Upon The Next Crisis, The Rules Will Suddenly Change

...For the benefit of the elites; not the rest of us...

We can add a third certainty to the two standard ones (death and taxes): The rules will suddenly change when a financial crisis strikes.

Why is this a certainty? The answer is complex, as it draws on human nature, politics and the structure of societies/economies ruled by centralized states (governments).

The Core Imperative of the State: Expand Control

As I explain in my book, Resistance, Revolution, Liberation, the core (i.e. ontological) imperative of every central state is to expand its reach and control.  This isn’t just the result of individuals within the state seeking more power; every centralized state views whatever is outside its control as a threat.  The way to reduce or neutralize a threat is to take control of the mechanisms that generated it.

Once the state has gained control of these mechanisms, it is loath to relinquish them; to relinquish control is to invite chaos.

There is of course an intensely self-serving dynamic to extending state control: those being paid to enforce this state control have an immense vested interest in the state retaining (or even extending) this control, as their livelihoods now depend on the state doing so.

The higher-ups in the state also have a vested interest in retaining these new controls, as more control means more wealth and power accrue to those at the top of the centralized power pyramid: this extension of state control means private enterprise must now lobby the state for favors, and it gives the higher-ups more perquisites and favors to dispense—for a price, of course.

This vested interest arises throughout the power pyramid, from the bottom functionary with newfound power over common citizens to the managers of the departmental bureaucracy tasked with enforcing the new control to the apex of state authority.

This hierarchy of state power creates another threat to the central state; the corralling of state power by fiefdoms within the state itself.  In other words, fiefdoms can become semi-autonomous agencies that are only nominally under the control of central authority.  The answer is of course additional layers of oversight, compliance, investigation and enforcement within the state itself.

The State Serves Elites First and Foremost

Though modern states always claim to serve the common citizenry, in reality the state serves the wealth/power elites who need state complicity to maintain their wealth/power.  These power elites function as the modern-day equivalent of aristocracy: everyone is equal, but some or more equal than others, to use Orwell’s timeless phrase.

This reality leads to a non-formalized two-tier system: one for commoners and one for the power elite/New Aristocracy.  A formalized two-tier system would incite political disorder, so the system is nominally “everyone is equal under the law” but in practice there are two tiers.

Tax collection is a good example. The corporate/financier power elite have access to complex tax avoidance schemes that are unavailable to commoners, who have few tax reduction tools.  The judicial system is another: power elites can play the system via high-cost attorneys while commoners are left to plea-bargain a reduced sentence, even when they are innocent.

When crises arise, the state first protects its own authority and control. Its second priority is securing the wealth and power of the elite.

The Self-Serving Savior State

Human nature being what it is, there are two motivations for state authorities to expand their reach and control.  Some of those with state authority feel it is their prerogative (or even their responsibility) to expand state control to protect the commoners who are likely to suffer should a crisis erupt. This do-good impulse may be genuine in some, but by and large it is not compassion that dominates decision-making but the dynamic of a central state having so much power in the first place: you have the power, so do something to save us from the consequences of crisis.

In other words, once power is concentrated in the hands of a few, those few are responsible for handling crises that would have otherwise fallen on a decentralized system with many levels of response.

Then there is the Machiavellian impulse to use crisis as the cover for a power-grab, a dynamic encapsulated in the phrase, never let a good crisis go to waste. This dynamic doesn’t have to be passive; power elites don’t have to wait for a crisis, they can engineer one by exploiting their control of state and private-sector mechanisms.  This process of engineering a crisis can be policy-driven (as described in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine) or propaganda-driven (the sinking of the battleship Maine, Nazi Germany’s Lebensraum, etc.).

Though many call an expansive state The Nanny State, I prefer the term The Savior State, as the state claims its expanding powers under the guise of saving us from a variety of threats—including those that arise from the socio-economic system the state oversees. In other words, The Savior State’s guiding ideology is to save us from ourselves.

If we might harm ourselves with addictive drugs, the state’s solution is to imprison everyone caught with addictive drugs—except of course those addictive drugs that enrich the Power Elites (nicotine, alcohol, synthetic opioids, etc.).

If the state deems it risky for children under the age of ten to play outside unattended, the state’s solution is to treat the parents/guardians as criminals.

Each extension of control creates new layers of vested interests—more functionaries who gain not from solving problems but insuring they fester into the future as a form of guaranteed employment, and more opportunities to dispense favors in the informal two-tier system of powerless commoners and influential elites.

The Crisis Toolbox: Political Expediency

History teaches us that authorities view crises as first and foremost a threat to state authority, secondarily as a threat to elites’ wealth and power, and then lastly as a threat to the socio-economic system they rule.

Given these crisis management priorities, their first response is to extend their authority by whatever means are necessary.  Once these new powers are in hand, the state deploys them to limit the threat posed to the power elites and the structure that supports state and elite wealth/power.

In a centralized power structure, this crisis management manifests as change the rules without warning to increase the reach and power of the state.  The justification is something along the lines of these emergency powers are needed to protect the nation—powers that all too often become permanent, as powers once taken are rarely relinquished for all the reasons outlined above.

While the rule changes are presented as both necessary and well-planned, in actuality the process is one of political expediency:  a hurried rush to do whatever limits the risks to the power elites’ wealth and power before opposition can be organized, and to cloak the power-grab in the usual Savior State garb: we are acting to save the system that benefits you.

But this expediency comes back to haunt both the state and the power elites, as expedient power grabs designed to protect the state and elites do not actually address the dynamics that spawned the crisis in the first place. Rather, they exacerbate the problem by introducing self-serving fixes that paper over the problem as a quick-and-dirty way of protecting the power and wealth of the state and private-sector elites.

These fixes end up crippling the mechanisms that are needed to actually solve the systemic sources of the crisis.

The Continuing Financial Crisis

Financial crises are inevitable, and the state (which includes the central bank) seeks to limit the crisis by taking control of the market. 

Examples include: closing the stock market, declaring a bank holiday, issuing a new currency, fixing wages and prices, and banning short selling.

In the current financial crisis that started in 2008 (and that has yet to end), central banks and states have largely avoided these outright takeovers of the market in favor of a more subtle strategy of controlling the markets while maintaining the appearance of “free markets.”

In Part 2: How To Defend Against An Unfair Re-Set Of The System, we’ll examine the ways the U.S. state and central bank have already extended control over the market—for example, via the mass purchase of assets by central banks (see accompanying chart)-- and what additional controls they will likely impose as the simmering crisis erupts anew in the years ahead.

We’ll also look at what we mere commoners can do to protect ourselves from the inevitable risks and unanticipated calamities this centralized control will unleash.

Click here to read the report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

Is U.S. Or China The World's Economic Superpower?

Since the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the world has had one undisputed economic superpower: the United States.

But while the U.S. has enjoyed its moment in the sun, the balance of power has been slowly shifting towards the inevitable rise of China. It’s been a long time coming, but, as Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes, China now has the manpower, influence, and economic might to compete at a similar level – and if you ask people around the world, they’ve certainly taken notice.

ECONOMIC SUPERPOWERS

The United States and China combine for 39% of global GDP, 53% of estimated economic growth in the coming years, and 23% of the world’s population.

But which one is perceived as the more dominant economic power?

According to a recent survey by Pew Research Center, the vary wildly depending on the people and country surveyed. However, on an aggregate level that uses the results from the people in 38 countries surveyed, Pew determined that a median of 42% of people list the United States as the world’s leading economic power, while 32% name China as top dog.

While the U.S. maintains a narrow lead in aggregate, things get much more interesting when we look at individual countries.

DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES

Do America’s closest allies view it as the clear global superpower? What about the countries that neighbor China – surely, they must witness China’s economic might firsthand.

Weirdly, the dominant perspectives in these places are not as obvious as one would think.

More people living in Canada, Australia, and major European countries like France, Germany, Sweden, Spain, and the United Kingdom tend to view China as the global economic superpower.

Meanwhile, the majority of people in South American and African countries see the United States as the world’s major economic power – and people in countries near China (such as South Korea, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, and Vietnam) all tend to agree with that sentiment as well.

America 2017 = France 1789

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

We are looking more and more like France on the eve of its revolution in 1789. Our classes are distributed differently, but the inequity is just as sharp. America’s “aristocracy,” once based strictly on bank accounts, acts increasingly hereditary as the vapid offspring and relations of “stars” (in politics, showbiz, business, and the arts) assert their prerogatives to fame, power, and riches - think the voters didn’t grok the sinister import of Hillary’s “it’s my turn” message?

What’s especially striking in similarity to the court of the Bourbons is the utter cluelessness of America’s entitled power elite to the agony of the moiling masses below them and mainly away from the coastal cities. Just about everything meaningful has been taken away from them, even though many of the material trappings of existence remain: a roof, stuff that resembles food, cars, and screens of various sizes.

But the places they are supposed to call home are either wrecked — the original small towns and cities of America — or replaced by new “developments” so devoid of artistry, history, thought, care, and charm that they don’t add up to communities, and are so obviously unworthy of affection, that the very idea of “home” becomes a cruel joke.

These places were bad enough in the 1960s and 70s, when the people who lived in them at least were able to report to paying jobs assembling products and managing their distribution. Now those people don’t have that to give a little meaning to their existence, or cover the costs of it. Public space was never designed into the automobile suburbs, and the sad remnants of it were replaced by ersatz substitutes, like the now-dying malls. Everything else of a public and human associational nature has been shoved into some kind of computerized box with a screen on it.

The floundering non-elite masses have not learned the harsh lesson of our time that the virtual is not an adequate substitute for the authentic, while the elites who create all this vicious crap spend millions to consort face-to-face in the Hamptons and Martha’s Vineyard telling each other how wonderful they are for providing all the artificial social programming and glitzy hardware for their paying customers.

The effect of this dynamic relationship so far has been powerfully soporific. You can deprive people of a true home for a while, and give them virtual friends on TV to project their emotions onto, and arrange to give them cars via some financing scam or other to keep them moving mindlessly around an utterly desecrated landscape under the false impression that they’re going somewhere — but we’re now at the point where ordinary people can’t even carry the costs of keeping themselves hostage to these degrading conditions.

The next big entertainment for them will be the financial implosion of the elites themselves as the governing forces of physics finally overcome all the ruses and stratagems of the elites who have been playing games with money. Professional observers never tires of saying that the government can’t run out of money (because they can always print more of it) but they can certainly destroy the value of that money and shred the consensual confidence that allows it to operate as money.

That’s exactly what is about to commence at the end of the summer when the government runs out of cash-on-hand and congress finds itself utterly paralyzed by party animus to patch the debt ceiling problem that disables new borrowing. The elites may be home from the Hamptons and the Vineyard by then, but summers may never be the same for them again.

The Deep State may win its war against the pathetic President Trump, but it won’t win any war against the imperatives of the universe and the way that expresses itself in the true valuation of things. And when the moment of clarification arrives — the instant of cosmic price discovery — the clueless elites will have to really and truly worry about the value of their heads.

Caught On Tape: Democratic Congressman Admits The Party Stands For Absolutely Nothing

Via Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

The problem very quickly became what Integral Metatheory calls a “legitimation crisis,” which it defines as a mismatch between Lower-Left (or cultural) beliefs and the Lower-Right systems (or actual background realities, such as the techno-economic base). The cultural belief was that everybody is created equal, that all people have a perfect and equal right to full personal empowerment, that nobody is intrinsically superior to others (beliefs that flourished with green). Yet the overwhelming reality was increasingly one of a stark and rapidly growing unequality—in terms of income and overall worth, property ownership, employment opportunity, healthcare access, life satisfaction issues. The culture was constantly telling us one thing, and the realities of society were consistently failing to deliver it—the culture was lying. This was a deep and serious legitimation crisis— a culture that is lying to its members simply cannot move forward for long. And if a culture has “no truth,” it has no idea when it’s lying—and thus it naturally lies as many times as it accidentally tells the truth, and hence faster than you can say “deconstruction,” it’s in the midst of a legitimation crisis.

– From the post: How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology Created Trump – Part 1

My primary theme thus far in 2017, has centered around the observation that no constructive opposition to Trump currently exists in America. All we have from “the resistance” (corporate Democrats, corporate media and the deep state) thus far are endless conspiracy theories about Trump and Russia. This clownish opposition doesn’t actually stand for anything, and remains fully committed to continuing down the disastrous path we’ve been on this entire century. Simply being opposed to something isn’t going to cut it any longer, and there’s increasing evidence that the public is starting to catch on to the total fraud that is the establishment Democratic Party.

Jimmy Dore does an excellent job exposing this sham in the following clip. Make sure to watch the entire thing, it gets better and better:

Unless the Democratic Party begin to stand for something, it will remain dead opposition. If you want some evidence, just take a look at this incredible chart from The Huffington Post:

As you can see, the real plunge happened right after the election when it became clear that Democratic leadership would remain in place, and rather than admit failure, began to harp non-stop on Russia conspiracy theories. This tactic clearly isn’t working.

It’s not just the Huffington Post poll either, the evidence is everywhere. As Matt Stoller showed in a tweet earlier today.

Democratic Party is less popular than GOP and Trump. And Pence blows everyone away. https://t.co/QkbAyvmwUx

— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 8, 2017

There’s a huge opening for a new political party in America. It’s low hanging fruit.

I’m ready.

What's So Bad About Globalism? (Spoiler Alert: Everything)

Via Jim Goad of Taki"s Magazine blog,

As far as I can tell, globalism is a scheme concocted by the rich to destroy the working and middle classes through worldwide financial imperialism.

I have a strong hunch that globalism is also a plot hatched to obliterate indigenous cultures and real human differences under the deceptive ruses of “multiculturalism” and “diversity.”

This is why I’m confused whenever I hear someone say they hate “the rich,” oppose “imperialism,” and support “the working class” while being an unquestioning cheerleader for open borders and global government.

Like Marxism’s pipe dreams about an eventual and irreversible dictatorship of the proletariat, the most seductive hook about globalism is the idea that it’s inevitable. Technology has made us an increasingly interconnected planet, and therefore the only logical and moral thing to do is establish a benevolent global governmental authority with the power to tax and imprison and torture and abuse.

But communism proved to be far from inevitable. After peaking last century, it has retreated from much of the globe. I’d like to think the same is true about the one-world-government schemes that underpin what is cheerily referred to as “globalism.”

I suppose that if you fetishize some dimwitted internationalist abstraction of the global “working class,” globalism may suit your emotional needs and your complicated bourgeois psychological issues regarding “wealth guilt” just fine. But if you support the American working class—and more importantly, if you happen to be a member of the American working class—you’d realize that globalism is your sworn enemy.

Those who’ve lived most of their lives with a sad and simple choice between working and starving can feel the disdain that the sneering global elites have not only for them personally, but for their culture and their humanity and their very existence.

Whatever jobs these wealth-crazed control freaks couldn’t pack into wooden crates and send overseas, they are more than happy to undercut wages here by importing “migrants” both legal and illegal who have nothing in common with you culturally and are trained to deride you as an evolutionary throwback if you dare to complain that the elites are laughing in your face as they pull the rug out from under you.

Globalism replaces First World workers with Third World workers and calls them “racists”—the modern equivalent of “niggers”—if they dare to make a peep about it. While it may be a boon for transnational financiers and manual laborers in Malaysia, for workers throughout the West, globalism has been a trapdoor through which they are likely to hang swinging at any moment. For the Western working class, globalism has meant retreat and defeat and dislocation.

After November’s election, White House chief strategist Steve Bannon described what had happened:

The globalists gutted the American working class and created a middle class in Asia. The issue now is about Americans looking to not get fucked over.

But as many of us are learning, the mere act of realizing you’re being fucked over—much less trying to stop it from happening—automatically makes you a Nazi and an anti-Semite and a white supremacist and a toothless, low-information rube who needs to be replaced on the assembly line by someone with more melanin and less money.

As the world’s financial elites grow more rootless and international, they no longer even pretend to find a common bond with the peasants and the pissants in the countries who host them. Instead, they openly deride them.

But to the horror and dismay of the ultra-arrogant cosmopolites, the rural rubes in flyover country are waking up to the fact that at the very best, they are viewed as obstacles to progress. At the very worst, they sense that the global planners would have no problem bulldozing straight over their corpses in order to pave the way for such “progress.”

Those who constantly slam “the rich” while naively embracing globalism and every attendant butterfly-chasing PC delusion fail to realize that almost without exception, global finance, global media, and global corporate culture are solidly behind this daffy, one-world movement of free trade, open borders, and PC thought-policing. The charitable foundations and the think tanks and the NGOs have all signed up for this mission that purportedly will uplift the masses and bring the rich to heel, yet very few people seem to find this even remotely suspicious. “The rich” are backing a movement that superficially demonizes “the rich” yet only makes them richer, but if you say anything about it, you’re a Nazi.

But beyond the galloping economic hypocrisy, the most loathsome thing about unbridled globalism is the toxic contempt its peddlers have for indigenous cultures, specifically European ones. For all the lip service they pay to the alleged “rights” of men who think they’re women to take a dump in the ladies’ room, they are blithely unconcerned with the fact that their unhindered financial and cultural predations are wiping out whole cultures across the globe in the service of creating one bland, deracinated, medicated, propaganda-addled, compliant consumer culture.

But in their blind quest for uniformity, they will never eradicate conflict. Globalism will only replace wars between nations with wars within former nations. It takes battles that formerly took place on borders and spreads them from street to street. It’s possible that rather than global harmony, endless and irrevocable conflict is globalism’s true end game.

Whether by accident or design, a sick irony about globalism is that it often poses as a humane antidote and a form of ongoing karmic retribution for European colonialism. As the argument goes, the fact that France unfairly colonized parts of Northern Africa means that the righteous thing is for Northern Africans to culturally and demographically colonize France. Apparently these dreamers’ parents never taught them that two wrongs don’t make a right and will likely lead to more conflict and bloodshed.

As an anti-collectivist by nature, I find something nightmarish about the specter of a global government with unelected officials overriding my will—and very often the raging majority’s will—at every turn. I don’t care to have every particle of my life micromanaged by people 5,000 miles away whom I wouldn’t trust to pick my nose.

John Lennon can be fairly viewed as the first pop-star globalist, and his naïve 1971 hit “Imagine” is venerated as a globalist anthem. He imagined a world with no countries, no private property, no murder, and universal cooperation. While he was imagining all this, a crazed fan pulled out a gun and blew Lennon’s brains out. Lennon sang that all we needed was love. What he needed that night was a gun.