Trust no one

[8 min read]

Last week, I reached out to Michael Krieger, who recently started writing at his excellent Liberty Blitzkrieg blog again.

I asked if I could occasionally publish his pieces in The Rum Rebellion. He kindly agreed.

We share a similar philosophy on how the world works. Only he writes about it with far more authority and eloquence. So I thought you might like to hear his views.

Plus, Michael worked on Wall Street for years. He is well aware of the corrupted centres of power that try to control the narrative and control your life. When I say centres of power, I’m talking centralisation of money (central banks) information (tech giants and MSM) and regulation (big government).

With the return of the establishment to the White House, and the MSM smugly telling you all is right in the world again, it’s a good time to remind yourself that it’s anything but.

Instead of hoping for another outsider to come in and challenge the status quo though, it’s time to take personal action. As someone far smarter than me once said, ‘be the change you want to see’.

The world is a pretty messed up place right now. I’m not a historian, but the recent attacks on personal liberties and freedom of speech hasn’t been seen in the West outside of war.

Of course, our political benefactors will tell you we’re at war with the virus. They’re taking your freedom away ‘for your own good’.

It’s the catch cry of all tyrants.

What about the tech giants then?

They’re simply at war with ideas they don’t agree with. If you challenge the official narrative, you don’t have a voice.

Michael talks about the power and pitfalls of social media in the essay below. But it’s more than just that.

You see, it’s hard to notice when you’re in the thick of it but you’re living through the breakdown of the global financial system. They’ve been trying to fix it since 2008, but it only gets worse.

That’s why you’re seeing sky-high debt levels, unprecedented monetary experimentation (with much more to come) economic problems and social divisions.

It’s also why stock markets are rallying. Investors are trying to flee the system, or at least flee cash. Stock markets don’t collapse in basket case economies, they rally. Just look at Turkey and Argentina, for example.

Anyway, let me hand you over to Michael. It’s a good read…

Keep in mind it was written in July last year but it’s more relevant than ever.

Trust no one

The title of today’s post is not meant to be taken literally. I trust plenty of people. I trust friends who’ve demonstrated their trustworthiness over the years. I trust my family. Having people in my life I love and trust makes everything far more meaningful and pleasant. I hope people reading this likewise have a circle of trust they’ve built over the years.

On the other hand, you should never trust anyone or anything that hasn’t given you good reason to do so, and if someone or something gives you good reason not to trust them, you should never forget that. The more power a person or institution has in society, the less trustworthy they tend to be. I don’t say this because it’s fun to be cynical, I say this because my life experience has demonstrated its accuracy.

In the 21st century alone, I’ve been given good reason to distrust all sorts of things around me, including the US government (all governments really), intelligence agencies, politicians, mass media, Wall Street and Silicon Valley, to name a few. These power centres make up ‘society’ as we know it in 2020, which is really just massive concentrations of lawless financial and political power obfuscating rampant criminality behind the cover of various ostensibly venerable institutions. What’s most remarkable is how many people still maintain trust in so many of these provably untrustworthy organisations and industries, which speaks to the power of propaganda as well as the comfort of denial.

That said, the ground is clearly beginning to shift on this front. As more and more people recognise that the system’s designed to work against them, increased numbers will reject conventional wisdom and search for an alternative framework. Unfortunately, this next step can be equally treacherous and it’s important not to jump from the frying pan into the fire.

This is where social media comes into play. It offers an endless array of opinions and analysis that you don’t get from mass media, but it’s also filled with bad actors, professional propagandists and con artists.

At this point, everyone knows that social media is the new information battleground, so every character or institution with malicious intent is aggressively playing in this arena and often with boatloads of money. The charlatans at MSNBC will have you believe it’s just the Russians or Chinese, but every government and every single special interest on the planet is now involved. They’re all on social media in one form or another, trying to push you in a specific direction that’s usually not in your best interests.

It took me a while, but I’ve finally recognised how unthoughtful and treacherous social media is whenever some big news event hits. Important arguments quickly lose all nuance and devolve into binary talking points and agendas. People split into teams in a way that feels very much akin to the traditional, and now largely discredited, red/blue political theatre. For COVID-19, it felt like half of Twitter thought it was an extinction-level event, while the other half was convinced the whole thing was a hoax. In the aftermath of George Floyd, you were either cheering on the civil unrest, or wanted to send in the military. Increasingly, if you aren’t in one of two manufactured camps on any issue you’ll be shouted down and ostracised. That’s not the kind of discussion I’m here for.

As someone who’s found great value in Twitter over the years, I’ve become far more careful in how I use it and where to direct my attention and energy. It reminds me of Mos Eisley in Star Wars, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but simultaneously a place you can connect with Han Solo and get a spaceship.

As we move forward, it’s going to feel like the world’s ending, and in some ways it will be. No, the world isn’t literally ending, but a specific kind of world is ending and it’ll be extremely difficult for many people to tell the difference as it’s happening. This will likely lead to many more episodes of mass insanity as professional manipulators take advantage of millions upon millions of disoriented people. Priority number one should be to stand guard at the gate of your mind during this time so as not to become a victim.

The best thing you can do from here on out is use your time and energy as productively as possible. We’re going to need builders, creators and inventors more than ever before, because we’re past the point of putting this thing back together. We’ll need to recreate, reimagine and rebuild, and all of this must spring from a point of consciousness in order to bring forth something that is both better and sustainable. Become more beautiful and resilient as others become ugly and unhinged. Focus on what’s within your capacity to control and always remember to resist the crazy.

Michael Krieger,

For The Rum Rebellion

PS: You can find more of Michael’s work at the Liberty Blitzkrieg website.

Regards,

Greg Canavan,
Editor, The Rum Rebellion

River of No Return
By Bill Bonner

Today, we drift downriver…

It is the same stream we were on yesterday…leading from the crystal source, way up at the top of the US’ imperial glory at the end of the 20th century…and then down to a muddy, bitter, confusing puddle in the 21st.

You’ll recall from yesterday’s Diary that there are only two important things a president has to do: He has to protect the American people…and their property. Like two banks of a river, they can never be entirely separated.

Wealth erosion

We’ve been exploring the financial side…looking at the ways the feds have failed to protect Americans’ wealth.

According to JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s calculation — shown yesterday — normal, pre-fake money growth rates would have produced twice as much additional GDP in the last decade, an extra $10 trillion to divvy up over the last 10 years.

So most people are deprived of both wealth and income as a result of the feds’ fake economy.

Even more egregious, the Federal Reserve gave some $7 trillion of fake money to the richest people in the nation. Relatively, everyone else is poorer.

More capital

But today, we’re going to cross over to the other bank of the river. We will take a look at how the US’ presidents have protected our freedom…or not.

On neither side of the river is the US blazing any new trails. This process of government-led impoverishment is nothing new. Or strange. Or mysterious.

The Soviets and the Chinese took nearly full control of both sides of the river — their citizens…and their wealth. The results were stark and obvious — famines…empty shelves…shoddy products…bad food…and so forth.

But as we cast off, let’s take a look at this important island in the stream…connecting the two sides. Economists call it ‘capital formation’. It refers to the thing that separates free, rich societies from poor, slave economies.

‘Net real investment’ is the amount of savings put to use training people, building new plants, and buying new ‘capital’ equipment. That is, it’s the part of what we earn that is not consumed…but used to create more wealth.

It’s why wages are higher in the US than in Mexico, for example; because the US has more accumulated ‘capital’.

Free people, once they get the taste for it, build capital. They save their money. They start new businesses. They create goods and services that add to the wealth of the whole group.

Unfree people don’t. They are not allowed to. Or sometimes, they fear their new wealth might be taken away from them, so why bother?

Or they are faked out by fake money, false interest rates, regulations, subsidies, bailouts, stimmy cheques…and other abominations.

Small government = good

And here, we will make it even simpler for the new president to understand what he is supposed to do.

Time and resources can either be used to create more wealth (capital formation)…or they can be consumed.

Government, with some small exceptions, is a consumer of wealth. The private sector creates it. So the smaller and less intrusive the government, relative to the private sector, the richer and freer the society.

There’s only so much time and space available. The more of it that is taken up by gun-toting, bossy-pants politicos, the less is left for the free, win-win, private sector. How hard can it be to remember that?

Small government = good. Big government = bad.

Power balance

But there is no point putting this on Joe Biden’s desk. It is the last thing he will want to read. The governing elite gain power and wealth by forgetting that kind of logic.

That is, after all, the aim of all politics — to hold onto power at any price…and use it to reward your friends and supporters.

Which is why the US' founders aimed to keep the feds from getting too big for their britches…

…by balancing the power of the executive with the power of the legislation…and restraining both with the power of the judicial branch…

…by having two houses of Congress. One was supposed to represent the people — carefully studying new laws to make sure they served the interests of their constituents. The other was meant to represent the states — which were sovereign members of the union…and able to walk away whenever it no longer served them…

…by making sure that the House of Representatives had the ‘power of the purse’…recognising that everything the feds did — whether passing out $2,000 stimmy cheques or $2 billion defence contracts — came at the expense of the people. Leaving all spending bills to the discretion of the House guaranteed that no expense would be undertaken without the prior consent of the voters (through their representatives)…

…by insisting that only Congress (not the president) had the ability to declare war and the responsibility to raise the troops and the money to pay for it…

…by enacting a Bill of Rights to lay out clearly what the federales couldn’t do, no matter how good an idea they thought it would be at the time…

…and by limiting the Republic’s money to ‘gold and silver’…so the feds couldn’t just print up paper money and use it for any foolish thing they wanted.

Out of date

But all of those things seem quaint and out of date today.

Congress never declares war…or raises money to cover the costs.

Congressmen don’t even read the laws they pass.

The power of the purse is meaningless; there is no money in the purse…our money is fake.

The states now look to the federal government for support. They are no longer sovereign and cannot leave the union or just say ‘no’ to the feds rules and regulations.

The Bill of Rights is still there…but there is hardly a single part of it that has not been eroded away. All the feds have to do is declare an emergency — terrorism…plague…you name it — and they can get away with murder.

Americans’ freedom has been taken away…one pettifogging regulation, one fake dollar, one lie…at a time.

Falling apart

And now, the whole system seems to be coming apart. Nothing is too extreme. Or too absurd.

Some 100 Democratic members of Congress have proposed a law expelling Republicans who challenged the election results. According to the charges, the Republicans are guilty of ‘insurrection’.

Said Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), expelling the duly elected representatives was a way of ‘healing’ the nation.

Representative Ilhan Omar, meanwhile, said that those who disputed the election results had ‘blood on their hands’.

While these were clearly over-the-top rhetorical excesses, they revealed a sad trend. Even the new president himself proposed to treat those who broke into the Capitol Building as ‘domestic terrorists’.

The Wall Street Journal reports that one of his first priorities is to pass a law against ‘domestic terrorism’.

And now, the War on Terror comes home. Here’s General Stanley McChrystal — for years head of Joint Special Operations Command in Iraq and the commander of the war in Afghanistan:

‘…a whole generation of angry Arab youth with very poor prospects followed a powerful leader who promised to take them back in time to a better place, and he led them to embrace an ideology that justified their violence. This is now happening in America. […] I think we’re much further along in this radicalization process, and facing a much deeper problem as a country, than most Americans realize.’

Get ready, Guantanamo! Order some more yellow jumpsuits…

More to come…

Regards,

Bill Bonner,
For The Rum Rebellion