Sharon writes to me, asking "So what do you recommend?" Here is my answer:
A fair question, though I'd feature a black box warning against accepting political advice from someone who is as idiosyncratic and detached from reality as I am.
* Start with the premise that the change we so desperately need is not going to come from the White House.
* Become active in local politics, and in community groups where you can prepare your neighbors for the next Helene or the next Patriot Act or the next pandemic.
* Become a citizen journalist, working around the shadow bans to tell people who trust you what you have learned that they can't read in the NYTimes.
* Organize groups to visit your Congressperson and Senator. Make them aware that there are issues outside the Overton window that concern you.
I've marched for decades - the main benefit is networking with other activists and the good feelings of seeing so many people in agreement. Unfortunately, many of the people marching today are being steered by billionaires or Democrat orgs funding fake "movements" that benefit the powerful. I'll never forget how all the Democrats got out in the streets because "kids in cages", but if you ask a Democrat now why Biden ended the rapid DNA testing of children coming over the border, they go silent and turn away. Kids being trafficked for sex and drugs, kids missing in the thousands, is not of interest to them. They are living in a media silo that doesn't verify it, so they ignore it.
Yes, everyone should get active in local political groups and be active in the community and speaking at City Council meetings, running for office themselves, etc.
But the assumption that nothing will come from the WH with RFK Jr. involved is not necessarily true - here is a website he has created to foster ideas from people for change. If nothing else, it is a great tool for bridging the divide for people to educate each other. Take a look.
Unusually downer of a post from you, Josh. Speaking for myself, there’s huge daylight between the two candidates. I cured myself of a bad case of chronic TDS when I escaped from a lifelong progressive party affiliation in 2020. I still see Trump as a flawed man, but then, I am a flawed man. Plus, I’ve never met him and I’ve come to take what I always read about him with skepticism (like what I was told about health and climate and so on with the standard narratives). That Trump has fostered some dialogue with RFKjr and Musk gives me some hope.
Then let yourself think that positive thought and be open to Trump being less of the monolithic baddie the [mainstream] media tells us. Maybe he won't stab him in the back. My getting over my TDS didn't mean I had to grant the guy sainthood—it just meant questioning what had been drummed into my head since he ran for office in 2015, and allowing for the possibility that he's not evil. Is he eloquent? Rarely. I loved how well-spoken Obama was, and I've since come to think that well-spoken and eloquent, like many other things, are not actually aligned with wisdom and good leadership.
Have you listened to what RFK Jr. has said about his conversations with Trump? He is convinced that Trump now sees addressing the national health crisis of children as his legacy, and RFK believes he is serious. Is RFK Jr. ignorant? So far, he has found a way to get the most possible bang out of his campaign for his cause after being sidelined by the Democrats. The man is not stupid.
How did Bobby get to where he is now, on his way to the WH? By being foolish? I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt. He has been in the trenches on many levels, has risked a LOT to do what he has done. He needs our support, not just assuming the worst because we don't like Trump.
I was amazed to see the MAHA moms on X reaching out after his endorsement of Trump, reluctantly, to network with the "far Right" because they are dedicated to saving children's lives. They were welcomed and began to engage and excite people with all of their ideas and experiences.
The last time I saw that level of reaching across the aisle by so many different people to make something good happen was the effort to elect Matt Gonzalez in San Francisco for mayor. It's a beautiful thing to experience.
neither of them will do this. They are both cabal puppets. They both remain silent now about the real drivers of the "covid" psyop and the "pandemic preparedness" racket. They are not about to end the globalists' puppet show. They are not about to give up their Bilderberg Groupie funders / handlers. They are not banning all "vaccines," for which the remaining shred of legitimacy has just completely snapped. JD Vance is an mRNA investor. His mentor and Trump's chief funder Peter Thiel is Palantir -- CIA / gov't contractor that managed all US and UK "covid" data and "jab" data. Not gonna kill their golden calf.
It's us regular people who are going to have to build the globalist-free society we need and deserve. Billionaires are not going to save us.
Nasty is an understatement. State the facts - what has Trump done or had the opportunity to do and didn't? What has the Biden/Harris administration done or didn't do? There are some basic facts you can't change. RussiaGate was a Hillary Clinton operation. Mueller testified under oath and found no evidence. Trump's border policies and his policies directing the DOJ on human/child trafficing that the media reported he was separating families when the media and Trump haters, maybe you are in this group, knew it was to determine if there was relationship between the child and the person accompanying the child. Under the Biden/Harris regime there are over 300,000 children they handed over to unknowns and are now missing. Inflation under 2%. Enterprise zones to minority areas. Met with Dictators like North Korea and the missiles stopped. Isil/Isis destroyed. Gas prices well below $2. Gas/diesel drives the economy. Didn't take a salary. Pro Life appointments to court. Anyone who has watched his meetings with his administration as I have will have seen a person who seeks input.
We are living the policies of Biden/Harris. Is it bad enough yet? A no vote indicates a lack of critical thinking. Harris served in one of the most corrupt administrations. Open borders and a advocate for crime. No cash bail - defund police. Destroyed the military via DEI. War in Ukraine. The latest with the disaster. Joe's 10% for the big guy - Hunter. A guy that doesn't know where he is. Kamala is an anchor baby whose parents were foreign students. They were part of the black revolution movement in California, Father a Marxist and mother who hated whites. Husband who knocked up his childrens nanny and his firm had questionable Chinese dealings. Yeah, looks like the same. Josh you are a pathetic human being.
I completely agree - both are so horrible. Some people's vehement support for one though, is only in order to oppose the other. But then again, that is just as baffling. The odds that someone's vote would sway the outcome are astronomical. I wonder, Josh, how one might calculate (or at least approximate) the likelihood of that.
The probability works out to be not as tiny as you might expect. Let's say you live in Nevada, and Nevada is a "swing state" where a small number of votes might swing the Electoral College. If there are 1.4 million votes cast, the probability of them coming out exactly balanced so that your 1 vote swings the state of Nevada is 1/sqrt(pi*1400000)=0.0005 -- about 1 in 2,000 chance that your one vote changes the outcome. In a larger swing state, the odds are still better than 1 in 10,000 that your one vote makes a difference.
Of course, this must be multiplied by the probability that the Blue and Red states are all so evenly balanced that your swing state makes a difference. That's harder to calculate, but I'd guess it's as high as a few percent.
Well that's disappointing. lol. I'd like to make the argument that it's tactical folly to vote for the lesser of two evils, so people should vote their conscience, and then we'd have less evil.
So... multiplying the probabilities, we have a roughly 1 in 100,000 chance of influencing the outcome. To me, that's low enough to vote conscience, but high enough that going the other way seems reasonable.
Still, I wonder, can we refine that calculation more? Your 1/2,000 (and ~1/10,000) numbers assume complete uncertainty about who'll win the state. In known lopsided states, voting ones conscience should be much more obvious. Is there any way to get a handle on a better number when having information about how a state inclines, or is that hopelessly complicated? For me, a vague sense that we're missing something remains - that the chances can't be that high. If they were, wouldn't we have seen instances of states being decided by just tens or hundreds of votes? Yes, Illinois in 1960, Florida in 2000. Should there be more and closer ones though? Were there more and closer ones, i.e. instances that were forgotten about because the state as a whole didn't matter? I'll have to look into that.
Anyone who understands true democracy is constantly on guard against the premise that it has any place outside of the electoral process in a constitutional republic.
I'm not clear about what you're saying. Public discourse? Lobbying? Public opinion polls? Freedom of the press? Right to seek redress? Judicial advocacy? Protest marches and freedom of assembly?
Here is one approach to confronting the wasteful, ignorant, destructive, aggressive militarism of the US as its power and reputation wane. It's decisive and emphasizes the best aspects of participatory democracy. It produces real alternatives in every electoral race to the lame, uniparty, tweedle-dee tweedle-dum "choices" engineered by the corporate ruling class through the puppet major parties .... https://warismakinguspoor.com/a-nation-at-peace/
💯 on the same page. I wrote about betrayal blindness in one of my Substacks ... that's the epidemic we need to address before we can truly move forward.
Like you (and Whitney Webb and Catherine Austin Fitts and Ryan Christian and a growing number of others), I believe building thriving resilient local communities is the way forward. Even individual decisions to step in that direction and to not buy into the 24 / 7 fear narratives loosens the globalists' abilities to manipulate and control the population. They need our buy in and consent to their narratives to pull off their agendas. Without us falling for it, their house of cards collapses.
Trump is the only President in my lifetime who has rejected the war machine. Today, over 500,000 Ukrainian men are dead and gone. The whole reason the Deep State was trying to remove Trump from the Presidency and now is trying to assassinate him is because he won't get their war on.
War is not good for business and Trump likes to negotiate business deals, not handing over control to corrupt generals to bomb nations like Libya into the dark ages to become a slave market (Obama).
Lives matter. I don't care what anyone imagines Trump is thinking or what he cares about. He won't get their war on, and that will save lives.
In the good old days, WAR used to matter to Progressives. But today, the "Left" only cares about skin color, gender identity, pronouns, transgenders, vaccine mandates, abortions up through birth, climate change, save every "newcomer", etc.
The so-called Left (actually just a Left version of the NeoCons) fell to the false front of actual fascists, like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton now calling for the First Amendment to be "fixed", while posing as "environmentalists", for "democracy", etc.
Only one candidate has rejected war, and instead accomplished the Abraham Accords. That's why today Trump has a network of other peace and health-minded people forming a coalition: Tulsi, Vivek, RFK Jr., Elon and many others on board. They understand the stakes right now.
There are wars the US is involved in.. You are missing the point.. Trump is only worried about one, but fancies the other wars to go on.. Trump didn't have to start a war because the CIA does that better all the time..
For whatever reason, Substack won't let me read the full comment. Phone glitch or pre-election sabotage of posts flagged by AI as supporting Trump? I posted this same comment above, your post is the same, I can't open it to read the full post. After listening to the Joe Rogan podcast with David Epstein I'm starting to question every interaction
Anyone out there got the number of Trumpys Doctor? Fantastic work & not the hint of a scar. A few dills on here Josh, they obviously haven't read your post with the right spirit nor depth of understanding. They'd make good candidates themselves. Wake-up America the world is laughing at you.
A man was killed by that bullet. The CIA FBI etc. hated Trump when he was in office. So they would face an assassination attempt now? The fake theory makes no sense whatsoever. I have never Yet voted for Trump. I agree with much of what Mitteldorf expressed here. My vote will follow Freedom of speech and ending war. From that perspective, the #rescuetherepublic crowd have it going on. I have always voted 3rd party. Why change now? Because freedom of speech is the #1. Keeping the internet free is #1. If we can't talk about it we can't fix it. And
1913 was the Federal Reserve Act. Money is created as a future claim against the assets of the US Government. The debt slowly mounted over a hundred years, until the interest on the debt (now $36 trillion and counting) is a substantial portion of all the tax revenue generated by the Federal government. The Fed has been depressing interest rates below market to prevent the USG from going into default, and these interests rates (lower than the inflation rate) have had distorting effects on the economy. Now that the USG is starting to pay interest at more realistic rates, a default looms. Read Web of Debt by Ellen Brown.
1944 was the Bretton Woods Accord, establishing the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. At the time, the dollar was backed by gold and the largest manufacturing economy in the world, by far. But in 1972, the US ceased to back the dollar with gold, and the US manufacturing base has slipped far behind China, with other economies rivaling the US in manufactured exports. This has precipitated a movement among other countries to settle their international trade with other currencies than the dollar. The US has hastened this trend by trying to use the dollar as a political bludgeon, with "sanctions" that exclude Russia and Iran from trading in dollars. The BRICS countries are well on their way to establishing alternatives to the dollar for international trade. The prices Americans pay for imported goods are artificially low because the US can print dollars that are accepted in exchange for hard value by other nations. We have financed a growing balance of trade deficit ever since the Reagan years, but we can't do this forever. Listen to Michael Hudson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlUSqQ8U8T8
Yeah, USG default looms. I don't know enough about large-scale economic machinations to foresee what all the ramifications of that would be. But if collapse of the banking system is one of them, and the powers that be would have a problem with that, well, debt can be forgiven with the stroke of a pen. Maybe Joe Blow with the savings bond won't forgive his share, but I don't think he looms very large. Who holds the national debt anyway? I thought it was like 90% the Fed, 10% foreign governments, with a smattering of ordinary citizens. Certainly the Fed's portion could be forgiven. By the way, I don't think it's true that dollars are a claim against the assets of the US Government. They aren't backed by anything.
I'm no expert on the Bretton Woods system either, but I have noticed the tensions therein. The system has struck me as resilient too though, and I don't see anything inexorable here, say like the exponential increase in debt at interest alluded to above. The BRICS countries have been at this a while now, haven't they? Why haven't they succeeded yet? This one scares me though. What happens to all those dollars used for settling international trade when they're no longer needed for such? I assume they come back here, resulting in even more inflation. And maybe that's hyper-inflation - I don't have a good quantitative handle. But I could see my life savings go up in smoke. I'd like to buy real estate, but of course, that's not exactly a piece of cake.
Old institutions won't disappear overnight, but their domination is what is fast giving way to competing alternative mechanisms of international finance and systems of trade.. This is what is posing danger to the dollar hegemon and the old systems, the same way as the internet has replaced the newspapers and the post office ..
Sharon writes to me, asking "So what do you recommend?" Here is my answer:
A fair question, though I'd feature a black box warning against accepting political advice from someone who is as idiosyncratic and detached from reality as I am.
* Start with the premise that the change we so desperately need is not going to come from the White House.
* Become active in local politics, and in community groups where you can prepare your neighbors for the next Helene or the next Patriot Act or the next pandemic.
* Become a citizen journalist, working around the shadow bans to tell people who trust you what you have learned that they can't read in the NYTimes.
* Organize groups to visit your Congressperson and Senator. Make them aware that there are issues outside the Overton window that concern you.
* March in the streets at every opportunity.
I've marched for decades - the main benefit is networking with other activists and the good feelings of seeing so many people in agreement. Unfortunately, many of the people marching today are being steered by billionaires or Democrat orgs funding fake "movements" that benefit the powerful. I'll never forget how all the Democrats got out in the streets because "kids in cages", but if you ask a Democrat now why Biden ended the rapid DNA testing of children coming over the border, they go silent and turn away. Kids being trafficked for sex and drugs, kids missing in the thousands, is not of interest to them. They are living in a media silo that doesn't verify it, so they ignore it.
Yes, everyone should get active in local political groups and be active in the community and speaking at City Council meetings, running for office themselves, etc.
But the assumption that nothing will come from the WH with RFK Jr. involved is not necessarily true - here is a website he has created to foster ideas from people for change. If nothing else, it is a great tool for bridging the divide for people to educate each other. Take a look.
I remain optimistic.
https://forum.policiesforpeople.com/
I'd like to note that Trump appears to be a "live player", now surrounded by other notable live-players, whereas Harris is a drone.
Neither gets my vote, as both support genocide.
Jill Stein MD gets my vote again, should there actually be "voting" this Guy Fawkes Day, 11/5/24.
Thanks for your note. The deep state doesn't try to assassinate drones
Unusually downer of a post from you, Josh. Speaking for myself, there’s huge daylight between the two candidates. I cured myself of a bad case of chronic TDS when I escaped from a lifelong progressive party affiliation in 2020. I still see Trump as a flawed man, but then, I am a flawed man. Plus, I’ve never met him and I’ve come to take what I always read about him with skepticism (like what I was told about health and climate and so on with the standard narratives). That Trump has fostered some dialogue with RFKjr and Musk gives me some hope.
I would like to think a Trump victory would result in some authority for RFK, but I consider it much more likely Trump would stab him in the back.
Then let yourself think that positive thought and be open to Trump being less of the monolithic baddie the [mainstream] media tells us. Maybe he won't stab him in the back. My getting over my TDS didn't mean I had to grant the guy sainthood—it just meant questioning what had been drummed into my head since he ran for office in 2015, and allowing for the possibility that he's not evil. Is he eloquent? Rarely. I loved how well-spoken Obama was, and I've since come to think that well-spoken and eloquent, like many other things, are not actually aligned with wisdom and good leadership.
Trump and JFK Jr. were close friends. In a letter from JFK Jr. after Trump's father died, he said he would make a great President
(https://x.com/Chicago1Ray/status/1644385209956040718)
https://x.com/Azkyrie/status/1827090947294851132/photo/1
Have you listened to what RFK Jr. has said about his conversations with Trump? He is convinced that Trump now sees addressing the national health crisis of children as his legacy, and RFK believes he is serious. Is RFK Jr. ignorant? So far, he has found a way to get the most possible bang out of his campaign for his cause after being sidelined by the Democrats. The man is not stupid.
Based on Trump's public record, I'd judge that Bobby is foolish to trust his word. I'd like to be surprised.
How did Bobby get to where he is now, on his way to the WH? By being foolish? I think we should give him the benefit of the doubt. He has been in the trenches on many levels, has risked a LOT to do what he has done. He needs our support, not just assuming the worst because we don't like Trump.
I was amazed to see the MAHA moms on X reaching out after his endorsement of Trump, reluctantly, to network with the "far Right" because they are dedicated to saving children's lives. They were welcomed and began to engage and excite people with all of their ideas and experiences.
The last time I saw that level of reaching across the aisle by so many different people to make something good happen was the effort to elect Matt Gonzalez in San Francisco for mayor. It's a beautiful thing to experience.
neither of them will do this. They are both cabal puppets. They both remain silent now about the real drivers of the "covid" psyop and the "pandemic preparedness" racket. They are not about to end the globalists' puppet show. They are not about to give up their Bilderberg Groupie funders / handlers. They are not banning all "vaccines," for which the remaining shred of legitimacy has just completely snapped. JD Vance is an mRNA investor. His mentor and Trump's chief funder Peter Thiel is Palantir -- CIA / gov't contractor that managed all US and UK "covid" data and "jab" data. Not gonna kill their golden calf.
It's us regular people who are going to have to build the globalist-free society we need and deserve. Billionaires are not going to save us.
https://suzanneokeeffe.substack.com/p/the-half-truth-challenge-round
https://unbekoming.substack.com/p/vaccinated-60-vs-unvaccinated-264
Nasty is an understatement. State the facts - what has Trump done or had the opportunity to do and didn't? What has the Biden/Harris administration done or didn't do? There are some basic facts you can't change. RussiaGate was a Hillary Clinton operation. Mueller testified under oath and found no evidence. Trump's border policies and his policies directing the DOJ on human/child trafficing that the media reported he was separating families when the media and Trump haters, maybe you are in this group, knew it was to determine if there was relationship between the child and the person accompanying the child. Under the Biden/Harris regime there are over 300,000 children they handed over to unknowns and are now missing. Inflation under 2%. Enterprise zones to minority areas. Met with Dictators like North Korea and the missiles stopped. Isil/Isis destroyed. Gas prices well below $2. Gas/diesel drives the economy. Didn't take a salary. Pro Life appointments to court. Anyone who has watched his meetings with his administration as I have will have seen a person who seeks input.
We are living the policies of Biden/Harris. Is it bad enough yet? A no vote indicates a lack of critical thinking. Harris served in one of the most corrupt administrations. Open borders and a advocate for crime. No cash bail - defund police. Destroyed the military via DEI. War in Ukraine. The latest with the disaster. Joe's 10% for the big guy - Hunter. A guy that doesn't know where he is. Kamala is an anchor baby whose parents were foreign students. They were part of the black revolution movement in California, Father a Marxist and mother who hated whites. Husband who knocked up his childrens nanny and his firm had questionable Chinese dealings. Yeah, looks like the same. Josh you are a pathetic human being.
I can’t stomach voting for either! 🤢
And I am baffled at the masses who are vehemently supporting one candidate or another?!
I completely agree - both are so horrible. Some people's vehement support for one though, is only in order to oppose the other. But then again, that is just as baffling. The odds that someone's vote would sway the outcome are astronomical. I wonder, Josh, how one might calculate (or at least approximate) the likelihood of that.
The probability works out to be not as tiny as you might expect. Let's say you live in Nevada, and Nevada is a "swing state" where a small number of votes might swing the Electoral College. If there are 1.4 million votes cast, the probability of them coming out exactly balanced so that your 1 vote swings the state of Nevada is 1/sqrt(pi*1400000)=0.0005 -- about 1 in 2,000 chance that your one vote changes the outcome. In a larger swing state, the odds are still better than 1 in 10,000 that your one vote makes a difference.
Of course, this must be multiplied by the probability that the Blue and Red states are all so evenly balanced that your swing state makes a difference. That's harder to calculate, but I'd guess it's as high as a few percent.
Well that's disappointing. lol. I'd like to make the argument that it's tactical folly to vote for the lesser of two evils, so people should vote their conscience, and then we'd have less evil.
So... multiplying the probabilities, we have a roughly 1 in 100,000 chance of influencing the outcome. To me, that's low enough to vote conscience, but high enough that going the other way seems reasonable.
Still, I wonder, can we refine that calculation more? Your 1/2,000 (and ~1/10,000) numbers assume complete uncertainty about who'll win the state. In known lopsided states, voting ones conscience should be much more obvious. Is there any way to get a handle on a better number when having information about how a state inclines, or is that hopelessly complicated? For me, a vague sense that we're missing something remains - that the chances can't be that high. If they were, wouldn't we have seen instances of states being decided by just tens or hundreds of votes? Yes, Illinois in 1960, Florida in 2000. Should there be more and closer ones though? Were there more and closer ones, i.e. instances that were forgotten about because the state as a whole didn't matter? I'll have to look into that.
Anyone who understands true democracy is constantly on guard against the premise that it has any place outside of the electoral process in a constitutional republic.
I'm not clear about what you're saying. Public discourse? Lobbying? Public opinion polls? Freedom of the press? Right to seek redress? Judicial advocacy? Protest marches and freedom of assembly?
Education is the only cure for the idiocy that democracy has any place in a constitutional republic beyond the electoral process.
Here is one approach to confronting the wasteful, ignorant, destructive, aggressive militarism of the US as its power and reputation wane. It's decisive and emphasizes the best aspects of participatory democracy. It produces real alternatives in every electoral race to the lame, uniparty, tweedle-dee tweedle-dum "choices" engineered by the corporate ruling class through the puppet major parties .... https://warismakinguspoor.com/a-nation-at-peace/
💯 on the same page. I wrote about betrayal blindness in one of my Substacks ... that's the epidemic we need to address before we can truly move forward.
https://suzanneokeeffe.substack.com/p/cant-handling-the-truth
Like you (and Whitney Webb and Catherine Austin Fitts and Ryan Christian and a growing number of others), I believe building thriving resilient local communities is the way forward. Even individual decisions to step in that direction and to not buy into the 24 / 7 fear narratives loosens the globalists' abilities to manipulate and control the population. They need our buy in and consent to their narratives to pull off their agendas. Without us falling for it, their house of cards collapses.
Trump is the only President in my lifetime who has rejected the war machine. Today, over 500,000 Ukrainian men are dead and gone. The whole reason the Deep State was trying to remove Trump from the Presidency and now is trying to assassinate him is because he won't get their war on.
War is not good for business and Trump likes to negotiate business deals, not handing over control to corrupt generals to bomb nations like Libya into the dark ages to become a slave market (Obama).
Lives matter. I don't care what anyone imagines Trump is thinking or what he cares about. He won't get their war on, and that will save lives.
In the good old days, WAR used to matter to Progressives. But today, the "Left" only cares about skin color, gender identity, pronouns, transgenders, vaccine mandates, abortions up through birth, climate change, save every "newcomer", etc.
The so-called Left (actually just a Left version of the NeoCons) fell to the false front of actual fascists, like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton now calling for the First Amendment to be "fixed", while posing as "environmentalists", for "democracy", etc.
Only one candidate has rejected war, and instead accomplished the Abraham Accords. That's why today Trump has a network of other peace and health-minded people forming a coalition: Tulsi, Vivek, RFK Jr., Elon and many others on board. They understand the stakes right now.
There are wars the US is involved in.. You are missing the point.. Trump is only worried about one, but fancies the other wars to go on.. Trump didn't have to start a war because the CIA does that better all the time..
For whatever reason, Substack won't let me read the full comment. Phone glitch or pre-election sabotage of posts flagged by AI as supporting Trump? I posted this same comment above, your post is the same, I can't open it to read the full post. After listening to the Joe Rogan podcast with David Epstein I'm starting to question every interaction
For whatever reason, Substack won't let me read the full comment. Phone glitch or pre-election sabotage of posts flagged by AI as supporting Trump?
Just as there's the uni-party in the US, there is uni-party talking heads.. Thanks for the truth Josh.
Anyone out there got the number of Trumpys Doctor? Fantastic work & not the hint of a scar. A few dills on here Josh, they obviously haven't read your post with the right spirit nor depth of understanding. They'd make good candidates themselves. Wake-up America the world is laughing at you.
A man was killed by that bullet. The CIA FBI etc. hated Trump when he was in office. So they would face an assassination attempt now? The fake theory makes no sense whatsoever. I have never Yet voted for Trump. I agree with much of what Mitteldorf expressed here. My vote will follow Freedom of speech and ending war. From that perspective, the #rescuetherepublic crowd have it going on. I have always voted 3rd party. Why change now? Because freedom of speech is the #1. Keeping the internet free is #1. If we can't talk about it we can't fix it. And
Hear! Hear!
In what way do you see the US banking system of 1913 and the global financial system of 1944 stretched to the point where collapse is inevitable?
1913 was the Federal Reserve Act. Money is created as a future claim against the assets of the US Government. The debt slowly mounted over a hundred years, until the interest on the debt (now $36 trillion and counting) is a substantial portion of all the tax revenue generated by the Federal government. The Fed has been depressing interest rates below market to prevent the USG from going into default, and these interests rates (lower than the inflation rate) have had distorting effects on the economy. Now that the USG is starting to pay interest at more realistic rates, a default looms. Read Web of Debt by Ellen Brown.
1944 was the Bretton Woods Accord, establishing the US dollar as the world's reserve currency. At the time, the dollar was backed by gold and the largest manufacturing economy in the world, by far. But in 1972, the US ceased to back the dollar with gold, and the US manufacturing base has slipped far behind China, with other economies rivaling the US in manufactured exports. This has precipitated a movement among other countries to settle their international trade with other currencies than the dollar. The US has hastened this trend by trying to use the dollar as a political bludgeon, with "sanctions" that exclude Russia and Iran from trading in dollars. The BRICS countries are well on their way to establishing alternatives to the dollar for international trade. The prices Americans pay for imported goods are artificially low because the US can print dollars that are accepted in exchange for hard value by other nations. We have financed a growing balance of trade deficit ever since the Reagan years, but we can't do this forever. Listen to Michael Hudson https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlUSqQ8U8T8
Yeah, USG default looms. I don't know enough about large-scale economic machinations to foresee what all the ramifications of that would be. But if collapse of the banking system is one of them, and the powers that be would have a problem with that, well, debt can be forgiven with the stroke of a pen. Maybe Joe Blow with the savings bond won't forgive his share, but I don't think he looms very large. Who holds the national debt anyway? I thought it was like 90% the Fed, 10% foreign governments, with a smattering of ordinary citizens. Certainly the Fed's portion could be forgiven. By the way, I don't think it's true that dollars are a claim against the assets of the US Government. They aren't backed by anything.
I'm no expert on the Bretton Woods system either, but I have noticed the tensions therein. The system has struck me as resilient too though, and I don't see anything inexorable here, say like the exponential increase in debt at interest alluded to above. The BRICS countries have been at this a while now, haven't they? Why haven't they succeeded yet? This one scares me though. What happens to all those dollars used for settling international trade when they're no longer needed for such? I assume they come back here, resulting in even more inflation. And maybe that's hyper-inflation - I don't have a good quantitative handle. But I could see my life savings go up in smoke. I'd like to buy real estate, but of course, that's not exactly a piece of cake.
I'll give Hudson a listen.
Old institutions won't disappear overnight, but their domination is what is fast giving way to competing alternative mechanisms of international finance and systems of trade.. This is what is posing danger to the dollar hegemon and the old systems, the same way as the internet has replaced the newspapers and the post office ..