“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”
– John F. Kennedy, 1962
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July 26, 2024 — What a difference a couple of generations make.
If you need a sign that the American empire is in decline, simply look around. You can find social decay, deteriorating infrastructure and rapidly emptying inner cities. Rising crime, rampant drug addiction and crony capitalism.
Political violence is barely a protest (or rally) away. And why not?
Let’s look at what the politics of social justice and empire have wrought. What follows is a short exercise in inductive reasoning from one state… to the nation.
From the nation to the world.
“Kamala Harris is responsible for California’s 31% more violent crime and 3x more homeless,” writes Michael Shellenberger, a long-time resident of San Francisco, examining what she did and didn’t do as a District Attorney, Attorney General, U.S. Senator, and Vice President. (Read at your peril.)
Over the past decade, nationally, the story doesn’t get any better.
Trump got us started with a trade war against China and the greatest political sellout move in U.S. history, leading to $6 trillion in “emergency” Covid spending.
After that, historic inflation was inevitable.
Then, to our great relief (sic), Biden takes up the challenge, including passing a spending program called the Inflation Reduction Act.
If Trump could lock down the economy… well, the humble careerist from Scranton could do even better.
There’s really no way to avoid the outcomes. You can strip out all the jingoist, political posturing during this election cycle (from both national parties) and you still get, hmn… screwed:
Average Hourly Wages:
Encounters at the Southwest Border:
Change Since January 2021:
Consumer Price Index since 2016:
Do we need a more centralized government to fix the ills of “centralized government”?
“What would the world be like,” reader Gary M. takes the question globally, “should the USA pull all its military forces out of foreign lands and we stop giving free handouts to them. Will that vacuum be filled?”
“Unfortunately,” we have responded to Gary, in part, “these kinds of historical shifts are what global wars are made of.”
The hard truth is, the U.S. cannot afford to keep policing the world, nation-building, spying on its allies, forcing alliances against the BRICS nations, and supporting NATO, among other populist projects the world-improvers in Washington get paid to promote.
The United States’ withdrawal from their limited edition of global empire will be no different, we suspect, than the long, slow decay of the British Empire before it.
We’ll be witness to haphazard, random events. Violent episodes. And a host of grandstanding populists who claim credit for successes and blame some other politically expedient villain for failures.
We’ve already had a dress rehearsal with the withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Populist politics from both extremes at home won’t make the process any easier.
The “elites” are going to continue pushing policies that benefit themselves. “Patriotism” and “the good of the nation” are only invoked when special interests need to persuade blocs of the mindless vote to back some initiative that is inevitably not in their best interest.
To be continued, for sure…
As the French, born in the trenches of World War I, would say, “Sauve qui peut!”
Bill Bonner has more on one particular episode of political violence we witnessed just two weeks ago. Enjoy ~~ Addison
CONTINUED BELOW…
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At the End of Empire
Bill Bonner, Bonner Private Research
On the surface, the story does seem preposterous. The US has seventeen different secret service-type agencies. On or near the scene in Butler, PA were dozens… hundreds… thousands… of people on the payroll charged with protecting the government and its operatives (including aspiring Commanders-in-Chief).
Local cops. State cops. FBI. Homeland Security. ATF agents. Army. Marines. The list goes on and on.
All were armed with the latest robo-cop gear… the latest intel, coming from snoops and spooks all over the country… and the latest crime-busting tactics.
How could they fail to stop a callow amateur, shooting from an obvious vantage at the man who must be the most obvious target in the whole world? How could a kid with an aluminum ladder foil a billion dollars’ worth of trained, professional security?
It is so preposterous… it must be true, right?
The premise — laid out by the former Chinese ambassador to the US — is that America has changed dramatically from the country we grew up in.
What caused the change? Where does it lead?
And the botched ‘assassination attempt’ on Donald Trump? How does that fit in?
November 22, 1963
We were fifteen years old when JFK was murdered. That assassin didn’t miss.
We recall how the nation mourned… and how everyone remembered where he was when Kennedy’s death was reported. No one joked about it. And no one forgot it.
Mrs. Kennedy, still wearing the blood-stained suit she had worn in Dallas, had stayed with the body until it was brought into the White House. There it lay, for twenty-four hours, guarded by Green Berets.
The next day, the casket was laid onto a horse-drawn caisson. Three hundred thousand people lined Pennsylvania Avenue and a whole teary world watched on television as the procession slowly marched to the Capitol. The crowd fell silent as the caisson went by… followed by a riderless horse, Black Jack. The only sounds were muffled drums and the clank of horses’ steel shoes on the pavement.
In the rotunda of the US Capitol, Jackie Kennedy took her two children in hand to kneel beside the coffin. She had asked for a closed casket; her husband’s head had been shattered. Outside, another quarter of a million people lined up in near freezing temperatures… the line was said to stretch for forty blocks… to say farewell.
One of the last mourners, at 2:30am was former heavyweight boxing champion, Jersey Joe Walcott, who said simply: ‘He was a great man.’
And then, there was the doubt… who really did it, and why? Did the dots know the pattern of which they were a part?
Kennedy had announced his clear intention to pull away from war. Dan Denning comments:
The Kennedy ‘Peace Speech’ was on June 10, 1963. At 11:45 [minutes into the speech] he makes the point you did about no nation suffering more than the Soviets in World War Two. At 19:44 he talks about the ongoing negotiations in Geneva for a ‘general and complete disarmament.‘
Kennedy had already noted that the CIA was out of control and vowed to break it ‘into a thousand pieces.’
Later, at American University he clearly aimed to follow through on Eisenhower’s warning and prevent the firepower industry from getting control of America’s government.
Did the secret service/CIA/military, industrial complex strike first…conspiring to kill Kennedy? Did they organize it with the Cuban mafia… or did they merely forget to report the threat from Lee Harvey Oswald, whom they had been following for years? Or, did they have no conscious involvement, none at all… maybe it was just one of those coincidences that make history – getting rid of the one the man who might have stopped America’s degeneration into a warfare state?
Was not Lenin shipped to Moscow on a special train provided by the Germans?
Was not the young Stalin sent to Siberia… and allowed to escape?
Did not Abraham Lincoln go to the theater, even though he might have preferred a quiet evening at home?
The dots act within the patterns of history. They do not know where it is headed or choose its direction. But they help it get where it is going.
In the mainstream media, Trump’s star has risen. He has achieved a kind of folk hero status. He survived a bullet. He survived ridicule and derision. He survived salacious reports about p#$$y grabbing and paying off a porn star to keep quiet. He survived grand juries, as well as state and federal prosecutions. He survived four bankruptcies and three marriages.
Now, he is even more likely than ever to be our next president. By contrast, Joe Biden’s election prospects are dim. Poor Joe’s brain seems to be clouding over day by day… while Trump’s brain, such as it is, is sharp and clear.
Outside of the mainstream, meanwhile, opinions are more nuanced. Some analysts see the US drifting into such lawlessness and violence that a 20-year-old kid shoots a former US president. Others wonder whether the Secret Service really wanted to keep Trump alive. Still more daring is the thought that maybe the powers-that-be set him up.
‘We can’t trust the politicized FBI to handle the probe of the Trump assassination bid,’ writes Jim Bovard in the New York Post.
Then, who can we trust?
Where are our ‘great men’ today? ~~ Bill Bonner, Bonner Private Research
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So it goes,
Addison Wiggin
Founder, The Wiggin Sessions
P.S. Okay, I admit it. Our politics have put me in a particularly sour mood today. At least it’s Friday and the Olympics will revel us with a little ‘bread and circus’ for the next two weeks.
Other than that… you can let me have it, if you must, right here: addison@greyswanfraternity.com.
How did we get here? For a complete review of the financial, economic, and political history of the United States from Demise of the Dollar through Financial Reckoning Day and on to Empire of Debt — all three books are available in their third post-pandemic editions.
Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed is now available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble or if you prefer one of these sites:Bookshop.org; Books-A-Million; or Target.
Please send your comments, reactions, opprobrium, vitriol and praise to: addison@greyswanfraternity.com
