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Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

Even before the coronavirus sprang upon an unprepared China the credit cycle was tipping the world into recession. The coronavirus makes an existing situation immeasurably worse, shutting down China and disrupting global supply chains to the point where large swathes of global production simply cease.

The crisis is likely to be a wake-up call for complacent investors, who are content to buy benchmark bonds issued by bankrupt governments at wildly excessive prices. A recession turned by the coronavirus into a fathomless slump will lead to a synchronised explosion of debt issuance for which there are no genuine buyers and can only be monetised.

The adjustment to reality will be catastrophic for government finances, and their currencies. This article explains why the collapse in overpriced financial assets and fiat currencies is likely to be rapid, perhaps giving ordinary people in some jurisdictions an early prospect of a return to gold and silver as circulating money.

Introduction

My last article suggested that both financial assets and currencies would collapse together. the basis of this supposition is twofold: first, central bank policies are binding together the rise in financial assets with the maintenance of value in fiat currencies. Therefore, if one falls, they both fall. And secondly there is historical precedence for this when one examines The Mississippi bubble 300 years ago.

The timing for such a collapse appears to be imminent. Every day, more and more data confirm that the global economy is sliding into recession. So far, people have been ignoring this important development, but now that it is becoming hard to ignore, no doubt the coronavirus will be blamed. This is a mistake because the factors leading to a slump, principally the end of the expansionary credit cycle combining with trade protectionism against Chinese imports by President Trump, echo developments leading up to the Wall Street crash in October 1929. If that point is accepted, then clearly the world could be on the edge of a very deep slump exacerbated but not caused by the virus.

The coronavirus has all but closed down China’s economy. It threatens to become a pandemic with serious consequences for all other national economies and their fiat currencies.

The central issue flowing from the upcoming monetary crisis centres on the rating of government debt. Almost all welfare-driven states are in debt traps. They think price inflation is under control, because their colleagues in the statistics departments tell them so, allowing them to continue to run increasing budget deficits with apparent impunity. Central banks do not realise that very soon they will be the only buyers of their governments’ debt which they will pay for with newly minted money. The irony of repeating the mistakes of Germany’s Reichsbank in 1918-23 will be completely lost to them and the path of escalating failure will only encourage the pace of printing to be accelerated.

The latest bombshell, coronavirus, is a trigger perhaps for the markets to regain control from the statist price riggers. This has to be the first step to fixing broken economies. The Panglossians in the ranks of the banking and investment communities will be rudely awakened to find themselves staring down the barrel of economic reality. Only then is there a chance that neo-Keynesian lies will be discarded by one and all, and a retreat towards sound money commence.

There is unlikely to be much time. Even without the downhill kick of coronavirus a bear market in bonds could be a devastating event on its own in a period of less than a year. Inflation of fiat currencies and interest rate suppression have been the principal agents for ramping bond prices, which tells us that their collapse will undermine currencies as well, giving complacent investors a double hit. But what are we to measure a decline of fiat currencies against? Sound money of course, gold and silver, with other stores of value, such as bitcoin, favoured by tech-savvy millennials, who will be quick to observe and understand the debauchment of fiat money. And the sooner we throw out fiat currencies, the sooner we can revert to sound money, which is gold.

Changing values for government bonds

We shall take as our primary example the US bond market, because fiat currency fans believe that other than individual time-values it is the risk-free investment yardstick. The ten-year US Treasury bond yields less than 1.6%, but its future pricing raises some serious issues.

Before addressing risk, we should note that time preference theory tells us that possession of cash is always worth more than its non-possession. The discount of that future value is not significant if you part with it to buy a ten-year UST with a view to trading it out in the next few days. But if you buy it with a view to holding it as an investment, then its discounted future value does become relevant. We cannot know what this time preference is, because it can only be realised in an unfettered market, not a market manipulated by the Fed’s actions. But with history as our guide an annualised discounted value of about two per cent for a 10-year bond can be used as a rough guide.

Figure 1, which is a long-term chart of the yield on this bond, appears to indicate there is a solid floor in the region of 1.4% represented by the horizontal line joining points at July 2012, July 2016 and August 2019. This floor is about half a per cent less than our estimated time preference value.

With its yield currently 1.56%, there appears to be very little upside in the price, and we can understand why. And if we accept government estimates of CPI-U all items index rising at 2.5% (year to January) the yield should be closer to 4% and must therefore be heavily suppressed at current levels.

That is not all. While the general level of prices is an economic concept, it is not measurable; a fact which allows the Bureau of Labour Statistics, along with all other nations who use “standardised” CPIs to effectively goal-seek an official figure for its rate of change. Two independent analysts, Chapwood Index and Shadowstats confirm each other that a more realistic rate for monetary depreciation of the US dollar is not 2%, but about 10% annually.

But for the moment, investors believe the price inflation lie because they want to. When they begin to realise the official rate is pure fiction, then one would expect government bonds to reflect a far higher redemption yield. In other words, any upside in bond prices is strictly limited while the downside is substantial. As an illustration, a 10-year bond at the current yield would have to fall from par to $47.40 to yield a more realistic gross 10% to redemption.

Clearly, the US Treasury market is badly mispriced. To estimate the likelihood of the Fed losing control of bond pricing, we should also take into account the state of the US Government’s finances, because we have not yet incorporated future currency debasement risks in our calculations. With a starting budget deficit in the current fiscal year estimated by the Congressional Budget Office at $1,027bn, a recession, let alone a slump, will make government finances considerably worse. For the years 2020-2022 the CBO expects real GDP to grow at an average 2% per annum. In the very near future, due to the coronavirus alone that is likely to be revised sharply downwards, if not by the CBO, but by market participants as further evidence of a looming slump becomes too hard to ignore.

All we need to know for now is the revision of economic prospects will be significant, based on recent evidence of recessionary trends and the potential impact of the coronavirus. The current stage of the credit cycle indicates the banks are in the process of withdrawing circulating credit, hitting SMEs particularly hard. Unemployment will rise, along with bankruptcies. And this assumes little or nothing for the effect of coronavirus.

But even if coronavirus is contained to China and East Asia, US corporations’ supply chains will cease to function, requiring both time and bank credit to relocate. Neither are available in the short term and in the current credit climate. And this is an election year, when any president’s financial and economic prudence are at their lowest ebb and his administration is most inclined to throw money at any and all economic problems.

Without a recession, other things being equal the CBO’s forecasting assumptions and the effect on government debt outstanding might be taken to be credible by gullible investors. But expressed in the economist’s jargon, not all else is equal and we can already see why these forecasts are going horribly wrong. The question then is what the effect on markets will be when these errors are realised and prices for financial assets are adjusted for reality.

The adjustment will follow the current period of complacency. US Treasury bond prices have recently risen, partly on a safe-haven basis, but certainly with an enduring belief in the state’s economic management. Equities are at or close to all-time highs on a relative value to bond yields argument, and an expectation that any recession will be shallow. Further monetary easing is expected to support the economy and maintaining the long-term prospect of a resumption to decent economic growth. Further monetary easing is seen to be bullish.

Concerns about the dollar are broadly absent. There is embedded in investor psychology Part One of Triffin’s dilemma, that concludes otherwise irresponsible fiscal policies will allow the provider of the world’s reserve currency to run deficits to increase its supply to foreigners, always hungry for scarce dollars, which they reinvest in US Treasuries. And if there is a recession, the argument goes, then there will always be a further flight to the safety of dollars and US Treasuries.

Part Two of Triffin’s dilemma ends in crisis, which broadly is what we now face. Investors are yet to take note.

Putting the effects of the coronavirus to one side for the moment, in their private capacity businessmen and their bankers are usually the first to see that economic optimism is misplaced. Businessmen are battling in deteriorating trading conditions, and bankers with their internal market intelligence and its impact on risk assessment. The authorities, particularly the Fed, who have made the mistake of believing in their own statistics, and of falling hook, line and sinker for Keynesian stimulation theories, will be next.

One can envisage the setup: having seen from its own internal information the economy is not performing as hoped, the Fed decides to call in the management of the G-SIB banks to hear their concerns, gather intelligence and reassure them they are on the case. Afterwards, we can imagine the following conversation:

Banker A. “Well, what did you make of that?”

Banker B. “The Fed must be worried to feel the need to reassure us. Things must be worse than we thought.”

Bankers A & B. (Thinking) I’ll report back to my Board that the Fed is very worried, and we must urgently reduce our loan book before our competitors do.

It has happened before. None of this would occur in an economy which is based on sound money and free markets, only susceptible to one-off disasters, such as war and the coronavirus. Instead, the US economy is managed on the basis of maintaining the crumbling confidence of consumers and the uninterrupted provision to them of credit. After many years of being bailed out, economic actors have become fully dependent on confidence being maintained and have no alternative plan in the case of its failure. But failure is now becoming evident.

The central question therefore devolves upon the future credit rating of the US Government. Assuming the Fed is losing control of the overall monetary situation and pricing returns to being set by markets, how do you rate a very large borrower with the following credit profile:

• No surplus of income over expenses since 2001. Current trend is for further deterioration with no end in sight.

• Net present value of future liabilities mandated by law is independently estimated (Kotlikoff) to be over $200 trillion. Current income (taxes etc.) of $3.6 trillion gives a ratio of income to future expense of well over 50 times. Tax income will almost certainly decline raising this ratio further.

• Net interest cost at unrealistically low interest rates is 38% of last year’s deficit. A more realistic interest rate could have an immediate and catastrophic effect on finances.

• Management seems unjustifiably optimistic that future revenue will pick up.

 In the absence of a management that agrees to radically alter course, there can only be one answer: do not lend it any money and eliminate all existing exposure. When they wake up, this should, and therefore will be, the reality facing not just the banks but all holders of US Treasuries, including foreigners without sound reasons to be invested in them.

Consequently, the switch from the current state of suppressive control to realistic pricing of government debt will be both vicious and rapid. The only foreigners likely to delay selling existing US Government debt are some governments, either under the US Government’s cosh, or not wishing to exacerbate the situation. With cross-border trade collapsing, others have no good reason to hold dollars and dollar-denominated debt, let alone extend their exposure. Furthermore, in recent years large hedge funds have made hay out of being short euros and yen and long dollars and US Treasury debt through fx swaps. Those trillion-dollar positions need to be unwound as well, which will put additional pressure on the dollar and the bond markets.

At anything close to these yields, the only buyer will be the Fed, which, as well as new issuance will have to absorb foreign sales and those of distressed hedge funds. For these reasons the monetisation of debt will almost certainly have to be on a far larger scale than following the Lehman crisis. There is no price for government debt in these circumstances, because the higher the interest rate, the worse the numbers become. Nor will there be any value in the currency used to buy it, because if the government is effectively bust its unbacked currency will also be worthless.

Other governments with substantial future welfare commitments are in a similar position. High debt to GDP ratios will become a debt trap on a combination of recession-fuelled budget deficits and realistic funding costs. In the EU and Japan, government funding costs have even further to travel from under the zero bound.

Meanwhile, there is an air of complacency with a general assumption that the next crisis will lead to yet lower rates, as has been the case with every credit crisis for the last forty years. But as Figure 1, the chart of the ten-year US Treasury above clearly showed, after a long decline in yields the world’s reserve currency benchmark yield is now struggling to go any lower. Zero or even negative dollar rates imposed by the Fed cannot alter that fact.

This is important, because central banks have tried everything that they can think of to restore economic growth and have run out of ideas. Led by the Bank for International Settlements, they are now pleading with their governments to borrow more while rates are cheap in the hope that greater budget deficits will stop the world from sliding into recession.

Other central banks are in the same boat

The debt devil tempts, and the weak follow, and debtor hell is the highest reward he can offer. The response by all G20 members to a sliding global economy will obviously be a BIS sanctioned coordinated burst of deficit spending leading to a synchronised expansion of government bond supply and fiat money to pay for it. It is proving impossible, even for a free trader like Boris Johnson, to resist the political imperative to build new hospitals, train thousands of new nurses and policemen and throw money at a new, wildly over-budget railway connecting the North of England to London. Which, incidentally, will probably empty the North of northerners seeking their fortunes in London, instead of spreading London’s wealth northwards. Most of this spending is classified as investment, but the fact is that without a commensurate increase in personal savings it is inflationary spending.

Perhaps the dollar will not be the first to slide, given the shutting down of China’s economy by the coronavirus. The yuan, surely, will be the first to suffer in the foreign exchanges, a process that appears to be starting. But this might galvanise the People’s Bank into positive action to stabilise the currency, which it can do by tying it to gold. In doing so, it would do humanity a favour by leading the way early towards a sound money solution to the unfolding financial and economic crisis, which with the coronavirus threatens to be potentially much worse than anything recorded in modern times.

The reason the dollar is likely to be next to slide is the exposure foreigners have to it, the equivalent of more than one year’s GDP. It is comprised of about $4 trillion in bank deposits, and $19.4 trillion of US securities, according to the last available TIC figures.

For the short-term, perhaps China’s imploding economy, taking Germany’s and others with it, encourages the investor’s myth that the dollar is a safe haven. The trade-weighted index has strengthened in recent weeks on the back of both the yuan and euro weakening, and US Treasury yields have declined as well. It is a situation unlikely to survive deteriorating economic conditions for much longer.

In addition to foreign sellers, speculative positions of perhaps several trillion dollars in currency swaps held by large hedge funds will have to be reversed if and when the dollar is undermined by foreign selling. That would lead to temporary buying of euros and yen. When that short-term effect is over, presumably these currencies will then suffer the combination of collapsing values for government bonds and stockmarket values at the same time as the currencies themselves fall measured against gold, silver and bitcoin.

Sound money alternatives signal the fiat crisis

An unfolding crisis from the combined effects of the turn of the credit cycle and the coronavirus can be expected to hit individual fiat currencies both sequentially and generally. This article has made some suggestions over a likely sequence: yuan, dollar, euro and yen. But how things actually unfold is for the moment a matter of speculation. From the turmoil ahead of us, the clear winners are likely to be gold and silver, and supply-constrained hedges such as bitcoin.

In real terms, gold is still under-priced relative to the dollar, based on their relative quantities. This is illustrated in Figure 2, which is of gold adjusted by the increase in the fiat money quantity.

This chart should contradict any thoughts that the recent increase in the price of gold might be overdone. The truth is that the devastating bear market in the gold price following the spike in 1980 has almost eliminated gold from investment portfolios in favour of inflation beneficiaries. If that long period is coming to an end, investors will attempt to switch their allocations from inflation beneficiaries and bonds with rising yields in favour of inflation protection. For this reason, the rise in the dollar gold price could be very dramatic, particularly when a further acceleration of global monetary debasement is taken into account. And this is before we see official CPI measures move much above their 2% goal-sought targets.

For both gold and silver, we can expect initial moves reflecting their eventual replacement of failing fiat as the trusted money in circulation. In the case of silver, it is worth mentioning that its original price relationship under bimetallic standards only become discarded when silver was generally dropped as money in favour of gold alone in the 1870s. When fiat fails, it is likely that silver will regain a secondary monetary role, and its remonetisation will have a substantial impact on its purchasing power. From a current gold/silver ratio of 87 times, a move towards the old ratio of approximately 15 times means that for speculators buying into the sound money argument, silver is likely to be the catch-up form of sound money.

Bitcoin

During previous currency hiatuses, the problem of failing fiat money has always been evidenced in the rising prices of precious metals. Since the last financial crisis, there has arisen a new category of store of value in thousands of different cryptocurrencies. While most of them appear to be akin to quack monetary remedies, the first cryptocurrency to be devised with its innovative blockchain technology is sufficiently understood by a growing band of followers to be firmly established as a form of money.

Bitcoin is currently not ideally suited as a means of settling transactions, or for making value comparisons between one good against another. Settlements are severely restricted relative to the superior scalability offered by credit and debit cards. Where bitcoin scores is as a store of value.

In learning about bitcoin and why it works, a new generation of tech-savvy millennials have become aware of the way their governments debauch their currencies as a means of secretly transferring wealth from them as individuals to the state, the banks, and their favoured borrowers. Bitcoin supporters are an intelligent, educated mob angry at their governments’ abuse of their fiat currencies.

In all populations, there is therefore a marginally greater recognition of the fragility of state currencies, and therefore the abandonment of them by the general public is likely to develop over a shorter time period than experience of previous instances would suggest.

Conclusion

The straws in the wind listed in this article point to a more rapid collapse of financial asset values and currencies than generally thought by sound money theorists who have long anticipated this outcome. Doubts about the timing have been settled to a degree by the sudden development of the coronavirus, which has already imploded China’s economy, disrupting global supply chains and the provision of consumer goods.

To the extent the coronavirus has had a hand in the forthcoming destruction of fiat currencies and Keynesian mythology, we can take some comfort that it will have brought forward the eventual reintroduction of gold and gold standards. The path is not straightforward. There will be destruction of financial asset values and the economic consequences for ordinary people will be dire. We can expect widespread civil unrest and political instability.

Western governments and their advisers are not familiar with the arguments in favour of gold, having spent half a century dismissing it. This fact favours the new economies which have not discarded gold, which include Russia, China, and many other Asian nations. Some governments, such as India, might attempt to confiscate their citizens’ gold, but in general the collapse of western economic fallacies could lead to Asia’s economic superiority.

It will be a rough ride for the rest of us.

Authored by John Whitehead via The Rutherford Institute,

“Every day in communities across the United States, children and adolescents spend the majority of their waking hours in schools that have increasingly come to resemble places of detention more than places of learning.”

– Investigative journalist Annette Fuentes

Just when you thought the government couldn’t get any more tone-deaf about civil liberties and the growing need to protect “we the people” against an overreaching, overbearing police state, the Trump Administration ushers in even more strident zero tolerance policies that treat children like suspects and criminals, greater numbers of school cops, and all the trappings of a prison complex (unsurmountable fences, entrapment areas, no windows or trees, etc.).

The fallout has been what you’d expect, with the nation’s young people treated like hardened criminals: handcuffed, arrested, tasered, tackled and taught the painful lesson that the Constitution (especially the Fourth Amendment) doesn’t mean much in the American police state.

For example, in Florida, a cop assigned to River Ridge High School as a school resource officer, threatened to shoot a student attempting to leave school for a morning orthodontist appointment.

In Pennsylvania, school officials called in the cops after a 6-year-old with Down syndrome pointed a finger gun at her teacher.

In Kentucky, a school resource officer with the sheriff’s office handcuffed two elementary school children with disabilities, ages 8 and 9. A federal judge made the sheriff’s office pay more than $300,000 (of taxpayer money) to the families, ruling that the handcuffing of  the students “was an unconstitutional seizure and excessive force.”

Welcome to Compliance 101: the police state’s primer in how to churn out compliant citizens and transform the nation’s school’s into quasi-prisons through the use of surveillance cameras, metal detectors, police patrols, zero tolerance policies, lock downs, drug sniffing dogs, strip searches and active shooter drills.

If you were wondering, these police state tactics have not made the schools any safer.

Rather, they’ve turned the schools into authoritarian microcosms of the police state, containing almost every aspect of the militarized, intolerant, senseless, overcriminalized, legalistic, surveillance-riddled, totalitarian landscape that plagues those of us on the “outside.”

Two years after President Trump announced his intention to “harden” the schools, our nation’s children are reaping the ill effects of gun-toting, taser-wielding cops in government-run schools that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to prisons.

America’s schools are about as authoritarian as they come.

From the moment a child enters one of the nation’s 98,000 public schools to the moment he or she graduates, they will be exposed to a steady diet of:

• draconian zero tolerance policies that criminalize childish behavior,

• overreaching anti-bullying statutes that criminalize speech,

• school resource officers (police) tasked with disciplining and/or arresting so-called “disorderly” students,

• standardized testing that emphasizes rote answers over critical thinking,

• politically correct mindsets that teach young people to censor themselves and those around them,

• and extensive biometric and surveillance systems that, coupled with the rest, acclimate young people to a world in which they have no freedom of thought, speech or movement.

Young people in America are now first in line to be searched, surveilled, spied on, threatened, tied up, locked down, treated like criminals for non-criminal behavior, tasered and in some cases shot.

In my day, if you talked back to a teacher, or played a prank on a classmate, or just failed to do your homework, you might find yourself in detention or doing an extra writing assignment after school.

That is no longer the case.

Nowadays, students are not only punished for minor transgressions such as playing cops and robbers on the playground, bringing LEGOs to school, or having a food fight, but the punishments have become far more severe, shifting from detention and visits to the principal’s office into misdemeanor tickets, juvenile court, handcuffs, tasers and even prison terms.

Students have been suspended under school zero tolerance policies for bringing to school “look alike substances” such as oregano, breath mints, birth control pills and powdered sugar.

Look-alike weapons (toy guns—even Lego-sized ones, hand-drawn pictures of guns, pencils twirled in a “threatening” manner, imaginary bows and arrows, even fingers positioned like guns) can also land a student in hot water.

Even good deeds do not go unpunished.

One 13-year-old was given detention for exposing the school to “liability” by sharing his lunch with a hungry friend. A third grader was suspended for shaving her head in sympathy for a friend who had lost her hair to chemotherapy. And then there was the high school senior who was suspended for saying “bless you” after a fellow classmate sneezed.

In South Carolina, where it’s against the law to disturb a school, more than a thousand students a year—some as young as 7 years old—“face criminal charges for not following directions, loitering, cursing, or the vague allegation of acting ‘obnoxiously.’ If charged as adults, they can be held in jail for up to 90 days.”

These outrageous incidents are exactly what you’ll see more of if the Trump Administration gets its way.

Increasing the number of cops in the schools only adds to the problem.

Thanks to a combination of media hype, political pandering and financial incentives, the use of armed police officers (a.k.a. school resource officers) to patrol school hallways has risen dramatically in the years since the Columbine school shooting.

Indeed, the growing presence of police in the nation’s schools is resulting in greater police “involvement in routine discipline matters that principals and parents used to address without involvement from law enforcement officers.”

Funded by the U.S. Department of Justice, these school resource officers (SRO) have become de facto wardens in elementary, middle and high schools, doling out their own brand of justice to the so-called “criminals” in their midst with the help of tasers, pepper spray, batons and brute force.

In the absence of school-appropriate guidelines, police are more and more “stepping in to deal with minor rulebreaking: sagging pants, disrespectful comments, brief physical skirmishes. What previously might have resulted in a detention or a visit to the principal’s office was replaced with excruciating pain and temporary blindness, often followed by a trip to the courthouse.”

The horror stories are legion.

One SRO was accused of punching a 13-year-old student in the face for cutting the cafeteria line.

That same cop put another student in a chokehold a week later, allegedly knocking the student unconscious and causing a brain injury.

In Pennsylvania, a student was tasered after ignoring an order to put his cell phone away.

When 13-year-old Kevens Jean Baptiste failed to follow a school bus driver’s direction to keep the bus windows closed (Kevens, who suffers from asthma, opened the window after a fellow student sprayed perfume, causing him to cough and wheeze), he was handcuffed by police, removed from the bus, and while still handcuffed, had his legs swept out from under him by an officer, causing him to crash to the ground.

Young Alex Stone didn’t even make it past the first week of school before he became a victim of the police state. Directed by his teacher to do a creative writing assignment involving a series of fictional Facebook statuses, Stone wrote, “I killed my neighbor’s pet dinosaur. I bought the gun to take care of the business.” Despite the fact that dinosaurs are extinct, the status fabricated, and the South Carolina student was merely following orders, his teacher reported him to school administrators, who in turn called the police.

What followed is par for the course in schools today: students were locked down in their classrooms while armed police searched the 16-year-old’s locker and bookbag, handcuffed him, charged him with disorderly conduct disturbing the school, arrested him, detained him, and then he was suspended from school.

Not even the younger, elementary school-aged kids are being spared these “hardening” tactics.

On any given day when school is in session, kids who “act up” in class are pinned facedown on the floor, locked in dark closets, tied up with straps, bungee cords and duct tape, handcuffed, leg shackled, tasered or otherwise restrained, immobilized or placed in solitary confinement in order to bring them under “control.”

In almost every case, these undeniably harsh methods are used to punish kids—some as young as 4 and 5 years old—for simply failing to follow directions or throwing tantrums.

Very rarely do the kids pose any credible danger to themselves or others.

Unbelievably, these tactics are all legal, at least when employed by school officials or school resource officers in the nation’s public schools.

This is what happens when you introduce police and police tactics into the schools.

Paradoxically, by the time you add in the lockdowns and active shooter drills, instead of making the schools safer, school officials have succeeded in creating an environment in which children are so traumatized that they suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, anxiety, mistrust of adults in authority, as well as feelings of anger, depression, humiliation, despair and delusion.

For example, a middle school in Washington State went on lockdown after a student brought a toy gun to class. A Boston high school went into lockdown for four hours after a bullet was discovered in a classroom. A North Carolina elementary school locked down and called in police after a fifth grader reported seeing an unfamiliar man in the school (it turned out to be a parent).

Police officers at a Florida middle school carried out an active shooter drill in an effort to educate students about how to respond in the event of an actual shooting crisis. Two armed officers, guns loaded and drawn, burst into classrooms, terrorizing the students and placing the school into lockdown mode.

If these exercises are intended to instill fear and compliance into young people, they’re working.

As journalist Dahlia Lithwick points out: “I don’t recall any serious national public dialogue about lockdown protocols or how they became the norm. It seems simply to have begun, modeling itself on the lockdowns that occur during prison riots, and then spread until school lockdowns and lockdown drills are as common for our children as fire drills, and as routine as duck-and-cover drills were in the 1950s.”

The toll such incidents take on adults can be life-altering, but when such police brutality is perpetrated on young people, the end result is nothing less than complete indoctrination into becoming compliant citizens of a totalitarian state.

Schools acting like prisons.

School officials acting like wardens.

Students treated like inmates and punished like hardened criminals.

This is the end product of all those so-called school “safety” policies, which run the gamut from zero tolerance policies that punish all infractions harshly to surveillance cameras, metal detectors, random searches, drug-sniffing dogs, school-wide lockdowns, active-shooter drills and militarized police officers.

Unfortunately, advocates for such harsh police tactics and weaponry like to trot out the line that school safety should be our first priority lest we find ourselves with another Sandy Hook.

What they will not tell you is that such shootings are rare.

As one congressional report found, the schools are, generally speaking, safe places for children.

In their zeal to crack down on guns and lock down the schools, these cheerleaders for police state tactics in the schools might also fail to mention the lucrative, multi-million dollar deals being cut with military contractors such as Taser International to equip these school cops with tasers, tanks, rifles and $100,000 shooting detection systems.

Indeed, the transformation of hometown police departments into extensions of the military has been mirrored in the public schools, where school police have been gifted with high-powered M16 rifles, MRAP armored vehicles, grenade launchers, and other military gear. One Texas school district even boasts its own 12-member SWAT team.

According to one law review article on the school-to-prison pipeline, “Many school districts have formed their own police departments, some so large they rival the forces of major United States cities in size. For example, the safety division in New York City’s public schools is so large that if it were a local police department, it would be the fifth-largest police force in the country.”

The ramifications are far-reaching.

There can be no avoiding the hands-on lessons being taught in the schools about the role of police in our lives, ranging from active shooter drills and school-wide lockdowns to incidents in which children engaging in typically childlike behavior are suspended (for shooting an imaginary “arrow” at a fellow classmate), handcuffed (for being disruptive at school), arrested (for throwing water balloons as part of a school prank), and even tasered (for not obeying instructions).

Instead of raising up a generation of freedom fighters—which one would hope would be the objective of the schools—government officials seem determined to churn out newly minted citizens of the American police state who are being taught the hard way what it means to comply, fear and march in lockstep with the government’s dictates.

So what’s the answer, not only for the here-and-now—the children growing up in these quasi-prisons—but for the future of this country?

How do you convince a child who has been routinely handcuffed, shackled, tied down, locked up, and immobilized by government officials—all before he reaches the age of adulthood—that he has any rights at all, let alone the right to challenge wrongdoing, resist oppression and defend himself against injustice?

Most of all, how do you persuade a fellow American that the government works for him when, for most of his young life, he has been incarcerated in an institution that teaches young people to be obedient and compliant citizens who don’t talk back, don’t question and don’t challenge authority?

Peter Gray, a professor of psychology at Boston College, believes that school is a prison that is damaging our kids, and it’s hard to disagree, especially with the numbers of police officers being assigned to schools on the rise.

Students, in turn, are not only finding themselves subjected to police tactics such as handcuffs, leg shackles, tasers and excessive force for “acting up” but are also being ticketed, fined and sent to court for behavior perceived as defiant, disruptive or disorderly such as spraying perfume and writing on a desk.

Clearly, the pathology that characterizes the American police state has passed down to the schools.

Now in addition to the government and its agents viewing the citizenry as suspects to be probed, poked, pinched, tasered, searched, seized, stripped and generally manhandled, all with the general blessing of the courts, our children in the public schools are also fair game for school resource officers who taser teenagers and handcuff kindergartners, school officials who have criminalized childhood behavior, school lockdowns and terror drills that teach your children to fear and comply, and a police state mindset that has transformed the schools into quasi-prisons.

Don’t even get me started on the “school-to-prison pipeline,” the phenomenon in which children who are suspended or expelled from school have a greater likelihood of ending up in jail. One study found that “being suspended or expelled made a student nearly three times more likely to come into contact with the juvenile justice system within the next year.”

By the time the average young person in America finishes their public school education, nearly one out of every three of them will have been arrested. Nearly 40 percent of those young people who are arrested will serve time in a private prison, where the emphasis is on making profits for large megacorporations above all else.

Indeed, this profit-driven system of incarceration has also given rise to a growth in juvenile prisons and financial incentives for jailing young people. In this way, young people have become easy targets for the private prison industry, which profits from criminalizing childish behavior and jailing young people.

None of these tactics are making our communities or schools any safer, and they’re certainly not contributing to environments in which learning flourishes. Incredibly, despite the fact that the U.S. invests more money in public education (roughly $13,000 per child per year) than many other developed countries, we rank around the middle of the pack in science, math and reading, and behind many other advanced industrial nations.

Without a doubt, change is needed, but that will mean taking on the teachers’ unions, the school unions, the educators’ associations, and the police unions, not to mention the politicians dependent on their votes and all of the corporations that profit mightily from an industrial school complex.

As we’ve seen with other issues, any significant reforms will have to start locally and trickle upwards.

For starters, parents need to be vocal, visible and organized and demand that school officials 1) adopt a policy of positive reinforcement in dealing with behavior issues; 2) minimize the presence in the schools of police officers and cease involving them in student discipline; and 3) insist that all behavioral issues be addressed first and foremost with a child’s parents, before any other disciplinary tactics are attempted.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if you want a nation of criminals, treat the citizenry like criminals.

If you want young people who grow up seeing themselves as prisoners, run the schools like prisons.

If, on the other hand, you want to raise up a generation of freedom fighters, who will actually operate with justice, fairness, accountability and equality towards each other and their government, then run the schools like freedom forums.

Remove the metal detectors and surveillance cameras, re-assign the cops elsewhere, and start treating our nation’s young people like citizens of a republic and not inmates in a police state penitentiary.

Despite Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro emerging victorious after last year’s tumultuous events, which included a US assisted coup attempt by a faction of the military last Spring, out of which Washington also maintained a diplomatic fiction that opposition leader Juan Guaidó is actually the president, it appears the White House is still considering military options against Maduro. 

Bloomberg reports “President Donald Trump is frustrated that pressure is building too slowly on Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and is still considering military options in the country, including a naval blockade, a senior administration official said.”

Apparently the current sanctions regimen and attempt to block all oil exports, which has seen the US go after major oil companies still doing business with state-run PDVSA (most recently sanctioning a subsidiary of Russian state oil major Rosneft), is not putting swift or severe enough pressure on the Maduro government. 

The goal remains, the unnamed top official told Bloomberg, “securing free and fair elections in Venezuela” — which in Washington-speak really means ensuring US-backed Guaidó secures loyalty of the military and thereby leadership over the country. “The U.S. doesn’t believe that free elections are possible with Maduro in power,” the official said further.

The report names Spain as a key European barrier to the US and EU campaign to ouster Maduro. Several new initiatives are being undertaken keep keep up and increase the pressure, however, as Bloomberg notes: 

The U.S. has put several companies that continue to do business in Venezuela on notice, the official said, including India’s Reliance Industries, Spain’s Repsol, Chevron and Greek shippers. Trump is likely to raise the issue of India’s oil imports from Venezuela with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a two-day visit next week, the official said Friday in a briefing for reporters.

Trump’s perhaps most aggressive plan of action remains a “naval blockade” of all goods going in and out of the country, which gained a lot of media coverage last August. 

The president had frequently vocalized the idea of a naval embargo which would involve multiple warships stationed up and down the South American country’s coastline. 

But top US military officers were said to have consistently opposed the plan, saying it was impractical and would take away already stretched naval resources busy engaging Iran and China. 

The White House has further been deeply frustrated that the Venezuelan opposition, which failed to deliver results after a months-long standoff last year and with full Washington support that even likely included covert aid via the CIA. 

Authored by Julie Kelly via AmGreatness.com,

People like Justice Amy Berman Jackson, who claim to hold the greatest devotion to our institutions, who purport to cherish the rule of law above all else, are the ones responsible for systematically demolishing it all.

She claim sounded like something from Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) or Rachel Maddow or any number of Russian collusion propagandists:

“He was not prosecuted for standing up for the president. He was prosecuted for covering up for the president.”

Those words, however, were not uttered on MSNBC but rather in a federal courtroom by Amy Berman Jackson, a U.S. district court judge seated in the nation’s capital, whose job is to ensure the fair administration of justice based on the rule of law.

The “he” Jackson was referring to is Roger Stone, a Trump confidant; the “president,” of course, is Donald Trump. 

Now, Stone wasn’t charged with covering up for the president nor did the indictment against him suggest as much. There was nothing to “cover up” as election collusion is a fantasy concocted by the Democrats and the news media. But the Obama-appointee was on a roll; facts, at that point, didn’t matter to Jackson. (In a tweet Thursday morning, Schiff echoed Jackson’s evidence-free remark, claiming Stone “did it to cover up for Trump.”)

Her absurd and blatantly political accusation from the bench was just part of Jackson’s 40-minute monologue Thursday morning prior to sentencing Stone to 40 months in prison for lying to Congress, obstructing justice, and witness tampering. (The loquacious judge doesn’t like competition; she put a gag order on Stone last year that is still in effect.)

The seven charges against Stone stemmed from Robert Mueller’s investigation into nonexistent collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin to sway the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. The Justice Department accused Stone of thwarting a similar investigation conducted by the House Intelligence Committee, then headed by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).

The case against Stone is rooted in the claim that the Russians hacked the email system of the Democratic National Committee—an intrusion, it’s important to note, that is backed up solely by an analysis conducted by CrowdStrike, a private cybersecurity firm. The politically connected company was hired to investigate the breach in the spring of 2016 by Perkins Coie, the same law firm that hired Fusion GPS to do opposition research on Trump. The DNC refused to surrender any devices or data to the FBI, despite several requests by then-director James Comey.

Stone allegedly, in no small measure due to his own boasting, was in touch with WikiLeaks, the website that eventually leaked the DNC’s hacked emails. His concealment of communications related to WikiLeaks earned Stone and his wife an early-morning FBI raid at their home in January 2019 as the CNN news cameras rolled.

Former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy wrote this of the government’s case against the eccentric political gadfly prior to his sentencing Thursday: 

The Stone prosecution is more politics than law enforcement. It was the Mueller probe’s last gasp at pretending there might be something to the Russia-collusion narrative. Notwithstanding that, when the “gee, it sure feels like there could be some collusion here” indictment was filed, over a year and a half after special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed, it had long been manifest that there was no Trump–Russia conspiracy.

It appears that Jackson, like so many Trump-haters in the Beltway, still clings to the fantasy that the collusion hoax is legitimate.

Evidently, in the judge’s mind, bad actors like Stone are the only reason why Team Mueller and congressional investigators failed to find what Schiff repeatedly assured the public was convincing evidence of collusion. Jackson told the courtroom prior to her ruling that Stone’s deception “led to an inaccurate, incomplete and incorrect report,” by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee.

But there is no evidence to support Judge Jackson’s accusation, nor did she offer any explanation. The lengthy report issued in March 2018—one month after Nunes released his memo revealing for the first time how the FBI deceived the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court—details the committee’s yearlong investigation into the matter. The report concluded that while the Russians attempted to interfere in the election, there was no coordination to do so with members of the Trump campaign.

Jackson’s purpose was clear:

To assist the Democrats’ nonstop crusade to undermine the credibility of Nunes and his report, and to suggest that if only Trump’s lackeys hadn’t hampered the work of dozens of super-smart investigators working with unlimited resources, proof of the secret conspiracy would have been uncovered and Trump would have been ousted from the White House.

In a statement by email, Jack Langer, a spokesman for Nunes, told me:

“Our 240-page report has precisely one sentence that may be inaccurate information provided by Stone. That line had no impact on any of the report’s findings whatsoever. For the judge to use that to characterize our report as inaccurate and incomplete is absurd. Then again, a lot of the judge’s sentencing speech seemed to be regurgitating the Democrats’ debunked talking points about Russian collusion.”

That was not Jackson’s only impersonation of Adam Schiff; she went full drama queen mode warning that Stone poses an insidious danger to the very foundation of our nation. 

“The truth still exists, the truth still matters,” Jackson lectured. (This is exactly why we need cameras in federal courtrooms so the public is privy to these sort of self-indulgent performances.)

“Roger Stone’s insistence that it doesn’t, his belligerence, his pride in his own lies are a threat to our most fundamental institutions. If it goes unpunished it will not be a victory for one party or another. Everyone loses.”

And it isn’t just enough for the judge to express her outrage about how Roger Stone almost single-handedly destroyed the work of our founding fathers by misleading lawmakers pursuing a concocted crime. No, we all need to rise up to signal our collective “dismay and disgust” at the American menace with a Nixon tattoo—and it must, the judge ordered, “transcend party.”

Jackson rattled off all the parties who “cared” about making sure Stone paid for his crimes against humanity, including Congress and the American people. (It’s a safe bet most Americans were paying no attention to this trial or could even identify Stone in a lineup.) She took more potshots at Stone; perhaps without being ironic, Jackson called Stone an “insecure” person who craves attention.

Jackson’s grandstanding might have been met with shrugs (or ignored altogether) in any other political climate but her dire warnings about the necessary consequences for committing perjury and obstructing justice and covering up for political pals demonstrate an astonishing level of hypocrisy if not flat-out complicity in the selective application of the law. 

The president and his supporters can hardly tolerate lectures about fairness when Trump foes such as Andrew McCabe, James Comey, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, and others continue to escape justice for far worse crimes.

Further, unlike Stone, those offenders held positions of power and influence—and abused both in service of achieving their mutual goal that Jackson so dramatically endorsed today: The sabotage of Donald Trump and anyone associated with him. 

The people, like Jackson, who claim to hold the greatest devotion to our institutions, who purport to cherish the rule of law above all else, are the ones responsible for systematically demolishing it all.

Who doesn’t enjoy a fun video where a seemingly elderly looking man beats the shit out of some young punk who tried to steal his cash?

A behatted old man was minding his own business standing in front of a surveillance camera near a parking lot when a young masked punk in a bright-colored vest suddenly rushes him and tries to rob him.

The man pushes back the young lad, then throws up his fists and clocks him right in the jaw. They dance for a bit, eventually moving out of frame. As the video ends, its clear the would-be thief has run away.

Surveillance footage shows 77-year-old fight off masked man who tried to steal his cash as he walked away from an ATM.

Police in Wales say the suspect fled the scene empty-handed. https://t.co/QddZfGQa4L pic.twitter.com/v1CNJR0nQG

— ABC News (@ABC) February 18, 2020

But why stop there? You know how liberals refuse to believe that armed citizens actually foil crimes? We suspect it’s because they couldn’t imagine showing that kind of courage, but for one southern couple, a pair of off-duty police officers, the ‘good guy with a gun myth’ became a reality.

The pair foiled a robbery when they chased off a masked suspect who tried to hold up the restaurant.

Off-duty husband-and-wife police officers from Elizabethtown, Kentucky, had their meal interrupted when a masked man walked into a Louisville chicken restaurant and demanded money.

They drew their weapons and helped chase down the robbery suspect. https://t.co/8jZeJPc85n pic.twitter.com/Rwn4kecbGv

— ABC News (@ABC) February 19, 2020

According to ABC, the couple were the only ones eating at the restaurant when the thief approached. The would-be thief was identified and, later, arrested.

That incident could have played out much differently if it weren’t for Kentucky’s generous 2nd amendment protections.

Authored (satirically) by CJ Hopkins, via The Unz Review,

Break out the pussyhats and vuvuzelas, folks, because the neoliberal Resistance is back, and this time they’re not playing around. No more impeachments and investigations. It’s time to go mano-a-mano with Trump, and they’ve finally got just the bad hombre to do it. No, not Bernie Sanders, you commies. A battle-hardened Resistance fighter. El Caballo Pequeño! El Jefe Mínimo! Subcomandante Michael Bloomberg!

Yes, that’s right, Michael Bloomberg, multi-billionaire Republicrat oligarch, has mobilized a guerilla army of overpaid PR professionals, Wall Street sociopaths, liberal racists, and anti-outdoor-smoking fanatics, and is steamrolling toward the Democratic convention to buy a brokered nomination and save America from “Putinism.” He’s had it with you sugary-soft-drink-drinking, chain-smoking, gun-toting, Oxy-gobbling, Hitler-loving, Putinist peasants and your infatuation with Donald Trump. So he’s decided to transform the entire country into a sterile, upscale, fascist themepark where you can rent a studio for $3,000 a month and the cops keep “the darkies” in their place, like he successfully did to New York City.

Although his campaign seemed to come out of nowhere (and sort of resembles a desperate attempt to prevent a Bernie Sanders nomination), the Resistance have been planning this corporatist Tet Offensive for quite some time. Apparently, Subcomandante Bloomberg and his inner circle of sub-subcomandantes have been hiding out deep in the mountainous jungles of Manhattan’s affluent Upper East Side (or in the Hamptons, or London, or in one of El Jefe’s other multi-million-dollar homes) since Trump and the Russians invaded the country, waiting for the perfect moment to start inundating the American people with television commercials and social media posts informing them of his “electability.”

Clearly, that moment has now arrived.

Bloomberg has spent over $400 million on TV, radio, and digital ads, and it isn’t even Super Tuesday yet. He bought the Democratic National Committee and had them change the rules so he could join the debates (which, based on his poor performance in Las Vegas, might not have been the most brilliant strategy). He has been buying politicians, community organizers, journalists, pundits, his opponents’ campaign staff, Instagram and Facebook influencers, and everyone else he can possibly buy to support his campaign to buy the presidency … which is totally legal, and the American way, and is our only hope of overthrowing the Putin-Nazi Occupation Government and regaining our God-given capitalist freedom!

Sure, to some folks, it looks … well, unseemly (not to mention decidedly undemocratic), this Wall Street oligarch attempting to bribe and bully his way into the White House, but, given the stakes, what choice do we have? As the corporate media and intelligence agencies have been telling us for the last three years, the country is under occupation by an evil conspiracy of Russian-backed Nazis personally controlled by Vladimir Putin! More or less any moment now, Putin is going to order Trump to nullify the U.S. Constitution, declare martial law, appoint himself Führer, and start rounding up and murdering the Jews … or investigating Hunter Biden, or the spooks who have been trying to force him out of office.

This Putin-Nazism cannot continue! Trump must be deposed, no matter the cost. As Robert Reich put it in this piece in The Guardian:

“If the only way we can get rid of the sociopathic tyrant named Trump is with an oligarch named Bloomberg, we will have to choose the oligarch.”

There you have it, folks. We’ll have to choose Bloomberg, or else his golf buddy, Literal Hitler, will destroy the fabric of democracy, or whatever.

Another op-ed in The Washington Post, It Might Be Time to Take Bloomberg Seriously, wondered, if it comes down to Bloomberg versus Bernie:

“Do you choose socialism or capitalism? An ideologue or an executive? Are you really going to ask Americans to trade one extreme for the other, or do you want to offer them a certified, electable moderate?”

Vox, in its “Case for Michael Bloomberg — Mike Bloomberg and His Billions Are What Democrats Need to Beat Trump,” observes that, sure, Bloomberg has drawbacks, like his history of racist remarks and policies, abusing women, oppressing the poor, and just generally being an arrogant little authoritarian corporatist creep, but hey, he’s apologized for all that stuff, and he’ll probably never do it again.

Plus, according to this piece in …uh, Bloomberg Opinion (which “does not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of Bloomberg LP and its owners”), The 2020 Election Is a Choice Between Democracy and Putinism! At the end of the day, once the dust has settled:

“It will come down to rule of law. In November, Americans will decide whether they will fight for the foundation of liberal democracy and democratic capitalism or whether they will accede to Putinism.”

You’ll be hearing variations of this message over and over, and over again, as we approach election day in November … that is, assuming Bloomberg and the rest of the Resistance can buy, bribe, badger, and bamboozle enough Democratic voters into nominating him. First, they need to deal with Bernie Sanders and his swarm of kill-crazy commie terrorists (who rumor has it are also being remotely controlled by Vladimir Putin). To do this, all they will need to do is deny Sanders a first ballot win in Milwaukee, which shouldn’t be too hard to accomplish. Sure, a brokered convention will be ugly, but, as Robert Reich said, they’ll have to do it, or else … well, you know, end of democracy.

Yes, I’m aware that Subcomandante Bloomberg blew his first debate (prompting Twitter pundits to pronounce him DOA) and that millions of “progressive” Democrats hate him, and that the corporate media are running a lot of “Bloomberg’s Nasty Past” pieces now (in order to maintain the appearance of journalism), but, make no mistake, if he secures the nomination, they’ll be lining up to “reluctantly” endorse him, because the alternative will be Russian Hitler!

Look, it’s easy to get distracted by the day-to-day ups and downs of the horse race (which is the primary purpose of the horse race, after all) and forget that we are in the middle of a global capitalist War on Populism … a war that GloboCap intends to win. Sure, they will survive another four years of Trump (or even four years of Sanders if they have to), but, at some point, in order to restore “normality,” or “democratic capitalism,” or whatever, they are probably going to need to stop dicking around and install a bona fide global capitalist oligarch in the Oval Office. They are going to need to do this in order to crush the hopes of the populist insurgency that erupted in the Spring of 2016, and led to the rise of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, the Brexit, the ongoing protests in France, the downfall of Angela Merkel, etc.

Another Obama is not going to cut it … people aren’t buying that con anymore. No, if the empire is going to reestablish control, it is going to need to take its liberal mask off, and shove a blatant corporatist oligarch like Bloomberg down the public’s throat in order to remind everyone who’s boss. It may not be Michael Bloomberg this time, but it is going to be someone like Bloomberg eventually. Someone powerful, and extremely unpleasant, who will be sold to us as the only one who can save the world from the “Nazis” and the “Russians” … which will necessitate taking some very extreme measures, like the ones we took during the War on Terror. You remember the measures we took back then, don’t you?

Or what, you think that GloboCap has been manufacturing all this mass hysteria over “Russian election interference” and “Nazi terrorism” for their own amusement? Yeah, that’s probably all it is. It’s probably not a prelude to anything.

The number of murders continues to rise under the Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) government. More than 36,000 people lost their lives in 2019 amid a deepening of Mexico’s drug war. 

We have routinely shared deteriorating conditions of Mexico in the last half-decade, and the warzones that have developed on many border towns. 

Last month, the US consulate in Mexico’s border city of Nuevo Laredo issued a warning as intense gunfire broke out across the city. Here’s the audio from the epic gun battle that unfolded (audio is from US side): 

This is horrible #NuevoLaredo pic.twitter.com/fd4REo9wmT

— Kαяø⁷ IS SEEING BTS (@cypherlarry_) January 2, 2020

Now it appears the Mexican Army has stumbled across a large bunker used by cartels. 

Breitbart said the “bunker was previously discovered in 2018 and was only used to store damaged vehicles.” 

Here’s a video of Mexico’s Army entering the structure only to find a charred SUV and bullet casings. 

#OJO #Reynosa #Tamaulipas

Elementos de la @SEDENAmx durante reconocimientos realizados el 12/02/2020 localizaron un búnker con aprox 70 Mts. Longitud por 6 Mts. De ancho y 2.5 Mts. De altura a inmediaciones de la col. Vista Hermosa del mpio de Reynosa, Tamps.

Vídeo 1 pic.twitter.com/j2B9qcFrfc

— La Voz Del Pueblo (Oficial) (@LPueblo2) February 16, 2020

The bunker is located in Vista Hermosa neighborhood of Reynosa, was previously discovered by the Mexican Army in 2018 during a raid that was littered with Claymore mines and had a treasure trove of weapons. 

Breitbart notes that the bunker was used to store weapons, armored vehicles, and other combat materials for cartels.

#OJO #Reynosa #Tamaulipas

En el citado Búnker se localizaron evidencias de disparos de arma de fuego, diversos cartuchos y cascos regados en el piso así como un vehículo incendiado mismo que se encontraba en el interior de referido Búnker.

Imágenes pic.twitter.com/jWxE5ukMxl

— La Voz Del Pueblo (Oficial) (@LPueblo2) February 16, 2020

Why is this concerning? Well, the bunker is just miles away from Texas. The border region is a hotspot for cartel violence that is at risk of spilling over onto US soil and could engender Americans. 

Some of the most recent gun battles on the border have seen cartel members using machine guns, armored vehicles, explosives, .50 caliber rifles, and other devices that would generally be found in a warzone. 

All of the above suggests AMLO has lost control of his own country, as his policies are failing to curb violence and arrest cartel gun battles that are routinely occurring on the border. 

AMLO’s recent deployment of an elite marine force to fight drug cartels on the border was most likely due to pressure by the Trump administration, who cited the total Mexican murder count in 2019 exceeded the 2018 record of 36,685. 

Trump began increasing pressure on Mexico in November following the murders of three mothers and six of their children in a fundamentalist Mormon compound in the northern state of Sonora. Cartel gunman reportedly ambushed the families while fighting for control of the area where the victims lived.

It’s only a matter of time before Trump sends in the military to clear out cartels on the border.