My colleague Todd Henderson has an opinion piece at Newsweek arguing that court-packing—adding additional Justices to the Supreme Court, for the purpose of changing the Court’s decisions—is unconstitutional. I don’t agree with the piece, but it has already attracted a ton of criticism and that criticism deserves more scrutiny.
One remarkable document that emerged from that conflict is the report from the 1937 Senate Judiciary Committee, on which Todd relies, which argued at length that court-packing for the purpose of manipulating the Supreme Court was unconstitutional, because it violated the spirit of the Constitution and the separation of powers. Before you dismiss challenges to court-packing as frivolous, you should really read it. And these arguments appeared much more widely in the legislative debate at the time as well.
After I read this report, I found it disturbingly easy to imagine a judicial opinion invalidating court-packing (many of these points are in Todd’s piece):
First it would talk about how in general Congress has power to structure the Court, but that under the long-established principles of the separation of powers, no one branch can be allowed to effectively destroy another.
Then it would argue that Congress has never before engaged in overtly outcome-motivated court-packing. (It’s not clear whether this is true, but there’s a respectable historical debate about the Civil War/Reconstruction era and other relevant moments, so the Court could say it with a straight face.)
Then it would note that the closest precedent was the New Deal battle over court packing, in which the legislative branch—dominated by a supermajority of the President’s own party—responded with powerful constitutional arguments, which may have helped carry the day against the President.
And finally it could say that in the years since, the arguments against court packing have only become more powerful: We have an additional 83 years of practice in which court packing is seen as generally unacceptable. And we have the rise of explicit judicial supremacy in Cooper v. Aaron and many other cases, which place the Supreme Court at the apex of the interpretive hierarchy—a position it could hardly occupy if Congress could pack the Court.
(Who would challenge the legislation? Presumably any Supreme Court litigant has standing to raise the question of who is lawfully entitled to hear his case. Though in some ways the Court would have to confront the issue earlier, when deciding whether the Justices would cooperate in administering the oath, give the new appointees office space, and so on.)
Now I don’t agree with this argument at all, and I don’t think the Supreme Court should strike down court-packing, if it occurs. But I know why I don’t agree with this argument, and I’m genuinely uncertain about why others don’t.
So far as I can tell, there are three basic paths to rejecting this argument:
The original meaning of the Constitution is our law, and under the original meaning, Congress’s Article I powers allow it to set the size of the Court even if it does so in order to manipulate the Court’s decisions.
The original meaning is not decisive, but even so, there are no unwritten separation of powers constraints on Congress’s legislation concerning the Supreme Court.
There are unwritten separation of powers constraints on Congress’s legislation concerning the Supreme Court, but court packing does not violate such a constraint.
I am an originalist, so point number 1 does it for me. But a lot of the people who reject this argument as frivolous do not accept originalism as decisive, so they must take one of the other two paths. Both of the other two paths seem plausible to me, but I think they would benefit from being spelled out.
For point number 2, if there are no nontextual separation of powers doctrines in this area, why not? And does that imply a rejection of other nontextual separation of powers doctrines, and if not what distinguishes them? This could be a very fruitful case study for understanding how non-originalists determine the validity of an asserted non-textual norm.
Or for point number 3, if court-packing complies with the nontextual separation of powers norms, why is that? One possibility is that court-packing is valid because it is a sort of “constitutional self-help,” valid only because it is a form of necessary retaliation against supposed misbehavior by the Court. But if this is the theory, it would be quite arresting to spell it out, and it would imply that the validity of court-packing rises or falls on the charge of judicial misbehavior. I’m sure it is not the only possible form of argument number 3, but hearing the other arguments would be helpful, and would also inform the broader debates about court reform.
I am an originalist, and I do not think court-packing is unconstitutional. Non-originalists seem to agree, and I assume they have good reasons of their own for doing so. But those reasons are not obvious to me, and the constitutional debate would benefit if they were spelled out, with their implications.
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A UK police chief has called it a “civic duty” to snitch on neighbors and businesses that violate COVID-19 restrictions while criticizing the culture that condemns such tattle tailing.
On Wednesday, Merseyside Chief Constable Andy Cooke condemned the ‘sneering culture’ against those who tip-off police when he told the Daily Mail that if Brits carry out their “civic duty” of snitching on those who refuse to follow the martial-law-esque social and economic restrictions imposed by government, they “will save lives.”
“People are doing a civic duty in contacting us for the right reasons,” Cooke said.
“The vast majority of people across the country are really concerned about this. Any information that you can give us in relation to breaches will save lives, and that’s why people are doing it.”
Cooke’s words follow the decision of West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner David Jamieson to break up any Christmas celebration that violates government lockdown restrictions.
“If we think there’s large groups of people gathering where they shouldn’t be, then police will have to intervene. If, again, there’s flagrant breaking of the rules, then the police would have to enforce,” Jamieson said.
After adding that “it’s not the police’s job to stop people enjoying their Christmas,” the Crime Commissioner stated that this would not stop the police from following orders.
“However, we are there to enforce the rules that the Government makes, and if the Government makes those rules then the Government has to explain that to the public.”
Jamieson says he believes that public “frustration” with decisions to spoil Christmas celebrations could boil over into civil unrest.
Meanwhile, National Police Chiefs Council chairman Martin Hewitt says it’s expected there will be ‘quicker enforcement’ of flagrant rule breaches.
For example, officers who are called to a large party in a private house or garden would give people a chance to leave but fines would be issued if they refused. The organisers ‘would be dealt with every time’, he said.
He said ‘flagrant breaches’ likely to attract fines included pubs serving past 10pm.
Mr Hewitt said: ‘With those kind of egregious breaches, which are putting everybody at risk, it is perfectly legitimate for a member of public to share that share that information.’
Encouragement from UK police to rat on those who breach COVID lockdown restrictions is nothing new.
In September, Police Minister Kit Malthouse encouraged reporting neighbors gathering in more than groups of six, labeling it a viable option.
“There is obviously the non-emergency number that people can ring to report issues, if they wish to,” the minister told the BBC Radio 4’s ‘Today’ show.
“If people are concerned, if they do think there’s a contravention, then that option is open to them.”
In October it was revealed that West Mercia Police had asked taxi drivers to snitch on passengers they suspected of beaching lockdown rules.
Despite the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control’s admission that the COVID-19 death rate in England lags far behind the recent spikes in new cases, top government scientists are pressuring ministers to impose even tighter restrictions on the public ahead of Christmas.
Social media reacted to the most recent snitching news:
Not going to grass on my naighbour for having me round for a few festive drinks am I. Be realistic. If the police do find time to attend my address could you also action some of the incident that have been reported about real crime or is real crime not priority at the moment
But yet when I ring police to report someone breaking in or stealing a car etc. They don’t have the resources??? So tell me again why should I grass on my neighbors….??
And people wonder why the police are despised, this is one perfect example. Let’s see how he feels when he’s got to sleep with one eye open for fear his family are narked on by one of his own copper mates. Filth
It would be fantastic if the police addressed the crime sweeping through the country. How many police assigned to keep watch on illegal immigrants who could all rise up and kill us? No one knows who they are or their motive. We could have another episode like France.
My colleague Todd Henderson has an opinion piece at Newsweek arguing that court-packing—adding additional Justices to the Supreme Court, for the purpose of changing the Court’s decisions—is unconstitutional. I don’t agree with the piece, but it has already attracted a ton of criticism and that criticism deserves more scrutiny.
One remarkable document that emerged from that conflict is the report from the 1937 Senate Judiciary Committee, on which Todd relies, which argued at length that court-packing for the purpose of manipulating the Supreme Court was unconstitutional, because it violated the spirit of the Constitution and the separation of powers. Before you dismiss challenges to court-packing as frivolous, you should really read it. And these arguments appeared much more widely in the legislative debate at the time as well.
After I read this report, I found it disturbingly easy to imagine a judicial opinion invalidating court-packing (many of these points are in Todd’s piece):
First it would talk about how in general Congress has power to structure the Court, but that under the long-established principles of the separation of powers, no one branch can be allowed to effectively destroy another.
Then it would argue that Congress has never before engaged in overtly outcome-motivated court-packing. (It’s not clear whether this is true, but there’s a respectable historical debate about the Civil War/Reconstruction era and other relevant moments, so the Court could say it with a straight face.)
Then it would note that the closest precedent was the New Deal battle over court packing, in which the legislative branch—dominated by a supermajority of the President’s own party—responded with powerful constitutional arguments, which may have helped carry the day against the President.
And finally it could say that in the years since, the arguments against court packing have only become more powerful: We have an additional 83 years of practice in which court packing is seen as generally unacceptable. And we have the rise of explicit judicial supremacy in Cooper v. Aaron and many other cases, which place the Supreme Court at the apex of the interpretive hierarchy—a position it could hardly occupy if Congress could pack the Court.
(Who would challenge the legislation? Presumably any Supreme Court litigant has standing to raise the question of who is lawfully entitled to hear his case. Though in some ways the Court would have to confront the issue earlier, when deciding whether the Justices would cooperate in administering the oath, give the new appointees office space, and so on.)
Now I don’t agree with this argument at all, and I don’t think the Supreme Court should strike down court-packing, if it occurs. But I know why I don’t agree with this argument, and I’m genuinely uncertain about why others don’t.
So far as I can tell, there are three basic paths to rejecting this argument:
The original meaning of the Constitution is our law, and under the original meaning, Congress’s Article I powers allow it to set the size of the Court even if it does so in order to manipulate the Court’s decisions.
The original meaning is not decisive, but even so, there are no unwritten separation of powers constraints on Congress’s legislation concerning the Supreme Court.
There are unwritten separation of powers constraints on Congress’s legislation concerning the Supreme Court, but court packing does not violate such a constraint.
I am an originalist, so point number 1 does it for me. But a lot of the people who reject this argument as frivolous do not accept originalism as decisive, so they must take one of the other two paths. Both of the other two paths seem plausible to me, but I think they would benefit from being spelled out.
For point number 2, if there are no nontextual separation of powers doctrines in this area, why not? And does that imply a rejection of other nontextual separation of powers doctrines, and if not what distinguishes them? This could be a very fruitful case study for understanding how non-originalists determine the validity of an asserted non-textual norm.
Or for point number 3, if court-packing complies with the nontextual separation of powers norms, why is that? One possibility is that court-packing is valid because it is a sort of “constitutional self-help,” valid only because it is a form of necessary retaliation against supposed misbehavior by the Court. But if this is the theory, it would be quite arresting to spell it out, and it would imply that the validity of court-packing rises or falls on the charge of judicial misbehavior. I’m sure it is not the only possible form of argument number 3, but hearing the other arguments would be helpful, and would also inform the broader debates about court reform.
I am an originalist, and I do not think court-packing is unconstitutional. Non-originalists seem to agree, and I assume they have good reasons of their own for doing so. But those reasons are not obvious to me, and the constitutional debate would benefit if they were spelled out, with their implications.
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“We Are At War” – French Official Warns Country Must Brace For More Islamist Terror Attacks Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/31/2020 – 07:35
For the second time in October, France has been hit with grisly knife attacks, forcing government officials to warn that more of these terror fueled incidents by “Islamist ideology” are coming.
The latest attack occurred in the French city of Nice on Thursday. Three people were stabbed to death at a church. While an investigation is underway, French President Emmanuel Macron was quick to say the French people are under attack by “Islamist and terrorist madness.”
Thursday’s killings follow the gruesome beheading of schoolteacher Samuel Paty in a northern Paris suburb earlier this month. A Chechen refugee beheaded Paty after he showed his students cartoons of prophet Muhammad in a freedom of expression lesson.
Besides Macron’s warning, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin told RTL radio on Friday, quoted by RT News, that the country must be prepared for future attacks as it battles Islamic extremism.
“We are in a war against an enemy that is both inside and outside. We need to understand that there have been and there will be other events such as these terrible attacks,” Darmanin said on RTL radio.
Video: “France is at war. We are at war with an enemy outside and inside. We are at war with the Islamist ideology,” he said on RTL radio.
La France est en guerre.
Nous sommes en guerre face à un ennemi extérieur et intérieur.
Nous sommes en guerre face à l’idéologie islamiste.#RTLMatinpic.twitter.com/7U1XKe1EZr
Video: “The greatness of our democracy, its strength, lies in being able to tell the French that within a legal framework, we can defeat the greatest barbarities. Islamism is a form of 21st-century fascism, extremism that we must fight,” he said on RTL radio.
La grandeur de notre démocratie, sa force, c’est de pouvoir dire aux Français que dans un cadre légal, on peut battre les plus grandes barbaries.
L’islamisme est une forme de fascisme du XXIe siècle, un extrémisme que nous devons combattre.#RTLMatinpic.twitter.com/SwKbPda3Xb
The government raised the terror threat to the highest “emergency” level late this week. Soldiers have been deployed to schools and churches across the country. This also comes as Macron declared a second national lockdown Friday until at least the end of November due to rising coronavirus cases.
UK prime minister Boris Johnson said the Nice incident on Thursday was a “barbaric attack:”
“Our thoughts are with the victims and their families, and the UK stands steadfastly with France against terror and intolerance,” said Johnson.
President Trump said, “America stands with our oldest ally in this fight.” Pope Francis said he prays for the victims, for their families, and for France.
Turkey, which is embroiled in a diplomatic spat with France over the publication of cartoons of the prophet Muhammad, said they “strongly condemn the attack at the church in Nice.”
While 79% of French people believe Islamists have “declared war” on their country, this could drum up support for nationalist political leaders in the country who have had a tough stance on combating Islamic extremism – such as Marine Le Pen.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3mKOrf3 Tyler Durden
With its systemic exposure to the Eurozone, sterling is likely to be a casualty of the failure of the euro system and shares the monetary hyperinflation characteristics of the dollar. The Bank of England is copying US monetary policies and will find it increasingly difficult to prevent the pound from escaping the same fate as the dollar.
Main points
Adjusting out QE of £300bn since last March tells us that measured in 2019 pounds the UK economy contracted by 34% in 1H 2020, not the 9.3% headline figure. A further round of QE and government spending will be deployed in an attempt to support the private sector economy through a second covid wave, which will almost certainly be greater than the initial £300bn—£317bn so far.
The Bank of England has now accepted that a second round of stimulus is required and is exploring the possibility of introducing negative interest rates. It has yet to factor in the deterioration in the outlook for global trade which will force it into further rounds of QE, irrespective of the path of the virus.
Britain’s banks, themselves exceptionally highly leveraged on a market capitalisation to balance sheet assets basis, are heavily exposed to the Eurozone’s banking system, which as I showed in last week’s article is could collapse in the near future. Rescuing British banks will require the government to underwrite at least a further £5.3 trillion in balance sheet assets at a time of mounting bad debts in the economy.
Since the Lehman crisis the banks have supported zombie businesses rather than face crippling write-offs. These zombies, epitomised by the desire of the industrial establishment to remain in the EU customs union rather than grasp the opportunities offered by free trade, are the principal beneficiaries of yet more government support. The moment that that support falters, Schumpeter’s creative destruction will hit the UK economy with a vengeance.
The impending economic failure triggered by waves of covid will doubtless be incorrectly blamed on Brexit. Nevertheless, the government and the Bank are committed to ensuring the economy does not slump. This will lead to yet more monetary inflation, setting the UK’s pound on the same hyperinflationary course as that of the dollar.
Introduction
There was a time when the British pound bestrode the world. More correctly, it was the gold standard behind it, the pound acting as a gold substitute between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the outbreak of the First World War. Its sound money was extended throughout the British Empire through commerce. Admittedly, the government financed a series of small wars, but these were never to conquer territory — rather they were to subjugate rebellion, mainly from forces that wanted to substitute power for commerce. Today it would be called US-style peacekeeping, but modern historians with an anti-imperialist axe to grind call it colonial oppression.
But the fact is that Britain brought civilisation and improved living standards to many people whose technology had not even advanced to the wheel. Following the First World War, Britain then began its decline and fall with a succession of weak socialistic governments which could only hang onto America’s coat tails until throwing her lot in with the Common Market. It has been the longest and most notable decline from prosperity and global commercial dominance in modern times — longer even that the failure of Soviet communism. For Britain the hundred years from the Great War to date have seen the reversal of the fortunes of the previous hundred years.
It is not as if this is a trend fuelled by ignorance — we know from our past how to become wealthy and successful. Margaret Thatcher knew it, and so did Boris Johnson. But both were overwhelmed by the system, Boris considerably more rapidly than Margaret. Already half forgotten, Boris’s plans were decent: the reduction of state bureaucracy, the creation of free ports and the restoration of Britain as an entrepôt — an acknowledgement of low taxes, free markets, and the opportunities of Brexit. They were quickly overwhelmed by fear of covid-19. Fear that the state health service, full of wonderful, dedicated people working in a bureaucratic organisation would be unable to cope.
The bureaucrats did what they always do, prioritise the organisation above its purpose. The dysfunctional national health system was eulogised with rainbow paintings and a weekly clap-for-carers. But because there were not enough masks, the public was told they were ineffective, while the NHS took for itself what was available. The surge in hospital numbers was managed by the sick being billeted in private sector care homes, infecting and killing their residents.
In the full knowledge of the likely economic consequences of the mismanagement of the pandemic there has been no suggestion that the state should rein in its spending. One would have thought that when the people are forced to economise, the state should as well to reduce its burden on the people. But no; to save the state’s employment record, spending on supposedly important causes with the intention of preserving jobs has gone off the Richter scale.
Civil servants in the Treasury, which has been brought under the Prime Minister’s direct control, still dream of a balanced budget, achieved not by cutting government spending, but by raising taxes. But others see that raising taxes too early risks destroying what’s left of the tax base. Meanwhile, the list of supplicants with good causes and their hands out for more and more money from the state grows even longer. The government’s problem is that after a hundred years of increasing socialism it finds itself accelerating on the road to yet more socialism instead of turning the tide towards Boris’s libertarian ideals.
Attempts to steer the economy back towards free markets and sound government finances were always going to be difficult. Boris is no de Gaulle, prepared to place national liberty and culture above foreign relations. Nor is he in a strong enough position to emulate Ludwig Erhard, who was empowered to ditch the status quo with a clear vision of the future. It is not necessarily Boris’s fault; it is the political reality.
If nothing else, covid has exposed Boris as relying on his advisors instead of ploughing his own furrow. It has exposed the British public’s wishful belief that a magic money tree exists ready to be defoliated, and that any government which doesn’t make full use of it is being monstrously unfair.
Covid is a crisis which has exposed the inadequacies of state planning. But the unsavoury fact is that given the scientific advice, from the political point of view the government had little alternative to locking down the entire nation on 23 March. Now that Europe and the UK are entering a second wave of the virus, all thoughts of a rapid return to normality have been debunked. The V-shaped recovery upon which financial and economic predictions were predicated has gone out of the window, and the establishment is only just realising it.
Brexit and continuing European ties
For the establishment there is the added pain of Brexit, where Britain can no longer hang onto its European nurse, for fear of something worse. As the habitual robber of its electorate’s freedom, the British establishment itself cannot easily come to terms with the prospect of its own freedom from Europe.
Brexit has already happened and the transition period, during which trade and other arrangements were meant to be finalised, ends on 31 December, so far without agreement. But at long last, the EU’s negotiating team realises that Britain means business over the remaining issues, principally fishing and sovereignty. From the British point of view, an understanding of proper economics tells us she should grasp the free market option, refuse to accept any trade deal and withhold any funds agreed as part of the withdrawal settlement. But the Westminster and Whitehall establishments, wooed by and in the pocket of vested interests, is wholly unable to embrace the sensibility of that outcome.
Whether it ends up with a trade deal or WTO terms is less relevant than the fact that with the exception of some cabinet ministers, Whitehall (civil service) and Westminster (politicians) establishments are solid Remainers — terrified of the economic consequences of Brexit. They are in the company of industry lobbyists, with their established European links and reluctance to explore new trade opportunities elsewhere. Any descent into a business slump will almost certainly be wrongly blamed on Brexit, ignoring the inadequacies of British business and the need for its fundamental reform — a need that can only be satisfied by allowing zombie businesses, mainly tied to European protectionism, to go to the wall and for capital of all forms to be freed and redirected towards profitable use.
Whatever the outcome of Brexit, the ties with the EU will not suddenly cease. In the event of a financial and systemic failure, extra financial obligations will arise, and there are considerable counterparty risks between European and British banks. See here for my recent analysis of the Eurozone’s banking and monetary system. The likelihood of a Eurozone banking collapse is now a virtual certainty and could transpire any moment. Figure 1 shows the scale of the collapse in their share prices. And as measured by the STOXX Index Europe 600 banks, the sector is on the verge of setting new lows.
The STOXX Europe 600 banks includes Eurozone, British and other European banks. Over this calendar year, the index has fallen by 43% at a time when equities recovered strongly following the FOMC’s announcement of unlimited QE on 23 March 2020.
The severe actual and relative weaknesses in Eurozone banks come at a time of similar weakness in the British banks, and a banking failure in the Eurozone or elsewhere would collapse British banks like so many dominoes. The Treasury and Bank of England will then be forced to underwrite their banking systems with unlimited credit, supporting balance sheets amounting to more than £5.5 trillion — over twice UK GDP. Furthermore, the fig-leaf concealing monetary inflation through QE would be blown away, exposing the ghastly reality of government finances.
This is a global problem to which the UK is exceptionally exposed. Every ten years or so the cycle of bank credit expansion ends: that was first evidenced perhaps in September 2019 when the repo market in New York failed. The Fed had already begun to cut its funds rate the previous month; its antennae having detected a change in credit market conditions. By then, it was evident that international trade had stopped expanding, due to the trade tariff war between America and China. And because global trade is dollar based, the first impact was bound to affect US banks, their balance sheets and their lending policies.
As the second most important international finance centre, London was bound to follow suit. In addition to the Eurozone exposure, and with the financial conflict between America and China escalating over Hong Kong, London faces risks from HSBC and Standard Chartered, two major British banks most of whose business is centred in Hong Kong and the Far East. And at over £2.6 trillion, these two banks have combined balance sheet liabilities that exceed Britain’s contracting 2020 GDP by nearly 40%. The full horror of the position of Britain’s banks is illustrated in Table 1 below.
By including the market’s rating of these banks (the price to book ratio), we end up with a better estimate of risk than by relying on balance sheet equity alone. This is because, for example, in the case of Barclays, the market is telling us that in a liquidation, shareholders will receive less than 28% pence in the pound: less, because in any share price there is also an enterprise value to consider as well as the option value of limited liability and unlimited upside. Even not allowing for these factors it is clear that none of the British banks, with combined balance sheet assets totalling £5.3 trillion, are in a position to withstand a Eurozone banking crisis.
Essentially, that was the position before covid wreaked its financial havoc, a factor which has only increased the certainty of a systemic banking crisis.
The financial and economic consequences of covid
In common with other nations the UK government moved quickly to prevent a surge in unemployment, fuelled by the belief that after lockdowns and with the right support from government the post-pandemic economy would quickly return to normal. The Bank of England stepped up to the plate with £300bn of quantitative easing, amounting to 13.6% of 2019 GDP and the equivalent of 34% of previously planned government spending.
At this juncture, it is important to understand something to which macroeconomists are generally blind: GDP is the sum total of all transactions, which without the addition of extra money is a static figure. Economic progress, or the lack of it, which is what GDP purports to measure cannot be measured, and an increase in GDP is simply an increase in the quantity of money in the economy. This is confirmed in Figure 1, where the quantity of UK broad money supply (M4) closely tracks annualised GDP, that is until this year, when the coronavirus hit — more about this divergence follows later in this article.
Another way of looking at the relationship is to understand that, apart from some minor variations in money retained for liquidity purposes, all money and profits earned are spent or saved, the latter being deferred consumption, supplying investment capital. With no change in the quantity of circulating currency there can be no change in the total spent and saved, and it is these totals that make up GDP, whether accounted for from the production or consumption sides. Therefore, if the central bank buys assets thereby pushing more money into the economy, or commercial banks expand credit out of thin air, GDP will rise accordingly by the amount of money created and credit expanded.
We can now consider the effects of monetary expansion on the UK’s national accounts. Since the Lehman crisis, which led to an emergency one-off £75bn round of QE, The BoE has been unable to resist the temptation of further rounds of inflationary financing, amounting to £745bn to date, which on a base of 2008’s nominal GDP of £1,589bn is an additional 47% of monetary inflation. [All GDP quantities in this analysis are of current price, or nominal GDP.]
By the end of 2019, annual GDP had increased to £2,214bn, including £445bn of QE, indicating that from 2008 the difference was made up by bank credit expansion totalling £180bn:
£1,589bn + £445bn + £180bn = £2,214bn.
In the first half of 2020, GDP was £1,031bn, after an injection of £300bn in QE. Putting to one side changes in levels of bank credit, without the £300bn QE, implied GDP in the first half of 2020 would have been £1,031bn less £300, or £731bn. This is an annualised rate of £1,462bn, implying an adjusted fall in annualised nominal GDP of 34%.
We can therefore conclude that the first wave of covid-19 reduced the monetary value of total transactions in the economy by 34% measured in pre-covid pounds, not the 9.3% headline figure, which includes the additional covid-related £300bn of QE. This leaves the question posed in Figure 1 about the relationship between a contracting GDP and increasing broad money supply, which we must now address.
Government lending schemes
As mentioned in the introduction, the government responded to the covid crisis by taking measures to restrict the effect on the level of employment. Clearly, with much of the economy locked down and running at only two-thirds of last year’s GDP there is a massive overhang not yet recorded in the 4.1% unemployment statistic. Furlough and other schemes to delay the impact were predicated on the hope that after the covid crisis things would quickly return to normal.
The normal to which the British planners hope to return is a post-Lehman crisis normal, where the ten-year expansion of bank lending has predominantly supported zombie businesses, which should have been allowed to fail[i]. Therefore, the government’s covid response is to extend zombie support by underwriting a range of bank loans for large, medium-sized and small business and relieve them of taxes and business rates. Banks are indemnified against all or most of the potential losses when acting as agents for government loans. Otherwise, it is clear that the banks would rather reduce their balance sheets at a time of escalating credit risk.
That explains why broad money, reflecting bank credit expansion of £243bn as well as £300m of QE, has increased. The difference with a contracting GDP exists because it has not yet worked through to prices, GDP itself being the product of the quantity of goods and services purchased and the prices paid. The bulk of covid support has been applied to business, the public sector and business tax reliefs, with only an estimated £83.7bn of the combined total of bank credit expansion and QE ending up in households, basically funding consumption.
If the money had been helicoptered into consumers’ bank accounts, the price effect would be more immediate. As it was, during the shutdown people were being paid somewhat less than they were earning before to do nothing, a condition of the furlough scheme, so overall consumption has declined, and so, therefore, has production.
So far, covid related government spending has led to an increase of government borrowing estimated £317.4bn[ii], slightly more than the Bank of England’s QE of £300bn. Before we move on to the effects of the second covid wave, we should note that the portion of bank credit not underwritten by the government will tend to contract. Already, there has been evidence of banks charging usurious rates of up to 40% on arranged overdrafts for individuals and the cutting of unused credit card limits. The squeeze on consumers’ and small businesses’ spending is bound to intensify. Businesses not qualifying for government support will find revolving credit virtually impossible to obtain, and businesses which have already drawn down on government guaranteed loans will find there is little further financial support available.
To the extent that the monetary stimulation from the Bank’s QE and government support schemes to the private sector is not neutralised by subsequent contractions of bank credit, the monetary inflation from these sources will lead to higher prices as the additions to broad money supply M4 circulates more widely. Furthermore, we can expect to see nominal GDP recover to close most of the gap between it and the level of M4 money supply as shown in Figure 1 above. While that will give the impression of economic recovery to slavish followers of statistics, it will misinform them. The reality is both production and consumption volumes and the purchasing power of the pound will have all declined.
Enter the second wave…
While statistically understating the negative effects of the inflation of money and credit on the general level of prices and of nominal GDP, there will be the additional effects of the second covid wave to consider. Already, plans to end the support given to business and households have been deferred with new support arrangements being introduced. As yet, these have not been fully disclosed and costed. But with the wreckage of the first round of shutdowns still in the works, the second covid round is likely to encourage the government into a second round of stimulus that will have to be greater than the first.
The government currently hopes that a refined version of complete lockdowns will limit the economic damage likely to be caused by the second wave. But pessimism mounts: only this week expectations that the second wave will lead to even greater strains on hospitals than those of the first wave have been reinforced by surging infection rates in Europe. “Second wave forecast to be more deadly than the first” was the lead story in yesterday’s Daily Telegraph.
It is becoming increasingly obvious to the government and the keeper of its money tree that the economic consequences are going to be at least as destructive as those of the first wave. In budgetary terms, The Institute for Government’s estimate of covid costs to September at £317bn will almost certainly be exceeded by a fair margin in the coming months.
Unsurprisingly, the Bank of England is preparing for yet more QE and in an attempt to lessen the impact on business is paving the way for negative interest rates. Commercial banks have been asked to report whether their systems are able to operate in a negative interest rate environment, and so far, only NatWest has replied that its systems cannot operate at or below the zero bound, but the deadline for replies is not until 12 November. The bigger issue is the sheer desperation that has led to the Bank to plan for their introduction.
The Bank of England plans unlimited inflation
While the committee’s members’ opinions vary, it is clear that the Monetary Policy Committee is collectively clueless — the MPC sets the bank rate and is the equivalent of the Fed’s FOMC. While firmly stuck on the belief that an interest rate is the cost of borrowing and not a reflection of time preference, the planners appear to ignore the fact that negative interest rates are a tax on the banks and their deposits, another form of wealth transfer from an embattled private sector to a voracious state. Then there is the hidden agenda of making limitless government borrowing affordable and thereby unleashing the prospect of unlimited monetary inflation.
The damage wreaked by negative rates is surely evident from the lack of their effectiveness in stimulating economies elsewhere, particularly that of neighbouring Euroland. If they were able to learn anything, the neo-Keynesians on the MPC would have understood that the interest rate structure can only be decided by free markets, and that as a committee they are therefore functionless. But if they have achieved anything, they have bought off the realities of a failing economy, overburdened by zombie businesses. And every day these realities are defrayed, the worse the eventual consequences become.
These are the endogenous economic and monetary realities. The exogenous ones, particularly the systemic risks of the Eurozone banking system, are factors no one appears to be taking seriously. The consequences of the contraction of global trade triggered by the tariff wars between America and China have rarely been taken into account.
So far, the foreign exchanges and general public, which ultimately decide the purchasing power of the state’s unbacked currency, only see the government’s response in terms of a currency which is fundamentally unaltered. A second round of QE, which is likely to exceed the first in terms of its size, can be expected to ring alarm bells, at least initially on the foreign exchanges, whose participants will then consider if the monetary dilution will be enough, and how much more will be needed to rescue the economy from a deepening slump. How these factors are reflected in dollar and euro exchange rates will depend on how similar factors affect those currencies. But it is easy to envisage, in the absence of the systemic risks mentioned above, sterling declining with the dollar, and its fall through parity with the euro being blamed on Brexit by Remainers in the establishment and the media. All currencies will then face the prospect of a slump in global trade being magnified by depreciating currencies measured in commodities, goods, and importantly essentials such as food.
If this leads to monetary inflation pushing up the general level of prices beyond the control of CPI methodologies, which seems certain to be the case, markets will take control of interest rates away from the MPC and America’s FOMC. The overt bankruptcy of the UK government will be reflected in a wider public rejection of faith in the currency, to the point where it will be disposed of rapidly for goods not necessarily needed immediately, in a crack-up boom.
That is the likely outcome of developments accelerated by the covid crisis and is in accordance with likely consequences for the dollar and the euro. It will take the characteristics of a monetary implosion instead of a quantity-related decline. In any event, sterling is already in a state of hyperinflation, which I have defined as the condition whereby monetary authorities accelerate the expansion of the quantity of money to the point where is proves impossible for them to regain control.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/321U3JL Tyler Durden
I was scrolling through the posts on my Maryland neighborhood’s Listserv this summer when a notice for a bake sale caught my eye. This was no brownies-on-a-card-table affair. It sounded like a banquet, with snickerdoodles, madeleines, pecan butterballs, lemon shortbread, and other treats spread out in a senior center’s parking lot.
Anyone who lives in a middle-class suburb knows that when Type A parents organize to raise money for the PTA, nothing can stand in their way. But this was a fundraiser for an initiative called Bakers Against Racism. All of the proceeds went to Black Lives Matter DC and, more generally, to groups that are fighting police brutality.
Suburbia is supposed to represent everything bland and boring, yet it still manages to surprise us. How can a place that we’re intimately familiar with—more than half of America lives in the suburbs—be so unknowable? This is the enigma Jason Diamond plumbs in The Sprawl, a collection of essays tracing the “undercurrent of strangeness” running beneath fescue lawns and chain restaurants, linking Ray Bradbury to Poltergeist to punk rock. The result is an enjoyable, generous, and heartfelt tour around the suburbs of the American psyche, although Diamond sometimes boxes himself in with a too-rigid conception of the suburban way of life.
Diamond lives in Brooklyn, but his roots are suburban. Growing up, he bounced around communities on Chicago’s North Shore. These are not just any suburbs: They’re the suburbs, thanks to Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and other movies that John Hughes filmed in the area, shaping the world’s perceptions of American suburbia for a generation to come. The misfits of The Breakfast Club are the kind of suburban souls whom Diamond most identifies with—creative, lonely teenagers restless to explore the world beyond their cul-de-sacs.
Diamond’s basic theory of suburban creativity is that dull suburbs foster a sense of alienation or anxiety or bottled-up longing that sometimes becomes art. So you get John Cheever’s famous short story “The Swimmer,” about a suburbanite who makes his way home from a party by pool-hopping across the backyards of his neighbors, a journey that turns progressively darker; but you also get the spate of suburban horror movies of the 1980s, with a menacing Freddy Krueger hinting at suburbanites’ fears of both urban crime and Russian nukes.
And you get lots and lots of music. Probably the strongest essay in the book is “In the Garage,” where Diamond explores the unselfconsciousness of teens messing around with riffs or beats in suburban basements. The raw, fatalistic rock of Suzi Quatro’s band the Pleasure Seekers sprang, he notes, not from mean city streets but from genteel Grosse Pointe, Michigan. In another Detroit suburb—Belleville—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson bonded in high school over their love of Kraftwerk and Bootsy Collins and went on to create Detroit techno.
Describing the suburban genesis of hardcore punk, Diamond takes a detour through the blog Hardcore Architecture, which brilliantly pairs punk bands of the 1980s with Google Street View photos of the homes at the mailing addresses they used. Mechanized Death was based in a Colonial Revival house in Montclair, New Jersey; No Comply produced “harsh abrasive thrash” in a little ranch house in Clearwater, Florida. Diamond locates the omphalos of suburban punk in Lodi, New Jersey, a working-class, largely Italian suburb of 25,000. In an unremarkable home there, Glenn Allen Anzalone, a.k.a. Glenn Danzig, put out the debut seven-inch of his band, the Misfits. The Misfits assembled their songs from the bric-a-brac of suburban adolescence: comic books, horror movies, William Burroughs novels. Other punk bands railed against conformity, but not so much the Misfits: “They didn’t write songs about the suburban experience; instead, they channeled it.”
Emphasizing suburbia’s role as a container for the child and teen psyche, Diamond fluidly weaves in moments of autobiography. In the most poignant of these, he returns to Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and the split-level on a hill that his parents bought when he was a baby, only to separate and move away shortly afterward. On childhood visits to family who lived in the same neighborhood, he writes, he would sometimes sneak away to the old house and gaze into what had been his bedroom.
For the author, escaping an unhappy childhood meant escaping from the suburbs. But having done so, he is unexpectedly struck by suburban longings. The smell of lighter fluid on a Weber grill full of charcoal briquettes is his madeleine. He gets nostalgic about skateboarding in parking lots, eating fries at Denny’s, and hanging out at the mall. (He hopes Generation Z will reinvent the mall as a true public space, fulfilling the utopian vision of its creator, architect Victor Gruen.)
Diamond’s effort to reexamine the places of his youth feels familiar, at least to this reader: As a teenager, I projected my feelings onto the world around me, but I later came to realize that my unhappiness sprang from who I was then, not where. The teenage angst animating the book gives it an emotional center.
Yet it’s also a limitation—suburbia is inhabited by more than moody high-schoolers. American suburbs have undergone considerable changes over the past few decades. The prevalence of aging Baby Boomers and a low birth rate mean that many suburban households these days don’t include kids. Suburban poverty is sharply on the rise. And despite a legacy of racial exclusion, suburbs are more diverse than ever; more black Americans now live in suburbs than in central cities, and immigrants have been flocking to suburbia. Diamond recounts these trends carefully at the beginning of the book, and he spends part of a chapter exploring suburban fiction by writers of color, but his core conception of what suburbia is doesn’t really budge.
After the election of 2016, Diamond confides, he started to seek out the enervating atmosphere of suburban chain stores and restaurants as a form of relaxation. Watching football at a Chili’s or wearing a Patagonia fleece to stand in line at Starbucks, you don’t need to worry about anyone judging you—it’s obvious that you’re not cool. “When I drive through the suburbs anywhere in the country, I notice all the same corporate boxes that anybody from any background can fit into. You might find some indie record store or a great Mexican restaurant…but it isn’t likely.”
Say what? In the area where I live, city people make trips to the suburbs just for Chinese and Vietnamese food. While not all cities have large suburban immigrant enclaves, many American suburbs are dotted with restaurants that serve up dishes from around the world, a reflection of residents’ diverse backgrounds and the importance of aging strip malls as small-business incubators. The idea of taking solace in Buffalo Wild Wings is funny, but a little more attention to majority-minority suburbs like Edison, New Jersey, or Missouri City, Texas, would have pointed in a different direction and enriched the book.
There’s also a misstep in the penultimate essay, “The Battle for the Soul of Nod Road.” Here Diamond recounts a campaign by homeowners in Avon, Connecticut, to block the construction of condos on a nearby golf course. “This was suburban activism,” Diamond notes with some surprise, and he comes around to their way of thinking: “It isn’t about keeping people out or stopping developers from doing business; it’s about retaining peace of mind. About holding people accountable and holding back the sprawl….Suburbia would only benefit if more of its people did the same.”
Yes, this is a form of suburban activism. But it isn’t surprising, and it’s certainly not beneficial. The campaign Diamond describes fits the larger pattern of affluent pushback to new development and, especially, to housing for people of limited means. (In 2018, the average household income in Avon was $132,500.) Defeating land-use reforms, as the Avon homeowners succeeded in doing, excludes would-be residents from desirable neighborhoods and schools in order to protect the status quo. This is what single-family zoning has done around the country for decades now, deepening racial and economic segregation.
But suburban activism takes many forms. Since the killing of George Floyd, Americans have protested in hundreds of suburbs, gathering in town squares, stopping traffic, and forming car caravans. Suburban demonstrators have sometimes faced police crackdowns, as in Aurora, Colorado, where police used pepper spray and batons to break up a June vigil for Elijah McClain, a local 23-year-old black man killed by police last year.
It’s much easier, of course, to put a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard—or to organize an anti-racist bake sale. But suburbia is already changing, perhaps more rapidly than Diamond is willing to credit. And as old attitudes are challenged, there’s reason to think the suburbs of the future will be more inclusive—and weirder—than the suburbs of today.
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I was scrolling through the posts on my Maryland neighborhood’s Listserv this summer when a notice for a bake sale caught my eye. This was no brownies-on-a-card-table affair. It sounded like a banquet, with snickerdoodles, madeleines, pecan butterballs, lemon shortbread, and other treats spread out in a senior center’s parking lot.
Anyone who lives in a middle-class suburb knows that when Type A parents organize to raise money for the PTA, nothing can stand in their way. But this was a fundraiser for an initiative called Bakers Against Racism. All of the proceeds went to Black Lives Matter DC and, more generally, to groups that are fighting police brutality.
Suburbia is supposed to represent everything bland and boring, yet it still manages to surprise us. How can a place that we’re intimately familiar with—more than half of America lives in the suburbs—be so unknowable? This is the enigma Jason Diamond plumbs in The Sprawl, a collection of essays tracing the “undercurrent of strangeness” running beneath fescue lawns and chain restaurants, linking Ray Bradbury to Poltergeist to punk rock. The result is an enjoyable, generous, and heartfelt tour around the suburbs of the American psyche, although Diamond sometimes boxes himself in with a too-rigid conception of the suburban way of life.
Diamond lives in Brooklyn, but his roots are suburban. Growing up, he bounced around communities on Chicago’s North Shore. These are not just any suburbs: They’re the suburbs, thanks to Sixteen Candles, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and other movies that John Hughes filmed in the area, shaping the world’s perceptions of American suburbia for a generation to come. The misfits of The Breakfast Club are the kind of suburban souls whom Diamond most identifies with—creative, lonely teenagers restless to explore the world beyond their cul-de-sacs.
Diamond’s basic theory of suburban creativity is that dull suburbs foster a sense of alienation or anxiety or bottled-up longing that sometimes becomes art. So you get John Cheever’s famous short story “The Swimmer,” about a suburbanite who makes his way home from a party by pool-hopping across the backyards of his neighbors, a journey that turns progressively darker; but you also get the spate of suburban horror movies of the 1980s, with a menacing Freddy Krueger hinting at suburbanites’ fears of both urban crime and Russian nukes.
And you get lots and lots of music. Probably the strongest essay in the book is “In the Garage,” where Diamond explores the unselfconsciousness of teens messing around with riffs or beats in suburban basements. The raw, fatalistic rock of Suzi Quatro’s band the Pleasure Seekers sprang, he notes, not from mean city streets but from genteel Grosse Pointe, Michigan. In another Detroit suburb—Belleville—Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson bonded in high school over their love of Kraftwerk and Bootsy Collins and went on to create Detroit techno.
Describing the suburban genesis of hardcore punk, Diamond takes a detour through the blog Hardcore Architecture, which brilliantly pairs punk bands of the 1980s with Google Street View photos of the homes at the mailing addresses they used. Mechanized Death was based in a Colonial Revival house in Montclair, New Jersey; No Comply produced “harsh abrasive thrash” in a little ranch house in Clearwater, Florida. Diamond locates the omphalos of suburban punk in Lodi, New Jersey, a working-class, largely Italian suburb of 25,000. In an unremarkable home there, Glenn Allen Anzalone, a.k.a. Glenn Danzig, put out the debut seven-inch of his band, the Misfits. The Misfits assembled their songs from the bric-a-brac of suburban adolescence: comic books, horror movies, William Burroughs novels. Other punk bands railed against conformity, but not so much the Misfits: “They didn’t write songs about the suburban experience; instead, they channeled it.”
Emphasizing suburbia’s role as a container for the child and teen psyche, Diamond fluidly weaves in moments of autobiography. In the most poignant of these, he returns to Buffalo Grove, Illinois, and the split-level on a hill that his parents bought when he was a baby, only to separate and move away shortly afterward. On childhood visits to family who lived in the same neighborhood, he writes, he would sometimes sneak away to the old house and gaze into what had been his bedroom.
For the author, escaping an unhappy childhood meant escaping from the suburbs. But having done so, he is unexpectedly struck by suburban longings. The smell of lighter fluid on a Weber grill full of charcoal briquettes is his madeleine. He gets nostalgic about skateboarding in parking lots, eating fries at Denny’s, and hanging out at the mall. (He hopes Generation Z will reinvent the mall as a true public space, fulfilling the utopian vision of its creator, architect Victor Gruen.)
Diamond’s effort to reexamine the places of his youth feels familiar, at least to this reader: As a teenager, I projected my feelings onto the world around me, but I later came to realize that my unhappiness sprang from who I was then, not where. The teenage angst animating the book gives it an emotional center.
Yet it’s also a limitation—suburbia is inhabited by more than moody high-schoolers. American suburbs have undergone considerable changes over the past few decades. The prevalence of aging Baby Boomers and a low birth rate mean that many suburban households these days don’t include kids. Suburban poverty is sharply on the rise. And despite a legacy of racial exclusion, suburbs are more diverse than ever; more black Americans now live in suburbs than in central cities, and immigrants have been flocking to suburbia. Diamond recounts these trends carefully at the beginning of the book, and he spends part of a chapter exploring suburban fiction by writers of color, but his core conception of what suburbia is doesn’t really budge.
After the election of 2016, Diamond confides, he started to seek out the enervating atmosphere of suburban chain stores and restaurants as a form of relaxation. Watching football at a Chili’s or wearing a Patagonia fleece to stand in line at Starbucks, you don’t need to worry about anyone judging you—it’s obvious that you’re not cool. “When I drive through the suburbs anywhere in the country, I notice all the same corporate boxes that anybody from any background can fit into. You might find some indie record store or a great Mexican restaurant…but it isn’t likely.”
Say what? In the area where I live, city people make trips to the suburbs just for Chinese and Vietnamese food. While not all cities have large suburban immigrant enclaves, many American suburbs are dotted with restaurants that serve up dishes from around the world, a reflection of residents’ diverse backgrounds and the importance of aging strip malls as small-business incubators. The idea of taking solace in Buffalo Wild Wings is funny, but a little more attention to majority-minority suburbs like Edison, New Jersey, or Missouri City, Texas, would have pointed in a different direction and enriched the book.
There’s also a misstep in the penultimate essay, “The Battle for the Soul of Nod Road.” Here Diamond recounts a campaign by homeowners in Avon, Connecticut, to block the construction of condos on a nearby golf course. “This was suburban activism,” Diamond notes with some surprise, and he comes around to their way of thinking: “It isn’t about keeping people out or stopping developers from doing business; it’s about retaining peace of mind. About holding people accountable and holding back the sprawl….Suburbia would only benefit if more of its people did the same.”
Yes, this is a form of suburban activism. But it isn’t surprising, and it’s certainly not beneficial. The campaign Diamond describes fits the larger pattern of affluent pushback to new development and, especially, to housing for people of limited means. (In 2018, the average household income in Avon was $132,500.) Defeating land-use reforms, as the Avon homeowners succeeded in doing, excludes would-be residents from desirable neighborhoods and schools in order to protect the status quo. This is what single-family zoning has done around the country for decades now, deepening racial and economic segregation.
But suburban activism takes many forms. Since the killing of George Floyd, Americans have protested in hundreds of suburbs, gathering in town squares, stopping traffic, and forming car caravans. Suburban demonstrators have sometimes faced police crackdowns, as in Aurora, Colorado, where police used pepper spray and batons to break up a June vigil for Elijah McClain, a local 23-year-old black man killed by police last year.
It’s much easier, of course, to put a Black Lives Matter sign in your yard—or to organize an anti-racist bake sale. But suburbia is already changing, perhaps more rapidly than Diamond is willing to credit. And as old attitudes are challenged, there’s reason to think the suburbs of the future will be more inclusive—and weirder—than the suburbs of today.
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“Whenever the government of the United States shall break up, it will probably be in consequence of a false direction having been given to public opinion. This is the weak point of our defenses, and the part to which the enemies of the system will direct all their attacks. Opinion can be so perverted as to cause the false to seem true; the enemy, a friend, and the friend, an enemy; the best interests of the nation to appear insignificant, and the trifles of moment; in a word, the right the wrong, the wrong the right. In a country where opinion has sway, to seize upon it, is to seize upon power. As it is a rule of humanity that the upright and well-intentioned are comparatively passive, while the designing, dishonest, and selfish are the most untiring in their efforts, the danger of public opinion’s getting a false direction is four-fold, since few men think for themselves.”
-James Fenimore Cooper
Democracy is something that has been completely taken for granted here in the West. There is an ongoing triumph over past laurels, without paying heed to the road we have strayed from. We criticize others for failing to uphold a standard we consider ourselves the leaders of, but democracy is not something simply “acquired” and subsequently “retained,” it is not a “possession.” This is because a system of democracy is at every moment of its existence defined by the character of its citizenry. Democracy only exists if it is upheld, and if a citizenry fails to do so, it renders itself defenseless to an ever-creeping tyranny.
For such a “creeping tyranny,” control is conditional to whether the citizenry is satisfied with an ever-growing “illusion of democracy.” Such a construct needs to give its subjects the impression that they have “free choice” in what shapes their future and their way of life, including: who will be their “friends” and who will be their “foes.”
And thus, War has always depended on a reliable system to spread its propaganda.
The Arthashastra written by Chankya (350-283 BCE) who was chief advisor to the Emperor Chandragupta (the first ruler of the Mauryan Empire) discusses propaganda and how to disperse and apply it in warfare. It is one of the oldest accounts of the essentialism of propaganda in warfare.
Propaganda is vital in times of war because it is absolutely imperative that the people, who often need to make the greatest sacrifices and suffer the most, believe that such a war is justified and that such a war will provide them security. To the degree that they believe this to be true, the greater the degree of sacrifice and suffering they are willing to submit themselves for said “promised security”.
It is crucial that when the people look at the “enemy” they see something sub-human, for if they recognise that said “enemy” has in fact humanity, the jig is up so to speak.
And thus we are bombarded day after day, hour after hour of reminders as to why the “enemy” is not human like us, not compassionate like us, not patient, just and wise like us.
No doubt, war has been a necessary response when tyranny has formed an army to fight for its cause, but I would put forth that most wars have been rather unnecessary and downright manipulated for the design of a small group of people.
During WWI, on Dec 25th 1914, something rather unexpected occurred and a series of widespread unofficial ceasefires along the Western Front took place between the French/British soldiers and the German soldiers. Some even ventured into “no man’s land”, given its name since none left it alive, to mingle with the “enemy” and exchange food and souvenirs. There were joint burial ceremonies and prisoner swaps. A game of football took place as well. It is said that these truces were not unique to the Christmas period but that they were much more widespread during the holiday season.
These fraternisations would understandably make it quite difficult to return to combat against one another…for no apparently good reason. Some units needed to be relocated since they had developed friendships with the opposing side and now refused to fight them.
The lesson was quickly learned and propaganda was heavily pumped down the throats of the Allied countries, and by the course of just a few years, they no longer viewed the Germans as human.
The Battle For Your Mind
“Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief…The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”
– William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”
Mass propaganda is the very reason why in this so-called “age of information”, we are more confused and divided from each other than ever…
It had been commonly thought in the past, and not without basis, that tyranny could only exist on the condition that the people were kept illiterate and ignorant of their oppression. To recognise that one was “oppressed” meant they must first have an idea of what was “freedom”, and if one were allowed the “privilege” to learn how to read, this discovery was inevitable.
If education of the masses could turn the majority of a population literate, it was thought that the higher ideas, the sort of “dangerous ideas” that Mustapha Mond for instance expresses in “The Brave New World”, would quickly organise the masses and revolution against their “controllers” would be inevitable. In other words, knowledge is freedom, and you cannot enslave those who learn how to “think”.
However, it hasn’t exactly played out that way has it?
The greater majority of us are free to read whatever we wish to, in terms of the once “forbidden books”, such as those listed by The Index Librorum Prohibitorum (1). We can read any of the writings that were banned in “The Brave New World”, notably the works of Shakespeare which were named as absolutely dangerous forms of “knowledge”.
We are now very much free to “educate” ourselves on the very “ideas” that were recognised by tyrants of the past as the “antidote” to a life of slavery. And yet, today, there is a fear of that very thing, that to “know” will label you an outcast from a “healthy” society. That the simple desire to know is the beginning of rebellion.
It is recognised, albeit superficially, that who controls the past, controls the present and thereby the future. George Orwell’s book “1984”, hammers this as the essential feature that allows the Big Brother apparatus to maintain absolute control over fear, perception and loyalty to the Party cause, and yet despite its popularity, there still remains today a lack of interest in actually informing oneself about the past.
What does it matter anyway, if the past is controlled and rewritten to suit the present? As the Big Brother interrogator O’Brien states to Winston, “We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not? [And thus, are free to rewrite it as we choose…]”
Of course, we are not in the same situation as Winston…we are much better off. We can study and learn about the “past” if we so desire, unfortunately, it is a choice that many take for granted. And thus, by our failure to ask the right questions and seek the appropriate answers, we find ourselves increasingly in the unsettling position of a Winston…we are enslaved by the very lack of our own will.
In Orwell’s “1984”, there are three main super states in the world: Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia that are in one combination or another constantly at war with each other and have been so for the last 25 years.
In the case of Winston, he has only known Oceania (the British commonwealths and U.S.), he knows essentially nothing of either Eurasia or Eastasia, except that sometimes Oceania is at war with Eurasia and sometimes it is at war with Eastasia. In fact, even this memory, that the enemy is not constant, is not something Winston is supposed to recollect or acknowledge. Just by doing this very thing, he is committing a “thoughtcrime”.
Winston’s experience begs the questions, if one were born into a fascist, totalitarian state would they know it? Of course, the state itself would not describe itself as such. How would you be able to compare your “freedom” with the “oppression” of the enemy, when all you were given was what the state chose to give to you?
How do you know that what has come to shape your convictions, your beliefs, your fears really belong to you, and were not placed there by another?
We are all very sensitive to this unsettling question because ironically, that has also been placed in us. It was what started this whole business of “mind control”, you see, it had to be done…for our “protection”.
Warfare in the 21st Century
For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the pinnacle of skill.
– Sun Tzu
There a many different forms of warfare, but namely there is warfare that exists in the physical domain of aggression vs defense and warfare that exists in the mental domain of ideas.
The majority of tyrants from the ancient times to present day, have always had a network of powerful people behind them (whether they were aware of it or not) that opened up a path for them to sit on the throne so to speak. For example, we now know that there was a very direct support of Hitler coming from the Bank of England amongst other very influential institutions. That is, Hitler did not arise to power ‘naturally’ or by his mere merit.
The desperation of that economic environment in Germany was predictably formulated as a direct consequence of the Treaty of Versailles which was essentially a death sentence to the German people. And Hitler who had started to make a small name for himself was selected and endorsed as the ‘face’ of what had already been decided would be the fate of Germany.
Wars have almost always been the result of funding and organising from powerful groups with geopolitical interests, often of empire, who create an environment of disinformation and desperation amongst the people through economic and military warfare along with color revolutions.
However, once there was the creation of nuclear bombs, geopolitical warfare was changed forever.
Though we still use much of the same old strategies today, war is ever more located on the plane of ideas, and along with this the ever increasing focus on the manipulation of information and the populace’s perspective of who is good and who is bad.
The war that needs to be fought against the present tyranny is thus increasingly a mental war. In the case of the populace, all together they hold more power than they realise. The real crisis of today’s western thinking is that the people have forgotten how to think. Attention spans have gone down drastically along with a functional vocabulary. People are becoming more and more dominated by image based messages rather than content that requires more than a 10 minute attention span. Articles in the news keep getting shorter and shorter because people seemingly cannot be bothered with too much reading. Along with the serious decline in reading in replacement for quick entertainment (more successful than any book burning in history), people no longer bother to work for a comprehensive viewpoint. Information becomes an annoying barrage of ad campaigns, each yelling louder and more frequently than the other.
The solutions to our problems such as the oncoming economic collapse (in case you haven’t noticed we are doing everything the same as pre-2008), have their solutions in what Russia and China are presenting.
The initiation of war has almost always been presented as a false ‘necessity’, that is in response to the dominating geopolitical ‘balance’, which is basically meant to service the present system of empire, and the erroneous belief in zero sum game.
However, the idea that humans exist in a zero sum game, doomed to battle forever over a diminishing return of resources, was disproven time and again in modern history through the application of successful principles of national political economy. Notable examples of which include Colbert’s dirigisme of France’s 17th century (later revived during the presidency of Charles De Gaulle), the Hamiltonian system of America as exemplified by Abraham Lincoln’s Greenbacks, FDR’s New Deal, and JFK’s space program as well as its most recent expression of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
This system understands that fast money is parasitical and acts in direct opposition to the long-term investments required for projects that will revolutionise a nation’s infrastructure, including science-driver programs.
That debt for such long-term projects is not qualitatively the same as the present debt we see accruing today, and that debt towards investing for the future will always yield a higher return than the cost over time. This is why debt towards long-term investment on infrastructure and science driver projects, such as space exploration, will always be sustainable with a massive return quantitatively and qualitatively. Whereas, the gambling of fast money will very predictably lead to a collapse as was clearly indicated by the 2008 financial crisis, and which insanely has yet to be addressed with a serious bank reform.
The higher battle ground is being fought on the plane of ideas and which proposed ‘new system’ will replace the current collapsing one we are presently in. On the one side the hegemonic rule of a one world government who thinks that they can use force and oppression to rule and on the other side a multi-polar system of cooperating nation states committed to progress that will offer a real qualitative return for the future.
The Art of Doublethink
“WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”
George Orwell’s “1984” (Big Brother Mantra)
A truly immersive system of propaganda, which necessarily will be full of contradictions to the truth, absolutely requires that its subjects are compliant with “doublethink,” that is, the ability to accept two contradictory thoughts in your mind without acknowledging that they are in fact opposites.
Orwell identifies this under two forms of “doublethink”, which are “crimestop” and “blackwhite”. “Crimestop” meaning the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of a dangerous thought.
Orwell further states “It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments…and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short, means protective stupidity.”
“Blackwhite”, is the act of contradiction of plain facts, applied to an opponent. And when applied to the Party, it is the willingness to say black is white when the Party discipline demands it so.
As Orwell describes it
“it means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past…The alteration of the past is necessary for two reasons…The subsidiary reason is that…he must be cut off from the past, just as he must be cut off from foreign countries, because it is necessary for him to believe that he is better off… [the precautionary reason] by far the more important reason for the readjustment of the past is the need to safeguard the infallibility of the Party.”
Orwell continues
“The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest.”
That is, it is the Inner Party members who are the most indoctrinated, the best at inducing “mind control” or “doublethink” on themselves, and at the same time believe that it is the best and right thing to do.
Orwell describes “doublethink” thus:
“The process has to be conscious , or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence guilt…To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink.”
What many fail to grasp when reading “1984” is that Orwell is not only the character Winston, he is also the character O’Brien. He is the Outer Party member-turned-revolutionary, and he is the Inner Party disciplinarian.
He is simultaneously the tormentor-programmer as well as the tormented-programmed.
Winston eventually breaks and releases the one thing that kept him human, his love and loyalty to Julia. In the end, an announcement is made that Oceania is ever nearer to winning the war and Winston looks up at a large poster of Big Brother and cries gin-filled tears of joy and relief, for he had finally come to love Big Brother.
He had become O’Brien.
So Who is the Said “Enemy”?
The enemy is our lesser selves.
Our most base fears, desires and obsessions. The voice that whispers in our ears telling us not to believe in anything genuine or honest, that the world we live in will ultimately destroy itself and thus it is all about looking out for number one. That it is our fate to be the playthings of higher powers.
This is the voice of a prisoner of Plato’s cave, neck shackled and looking at only shadows on a wall. This is not reality. This is the voice of someone who has been enslaved for most of their life. The voice of someone who has become so disempowered that they wholly accept whatever ugly condition is imposed upon them and will even work to defend it as necessary.
There is a way out of all of this, but you will have to become an optimist in order to see the solution.
“We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
– Abraham Lincoln
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34H5RCP Tyler Durden
