Monkey Business
As an empire degenerates, civilian authorities become less competent and more corrupt, with too many groups competing for power and money. Elected assemblies become like the monkey cage at the zoo.
Tuesday, February 18th, 2025
Bill Bonner, writing from Baltimore, Maryland
There’s Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). And there’s also Trump-o-philia (ToP). One man hates him. Another loves him. Which one sees most clearly?
“It feels like Christmas, every day. He’s really getting the economy going. And getting rid of all those freeloaders.”
A local real estate agent — a strong Trump supporter — came to visit. She watches the news… and is delighted. Trump attacks the pretensions, waste and balderdash of the Democratic elites. He and his sidekicks, Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, are on the rampage, she believes.
They gut agencies…uncover billions in fraud…and talk tough to foreigners. Europe has lost its way, Vance tells the Old World. You’ll have to spend more to protect yourselves, Trump adds.
“You’re fired,” says Elon…and we’ll “get rich” from tariffs, Trump promises.
What fun!
“I’m heavily invested in [a crypto currency]. I’ve been following them for years. If they keep going up, I’ll have enough to buy a family compound.”
Alas, the young woman might be a little short on cynicalism.
Good luck to her. But we have our doubts.
“Do you know that that foreign aid group was sending millions of dollars to Chelsea Clinton?” said our realtor friend. “They fund the Clinton Foundation… and other groups that she is part of… on the board… a director… something… they have contracts for $84 million. The whole thing was such a scam. It’s a pleasure to see Trump and Musk doing something about it.”
The fact-checkers claim it is not true. Also on the internet, Chelsea’s net worth is reportedly $70 million — which is a lot of scratch for someone who works for non-profits.
What to believe? We don’t know. But compared to the MIC budget, whatever Chelsea gets is peanuts. In order to avoid a financial catastrophe — chaos… inflation… default — the US needs to cut deeper.
Not by a few billion… but by trillions [more on Social Security and Medicare fraud later this week]. And to do that, it needs to trim its ‘transfer’ payments and put its firepower industry back on the leash. That’s the real challenge. And neither TDS nor ToP has anything to do with it. But Bloomberg reports:
GOP Defense Leaders Pushing Trillion-Dollar Pentagon Budget
Rogers, Wicker want defense spending to be close to 5% of GDP. Congress has been wrestling with how the US should prepare for possible future conflict with China and address weaknesses in the defense industrial base supply chain exposed by wars in Ukraine and the Middle East.
That’s right; they’re planning to spend more, not less. Is China readying an attack on California? No? Then why would US policymakers want to spend more money to prepare for it?
Typically, as an empire degenerates, its civilian authorities become less competent and more corrupt, with too many groups competing for power and money. Elected assemblies become like the monkey cage in the zoo, each member dancing a jig for whomever hands out the bananas.
Then, democracy — grown too big, with a growing hodge-podge of fraud and contradictions — awaits its ‘strong man.’ He says something such as “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” recently posted on Truth Social by Donald J. Trump. Claiming to ‘save his country’ he thinks he can do almost anything.
And he’s right. The institutions that might have stopped him have been twisted or strangled — the Constitution, the Courts, Congress…along with the public’s sense of right and wrong. In the 9/11 panic, people learned to get in line to be patted down at airports. Then, the Covid hysteria had them going along with lockdowns…whether they were at any real risk or not. The universities and the press do their parts too — ‘schooling’ or exiling anyone with alternative points of view. They were paid to do it. Asia Times:
How much of USAID’s US$40 billion annual spending and the budgets of the National Endowment for Democracy and other government agencies bought the cooperation of journalists worldwide?
The nearly $270 million in payoffs to “independent media” in the 2025 federal budget – a staggering sum compared to the editorial budgets of the world’s news organizations – may be a small fraction of the total subsidy once payments to so-called charitable foundations are tallied up.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations and other private entities subsidized the same media, bringing the grand total into the billions.
The big man comes like a breath of fresh air to the many ToP sufferers.
Those afflicted most severely with TDS will resist. But that is where the MIC — including muscled-up local police and dumbed down civilians — will come in handy.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Market Note, by Tom Dyson
Gold continues to hit record highs. We suggest a 40% allocation to precious metals, and as I wrote in my update to paying subscribers last week “we’re not selling a single ounce.”
When should we exit the gold trade?
A Dow/Gold ratio of 5 is my primary signal, but this chart is worth keeping an eye on, too. It shows the Fed’s gold backing. When the Fed has ample backing, as it did in 1940 and 1980, it’s a signal that gold may be fully valued. But we don’t have to worry about this yet. Currently, the Fed’s gold backing is about half of what it was in 1969, where gold’s last bull market started.
The whack and slash has to be done by an outsider. I laughed the other day when that congressman said that they should be given to the opportunity to do this under their own efforts. What a joke, that's like putting a bank robber behind the cash register. If they were embracing DOGE, I would be worried, but they are scared to death that the big party is about to get raided. It is going to be messy, but that is part of the business. You can't leave that to someone who wants to be re-elected. Opportunities like this only come so often.
This is the best thing I’ve watched happen in our country since returning from s.e. Asia in 1965. Trump may not be perfect as alas he’s only human, but compared to the sopranos who desacrated the white house for 12 out of 16 years he’s an avenging angel. God speed Pres Trump.