February 21, 2014
Sovereign Valley Farm, Chile
I need to caveat this missive and highlight that I am not a pessimistic person. I’ve traveled to so many places over the years– well over 100 countries. And I typically visit 30-40 each year.
So I’ve seen first hand the tremendous opportunity that exists in the world, and the incredible way that human beings innovate to overcome challenges.
But the reality is that the world is on fire right now. In some places, like Ukraine or Thailand, quite literally.
In many others (like Japan, China, and much of southern Europe), there are heaps of smoldering embers beneath a continent-wide funeral pyre.
And in the Land of the Free, it’s as if politicians and central bankers are smoking their back-room cigars at the foot of a mountain of napalm and thermite that grows ever-higher by the day.
If you step back and look at the big picture, there is cause for concern.
For one, the tiniest elite has achieved record wealth thanks to the endless money printing of central bankers. The richest 300 people in the world alone addded $524 billion to their fortunes in 2013, while billions of other people across the planet pay higher prices for food and fuel.
This gap between rich and poor has grown to its widest since the Great Depression… and I would argue in many ways since the feudal system.
Obviously this isn’t a tirade against wealth, but rather the massively disproportionate benefits realized by a tiny elite at the expense of everyone else. And it exists because there is no separation between Bank and State. As Henry Ford said,
“It is well enough that the people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.”
Well, it’s happening. People might not fully understand how central banking works. But they know there is something very rotten in the system.
And they’re starting to realize that it doesn’t have anything to do with a single party, or an individual. Even in the Land of the Free, more voters than ever are disgusted by both parties and identify with neither.
This is fundamentally what’s happening in Ukraine. People understand the system is rotten to its core– that a band of criminals has taken control, and that ‘elections’ will only serve to put a new band of criminals in control.
It is precisely what will likely play out in southern Europe, where unemployment among the youth (i.e. those of revolutionary age) is astoundingly high. And potentially even in the Land of the Free.
It’s an uncomfortable and contentious notion, I know. But this rotten system is fundamentally the same in the developed west. The only difference is there is even more debt underpinning it.
Every living creature has a breaking point. It is in our instincts to rise up when threatened.
And rather than watching these kinds of events unfold on TV thinking, “That could never happen here,” I would suggest looking at the situation rationally, and historically. Many great civilizations before arrogantly assumed the same thing.
So the question to ask is, “Am I prepared if this kind of turmoil ever comes to my doorstep?”
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