Of the Few, By the Few, For the Few

How government really works...

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Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Youghal, Ireland...

“I have my principles. If you don’t like them, I have others…”  

~ Groucho Marx

In the news yesterday was James Bovard, writing in The New York Post:

Special counsel John Durham exposed Monday how the FBI and Justice Department plotted to rig the 2016 presidential election. His 316-page report proves federal law enforcement was weaponized by shielding the Hillary Clinton campaign and persecuting the Donald Trump campaign.

That was the FBI, colluding with the Hillary Clinton campaign to distort the will of ‘the people.’

America’s CIA also has a well-deserved reputation for chicanery. It interferes in elections all over the world. Would it be so surprising to learn that it meddles in US elections too?

How the Feds Work

In the 2020 contest, 51 CIA retirees signed an open letter in an effort to bury the Hunter Biden Laptop story. They claimed the affair bore all the ‘classic earmarks’ of Russian disinformation and should be disregarded. But there was no evidence of Russian involvement. And the spooks knew it. The Wall Street Journal: 

Biden’s CIA Assist in the 2020 Presidential Election

…a CIA official was using government time and resources to scheme with outside partisans to assist in Mr. Biden’s victory…Consider, too, that this CIA official was better placed to know there was no truth to the letter’s assertion. That very day, then-DNI John Ratcliffe—privy to all—had publicly said the intel community had nothing to support the claim that the laptop was “disinformation.”

This is of interest to us only because it shows how the feds work…and it gives us a hint about how they will deal with the financial crisis ahead. In short, we’ll see how one large group of Americans will be sacrificed to protect a small, more powerful group.

America was s’posed to be a country based on principles, not on brute force or flimflam. But though the bottle was new, the wine was as old as Adam. And it was still intoxicating. In the many generations since The Flood, humans always found ways to cheat. From the bottom deck, from an ace up the sleeve to the wildest cards they could imagine – it was futile and vain to think that they were going to let a constitution or a Bill of Rights – principles – stop them from flimflamming  

We edited a book about it. ‘The Idea of America’ it is called. The idea was that instead of being ‘subjects’ to royal or imperial power, people could run their own lives and govern themselves.   

Rig the Vote

How much tax would they pay? It was up to them. Who would occupy the White House? Their choice. What rules, regulations, standards would be applied? What language would they speak? What flag would they fly? What kind of beer would they drink?  Nobody could say, but themselves. Not the king…not the emperor…not the Grand Poobah…the Sultan…the Doge…neither the Great Khan nor a lesser Khan…no one with roman numerals after his name…no one called “The Magnificent”…no one you had to address as “your highness”…or “your lordship”…no dukes, no barons, no earls, no counts, no viscounts, no no-accounts…no one to whom you had to bend a knee or bow a head.  

Americans could hold their heads up. They were the rulers now…they were the deciders. If there were disastrous public policy decisions to be made, they would make them themselves. For better or for worse, it was meant to be a government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’  

But how could ‘The People’ know that Hillary Clinton was conspiring with the FBI to rig the election of 2016? How could they know which side God is on in the war in the Ukraine? And how could the typical voter know now that he has been set up by both political parties, and by the Fed, to be wiped out by inflation?

Connivers and Hustlers

The idea of ‘democracy’ came from Greek and Romans writers. And it works fairly well – on a small scale. In a small town, for example, where everyone knows who’s who and what’s what, the voters can form their own judgements – good or bad – and come to reasonable decisions.  

But on a large scale, honest democracy is a sham. ‘The People’ don’t really have any idea of what is going on. Nobody knows anything. So, the deciders stack the deck and find new principles more suitable to their ambitions.

This view is deeply offensive to many people. They want to believe that their government is benign…that it is looking out for ‘all of us,’ as Hillary famously put it. But the real government is a thin, polished veneer over the crooked timber that is mass man. It is the rich and powerful…the connivers and hustlers…the Bonapartes and Bidens – using their chutzpah and cunning to get an advantage.  

Yes, government is perhaps inevitable. But like mosquitoes, food poisoning, and social media, the less of it you have, the better off you are.

Our beat is money. And we see ‘inflation’ in a different light than most. It is not an accident. And the damage it inflicts on the middle classes is not ‘collateral;’ it is government policy. It is deliberate. It is a way, not just to fund the programs of the deciders, it is also a way to destroy the middle classes and eliminate them as a political force.

More to come…

Regards,

Bill Bonner

Joel’s Note: Dear readers will recall that it was the Greeks who first gave the world democracy – from the Greek, dēmokratía, literally “Rule by ‘People’”. And yes, it was those very same Greeks who put their own beloved Socrates to death… by a majority vote of 361-140.

Call it “tyranny of the mobjority.”

It seems that, in the murky realm of human affairs, there really is nothing new under the sun. Jealousy, vengeance and pride before the fall… love, loss and betrayal… scheming, scamming and conniving… it stands to reason that any government made up “of men” (by which we include Hes, Shes, Theys and Undecideds) is likely to express the underlying character of our basic human condition, such as it is.

And now, thanks to the wonders of human ingenuity, we can add Artificial Intelligence (AI) to the list of corruptible concerns facing the sacred cow that is modern, representative democracy.

Political scientists and whizz-bang computer engineers have long warned about the potential for advanced technology to usurp the so-called “will of the people” at the voting booth. Ignoring the fact that “the people” have no collective will in the first place, experts fretted that cheap, widely-available AI tools could be used to render “deep fakes,” in which counterfeit audio and video could be produced to sway voter opinion.

Until recently, the images and imitations have been rather crude. But that’s changing… and fast. Reads a story from the Associated Press earlier this week:

Sophisticated generative AI tools can now create cloned human voices and hyper-realistic images, videos and audio in seconds, at minimal cost. When strapped to powerful social media algorithms, this fake and digitally created content can spread far and fast and target highly specific audiences, potentially taking campaign dirty tricks to a new low.

The implications for the 2024 campaigns and elections are as large as they are troubling: Generative AI can not only rapidly produce targeted campaign emails, texts or videos, it also could be used to mislead voters, impersonate candidates and undermine elections on a scale and at a speed not yet seen.

On the political front, you can expect this to open the door for all manner of accusations of “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and “mal-information” from jilted politicians (on both sides) who don’t get the results they paid for. No doubt the powers that be will use this as an excuse to usher in ever more “content moderation” (read: censorship) in order to “protect” voters from outside influences (read: the other team).

There’s a lot more to the developing AI story, both from a political, social and, of course, financial stand point. Dan touched on this in his Friday research note to BPR members. It’s something we’ll be following up on, too, in future musings. Stay tuned…