“There is no such thing as ‘safe’ socialism. If it’s safe, it’s not socialism. And if it’s socialism, it’s not safe. The signposts of socialism point downhill to less freedom, less prosperity, downhill to more muddle, more failure. If we follow them to their destination, they will lead this nation into bankruptcy.”
– Margaret Thatcher
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June 24, 2024—With the first presidential debate of the 2024 season upon us, it’s time to turn at least some attention to American politics.
We’ll start by handing today’s essay over to Bill Bonner. It’s been my pleasure to write with Bill over the decades.
His worldview on how political elites – no matter which party they claim to come from – has proved prescient as America’s politics has declined to endless bickering while national issues go unattended and the national debt continues to soar.
Today, Bill notes how America’s economy is much like the late-era Soviet Union before its collapse. While many may still find that unthinkable, it does point to a possible Grey Swan event that could hit markets in the not-to-distant future.
Enjoy ~~ Addison
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Back in the U.S.S.A
Bill Bonner, Bonner Private Research
The best government is a benevolent tyranny tempered by an occasional assassination. –Voltaire
There are the elites… and there are ‘the people.’
Yes, the rich are different. But it’s not just a matter of money, they also have power.
It is as if they lived in ‘two separate countries,’ says Stephen Moore.
The elites live on the two coasts. They send their children to good schools and universities. They work in the ‘talking professions’; that is, they don’t sweat with hammers, drills, grills, machines or chemicals. Instead, they bend ideas, information and spreadsheets — as investors, lawyers, journalists, professors and managers. They earn more money. They live in bigger houses. But they weigh less, on average, than MAGA supporters… .and they wouldn’t be caught dead at a Trump rally.
As socialite Ms. J. Gordon Douglas once put it, among the elite, ‘you can’t be too rich or too thin.’
The Rasmussen polling organization took their pulse at the end of last year, reporting the results in January. They defined the elite as having at least one postgraduate degree after graduating from an Ivy league college, $150,000-plus income, and living in a ‘dense urban area.’ This probably defines more of a super-elite than the top 20%… but it is something the rest of them can aspire to.
What did they find? Moore summarizes:
Nearly three-quarters of the elites surveyed believe they are better off now financially than they were when Joe Biden entered the White House. Less than 20% of ordinary Americans feel the same way….Elites are three times more likely than all Americans to say there is too much individual freedom in the country. Astonishingly, almost half of the elites and almost 6 of 10 ivy leaguers say there is too much freedom.
An astonishing 72% of the elites — including 81% of the elites who graduated from the top universities — favor banning gas cars. And majorities of elites would ban gas stoves, nonessential air travel, SUVs and private air conditioning.
Most elites think that teachers’ unions and school administrators should control the agenda of schools. Most mainstream Americans think that parents should make these decisions.
Oh, and about three-quarters of these cultural elites are Biden supporters.
Moore comments:
The snobs thumb their collective noses at the unrefined working-class Americans. The elites believe they are intellectually, culturally and morally superior to the working class and rural America… Crime, illegal immigration, inflation, fentanyl and factory closings aren’t keeping the elite up at night because in their cocoons, they don’t encounter these problems on a daily basis the way so many Americans do today. Not too many main street Americans are losing sleep about climate change or LGBTQ issues.
But the situation does not describe merely a political divide. It is not just a matter of Republicans versus Democrats… not a case of good guys versus bad guys. If you vote for Donald Trump you may think you will end the elites’ control. But that’s not how it works. If you rid yourself of one group… another will take its place. Like the poor, the elites will always be with us.
The coming election will make little difference… no matter which way it goes. Because both parties are frauds. They merely represent different aspects of elite America; neither represents ‘the people.’ Both have been corrupted by power and money; both have signed on to the important parts of elite agenda — more spending, more war, and more debt.
Both Republicans and Democrats have been suborned… neither dares oppose the powerful elites that support them. That’s why debt ‘ceilings’ never hold… budgets are never balanced… and US troops still lounge at more than seven hundred overseas bases – decades after the need for them disappeared.
Soviet America
Historian Niall Ferguson likens the US situation circa 2024 to a “late, Soviet America.” He notes that in 1990, observers were noticing a “ghastly and tragic… loss of morality” within the USSR. “Apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching,” were running wild. Nearly half the population thought that theirs was an “unjust society.” USSR leaders were old party hacks — Brezhnev, Kuznetsov, Andropov, Chernenko — or just ineffective.
The Soviet economy was largely fake… almost all of it directly or indirectly controlled by the Communist Party. The government ran chronic deficits… supporting a bloated military that looked powerful, on paper, but couldn’t win a war.
“Sound familiar?” asks Ferguson:
Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.
We gave up trying to solve the nation’s problems a long time ago. Today, we merely try to anticipate them.
It’s not the Democrats’ fault. Nor the Republicans’. Both are tools of degenerate elites, who are likely to drag the country further and further into debt, inflation… and war.
Expect a long period of chaos — financial, political and social. And watch out for the guillotine.
~~ Bill Bonner, Bonner Private Research
So it goes,
Addison Wiggin
Founder, The Wiggin Sessions
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P.S.: How did we get here? An alternative view 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.
(Or… simply pre-order Empire of Debt: We Came, We Saw, We Borrowed, 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
