The U.S., Germany, UK, Israel, and South Africa, are now beyond the point at which the spiraling downward into chaos can’t be stopped, and will therefore, in the most optimistic scenario, end in a successful democratic revolution (if that is even possible there). (The depressing alternative would be as failed states.) In all five societies, political and financial leadership have become so corrupt and so psychopathic that whatever constitutional democracy had formerly existed there, is now essentially gone and replaced by a “Deep State,” or network of a thousand-or-so extremely wealthy and interconnected individuals, who control not ONLY the Government but ALSO the nation’s economy, leaving the entire rest of the population as their mental slaves whom the billionaires mentally control through the media (where Republicans blame Democrats and Democrats blame Republicans), and through the nation’s ‘non-partisan’ ‘educational’ (actually indoctrinational) institutions.
On 31 October 2018, three political scientists documented that the wealthiest 1% of the wealthiest 1% of Americans — the wealthiest ten-thousandth of Americans — donate 57.16% of all the money that funds U.S. political campaigns. The “Top 400 Donors” (all of whom are multi-billionaires, not merely billionaires) donate 29.86%, or virtually 30%, of all political money, in the U.S. But, actually: only billionaires (and an occasional mere centi-millionaire) who are among the ten largest donors to U.S. politics in a Presidential-election year, have any real impact in determining whom America’s next President will be. Only those ten ultra-rich Americans do. And, from one Presidential ‘election’ to the next, many of those ten people will be the same both times. All of the other 332 million Americans are their subjects, not any country’s “citizens” (except, perhaps, on passports, etc.). But America isn’t a kingdom; it’s an aristocracy. (Of course, some kingdoms are representing their aristocracy and/or their theocracy, but, in any case, America is an aristocracy.)
Two prior studies, one in 2016, and the first one in 2014, had already demonstrated that, as I headlined about both of them in 2018, “America Is One-Dollar-One-Vote, Not Really One-Person-One Vote.” The breakthrough first study, in 2014, was brilliantly summarized and explained in a 6-minute video here. So: anyone who says that America’s Government is better than other Governments because it is a democracy is either a fool or else a liar. This myth has, by now, become buried so deep that only a second American revolution might be able to resurrect it to some sort of reality again.
As the liberal (Democratic Party) wing of America’s aristocracy said, in the person of its Warren Buffett, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein reporting in the aristocracy’s New York Times, under the headline “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning”, on 26 November 2006, but that newspaper won’t let readers access the article online, and instead prefer to charge anyone who seeks to see whether or not the quotation is authentic — it is. And the statement is true. However, the 31 March 2019 issue of Forbes headlined “Reimagining Capitalism: How The Greatest System Ever Conceived (And Its Billionaires) Need To Change”, and reported: “‘America works, and it works now better than it ever worked,’ Buffett says.” Better for himself and other billionaires, that is. But not for the bottom 90%, and it worked lousy for the bottom 50%, and still worse — economic decline — for the bottom 25%. But to the liberal Buffett, that’s still “better than it ever worked.”
Trump (like Biden and Obama and Bush before him) fulfills ONLY the secret private promises he made to his billionaires — NOT the promises he publicly made to his voters; and this has been normal for U.S. Presidents ever since AT LEAST 1980, according to the empirical scientific studies that have been done about the matter.
The authoritative study of how corrupt the U.S. now is, is the best-selling book by former Goldman Sachs Managing Director Nomi Prins, who had quit finance because of how hopelessly corrupt it has become (and when she finally decided she could no longer take it, she just quit the field entirely), and the book is titled Permanent Distortion: How the Financial Markets Abandoned the Real Economy Forever. Here are some of the reviews it has gotten — not only to show what experts in the field think of it, but especially because the revews I’m selecting here provide collectively a good summary of its contents:
“The timing of the release of Prins’ book could not be more appropriate as signs mount of how entrenched corruption has distorted the world in which we live to the point that it increasingly feels like a bad sci-fi movie…Prins brilliantly captures the insanity and mass hypnosis of regulators who have taken a hands-off approach to the Fed’s unlimited money spigot to the mega banks on Wall Street with indisputable facts and figures. She builds her case against the monetary policies of Bernanke and his successors (Janet Yellen and Jerome Powell) in the artful way that a master mason builds an exquisite rock wall—one carefully placed stone at a time.” ― Wall Street on Parade
“Readers curious about recent history and potential futures of the global economy will find much to capture their interest in Nomi Prins’s Permanent Distortion, which is expansively researched, clear-eyed and conversational in tone… This comprehensive recent history is an informative and valuable work of observation, research, analysis and warning to financial experts and novices alike–and all who care about the structures of economic power.” ― Shelf Awareness
“A hard-hitting survey of the forces . . . that fuel financial markets at the expense of destabilizing the real economy. . . . Nomi Prins effectively dismantles the machinery of financial markets and explains how they operate in a secret world of their own.” ― Kirkus
“This book shows how finance has separated from economics and only serves the banks not the people. Nomi Prins has done it again. She’s the best writer around offering original and deep research into the history of banking and the relationship between banks, the Federal Reserve and the real economy. The fact that the Fed serves the banks and the banks serve themselves is not new. Nomi has demonstrated that in her previous books. What Permanent Distortion adds is that the separation is now complete and irrevocable. The financial markets are detached from the economy and from the people who rely on the economy for jobs, growth, and their portfolios. A backlash is coming and Nomi Prins offers fair warning.” — James G. Rickards
Her book is really about the entire U.S. empire, because America’s colonies are wedded to this pshychopathic neoliberal (or ‘libertarian’) ideology that equates a person’s worth with the person’s net worth. (Consequently, for example, a billionaire is 1,000 times more worthy than a millionaire, and poor people are entirely insignificant except insofar as they can be exploited by the super-rich as being either employees or consumers — and so there is really no need for regulations to reign-in such abuses — that would ‘just get in the way of the free market’ and so should be eliminated as much as possible.
At the opposite end of this supremacist ideology stands a remarkably liberal version of it, in which the nation’s history has largely replaced wealth as the ethical standard and inserts instead ‘reverse-racism’ — how well-connected a person is among the dominant group, who are black: South Africa. Lawrence Thomas headlined about this at Palladium magazine on March 11th, “South Africa’s Racketeer Party State: South Africa’s spiral of corruption and decay is what happens when an extractive, revolutionary political elite takes charge of a fundamentally Western, liberal, and modern society.” It’s like America’s Old Dixie was, except with the colors reversed: the hyper-corrupt ways of the formerly elite group have penetrated to the core to shape the values of the previously exploited group, so that, just like before, the poorer 95% are systematically exploited by the richest 5%.
And, of course, America’s colonies, such as UK, Germany, and Israel, are hopelessly corrupt, and are similiarly ‘libertarian’ — meaning increased liberty for the super-rich, but all systematically at the expense of everybody else.
This originally appeared on Eric’s Substack.
