities for European farmers, other exporters and investors – and a flood of refugees from failed post-Soviet states drawn into the NATO orbit, most recently Ukraine.
To U.S. strategists, what made changing IMF rules urgent was Ukraine’s $3 billion debt falling due to Russia’s National Wealth Fund in December 2015. The IMF had long withheld credit to countries refusing to pay other governments. This policy aimed primarily at protecting the financial claims of the U.S. Government, which usually played a lead role in consortia with other governments and U.S. banks. But under American pressure the IMF changed its rules in January 2015. Henceforth, it announced, it would indeed be willing to provide credit to countries in arrears other governments – implicitly headed by China (which U.S. geostrategists consider to be their main long-term adversary), Russia and others that U.S. financial warriors might want to isolate in order to force neoliberal privatization policies.
Article I of the IMF’s 1944-45 founding charter prohibits it from lending to a member engaged in civil war or at war with another member state, or for military purposes generally. An obvious reason for this rule is that such a country is unlikely to earn the foreign exchange to pay its debt. Bombing Ukraine’s own Donbass region in the East after its February 2014 coup d’état destroyed its export industry, mainly to Russia.
Withholding IMF credit could have been a lever to force adherence to the Minsk peace agreements, but U.S. diplomacy rejected that opportunity. When IMF head Christine Lagarde made a new loan to Ukraine in spring 2015, she merely expressed a verbal hope for peace. Ukrainian President Porochenko announced the next day that he would step up his civil war against the Russian-speaking population in eastern Ukraine. One and a half-billion dollars of the IMF loan were given to banker Ihor Kolomoiski and disappeared offshore, while the oligarch used his domestic money to finance an anti-Donbass army. A million refugees were driven east into Russia; others fled west via Poland as the economy and Ukraine’s currency plunged.
The IMF broke four of its rules by lending to Ukraine: (1) Not to lend to a country that has no visible means to pay back the loan (the “No More Argentinas” rule, adopted after the IMF’s disastrous 2001 loan to that country). (2) Not to lend to a country that repudiates its debt to official creditors (the rule originally intended to enforce payment to U.S.-based institutions). (3) Not to lend to a country at war – and indeed, destroying its export capacity and hence its balance-of-payments ability to pay back the loan. Finally (4), not to lend to a country unlikely to impose the IMF’s austerity “conditionalities.” Ukraine did agree to override democratic opposition and cut back pensions, but its junta proved too unstable to impose the austerity terms on which the IMF insisted.
U.S. Neoliberalism Promotes Privatization Carve-Ups of Debtor Countries
Since World War II the United States has used the Dollar Standard and its dominant role in the IMF and World Bank to steer trade and investment along lines benefiting its own economy. But now that the growth of China’s mixed economy has outstripped all others while Russia finally is beginning to recover, countries have the option of borrowing from the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and other non-U.S. consortia.
At stake is much more than just which nations will get the contracting and banking business. At issue is whether the philosophy of development will follow the classical path based on public infrastructure investment, or whether public sectors will be privatized and planning turned over to rent-seeking corporations.
What made the United States and Germany the leading industrial nations of the 20th century – and more recently, China – has been public investment in economic infrastructure. The aim was to lower the price of living and doing business by providing basic services on a subsidized basis or freely. By contrast, U.S. privatizers have brought debt leverage to bear on Third World countries, post-Soviet economies and most recently on southern Europe to force selloffs. Current plans to cap neoliberal policy with the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) and Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement (TAFTA) go so far as to disable government planning power to the financial and corporate sector.
American strategists evidently hoped that the threat of isolating Russia, China and other countries would bring them to heel if they tried to denominate trade and investment in their own national currencies. Their choice would be either to suffer sanctions like those imposed on Cuba and Iran, or to avoid exclusion by acquiescing in the dollarized financial and trade system and its drives to financialize their economies under U.S. control.
The problem with surrendering is that this Washington Consensus is extractive and lives in the short run, laying the seeds of financial dependency, debt-leveraged bubbles and subsequent debt deflation and austerity. The financial business plan is to carve out opportunities for price gouging and corporate profits. Today’s U.S.-sponsored trade and investment treaties would make governments pay fines equal to the amount that environmental and price regulations, laws protecting consumers and other social policies might reduce corporate profits. “Companies would be able to demand compensation from countries whose health, financial, environmental and other public interest policies they thought to be undermining their interests, and take governments before extrajudicial tribunals. These tribunals, organised under World Bank and UN rules, would have the power to order taxpayers to pay extensive compensation over legislation seen as undermining a company’s ‘expected future profits.’”
This policy threat is splitting the world into pro-U.S. satellites and economies maintaining public infrastructure investment and what used to be viewed as progressive capitalism. U.S.-sponsored neoliberalism supporting its own financial and corporate interests has driven Russia, China and other members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization into an alliance to protect their economic self-sufficiency rather than becoming dependent on dollarized credit enmeshing them in foreign-currency debt.
At the center of today’s global split are the last few centuries of Western social and democratic reform. Seeking to follow the classical Western development path by retaining a mixed public/private economy, China, Russia and other nations find it easier to create new institutions such as the AIIB than to reform the dollar standard IMF and World Bank. Their choice is between short-term gains by dependency leading to austerity, or long-term development with independence and ultimate prosperity.
The price of resistance involves risking military or covert overthrow. Long before the Ukraine crisis, the United States has dropped the pretense of backing democracies. The die was cast in 1953 with the coup against Iran’s secular government, and the 1954 coup in Guatemala to oppose land reform. Support for client oligarchies and dictatorships in Latin America in the 1960 and ‘70s was highlighted by the overthrow of Allende in Chile and Operation Condor’s assassination program throughout the continent. Under President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the United States has claimed that America’s status as the world’s “indispensible nation” entitled it back the recent coups in Honduras and Ukraine, and to sponsor the NATO attack on Libya and Syria, leaving Europe to absorb the refugees.
Germany’s Choice
This is not how the Enlightenment was supposed to evolve. The industrial takeoff of Germany and other European nations involved a long fight to free markets from the land rents and financial charges siphoned off by their landed aristocracies and bankers. That was the essence of classical 19th-century political economy and 20th-century social democracy. Most economists a century ago expected industrial capitalism to produce an economy of abundance, and democratic reforms to endorse public infrastructure investment and regulation to hold down the cost of living and doing business. But U.S. economic diplomacy now threatens to radically reverse this economic ideology by aiming to dismantle public regulatory power and impose a radical privatization agenda under the TTIP and TAFTA.
Textbook trade theory depicts trade and investment as helping poorer countries catch up, compelling them to survive by becoming more democratic to overcome their vested interests and oligarchies along the lines pioneered by European and North American industrial economies. Instead, the world is polarizing, not converging. The trans-Atlantic financial bubble has left a legacy of austerity since 2008. Debt-ridden economies are being told to cope with their downturns by privatizing their public domain.
The immediate question facing Germany and the rest of Western Europe is how long they will sacrifice their trade and investment opportunities with Russia, Iran and other economies by adhering to U.S.-sponsored sanctions. American intransigence threatens to force an either/or choice in what looms as a seismic geopolitical shift over the proper role of governments: Should their public sectors provide basic services and protect populations from predatory monopolies, rent extraction and financial polarization?
Today’s global financial crisis can be traced back to World War I and its aftermath. The principle that needed to be voiced was the right of sovereign nations not to be forced to sacrifice their economic survival on the altar of inter-government and private debt demands. The concept of nationhood embodied in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia based international law on the principle of parity of sovereign states and non-interference. Without a global alternative to letting debt dynamics polarize societies and tear economies apart, monetary imperialism by creditor nations is inevitable.
The past century’s global fracture between creditor and debtor economies has interrupted what seemed to be Europe’s democratic destiny to empower governments to override financial and other rentier interests. Instead, the West is following U.S. diplomatic leadership back into the age when these interests ruled governments. This conflict between creditors and democracy, between oligarchy and economic growth (and indeed, survival) will remain the defining issue of our epoch over the next generation, and probably for the remainder of the 21st century.
- Mapping The United States Of Welfare
When was the last time you stopped to think about how much the government spends on welfare?
Most people probably don’t think about it too much, but we bet even for those who do, they don’t know how much their government spends, much less what the money actually pays for.
That’s why we created a new map showing you how much each state spends on the public dole.
Our viz takes U.S. Census Bureau data from GoBankingRates to create a map for the entire country. Each bubble represents a state, and the size of the bubble corresponds to the size of the public expenditure on public welfare. We then color-coded each circle according to the size of the expense. Shades of blue mean that the state spends relatively little money, but pink and red indicate a higher-than-average amount. There’s a lot that you can quickly learn by breaking mapping public welfare expenses in this war.
First off, what is public welfare? This can be a controversial topic with a lot of stereotypes, so let’s get our definitions straight. If you rely on public welfare, then you turn to the government for help with paying your basic necessities, like food, housing and healthcare. The federal government runs programs that provide these types of things, and to varying degrees, so do some states. As you can clearly see, some places are more generous than others.
California is the obvious standout on the West Coast, dropping north of $100 billion on public assistance. Texas is the only other Western state with over $30 billion of expenditures, followed by Washington at under $12 billion.
There’s a significant cluster of high-spending states across the Northeast, including New York ($61.4B) and Pennsylvania ($26.8B). Florida stands out in the South at over $27B, thanks in large part to its retirement communities. There’s also a cluster of states in the Upper Midwest in light pink, where there a lot of old manufacturing cities.
We should also point out the states with much smaller expenditures, stretching across the Midwest and into the deep South. The simplest explanation for the lack of huge welfare budgets in these states has to do with geography: there just aren’t a lot of big cities in places like Iowa and Alabama compared to other states. This helps explain why California and New York spend so much on welfare. They rank first and fourth as the most populous states.
Here’s a straightforward list of the top ten states with the highest expenditures on public welfare. Note the enormous difference between California and New York and the rest of the country.
1. California – $103 Billion
2. New York – $61.4 Billion
3. Texas – $35.4 Billion
4. Florida – $27.2 Billion
5. Pennsylvania – $26.7 Billion
6. Illinois – $21 Billion
7. Ohio – $20 Billion
8. Massachusetts – $18.6 Billion
9. New Jersey – $17.3 Billion
10. Michigan – $16.3 Billion
Here’s an interesting fact for you. The top ten states listed above spend more on public welfare ($346.9B) than all of the bottom forty states (plus the District of Columbia) combined ($262.7B).
Regardless of how populated any particular state is, you want to pay attention to these numbers because they foreshadow future budget problems.
When you consider the fact that many states run operating deficits and have enormous debt problems, you begin to wonder if some of these numbers are sustainable for the long term.
- Is The Left Self-Destructing, Or Is Something Else Going On?
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
The temptation to revel in the implosion of the extreme political Left is high, and it's understandable.
I could go through a long list of insane offenses by the cultural Marxist cult of the church of "social justice," but I think this latest example summarizes the problem nicely.
In this video, teaching assistant Lindsay Shepard at Wilfred Laurier University in Canada is reprimanded and brow beaten by two professors for daring to commit the heresy of showing her students BOTH sides of the debate over transgenderism and pronoun politics.
The zealotry on display here by these professors is indicative of a deep-rooted cancer within the Left. Shepard was not attempting to troll her class with misinformation or subtly manipulate them with propaganda, in fact she wasn't seeking to pressure them to support either viewpoint. She was not violating anyone's private property rights to assail them with her arguments, either. Her only goal was to show people in a public space that there are in fact at least two opposing viewpoints on the issue in question. But in a cult it is unacceptable to acknowledge that there are different ways of thinking from the prevailing doctrine. Other beliefs and evidence must be filtered out completely, otherwise, the devout members of the cult might be faced with uncertainty.
If an ideological system is so fragile that it cannot tolerate the slightest hint of legitimate counter-evidence, then something is very wrong with that system. If that system is incapable of arguing its merits using facts and instead relies on the argument of "How dare you!," the only things that could possibly keep it alive are threats of force and terror.
Decades ago, it was the "Christian Right" that was often attacked as being too puritanical and theocratic in its attempts to not only control politics and legislation, but to also control the public mindset. They were not satisfied by merely dictating the laws; they wanted individual people to believe the way they believed, or at least act like it for the sake of conformity. This caused a considerable backlash from the general populace, and over time the image of the rest of Christianity suffered because of the overreach of an aggressive and often self-contradicting and hypocritical contingent.
The social justice cult is running into the same conundrum today. The backlash is reaching epic proportions and the term "SJW" is becoming a household joke, when only a year ago most people had no clue what an SJW was — all they knew was that "political correctness" was furiously taking over Hollywood, the internet, politics, etc.
Most people do not like zealots, no matter what side of the political spectrum they claim to come from. And, whenever zealotry poisons a social movement and causes it to violate the non-aggression principle, there is always a reaction in the other direction from the citizenry. You cannot force people to believe what you believe, to think the way you think or to speak the way you want them to speak.
The laws of social physics at least partially explain the current collapse of the Left. However, I believe there is another underlying agenda taking place here, and it is working to the detriment of all people, regardless of their political affiliations.
In my article "Order Out Of Chaos: The Defeat Of The Left Comes With A cost," published just after Donald Trump's election win, I warned of the potential danger that the Left is being exploited by the establishment as a sacrificial appendage, a tool used to push conservatives to their own extremes and their own zealotry. Meaning, conservatives could be manipulated into embracing government power and totalitarianism in order to crush the zealotry of the cultural marxists. Essentially, we would become monsters in order to defeat monsters.
The next stage in this theater of fourth-generation warfare would be for the Left to hit rock bottom and then rise again from the ashes as something new, and entirely more dangerous.
So, has the Left hit rock bottom yet?
I would note that the tidal wave of mainstream media reports on sexual deviance and misconduct on the part of celebrities and politicians has been composed primarily of people on the left. Celebrity icons that are long time representatives of Democratic party money and support. I find it interesting also that many of these celebrities are people who attacked Donald Trump for his rather minor recorded discussion of sexual activity, the same recording the mainstream media used to admonish him as akin to a rapist.
Whether or not the accused people are guilty, or even require a self-flagellating apology, remains to be seen. I am not one to take the court of public opinion very seriously. That said, I wonder why there have not been more accusations against Republican icons recently? I mean, Republican figures have certainly not been strangers to sexual misconduct in the past, so why are the vast majority of pariahs being exposed today, including Harvey Weinstein, major Democratic players?
My theory is that the establishment and the controlled media are being very selective in their targets and are going after mainly leftists who represent low hanging fruit. But why? As mentioned above, the extreme Left must hit rock bottom, and then mutate into something else. They must be molded into something even more extreme. The social justice cult must be pressured into doubling down.
The people who supported attacks on Trump over his sexual commentary now look like idiots because some of their favorite Hollywood idols are being exposed as allegedly much worse in their behavior. What will their response be, I wonder? Admit they were wrong? Or become even more zealous in their political correctness and indignation?
The obviously fraudulent and completely fabricated Russia-gate issue is also disintegrating. But, contrary to what many conservatives and liberty movement analysts assumed, this piece of propaganda was NOT meant to take down Donald Trump; not in the slightest. In fact, it was meant to help radicalize the Left, to make them more aggressive and violent and to give them false hope that there was a way to get rid of Trump without waiting for another election. That hope is being taken away from them as Russia-gate fumbles.
The people who blindly supported the Russia-gate narrative now look like idiots. What will their response be, I wonder? Will it be to admit they were wrong? Or, will they become even more angry and violent?
The U.S. government is clearly ready to help this narrative along. The FBI and DHS officially classified ANTIFA activities as "domestic terrorist violence" back in September. And, according to Edward Klein who is publishing FBI documentation on leftist groups in his new book, the government is also asserting that leftists have been traveling to Europe to meet with Al-Qaeda and ISIS representatives, apparently to form ties with said organizations and to learn terrorist skill sets.
Do I believe this to be true? No, not really. This kind of agency propaganda reminds me quite a bit of the propaganda used against "patriot groups" over the last decade, including the not so subtle insinuations that "right-wing extremists" would work with Al-Qaeda and form an alliance. Which is, of course, absurd, because right-wingers are pretty adamant about opposing the tyranny inherent in Islam.
The claim may be more believable in the case of cultural Marxists, but still unlikely. What is MORE likely, and what I have been warning about since before Trump's election, is that there will be terror attacks in the name of leftist ideologies, but that these attacks will for the most part be initiated by the establishment. Just as the establishment funded and trained Al-Qaeda and ISIS and then set them loose to create havoc, and just as the establishment has engineered false flag attacks that were automatically blamed on a designated bogeyman, it now appears to be the extreme Left's turn.
If we see catalyzing events like war and continued economic downturn, the chances of Leftists being swept into an engineered fervor are even higher.
The Left is plummeting into the depths of embarrassment and despair. As Trump's first term goes forward, these feelings are probably only going to fester. Civil unrest and rioting are inevitable, but the greater threat is the issue of Gladio-style terror that is obviously being prepared. The narrative is being carefully set. And, at this point, conservatives are all too happy to believe that the Left is capable of almost anything. With the madness they have displayed so far, why wouldn't we think the worst of them?
Again, the danger is that when this begins to happen in great frequency, conservatives may respond by acting against their own ideals of limited government and individual liberty. When terror attacks are blamed on the Left, how will we react? Will we question the validity of the narrative? Will we apply suspicion to the Trump administration, which has only increased the number of swamp creatures in "the swamp" since its inception? Will we seek out solutions to the problem by staying true to the Constitution and without turning to state power? Or, will we embrace the narrative, embrace the Trump administration without question, throw our full weight behind government power and say "Let's stomp lefty faces into the dirt!"
I hope this will not be the outcome, because if it is, then the last vestiges of liberty in America are doomed. Hating the Left could be seen as reasonable and rational in our era, but abandoning our principles is not.
- Australian Banks – First The Housing Bubble Bursts, Now A Public Inquiry
We keep returning to the subject of Australia and the growing signs that its bubble economy is bursting. Earlier this month, we discussed how the world’s longest-running bull market – 55 years – in Australian house prices appears to have come to an end. We followed this up with “Why Australia’s Economy Is A House Of Cards” in which Matt Barrie and Craig Tindale described how Australia’s three decades long economic expansion had mostly been the result of “dumb luck”.
As a whole, the Australian economy has grown through a property bubble inflating on top of a mining bubble, built on top of a commodities bubble, driven by a China bubble.
Last week, in "The Party's Over For Australia's $5.6 Trillion Housing Market Frenzy", we highlighted some scary metrics for Australia’s housing bubble – notably how the value of Australian housing is more than four times gross domestic product – higher than other nations with housing bubbles, e.g. New Zealand, the UK and Canada. Two days ago, we noted the number of Australians optimistic about the year ahead had plunged to a record low.
Moving on to the nation’s banks, while Australian households are the second most indebted in the world, its banks are the most exposed to housing debt…
…which doesn’t augur well if, as we expect, the housing bubble deflates. We pointed out that an additional risk for Australia’s banking sector, which certainly wouldn’t help the property market either, was the growing demand for a public inquiry. This follows a series of scandals relating to misleading financial advice, attempted rate-rigging, fee gouging and alleged breaches of anti-money laundering laws. According to Australia’s ABC News.
But the overwhelming reason for an inquiry rests on just one principle — accountability. What has been forgotten in the endless round of scandals in recent years is that the Australian banking sector is a taxpayer subsidised industry. It's an industry that pays ridiculously bloated salaries to its leaders; that showers itself with massive bonus payments when profits are soaring but instantly demands taxpayer protection and support when the tide turns.
Australia’s biggest lender, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, is currently facing a lawsuit from the country’s financial crime agency alleging it repeatedly breached anti-money laundering laws. A class action suit has been launched resulting in to further probes into alleged misconduct. In May, the government announced an additional A$6 billion tax on the four biggest banks along with Macquarie.
Having resolutely opposed a formal inquiry into the banking industry, which happens to be a major political donor, Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberal-National coalition government has finally caved in to political pressure. According to Bloomberg.
Australia’s banks will be subject to a wide-ranging public inquiry after Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull bowed to pressure to address scandals besetting the industry. The year-long royal commission will examine the conduct of the nation’s banks, insurers, financial services providers and pension funds, and consider whether regulators have enough power to tackle misconduct, Turnbull said Thursday. He pledged the inquiry would not put “capitalism on trial.”
The next part of the story is truly laughable, as the banks suddenly did a 180 degree turn and welcomed an inquiry in a letter which, minutes later, provided the political cover for Turnbull to reverse his opposition. Bloomberg continues.
The announcement came just minutes after Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., Westpac Banking Corp. and National Australia Bank Ltd. dropped their opposition to an inquiry, saying in an open letter to the government that months of political squabbling over the issue risked undermining offshore investor confidence.
“Ongoing speculation and fear-mongering about a banking inquiry or royal commission is disruptive and risks undermining the reputation of Australia’s world-class financial system,” Turnbull said. The inquiry will “further ensure our financial system is working efficiently and effectively.”
In the letter to Treasurer Scott Morrison, the banks’ chief executive officers and chairmen said that political uncertainty was “hurting confidence in our financial services system, including in offshore markets, and has diminished trust and respect for our sector and people.”
“It also risks undermining the critical perception that our banks are unquestionably strong,” the letter said, and urged the government to “act to ensure a properly constituted inquiry into the financial services sector is established to put an end to the uncertainty and restore trust, respect and confidence.”
No evidence of collusion between Turnbull and his banking friends there then. It was merely damage limitation.
“This is not a win for Turnbull — at best it’s a face-saving exercise,” said Haydon Manning, a political analyst at Flinders University in Adelaide. “He obviously realized that a public back-flip today would be less embarrassing than the potential sight next week of members of his own government voting against his policy position in parliament.”
The announcement follows months of campaigning by the main opposition Labor party and some National party MPs (the junior coalition partner), which demanded a royal commission to investigate the banks’ conduct. A Guardian Essential poll published on 27 November 2017 showed that 64% of Australians were in favour. As for its impact on the banks themselves, Bloomberg reports Moody’s sees it negatively impacting investor confidence.
A royal commission has the power to compel documents and summon witnesses to answer questions under oath. “In the short term, this could be embarrassing and has the potential to negatively impact the banks,” Frank Mirenzi, a banking analyst at Moody’s Investors Service, said by phone. “There may be some waning of investor confidence simply due to the headline risk. However in the longer-term, investors will look through this and focus on the underlying financial strength and well-regulated nature of the banks.”
The inquiry is unlikely to “meaningfully alter” the structure of the industry, Mirenzi said, adding the ratings company’s assumption that the government would support the big lenders in the event of a crisis — which underpins their high credit ratings — was unaltered.
The announcement wiped A$8 billion ($6 billion) off the combined market caps of the “big four” banks in early Sydney trading, with Commonwealth Bank declining as much as 2.7%. By the close, Commonwealth Bank was down 1.9%, ANZ down 1.1%, Westpac down marginally and National Australia unchanged.
Betting against Australia’s housing bubble by selling the big four banks has been a “widow-making” trade for years. Maybe, just maybe, that’s beginning to change.
- "Here Are The 3 Questions We Hear Most About Bitcoin Right Now"
As DataTrek’s Nick Colas, formerly chief market strategist at Convergex Group, writes overnight, “we’re doing our best to make sure we don’t flood you with bitcoin/crypto information because there are plenty of other issues with broad appeal.” However, he finds that hard to do when the topic dominates both financial news headlines and popular imagination… and when it goes from $11,000 to $8,900 in two hours.
To address some of the pent-up confusion, here are the three questions (and answers) Colas it getting most about bitcoin at the moment:
#1 Where is all the new interest coming from (i.e. is it just the US?)
Looking at Google Trends, the top five countries for bitcoin searches over the last 24 hours are: The Netherlands, Australia, South Africa, Singapore, and Switzerland. The US is in 8th place. Searches for “Coinbase” (a popular wallet app) come from Malta, Singapore, the US, Norway and Switzerland (in that order). Within the United States, bitcoin is strictly a bicoastal phenomenon. Google searches come most from New York, California, Hawaii, New Jersey, and Washington. Searches for Coinbase look the same.
The upshot is that bitcoin is a tech-enabled (and therefore global) phenomenon, which is a critical feature of its price advance. We can’t think of another financial asset in history where the majority of the world’s citizens can invest as easily as they view an Instagram picture or chat on Twitter. And on that point, one fun (and perhaps telling) statistic: in the US, Google searches for bitcoin are 6-7x greater than those for “Kim Kardashian”. Enough said…
#2 When will the rally stop/slow down, and what is bitcoin’s “Fundamental” Value?
Our best look at bitcoin’s intrinsic worth is to compare it to the total value of American and European high-denomination bank notes in circulation. Both bitcoin and its fiat currency counterparts are portable stores of wealth, which appeals to buyers/holders of each. Yes, fiats are government backed, but you can’t counterfeit a bitcoin. So we’ll call it a draw in terms of relative attractiveness. There are currently $1.1 trillion in $100 bills in global circulation, and $650 billion in high denomination euro notes. Total value: $1.7 trillion, not counting counterfeit notes that likely add 20-30% (in the case of $100 bills at least).
By comparison, bitcoin’s current total value is $167 billion, and total crypto currency outstanding is $307 billion.
The question is: what is the appropriate share for crypto currencies like bitcoin in a market defined as “fiat+crypto currencies”? At current levels, bitcoin’s share is 8%, and all cryptos combined have a 15% share.
Where could this ratio go? Here is a table to consider, assuming bitcoin remains 50% of the total crypto currency market (a fairly sticky ratio lately):
- Bitcoin at $20,000: 14% market share of crypto+fiat paper currency market
- Bitcoin at $50,000: 25% market share
- Bitcoin at $100,000: 33% market share
The calculus here comes down to adoption rates, just as it does with any new technology. One advantage for bitcoin in terms of price: incremental supply comes on very slowly, unlike other tech-enabled products like smart phones where manufacturers produce as many units as possible.
Our take: bitcoin remains a highly speculative asset – the spiciest thing we’ve seen in +30 years on Wall Street. We can see pathways where it continues to climb, but even a glance at a historical price chart shows this is a highly volatile situation. More on that in point #3…
#3 VERY IMPORTANT: What will the entrance of futures exchanges and bitcoin contracts do to the price?
Both the CME and CBOE are set to launch bitcoin futures soon, and today the NASDAQ threw its hat in the ring as well. Moving bitcoin into a regulated structure will allow more sorts of investors and traders to speculate on price moves in the currency. That, the thinking goes, should be good for bitcoin prices.
One intriguing point: shorting bitcoin is currently a clunky process, but futures markets will make it much easier. The difficulty of shorting bitcoin has been an underappreciated feature of its meteoric rise, limiting true price discovery. Whether anyone is brave enough to put on a sizable short position remains to be seen. But someone who wants to back up their “Bitcoin is a fraud” talk with dollars will soon have a place to express their viewpoint.
* * *
And a final, and deeply cautionary, point: yesterday’s plunge in bitcoin’s price may have been caused by a DDOS (Direct Denial of Service) attack on several exchanges. That’s the color from some market observers, anyway. The speed and severity of the decline certainly points to a technological glitch.
Put together the ability to short bitcoin easily with what happened today, and you see the problem. The financial incentives to disrupt the bitcoin exchange/wallet ecosystem increase exponentially once futures start to trade. Whether the world’s bitcoin exchanges and wallets are up to that challenge is an important – and unanswered – question.
- North Korea's Newest Missile Is Capable Of Carrying Multiple Warheads
Contrary to the South Korean government’s initial analysis, the missile launched by North Korea into the waters west of Japan yesterday could represent an important advancement in the country’s missile technology that would allow it to carry multiple warheads.
According to a report in Japanese business newspaper Nikkei, photos of the Hwasong-15 published by local North Korean media showcase a newly developed launch system and casing.
Rodong Sinmun, a mouthpiece for the North's ruling Workers' Party of Korea, published photos of the Hwasong-15, the country's latest intercontinental ballistic missile, at liftoff and mounted on what appears to be a newly developed mobile launch system. The missile seems to involve a completely new rocket, judging by its size and shape, South Korea's Ministry of National Defense said Thursday. The ministry's initial analysis Wednesday claimed the Hwasong-15 was merely a retooled version of the Hwasong-14 ICBMs launched in July.
The shape of the rocket’s nose cone suggests that it was designed with an eye toward carrying multiple warheads, which could make it easier for the North to outfit the rocket with a nuclear payload. Also, by possessing the capability to strike multiple sites with one missile, it would make it more difficult for anti-missile defense systems to intercept it.
The latest missile's nose cone is more rounded than that of its predecessor. This could indicate it was designed with an eye toward a multiple-warhead system, Chang Young-keun of the Korea Aerospace University said in response to questions from South Korea's Yonhap News Agency. It was generally agreed that inserting multiple warheads into the Hwasong-14's pointed nose cone would be difficult.
A missile capable of striking multiple sites at once would be more difficult for ship- and land-based defense systems to fully neutralize than a single-warhead missile. North Korea, long thought to be seeking this technology, would pose a much greater threat as a result.
To be sure, the rounded nose cone may have been designed solely to protect the missile as it reenters Earth’s atmosphere. Atmospheric re-entry has long been a major obstacle for the North’s missile program.
The missile's shape may also be related to technology intended to protect its payload from the stress of re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, said Kim Jung-bong, a professor at Hanzhong University. Heavy use of high-performance material such as carbon fiber could account for the rounded form, Kim said.
Re-entry technology is considered a major hurdle blocking North Korea from deploying a functional ICBM. A warhead must survive the intense heat and pressure of re-entry to be useful as a weapon. The North is thought to have obtained high-performance materials, using them in its quest to clear that barrier.
Finally, the rounded nose might be necessary to allow North Korea to load its rudimentary nuclear warheads on the rocket. US and Japanese officials now believe the North is less than two years away from being able to successfully strike the continental US with nuclear weapon.
A rounder nose cone also allows for a larger payload, perhaps intended to let Pyongyang mount a nuclear warhead on the rocket, a source at Japan's Ministry of Defense said. The North's technology is "certainly advancing," Adm. Katsutoshi Kawano, chief of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces' Joint Staff, told reporters Thursday. Japan will operate under the assumption that "the threat has grown," he said.
Furthermore, the missile’s added girth suggests that it has been outfitted with two engines for the first two stages of flight instead of one.
The Hwasong-15 is 30 centimeters wider than its predecessor at around 2 meters, one expert said. This suggests the missile contains two engines in the first of its two stages, up from one in the Hwasong-14, said Kim Dong-yup, a professor at the University of North Korean Studies in Seoul. The increased thrust could put the entire U.S. mainland within the missile's range without any reduction in the weight of the payload, the professor said.
A Rodong Sinmun editorial posted online Thursday called the launch of the Hwasong-15 a watershed moment for the North. Many think locking down multiple-warhead technology will take some time. But Pyongyang's progress toward a functional ICBM is undeniable.
While there’s still no guarantee the North could pull off a nuclear strike with a high degree of accuracy, a nuclear weapon detonated several hundred miles above the center of the country could destroy the US by causing a giant electromagnetic pulse. Such an attack could kill hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people by wiping out access to electricity across the entire continent.
- "What Can We Do…?"
Authored by Eric Peters via EricPetersAutos.com,
Until enough people’s minds are changed about coercion and collectivism, resistance is futile.
The debate will continue to be about how much should be stolen from whom and for what purpose – rather than about whether anything should be stolen by anyone for any purpose.
As things are, many people believe it is ok to steal from others – provided the stealing is done on their behalf by other people (these are called “tax collectors”) and the stolen goods are called by pleasant but intellectually dishonest, morally evasive names (examples include Social Security, welfare, foreign aid, grants and so on).
Using this technique of doublethink, people are able to do things to other people – or urge they be done to other people, on their behalf – without feeling ashamed or guilty, as they would if they were to do these things themselves, personally.
This “surgical excision” of the psychologically normal human revulsion for other-than-defensive violence and for the use of violence to take things from others is the keystone of the coercive collectivist system. Dislodge it and the whole edifice collapses.
It is that simple – and that hard.
Simple, because the moral principle is already established.
Excluding psychological defectives – the relatively small population in every society that does not feel ashamed or guilty about the use of violence (these people are called “criminals”) most people do feel ashamed and guilty when they steal or resort to violence.
And hence, most people do not steal or resort to violence.
It is a broadly accepted moral principle that theft and violence are wrong things; that those who steal and threaten to harm others in order to get what they want are not good people. This is half the battle, already won.
The problem is the disconnect which occurs once you transcend from the individual to the group.
For some reason, most people – who are good people, basically – are able to not feel shame or guilt when the very things they understand instinctively as well as intellectually to be wrong when they do them on their own are done by people acting in some “official” capacity.
Theft becomes not-theft by the same method that Orwell’s character O’Brien in the novel 1984 used to persuade Winston Smith that the four fingers he was holding up were really five – with the difference being cognitive dissonance on a mass rather than an individual scale, inculcated from youth by a kind of warping of the critical faculty rather than by crude torture, as in the book.
The same person who would never threaten or assault his neighbor in order to take his property or dictate to him how he will be allowed to us his property (even if he had the physical power to do so) refrains from doing so because of the internal “check” of the guilt/shame mechanism about doing violence to others and stealing; yet this same person will feel good about going to the ballot box on election day and pulling a lever that will empower a proxy to do precisely the same things.
He will proudly wear an “I voted” sticker – and gladly accept the stolen goods he receives via proxy theft. He will advocate and defend this, even to the extent of considering his receipt of stolen goods an entitlement (as for instance “my” Social Security). The ends are immaterial; the means are always the same.
So long as it is called anything but what it actually is. So long as the violence necessary to obtain it is obscured from sight – and thought – much in the same manner that one encounters a steak, neatly wrapped, without thinking about the cow that was killed to provide it.
The horror is camouflaged by verbiage.
Social Security. Obamacare. Aid to whomever. All the numerous form of government “help.” All of it comes – obviously enough, if one thinks about it honestly – not from the government but from our neighbors, taken from them against their will in exactly the same way that an ordinary thief takes their property. Only it is called something else and so considered – somehow – to be a normal, acceptable thing. The “price we pay for civilization.”
Organized, codified, legalized thievery without even the self-ware honesty of the street mugger.
Could anything be less “civilized”?
It is exceptionally odd.
These same people also accept the idea that a man wearing a certain kind of costume (i.e., a “law enforcer”) may assault them, effectively at will. And worse, they approve such assaults upon others whose personal activities do not affect them in any way – yet somehow offend their sensibilities.
And then object when the same sort of thing is done to them by others, whose sensibilities are also offended, but for different reasons.
Liberals vs. conservatives. Democrats vs. Republicans. It is a battle over means – but the ends are always the same.
Deconditioning these essentially good but horribly misled people is the first – admittedly gigantic – step away from coercive collectivism. It will be the hardest part, in part because these people are to some degree unconscious. A conscious mind knows that theft is theft in the same way and for the same reason that a chicken is a chicken and not a Labrador Retriever or a pile of wood.
This is self-evident to the conscious mind. It is what Aristotle had in mind when he talked about “A is A” – a thing is what it is and cannot simultaneously be something else. Government schools very deliberately tamp down the critical faculty in favor of repetition exercises – each thing treated as a separate and unrelated thing. Linguistic falsehood being one of the fathers of moral relativism and the grandfather of the much worse things which always proceed from that.
But get people awake . . . get them to see . . . and the unconscious acceptance of generations can be dissipated in a moment.
It is that easy to change the world – by changing the words. By demanding that words be used precisely; that language not be used to obfuscate but to clarify.
Thomas Paine understood this power – and used it to greater effect than the armies of the British Empire at its very peak. He changed people’s minds about a doctrine which had been accepted as not only normal but reasonable by most people – by good people – for generations: The “divine right” of kings.
Paine’s clear, concise language rendered this not merely ridiculous but obnoxious. The idea that a man in an ermine robe with a tiara on his head was somehow special, set apart from other men and entitled to rule over them. Kings suddenly became what they always were in fact: Men who trampled upon the rights of other men.
Only now – courtesy of Paine – people saw it.
It will be the same, some day, with coercive collectivism – whether practiced by Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives. One day, it will also be seen for what it is – and regarded as both ridiculous and obnoxious.
The world can change in an instant.
It begins with a thought.
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