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“Empire First” > “America First”

Tuesday, February 12, 2019 17:49

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“Empire First” > “America First”

by David Stockman

“Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.”

– George Orwell, “Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949)

“We’re doomed.

Our fate is determined by the twin burdens of the Welfare State and the Warfare State. And nobody can or will do anything about it, including the Great Disruptor. The Welfare State is demographically and politically immovable. There’s no way to avoid the tsunami of Baby Boom retirements now that the GOP has abandoned its traditional role in our democracy as the tribune of fiscal rectitude.

The Warfare State’s grip on our finances is no less forbidding. That much is obvious after two recent outbreaks of “Empire First!” inside the Beltway. That includes the Tweeter-in-Chief’s embrace of gung-ho interventionism in Venezuela. And then there’s the 100% vote by the newly elected liberal firebrands in the House of Representatives to preserve NATO.

The math is straightforward. Several decades down the road, the Welfare State will cost 18.5% of gross domestic product (GDP). And the Warfare State will be pushing 5% of GDP, when you count Veterans Administration costs and interest on past wars. The rest of government – including even minimal pork barrel and normalized interest expense – will run at least 4% of GDP.

So, future federal outlays will equal 27% of GDP, at a minimum. This year, it’s 21%. And that’s relative to a revenue baseline that won’t even reach 17% of GDP. That revenue baseline is ferociously guarded by the GOP’s anti-tax junk-yard dogs. They’ve sabotaged any and all efforts to find more benign sources of revenue, such as a consumption tax, even as they remain AWOL on cutting entitlements, domestic pork, or anything else.

The “Empire First” move is to borrow the difference. That’s absurd when the difference is 4%. It’s insane when it’s heading to more than 10% of GDP… in an economy with a 3% to 4% long-term nominal GDP growth trend… at best.

Let’s consider the latest illustration of the Warfare State’s grip on America’s fiscal accounts. Because it has a hold on the Donald now, too. That’s how deep interventionist group-think runs; no one can escape it, not even the America Firster in the White House. It’s impossible to square his recent plunge into the internal affairs of Venezuela with sentiments he delivered at the United Nations just four months ago: “I honor the right of every nation in this room to pursue its own customs, beliefs, and traditions. The United States will not tell you how to live or work or worship. We only ask that you honor our sovereignty in return.”

Exactly when did the socialist lunatic Nicholas Maduro – who, for better or worse, was elected president of Venezuela – threaten to send gunboats into the Port of Miami? And who is Vice President Pence to unilaterally declare Venezuela’s recent election invalid and to install, under the threat of force, his own choice for president of that country instead?

Make no mistake: The threat of devastating economic sanctions against Venezuela’s national oil company has all the practical consequences of in the marines. Whatever spark of life is left in that country’s ransacked economy depends on oil exports and earnings for Petróleos de Venezuela S.A.

It’s bad enough that the Donald is being led by the nose by his lightweight neocon veep. He’s also brought in war criminal Elliot Abrams from the neocon bench to execute this blatant negation of America First. Abrams, one of the chief architects of the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, is among the most rabid neocon interventionists to ever roam Imperial Washington. His appointment as the Donald’s point person to “restore democracy” in Venezuela is a sick joke. It’s also a sign that Empire First still reigns.

When Empires Fall: The crash of 2008-09 was not some “once in 500 years” economic ailment that needed to be “healed” with “extraordinary” policies like “ZIRP” and “QE.” To the contrary, the Great Financial Crisis was an intense but standard-issue bursting of a bubble. It’s the inherent result of monetary central planning and the systematic falsification of financial asset prices.

It’s going to happen again. But it won’t be “all at once,” nor will it be a straight line down. But we must prepare for a major re-pricing for all financial assets. And thousand-point intraday or day-to-day swings are part of that equation. Those can be frightening…”

- https://www.contracorner.co/

Source: http://coyoteprime-runningcauseicantfly.blogspot.com/2019/02/empire-first-america-first.html

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