American democracy was an important proof of concept that changed the world. If you read the pro-democracy (anti-king) activists of the time like Thomas Paine, it is clear that the success of US democracy was a sea change that encouraged democratic revolutions across Europe. At the time, the idea of a nation governed by its people was rather novel and untried. The model ultimately chosen in the US and defined in the constitution was one of divided, representative, federalized, democracy. Other Western democracies have since chosen small variations on this model.

All of these Western democracies have been corroded and, in my opinion, mortally stabbed by a number of external and internal power centers. In re-reading some of the books of these early champions of democracy it is quite sad to see how differently elected government has turned out compared to their visions. For example, Thomas Paine and John Stewart Mill praise the end of wars and the beginning of peace under democracy as the people never stand to benefit from wars and taxes. In the end, the same corruption and bureaucracy infected democracy and led to governments almost indistinguishable from the kings and queens of feudal Europe.

In theory, the representative democracy (which is just one of the forms of democracy) was designed to divide power in order to prevent any one body from collecting all the power. In this way, the US senate was given appointment approval powers and the US House (designed as more populist) was given ultimate control of the budget, taxing, and spending. The President, the Constitution, and the Courts were given powers designed to limit the elected government. Other forms of power division were also used including reserving certain powers to states and delegating power (like Germany where delegation of powers is used by their elected Bundestag). This division of power addressed concerns and problems with government at the time, but lacked a serious understanding of political power outside of a king. This left the American form of government vulnerable to the subversion described below – listed in order of when each one was injected into the body politic of America. As we will see, Western democracy has been controlled by special interests since its birth.

Federalism

An early method of consolidating political power away from the more local and populist state governments was the idea that a national government should be given more power at the expense of the sovereignty of the states. Various reasons were given for this centralization, all of them dishonest in my opinion. A similar debate is going on in Europe where centralization is happening even as the power center in Brussels fails. The arguments made now in Europe for more power for the European Commission are similarly dishonest. For example, it is argued that centralization will aid the debt imbalances, when in fact it will simply feed the same beasts at a faster rate. No, the Federalists and all such centralizers sought the power resources of a monarchy while paying lip service to democracy. For example, the celebrated Hamilton, leader of the Federalists, proposed making the president a position for life. Federalists desired from the beginning a permanent bureaucracy that could manage and subdue the states. Such management is naturally allergic to popular democratic change.

Power Brokers

Regional power brokers and coalitions joined workers groups, elites, and immigrant groups into political machines that often centered around a large regional metro center like NYC or NOLA. These political machines were recognized as an incurable scourge as early as the time of Andrew Jackson and continued to decide presidencies and senate elections beyond the time of LBJ (1960s). Famous examples are the Tammany Hall Machine, the Chicago Machine, and the Byrd Machine. These political machines operated purely on power and purely on the power seized by controlling the state, which in turn was used to buy support in the form of patronage. Thus, early American democracy devolved into patronage networks that can be summarized by their operating principle: reward friends and punish enemies. Corruption was explicit and public with state employees in some cases being required to pay into the machine a percentage of their state wages. The state and courts were merely tools for power and favors with little regard for representation. Europe has this problem throughout the EU governmental bodies.

Commercial Interests

Alongside the birth of democracy another idea for the distribution of the power of money was developed: capitalism. Here the founders deserve extensive fault for not protecting the young republic from this form of subversion. Already powerful commercial interests (for example, the East India Company) in the colonial powers of Europe exerted massive influence over the monarchies of Europe. In America, democracy proved even more vulnerable to their influence. As transportation became more efficient and America became more connected, the power of these commercial interests grew as well. Today, Citizens United is the law of the land, enshrining the right of corporations to bribe politicians as simply “free speech.” In Washington DC, power follows those politicians who can raise the most money for their party. Elections cost billions of dollars with many corporate interests donating to both sides to ensure influence. Finally, parties have become machines against any politician amongst their own ranks which dares to represent their citizen’s interests – by funding primary challengers at the request of their donors.

Banking Interests

No greater conflict has challenged government since the Greek era more often and more subversively than control of the money supply of a nation. At its extreme, control of the money supply is sovereignty and control of policy. Before democracy swept Europe, kings generally controlled the production of money within their nations / empires. As the king was replaced by Parliament, bankers repeatedly demanded oversight of the money supply pointing to the long history of failures of government run banking (inflation) which was mostly at that time under inflation under kings. Now almost every Western democracy has a central bank that controls the money supply and is independent from elected government and partially/totally-controlled by the private banking sector. While the “independence” of these central banks is questionable, no one can challenge the fact that they are explicitly controlled for the benefit of bankers and implicitly to hurt labor by preventing “labor inflation”. Ultimately, power over the money supply is power over the economy and, therefore, the unaccountable power over the electoral success of government administrations. These interests run counter to the right and the left of the political spectrum but nevertheless have been rendered untouchable.

The Permanent Bureaucracy

Change in a democracy is sold as something driven by elections and the people. In reality when the action must be taken through a permanent bureaucracy (PB), those in that bureaucracy can hold change hostage. The PB forms an unofficial private-public partnership where government contractors are awarded contracts by the PB and then these contractors lobby for the continued existence and the status quo at the agency. Both the contractors and the PB profit more when no changes are made and often when no results are produced. This unofficial partnership can also be seen in the so called “revolving door” between government agencies and those corporations that they regulate or award contracts to. Even worse, certain three letter govt. agencies have been known to directly lobby congress to maintain their power, blackmail politicians, lie about evidence to sway elections, and otherwise act in their own interests and against those of the people. This is what makes them permanent and politicians temporary. Just see JFK.

The Military

The founders and especially George Washington saw this risk of the military or a peace-time standing army forming too strong of a power versus the elected government. This weakness of most democracies is often exploited by the CIA in latin america and south east asia, where military coups take over elected governments likely to counter US colonial interests there. Later, President Eisenhower described the danger further by describing a particular permanent bureaucracy that he called the military-industrial complex (MIC). One way of looking at this is that every major threat the US has countered since the Korean war was due to indiscriminate US meddling with little purpose other than mission making or countering others. In particular, many US funded groups went on to be the largest threats to the US (Saddam Hussein, Hamas, ISIS, Al Qaeda, even Nazis), reaping profits for this complex all along the way.

This complex, however, is more dangerous than other PBs because rather than just advocating for greater budgets, this complex profits by making the world a less safe place and benefits when America has many threats. Thus, US foreign policy has not been peaceful or diplomatic since at least the first world war because the influence of this military PB which has an outsized budget and unchecked power to covertly generate the very hotspots that then justify its funding. This is a cancer unable to be severed; JFK tried. Unfortunately, a cancer for the US is a plague for the world and international relations such that no western democracy is untouched by this cancer. The early activists for democracy thought it would lead to world peace as no citizen would fund needless petty wars; this complex has instead proven democracies to be some of the best instruments for collecting taxes for wars (feudal kings would be jealous).

Conclusion

Power collects and centralizes regardless of the human divisions and weaknesses that are introduced into the official power structures. If power cannot flow through the primary structure, it will flow through some other structure to get its desired result much like a lightning bolt. No amount of division of power by the founders of the US could prevent what we have today and that is because these founders were blind to the nature of political power due to the fact they had never been close to any such power (in their time, this was the royal courts, which had similar issues to those above).

At no time in the history of western democracies has government represented and pursued only the interests of its own people. It was corrupted from the start, which is readily apparent just from the fact that the Bill of Rights was amended into the Constitution immediately after the creation of the Constitution, enshrining some of America’s most important protection for citizens. As soon as the federal government was empowered it had to be constrained to prevent abuse. From that point, Federalism, Political Machines, Power Brokers, Commercial Interests, Banking Interests, the Permanent Bureaucracy, and the Military each wielded far more power than the citizenry.

Representative democracy also has an underlying premise that is false and is now so ludicrously, and obviously false that, as a result, Americans have a 12% approval rating for their own elected Congress. That false premise is that a person elected based on a platform and based on statements made before election will define the platform and the politician’s actions once elected. This is what is called an agency problem where our elected officials are agents acting on behalf of the people after being empowered by the people. As is increasingly apparent, politicians will say anything to get elected and then shamelessly do the opposite. Since they are controlled by the same interests, they vote the same way and no "change agent" results in change (cough Obama, cough AOC, cough Mike Johnson, cough Meloni).

Other models of democracy exist and flourish in the world today outside the West. These models are demonized in the West by politicians and the PB because their livelihoods depend on the current model. The founders of the US and those that copied them in Europe got it wrong – division of power does not weaken it, but rather re-channels that power into darker places hidden from you and I. Other models of democracy address this fundamental nature of power differently to better represent the people, which can be confirmed by populist change or approval polls. There is no greater current indictment or proof of failure of the current democracies in the West than their widespread disapproval by their own voters and their constant pursuit of policy goals adverse to their populace. Therefore, a return to the US constitution or to the founders' intent or equivalent representative democracy is insufficient; such democracy is a swiss cheese for the worms of hidden power to thrive in.

As described above, the “powers that be” have a solid grip on the laws that are made, the policies that are pursued, and the wars that are fought. Additionally, because central banks are managed by bankers and not governments (so called independence), the bankers and the 1% also control a key part of the economy: money. Even with that control, capitalism is dynamic enough in its raw form that it (or the power given by it) poses a threat to the top-down control of the nations of the West that we currently have. To prevent any such upstart entrants from changing the status quo by rising to wealth via capitalism and prevent any possible losses for themselves, the oligarchs developed an economics that ensured that the flow of money in the nation developed in the right direction (their direction).

As a result, we have had rising inequality as a norm for much of the 1900s and 2000s (even if punctuated by deep setbacks to rich and poor, like the 1980s). In this part, we will look at the corrupted logic that forms the foundation of this economics, we will look at why it is beneficial to those at the top but not for any nation in the West, and we will see how this long term cancer on the nations of the west has finally reached the point where it is unworkable and unsustainable. Collapse is coming at all levels of the economic pyramid because productive economic policy has been jettisoned for favors, earmarks, and crony spending. All of this failure can be tied to the economics of experts like Larry Summers and Paul Krugman, who are loved by left and right, but whose policies and economic logic have bankrupted the West.

Money / Central Banks / Inflation

Let's start with money. The paper bills we all use in the West to pay for things have always decreased in value. They buy less things each year; and each year there are more dollars / euros / yen. The top 1% of the wealthy manage this money supply via central banks and monetary policy. Many articles have been spent on how money is created, but that is a waste of time. In reality, they make it up (the policy / the reasons / all of it) - just look at the reasoning and design of TARP in 2008. Since they make it up and, by law, THEY (in the West) are wealthy independent bankers, then you can expect what groups they favor to have money. So they have created a monetary policy that gives money to the 1% and called it trickle-down-economics (they even created the term). Yea, that's right, they're pissin on ya. This creation of money according to their fake rules benefits them in at least five major ways:

First, Central Banks specifically target creating enough extra money each year to average 2% inflation (one of their made up rules). Of course, more recently the US and Europe have seen far more inflation. The advantage of having inflation on-demand is to crush labor / workers and benefit huge corporations. Recently, as wages rose in the US, Central Bankers went on TV and said their mandate was to crush these wage increases. To do this they use inflation (and unemployment), inflation makes a worker's salary worth less each year and so in five years or even two years the worker can no longer afford their previous life while making the same amount. Even though businesses can change their prices very quickly, salaries do not increase day to day. Inflation forces the worker to ask / beg for higher wages from their employer. This puts the employer in the position of power, the position to just say NO, the position to profit off the current salary of the employee while charging higher prices. Just think if this was reversed (deflation), then employees could buy more with their salaries every year and corporations would have to ask their employees to accept a lower salary so that they could lower their prices and compete. So the monetary policy of average inflation of 2%, which has basically been achieved over the past 10 years (2014-2024), has in those ten years reduced the value of a worker's salary by 32%. That is, money creation by bankers for their buddies (as we see below) has not only cut into the worker's ability to live life, but also forces that worker to repeatedly beg for more money from their employers or they will fall behind by 32% automatically. That is a rigged game.

Second, by creating a running inflation (price increases), those people saving money in bank accounts or in a safe at home lose 30% of the value of that money every 10 years or so. A man saving for retirement by not going to Starbucks and putting $100 in a mattress every week will find that after 30 years 90% of the value of that money is gone, again automatically. This forces every worker to find things to buy with their money that will not go down in value over 30 years. This forces every worker right into the arms of money managers because these workers have to invest their savings in the stock market, bonds, or real estate. Workers then have to give this money from their savings to the very people managing the increases in prices that are destroying their savings. In reality, investment banks are providing the solution to the problem they created via inflation / price increases. You wouldn't need them if your money kept its value at exactly the same amount for 30yrs. So again, the game is rigged to have the money flow back to them.

Third, these large banks that manage the central banks and money of the US and Europe benefit from making prices go up because to them price increases means price increases on things they own or have provided loans for. Think about what happened in 2008. All major banks had loaned money out to people to buy houses at increasingly higher prices. These higher prices created huge profits for the banks. Then it became clear that housing prices would go down, if a house price goes below the amount loaned banks start to lose money. Well the rich / banks / elites hate to lose money. So they turned on the money hoses and prices went back up, way up. This didn't help the average American, but it saved the asses of the banks.




In this way, banks can make loans, profit from those loans, and have no fear of loss on the price of the house. Banks refuse to lose money on loans to a market (demanding bailouts), but if you skip a payment to them, you lose your home. Just watch this logic repeat as we face a commercial real estate crash rivaling that of the housing crash of 2008. So banks and the 1% benefit when asset prices go up because they own those assets. No value was added to the economy by having the same house / boat / land increase in price; and yet anyone who did not have one of these assets is losing. This generates demand for more and more people to buy the things the rich already own, which again ensures the money flows to them. A person in the US or EU or Japan or Korea cannot merely work a job and save, they must constantly be in the game, the game of buying things that will go up in value NOW because they won't be able to afford it later. This is a game rigged for those who own these things and do not work (the 1%), while it harms those who work for their living and who must gradually try to achieve / save for this ever-moving target like buying a home.

Fourth, let’s understand what happens to this money when created. It gets given to banks to loan out or to govt to spend. As we see below, giving new money to govt to spend on whatever it wants subverts democracy. But first, let’s look at the money distribution process. Who gets money first: bankers and government insiders like DOD contractors. Who gets money first matters for two reasons. One reason is that getting money first lets you buy things with the new money before it causes prices to go up (called the Cantillion Effect). Once the money has trickled down (as they say), then everyone is using their new dollars for things and demand for those things drives up prices. Another reasons is that getting money first lets you decide who else gets it, call this buying power or lending power or grant power. Regardless of the name, it is POWER pure and simple. It is again, forcing people to come to the bankers for the fresh new money – rigging the game.

Fifth and finally, the lack of control people have over the money creation process means that governments can just bypass the people and spend money on the things they want. This means the 1% get the wars that they want, they get the science and research that they want, they get the government grants that they want, they fund the voices they want (who would actually pay for the BBC), they get nice roads where they want, they get the new weapons they want, they can pay off whoever they want. All of this is possible because printing new money allows the government to avoid finding someone to tax (take the money from). It allows a government to fund things that would not have majority support, which subverts democracy or any say of the people. With majority support, the government is more than happy to tax and spend that money. On the other hand, cronyism, wars, and gender studies would not be priorities for majorities of democratic populations to get taxed in order to have. Indeed, the founders of democracy like Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson were sure that democracies would end wars because only kings could justify spending that amount of money on something so wasteful. Of course, we may never know because govt can just print money for their wars. Ultimately, this means that the government and the bankers can get what they want when they want it by printing money (which reduces the value of the money we all have and earn), while the majority of a population must fight to agree to get taxes increased on something in order to get what the majority wants...in a “democracy.”

Conclusion

These points summarize the goals and aims of “trickle-down” economics from a money-creation perspective. This is mainstream economics at a major US or European university. These powers are not questioned. Inflation of 2% is considered reasonable (despite destroying 20% of the value of money every 10 years). For a few years, these economics experts even offered the idea that printing money didn’t cause prices to increase because they did not see inflation even after generating trillions of dollars. Well it turns out that they had just given the trillions to the 1% which had no more use for more money and so it never got used and affected prices. That is the state of expert economics: they have made inequality so bad and productive spending so minimal (more on this later) that pushing trillions of dollars into the economy via their friends trickled down nothing to the people and created no price increases. Of course, then during COVID they actually gave a little money to the people and inflation exploded.

Globalization and the Third Way

As we saw, many of the aspects of money management by elite bankers that control the money supply also hurt labor. Similarly, the growth of multi-national corporations and the trade reforms that streamlined and increased imports into the US is anti-labor. From the early 1900s all the way through the 1980s, the political power of labor / unions in the US was quite large and strikes often became violent. Highly skilled labor in the US served as a core organizer of the middle class and, thus, prevented for as long as they had their power, the predations of the rich on the middle class. Then Clinton and Reagan introduced neoliberal economics, which was also called the “third way”. This Third Way is a way to avoid the class conflict that had existed since the end of feudalism and which sparked so much unrest in capitalist countries. The “Third Way” was an economic program to crush the power of labor with basic economic system changes rather than police with bully sticks. Its principal way of eliminating labor power is outsourcing.

Outsourcing was enabled by opening trade and removing tariffs on goods from Asia and Latin America – China joining WTO and the signing of NAFTA. We all know what outsourcing did to the heartland of America. America went from a manufacturing country and an exporting country to an importing country. Of course, typically when an economy stops producing things it stagnates. The Third Way avoided this in three important ways, exporting inflation, destabilizing the world, and domestic financialization. Beginning in the 1990s, the US and Europe reigned supreme militarily and economically (only South Korea was really still growing its real economy; Japan had stagnated; China was far behind). OK, but being the largest economy still did not leave the elites with enough of the pie, so to speak. They wanted to increase the productivity of their companies without paying domestic wages. This outsourcing led to huge CEO pay increases and slumping real salaries for engineers and skilled trades for the past 30yrs. All the productivity increases went to stockholders and executives; and why not, the workers clearly didn’t deserve it, in fact, the foreign workers were less efficient but just cost far less, so clearly the genius and tireless work of the executives deserved this reward – so the logic went (and shareholders naturally agreed).

***In the EU, the impact to the middle class was far more muted because of embedded labor power in institutions of govt themselves and because the democratic socialist structures that returned some of these outsourcing profits back into quality of life benefits for their citizens***

OK, so the US decided to stop producing anything (indeed for a while there in the 90s the US was not even producing oil like today). So how to balance things out and still have GDP growth despite less actual production.

First, the Third Way deregulated financial institutions in the US (and this was carried over in Europe as well, esp. UK). This deregulation allowed banks with their extensive reserves of depositor funds to get into the financial markets. This deregulation (for example ending Glass-Steagal) was carried out by Reagan and Clinton. It created a speculative environment that saw repeated bubbles and crashes. It also drove GDP immensely. Assets traded more, they increased in price more, they attracted foreign investment. Single family homes became less and less affordable as they continually increased in price (even 2008 financial crisis barely slowed it down because of the money creation and low rates stabilized prices so the banks couldn’t lose). Every asset in the US and many in Europe exploded in price and GDP increased as did the wealth of those with such assets. This is the first distortion that the Third Way introduced: financialization and the increase of the price of assets even as the price of goods decreased. Anything financialized increased in price including college tuition, healthcare services, and stocks (P/E ratio) despite no appreciable increase in quality, features, or productive output of the asset. Whenever the stock market went down or financial institutions got in trouble, neoliberalism prescribed austerity (less social/state benefits) for the people and support (money printing) for the elite. All this led to increased inequality, less affordability, and a destruction of the middle class. Some would say that was the goal; money flowed to the top 5%.

Second, the US and the EU as the dominant / stable economies coming out of the Cold War acted as investment havens. Foreign capital was allowed to buy anything and everything – multi-million dollar condos in NYC and Miami, farmland, water rights, etc. This created a place for the dollars spent on imports to return to. So the dollars went out for cheap toys and consumer goods and came back to the US as investments by shady developing country businessmen (like Russian oligarchs) in assets. The same closed loop was used to support the UK Pound with investments in real estate in London. These closed loops maintained strong currencies despite the huge increases in the amount of money and the lack of any production growth in the domestic market. The currency inflation could be hidden as wage increases overseas and asset increases (wealth increases) at home. The strong currency of dollar/euro/pound resulted in domestic currencies abroad being used less and so less desired even in the currency’s home country. This meant inflation – exported inflation – over and above the wage inflation. Thus, US assets provide the world with a speculation playground not to mention a money laundering haven for the elites of other poorer countries to hide their wealth.

The US is aware of how the dollar’s strength can be used as a foreign policy tool or weapon. Even before sanctions were leveled at nations, the US used dollar strength and high interest rates (or lack of dollars abroad) (or low dollar liquidity) for short periods several times over the past few decades to destabilize weaker countries and force them to get more loans in dollars or inducing the flight of money from those countries and into US assets as a “safe haven.” This is again a core policy and key advantage that has probably never been enjoyed by any other nation (except England during the British Empire). These advantages, however, were exploited to force investment in a country that produced less and less. Such an economic policy is obviously unsustainable and not re-producible.

Western economists, however, developed neoliberal economics around this very model, a model requiring a foundation of exported inflation. In 1992 for example, when asked about whether the United States should have an explicit semiconductor production policy, Michael Boskin, chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisors under Clinton, quipped, “Potato chips, computer chips—what’s the difference?”. When this ignorant economic model of disregard for production was exported as the solution to so many failed states, the cure proved worse than the disease (see Peru, Chile, and other “shock doctrine” experiments). So really, neoliberal economics or third way economics is a special case unique to America and unique to the very short time before the lack of production (the lack of a real economy) caught up with the US. With COVID and the following inflation, that lack of production was laid bare.

The West is now caught in this trap, a unique neoliberal economic trap. The trap is this: (1) any high inflation destroys the Euro/Dollar as safe havens and/or forces high interest rates on mountains of debt; (2) reducing the money printing and attempting to rebuild production through investment in factories will burst the asset bubbles that currently sustain GDP growth; (3) the cost of inflated assets such as homes has grown to be such a large percentage of the western worker’s budget that our workers cannot be competitive worldwide (automation cannot solve this because of the expense of such a build out also exceeds what it would be elsewhere); (4) Tariffs generate worse outcomes for points (1)-(3) in the short term (10yrs) at least. The only option to recover from this trap is world war – a world war that the West wins and which places itself in the position that the West had after WW2 where competitiveness did not matter because all rivals were in ashes.

Third, as suggested above, neoliberal economics and really worldwide economic control can also be supported by war, by destabilizing other countries and their neighbors to such an extent that the West remains the safe haven for assets world wide and can continue printing Euro-dollars for things it wants. This strategy also replaces the older high interest rate strategy of collapsing emerging economies. The West is now so indebted itself that it cannot afford this solution – it is struggling to maintain 5% interest rates. So war and scorched earth became the solution and this was first implemented in north Africa with the Arab Spring. Now it is being applied to south east Asia, eastern Europe, and the middle east. Save civilization and “western values” by bombing everyone else back to the stone age is the thinking. Well fortunately, even this strategy is appearing unaffordable and unattainable... in part, ironically, because wars require production. So, wars to support the lack of domestic productive GDP do not compute, except in neoliberal economics and its foreign policy.

Conclusion

So the West is trapped. It is so clearly trapped it is sacrificing its own: Europe. With the destruction of the Nordstream pipelines and the cut off of pipelines through Ukraine and Poland, Europe is itself being destabilized; production there is being destroyed in the hopes it relocates to the US (with healthy subsidies for exactly this in the “Inflation Reduction Act”). Inflation in Europe will drive wealth to the US and continue to support the asset bubbles for a few more years. Clearly, though, when neoliberal economic policy is essentially eating its own, then the end of its unique wealth creation in the US is about to come crashing down.

There are just so many lies. So many blatant open lies. Lies to just allow the politicians and experts to duck and cover for 24hrs or a month or whatever is needed to dodge responsibility:

Remember how many times Biden said that COVID vaccines would stop the spread. That you could not get COVID if you took the vaccine. That you were killing your grandmother if you didn't take the vaccine. And there were so many more lies like this for two years straight. "Two weeks to stop the curve." "COVID variants can't evade (mutate around) the vaccines." We now know they were all lies, in most cases knowing lies by experts who had seen contrary evidence, based on congressional testimony and lawsuits in the 9th Circuit. But those lies served their purpose, the sheep obeyed and grandmothers died anyway.

Remember how the very true stories of corruption from the computers of both Hillary Clinton and Hunter Biden were labeled "Russian Misinformation." Knowing this was true information, members of our own government and ex-members demanded that the emails, pictures, and transactions detailed in both of these instances must be hidden prior to an election because they were foreign influence. We now know that the FBI in both cases knew the documents from these two computers which detailed corruption by presidential candidates were authentic. Yet, they lied and said Hillary's server was hacked by Russians, despite the third party cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike that analyzed it AT THAT TIME finding the opposite. Yet, the intelligence community lied and said Hunter Biden's laptop was not his and the documents were not authentic. These lies are still believed by a majority of Americans and these lies were repeated and amplified precisely to influence a domestic election. It is very clear: the people cannot be trusted with truth.

More recently Admiral Kirby and Secretary of State Anthony Blinken got a ceasefire agreement adopted by the UN Security Council by stating that Israel had endorsed it. They went on every TV channel and said that all that needed to happen was for Hamas to accept. That this was Israel's proposal. Of course, that was a complete lie, Israel did not agree and publicly stated so. Almost every foreign govt also saw through this lie the day it was announced. Yet, they kept repeating the lie, just so they could have something to point to to say "we tried." An international diplomatic lie at the highest level of the UN security council for what seems to be just short term domestic political gain.

Similarly, German Chancellor Merkel bragged that two agreements between European countries and Russia describing the steps to be taken for peace in Ukraine were entirely lies. These two Minsk Agreements were apparently never intended to be followed. Lies were put on paper and signed by major European Powers with almost no regard for what that does to diplomacy. In fact, the West has jettisoned diplomacy altogether; only threats and lies remain. Threats like that to Israel by proposing an agreement as theirs that they did not agree with. Threats to our ally Germany that the US will never allow the Nordstream pipeline to supply Germany with energy - and it was then blown up. Lies to almost every country in written agreements like JCPOA and the Minsk Agreements that no one in the West intend to follow.

And it is not just our politicians. Journalists independently craft lies intended to scare people into voting one way or another. For example, that Trump will start a nuclear war; Trump will round up Muslims in concentration camps. Those did not age well given current affairs in the world without Trump. Now Rachel Maddow says her and all of CNN will be rounded up and put in concentration camps if Trump wins. The lies just do not stop; there is no accountability. And why would there be? The lies are working as intended.

Perhaps most disturbing of all though is that the voters in the West still believe these lies. They may have low approval ratings of their current leaders because reality shows them that things are getting worse. But the blame is hidden; put on particular groups like immigrants; or just simply countered with lies so that most employment and inflation statistics now are fraudulent. I see nothing that indicates that the average voter is not exactly where the politicians on both sides would like them to be: perfectly divided and heavily distrustful of all neighbors and allies. And so pointing out the lies does no good because they are targeted lies that are intended to produce exactly this effect. Trump is just as big of a liar as Biden; supporters of each believe these lies are necessary and so there you have it. Lies everyone knows are lies are now preferred to reality. We have moved beyond infowars and its is simply gleeful LieWars perpetrated by all political actors. The quote "No one knows what it means, but it it provocative. It gets the people going." describes the entirety of Western political discourse right now. And so what kind of democracy can there be where information and truth is so widely disregarded and corrupted?

So why let everyone know it is all fucked? What to do? Well clearly as explained above, representative democracy, activism, and protests won’t get anyone anywhere for anything. So what to do? Well look I am a fan of local. I think the average American / European, rural or suburbs, is a good source of community, assistance, and neighborliness. I suggest you build a family, community, and a business. And just wait. I know the following is an evergreen comeback, but the ideology of the West can only really rise from ashes, so just wait and prepare.




Left and right, I think honestly want something far closer to FDR’s America, the oligarchy stands in the way. So just wait, because as I will explain shortly, pure math is coming for those oligarchs. As the pie of resources and plunder from the centralized governments of the west diminish, violence over the remaining piece of the pie will increase. Ben Hunt has written a far better description of what to do and why (to avoid this violence) than I ever could in his article Make, Teach, Protect.