Who Do Representative Governments Actually Represent?
Circumstances have kept me sidetracked from writing for a few months. As life has settled a bit, although the spring weather keeps me busy working in the food garden, I felt it time to post again. Here is a comment I wrote this morning in the Tyee in response to an article on corporate bailouts and a call to give government more power.
Almost all of us live within a narrative matrix that we exist in a fair and transparent world where the ruling class exists to serve the people of a particular territory, that government and its efforts/energies are directed primarily towards benefitting the citizens it is supposed to represent, and that the resources of the nation will be distributed in a way that is equitable and just. We are taught such a world exists through our government education systems and repeatedly told this via our corporate media. If glitches in the matrix occur, it’s because of some particular individual’s defect but never a systemic problem.
A look through pre/history and a gentle scratch at the surface of this general perspective, however, will show that this view is all bullshit. The ruling class exists to benefit itself, and this is always done at the expense of its citizens. They have created an elaborate narrative to market themselves as ‘representatives’ of the people in an ongoing and expansive attempt to legitimise their rule and power. And the vast majority of people believe the stories (primarily to reduce the cognitive dissonance that is created when the notion of living within a massive, propagandised world where one has little true agency in sociopolitical and socioeconomic matters collides with the sociocultural myths of ‘representative’ government and citizen participation).
Once you realise that the world you thought exists does not, you come to view situations such as corporate bailouts as part and parcel of the ruling class taking care of itself as they always do, and not in the least surprising. We can stamp our feet and shout as much as we want but such travesties of justice and righteousness have been going on since large, complex societies came into existence and it will continue to go on as long as they exist. Periodically a sacrificial corporate lamb is paraded out to demonstrate to the public the government’s not subservient to the oligarchs/elite, but this is all just part of the theatre. Occasionally a massive revolution comes along to try and shift the balance of power back to the citizenry, but mostly this simply results in one set of sociopathic elite being replaced by another equally sociopathic group of elite.
Giving government more power and control, as this author suggests, is not a solution by any stretch of the imagination. In fact, it is probably the opposite of what we want and plays right into the hands of the ruling class (for example, the narrative that we can continue business as usual by electrifying everything and transitioning to non-fossil fuel alternative energies is mostly about shifting capital from one dead-end, unsustainable, resource-intensive, and ecologically-destructive industry to another equally dead-end, unsustainable, resource-intensive, and ecologically-destructive one so the financial/economic Ponzi we exist within can continue for a while longer and further enrich those at the top of our social power structures).
The best thing one can do is attempt to remove one’s family and local community from this delusional matrix as much as is possible. Yes, make your displeasure and contempt for the way things are known, especially at a local level, but focus on building your community’s self-sufficiency and -reliance. Reduce your consumption. Grow your own food. Re-localise as much as possible. Stop depending on both government and corporations. Stop feeding the beast for it will consume us all while selling us lies and stealing our ‘wealth’.
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,”
This phrase, misattributed to Voltaire, has largely come to dominate—and confuse—our understanding of the importance of free speech in a free society. That misunderstanding seems to be at the heart of the very lukewarm response elicited by the exposure of “the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history” unearthed through discovery in Missouri v. Biden now before the Supreme Court.
The trouble with this framing of free speech is that it focuses on hateful speech, framing the imperative to defend the utterance of hateful speech as a form of polite, reciprocal tolerance, necessary for the smooth functioning of a liberal society. If ever there were a framing that caused one to miss the forest for the trees, this is it.
The primacy free speech enjoys here in the US has nothing whatever to do with some dewy-eyed ideal of tolerance. Rather, it owes its primacy to pragmatism. Freedom of speech is the best tool we have to ascertain the truth of any given matter. Like a sculptor transforming a shapeless piece of marble into a work of art, free and open debate chisels away at the falsehoods and misapprehensions in which the truth lays embedded. Restrict debate, and the gradual emergence of that truth will be delayed or deformed, with the result imperfect at times to the point of monstrosity.
The reason we must “defend to the death” the right to utter “intolerable speech,” is that failure to do so results in the swift and certain condemnation as “intolerable” all speech that diminishes the power or legitimacy of those in power…
While I certainly appreciate the need to ‘correct’ our global industrial civilization’s path from its current trajectory there is an obvious ‘problem’ with the argument presented here: forcing the wrong ‘solution’ upon society is a recipe for an expedited collapse.
As in the movie/series Snowpiercer (where an attempt to ‘correct’ global warming ended up leading to a frozen planet), the human need to ‘do something’ often leads to negative, unintended consequences and, quite frequently, the opposite of what was desired.
A great example of how the above ‘solution’ would likely bring about more quickly the opposite of what is desired is found in this statement: “We must conduct an inventory, determining how many heat pumps, solar arrays, wind farms, electric buses, etc., we will need to electrify virtually everything and end our reliance on fossil fuels.”
To me, this shows quite clearly that the ‘solution’ is not to address the dilemmas created by chasing infinite growth, as our ‘modern’ world does, but maintaining business as usual by trying to have our cake and eat it too. It proposes maintaining all the technological, industrial, and energy-intensive baubles/conveniences that fossil fuels have brought us without realising the price that must be paid to do this (in fact, I would argue the impossibility of doing this).
As I have argued several times on these pages, renewable are NOT the panacea they are marketed as. The energy-return-on-energy-invested (EROEI) is markedly lower than fossil fuels resulting in significantly less energy available for end use.
They all rely on environmentally-destructive processes for their material input. They depend upon industrial processes in their manufacture that cannot be done without fossil fuels. They use finite resources, some of which are already experience diminishing returns. They cannot replace fossil fuels.
Then there is the issue of absolute government tyranny/authoritarianism being proposed here. The political class, being what it is — a caste in society whose primary motive is to control, protect, and expand the wealth-generating systems that provide their revenue stream — will jump at this kind of power grab and most certainly market it as the best thing since sliced bread for society; and look, it’s been proposed by ‘expert’ academics, so, ‘Science!’ And, of course, nothing could ever go wrong with a government that has such power.
We cannot, nor should we, be trying to ‘electrify everything’ and forcing such a misguided solution down the throats of people. What we need to be doing is having a very frank discussion about what is ‘needed’ in our world (not ‘wanted’) and how we can support a calm and equitable ‘degrowth’ of it.
Attempting to maintain our current iteration of society is not only a fool’s errand but one that will simply speed the exploitation of finite resources and bring about all the negative consequences of such a flurry of activity.
An energy descent is in our future whether we wish it or not. We can go through the ‘collapse’ that always accompanies a species that has overshot its environmental carrying capacity in a relatively dignified way by addressing the dilemma head on, or we can spend our last breath attempting to sustain the unsustainable and go out with a bang.
I’d like to believe we could do the former but my bet is on the latter for humans very much engage in behaviour that reduces their cognitive dissonance to avoid reality and, unfortunately, the foxes are firmly in charge of the henhouse and seldom, if ever, allow a good crisis to go to waste…
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is taking Canada down a dangerous path of censorship to regulate streaming services and social media platforms. The next regulation phase comes as some podcasters will soon have to register with the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
The Online Streaming Act, formerly Bill C-11, goes into effect on Nov. 28, meaning any online streaming service that operates in Canada and generates revenue of more than $10 million in a given year will have to register with CRTC.
The Canadian government pitches the new rule as a “modern broadcasting framework that can adapt to changing circumstances. To do that, we need broad engagement and robust public records.” It requires those podcasters to register with CRTC ‘only once’ and “collects basic information” from them, such as:
“First, the CRTC is setting out which online streaming services need to provide information about their activities in Canada.”
So what’s with the government creating a database of prominent podcasters?
One potential reason could be for the Liberal government to censor unapproved government narratives quickly. Having a registry of podcasters and the type of content they create makes it much easier for those in the government’s censorship department.
“The CRTC now wants to regulate podcasts,” Toronto Sun’s Brian Lilley posted on X, adding, “Here is my simple message to them. Go to hell.”
On Sunday morning, Elon Musk chimed in on the conversation, responding to X account Wall Street Silver: “Regulate podcasts!?”
While Trudeau has called everyone under the sun a ‘Nazi,’ from a Jewish member of parliament named Melissa Lantsman to “Freedom Convoy” trucker protesters, the radical leftist prime minister recently applauded a literal Waffen-SS Nazi with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in Canada’s Parliament.
Last month in the middle of the surreal “Bidenomics” hype I published an article titled ‘Nothing Is Over: Inflation Is About To Come Back With A Vengeance.’ I outlined the misconceptions surrounding CPI and how it is not an accurate model for the effects of inflation. I also noted that the index had been manipulated downwards by Joe Biden as he flooded the market with oil from the strategic reserves. Because so many elements of the CPI are connected to energy, Biden had created an artificial drop in CPI using this strategy.
I argued that as the strategic reserves ran out and Biden lost his leverage, CPI would rise again and prices on a number of necessities would climb. This is happening now, with the biggest jump in CPI in 14 months and gas prices clawing back towards all-time highs.
Inflation is not going away anytime soon, but the bigger issue at hand is who benefits most from inflation and rising prices? The answer might be obvious to some but many people are oblivious to the root cause of inflationary dysfunction and often see it as a consequence of random economic chaos rather than a product of clever engineering. The truth is, banking oligarchs and political authorities revel in the inflationary tidal wave because it is a perfect opportunity to institute far reaching socialist controls over resources.
In most cases central bankers are the primary culprits behind the creation of an inflationary event, and the word “creation” best applies because it is nearly impossible for overt inflation to occur without them. While money supply is not the only factor when dealing with inflation (sorry purists, but there are indeed other causes), it is the most important…
All fiat currencies are no more than floating abstractions of value. Society has put its faith in fiat currency issued by governments. These government-issued currencies are not backed by a physical commodity, such as gold or silver, but rather by the promises from the government that issued it. A difficult question investors today face is determining which assets will appreciate most thus rising in value and which form to hold their wealth.The value of fiat money is derived from supply and demand and the stability of the government that issues it. Over the years many promises have been made that simply cannot or will not be honored. History and many real-life examples exist that indicate that promises are easier to make than keep.
It is very possible in the near future we may see a strong bifurcation of the financial system. The Hard Asset Inflation / Paper Asset Deflation Theory laid out below is based on the idea that as wealthy individuals begin to realize the fragility of the current financial system they will shift their investment preferences to items of substance.
It won’t be long before governments around the world, including the one in Washington, self-destruct.
Strong words, but anything less would be naïve.
As economist Herbert Stein once said, “If something cannot go on forever, it has a tendency to stop.” Case in point: fiat money political regimes. Interventionist economies of the West are in a fatal downward spiral, comparable to that of the Roman Empire in the second century, burdened with unsustainable debt and the antiprosperity policies of governments, especially the Green New Deal.
In the global Ponzi scheme, thin air and deceit substitute for sound money. As hedge-fund manager Mitch Feierstein wrote in Planet Ponzi, “You don’t solve a Ponzi scheme; you end it.” Charles Ponzi and Bernie Madoff
made some of their investors a whole lot poorer, but the world didn’t come crashing down as a result.
For that—for a Ponzi scheme that would threaten to bankrupt capitalism across the entire Western world—you need people much smarter than Ponzi or Madoff. You need time, you need energy, you need motivation. In a word, you need Wall Street.
But Wall Street alone doesn’t have the strength to deliver a truly cataclysmic outcome. If your ambition is to create havoc on the largest possible scale, you need access to a balance sheet running into the tens of trillions. You need power. You need prestige. You need a remarkable willingness to deceive. In a word, you need Washington.
As Gary North wrote in a brief review of Feierstein’s book, “The central banks have colluded with the national governments in order to fund huge increases of national debt, beyond what can ever be paid off. In other words, [Feierstein] has described government promises as part of a gigantic international Ponzi scheme.”
If you hold precious metals in your portfolio, there is a good chance you fear hyperinflation and the crash of fiat currencies.
You probably distrust governments in general and believe they are self-serving and have no interest in your economic well-being. It is likely that your holdings in gold are your lifeline – your hope to get you through these times while holding on to your wealth.
But have you ever given any thought to the possibility of having this lifeline confiscated by the authorities?
In my conversations with friends and associates, I have often raised this question. The typical responses:
“They’d never do that.”
“I’ll deal with that if and when it happens.”
“I just wouldn’t give it to them.”
I consider these “wishful thinking” responses.
It’s an interesting thought that the greatest threat to gold and silver investment might not be the possibility of losing on the speculation, but the government taking it away from you. It’s a thought that I’ve found few want to even think about, let alone discuss.
If you fall into this camp, you’re in good company. Some of the forecasters whom I respect most highly also treat it either as unlikely or at best, “something we may need to look at in the future.” To date, in conversing with top advisors worldwide, the two primary reasons they believe gold will not be confiscated are:
“Confiscation would mean the government acknowledges the reality of the value of gold.”
Yes, this is quite so. They would be changing their official view… which, of course, they do all the time. But I submit that all that they need to do is put the proper spin on it.
“They would meet greater resistance than they did back in ’33.”
International Man: The average person doesn’t care about economics. But to the extent that he does, he only reads mainstream publications like The Economist and editorials in The New York Times.
In these publications, the average person will find so-called economists advocating upside-down and destructive concepts like negative interest rates, banning cash, debt-fueled consumption, government spending, and rampant money printing as the cures to economic ailments.
And if those methods don’t work—or inflict damage—the establishment economists’ response is to simply call for more money printing, more debt, and even lower interest rates.
What’s your take on conventional economic thinking and methods?
Doug Casey: Frankly, most “economists” today are only political apologists masquerading as economists.
An economist is somebody that describes the way the world works—how people go about producing, consuming, buying, selling, and living their lives. That’s not, however, what most of today’s PhD economists do. Instead, they prescribe the way they would like the world to work and tailor theories to help politicians demonstrate the virtue and necessity of their quest for more power.
As a result, legitimate economics barely exists today. What passes for economics has a very bad reputation, and it’s well deserved. Economics has become degraded. It’s not quite a laughingstock like gender studies, but it’s on a level with political science—which isn’t a science at all.
Every individual has vastly differing likes and dislikes and wants and needs. But these so-called economists like to treat people as if they were standardized atoms. They think they can manipulate people as if they were chemicals and treat the economy as something they can heat up or cool down. And they’re the ones who decide what the masses need.
Economics has become an excuse for central planning, and economists have become social engineers.
One of Brazil’s most popular podcasters, Monark (real name Bruno Monteiro Aiub), is under criminal investigation and has received a fine equivalent to $75,000 for his online conduct.
Critics of the authority’s behavior here – like Brazil-based investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald – see this as a way to completely science the online personality known as the country’s version of Joe Rogan.
Moraes is no stranger to taking an active part in controversial policies and decisions slammed for suppressing free speech on the internet.
In fact, he now has a fairly long history of involvement in this, dating back to the campaign to oust Brazil’s previous president.
In line with this reputation, Moraes’ decision was explained as the podcaster’s failure to comply with a court order, and in addition to the fine, includes blocking his bank account, suspending any new social media accounts, and demonetizing his channels.
In other words, a pretty thorough deplatforming and canceling, and Monark said he also lost his Rumble contract over the incident. And the reason: Moraes says he’s fighting “disinformation” allegedly spread by Monark, as well as his tactic of trying to get his voice heard by creating a new account, once an old one gets banned.
Monark’s defenders, including his lawyer, say that the “crime” he committed is that of having an opinion that is not liked by the government, and that accusations of “instigation of anti-democratic acts” are not true.
The Home Office is encouraging police forces across the country to make use of live facial recognition technologies for routine law enforcement. Retailers are also embracing the technology to monitor their customers.
It increasingly seems that the UK decoupled from the European Union, its rules and regulations, only for its government to take the country in a progressively more authoritarian direction. This is, of course, a generalised trend among ostensibly “liberal democracies” just about everywhere, including EU Member States, as they increasingly adopt the trappings and tactics of more authoritarian regimes, such as restricting free speech, cancelling people and weakening the rule of law. But the UK is most definitely at the leading edge of this trend. A case in point is the Home Office’s naked enthusiasm for biometric surveillance and control technologies.
This week, for example, The Guardianrevealed that the Minister for Policing Chris Philip and other senior figures of the Home Office had held a closed-door meeting with Simon Gordon, the founder of Facewatch, a leading facial recognition retail security company, in March. The main outcome of the meeting was that the government would lobby the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) on the benefits of using live facial recognition (LFR) technologies in retail settings. LFR involves hooking up facial recognition cameras to databases containing photos of people. Images from the cameras can then be screened against those photos to see if they match.
The lobbying effort was apparently successful. Just weeks after reaching out to the ICO, the ICO sent a letter to Facewatch affirming that the company “has a legitimate purpose for using people’s information for the detection and prevention of crime” and that its services broadly comply with UK Data Protection laws, which the Sunak government and UK intelligence agencies are trying to gut. ..
At times, we are confronted with choices that demand us to pick between two undesirable alternatives, often known as a dilemma. The annals of history are brimming with such instances. When Hitler ascended to power in Germany and commenced his invasions across Europe, we were presented with the dire decision of either passively observing country after country succumb to Germany’s might or intervening in the war to halt him by force. There was no solution that could be deemed politically feasible, at least not in the traditionally peaceful democratic sense. Sometimes, circumstances unfold just like that.
It appears we find ourselves in the grip of a similar quandary at present. We’re forced to select from a set of distressing options. Some would present it as a decision between climate change causing widespread avian fatalities, or in their judgement, causing fewer with the installation of wind turbines and transmission lines and thwarting the climate crisis.
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L.A. Times journalist Sammy Roth penned an article exploring the Audubon Society’s endorsement of wind turbines and transmission lines, notwithstanding the escalating tally of bird deaths attributed to these structures. Roth expressed via Twitter that while the loss of birds may not be the optimal outcome, it could be a required sacrifice for the broader objective of addressing climate change.
The Audubon Society and many others, including Roth, perceive our options as a choice between renewable energy and climate change. However, in my view, they overlook a critical component that they, along with the majority, are reluctant to contemplate.
For some time now I’ve been looking for a way to talk about one of the most common bad habits of thought in the modern industrial world. Habits like this are far more important that a casual glance might suggest. Plenty of pragmatic factors are piling up crises for our civilization just now, but many of those could be solved—or at least faced in a more constructive way—if our government and business elites could think clearly about them. It’s the fact that they don’t seem to be able to do this that makes the crisis of our time so overwhelming.
It’s really quite remarkable, when you think of it. These days, if a government bureaucracy or one of those dreary panels of multibillionaires get together to try to solve some problem, you can bet your bottom dollar that they’ll either do nothing or make the problem worse. It’s not that the people in question aren’t educated—they have the best education you can get in a modern Western society. It’s not that they lack resources—for example, the money and energy that go into those climate conferences each year, put to some productive use, could have contributed considerably to mitigating the effects of climate change. No, the problem is that the people in question are stuck in habits of thought that make it impossible for them to do anything useful in a crisis.
I know that this is a controversial claim these days. Quite a few people have become convinced that our government and corporate elites can’t possibly be as stupid as they seem. No, it’s got to be a sinister conspiracy! It’s easy to understand why that sort of thinking has become popular…
Edward Snowden said in an interview on June 8, 2023 that advances in surveillance technology have made it far easier for government agencies to spy on citizens than it was in 2013, when he first disclosed the broad use of spying by the NSA and other agencies.
“We trusted the government not to screw us,” said Edward Snowden. “But they did. We trusted the tech companies not to take advantage of us. But they did. That is going to happen again, because that is the nature of power.”
With this week marking 10 years since whistleblower Edward Snowden disclosed information to journalists about widespread government spying by United States and British agencies, the former National Security Agency contractor on Thursday joined other advocates in warning that the fight for privacy rights, while making several inroads in the past decade, has grown harder due to major changes in technology.
“If we think about what we saw in 2013 and the capabilities of governments today,” Snowden told The Guardian, “2013 seems like child’s play.”
Snowden said that the advent of commercially available surveillance products such as Ring cameras, Pegasus spyware, and facial recognition technology has posed new dangers.
As Common Dreams has reported, the home security company Ring has faced legal challenges due to security concerns and its products’ vulnerability to hacking, and has faced criticism from rights groups for partnering with more than 1,000 police departments—including some with histories of police violence—and leaving community members vulnerable to harassment or wrongful arrests.
Law enforcement agencies have also begun using facial recognition technology to identify crime suspects despite the fact that the software is known to frequently misidentify people of color—leading to the wrongful arrest and detention earlier this year of Randal Reid in Georgia, among other cases.
