INAUGURATION SPEECH: a vision without a cheque-book

To the lachrymose hypocrisy that was ever-present in today’s Inaugural ceremony was added yet more of the DNC-liberal media-secret State script about fake news, building better, riotous mobs and threats to democracy throughout Joseph R Biden’s speech. But the bigger threat to America’s future lies not in this stooge himself; rather, it lies in the economic and fiscal dreamland that has taken over the Democratic Party.

Judging from the hits it’s been getting today, Amy Boone’s piece on the triumph of the Unelected State in the US has struck a major chord. The US hits piled in later as Americans picked up on the post, but as of early afternoon CET, 80% of the readership was Europe, the UK and Australasia.
There’s a good reason for this: be it France under Macron, Italy at odds with Brussels, the rise and rise of frenetic pc Down Under or the arrogance of the Boris inner clique in Britain, dictatorial élite policies and suspicions about “liberal” motives have become a genuinely global issue.

While the great majority of citizens continue to accept the experience of being slowly-boiled lobsters, an increasingly vocal minority find themselves uneasy with – to list just a few examples – vote tampering, banker money flooding elections, bureaucrats acting like Quislings in the undermining of referendum outcomes, rabid and orchestrated media manipulation, and rewriting the history of virology to suit the Pharmafia narrative on Covid 19.

The internet has been exemplary in its desire to point out the pernicious influence of the Gigarich unelected individuals and institutions that now dominate our lives. George Soros, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Bill Gates, Twitter, Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Wall Street, CNN, Goldman Sachs, the CIA, MI6, the Pentagon, oil interests, NATO, Davos, WHO, Greenpeace, the UN and Klaus Schwab….again, most citizens have barely a clue about that list beyond vague generalities about tech, news, media, energy, climate change or intelligence.

But those with enough brain synapses to rub together and get a flame going put all of it into a kind of historical drift. The Establishments of the Western World frame this as “conspiracy theory”, but the easily established facts and statistics dismiss that risible catch-all. The reality – and even that concept has beome an Orwellian moveable feast in the post-spin World – is that 2,560 people now own 60% of global wealth. They answer to nobody, but it is largely their perversion of the capitalist ideal that has seen real incomes fall 30%, unemployment stats bent to hide the true situation, inflation baskets fiddled to convince us that there is global deflation, interest on capital removed from the equation that keeps retired people solvent, and – perhaps most of all – bourse levels that bear no relation at all to economics at the coalface.

The World Economic Foundation (WEF) founded by Klaus Schwab in 1970 has now awoken from its abhorrent, stitched together creation in the laboratory, and told us that a happier future is one in which we earn and own nothing, and rejoice in the lack of anxieties such an existence would clearly bring with it. Opah Klaus (upper class?) and his retinue of zillionaires will do all the worrying for us. It’s all reminiscent of an ironic advertising strapline: We care, so you don’t have to.

In truth, this financialised slicker-capitalism has favoured the lumbering multinational behemoths, the wheeler-dealer merchant banks, and the use of fiat currencies devoid of real valuation to encourage an explosion in the use of credit. Be it a household, a small business, a plc company, a bourse trading house or a sovereign power, today’s odd logic suggests that drowning in debt must be OK, because millions of others are doing the same.

It is, in fact, yet another dimension of what this century thus far has been about: the flight from 3-dimensional reality.

You may be wondering by now what any of this has to do with the at best bogus and at worst bogwood inauguration of Joe Biden today.

The answer is everything: because the social expectations and potential chaos that the Democrats harnessed in order to make Trump look dysfunctional will haunt them over the next few years….and a way has to be found to pay for it.

Those of a mental disposition made more fragile yet by Lockdown may wish to look away now; because the economic “ideas” to which Sleepy Joe’s advisers cleave are the sort that evoke the “what on earth could go wrong?” response. And naturally feed the fears of those like me who see their blasé attitude as in turn based on the certainty of a Great Reset bailout powered by Davos, the central bankers, invented global emergencies and deranged hegemonous assumptions.
For this sequence, I make no bones about having absorbed and drawn from the recent work of David P. Goldman, president of Macrostrategy LLC, who writes the “Spengler” column for Asia Times Online and the “Spengler” blog at PJ Media.

At the end of November last year, two men close to Biden – former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and former Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Jason Furman – suggested that Governments will be able to borrow and spend as much as they want for whatever purpose they want, and interest rates will remain low forever.

They claim that ‘changes in the supply of saving associated with lengthening life expectancy, rising uncertainty and increased inequality along with reductions in the demand for capital associated with demographic changes, demassification of the economy, and perhaps changes in corporate behavior have driven real interest rates down’.

That counter-intuitive paragraph strikes me as a cheeky mélange of cant and woffle. Put together, it baffles. Since 2011, the US Fed has engaged in multi-trillion-dollar purchases of Treasury and agency securities (aka, buying rubbish): this is what kept Treasury yields in the Zirp range throughout the decade….and especially during the course of last year. (See endless Slogs passim). As a fixed income chap myself, I can aver without fear of contradiction that wrinkly boomer concerns do not include how to become even poorer just to bail out mad bankers.

The American national debt is now a staggering $20 trillion. The American gdp is around $20.8 trillion. This is what we highly-trained MoU stats guys call an ongoing debt/gdp equality situation. If Biden and his fellow space cadets spend even half of what they’re promising, within two years – and no doubt more neocon wars – the US could be accused by the old-fashioned among us of trading insolvently. In this sense, they will join the hallowed ranks of Greece, Eritrea, Suriname and Bélize.

Cursory observation will tell you that the US has vastly more natural and human resources than those nations….and such will lead you to ask two questions: one, how did the US get into such a mess; and two, why the bald blistering blazes do the Democrats’ economic gurus think it’s all tickerty-boo for the Build Back Better thing?

The answers are disturbing but obvious. Vast military budgets and Permanent War alongside the greed of 2,560 Davosites stole it. And Summers et al are obviously relying on what they know to be the certainty of a Reset in which they absolve themselves of all responsibility for debt. (They’re also assuming that those who resent American delusions of hegemony will just sit back and take that kick in the teeth in a generally bonhommous, relaxed fashion. Good luck with that one)

You can tell that all this fairyland-funny-farm stuff is the proposed way ahead, because Democrat Inhouse magazine The Washington Post a month ago declared that ‘Far from burdening future generations, governments have a golden opportunity to fund long-standing needs by borrowing for investments in future prosperity—the list includes child care, early education, job training and clean water.’

And why not? I’m reminded of the now ancient Monty Python sketch in which some tartan paint salesman asks, “Why be poor when you can be rich? Why be old when you can be young? Why be a midget when you can be tall?

Were the new administration to borrow as a means of rebuilding its industrial base and reduce the current account deficit, increased debt might be justified. But this is quite clearly not the goal of a Biden Government committed to vast expenditure on social and environmental programmes that will keep the Greens, BLM and Antifa off the streets.

Such was confirmed by the CNBC coverage of the Biden Inauguration this afternoon. There was much blather about institutional racism, healing, repairing the losses of blue collar workers and reuniting a divided Republic. But the denialism about 20,000 troops in Washington (all carefully out of shot at all times) did not require the viewer to develop a sixth sense. The universality of face masks, the ranks of spectators thinned by social distancing and the banal wishfulness of the commentary all bore witness to a national neurosis, a world of false hysteria that the Democrats and their uneasy coalition have created.

There was another America left out this afternoon, alongside an absence of concrete plans for the future. Those two missing elements are not going to go away – whatever the Reset does or doesn’t do.