Saints and Sinners
A closer look at our better angels in government
Bill Bonner, reckoning today from Dublin, Ireland...
And one was straight, and one was a queen,
and one was a fraudster pretending to be green:
they were all of them saints of mammon, and I mean,
God help me to be one too.~ Apologies to Lesbia Scott whose hymn, “I sing a song to the saints of God” was a favorite in the Episcopal Church
The well-meaning elite have so many reasons to feel good about themselves. When they look in their mirrors in the morning, they must all see halos over their heads…
…or perhaps they just gaze upon their beatific smiles – an outward sign of inner grace.
The Heroes of 2020
Today, we salute the saints, the heroes.
Michael Chertoff. Leon Panetta. Michael Hayden. Jim Clapper. John Brennan.
How do we know they are heroes? The mainstream press says so. They are the ‘Heroes of 2020’ who saved us from the truth. All former spooks…heads of various government agencies, they spent much of their careers peeking in windows, opening other people’s mail, and spreading misinformation. As experts in this kind of thing, they signed an open letter, three weeks before the election of 2020, assuring us that the New York Post’s scoop about Hunter Biden was false. The laptop story, they said, was a “Russian (dis)information operation.”
They ought to know! And their public declaration led to a thousand headlines. Here’s Politico, with the leading example:
“Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former officials say.”
It sounded conclusive. And it dismissed a line of questions that might have derailed the Biden presidential campaign.
But it wasn’t Russian disinfo. It was American disinfo fed to us by former public servants of the highest rank…people we were supposed to trust. And that’s another thing the great and good can feel great and good about: protecting the public from ‘wrong think’…and honest elections. In this case, these people were paid to know what was going on. But they either didn’t know what they said they knew…or didn’t want to say what they really knew. So, they lied.
Michael Morell, former Deputy Director of the CIA, explained why he did it:
“Because I wanted him [Joe Biden] to win the election.”
Hmmm. Had they not misled them, voters might have chosen the wrong candidate.
What saints! And thousands more like them!
Capital for the Cronies
They are not only saving our democracy…they are saving the entire planet. Do they not separate their trash…turn down their thermostats…and serve vegetarian-only meals on their private planes? Did they not support Biden’s ‘Inflation Reduction Act,’ knowing that it had nothing to do with inflation and everything to do with rewarding crony industries in the ‘green’ sector?
Are they not banishing racism, white supremacy, and homo-trans-weirdo-phobia? Do they not run the “Equality” flag up the pole every morning and salute, before checking to see how much their ESG stocks have risen?
Did they not ‘stimulate’ the economy with an addition of $8 trillion to the Fed’s balance sheet…and $27 trillion in extra federal debt (aka “money printing”) so far this century? Did they not stop the corrections of 2001…2008…and 2020?
Are they not protecting the sovereignty of the Ukraine, insisting that Russians respect the results of the CIA-led coup of 2014…and keep the border right where Lenin, Stalin, and Khruschev put it? Did they not rise to their feet (perhaps suppressing a laugh) and applaud heartily when Zelensky spoke to a joint session of Congress?
And just to make sure that everyone knows who’s in charge, do they not – Republican and Democrat alike – support spending $1.5 trillion annually (according to figures from Winslow Wheeler, including veterans’ benefits, aid, loans, and other foreign policy spending) to keep the empire in business?
With so many things to be proud of…
…how lightly they must trod…skipping from one fantasy to another… conveniently forgetting all the chaos and misery they’ve wrought so far.
Aren’t they – Biden, Pelosi, McConnell et al…all the old humbugs and ‘heroes’ who have pulled the strings for the last half a century – responsible for it?
America’s $33 trillion in debt…its $1 trillion trade deficit…$8 trillion squandered on wars (this century)…prisoners tortured…1 million lives lost – where are the investigations…the tribunals…the war crimes trials? Have we no lampposts from which to hang these people?
Activists and politicians are almost always scoundrels. For every Sophie Scholl there are a hundred John Browns. For every one who resists evil, dozens are ready to cause it.
Just Stop… Protesting
And in last weekend’s Financial Times, we are given more examples of what we least need. More heroes!
“Greta Thunberg and her fellow students in the Fridays for Future movement, and the young people of colour (!...aren’t white activists heroes too?) who launched the global Movement for Black Lives after George Floyd’s murder in 2020…
Recent protests by Just Stop Oil activists interrupting the World Snooker Championships in Sheffield, by animal rights demonstrators invading the course at the Grand National and by French opponents of pension reform storming the Paris headquarters of luxury goods company LVMH…
According to Yarmin, they are all saints, selflessly ‘taking a stand,’ often illegally, to protest something they don’t like.
Oddly, there is no mention of the Trump activists who stormed the Capitol, January 6, 2020. Nor of the demonstrations led by the Hitler Youth in the 1930s…nor of Mao’s hit squads in the Cultural Revolution…nor of those who seized the Bastille and executed its commander in 1789… nor of those who massacred the Swiss Guards in the Sack of Rome in 1527… nor of Gavrilo Princip’s bold move, when he took the law into his own hands, assassinated the Archduke Ferdinand, and started WWI…nor of the mob that began the Petrograd food riots of 1917 that led to the Bolshevik Revolution.
But what a charm it must be to have a mind so untarnished by history…so untainted by nuance or ambiguity…
…that it can believe any damn thing it wants.
Regards,
Bill Bonner
WHEN YOU ARE A SAINT YOU CAN EVEN BLOW UP PIPELINES, WITH NO MENTION OF IT IN THE PUBLIC EYE.
What a great outpour of facts so skillfully presented. To understand it it takes some knowledge of one’s own and the honesty to share it with strangers. Bill Bonner must be confident that there are enough of us worth addressing and hoping that we can become a seed in an evolution to change for better. Regardless of convictions there is hope. Regardless of how one feels about Donald Trump, in my mind, he represents the first step in openly discrediting our government. It is my believe that regardless of the mount of criticism, history will record Trump as the one who initiated changes and provided the inspiration to changes.
This current leadership will show the enormous powers a country’s leadership possess in destroying just about everything is set to destroy.
We remember events, we know facts and we understand the human race. Our role is not only to recite the meanings of the words but to become missionaries of new ideas, new ways to abolish the existing form of government and replacing with the best humanly possible. America is known as a country of the greatest constitution and it could become a model of government. I disagree with Trump’s slogan “make America great again”. America was never great but as far as one’s ability to earn a living, it was a place of greatest opportunities.