Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Youghal, Ireland...
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.
~ 2 Corinthians 4:18
America is headed to ‘the most predictable crisis ever’ – a debt debacle. How the country prepares for…averts…or succumbs to that crisis is the number one financial story for the next decade. It will largely determine what happens to our savings and investments…and to the country itself.
Why don’t we hear more about it?
Already, the interest on our national debt has risen to over $1 trillion per year. This is not a ‘discretionary’ outlay. It has to be paid. And the amount will get larger as US debt rises to $40 trillion…and then $50 trillion.
So, let us look at the reason we have so much debt, and what the elites who control our financial and military policies will do about it.
Debt comes from deficits. And deficits are a way for the elites to spend more money (much of it going to themselves) without generating too much opposition from the voters. In effect, they take it from future generations, to be paid…eventually…in defaults and/or inflation. Their fortunes and their hearts are thus deeply embedded in America’s $34 trillion of debt. It was the EZ money regime – 2009-2020 – that brought about that debt…and vastly increased the wealth of the top 5% of the population (aka the ‘deciders).
Disseminating Propaganda
This week we’ve been exploring a theme from Mike Benz, who claims that the US has already become a military dictatorship, which directs most of the ‘discretionary’ spending to itself. We’ve seen, too, that reducing military spending is the only plausible way to avoid a debt crisis. Today, we add another explosive charge. This time, the allegation comes not from Mike Benz, but from ourselves. For now we see that cutting the US dollar off from gold in 1971 not only created an Everest of debt and a whole class of privileged elite; it also turned the US military against the people it is supposed to defend. The firepower industry insists on bigger deficits and more debt; ‘The People’ would rather have a solvent government.
It is a bit of a stretch to call the US a ‘military dictatorship.’ So too, it is an exaggeration to say that the US media is ‘controlled’ by self-serving elites. But Benz is right that the important decisions are not made by the voters, but by the elites – academic, bureaucratic, political, media, Wall Street…and, most importantly, by the biggest and most powerful special interest in the country – the firepower industry.
We’ve seen too that America’s spooks have been disseminating propaganda and manipulating elections overseas for the last 70 years. Would it really be so shocking to find out that they do it at home too? Maybe they have the right to do so?
Here’s lifesitenews:
Supreme Court to hear case on Biden admin censorship collusion with Big Tech
The forthcoming Supreme Court decision may decide the status of free speech in America. Though the First Amendment prohibits restrictions on free speech by federal agencies, the legality of federal influence over social media companies is not clearly defined.
Murthy v. Missouri…the case is significant, as it treats the 2023 decision of the Supreme Court to stop an injunction which ordered the Biden administration to halt its online censorship of a host of controversial subjects, including “the COVID–19 lab leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
A Conflict of Interest
The whole idea that there are ‘elites’ and that their interests are no longer aligned with those of the great mass of Americans must be disturbing to many people…and might need some discussion. The mainstream press, for example, doesn’t believe it. They don’t recognize a conflict of interest between the deciders and ‘The People’ …nor have we seen any ‘opinions’ that suggest it. This does not mean that there’s a conscious effort to ‘suppress’ the idea; it is just not a thought that the elites think is worth having.
Also, the ‘class struggle’ has a distinctive and disreputable history. Marxists used the notion of a conflict between capitalists and labor to argue that the proles should take charge and eliminate the capitalists all together. We harbor no such opinion. Both workers and capitalists, owners and employees, rich and poor, benefit from a free, open and honest economy. Who actually ‘owns’ the means of production is irrelevant. It’s who calls the shots that counts.
In that regard, every society has people who are more ambitious, and perhaps smarter and better educated, than most. These people naturally assume leadership positions and congregate, like flies on a dung-heap, in government. Over time, naturally…organically…with no intent to steal, cheat or defraud…they enact laws, rules, regulations and practices which favor themselves, their agenda, their friends, their cronies…and their ‘caste.’
‘On Message’
They fight poverty, pollution, inequality, drugs, alcohol, terrorists, Russia, Palestinians – drawing on their experts …administrators…bureaucrats…officers…contractors and kibitzers, all from the educated elites. Their power grows and their purses burst at the seams. This is not exactly ‘corruption;’ it is just the ordinary ‘mission creep’ of an established elite.
But as it progresses, it becomes more and more at odds with a free, healthy society.
It also requires greater and greater efforts to keep the public ‘on message’…
That’s why the mainstream media were so negative on Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin. “Reprehensible,” they said. It was “two hours of propaganda,” they claimed. Or this gem from Hillary Clinton: Carlson was a ‘useful idiot’ for the Kremlin.
Tucker’s sin was not that he talked to Putin but that he allowed Putin to talk to us. Americans, many for the first time, were given a narrative that had not been approved by the US military-media-foreign policy Establishment.
Stay tuned…
Regards,
Bill Bonner