Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.
—Hosea 8:7
One country. Two systems.
One financial. One economic.
One for Wall Street. And one for Main Street.
One for the elite. And one for everyone else.
One fraudulent. The other just a rip-off.
To make a long story precariously short (and deliberately provocative), the ‘rich’ got some of their wealth honestly.
The rest they got by ripping off the poor and middle classes, using their fake-money system.
In effect, after 2008, they had access to an almost unlimited amount of credit priced at artificially low rates, giving them a greater and greater share of the nation’s real wealth.
And who noticed? They said the Federal Reserve was ‘stimulating’ the economy.
But the two-system system is now wreaking havoc on our economy, our society, and our government…and driving the whole kit and kaboodle to a disaster.
To back up…
Sons and daughters
The two-system system works for us, the top 10% who benefit from it. Many of us are retired. What’s it to us if there are no jobs?
We have financial assets (stocks, bonds, real estate, cash, gold). We’re happy to see the Fed pumping them up.
We don’t even mind (for now) that the economy was shut down by the Trump-Fauci duo. We didn’t have to go to work anyway.
But what about the others? The 90%? Our sons and daughters.
The uneducated…the poor…the ones who have nothing…who earn minimum wages…who need jobs…and who start families and careers already burdened with hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of student debt, mortgages, car payments, and their share of the national debt, too?
And don’t forget the middle-aged, middle classes…Typically, the ones in the middle suffer most when a nation goes nutty.
They have something to lose…but not enough wealth or financial savvy to protect themselves.
And there’s a good chance they will lose everything in the collapsing economy/money-printing lollapalooza/political upheaval ahead.
Built on a lie
If such a disaster is so obvious (to us), how come others don’t see it? How come they don’t look into an awful future and change it before it happens?
After all, they created the two-system system. They, and only they, could change it.
Well, how about this for a naked reason…
The deciders, the influencers, the economists, columnists, politicians, academics, captains of business, and sergeants of well-meaning nonprofits — almost none of them understands what is really going on.
Why not? Because it’s amazing what you can’t see when your wealth depends on being blind.
All of them — Democrat, Republican, Trump-lovers, Trump-haters — are part of the upper 10%. They all benefit from the fraudulent, fake-money system…and none wants to think about it too hard.
They’ve built their careers, their reputations, their fortunes on a lie. They’re not about to open their eyes now.
Besides, they — like all of us — are caught up in the whirlwind.
Politics…racism…fascism…Keynesianism…MMTism…global warmingism…COVID-19ism…Just read our mail!
We’ve described it previously as ‘context collapse.’ The rules…the traditions…the ideas we thought we could trust…suddenly give way.
The hot air rushes by us so fast, our feet leave the ground…and we are dizzy…and then nauseous.
Context collapse
Just think about what’s happened in the past few months.
The economy effectively ‘turned off’…with a 50% drop in GDP…and 20% unemployment.
…The Fed ‘printed’ three trillion in the last three months.
…Between April ’19 and April ’20, the difference in federal tax collections dropped by nearly a trillion dollars.
…Strange new unidentified ‘defense forces’ — kitted out like robocops from a sci-fi movie — appeared on the streets of Washington.
…A U.S. president so afraid of his own people he needs to hide in a bunker? The Washington Post:
The security perimeter around the White House keeps expanding. Tall black fencing is going up seemingly by the hour. Armed guards and sharpshooters and combat troops are omnipresent.
Three months ago, these things would have been considered impossible.
But now, everything is possible…no matter how bizarre, grotesque, un-American and implausible.
And now, as the center of our ‘normal’ beliefs turns to mush, the edges harden. The ‘fascists’ on the right…the ‘anti-fascists’ (Antifa) on the left.
The fences go up…but the barriers to civilized conduct go down.
Moonstruck delusions
Some want to destroy what they think is a ‘capitalist’ system. Some want to protect what they believe is a ‘conservative’ society.
Both groups are moonstruck…seeing new possibilities…with new hope…and even greater delusions. CNN:
The Boogaloos [apparently anarchists] are an emerging incarnation of extremism that seems to defy easy categorization. They are yet another confounding factor in the ongoing effort among local, state and federal officials to puzzle out the political sympathies of the agitators showing up to the mostly peaceful George Floyd rallies who have destroyed property, looted businesses, or — in the case of the Boogaloos who descended on Minneapolis — walked around the streets with assault rifles.
And here’s MSN:
Sen. Tom Cotton, an Arkansas Republican, on Monday pushed for the use of military force against Black Lives Matter demonstrators…
‘…let’s see how these anarchists respond when the 101st Airborne is on the other side of the street,’ Cotton said on Fox News.
After all, paraphrasing former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright…
What good is an army if you can’t use it to protect yourself from the people you stole from?
Regards,
Bill Bonner