Metrics and valuations:
US$:103.2; Fed’s  B/S: $44bn short of $9.0trn and down $10bn from prior week; US government debt: $30.4trn; total US debt: $88.3trn or 3.6x US GDP; US net international investment position: -$18.1trn;  US 10-yr: 2.8%; the real yield: -14.2%; 700-year average real risk free yield: +4.78%; Vanguard Bond ETF YTD return: -9.0%; CPI: 8.5%; ShadowStats CPI: 17%; S&P 500: 4183; S&P 500 GAAP P/E: 21.1x for a 4.7% earnings yield; Oil: $101.92; Gold:$ 1,884; Silver: $23.37

Post #80: Short-lived QT, revisited – we will soon all be Japanese

The Fed’s balance sheet (sorry about the terrible quality of this graph — please click on link to get a crisp image):

Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

First, a US dollar valuation comment:
As some of you may know, I have long thought the buck tremendously overvalued, especially based on the huge and growing deficits America has at both the governmental and the trade levels.  Just as I like free cash flow generating companies, same thing applies for countries and their currencies.  Alas, the dollar has long defied gravity, cheering on a hugely negative free cash flow nation and extending America more rope to hang itself with.  And it continues to defy gravity and econ 101.  There is only one explanation that makes any sense to me whatsoever currently, and it is a tragic thought: with no resolution in sight on the Ukrainian war front — deep state puppet Zelenksy won’t save his own people by declaring the Ukraine a neutral nation, the West refuses to stop arming the Ukraine as both Sweden and critical Finland are being incentivized to join NATO, and Russia most understandably refuses to have NATO and NATO missiles on its border after decades of NATO (the US and its European lackeys) provokingly and accord shatteringly moving east — money/capital could be heading for American shores to distance itself from a potentially frightening and possibly even nuclear war in Europe.  God help us all if this happens.

If the ultimate horror doesn’t happen, despite our psychopath politicians, let me ask you this: would you rather own a currency whose central bank prints the money to buy huge amounts of vital goods and commodities that America needs to procure overseas or the currencies of nations that sell them to America and the ROW, very much including the Russian ruble?

Fed QT and Fed QE:
Back to the topic of this post, namely short-lived QT, revisited, a topic that I have published on numerous times, including in Post #44, where one of the sections was titled: “That Fed QT (bond sales) will morph into record Fed QE (bond purchases or debt monetization) amidst reversion beyond the mean.”  Note that between November 2016 and September 2019, the Fed’s balance sheet fell from $4.47trn to $3.78trn, a reduction of nearly $700bn over 2.8 years, or an average annual reduction of $250bn.  Please see the Fed (fred) link above for both the depiction and the balance sheet numbers upon which the graph is based.

From that $3.78trn low point, the Fed’s balance sheet, mostly consisting of short-term US debt and to a lesser degree mortgage bonds, has ballooned to $8.96trn in just 2.7 years, an increase of 137% or a whopping $5.2trn.  Makes the $700bn balance sheet reduction over a similar time period look puny.

The Fed’s counterfeiting — or bond purchases, most recently at the rate of $125bn per month or $1.5trn p.a. — has not only soaked up bonds, in the process creating an artificially low yield (financial repression or the enablement of outsized government spending and deficits), but the central bank bond purchases have increased the monetary base by a similar magnitude, again opening the door to widespread growth in the money supply in a fractional reserve monetary system such as ours/the world’s.  

That same Fed now wants to revisit QT (if it ever gets off the ground), which is the same as shrinking its balance sheet or the monetary base.    The Fed has targeted selling bonds at up to a $95bn monthly clip, which amounts to $1.1trn a year in bonds that it will sell, in the process taking the same amount of money out of the system.  Mopping it up, if you will.  (And this is prior to considering the leveraged impact this will have on a fractional reserve monetary system, which traditionally has been 10:1.)

Now, $1.5trn in less money created/printed coupled with $1.1trn p.a. of money absorbed and effectively disappearing from the monetary system spells a sea change of $2.6trn p.a. in liquidity.  That’s huge.

Juxtapose this against a fiscal 2021 US federal deficit of $2.8trn prior to a formal recession.  This is a spending binge-fueled deficit: Congress enacted a whopping $7trn in new spending over the past 18 months. The deficit, which is already expanding markedly half-way through fiscal 2022, will likely bloat by $1trn to $2trn given lower tax revenues and higher transfer payments associated with an even stouter recession (than the one I am convinced we are in currently).  Said would be prior to another $5.8trn in the spending pipeline on redistributionist entitlements ($1.8trn) and on green energy cronyism ($4trn), which, if enacted, would pulverize leveraged output (productivity!), property right protections, and energy affordability even further.  The gathering recession will feature significant job losses, greatly reduced consumer purchasing power, and heightened poverty in an increasingly stagflationary environment — official US consumer inflation is now running at 8.5% on an annualized basis or about 17% p.a. in street terms.  As such, in a deepening recession the federal deficit could be even larger than $3.8trn to $4.8trn as goods and services people need continue to get ever pricier and those that they want, yet have to forgo, inevitably become cheaper, but define neither Main Street consumer inflation nor do they offer material “affordability relief.”  That affordability relief will have to come from heightened, deficit-widening transfer payments, especially in election years — think 2022.  

Also juxtapose Fed QT against a trade deficit in goods and services moving into the $1trn plus range annually, and you have a financing dilemma that by definition will exert substantial pressure on the cost of money (up to 12 months in duration) or capital (more than one year in duration).

In aggregate, if the Fed really commences with substantial and sustained bond sales, about $2.6trn in less liquidity will be set against something on the order of $3.8trn plus in federal government deficit financing needs in a mounting recession (note that average total federal receipts amount to “only” about $4trn in a non-recession year, about $2.5trn below total federal outlays).  Moreover, and as observed, Fed QT or bond sales would not only make it substantially more difficult to finance a $1trn trade deficit with foreigners increasingly reluctant to finance US deficits, but foreigners looking to front run or at least “ape” the Fed may even begin selling some of their net US dollar-based assets of over $18trn, especially given the growing weaponization/politicization of the US dollar and thus its declining transactional allure and significance.  And yes, the US is a net overseas debtor of over $18trn, meaning if foreigners really sought to jettison dollars for other transaction currencies (think of Russians selling natural gas in rubles or the Saudis eventually selling oil in renminbi) in which to conduct international trade, the buck would collapse and US inflation would go through the roof.  All said, there could suddenly be a major, multi-trillion-dollar shortfall of capital to finance something like $4.8trn in USD-based financing needs at the governmental and trade deficit levels BEFORE any net sales of US assets by foreigners.  And the Fed wants to sell bonds?

Short of WWIII, please tell me how this won’t ultimately result in higher, potentially significantly higher, interest rates as a heavily indebted American private sector, both corporate and households, will require a greater incentive to even consider purchasing government bonds now that the Fed wants to get out of the game on the one hand and even sell bonds (QT) into the market on the other hand.

To add insult to injury, a misallocated, $1.9trn annual compliance cost American bubble economy with ever more regulatory cost and regulatory insanity that also has a) total interest-bearing debt of $88trn, b) short-term financing, and c) a de facto increased interest expense of roughly $880bn for every 100 basis point (one percentage point) increase in the average cost of financing is a very fragile economy indeed.  As a percent of US GDP, $880bn amounts to a chunky 3.6% of national output.  A 200 basis point increase, which would correlate with a 4.8% “risk free” rate of return on a 10-year US Treasury bond, a level not too far above its average multi-century yield of 4.5%, would amount to $1.76trn in additional interest expense, or a whopping 7.2% of current GDP, an economy killer.  A 15.84% yield on the 10-year Treasury, or the previous peak in investment grade bond yields back in September 1981 when America was much less leveraged and was still a net creditor nation to the tune of over $227bn, would result in a $11.44trn higher financing cost, which would equate to 46.8% of current US GDP, an obvious impossibility but of illustrative use in terms of depicting how unsustainable our financing has become even if creditors accept smaller negative real returns instead of demanding positive real returns.   (Note that a 15.84% yield on the 10-year Treasury would still be below current real world consumer inflation of 17%, a rate poised to go higher, possibly substantially.)

I’ve long called our Frankenstein finance and economics the progeny of a highly toxic public policy stew enabled by the printing press.  A wealth of nations’ poison that punishes savers and thus stunts real (versus printed) capital formation with which to invest in order to facilitate both productivity and organic growth — you can’t have free market capitalism without capital, and sustained crony capitalism only works wonders for the fascist elites while threatening reimposition of serfdom for the masses.  Now consider this epic mess against the backdrop of a grossly misallocated bubble economy and the long-standing, misallocation-enabling zero interest rate policy that, together with unprecedented Fed money printing and foreign financing of US deficits, has resulted in deeply negative real US interest rates of around MINUS 14.2% (a 10-year Treasury yielding 2.8% less 17% real world consumer inflation).  The deeply negative real rates promise to stoke even more inflation and even more malinvestment and redistributionism from non-crony, Main Street makers to takers from K Street to illegal aliens while it fleeces creditors, pension funds, and grandma.  How long until bond vigilantes return?  Will they want to sell their vulnerable low-yielding bonds, which are already closing in on a -10% return only four months into 2022, together with the Fed before they decline further, or will they start front running the Fed?

Moreover, dwell on a 40-year bond bull market that is set to reverse powerfully into a very deep and long bear market given our extreme money printing induced indebtedness, raging inflation, and ever-growing solvency risks in public and private sectors alike.  Again, the only ugly caveat here would be if the Russian/Ukrainian war spills over into wider Europe, which would then cause a flight into the dollar, again letting America get away with fiscal, monetary, and rule of law “murder.”  In fact, this may already be occurring.  This is the big wild card, although obviously no one will be able to hide if the war goes nuclear.  Then the only concern will soon be survival.  Globally.  In other words, everything else will be rendered academic.

Assuming we are spared such a horror despite our psychopath politicians, how long does the Fed think it can carry forward a tightening policy in an over-indebted economy with short-term financing on the one hand and asset bubbles that rising interest rates would pop on the other hand?  It was already tried between 2016 and 2019, and it was an utter failure.  Debt, grotesque misallocations, cronyism, Coronacrat Main Street destruction, and even more onerous, freedom and property rights pummeling decisions, legislation or regulations, including even more insidious social, environmental, corporate, and government engineering, promise to increase the political and economic straight jacket further still, requiring yet more money printing as the economy and the enabling productivity wilt in progressively more pronounced terms.  To wit (please note that productivity growth not only underpins economic growth and enhances consumer purchasing power, but it tempers inflation — in fact, each secular growth company IS a deflation story):

Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased 7.5 percent in the first quarter of 2022, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, as output decreased 2.4 percent and hours worked increased 5.5 percent. This is the largest decline in quarterly productivity since the third quarter of 1947, when the measure decreased 11.7 percent.

Therefore, look for a rapid, even more outrageous return to QE and a reversal of any baby steps on the Fed Funds rate front sooner rather than later, which, in a high inflation landscape, promise to increasingly entrench consumer goods inflation and add even more pressure on the dollar’s reserve currency and leading commercial currency (the petrodollar) role beyond that which is already beckoning in Russia, China, Iran, and Saudi Arabia.   Add to that the corporate shift from just-in-time to just-in-case (it costs more and is unavailable) inventory practices, consumer hoarding, the rising proclivity to spend increasingly rapidly depreciating dollars, euros, pounds, and yen, and you have the HUGE global increase in the monetary base of leading central banks all the sudden getting a lot of money multiplier traction to yield way too many counterfeit currencies chasing a deficit of goods and services made much worse by the “plandemic” lockdowns and the related supply chain destruction.

Stagflationary investing and inflation:
Allocation advice: get out of incredibly overvalued bonds, get out of non-resource focused equities that sell things you want but don’t need, especially hyperinflated growth stocks in the tech sector that will suffer most when economics again trumps politics and real interest rates go from about -14.2% in the US back into positive territory.  Consider increasing your exposure to the vital ag/food and dense energy arenas because this is what people won’t stop buying; it’s what they need to survive.  In the reallocation process, raise liquidity, and, when you do that, opt to start or increase your allocation to physical precious metals in your possession.  And recall this: if you can’t touch it, you don’t own it, which also goes for stock certificates.  Physical precious metals are not only a store of value that protects purchasing power over time, but gold and silver could prove to be money on steroids once confidence in our sick world being able to sustain itself wanes, making precious metals a source of funds on steroids with which to purchase Blue Chip crony stocks once they again sport single digit P/Es/double-digit earnings yields (figure 10, page 7 — or, please see chart below) and high single-digit dividend yields. We saw this in the stagflationary ’70s, and this time around valuations ought to be even more enticing because our stagflation will be much, much worse on the heels of decades of terrible fiscal, monetary, regulatory, and economic policy which have crushed productivity growth and brought us record debt.

Source: S&P 500 Dividend & Earnings Yield (yardeni.com)

Precious metals dry powder may also be useful for purchasing investment grade bonds, i.e., if there will be any left, that again offer double-digit yields thanks to investors demanding such returns to offset outsized inflation and insolvency risks.  Reflect on the late 1970s and into the very early 1980s as a preview of coming attractions, revisited.  Today’s investors will also increasingly balk at buying ever more bonds thrown on to the market given firming stagflation, in the process ultimately demanding positive real yields, at first only at the margin, then much more so.  This is because neither ZIRP nor NIRP help defined benefit pension plans generate the 7% – 8% annual returns they need to avoid eventual insolvency much less meet their payment obligations in nominal dollars or other fiat currency terms.  It is also because bond losses will multiply as a secular bond bear market establishes itself, adding to the sting of yield starvation on the one hand and mandating double-digit yields on new bond commitments in order to have any chance at all of meeting commitments made to pensioners on the other hand, something an even greater coming glut of bond issuance ought to underpin.  In short, boom-bust history will repeat.  Take advantage of bubble valuations to position yourself correctly as time grows short for the inevitable bond and stock busts that will make today’s negative returns (-9% YTD in bond land) look good in comparison.  

Speaking of stagflation or negative real growth accompanied by rising inflation, it will continue to percolate given a massive, utterly unprecedented expansion in the domestic and global monetary base, widespread and lingering “plandemic“-triggered sourcing and production issues, and, last but not least, a huge change in inflation psychology.  We are looking at the beginning of a secular story.  As alluded to above, a “crack up boom” is on the horizon as corporations and people will increasingly want to unload depreciating currency to stock up on inventory and to buy vital real goods, respectively.   Progressively more negative real interest rates will add even more incentive to borrow cheaply and purchase progressively more expensive “scarcity assets.”  And a weak economy defined by consumers’ wages and salaries continuing to broadly lag services and goods inflation, likely by growing amounts, will ironically usher in a return to QE, Japanese style, from what I am convinced will be very abbreviated QT for political reasons.  That last shoe to drop will turbocharge inflation, i.e., until governmentally-imposed “wage and price controls, revisited” prove to be yet another supply side hammer, worsening both scarcity and (black market) inflation, in the process driving another nail into the economy’s coffin while further fraying the social compact, a horrific double-whammy.

For a precursor of what is ahead at the consumer price level, consider that US producer prices surged at a historic 11.2% annualized rate in March, (again) handily outstripping annualized “8.5%” consumer inflation and way ahead of annualized wage gains of 4.7% during the same month.  Even more significantly, US import prices surged at an unprecedented 12.5% annual rate in March as export prices rocketed 18.8% higher YOY, also a record, indicating a) that sanctions-impacted import prices will continue to surge despite a strong dollar and b) that domestic prices will eventually surge in sync with how much more exporting corporations are charging their foreign customers.  And remember that consumer inflation and economic weakness go hand in hand in fiat currency economies.

Note that there are pundits pointing to the “global” deflationary impact from rising prices of goods and services that you need, such as food, energy, lodging, and insurance, and those that you want, such as Netflix streaming and Disney entertainment, which will come under pressure – as if this will moderate overall inflation substantially in a fiat currency world.  As said, it won’t.  Things that you need will go up in price in the process absorbing an ever-greater portion of our liquid means, and things that you want but don’t need will suffer less demand and less pricing power.   This is called Main Street price inflation, and thus national price inflation, which the Fed and other central banks will inevitably stoke even further in an effort to rescue their asset bubbles, their political friends’ election prospects, and, as regards the Fed, the money center bank balance sheets and earnings – in short, the balance sheets and earnings of the Fed’s owners.   For perspective on just what central banks will do to save asset bubbles, consider the BOJ’s decision to launch unlimited bond purchases to keep the 10-year JGB from rising above 0.25% as inflation in Japan and in Germany is soaring on the back of supply chain disruptions, Western sanctions against Russia, and of course unprecedented counterfeiting by the BOJ over decades and the ECB since 2008.  This is called spiking the inflationary punch bowl.  We will all soon be Japanese.

Separately, pundits are also pointing to the potential deflationary fallout from substantial illness and deaths from the Corona virus clot shots.  As you may be aware based on various publications on this topic, I share that horrific concern at the health level, but not at all at the consumer price inflation level.  Think about the former USSR long suffering under a declining population, low life expectancy, and a large Vodka problem.  Did that prevent hyperinflation in that former country?  No.  Do shortages, lacking medical care, and starving people prevent hyperinflation in North Korea?  No.  Do wars, falling output, and genocide prevent hyperinflation in African nations suffering from same?  No.  HELLO, pundits, time for a reality check in a fiat money world with paper and electronic printing presses!  It’s like the incessant babbling about “reversion to the mean.”  There is no reversion to the mean, only beyond the mean, otherwise known as asset bubbles and busts.   That mean valuation level of bonds and stocks is but a rare moment in time on the way to a bubble or a bust, and we’ve been in bubble land for an unprecedented period of time.  Markets, just like the humans that create them, have manic depressive tendencies.

In terms of how to position your investable assets for our world, think beyond the Fed and ECB hype and their baby steps regarding raising central banks’ short-term rates to a level that will still be way below consumer price inflation, both as regards the fake CPI and real-world consumer inflation, which is roughly twice as high and rising.  Think beyond central bank balance sheet reductions (selling the very bonds that investors don’t want thanks to negative real yields and rising inflation and solvency risks).   Just like before, and just like the BOJ today, the Fed and the ECB may well institute open-ended counterfeiting to hold down long bond yields while enabling even larger negative real yields at the short end of the curve they control.  Ultimately, the world’s leading central banks will lose both the inflation war and the interest rate suppression war, in the process pushing nations into insolvency, economic chaos, and political instability, a horrific fiat currency legacy, revisited.   

THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT, the four most dangerous words in the investment business!  Why will it be different this time?  Why will there be no “happy ending?”  Because the globally unparalleled monetary inflation genie can’t be put back into her bottle and because monetary policy changes typically have a substantial time lag – think of how long it took to really get “official” (deeply understated) price inflation cooking after the initial off-the-rails global money printing binge back in 2008, a binge that can no longer be absorbed or contained in a collapsing bond bubble.  Add the deficit-laden fiscal and toxic regulatory policy into the mix, which (I am convinced) has so eviscerated productivity growth, and then consider our gaping retirement underfunding, which politically can only be met with even money printing to at least meet commitments in nominal dollar and other fiat currency terms, and the post #80 title may make even more sense, i.e., until our fiat currencies are increasingly repudiated, which is also why you will want to have at least a physical precious metals insurance policy.

Conclusion:
Investors should be selling long-duration bonds and stocks before central banks do for a spell, and then selling them to the central banks once they follow the BOJ’s lead to initiate unlimited bond purchases to keep long-term rates from rising above 0.25% in the Land of Nippon.   And take the gifts from our serial counterfeiters and bubble blowers to increase your exposure to assets that people will need, especially in the secularly challenged ag and dense energy patches (there is a low single-digit P/E fire sale going on in Russia right now also known as Gazprom shares!), two industries that I have been recommending exposure to over the past nearly 13 years, including during my tenure as thematic strategist at Credit Suisse’s CIO Office, and as DK Analytics posts, videos, and reports bear out.

Sincerely,
Dan Kurz, CFA
DK Analytics

The obligatory boilerplate:
This commentary is not intended as investment advice or as an investment recommendation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Price and yield are subject to daily change and as of the specified date. Information provided is solely the opinion of the author at the time of writing.  Nothing in the commentary should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Information provided has been prepared from sources deemed to be reliable but is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision.  Liquid securities can fall in value.

FYI: select edits, grammatical improvements/corrections, and/or additional links have been incorporated into this post past the initial publishing date of April 27th, 2022.  That said, neither the thrust of the piece nor the overarching message that was communicated at the initial publishing date have been altered in the slightest.

US$: 92.75; Fed’s B/S: $8.3trn; US debt: $28.7trn; US 10-yr: 1.4%; S&P 500 P/E: 34;  S&P 500: 4513;  Oil: $69.32;  Gold: $ 1,788;  Silver: $24.07

Post #79: Federalism to the rescue?  Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) decried lockdowns and mandates — while promoting monoclonal antibodies
(Please scroll to bottom of page for post publication updates)

Federalism led by the Sunshine State government
Very impressive and much too rare in today’s age. Freedom over tyranny.  Science and statistics over lies, scaremongering, oxygen deprivation, and unconscionable, forced vaccinations of the very cohort, young people, that are least likely to succumb to the Corona virus. Sanity over destructive insanity.  Humanity over inhumanity.  Sovereignty over a wide open southern border.  And penalties for FL-based employers, both public and private, that demand Corona virus vaccine documentation, which the Sunshine State governor and legislature view as infringements of 4th Amendment privacy rights and, I strongly assume, as infringements of unenumerated, yet inalienable rights codified in the 9th Amendment.  In short, penalties for documentation demands that threaten employee discrimination and termination and violate state and federal medical privacy rights are being addressed by the pivotal executive and legislative branches of the Florida State government.  

Isn’t this what we should expect from every governor who took an oath to uphold his/her respective state’s constitution, which closely mirrors the US Constitution to which the original states gave birth, and to which every state is bound, as concerns the Bill of Rights protections for all Americans, thanks to the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution?  Isn’t this what we should expect from every state level legislator that took the same oath, especially if the federal government acts tyrannically, i.e., if the separation of powers doctrine between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches, clearly enumerated and limited powers, and the 10th Amendment enshrined into the US Constitution fail to prevent tyranny and uphold freedom?  Isn’t it then — now — up to the states, which gave birth to the US government and clearly “ring-fenced” its power over both states and individuals, to fight for a revival of the very inalienable rights protections they insisted upon when drafting and signing off on the US Constitution, very much including the incorporation of the Bill of Rights?

Federalism in limited, but stout action:
Go Freedom Ron! Go Florida State legislature, which has worked with the governor to recover various inalienable rights that were indefinitely and unconstitutionally suspended or stripped from the people of Florida by tyrannical bureaucrats at county, state or federal levels.  These usurpations were either:
— A violation of the 10th Amendment to the US Constitution assuring substantial state and citizen rights not explicitly delegated to the United States in the federal constitution
— And/or a violation of the Takings Clause of the 5th Amendment thanks to prolonged, bankrupting lockdowns imposed especially on small businesses and churches
— And/or a violation of the US Constitution’s Commerce Clause, whose prime purpose is to underpin international and interstate trade at the federal level, not to impede it, as per the CDC’s long-standing sailing ban, which Florida succeeded in getting overturned
— And/or a violation of other aspects of state or federal statutory or constitutional law that protect the rights and powers of individuals while limiting the extent to which government can “lord over them,” very much including daily masking up, for up to eight hours a a time, five days a week, of the very school children that are at virtually zero risk to the Corona virus, even if parents opposed it.   

How did the Florida legislature specifically reinstate greater freedom for Floridians?  Via new bills issued by the legislature which were signed into law by the governor to ban unconstitutional usurpations (“Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Landmark Legislation to Ban Vaccine Passports and Stem the Tide of Local and State Government Overreach“) and, in truly landmark fashion, to end increasingly destructive indoctrination over education. Recall that statutory laws, which have deference only to constitutional law, or the supreme law of the state (and country), have constitutional primacy and legitimacy over any executive orders issued by governors, the true nature of which is not legislation, but to execute statutory law in a constitutional order where only the legislature gets to legislate, not the executive or judicial branch, or an un-elected, unaccountable bureaucracy, as is befitting of a representative republic featuring separation of powers.  Plus, executive orders are easy to overturn, as we have seen since the early days of the Biden administration.  Legislation, in contrast, is much more strictly construed and harder to overturn, much as it is harder to institute, as it requires majority votes in both legislative chambers in favor of a bill (would be legislation) as well as the governor’s or the president’s signature to become a new statutory law.

I’m also referring to the fine Republican Florida legislature working in tandem with a liberty-loving, gutsy, common sense Republican Florida governor who put out the first executive order by any governor in the nation on September 25th, 2020 to end months of  mandates and lockdowns.  These are mandates and lockdowns which made a mockery of 5th Amendment property right protections.  In the process, they have ruined so many small businesses (the Corona virus policy insanity and tyranny has resulted in 44% less small US businesses) without leading to lower Corona virus death rates per 100,000 residents since January 21st, 2020 in heavily locked down states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Dakota, and New Mexico.

Furthermore, I’m referring to the Florida legislature working with the Florida governor to eliminate mask mandates and forced vaccinations, which eviscerate bodily integrity protections clearly afforded by the encompassing 9th Amendment, as well as by the God-given right to breathe freely and to determine which substances we allow to enter our bodies. As regards the latter, I’m not only referring to the executive branch working with the legislative branch to make “vaccine passports” illegal in Florida — and, by extension, adding teeth to statutory law by fining public or private employers that insist on such information $5,000 per (reported) incident — I’m referring more broadly to Florida preserving the pivotal, constitutional right of medical privacy and overall privacy, for if you have no privacy, you clearly have no freedom.

Finally, the elimination of Corona virus mandates (distancing, capacity limitations, masks, vaccinations, etc.) and lockdowns thanks to the Florida State government striking down unduly, irrationally, counter-productively, and unconstitutionally imposed diktats, whether at the county, state or federal level, is all the more sensible given the following truisms: first, if masks work, then the masked are protected against the unmasked, so why should the masked worry about the unmasked?  Second, if inoculations work, then the inoculated are protected against getting infected by the Corona virus, so why should they worry about the uninoculated?

Isn’t it wonderful when politicians uphold their constitutional oaths, and when this dovetails with science, i.e., as long as same hasn’t become politicized, which has sadly become more of an exception than a rule?  Isn’t this how it is supposed to be in a country that has the most constitutional individual freedom and inalienable rights protections?  A constitutional, federalist, representative order is designed to protect individual liberty, maximize local decision-making authority, and limit the reach and tyranny of the federal government.  Why isn’t every governor and every state legislature, or at least the vast majority of red state governors and legislatures, doing exactly what the Florida governor and legislature are doing here and elsewhere when constitutionally protected inalienable rights are being usurped, especially by fascistic, demonic Coronacrats?  Didn’t state level politicians swear to uphold their state constitutions, in which inalienable rights protections are an integral part?  Therefore, shouldn’t our elected representatives become very active when these rights are being taken away by any source, be it bureaucratic, judicial, corporate or other?  And even if neither the governor nor the legislature can trump judicial tyranny in the short-term, at least they can make a principled stand against it and take their appeal to the ultimate sovereigns, the people, so that the state level legislature gets “we the people support” to reconfigure courts (via new appointments as judges retire — no “court-packing” — or via more prevalent term limits) or even to impeach unconstitutional judges, which a liberty-loving governor such as Ron DeSantis would certainly back? 

Will Florida’s federalism revival fail to get coattails?  (Please scroll down to post publication developments that I want to “carve out” at very bottom of this piece.)
What the heck is wrong with all the governors and legislatures falling down on “job one,“  especially in “red” states?  Where are all the “other Floridas?”  We’re going to need much more than just one state really endeavoring to consistently peel back federal, bureaucratic, and judicial tyranny, which is all the more urgent given how incredibly unhinged and destructive the US government has become be it fiscally, monetarily or culturally.  Have the deadbeat governors and the legislators been bought off by the feds or by Corporate America?  Have they been blackmailed?  Are they spineless wimps?  Do they not understand the oaths they have taken to uphold their states’ constitutions? Or, are too many of them fully aware of the oaths they’ve taken, yet are too addicted to the power and rush of despotism or to the allure of unimaginable financial gains thanks to fiat money-enabled redistributionism and cronyism, respectively?  In other words, constitutions, oaths to uphold them, decency, sovereignty, freedom, and humanity be damned? Or, are such governors and state legislators utterly convinced that they will be able to sustain their privileges and wealth as the country and living standards crumble? Or, are our elected leaders simply reflections and manifestations of an increasingly uncivil society more interested in handouts and alleged safety over precious and rare freedom married to personal responsibility?

Whatever is going on, none of it is good.  None of it augurs well.  To the contrary, happy federalism exceptions notwithstanding, including fighting federally mandated vax tyranny (please scroll down to very bottom of post).  Will more slacker state legislatures address the pivotal 2020 election fraud and unconstitutionality, in the process re-asserting their federalist constitutional right and duty while moving to mitigate the risk of “electing” another  illegitimate president.  Ultimately, people get the government they collectively deserve, freedom lovers and the blueprints to sustain them and free market capitalism — and thus the wealth of nations — be damned.

Fortunately, there are some signs that more and more Americans are ready to ignore the Coronacrats’ unconstitutional diktats on the masking front, on the physical distancing front, on the lockdown front, and on the socially, emotionally, and physiologically disastrous  “stay at home and isolate” front.  Not only are everyday Americans increasingly aware of the Coronacrats’ hypocrisy regarding “all that,” whether it is how they lead their own lives or how they conduct their lavish, unmasked parties, or when the leftist elites’ favorite unmasked anarchists demonstrate and smash innocent citizens and their property (that long, hot summer of 2020), but more and more Americans are gathering peacefully in large numbers in a natural, healthy, happy, and social manner, whether it is at July 4th festivals in small town Florida or at late summer ball games across America:

Enough such Americans, endowed with the requisite civil courage, civic duty, ethics, common sense, and honesty engaging in sustainable behavior  — especially when they are totally sober and their like-minded buddies aren’t nearby, but a tough, every day situation “singles them out” — will be required to counter a long-standing, increasingly self-mutilating societal collapse; a “Jonestown” event at the national level (much the same can be said for the majority of OECD nations).  Perhaps, just perhaps, enough such Americans will in fact encourage reticent state level leaders to revisit the oaths they took and push them into tyranny-defusing policy action.

In any event, “freedom field generals,” such as President Trump and Governor DeSantis, will very much need at least a small “army” of such Americans ready to also nullify (“no, we won’t close” or “just say no“) unconstitutional, freedom-robbing decrees if society is to have any hope of restoring inalienable rights and the rule of law.  A general can’t lead a fight against a cancerous enemy — a despotic, deeply entrenched, destructive, lawless, rent-seeking enemy that controls virtually all institutions — wanting to eviscerate the last remaining vestiges of individual freedom, Main Street property right protections, and constitutional fidelity without at least a stout minority of “we the people” being on the “battlefield for liberty.”  This is even true, no especially true, if it seems like a lost cause, and even if it will often feel very lonely, at least initially.  Last but not least, this is all the more true given what is sadly obvious, and was presciently predicted would occur some 64 years ago, namely today’s status quo:

“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed.”  ~ Ayn Rand

Or, a tyrannical, increasingly centralized status quo formulated brilliantly and frighteningly by Mark Levin:
“They (the statists/lefists) created a massive leviathan, they want to double its size in two weeks, and they’re using this leviathan, which is an appendage of the Democratic party and visa versa, let’s be honest — so they’ve used the CDC to go after landlords and guns, they’re using OSHA to go after the “unvaccinated,” they are using the Department of Education to violate federalism and the 10th Amendment and to go after a governor (Ron DeSantis). … You can see the enormous destruction to our constitutional system, to the police powers of the states, to undermining of states’ authority vis-a-vis their school systems, the centralization of power that is taking place whether it is the virus, whether it is taxation, whether it is voting, we are under assault.  The entire system is under assault.   

Some portfolio allocation food for thought given our status quo:
How does this all tie in to asset allocations and asset prices?  Like this: in an age of fiat government and fiat money and the resulting cronyism, increasing redistributionism from makers to takers, ever-rising regulatory complexity impediments and an estimated $1.75trn in annual regulatory compliance costs for the small business backbone of the economy, evisceration of price discovery (imperfect, albeit it sound market-based allocations underpinning productivity enhancement and rising standards of living), ZIRP and QE-determined asset valuations, and the unsustainable rise in debt fathered by artificially low interest rates, most assets are mis-priced, and real economic growth prospects are going from bad to worse — which will require even more electronic money printing!  Talk about a vicious cycle.  In the interim, the valuation disconnect between the very bonds and stocks most impacted by fiat money and the underlying economy most distorted and ravaged by unsound money and unconstitutional government remains both the reallocation (away from overvalued assets) opportunity and the overvaluation risk for accounts featuring substantial exposure to those bubble valuation assets.

In a related manner, and I know you’ve heard this from me too many times, it will behoove investors who are ignoring Mr. Market’s boom to bust history to stop ignoring it and to instead ignore the perennially self-serving Wall Street advice to stay “fully invested” in so-called traditional assets.  Specifically, investors should prepare themselves for the long overdue and inevitable reversion from today’s overvaluation boom to “tomorrow’s” undervaluation bust.  That bust will result in bond and stock valuations that will make mean valuations such as a 4.5% yield on a 10-year Treasury and a P/E on the S&P 500 of 16 look like bubbles.  Consider realizing the “bubble-blowing” valuation gifts in bonds and stocks still on offer.  Consider reallocating a material portion of your investable portfolio elsewhere.  To gain incredibly valuable “optionality,” start by purchasing short-term government bonds of OECD nations that have no interest rate risk. Put up with ZIRP and nominally negative real yields to to avoid a very stout interest rate-induced bond and stock valuation compression (please see figure 10 and hone in on the graphed section between 1970 and 1981), also known as sharply rising interest rates.  For framing purposes, recall that the 10-year Treasury’s yield topped out at over 15% during 1981, a point in history when America had a hugely better balance sheet and manufacturing base, and an incomparably smaller monetary base in both absolute terms and, more importantly, relative to the size of the economy.  Said differently, bond valuations stand to get drubbed even much more significantly than they did in the late ’70s and into the early ’80s, especially when considering our historically low bond yields.

Furthermore, as regards purchasing US T-bills or their foreign equivalents, count on fiat governments putting their fiat banks’ printing presses to work to repay you when you invest in short-term government bonds, should tax collections fall short, which they invariably will, and already are, by increasingly gaping margins.  Then capitalize on that “optionality” to venture into attractively-valued real asset investments, an investment window that could well appear on a fleeting or tactical basis thanks to a “risk-off” persuasion associated with increasingly pronounced economic weakness.  Invest in particular in the vital and scarce energy and ag arenas.  Such assets will become even scarcer and more valuable over time (strategically) as the last remnants of free market capitalism threaten to disappear throughout developed nations.  Perpetually rising crony capitalism and fascism will  serve to further fuel unrivaled currency debasement (ZIRP and $120bn of monthly QE in the US), as they and other forms of plutocracies or oligarchies always do.  Meanwhile, amidst spreading signs of increasingly intractable parts shortages, rapidly rising producer price inflation (both the inevitable progeny of virus policy-induced supply problems), an inescapable move away from just-in-time inventory to getting stocked up, sustained policy incentives not to work, progressively more strident vax tyranny, and unparalleled money creation over the past 15 years starting to move from the financial economy to tangible assets, we may be on the brink of igniting the mother of all stagflations.  (Note that hyperinflation has always accompanied economic weakness and usually outright contraction.)

Last but not least, and especially if the stagflation of the ’70s and early ’80s was but a “warm up” of what is ahead, don’t forget to get portfolio insurance, also known as physical silver and gold.  Such an allocation, if only of satellite size, could well offset, and potentially even overcome, those assets in your portfolio that get substantially repriced to the downside, despite timely repositioning efforts away from bubble valuation assets.  This way, if what remains of inalienable rights and sanity gets taken away together with much of your property, at least you’ll have some discreet and transportable wealth which will be poised to explode in dollar and other fiat currency terms.  Said could prove highly valuable in terms of procuring adequate amounts of energy, food, and other critical supplies and tools down the road as our economic system breaks down.  Bullion may also prove useful to bribe corrupt government officials or border guards, should that become necessary.  Monetary, economic, and political history unfortunately tells us such bribes may again occur in the developed world. Sadly, this time around, they may well first become common in the biggest banana republic of all in the making, the US, with much of the erstwhile rule-of-law developed world a few steps behind, but heading to, and then off, the same cliff.

And if, against all odds, spreading federalism abetted and enabled by civil courage can help return us to a liberty-drenched, representative, constitutional republic, then those freedom-loving individuals that have the means to underpin and propel such a wonderful outcome may be able to play a critical role not only to benefit themselves, their family, and their friends, but on behalf of future generations that will also yearn to live free, a desire as natural as breathing.  After all, this is precisely what the unparalleled American Founders and Framers bestowed upon us, at tremendous cost in blood and treasure for hundreds of thousands of Americans at the time.  It would be nice if we could take a page out of their “Mission Impossible, Made Possible” book. 

Sincerely,
Dan Kurz, CFA
DK Analytics 

The obligatory boilerplate:
This commentary is not intended as investment advice or as an investment recommendation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Price and yield are subject to daily change and as of the specified date. Information provided is solely the opinion of the author at the time of writing.  Nothing in the commentary should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Information provided has been prepared from sources deemed to be reliable but is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision.  Liquid securities can fall in value.

FYI: select edits, grammatical improvements/corrections, and/or additional links have been incorporated into this post past the initial publishing date of September 8th, 2021.  That said, neither the thrust of the piece nor the overarching message that was communicated at the initial publishing date will be altered in the slightest.  Separately, I am grateful, as always, for various links to great articles and graphs that my friends Doug and Debi furnished me with.  Said often find their way into my publications.  Thank you, D&D!

 

Post publication developments that I want to “carve out:”  Older ones directly below, newer ones progressively further down the page.
— Federalism spreading!  (19 Governors, 2 AGs Resist Biden’s Vaccine Mandates)
— A gutsy Lee County, FL state representative is involved in removing a tyrannical Lee County education department bureaucrat that refuses to leave it up to parents to determine whether their kids masked up (I was deeply involved in trying to achieve same for nearly one year.  Related links, from the first to the second to the third effort. The first one was an appeal to the bureaucracy, the second one to the governor, the third one to parents.) 
— DeSantis Responds to Biden’s Vaccine Mandate: ‘In Florida, We Will Fight Back.’
— If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.  If Big Pharma working in cahoots with our political, fascistic FDA and CDC can’t demonize and ban Ivermectin enough, well then Pfizer will reformulate it to make billions of $.  Suddenly, Ivermectin will no longer be a horse de-wormer, but FDA-approved and CDC-marketed “Pfizermectin.”

— Courts Will Rule Against Biden on Vaccine Mandate Penalties: Alan Dershowitz.  Excerpts: “No. 1, is this something the federal government can do as compared to the states?” Dershowitz told Newsmax. “The states have police power. The federal government doesn’t have police power. The federal government’s powers have to derive from the text of the Constitution.”  It’s likely that courts will say that the government can enforce vaccine mandates but will argue that it is only Congress that can order punishments and fines, he said (recall that only the legislative branch can legislate and create new statutory law, not the bureaucracy and not the courts, whether at the federal or the state level — Dan).  “I think the courts will say the federal government does have the power because this is a national issue across the state lines. It’s not limited to states. It’s contagious,” Dershowitz said. “I think they will say that in the event that science supports it, there can be mandated vaccinations with exceptions.”  But such mandates are “generally relegated to the legislature in our system of government, so I think the courts will focus on that issue first and say that the president may not have the authority to do this without congressional authorization,” Dershowitz said.
— Prominent immunologist now regrets voting for Biden.  Excerpts: Dr. Noorchashm slammed Biden’s White House and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in late August for an “irrational focus on mandated vaccination, instead of immunity,” which he claims causes harm by not promoting determination of medical necessity and vaccinating already immune individuals.  The last straw for Noorchashm came when Biden announced his sweeping vaccine mandate last Thursday.  “LET ME BE CLEAR @POTUS: To mandate vaccination of any COVID-recovered American against his/her will is unscientific, unethical and illegal,” Noorchashm wrote on Twitter. “@WhiteHouse U have overstepped and are operating in dangerous territory when it comes to already immune Americans. Cease and desist!”  Noorchashm, who voted for Biden in the 2020 presidential election, instantly regretted helping the Democrat get into the White House.  “I voted for Biden….As a McCain republican. It was an error and I now regret it,” the immunologist tweeted on Friday morning. “Last night’s chest beating press conference by @POTUS was one of the most destructive and divisive speeches ever given by a US president who claims 2 B a well-reasoned uniter, acting on science.”
— Horowitz: As vaccinated COVID hospitalizations soar, government blocks the one option that works.  Excerpts: Now that the vaccines are no longer working and the mass vaccination appears to have made the virus worse through a leaky vaccine syndrome known as “the imperfect vaccine hypothesis,” why are we all not uniting behind early treatment? Notice how no other governor aside from Ron DeSantis is even promoting the monoclonal antibodies, much less making them more accessible and telling everyone to get treated on day one. I can’t tell you how many emails I get from my show listeners who complain they can’t access the monoclonal treatments for various reasons in some states. Why would our government not make sure every American is as inundated with information about the monoclonals as they are with information about the vaccines that are already obsolete?  There are no good answers to this question that do not reveal a very dark and sinister motivation. But the answer is likely related to why the government-medical establishment has declared war on all early treatments and has refused to approve outpatient antibiotics and steroids for treatment, much less ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and several dozen other promising therapeutics. By ensuring that there is zero approved outpatient treatment, our government has trapped nearly every American who has not been infected – vaccinated and unvaccinated – into a death trap in the overrun hospitals. And that seems to be exactly where they want us.
— CDC Director: Agencies Urgently Working on COVID-19 Vaccine for Younger Children.  Excerpts: The UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) earlier in September said it will take a “precautionary approach,” saying that “given this very low risk, considerations on the potential harms and benefits of vaccination are very finely balanced.”  In June, scientists from University College London, as well as the Universities of York, Bristol, and Liverpool, discovered that most children who died of COVID-19 had underlying health problems. Overall, the COVID-19 mortality rate among children is 2 deaths per 1 million children in England, they found (bold text courtesy of your author).
— Members of Congress and Their Staff Are Exempt From Biden’s Vaccine Mandate
— Department of Education opens civil rights investigation into Florida ban on mask mandates; New CDC figures appear to bolster Gov. DeSantis argument for parental choice over mask mandates.  Excerpt: “This data was based on reports from 260 medical centers in the U.S. The major findings were that 1,790 kids were hospitalized with COVID during the period from August 2020 to August 2021, and a total of eight have died.”  (Bold text courtesy of this site’s author.)
— Major Food Industry Employer- Biden’s Tyrannical Vaxx Mandate will be Met with 1776.  Alfie Oakes of https://www.oakesfarms.com/ joins The Alex Jones Show to call on people to urge Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to take a meeting with him by emailing him your concerns about Biden’s Medical Tyranny Lockdown: governorron.desantis@eog.myflorida.com and text “USA” to (833)-501-0831 to show your support for Alfie Oakes.  TALK ABOUT CIVIL COURAGE and an action bias!  Two liberty giants at work!
— Hot Mic Catches Israeli Health Minister Admitting Vaccine Passports Are About Coercion
— DO MASK MANDATES WORK?

— Arizona attorney general suing Biden administration slams ‘complete hypocrisy’ of COVID vaccine mandates
— It isn’t just against a tyrannical federal government that states should push back, but against the globalist elite also threatening to pursue medical tyranny, eviscerate affordable energy for the masses, end national sovereignty, and strip property rights from Main Street makers and job takers.
— A tactical win for freedom, parental rights, and sanity in strategic war against rapidly spreading despotism: Federal Judge Sides With DeSantis on Mask Mandate Ban.
— This is precisely what red states need to put down, led by the Sunshine State: Missouri Math Teacher Dismissed Following Private Conservative Facebook Posts
— FDA Hearing: Doctors and Experts Testify Government Data Demonstrates COVID Shots are Dangerous and May Kill More Than They Save.  Excerpts: The FDA hearing prior to the decision was stunning. The hearing was 8 hours long and it included SHOCKING testimony from American doctors. Dr. Joseph Fraiman, MD told the FDA on Friday that government does not have data to show the vaccine was more beneficial than it is harmful for teenage boys.  Dr. Fraiman told the FDA panel he has NOT seen that those who show vaccine hesitancy are uninformed. “That is not what I’ve seen… The vaccine hesitant I’ve met in the ER are more aware of the vaccine studies and more aware of their own COVID risks than the doctors do. For example, many of my nurses refuse the COVID vaccine despite seeing more COVID deaths and devastation than most people have.” Dr. Fraiman went on to say he cannot assure a nurse associate who is 30 that the vaccines are safer than catching the virus is for a healthy woman her age.  Steve Kirsch, the Executive Director of the COVID-19 Early Treatment Fund was up next to testify before the FDA. Kirsch argued the vaccines kill more people than they save.  Kirsh pointed out that there patients were 71 times more likely to suffer a heart attack after taking the vaccine than those taking other vaccines. 20 died from the drug, 14 from the placebo. Steve Kirsch also pointed out that early treatments are more successful than boosters, noting that cases in Israel are at an all-time high and cases in Uttar Pradesh, India where they administer Ivermectin, the cases are nearly non-existent today.
— MS Gov. Reeves and President Biden throwing punches over COVID-19 vaccine mandate.  More federalism stirring! Reeves called the president’s new COVID-19 vaccine requirements unconstitutional and pledged to challenge Biden’s legal authority to implement those requirements.  “Huge difference between laws passed by a state’s legislative body with input of the people vs. one man threatening American workers’ ability to feed their family,” a tweet by Reeves read. “If you can’t comprehend that, you’re in the wrong job-or the wrong country!”
— 72% of Americans Will Quit Work Rather Than Take a COVID Vaccine  (The unvaxxed are being referred to.)
— Parents Band Together, Force Resignation Of School Superintendent Who Pushed For Teaching Critical Race Theory
— DeSantis Office: Over Half of Those Seeking Lifesaving COVID-19 Treatment in South Florida Fully Vaccinated. Excerpts: A spokesperson for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s office said that more than half of those who are seeking monoclonal antibody treatment in the south of Florida are “fully vaccinated” individuals amid supply issues.  “More than half the patients getting the monoclonal antibody treatment in south Florida are fully vaccinated,” DeSantis spokeswoman Christina Pushaw wrote in response to a comment on Twitter that suggested that only unvaccinated people are the reason why there is a significant demand for monoclonal antibodies. Florida, she wrote hours earlier, “is above average in vaccination rate” and that “more than half of the patients in south Florida getting monoclonal antibody treatment are vaccinated and have breakthrough infections. Vaccinated or unvaccinated -Denying treatment to Covid patients is wrong.”  Monoclonal antibodies are engineered immune system proteins that boost an immune response against an infection.
— https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mark-levin-podcast/id209377688?i=1000535824359:  Minute 58 mark, medical tyranny and unethical, Hippocratic oath-pummeling politics by major institutions from the federal government to your local pharmacy are conspiring against citizens seeking proven, affordable, therapeutic remedies in order to save lives.  Despotic, criminal, and evil.  Have a listen. Better yet, speak up and go on the offensive to help save lives and role back tyranny.
— Why we desperately and rapidly need a federalism revival (state and federal powers and rights returned to constitutional size, the rapacious, capricious, lawless federal government shrunk back to the confines of strictly enumerated and limited powers and to separation of powers): Life, Liberty & Levin 9/19/21| FOX BREAKING TRUMP NEWS September 19,21
— Eric Clapton plays venue with vax mandate — despite saying he wouldn’t
— Horowitz: Now that vaccinated people need the monoclonal treatments, Biden admin and media attack the treatment.  Excerpts: “For those of you who couldn’t believe that the government’s war on ivermectin and every other treatment was rooted in a sinister motivation, its new attack on the monoclonal antibodies should indelibly cement the terrifying thought in your mind. The government and the media are now using the same attack pattern on the monoclonal antibody treatment that they used on hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin now that it has become popular with people desperate for treatment – vaccinated and unvaccinated alike.   The vaccines are no longer working, especially for those who got them early on — particularly the elderly — and many of the people who got them badly need treatment. As Gov. DeSantis reported, the majority of those seeking monoclonals are vaccinated, a fact I have verified in the facility closest to me in Baltimore. The vaccines cost a fortune and failed. Now these same people need treatment. The same government officials rationing the monoclonals have already scared 99% of doctors away from prescribing and pharmacists from filling cheap off-patent drugs that have cured the few people who can access them. The monoclonals are made by the cool kids at big pharma and are approved by the government. Except our government paid them off up front and then refused to even make the public aware of their existence. Thus, even things produced by big pharma are now attacked, so long as they actually work and people begin successfully using them. It’s so cute to watch the government and media suddenly become concerned about expensive treatments after spending billions on the vaccines. There is a simple solution, and that would be mass production of ivermectin and encouraging all physicians to treat everyone early with it and other cheap drugs. But now that the government has essentially banned them, the monoclonals are the only show in town. This is where the Biden administration wants to place Americans they don’t like into a death trap.
— Study: Pfizer Vaccine Increases Myocarditis Threefold. Excerpts: As the mass administration of COVID-19 jabs continue worldwide, we’re beginning to see some of the more common side effects emerging. Myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, is among them. This condition can cause symptoms similar to a heart attack, including chest pain, shortness of breath, abnormal heartbeat and fatigue.A large study from Israel revealed that the Pfizer COVID-19 mRNA jab is associated with a threefold increased risk of myocarditis, leading to the condition at a rate of one to five excess events per 100,000 persons. Other elevated risks were also identified following the COVID jab, including lymphadenopathy (swollen lymph nodes), appendicitis and herpes zoster infection.
— Psaki Suggests Illegal Immigrants Don’t Need To Prove Vaccination Status Since ‘They’re Not Intending To Stay Here’
— DeSantis Says Feds Slashing Florida’s Share of Monoclonal Antibody Treatments.  Excerpts: The federal government is set to slash Florida’s allotment of monoclonal antibody treatments to fight COVID-19, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Thursday.  Speaking at a news conference at Broward Health Medical Center in Fort Lauderdale, DeSantis said Florida is expected to see a “dramatic reduction” in the number of monoclonal antibodies from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that the state will have to make up for.  “To just spring this on us, starting next week we’re gonna have to do that, there’s gonna be a huge disruption and patients are gonna suffer as a result of this,” DeSantis said. “So we’re gonna work like hell to make sure that we can overcome the obstacles that HHS and the Biden administration are putting in us.”
— The inhumanity, criminality, and evil of it is beyond description: Video Shows Crying Toddler at New York Daycare Forced to Wear Face Mask.
— CV19 Vaccines are Poison – Karen Kingston | Greg Hunter’s USAWatchdog.  Excerpts: New research has come out this week from pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole, and he is seeing cancers in the fully vaccinated 20 times higher than normal. Kingston is not surprised and says, “I believe that’s (20 fold increase of cancers) a very conservative estimate as far as the increase of cancers we are going to witness in people who are injected with these ‘Emergency Use Authorization’ injections. What happened with the FDA is they violated their own laws. . . . They actually have to prove that they have done all the tests and prove there is minimal risk to humans. That would be the pre-clinical testing or the animal testing, but they skipped the animal testing . . .”  Kingston says another bad side effect of the CV19 vaccinations is Erectile Dysfunction or ED, but it doesn’t stop there. Kingston explains, “Erectile Dysfunction, I believe, is a very common side effect in men with these mRNA vaccines. Why? Because they cause the proliferation or production of spike protein. What do these spike proteins do? . . . They cause blood clotting. According to the FDA, this is called disseminated thrombolytic coagulation. This is a fancy word for blood clots throughout your body and small blood clots. So . . . if your capillaries have small blood clots in them, they will experience Erectile Dysfunction. I believe a lot of men who have been vaccinated are probably experiencing this problem. . . . Some people are sick right now from the vaccines and may not even know it. . . . One of the first symptoms is chronic fatigue syndrome. So, if you are exhausted and you are injected, it is probably a side effect from that injection. This is why I brought up ED. People are considering this to be a lifestyle condition. So, whether it’s ED or exhaustion, they are not attributing it to the vaccine.”  Kingston says these side effects are only the beginning of increasing sickness caused by the vaccines.
— Sex-ed curriculum used in Richfield schools asks students to role play gay sex scenarios. Watch civil courage in action.  Concerned mothers fight back against a depraved school board.
— Freedom Ron, the leader of federalism, is again standing tall for Floridians: Florida Acquires Monoclonal Antibodies From GlaxoSmithKline After Biden Administration’s Rationing
— Our lawless, demagogic, fascistic federal government at work (and why federalism is more important than ever): Jan. 6 House panel subpoenas Trump allies Bannon, Meadows, 2 more
— Why stout federalism, continued.  Tucker: Why would Biden do this to his own country? I have long called this out.
— More freedom, sanity, and science courtesy of Freedom Ron’s latest appointment: Dr. Joseph Ladapo: Florida’s New Surgeon General
— Catching up to Florida.  Norway Official: COVID-19 Can Now Be Compared to the Flu as Country Removes Pandemic Restrictions
— US COVID-19 Vaccine Progress Tracker | Vaccinations by State | USAFacts
–9/29/21 Billions hidden in $3.5 trillion bill to tilt election scale
— 9/29/21 Mark Levin exposes Democrats’ reckless schemes and lies (related to the $3.5trn — really $5.5trn — “spending bill”)
— 9/29/21 Tucker: These are the moral priorities of the Democrats (let illegal aliens in by boat load without any virus tests or vax requirements but fire Americans that refuse vax)
— 9/30/21 Arkansas Bill Would Create Antibody Exemption for Biden Vaccine Mandates
— 10/1/21 Tucker shreds Australia’s tough COVID restrictions
— 10/1/21 NYC Restaurateurs: Business Down 40 to 60 Percent Due to Vaccine Mandate
— 10/1/21 Harvard Business School goes virtual to fight COVID outbreak among jabbed students — Of the 74 COVID cases on campus, 60 were graduate students. All of the graduate students were jabbed.
— 10/4/21 People Injured by COVID-19 Jab Share Their Horror Stories
— 10/5/21 Vermont Woman Fired, Denied Unemployment for Refusing Vaccine, Becomes Homeless and Flees to Florida
— 10/6/21 ‘We’re in the middle of a major biological catastrophe’: COVID expert Dr. Peter McCullough
— 10/7/21 On Tuesday’s Mark Levin Show, Attorney General Merrick Garland has no authority to label parents that protest as domestic terrorists and use the FBI to silence them. The letter from the National School Boards Association smacks of an inside job to help the Federal government further nationalize its reach into local communities. The Biden administration wants to strike fear in the hearts of parents and community members who dare assemble to question their government. If they succeed, the public will have ceded our children, our future, and our liberty to the Marxist left. Then, Manhattan Institute Senior fellow Chris Rufo calls in and explains that this is simply an outrageous attempt to politicize the DOJ even further and prosecute parents for protesting under the Patriot Act. This is a suppression tactic to infringe upon one’s Constitutional right to free speech and assembly similar to how the Obama administration used the IRS to stifle conservatives in the Tea Party movement in 2010. Later, Victor Davis Hanson, author of “The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America” joins the show to explain the fragility of citizenship. The destruction of the middle class, border security, the administrative state, and academia are contributing to the demise of American citizenship.  (In a nutshell, this is a full-bore attack on the first amendment, the ninth amendment, and the 10th amendment, namely on free speech, on uncodified inalienable rights, and on federalism– DK)
— 10/8/21 Young mom who died from COVID vaccine was coerced into receiving jab via government mandate, heartbreaking obituary says
— 10/8/21 Mark Levin RIPS AG Garland for ‘weaponizing’ FBI against parents, reveals multimillion dollar motive for CRT push: ‘This is making the FBI into the East German Stasi’
— 10/8/21 Practical Reasons Why Vaccine Injuries Are Rarely Reported   And in case “to left” disappears: https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2021/October/PDF/vaccine-injuries-vaers-whistleblower-pdf.pdf
— 10/12/21 Horowitz: The data is in, and we are now worse off than before the experimental shots.  Excerpts: “Finally, there is a not insignificant risk of the vaccine virus reverting to wild-type virulence, as has sometimes occurred with the oral polio vaccine—which is not intended to be fully virulent or transmissible, but which has reverted to become both neurovirulent and transmissible in rare instances. This is both a medical risk and a public perception risk; the possibility of vaccine-induced disease would be a major concern to the public.  Whether this vaccine actually sheds the spike protein onto other people is still not yet proven (although Pfizer seems to indicate it can spread through skin-to-skin contact in “inhalation”), but the principle of mass vaccination with a faulty vaccine making a virus both more transmissible and more virulent is something that is hard to deny at this point. The reality is that more people have died from COVID-19 in 2021, with most adults vaccinated (and nearly all seniors), than in 2020 when nobody was vaccinated. Something is not adding up, and perhaps those who have been dabbling in gain-of-function research in recent years have the answer.”
— 10/12/21 ‘A Definite Loser’: Ron DeSantis Rails Against Vaccine Mandates Implemented By Biden
— 10/12/21 VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: America and ‘the dying citizen.’ Excerpts: Given our privileges, affluent and leisured Americans must always ask ourselves whether as citizens we have earned what those who died at Gettysburg or on Omaha Beach bequeathed at such costs.  Refusing to stand during the national anthem is not and should not be illegal. But such blanket rejection of American customs is admittedly now a collective narcissistic tic — and hardly sustainable for the nation’s privileged to sit in disgust for a flag that their betters raised under fire on Iwo Jima for others not yet born. Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating customs and traditions as by breaking laws. Instead, freedom requires constant reinvestment in and replenishment of a nation’s traditions and ideals. Self-criticism of one’s country is salutary to ensure needed changes, but only if Americans accept that an innately self-correcting United States does not have to be perfect to be good — and especially when, in a world of innately flawed humans and failed states, it remains far better than any of the alternatives abroad.
–10/12/21 The New Secession Movement | City Journal. The ultimate federalism answer to sustained federal government lawlessness, one which I have long called out, as in right here: https://dkanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/DK-Analytics-Post-4-State-level-_nullification_-of-unconstitutional-federal-edicts-only-ASAP-recourse-7_28_15.pdf
— 10/12/21 Your Vote Won’t Count
— 10/13/21 Outraged parents say Loudoun County school board is ‘complicit’ in alleged school sexual assaults, demand resignations
— 10/13/21 The Unvaccinated Are Looking Smarter Every Week
— 10/14/21 Will Ron DeSantis Save Christmas?  Excerpts: The media has been very busy issuing warnings to American consumers of late. CNN told us to get ready for emptier shelves. News outlets suggested shopping early for Christmas to avoid shortages. Pictures of dozens of container ships off the West Coast that are not allowed to dock have gone viral.  What can a concerned consumer do? Head to Florida.  Last week, the Florida Ports Council put out a press release telling shippers that the state’s ports are open, staffed, and ready for business. “Florida is where your success comes in, and our seaports are the solution to ensure the cargo shipping logjam doesn’t become the grinch that stole Christmas,” said Florida Ports Council President and CEO Michael Rubin. He added, “With inflation growing, shipping and manufacturing industries can save time and money by calling on Florida ports. Why pay to moor off the coast of California, when Florida shipping lanes are open and serving as the gateway for getting goods to America’s market?”  More than 60 ships holding thousands of shipping containers were moored off the California coast when the council sent the letter. Rubin asserted, “Florida is open for business, and we are the solution to help resolve the global supply chain crisis. Instead of waiting off the coast of California, cargo vessels can offload and move their product to Florida and other discretionary markets in the same time it takes to find space in an increasingly congested California.”
— 10/15/21 Biden administration reverses all punishment of Andrew McCabe  “The Deep State takes care of its own, scoring a big victory yesterday thanks to the Biden administration defaulting, using an old trick to reverse all punishment of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who lied repeatedly to FBI officials — normally a crime that can be prosecuted severely.  That he lied is undisputed.  See this inspector general’s report.  Former attorney general Jeff Sessions fired McCabe just before his pension vested, but the thoroughly politicized Department of Justice declined to prosecute him.  Losing pay and pension rankled McCabe, so he sued.  Rather than fight McCabe in court and let a jury decide, Merrick Garland’s Justice Department has caved in completely and given McCabe everything he wanted in a “settlement agreement” that includes half a million dollars in attorney’s fees and about $200,000 in pension payments he missed plus future pension payments for the rest of his life.  Having already stepped down from his position as deputy director of the FBI — to which he was appointed by James Comey, who raised him from the ranks — McCabe will not be getting his old job back — just the cushy package of benefits and pension payments that retired senior government bureaucrats enjoy.  He joins Lois Lerner of the IRS in the ranks of guilty political hacks who escape punishment for their partisan misdeeds in office.  Me: When traitorous, felonious Andrew McCabe, who perjured himself before Congress, gets all his federal retirement and health benefits reinstated and numerous January 6th protestors get denied due process rights and are left to rot in solitary confinement, then you really know that a mob runs the country.  B.R. response, Debi.
— 10/17/21 Republican AGs Say There Is No Federal Vaccine Mandate for Private Workers, Vow to Sue
— 10/17/21 Civil War 2.0? | Power Line
— 10/17/21 Senator Johnson on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo: Biden flip flops on vaccine mandates.  KEY video on the insanity, tyranny, demagoguery, and destructiveness of the clot shot mandates.
— 10/19/21 Doctors Can Prescribe Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine Off-Label for COVID-19: Nebraska AG
— 10/19/21 On Tuesday’s Mark Levin Show, people deprived of a religious exemption for vaccinations can sue their employers. The federal government has no authority to issue any such mandate, only states have that type of police power. Professor Ken Terry writes on the legality of vaccination mandates, noting that they have quarantine powers but no precedent to force inoculations
— 10/22/21 Putin Blasts Pushing Transgenderism On Children As “Simply Monstrous” In Critique Of West’s ‘Wokism’ | ZeroHedge
— 10/24/21  Florida Governor Calls for Special Session to Counter Vaccine, Mask Mandates
— 10/24/21 DeSantis Calls On Businesses To Pay For Adverse Reactions To Vaccine If They Mandate It
— 10/24/21 Biden Admin Proposes Taxing Billionaires’ ‘Theoretical Income’
— 10/25/21 ‘Life, Liberty & Levin’ host Mark Levin says the Democrat Party want to fundamentally change America
— 10/25/21 NIH Removes Language on ‘Gain-of-Function’ From Website Amid Criticism Over Funding Chinese Research
— 10/25/21 Health Care Workers Speak Out on Why They Would Rather Lose Their Jobs Than Take a COVID-19 Vaccine
— 10/26/21 The Leaky Vaccine Breakthrough Variant Is Here
— 10/27/21 FDA panel approves Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for kids ages 5-11 (an age group that has virtually zero virus death risk — how does one spell diabolical?)
— 10/27/21 Exclusive — Road Dog Trucking’s Mark Willis: Vax Mandate Worsens Existing U.S. ‘Driver Shortage’ of About 80,000
— 11/4/21 ‘What Percent Of CDC Employees Are Vaccinated?’: Cassidy Grills Walensky At Senate Hearing

— 11/5/21  Biden’s private business vaccine mandate begins Jan. 4 — with $14K per penalty
— 11/5/21 ‘Most Destructive Bureaucrat In The History Of Our Country’: DeSantis Targets Fauci In Speech
— 11/6/21 US appeals court blocks Biden’s federal COVID-19 vaccine mandate
— 11/6/21 Schumer shimmies at SOMOS after Dem infrux win — breaking mask rules
— 11/10/21 ‘I Will Send Them To Delaware’: DeSantis Proposes Sending Undocumented Migrants To Biden Home State

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

US$:92.12; Fed’s B/S: $8.3trn; US debt: $28.7trn; US 10-yr: 1.4%;  S&P 500: 4535;  Oil: $68.73;  Gold:$ 1,811;  Silver: $24.28

Post #78: We the sheeple or we the people?  The depraved, tyrannical left gets to go maskless, yet Swissair calls the cops and they arrest four passengers refusing to mask up

The tyranny of the minority over the majority.  There are two sets of laws.  One for “we the plebes.”  Another one for the activist, leftist mob (mobocracy), and of course one for our leftist politicians, bureaucrats, and big, fascistic corporations,  all of whom have been caught hobnobbing, without masks, with other leftist elites at expensive, exclusive events from just outside San Francisco to Martha’s Vineyard.  (Of course the “little people” service personnel that wined and dined them had to mask up!)

The key enabling agent for two sets of laws: we the sheeple!  We outnumber the leftist mob by well over 100:1, and the tyrants in power by about 100:1.  Yet we typically accept, or stand idly by, as factions, from BLM to Antifa to the LGBTQ (or whatever) crowd, flaunt the very decrees and laws that we abide by “or else,” while we allow those in power to strip us of our freedom and our property rights.  How does one spell disgusting?!

Check out a very recent case in point here in Switzerland, namely the Zurich “Pride” festival, which took place during the September 4th weekend:
https://www.myswitzerland.com/en-us/experiences/events/zurich-pride-festival/   (Please note: the page was taken down; it showed, via various links, thousands of unmasked “pride festival” particpants!  Can’t have that.  See below)
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pictures+of+september+4th+2021+zurich+pride+parade+festival&t=chromentp&atb=v284-1&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images&iai=https%3A%2F%2Fstatic.az-cdn.ch%2F__ip%2FEka9wpQunyshVxEPGapXTbjvK0E%2F7a4b59c841a881a100e3af048eec32cc08fe928a%2Fn-large2x-16×9-far

It’s okay if thousands of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transsexuals, and other “lovelies,” who collectively represent less than one percent of the population, make their demands known to the other 99% of the citizenry via large, mainly unmasked public gatherings (festivals), which the “authorities” de facto approve.  But, if four people refuse to mask up in a Swiss Air aircraft prior to departure, they get escorted off the plane and are then arrested (the link is in German; perhaps you can put Google to some good translation use for a change, i.e., if they are more honest here than elsewhere?).

You just can’t make this stuff up.  The double standard is so outrageous.  Yet the broad-based lack of civil courage to stand tall for sanity and freedom is even more outrageous, and despotism enabling!

When, oh when, are constitutional law-abiding citizens going to assert their inalienable rights by taking their masks off in such numbers that our despotic Coronacrats are utterly overwhelmed?  That is all that it will take to end this nightmare, together with other profound lawlessness, including forced “vaccinations,” vax passports, and arbitrary small business or church closings.

We are so close, yet so far.  Can enough of us find the civil courage in time to regain our inalienable rights before it is checkmate, or will we continue to allow tyranny and evil by the elite minority to metastasize to the point of no return?  Will we continue to condone the same elites that don’t live by the rules they whimsically, unconstitutionally, and devastatingly impose on us while they look askance when a favored faction of theirs disregards those rules in broad daylight?

The great thing is that it is still up to us.  The bad thing is that we are unlikely to step up while we still can.  Prep, and allocate accordingly.  For tips on the latter, refer to Article 1, Section 10, clause 1.

Greetings,
Dan Kurz
www.dkanalytics.com

The obligatory boilerplate:
This commentary is not intended as investment advice or as an investment recommendation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Price and yield are subject to daily change and as of the specified date. Information provided is solely the opinion of the author at the time of writing.  Nothing in the commentary should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Information provided has been prepared from sources deemed to be reliable but is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision.  Liquid securities can fall in value.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

US$:92.10; Fed’s B/S: $8.1trn; US debt: $28.5trn; US 10-yr: 1.4%; S&P 500 P/E: 33; S&P 500: 4370;  Oil: $74.56;  Gold:$ 1,808;  Silver: $26.10
(For post publishing developments worthy of stand out reference, please scroll down to very bottom of post)

Will lawlessness, debt, deficits, legalized theft (QE), and percolating insanity lead to impoverishing destabilization & tyranny?
(Will we let the “kindergarten bullies” win and take down what remains of meritocracy, sustainability, and sanity?)

FYI, Joe: Florida parents cultured their children’s masks and found dangerous bacteria — the “duh” factor & the face of tyranny
FYI, Joe: kids with masks on for only 3 minutes are inhaling 6x acceptable levels of CO2 

 

Anti-citizen, anti-national sovereignty, anti-nation state, anti-freedom, anti-private property lawlessness:
(Not only privacy and “our” money and how we spend it are at stake, but our civilization!)

Since discriminatory demagogue “King Biden” assumed office, and hired a cabinet brimming with Anti-Americans, Anti-Semites, racists, “racialists,” redistributing segregationists, and indoctrinating, class warfare, “social justice,” “cancel culture” Marxists (a.k.a, domestic terrorists), a plethora of executive orders (EOs), or “royal proclamations,” typically praised and regurgitated by the sycophantic, agenda-driven, false narrative “Pravda press,” have pushed aside the legislative prerogative in unprecedented terms.  Moreover, Biden’s EOs are displacing constitutionally conceived laws and statutes while Bill of Rights protections, including the first, fourth, and fifth amendments, are being targeted in truly Stalinist terms, the fabricated rationale being either a “disinformation campaign” or a new, even more grotesque January 6th, 2021-style “national security threat,” an occurrence which not only was likely staged or enabled by a politicized FBI, but is sadly reminiscent of the Dems’ diabolical, purely political  “Russia did it” hoax.  It’s also reminiscent of the media’s shameless Lafayette Park lies parroted by Democratic bigwigs in yet another illegitimate, utterly concocted attempt to take down President Trump. (One could be forgiven for wondering whether the propaganda media truly runs America.)

A raft of Biden EOs has fortified the all-powerful administrative state (the unelected, unaccountable, frequently tenured, despotic bureaucrats working symbiotically with K Street/Corporate America and Wall Street, also known as fascism) nestled in the executive branch that carries them out, thereby sustaining and accelerating a multi-decade usurpation of the sole legislative function that Congress was given by the US Constitution under the singularly vital, tyranny-disabling, separation of powers doctrine. That same, deeply politicized, statist bureaucracy has increasingly trampled on federalism, property right protections, sound money (to stave off cronyism and redistributionism), and, in the case of the extremely political CDC, “all of the above,” while its policy has made a mockery of its charter to “save lives and protect people” while torching its de facto “do no harm” obligations and its credibility.  To add insult to injury, the federal courts, which are supposed to be guardians of the US Constitution, continue to broadly legislate from the bench while often refusing to uphold the American Constitution from separation of powers to the last presidential election to fraudulent-free elections to sound money to federalism to citizens’ inalienable rights perspectives.

In the interim, the perennially highly political, anti-federalist, leftist, unrest-inciting, and dystopian Department of Justice (DOJ) increasingly surveils both Americans and local police while it approves police state tactics and the trashing of 4th amendment privacy rights and 5th and 14th amendment due process rights for Trump voters and high-profile Republicans, including Rudi Giuliani and former President Donald Trump.  In stark contrast, high-profile Democrats, such as Hunter Biden or Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama or John Kerry or lawless Joe Biden prior to his appallingly illegitimate election, never get raided by the FBI despite a treasure trove of allegations against them — which the DOJ doesn’t take up, and the media and Big Tech censor.  It is all part of a “wonderfully” successful B.R. joint venture to subvert the rule of law for those typically wielding power on the one hand, while setting them up for lucrative paydays, or even a return to power, once their “above the law” status has been assured on the other hand.

Furthermore, state and federal level courts have been de facto letting “trial by mob” injustice show its ugly head, be it in the nationally-followed Chauvin trial earlier this year, which fanned legitimate concerns that intimidation and threats influenced the jurors’ decisions, or via  increasingly overt Democratic intimidation tactics against SCOTUS justices.  Speaking of which, the court on which those justices sit that pathetically and most harmfully refused to uphold the Constitution in the last presidential election for political reasons is now targeted by the Biden administration for leftist packing, which will make the SCOTUS even more political and even less inclined to render decisions that uphold the Constitution.  Moreover, as both juries and judges/justices throughout the land increasingly fear retribution by the street mob “at their front door” — or by government mobsters such as Chuck Schumer and his ilk — should they actually issue decisions or opinions that underpin justice and (a return to) constitutional fidelity, yet threaten the advancement of either governmental tyranny or a “mobocracy” (mob rule), injustice threatens to become the norm as individual liberty, due process rights, the vaunted US Constitution, and honest and lawful elections continue to be eviscerated.

 

Speaking of retribution, political factions, also known as mobs (think BLM or Antifa), have increasingly acted out in a destructive and racist manner.  Shockingly, they do this in concert with the fascistic US government’s growing mob tolerance, regulatory discrimination against Main Street/small business, and lawlessness as materially abetted by a) censoring Oligarchs at Big Tech and racist, rioting-enabling, election integrity-undermining Corporate America kowtowing to the human rights-abusing CCP, and b) by virtually all significant institutions in the land promoting racism and bastardization of gender, very much including public school boards across the country.  The fascistic agenda is a list of horrors, including sustained efforts to muzzle election constitutionality and integrity,  the freedom of speech, the freedom of assembly, the free exercise of religion, the freedom to work, the freedom to conduct business (Main Street gets shut down, and K Street and Wall Street get bailed out — and then buy up Main Street), the freedom to leave your home, the freedom to have people visit your home, and the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms — yet you can still order from Amazon with your UBI, i.e., after the kleptocrats/Coronacrats have impoverished and shut down wide swaths (over 44%) of small businesses/Main Street, in the process fattening Corporate America’s market share and profits.  Here is how the great American Thinker peels back the layers of one vile fascist onion:

The US at the national level has been moving toward fascism steadily and deliberately. Democrats and Republicans in Washington endorse big state crony capitalism openly in some cases, and tacitly in others. The trend is accelerating right now due to Covid windfalls that hugely benefit many oligarchs. Today’s fascist oligarchs comprise a formidable array: the deep state of unaccountable bureaucrats, academe, the megalomaniacs of Silicon Valley, Davos elites, Hollywood, Wall Street, big banks, many of the largest corporations, legacy media, some state governors, professional sports, New World Order kleptocrats, some functionaries of both parties.

The oligarchs’ front men in legacy media are partisans. In the US, what on the surface appears to be two party governance is in fact one party, the big state party, with two branches: the pedal to the metal fascists and the drive 55 fascists, the latter renowned for their complicity in private but now exposed thanks to an American president. Their allies in academe have been and are doing everything they can to obscure the evidence, cloud the issues with misdirection and propagandize the young against Western liberalism.”

Staying on the propagandizing “page,” and beyond chilling, there is a growing body of evidence, on the heels of an FBI-run, well-orchestrated January 6th, 2021 breaching of the Capitol,  that Trump voters have been unconstitutionally targeted using police state tactics sadly increasingly reminiscent of those deployed by the Stasi in erstwhile communist East Germany.  In plain English, too many Trump voters present at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021 have been stripped of the sacred presumption of innocence, stripped of due process rights, incarcerated, maligned, and grounded for being part of an “armed insurrection.”  This propaganda has been unleashed relentlessly ever since January 6th, 2021 by the leftist media, a broad spectrum of leftist politicians, and especially by the all-powerful bureaucracy, even though it was a non-armed, non-insurrection with cops opening the door.

The only insurrection taking place here is being undertaken by the “weaponizing” party in power bent on eviscerating the last remaining elements of a lawful, constitutional government as abetted by an American version of the Pravda press.  Police state tactics are being deployed by the bureaucracy that is utterly controlled by the Democratic party.  That bureaucracy very much includes Biden’s DOJ and sentencing federal judges; it’s part of the same administrative state apparatus which frequently shuns constitutional fidelity while it rules the nation in an increasingly lawless and Bill of Rights truncating manner.  And, last but not least, most of the “turbo-charged” propaganda and the resulting tyranny that we’ve been witnessing over the past year or so has been undertaken in the name of “public safety,” i.e., to “protect” each of us from the Corona virus.  Rockefeller’s chilling “all we need is the right crisis and the people will accept the new world order” proclamation at a UN dinner in 1994 comes to mind.  Just ask Stan:
Meanwhile, Biden has seen to it that the increasingly functional southern border featuring stoutly reduced illegal immigration that the Trump administration bequeathed him has been turned in record time into an open border cultivating statutory lawlessness, human smuggling, human suffering, sickness, pedophilia, and other forms of extreme child abuse and inhumanity — in short, into a border crisis spreading inland.  That same open border and the ensuing border crisis, which the Biden administration seeks to hide or deflect attention from, promotes and incentivizes massive third world amnesty.  It also shifts massive resources and manpower away from citizens and their towns to illegal aliens pouring in in record numbers from the south.  Moreover, it sets the stage for the continuation and acceleration of the financial and political disenfranchisement of American citizens, in the process promoting Balkanizing multiculturalism over Americanism and the needs of immigrants over how those immigrants will improve and contribute to America — which is how the American immigration policy worked with great success for immigrants and citizens alike, i.e., until the Hart Cellar Act of 1965.

The Hart Cellar Act has been the cornerstone of a political agenda to enable an illegal, immoral, anti-merit, anti-integration, anti-common language, and anti-citizen reconfiguration/expansion of the US population to include an ever larger third world immigrant aspect — a country within a country, a city within a city.  For flavor, consider that Hispanics account for a growing share of births among US-born women.   In 2018, 17% of US births were to women of Hispanic origin, up from 10% in 2000.  This growth was primarily driven by the rapid expansion of the US-born Hispanic population.  For instance, by 2018, the number of Hispanic women aged 15 to 44 residing in the US was more than double the 2000 level.  Needless to say, this population bulge was due to both sustained, outsized, and undocumented (illegal) immigration from Latin America on the one hand, and to outsized Latin American fertility rates on the other hand.

Illegal immigrants and their offspring vote Democratic about 69% of the time thanks to the expansive benefits and privileges showered on illegal third world aliens granted amnesty, especially as their US-born offspring will immediately become US citizens with full-voting rights less than a generation later.  Since the advent of the Biden Administration and its de facto open southern border policy, immigrants showing up at the southern border are up roughly nine-fold per month, reaching an average level of 179,000 during April and May 2021, up from 20,500 on average during the same months last year.  Not ready to leave the ongoing expansion of the Democratic base alone, the Democrats, with their HR1 Bill,  which was thankfully just blocked by Senate Republicans for the time being, are trying to capitalize on the Biden presidency and on their razor-thin legislative majority to effectively institutionalize the fraud (“providing valid ID is racist”) and “federalism abandoned” (state legislators are solely empowered by the US Constitution to determine presidential electors).  Either effort could soon make it impossible for a Republican to be elected president ever again; in tandem, it will make it impossible.  In short, while the Democrats are bent on Balkanizing America, they are simultaneously focused on turning America into one-party (Democratic) California, which would fit nicely into the autocrats’ global government wet dream of subsuming recalcitrant America into a totally unrepresentative New World Order at long last.

Speaking of which, clearly illegitimate President Biden (does anyone really believe that a man that couldn’t get 2,000 people to attend all the election rallies held in his name won against a sitting president that had over 1.1 million fans show up, often with hardly any advance notice, some 86 different times, including in the middle of the night?) and the other despotic governmental decision makers are working in symphony with the Davos plutocrats, Big Tech, the “mainstream” media (the “Pravda press”), and the CCP to orchestrate autocratic global government in which individual freedom and inalienable rights once again become curiosities instead of codified realities.  The fiscal, regulatory, and monetary policies that continue to be enacted underpin exactly that, effectively transforming what’s left of free market capitalism, solvency, price stability, price discovery, productivity, and economic sanity into an engineered train wreck that sets the stage for the complete rejiggering of the relationship between states and their supposed sovereigns, citizens, to the state being the sovereign, i.e., citizens obeying the state, being dependent on the state, and accepting censorship and the loss of freedom and property rights in the process.  Of course, the Democratic cheaters (liars) in office from Biden on down, who are too often underpinned by RINOs or don’t face capable Republican opposition, have to lie in order to further their toxic trajectory, because otherwise they couldn’t “sell it” to the American people, who continue to be too trusting, or too naive, or too bamboozled, or too indoctrinated, or too “bought off” — or perhaps a combination of some or all of the above, as shown by Biden’s shockingly high approval rating in light of the highly destructive demagogue’s efforts to eliminate the Electoral College, open the southern border, obliterate the difference between citizenship and non-citizenship, pack the SCOTUS, shut down affordable, 24/7 energy, and create a one-party state filled with comrades instead of a nation comprised of citizens endowed with inalienable rights.

A toxic political trajectory is always accompanied by those in positions of power being above the law they impose on everyone else, indoctrination, lies masquerading as the truth (statist propaganda), suppression of free speech, intimidation, unhappiness, poverty, and, at times, even genocide for those that pose a threat to autocratic rule (the communists killed 100m people in the twentieth century and enslaved an estimated one billion people).  These, arguably, are the rapidly metastasizing realities that the vast majority of people face as we move ever closer to “high noon,” i.e., ever closer to permanently losing fair, honest, and constitutional elections while our individual circle of liberty continues to shrink, individual property rights remain under attack, tolerance for opposing points of view continues to decline, selection based on meritocracy instead of physical differences wanes, the remaining vestiges of sanity slip through our fingers, our children are indoctrinated with hateful ideologies, and the only economic system which underpins freedom, namely free market capitalism, is lost.

The despotic, malevolent, illegitimate, and unnatural movement behind this tragic trajectory, which is attempting to take our current fascism — advanced most recently by our small business-crushing Coronacrats — to the next level can be labelled Marxist redistributionism and Marxist culture wars.   Marxist redistributionism takes statist economic control and adds out-of-the-closet property theft (either intellectual or asset-based) from non-political makers, employees, and savers to politically-connected takers and debtors, otherwise known as communist party members.  Marxist culture wars amount to an all out effort, starting in public schools, to intimidate, Balkanize, “tribalize,” and ultimately persecute wide swaths of a once broadly unified people (e.g., Trump voters), especially the most prevalent, or dominant, group.  Combined, Marxism amounts to a sinister and impoverishing economic, cultural, and racist movement that undermines tolerance, diversity, individual freedom, market-based incentives, economic vibrancy, and national unity and cohesion in America and the West at large.  It is currently being foisted by the American left, like never before, on both Republican lawmakers and a largely silent majority mainly via playing the race and equality cards, often through sheer demagoguery, and often courtesy of our leading institutions.  That is, the silent majority and elected officials against race-based “reform” (codified racism) and equality of results (versus opportunity), as dictated by an increasingly deficitary, redistributionist, and discriminatory government, are fearful of being called racists, and thus don’t stand on principle, in the process allowing themselves to be blackmailed.  This accelerates our society’s and our economy’s demise while moving us ever further away from representative government, separation of powers, limited government, sound money, federalism, and codified inalienable (individual) rights — from an erstwhile constitutional republic embracing and codifying Enlightenment Era principles to an increasingly Marxist regime.

Marxism can be broadly defined as centralized control and power.  Its manifestation is the destruction of individual initiative and the nature of man.  It is the fusion of politics and society.  It may involve a cultural revolution to pulverize the prior order.  Marxism seeks the equality of outcomes, not the equality of opportunity.  Meritocracy and competition are eliminated, as is private property.  The iron fist rules.  

As regards cultural Marxism’s toxic history, below is how a very well informed, illuminating colleague put it during a recent email exchange, which commenced when another very astute colleague forwarding me this link with the following observation: “If the races were reversed, this would be national news & breathlessly leading on cable.  But instead … virtually no one will hear about it & there will be no racial angle.”

After erroneously responding that the majority never acquiesced to a takedown by the minority, that illuminating colleague fired back a fitting, terse, and sobering response in order to enlighten me (knowing how kindergarten bullies operate, I should have known better, even without the requisite grasp of history in this matter): “This is how they do Marxist takeovers.  They take the majority group and call them racist and start their critical theory.  It happened in the Bolshevik Revolution.  The Russians were the majority and they accused them of Great Russian Chauvinism.    They implemented Criticize Great Russian.  In Mao’s China, the Han, which made of 98% of the population, were accused of Han Chauvinism and they’ve been discriminated against ever since.  The Han were the only group forced into the one-child policy, which of course was just removed.  I assume this is what they (the communists) do in every country.   I assume this happens in all Marxist takeovers.  It is exactly what Bezmenov explained.  They take the dominant group, label them the oppressor, then pit as many ‘downtrodden’ groups against them as possible.  Bezmenov claims it is a tactic as old as Sun Zsu’s Art of War book.”

If tolerant and inclusive Americanism, a vigilant American people ready to defend inalienable rights, the American Constitution, meritocracy, and the energy-intensive, high-output American way of life can be taken down (think Paris Climate Agreement, think Keystone XL Pipeline permit revocation, think cessation of drilling on federal lands) on the back of CO2 and climate change lies (IPCC Official Admits Global Warming Is A Lie To Redistribute Wealth), and on the back of counterfeiting, Balkanization, and an obsession with racism, there will be nothing left to stand in the way of autocratic global government to impoverish us, segregate us, and lord over us.  This is why the “globalists” have a big fat target on America’s back.  With Trump out of the way and a heavily compromised, divisive, illegitimate, fraudulent, unconstitutional, crony president pandering to China and to nation state sovereignty eliminating agreements and/or institutions such as the Paris Climate Agreement, the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, the G20, and/or the Bilderberg Group, individual freedom, property right protections, and a rule of law featuring codified inalienable rights are under threat since no time since WWII.  One hundred and twenty four retired American generals and admirals said it perhaps best of all (caveat: sadly and forebodingly, we only hear this from the retired top brass that can no longer make policy and has secured lavish taxpayer-financed retirement and healthcare packages):

Our Nation is in deep peril. We are in a fight for our survival as a Constitutional Republic like no other time since our founding in 1776.  The conflict is between supporters of Socialism and Marxism vs. supporters of Constitutional freedom and liberty… Without fair and honest elections that accurately reflect the ‘will of the people,’ our Constitutional Republic is lost. Aside from the election, the Current Administration has launched a full-blown assault on our Constitutional rights in a dictatorial manner, bypassing the Congress, with more than 50 Executive Orders quickly signed.

It is not only the American nation that is in deep peril.  Effectively, only a weakened America sorely lacking a vigilant enough, enraged enough, and engaged enough people stands in the way of the rapidly assimilating “Borg” because America is the citadel of codified individual freedom, inalienable rights, and limited and enumerated powers government.  This is why the takedown of America, its Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and its domestic exploitation of huge dense energy assets is so vital for those eyeing an all-powerful, dictatorial global government. It is also why the fight to end individual freedom, property rights, “do no harm” medical care, and even good health has to continue to be waged at “ground zero,” where “bread and circuses sheeple” ready to be lorded over by hypocritical politicians, unhinged, racist demagogues dressed up as bureaucrats (researchers at the University of Maryland could find less than 70 people in the entire country who died from white supremacist violence over the entire period between 2015 and 2019), and increasingly fascistic corporations may sadly outnumber people ready to defend what remains of rapidly disappearing freedom and sanity.  Will America be overthrown from within, and steamrolled from without?  This epic battle between light and darkness, between freedom and tyranny, between sanity and insanity, between open dialogue and ostracism, between the rule of law and fiat law, and between power brokers above the law and rest of us subject to it continues to leave increasingly revealing and disturbing fractures financially, economically, politically, and socially as the forces of darkness gain the upper hand.

In this regard, and has history has repeatedly shown, neither a country’s economic system nor its societal stability can be sustained if its population or its currency melts down.  Moreover, a nation’s currency is the barometer of its overall health and stability.  Caveat emptor, America in particular, and the West in general, as unhinged deficit spending underwritten by currency debasement underpins increasingly destructive policies and behavior (insanity).  How far away are currency controls?  As close as the impending dollar crisis, from an American perspective.  Investors better get into their desired currencies and assets, in the process focusing on hard assets and short durations, i.e., assets less sensitive to rising inflation and interest rates, very much including resource stocks poised to benefit from inflation and value stocks less impacted by it, especially the non-domestic/non-US variety, whose USD-based returns should be flattered by currency translation gains.  Investors should also acquire physical precious metals portfolio insurance at today’s attractive prices in dollar terms; more on “all that” later.

As a closing thought for this section, consider that the ice of systemic stability and sustainability has gotten so thin, that economic, financial, political, and/or societal functionality could collapse at any time.  Any dysfunctionality in one realm would “feed on itself” given human nature, and then likely expand into all of the above sectors, resulting in a systemic breakdown with horrific consequences for the vast majority of the population.  Perhaps the dearest price of all that people trapped in such an implosion followed by the iron fist will have to pay is the ability to freely tell the truth without risking a reprisal.  Perhaps having to regularly regurgitate bald-faced lies, also known as propaganda, is perhaps the biggest, most insidious inhumanity all.   Talk about a dark, joy and health-robbing world too close for comfort, and increasingly rising, even at erstwhile citadels of free speech and thought.

 

US debt, deficits, QE, and the related collateral damage of a redistributionist racket:
(How did you go bankrupt?  Two ways.  Gradually, then suddenly — and en route, get ready for soaring inflation & shortages)

Prior to the painful details below, consider this incredibly apt and prescient  “executive summary” from 51 years ago:
“The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship. This goal does not have to be inferred—many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.”  Ayn Rand, author of  ”Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution”

The US government is $28.5trn in debt; that’s $226K per taxpayer, but never mind!  Biden, in his speech to a joint session of Congress, announced a) a child credit tax plan for people that don’t have children, b) the creation of a national paid family medical leave program that would pay workers up to $4,000 a month if events such as the birth of a child or a loved one requiring medical care require it, c) another “meals program for children,” and d) federal unemployment insurance “reform,” or a permanent federal unemployment benefit on top of state unemployment benefits, or a first stage federal UBI scheme — talk about yet another disincentive to return to work or to look for a job, which will force the private sector to bid up wages or businesses to shutdown if automation isn’t feasible, exerting further pressure on supply, wages, and inflation.  The redistributionist price tag of this so-called “American Families Plan” has been pegged at $1.8trn.  And, of course this will be “paid for” by increasing marginal tax rates on “the rich” that already pay a hugely disproportionate share of federal income taxes.  In reality, this never happens, as “the rich” either throttle back earned income — thereby employing less people and curtailing services and goods output, further dampening supply — or increasingly seek out IRS code-enabled (right, hypocritical Joe Biden?) payroll tax minimization schemes, as is the case with an “S-Corp.” tax structure, which dramatically reduces such an enterprise’s Social Security and Medicare taxes on behalf of its employees, de facto contributing to greater national underfunding of same.

US federal debt has been expanding at deficit-ridden $4.5trn annual rate, sky-rocketing to 129% of GDP from 107% of debt a year ago; with all the “stimulus” spending being spooled up by the even more spendthrift Biden administration, this promises to get worse, probably a lot worse — note that Biden just targeted a 16% increase in civilian agency (non-defense) spending in the upcoming fiscal year, setting the stage for the expansion of the bloated (2.1m employees strong), intrusive, and extremely expensive (roughly $2.0trn in annual regulatory compliance costs), asphyxiating federal bureaucracy.  In short, an immense and highly redistributionist racket for bureaucrats, their K Street crony pals, plaintiff trial lawyers, for UBI-recipients (more on that down the page), and for crooks courtesy of Main Street makers, more debt, and more money printing which are enabling uneconomic, productivity-killing, statist allocations (more on this down the page as well).

Speaking of US government spending and deficits, outlays for the first six months of fiscal 2021 rose by 45% yoy (year-over-year) while receipts were only 6% higher yoy.  This resulted in a federal budget deficit of $1.7trn for the initial six months of the new fiscal year, almost $1trn more than during the first six months of fiscal 2020.  

Over the past 16 months since the monetary virus policy response kicked in, the spendthrift-enabling US monetary base rose by a staggering $3.8trn to $8.1trn, a 91.6% increase.  The Fed’s balance sheet is set to rocket much higher sooner rather than later.  This is due to the ballooning deficit spending thanks to all kinds of historical redistributionism (so-called stimulus bills that get through Congress and are signed by Biden) that is taking place in order to enrich the Democratic base, to rescue mismanaged and heavily indebted Democratic cities and states, to expand green cronyism, to ramp-up racist-based anti-Americanism, and, most of all, to buy votes — because this is how most voters will sadly forget or forgive “everything else,” very much including the progressively larger loss of freedom.

Votes are actually bought using the (electronic) printing press, which is the wellspring of the money supply.  As of the latest available data (May 31, 2021), US M1, at $19.2trn, is up a stout 14.9% yoy, broader US M2, at $20.3trn, is up 11.8% yoy, and real GDP as of Q1:21, at $19.1trn, is flat yoy.  THIS is how one spells inflation.

Meanwhile, US federal government spending is careening out of control as the federal deficit explodes; it reached a breath-taking 15% of domestic GDP last year.  Under the Trump administration, the economic destructiveness of the Corona virus policy response was offset by $4.1trn in aggregate “stimulus spending,” which was 100% deficit spending financed mainly by the Fed’s printing press.

In addition to the Biden administration’s $1.8trn “American Families Plan,” the current administration has also signed off on yet more spending out of an empty pocket.  Specifically, another $1.9trn in deficit spending.  That spending is supposed to be devoted to pandemic relief, yet only about 6.5% of which has anything to do with the physical impact of the  Corona virus (COVID-19), which is supposed to be such a menace to humanity.  Related to same, and according to a May 13, 2020 bulletin by the WHO that was updated on September 9th, 2020, the virus will end up killing a flu-like 0.27% (corrected from 0.23%) of all the people that get infected by it (not exactly a “pandemic;” more of a “plandemic”).  This is how John P.A. Ioannidis‘ shed some more light on his population-wide Corona virus mortality analysis for the WHO: “the inferred median infection fatality rate in locations with a COVID-19 mortality rate lower than the global average is low (0.09%).  If one could sample equally from all locations globally, the median infection fatality rate might even be substantially lower than the observed 0.27%.” 

As such, and to repeat, it may not surprise you that most of the $1.9trn in deficit spending will not be related to the Corona virus “pandemic.” This becomes even clearer thanks to the US CDC recently admitting that the Corona virus was solely responsible for only 5% (down from the CDC’s earlier 6% rate) of the tabulated Corona virus deaths. Furthermore, the CDC notes that for deaths with conditions or causes in addition to the Corona virus/COVID-19, there were 4.0 additional conditions or causes per death on average – have you ever heard of people with terminal cancer or heart disease or diabetes “dying of a flu?”).  Specifically, as concerns 2020, 375K deaths in US were associated with the Corona virus, yet only 5% of those deaths, or 18,750, were solely attributed to the virus.  Without trying to sound cold, those 18,750 deaths are the rough equivalent of just 2 days of average daily deaths in America of 9,202, a good number of which would likely have been avoided by widely prescribing proven and very affordable anti-viral drugs for early treatment.  In other words, it’s not the virus deaths that are being addressed with hugely deficit-ridden stimulus bills, but rather the economic and societal carnage that the uniquely disastrous Corona virus policy response has wrought.  In a related manner, and capitalizing on “never letting a good (manufactured) crisis go to waste,” out of the $1.9trn, $410bn will be doled out as stimulus checks, which is all about buying votes.  Approximately 130m American households are projected to receive a government check.  Note that a family of five earning $150K could expect a whopping $7K check from the federal government as a result of just this “stimulus” bill.  The second biggest chunk, $360bn, is largely to bail out bankrupt blue states and blue cities that were already grossly in debt prior to the virus policy disaster.  

(Separately, the $1.9trn redistributionist, vote-buying “stimulus” spending features permanent extensions which effectively institute another federal layer of UBI. The extensions promise to expand the spending to at least $3.3trn, which will likely happen much sooner than anticipated given the massive damage that has been done to the supply side of the economy, to private sector job creation, to incentives to work, and to Main Street in terms of pervasive small business closures and the destruction of small business equity.  In a related and toxic manner, the Treasury, led by Yellen, and the Fed, led by Powell, are working in unison to support all kinds of failed Keynesian initiatives such as cronyism, deficit spending, yield starvation, and inflation-fanning monetary base bloat to move us ever more deeply into stagflation — national balance sheet, a sound currency, Main Street property right protections, Main Street’s labor competitiveness, price discovery, incentives to save, incentives to produce, and a wealth of nations’ trajectory be damned.)

Add to enormous “stimulus” checks handed out to most American households increasingly widespread debt forgiveness and governmentally-approved non-compliance with mortgage and rental payments, and suddenly you get a lot of artificial buying power for the average voter without a pick up in supply as people prefer to get paid for not working/not producing, which is best reflected in a US labor force participation rate that, at 61.7% currently, is only 1.5 percentage points above last April’s hard lockdown level of 60.2%, which was the lowest labor force participation rate in over 47 years.  Obviously — and especially when combined with a highly expansionary monetary policy — this also makes for an increasingly inflationary economy, otherwise known as too many dollars chasing too few services and goods.  Speaking of rapidly rising inflation, “official” US consumer inflation rose at an annualized 5.0% rate in May, the fastest pace since 2008.  A more realistic measurement of consumer inflation, the SGS Alternate CPI, which measures consumer inflation as it was in 1980 prior to extensive substitution, “hedonic adjustments,” and a move to less representative weighting of what consumers actually buy, spiked to an annualized 12.3% recently (below), which by implication means that not only is the real economy in the US contracting, but it has typically been shrinking on an annual basis for decades:
                                                                                            http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/inflation-charts

In fact, accelerating inflation is manifesting itself widely in my SW Florida geography, as double-digit, and even select triple-digit, annual increases in the prices of homes, lumber, concrete, house paint, gasoline, oil, bicycles, beef, fish, cheese, car repairs, pool care, a medical exam, a dental cleaning, a chiropractic adjustment, a veterinary visit, pet Rx, homeowner’s insurance, car insurance, container shipment rates, and rental car rates, to name a few.  Moreover, accelerating inflation is also being registered at the national level, be it in surging commodity prices, or in rising producer and intermediate prices, and now at the consumer price level for goods and services alike.  Then there is a third leg to the stool, and it is the metamorphosis from the rest of the world (ROW) exporting deflation to America to exporting inflation; note that May’s import prices were a whopping 11.3% higher than a year ago, with inflation building.  

Budding external, or international, inflation can be attributed to many of the same “cast of inflationary characters” that have been pressuring prices higher domestically, namely government-mandated lockdowns, the substantial associated bankruptcies, the related supply chain shocks, and the resulting lingering goods, services, and shipping supply constraints — or outright and substantial shrinkage — juxtaposed against historic amounts of deficit-based fiscal stimulus financed by central bank money-printing.  In short, a perfect lockdown policy-triggered international and domestic stagflationary storm in the making, especially if the buck crumbles, which will turbocharge domestic price inflation while likely triggering “beggar thy neighbor” currency devaluation contests (more money printing) by mercantilist nations seeking weak currencies, further stoking global price inflation and entrenching inflationary expectations — and thus inflation — in the corporate and consumer worlds.  Moreover, when policy-mandated/artificial supply constraints (lockdowns) are combined with fiscally-induced, monetarily-enabled, UBI-triggered labor shortages, not only are broadly rising prices goods and services prices inevitable, but so are shortages, from lumber to gasoline to electronics-rich gadgets to vehicles loaded with electronics to rental car availability to airplane seats (eventually, and then all of a sudden). 

Speaking of shortages, decades of underinvestment — often due to increasingly expensive and lengthy permitting — in harvesting, mining, and drilling has not only made commodities as diverse as water, crops, copper, oil, and uranium scarcer, but more expensive.  The building global commodity supply problem was greatly worsened by the expansive and lengthy Corona virus policy lockdowns, which have raised the raw materials cost structure of a very wide range of goods and services (e.g., consider that there is oil in virtually all textiles and fabrics, in virtually all structures and gadgets, in the road on which you drive, and in gasoline and kerosene), which is now being passed on to a consumer with no choice.  To add insult to injury, potential workers are being incentivized to collect money-printing financed welfare instead of seeking a job in the US and elsewhere in the OECD world, adding labor cost pressures to commodity price inflation amidst surging currency debasement.  Quite the stagflationary recipe.  And do recall that historically hyperinflation has accompanied weak or negative real GDP growth or a collapse in aggregate supply  or sociopolitical instability or war; it has not accompanied small government, sound money, free market capitalism, productivity, and the stout growth with falling prices that productivity enables.  (At the micro level, this is called a growth company: innovation drives better products and services and lower manufacturing costs, which are passed on to consumers that buy in larger numbers, allowing production scale to magnify declining unit costs that offset lower average selling prices, enabling profit expansion via greater volume.)

Staying with lockdowns and their impact, it is precisely tyrannical, fascistic Democrat-run cities and states, which are typically anti-small business, have huge debts, have hugely generous public sector pensions, and have hugely underfunded public sector pension plans, that have collectively insisted on the most draconian and lasting lockdowns in America.  Those lockdowns, many of which are still in force, killed business activity and thus tax receipts, triggering even higher social safety net spending amidst tax receipt shrinkage.  That “double whammy” has to be addressed by the abused federal taxpayer under big government rule, by the yield-deprived saver under ZIRP looking at stagflation around the corner, by the Fed if creditor demand for bonds is lacking, and ultimately by international creditors facing ever greater USD devaluation risk.

The ever greater dollar devaluation risk is thanks to sustained monetary base expansion way in excess of real GDP growth.  It is also due to America’s huge net debtor status vis-à-vis the rest of the world, which continues to expand robustly, particularly since too many Americans are being paid not to work (nationally, a record 9.3m jobs openings were not being filled in April while Florida reported 513,000 unfilled jobs in May) or they have been prevented from going to work, triggering higher imports and less exports, further bloating America’s singularly huge and persistent trade deficits.  All this “borrowing from the future” casts a gigantic, growing shadow over the dollar’s buying power as the currency will increasingly and painfully “price in,” or reflect, our extreme prolificacy.  This is how a currency is destroyed.  The dollar has been able to resist the laws of economics and finance for a protracted period of time thanks to its reserve currency status.  The extra rope thus extended will lead to an even more wrenching and painful fall for the vast majority of the American citizenry.

The aforesaid couldn’t interest politicians less — and sadly, most citizens that vote, either.  With the Democrats controlling both the elected branches of the federal government as well as the bureaucracy, they are looking to go even bigger, in terms of deficit spending.  And they are in a hurry, especially with 2022 elections coming into view and their need to buy votes to soften the societal and economic mayhem of their “Jonestown” policies.  A counterproductive $2.5trn “infrastructure” bill laden with pork and redistributionist cronyism that will (again) be “washed through” the massive federal bureaucracy is in the works, despite the current Republican opposition, which may be buckling, in true RINO fashion, i.e., before it is recast to include a hopefully DOA $6trn bastard child.

In addition, the bill will, once again, not live up to its misleading name, as only 25% is devoted to true infrastructure that is pivotal to the functioning and productivity of the broad economy — items such as roads, bridges, electric transmission lines, electric grid infrastructure, pipelines, and water, sewage, and hazardous waste facilities.  It will, once again, have more to do with pandering to the Democratic base ($400bn will be spent to force unionization!), buying votes, and green crony redistributionism (the Green New Deal) that will make leftist billionaires even richer while it subsidizes wealthy Tesla buyers and sets the stage for even higher power costs and gasoline prices for Main Street.  Speaking of Main Street, Biden’s infrastructure bill is the first step in ending suburban single-family zoning.  Democratic urban America will be incentivized and subsidized to extend its footprint and multi-story building density into towns and suburbs, effectively creating urban sprawl financed by Republican/Red State suburban and rural America, whose city councils will get incentivized, and even blackmailed, into forsaking new single family housing permits (you could also call it forsaking “county-level” federalism) by a federal bureaucracy bent on centralization and determination of local zoning laws.  This crass, statist/collectivist redistributionism would more appropriately be called reconfiguration and nationalization of suburban and rural America by the federal government mob than an infrastructure bill.  You can also call it another Biden fraud.

In any event, total up all the Trump ($4.1trn) and Biden ($7.6trn and counting) vote-buying, redistributionism, and pork spending, commitments, and intentions over the past year or so, and you’re looking at $11.7trn in additional government spending on top of the $4.9trn the federal government was spending annually, i.e., before the “Coronacrats” got a hold of it.  The vast bulk, if not all, of that $7.6trn in additional US federal government spending courtesy of the Biden administration will take place within two years or less.  Conservatively annualized, that amounts to $3.8trn in additional federal spending (with more likely to come), which is the rough equivalent of a scalding 17% of annual US GDP, and it will all be deficit spending, because a) Biden’s tax rate hikes will yield little in net new tax revenue especially in a weakening economy, and b) because the US federal government was already running a nearly trillion dollar deficit going into the virus policy response disaster and prior to an even bigger spender than Trump, namely Biden, who, as mentioned, wants to increase domestic spending by a stunning 16%.   Talk about doubling down on an increasingly misallocated, debt laced, statist economy.

Upshot: look for the Fed to massively increase its balance sheet as it soaks up trillions of dollars in deficit spending that the ROW is getting tired of financing in order to prevent rising long-term bond yields, which a highly indebted bubble economy couldn’t handle.  Talk about a proliferation of dollars in the pipeline, and that’s before foreigners shed any dollars.  THIS is how you spell inflation! And it is government-engineered inflation that is the most destructively impoverishing force for low and middle-income people who bear the full brunt of because a) they spend the vast majority of their limited incomes and b) because they typically cannot acquire the financial and real assets that stand to profit from broadly rising prices, including stocks with material P&L exposure to vital commodities, farmland, and precious metals.

Sustained and huge deficit spending, be it at the federal or the state or county level, is nothing other than thinly disguised property theft for taxpayers whose taxes will rise markedly when endless debt expansion ends as well as a) for those unable to shield themselves from the inflation debt monetization inevitably creates (the vast majority of the population), b) for foreign creditors exposed to dollar devaluation, c) for all creditors given the immense valuation implosion sensitivity near-zero yield bonds have to rising interest rates (so-called duration exposure), and d) for young and future generations stuck with massive IOUs they didn’t generate, which is destabilizing financially, politically, and socially.   No entity, be it a nation, a state, a county, a business, or a family can continue to spend beyond its means forever, piling debt on top of debt forever, simply because creditors won’t allow it and because central bankers can’t print the money to perpetually finance even more deficit spending without destroying their increasingly overabundant currencies’ purchasing power, which will cause interest rates to soar, which will devastate the value of bonds, as happened in the late ’70s and into the early ’80s, when the 10-year Treasury yield topped out at 15.8% in September of ’81.

Regarding debt, it rose at all levels in the US to an imposing $83.5trn by year-end 2020 from $75.5trn at year-end 2019, a $8trn increase, a number which equates to a whopping 37% of last year’s American GDP, which came in at $21.5trn!  Debt that is the equivalent of almost 4 times annual output is sobering enough.  But if bonds flip from a 40-year bull market to a secular bear market, and we only get a mean 10-year Treasury rate of 4.5%, or some three percentage points higher than today, then the cost of carrying that debt would rise by roughly $2.4trn p.a. before all too long, which would be the equivalent of 10.9% of GDP all by itself.  If we had reversion beyond the mean, which Mr. Market always ultimately provides, regardless of the delaying machinations by central banks, that $2.4trn higher annualized borrowing cost in a few years would constitute just a small preview of much bigger debt financing cost increases, which would obliterate the economy, spike leverage, tank the dollar, raise borrowing costs even further, and heat up price inflation possibly beyond the double-digit inflation of the stagflationary ’70s.  In short, if history is any guide, it would unleash a banana republic future featuring massive unrest, poverty, and political instability.

If we drill down into that “all-sector” debt of $83.5trn at the commercial and retail real estate level, it is incumbent upon investors to consider the outsized “house of cards” risk in overbuilt and over-indebted commercial real estate (over $3trn in debt), which the Corona virus policy-based lockdown tyranny has turned into a crisis of such proportions that this may sink the US economy, and what’s left of its tattered balance sheet, all by itself, courtesy of a sizable non-performing commercial loan ripple effect.   For flavor, consider that as of March American mall values had cratered by an average 60% within one year.  Or, consider the national and global commercial real estate implosion (e.g., empty offices) thanks to the lockdowns.  Talk about the ultimate asset valuation fallout risk authored by our public officials’ “asset bubble blowing” monetary policy followed by draconian lockdown diktats, which may well lead to the worst central planning meltdown ever.

In the meantime, the public sector debt, deficit, and money printing binges that have immensely empowered and enriched statists, cronies (big business in bed with big government politicians, and especially with the tenured Democratic bureaucrats and their extortionist plaintiffs’ tort lawyer pals), and takers in general at the expense of Main Street makers have reverberated, as stated, well beyond the federal debt and deficits.  One of those reverberations has long been manifested in an artificially depressed 10-year Treasury Bond yield.  That Treasury is the “benchmark” interest rate or cost of capital, on a risk-adjusted basis, for the entire economy, i.e., those participants that can access capital, which, beyond mortgage financing, is typically limited to larger institutions.  Upshot: savers have been substantially harmed financially for over a decade with yield deprivation while small businesses have been capital starved or unable to access the cheap capital Corporate America has binged on to buy back its own stock instead of investing more substantially in organic growth.  The “collateral damage” caused by our toxic “central planners” or public policy makers is evident in terms of a protracted period of low new business formations, low Main Street capital formation, increasing industry concentration, growing oligopoly/monopoly profits, declining meritocracy-based job and contract awards, and marked permanent closings of small businesses on the heels of the tragic virus response.  All said, this not only decreases competition and choice, but it stifles innovation, eviscerates productivity growth, and reduces economic activity and new job openings even as small businesses remain the (beleaguered) workhorse of output and jobs in both the US and other OECD nations.  This is also how one spells stagflation accompanied by less innovation. 

While the US government’s electronic printing press, and that of other OECD nations, can continue to print the money to pay for deficit spending, or for politically effective and lucrative, lobbyist-based redistributionism from Main Street taxpayers and free market makers to various taker leeches closer to the Eccles Building’s counterfeiting, be they bureaucrats, K-Street cronies, Wall Street cronies, ambulance-chasing plaintiff trial lawyers, and a rapidly growing population of UBI recipients, common sense, ECON 101, and history tell us that debt cannot continue to go up relative to income and assets indefinitely.  How do you go bankrupt?  Two ways.  Gradually, then suddenly.  The first sign of impending financial doom is typically reflected by a rapid and material loss of confidence in a currency in which that debt is priced.  This is manifested in a plummeting currency.  Sky-rocketing interest rates quickly follow, as does surging inflation.  Most economic participants, especially the poor and the middle class with limited income and little if anything in the way of portfolio-based inflation protection, end up paying a disproportionately heavy price for governmental prolificacy enabled by the printing press.  In The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), John Maynard Keynes wrote: “Lenin was certainly right. There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency. The process engages all the hidden forces of economic law on the side of destruction, and does it in a manner which not one man in a million is able to diagnose.”

In the interim, look for significant and ever more encompassing tax hikes, i.e., once US politicians agree on even more reckless spending out of an empty pocket.  Those tax rate increases will dampen reported taxable income, incentives,  and thus economic activity, as history has shown, but that won’t stop the class warfare demagoguery.  In fact, you don’t need much imagination here, for the Democrats are already moving to institute anti-science, anti-growth carbon and anti-rural (anti-Red State) mileage taxes on top of CO2 output levies, a toxic brew that if sustained would propel us back into pre-industrial age living conditions (more on that down the page).  Higher death taxes are already being spooled up, which will be devastating to small businesses and family farms if they are signed into law.  And higher marginal tax rates will either lead or follow, which Corporate America, courtesy of its symbiotic/fascistic relationship with big government (lobbyists typically write “1,000 page” redistributionist/corporate pork bills that senators and representatives never read), will be able to skirt or offset courtesy of loopholes that Corporate America’s (Big Cap’s) sizable staff of tax minimization artists/lobbyists authored and will exploit — loopholes that aren’t available to Main Street makers or family farmers.  And this is prior to the fleecing of Main Street to first “wash it through” the 2.1m strong federal bureaucracy, which then awards and rewards Corporate America with this an ever-growing, sped-up transfer of wealth — redistributionism as described above.  It’s all about bureaucrats aligned with cronies under the guise of “societal equity” (codified discrimination), “green” (not) energy, CO2 reduction (more below on that negative productivity shakedown racket), and other Marxist claptrap that always ends up impoverishing the masses and lording over them.

Higher marginal tax rates and policy-based fossil fuel scarcity will hit “Red State,” Main Street America hard while throwing another wet blanket on to very supply side of the economy that has been (even more) strangled by the Corona virus policy lockdown response.  It will also make America even more import dependent, adding to both unemployment and trade deficits.  Clearly, a nation with a gargantuan and rising overall trade deficit cannot, by definition, be a strong economy nation, especially when the trade deficit is mostly comprised of consumer goods.  Higher taxes and more levies will only worsen America’s globally competitive output gap as capital will seek more receptive locations.

Higher taxes also typically yield a double-whammy for most non-crony, Main Street makers and Main Street job takers.  This manifests itself in terms of the value of their savings, or their property, and in terms of their P&L and their compensation, respectively, which get bludgeoned by an output disincentive consisting of higher taxes, higher inflation, even more regulatory compliance costs, and an even more litigious, and thus inhibitive and expensive, business operating environment.  This will manifest itself thanks to plaintiff trial lawyer leeches being “rewarded” by a) being able to “chase down” newly minted regulatory compliance shortfalls ginned up by an expansionary, insatiable administrative state and b) by the president they helped to elect, who is enabling that expansion.  

The aforesaid, and this is before an even more crushing load of regulatory insanity and litigation risks courtesy of the highly destructive and fascistic (criminal) Corona virus policy response, is the result of an unholy alliance between leftist hedge funds, fascist Corporate America, plaintiff trial lawyers, America’s leading teachers’ unions, and the Democratic party.  The aforesaid constituencies finance and get the vote out for in a big way for the Democratic party– an elitist, totalitarian party that currently controls virtually everything and all our leading institutions.

If that wasn’t enough valuation or output or income headwind for US assets, America keeps on becoming an ever-larger debtor nation thanks to running perennially large and growing goods and services trade deficits.  The overall trade deficit, currently at an over over $800bn annual run rate, means ever more interest paid by Americans instead of interest collected, ever more US asset sales-based consumption by Americans instead of investment in new domestic production, and declining capacity to produce globally competitive goods.  In all, this will feed on itself to hit manufacturing output (at nearly 23m, government workers at all levels exceed manufacturing workers by 86%, a tally which has fallen by 29% over the past two decades), employment, and economic self-sufficiency hard — for flavor, consider May’s 559,000 growth in total nonfarm US payrolls, which had productivity and output robbing government jobs increase by 67,000 while US manufacturing employment grow by only 23,000 (4.1% of total!).  Meanwhile, May 2021’s total US nonfarm payroll employment was still 7.6m, or 5%, below February 2020’s pre-Corona virus policy response level!  The one-two punch of sharply rising US debt and increasingly feeble manufacturing competitiveness make America and dollar-based assets vulnerable to a potential flood of US asset sales (mainly bonds and stocks) by the rest of the world (ROW) that would accompany foreigners’ reduced appetite for buying, much less holding, US assets, which would place US inflation and interest rates under upward pressure while incentivizing foreign producers to ship their wares to “free cash flow” nations with sound(er) currencies. 

As the ROW holds, on a net basis, over $14trn in US assets, this is no idle concern.  And as these assets are priced in dollars, this would bode ill for the buck’s relative exchange value, which would further fan rising inflation in the process, and potentially help ignite rising inflationary expectations, which the Fed and other leading central banks have long been seeking — for proof, reflect on a decade plus of globally unparalleled fiat currency debasement and counterfeiting also known as ZIRP, NIRP, and QE, respectively.   In a world defined by currency destruction, the biggest debtor with the largest deficits will ultimately have the weakest currency.  This is is the dollar’s fate.  To add insult to injury, add an even more deficit-ridden US fiscal policy that has to ultimately be financed by the Fed’s electronic printing press. En route, drive the world’s highest liability costs per unit of GDP (nearly 3x Europe’s) — and the associated unparalleled regulatory compliance costs — higher still, i.e., taxpayer money siphoned off to “ambulance chasing” lawyers, bureaucratic leeches, and their hangers on in possibly the biggest, most unconstitutional redistributionism (theft) of all.  And note that typically well-cloaked regulatory compliance costs will be more easily passed on to buyers during a reflationary period.  Increasing compliance costs (just think Biden’s expanding bureaucracy or the CYA Corona virus compliance circus) will further dampen increasingly feeble US economic and productivity growth — they are tied at the hip — leading to rising US unit labor costs and yet higher American consumer goods and services inflation.

In a related fashion, the ROW appears increasingly concerned about the permanently spendthrift, hugely incompetent, and deficit-and-debt-ridden US government, increasingly copious trade deficits, and the Fed’s willingness to “print the money out of thin air” to pay the bills — a government cannot spend trillions and trillions of newly printed dollars through the incompetent bureaucrats up and down the chain from the feds to the states to localities without taxpayers and creditors being taken to the cleaners.  That increasing concern is best displayed below in a chart that shows the dollar’s pronounced decline in terms of its share of global reserve currencies (the euro is the beneficiary), which is a loose benchmark for how much trade is conducted in the dollar versus in other currencies, and thus a leading indicator of dollar weakness spawned by reduced transactional demand for the currency:

 

Sustained mismanagement fallout on dollar asset valuations (and crack-up boom allocation implications):

Needless to say, sooner or later “all that” is going to be reflected in a plunging dollar, current Fed-speak notwithstanding.  Specifically, on the heels of the Fed’s balance sheet ballooning by $112bn in one week as per June 16th, 2021, Fed officials recently mentioned reducing bond purchases from $120bn per month, which they would set the stage for raising the Fed Funds rate in two steps from zero (0.1%) currently to 0.50% by late 2023 — instead of in 2024.  In the interim, intractably large trade deficits keep expanding, debt keeps surging, money printing keeps accelerating, consumer price inflation keeps increasing, the real rate of return (the interest rate less inflation) is becoming progressively more negative, and the Fed remains “married” to its stock and bond bubble offspring.  

Said differently, and as history has amply shown, the Fed will sacrifice the dollar in order to sustain its asset bubbles, which remain inflated thanks to its policies, namely (what has turned into) chronic ZIRP and QE.  Sooner rather than later, the ROW will increasingly value the US currency based economic and financial realities and on Fed policy instead of Fed speak.  The dollar will then hit an air pocket, especially if the Fed is successful in talking it up now.  A tanking dollar will boost inflation to even higher levels in import dependent America — for import dependency flavor, just order something from Amazon or go to Walmart’s non-food section or to Home Depot.

A plummeting dollar will also eventually pressure bond prices, likely severely, given the fact that the Fed will sacrifice the dollar to hold down bond yields for as long as possible  (FALAP) to keep the debt edifice from crumbling for as long as possible.  The reason for this, as touched on elsewhere, is deceptively simple: a nation whose total current debt was just tabulated at $84.6trn as per Q1:201, or 3.8x the most recent snapshot of annualized GDP of $22.1trn, can ill afford to pay substantially higher interest rates (a one percentage rate higher cost of average funding would increase interest expense by $846bn, or 3.8% of GDP).  This is all the more true given that all US debt is currently compounding at a $4.4trn rate, and unparalleled deficits are expanding, implying even higher compounding as the year continues to unfold.   Meanwhile, that same nation prints the money to finance the new debt and to refinance the maturing debt, in the process hoovering up debt issuance and putting a floor under bond prices, i.e., until unparalleled debt monetization “triggers” bond vigilantes increasingly concerned by both mounting monetary inflation and insolvency risks.

Investors increasingly concerned with monetary inflation (money printing) will reallocate away, at least at the all-important margin, from bond and stock valuation bubbles into commodities (already happening in a big way), which will add additional pressure to rising consumer goods and services inflation, adding more fuel to inflationary pressure emanating from rising wage costs engineered by “spreading UBI.”  Turning to the real economy, with a wide assortment of goods and services prices going up in double digit annual terms here in SW Florida (as detailed above) and likely throughout much of the country, it won’t take much more to perpetuate inflationary expectations for corporate purchasing agents, small business owners, and consumers.  Those participants have already experienced the initial secular upturn in inflation, which will profoundly impact their inventory behavior away from “just in time” to “more is better” in a rising price environment, in the process lifting both the money multiplier and monetary velocity, further underpinning firming prices in a supply and labor short world.  Increasingly intractable inflationary expectations by both investors and real economy participants will help to manifest and then perpetuate the CPI inflation that the Fed has long unleashed at the monetary base level, but has largely been reflected in asset bubbles underpinned by its own counterfeiting and, until recently, by foreign creditor nations “recycling” their dollar-based export surpluses back into US financial assets.  ZIRP bonds, in a four decades-old bull market, couldn’t look more vulnerable.  

In a related fashion, and as you know, bond and stock valuations are tied at the discount (interest) rate hip, so once bonds re-enter a bear market borne of both inflationary and insolvency concerns (welcome to fiat currency regimes’ dual disasters that have played out over time in so many countries lacking monetary discipline!), stocks will also get repriced in terms of progressively lower P/E valuations and progressively higher E/Ps (inverted P/Es), or earnings yields.  Consider Blue Chips (S&P 500 stocks) to be investment grade bond substitutes to a considerable extent.  For graphical flavor of their shared valuation journey over nearly seven decades, below please see the insightful S&P 500 reported earnings yield versus US Treasury 10-year yield chart by Yardeni.  This means both bond and stock valuations should enter secular bear markets pretty much in sync, or with only a minor lag by one or the other asset class, with each other.

Bear markets are typified by high bond yields and low stock P/Es.  Out of favor bonds and stocks must offer much more enticing returns to investors. The upcoming bear markets will not only be of the typical “reversion beyond the valuation mean” variety that manic-depressive Mr. Market always provides, but this time around, given all the monetary heroin-induced debt, misallocations, and unproductive redistributions to both cronies and an expanding welfare constituency, unprecedentedly high valuations of both bond coupons and stock EPS will likely be further compacted by America’s, and the OECD world’s, protracted and increasingly stout anti-free market, anti-price discovery, anti-capital formation (the fruits of a generation of yield starvation!), anti-dense energy, anti-productivity, currency counterfeiting, perpetually more indebted  “toxic public policy stew!”  Translation: not only will bond coupons and EPS (shareholder earnings) be assigned lower valuations thanks to the coming secular, highly overdue bond bear market, but those coupons and those EPS will likely come under sustained (secular) pressure, suggesting a one-two punch that could well result in unparalleled declines in bonds’ market value, in stocks’ prices or market caps, and in highly interest rate-sensitive real estate.  While less overvalued bonds and stocks in more financially solid countries stand to do at least relatively well, when Mr. Market trumps the Fed and goes from manic to depressive, in the process devastating America’s bond and stock valuations, don’t expect the considerably correlated ROW to remain “valuation untouched” when the global general gets taken down.   

The first, still tepid indication a one-two punch potentially in the making, i.e., an analogous reduction in the valuation of bond coupons and share EPS, or rising earnings yields and bond yields, is on display below.  Caveat: there is one mis-representative caveat as regards Yardeni’s current S&P 500’s earnings yield (E/P) of 4.8%, or an implied S&P 500 P/E of “only” 21.  It is this: Yardeni’s outfit moved to flatter S&P 500 earnings beyond GAAP reality some time ago, which involved forgiving select restructuring charges even though involved businesses weren’t sold or terminated, as previously commented on, and as long observed by others at the corporate reporting level.  This very fact has led to an overstated S&P 500 earnings yield over for the better part of the prior decade.  For a source-based “hard and true” numbers perspective currently, and setting aside creeping earnings residual inflation de facto condoned by GAAP, the S&P 500’s current P/E based on the index’s closing price at the top of this post and on trailing 12-months of “as reported” (GAAP) earnings is 34, not 21 (equivalent to a 4.8% earnings yield). That P/E of 34 can be ascertained by going to S&P’s site and coming up with $128.20 in index earnings through Q1:21.  That P/E flipped results in an S&P 500 earnings yield of 2.9%, not 4.8%!  Plus, the current Treasury yield is nearly 1.4%, not Yardeni’s latest (July 6, 2021) web-based Treasury yield of 1.6%.  As such, true(er) earnings yields and true bond yields, namely 2.9% and 1.4%, respectively, are much closer together than the unfortunate misrepresentation below of 4.8% and 1.6% implies. The bigger point: bond yields and earnings yields (“E/Ps”) are tied at the hip and remain strategically correlated as the graph below shows, so look out below, stock valuations and share prices, once the 10-year Treasury enters a serious bear market.

                                                        Source: https://www.yardeni.com/pub/sp500earnyield.pdf               

Moreover, look for increasingly pernicious “real world” inflation to eat away at both the purchasing power of most bonds, stocks, and real estate (real estate values are highly negatively correlated with mortgage financing costs).  Said adds insult to injury emanating from the upcoming NPV (net present value) compression of stocks and bonds alike, as depicted above during periods of surging earnings yields and Treasury bond yields — during periods of sharply rising interest rates.  In other words, not only do today’s bubble stock and bond valuations (i.e., high P/Es and low yields) stand to be eviscerated in sync with these assets’ upcoming NPV compression, but the purchasing power of the remaining “shareholder earnings stubs” are going to get another “haircut.”  Not just a double-whammy, but really a triple-whammy: rising goods and services prices, lower stock and bond valuations thanks to rising interest/discount rates, and reduced earnings power and balance sheet strength in a stagflationary economy that will likely make the late ’70s and early ’80s stagflation pale in comparison.  How so?  Via sustained and increasing monetary base expansion of the dollar coupled with economic participants rising proclivity to put those dollars.  Those factors will ignite the both the velocity of money, which is still in a “deep sleep,” and it will turbocharge the money multiplier, leading to an outsized increase in the money supply, which will drastically overwhelm increasingly depressed economic output — in other words, a crack-up boom.  Your stocks and bonds will be worth a lot less in a rapidly rising inflation, rapidly rising interest rate, plummeting real growth/weak EPS world. 

Let me circle back to NPVs (net present values) one last time.   NPVs are estimates of future income or dividend streams that are worth less when rising inflation and rising default risks push up the discount rate, which pushes down the value of corresponding assets.  Think of the late ’70s into the early ’80s, and double-digit bond yields and single-digit P/Es/double-digit earnings yields for flavor, which the above chart portrays so well.  Now consider Shiller’s current nosebleed 46.4 P/E (Shiller’s calculation appears to still lack complete incorporation of Q1:21 results) of twelve-month trailing, as reported S&P 500 earnings, a P/E that is 190% (2.9 times) higher than the S&P 500’s historical mean P/E of 16.0.  Or, consider 10-year US Treasury yields that are currently a puny 1.4%, 69% below the 10-year’s historical mean yield of 4.5% — note that the historical mean yield is 3.2 times higher than the current yield.  If stocks and bonds returned to mean valuations, prior to any marked EPS compression (Income statement EPS “residuals” fluctuate much more than GDP does) and prior to even more pronounced monetization and/or insolvency risks, well over half of the current traded value of stocks and bonds as asset classes would be at risk.  And when you contemplate this, recall that manic-depressive markets are reversion beyond the mean valuation “machines.”  Boom or bust valuations are much more common than mean valuations, which assets pierce en route to over or under-valuations.  Remember that we’ve been at boom (bubble) valuation levels for an unprecedented period of time.  Then juxtapose that against the increasingly ingrained toxic public policy stew mentioned in considerable detail throughout this post, including in this section.  In plain English, US-based bond and stock prices could come down in excess of 75% from today’s levels for exposed investors.

And dwell on this, dear reader: investors and speculators are currently starting to price in a more hawkish — than ZIRP and unprecedented US money printing — Fed monetary policy.  This is currently visible with rising government bonds or falling 10-year Treasury yields.  Yet bubble valuation America, and the world at large, are more indebted and misallocated than ever.  Collectively, these are the progeny of currency counterfeiters (the world’s central banks).  Are the leading central banks going sacrifice their own asset bubble offspring and plunge the economy into recession?  Are they going to stop printing the money with which to “pay” for large public sector deficits?  Are are they going to move to slow down the very accelerating rising prices their monetary policy has created, and thus nip in the bud the only hope too many governments have to “inflate away” an increasingly onerous debt, the vast majority of which is issued in non-inflation adjusted (e.g., TIPS) terms?  Not if you consider the ECB’s recent communique, which raised its inflation target.  And certainly not if you consider the Fed, which has stated repeatedly that it would find consumer goods inflation above 2% acceptable to “make up for” years during which inflation was “too low!”

And even if we set our currency counterfeiter’s destructiveness aside for a moment, Paul Volcker’s tough love would be impossible to revisit simply because of the explosion of American, and also global, debt to GDP.  Recall, if you will, what leading central banks have done since the institutionalization of widespread, unparalleled currency debasement began some 15 years ago: each time there is a risk of a stock market swoon or an actual material drop, they immediately commit to saving their indefensible edifices, while they claim to promote “full employment” through monetary policy, which of course only increases inflation and lowers real economic growth — hardly a recipe for firming payrolls, but never mind.  Why should the current round of central banks’ tiny steps away from ZIRP and NIRP and money printing, including the Fed’s most recent effort to withdraw excess corporate liquidity in the reverse REPO market —  be any different, or short-lived, this time around?  In fact, the Fed’s and other leading central banks’ currency debasement fire hoses will need to intervene more quickly and convincingly for very well known reasons, including reversing expectations of tightening ASAP to avoid a historic asset valuation meltdown on the one hand, and an excess cleansing correction for their crony pals on Wall Street and K Street on the other hand, which nearly occurred in September 2019 as the Fed stepped in to “bail them out.”  Nevertheless, markets fall for central banks’ crying wolf time and time again.  Any observer with a bit of recall knows this, so why do tactical investors get hoodwinked?  Mysteries aside, strategic investors can capitalize on “inflation plays that go on sale.”  Not only may enhanced return opportunities (lower valuations) to buy ownership stakes in vital dense energy, ag, and precious metals assets present themselves, but potential returns will get yet another lift thanks to, you guessed it, a sooner-rather-than-later return to unprecedented fiat currency destruction.

What kind of investable assets make sense in such a world, as pertains to your liquid and disposable funds?  Not ZIRP and NIRP bonds offering negative real (world) returns, not most stocks, especially not massively overpriced US stocks as defined by leading index valuations and by the best known, most hyped stocks, where record margin debt has been deployed.  Consider selling overpriced bonds and stocks and fleeing into the lacking interest rate sensitivity T-Bills and other short term “investment grade” government bonds because they can print the money to repay you.  Consider attractively-valued resource stocks, especially in the ag and dense energy sectors.  Consider generally more attractive overseas stocks trading in less unsound currencies, and, last but not least, consider acquiring at least a satellite allocation in real money over thousands of years, physical gold and silver.  And if you purchase stocks, request the certificates; don’t hold them in street name with your broker, thereby eliminating brokerage risk.  Should you buy physical precious metals, make sure you do so through a reputable dealer and then outside of the banking system so your safety deposit box assets won’t get assets won’t get bailed in.  Lastly, from an American perspective, consider reallocating a material portion of your assets in nations and currencies which have better balance sheets, better trade balances, more intact rule of law, and smaller, less interventionist (meddling and pilfering) governments.  Given the growing likelihood of currency controls in the future combined with bubble valuation gifts waiting to be harvested while they last, there no time like today to contemplate and execute this.  The bird of time is on the wing.

 

Policy and societal insanity beyond, or in addition to, fiscal and monetary lunacy:

De facto UBI:
I’d be remiss if I didn’t begin this section by stating perhaps the ultimate economic and societal insanity, at least tactically speaking.  Specifically, incentivizing lots of people not to return to work by showering them with money printing-financed government unemployment checks.  This is not how you increase domestic output, especially as lots of small businesses, the teetering backbone of the economy that already got walloped by expansive and prolonged lockdowns, now can’t find (affordable) workers.  The reasons: those would-be workers get paid by Uncle Sam to relax.  Those would-be workers often end up making more on the dole than they did while they were employed.  Depressing output while printing money is a recipe for stagflation.  Call it sustaining a highly toxic Corona virus policy response for political reasons, this time to re-elect Democrats.  Or, call it a tactical springboard into strategic UBI, same rationale.

 

Corona virus policy response insanity (and tyranny for Main Street):
Let me turn to the strategic blunder aspects of the globally disastrous Corona virus policy response, starting with a PCR test that was never to be used for infectious disease determination, according to its inventor, yet has been put to global use, in the process generating false positives with tremendous personal and business restrictions, from quarantines to lockdowns, leaving a tale of societal woe in its wake.  In human terms, the Corona virus policy “cure” has proven much worse than the disease.  A disease that has proven deadly to 0.27% of the people it infects (and less than 0.1% deadly to those 70 and under that are infected by it, making the Corona virus less deadly than the average flu for said cohort!).  Nevertheless, that “Covidocracy cure” has created untold havoc, dislocation, impoverishment, strife, despondency, depression, and illiquidity.     The ugly faces of the Covidocracy pushed upon us by fascist Coronacrats (oligarchs and bureaucrats) are best displayed by hours of masking-up with masks whose lattice lets the virus particles through as they decrease oxygenation and increase CO2 inhalation, by arbitrary and interaction/relationship damaging distancing, and by de facto vaccination diktats for experimental and health-curdling, DNA altering concoction — including for children, who if living normal lives typically have close to zero Corona virus exposure risk.  If that wasn’t toxic enough, the Corona virus vaccinations’ efficacy in terms of materially reducing — say by 25% — the 0.27% global death rate of those contracting it has not even been established — and even if it is established, which is highly unlikely, at what huge cost in terms of societal damage, liberty lost, business bankrupted, and the material reduction in overall healthcare efficacy and availability?  (Can anyone putting this all together be blamed for wondering whether there isn’t a sinister agenda, such as depopulation, at work by the global “Davos crowd” plutocrat puppeteers?)

Any individual with a small sense of history (or an ability to go online) knows that viruses are about as common as colds and just as difficult to constrain/contain, at least on wide basis.  We also know intuitively that the best way for society as a whole to “have at” a new bug is be well-nourished, keep hydrated, take some good supplements, exercise frequently, get enough sleep, laugh enough, hug enough, don’t worry (be happy), don’t live in a sterile bubble (“bubble boy’s” immune system will fall down on the job), go to work, go to social events, and get enough sunshine, fresh air, and playtime —  and avoid useless, health-damaging masks.  THIS is the only recipe that allows for optimal health, happiness, normalcy, and a good (at least better) economy for the largest segment of the population.  We also know that historically we have only sheltered and isolated (locked down) the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us from flus or viruses while we let the bug spread throughout the land until natural herd immunity largely puts it down.  Nature at work.  There aren’t nearly 7.9bn of us by accident, cell biology basics-denying, neo-Medieval WHO! That same outfit issued this frightening proclamation last October: “In other words, herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.   Never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic. It is scientifically and ethically problematic.”  Translation: only vaccinations work.  A suitable quote: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” – H.L. Mencken

Speaking of vaccinations, “adverse events from drugs and vaccines are common, but underreported.  Although 25% of ambulatory patients experience an adverse drug event, less than 0.3% of all adverse drug events and 1-13% of serious events are reported to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Likewise, fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.”  With alt media reporting of adverse to highly adverse events reaching into the thousands courtesy of eminently credible scientists and doctors (please see articles section below), there could be hundreds of thousands of adverse events such as blood clots, thrombosis, reproductive system issues, coordination issues, vision issues, and strokes related to Corona virus vaccinations that are going unreported.  In earlier times, vaccinations were suspended after a small number of so-called adverse events.  In earlier times, what is going on today would have been considered medical malpractice.  It still is, and on an absolutely unprecedented scale. i.e., if we set aside the tragedy of thousands upon thousands of unnecessary Corona virus-related deaths that timely administration of proven, affordable medications such as Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine could have prevented.  Call it a malpractice double whammy.  Which the globalist Coronacrats want to double down on with virus vaccination tyranny, namely by requiring proof of inoculation via vaccine passports!  Such passports will be used to increasingly limit access to stores, events, planes, etc.  Such passports make no sense, and are only about “command and control.”

In economic terms, the Corona virus policy insanity and tyranny has resulted in 44% less small US businesses (choose “small businesses open” link) being open in June 2021 compared to January 2020 , prior to the onset of lockdowns.  Small businesses remain the much maligned backbone of the economy and employment.  How can we have a strong economy with small business on its back and huge and growing lockdown-triggered supply chain issues?

In financial terms, debt and money printing over the same period went through the roof.  Simultaneously,  highly effective, off-patent, very affordable (as in well under $40 per Rx) Corona virus mitigation solutions were smeared or rejected because Big Pharma, which has bullet proof liability protection as regards vaccinations, has been investing in experimental vaccinations that can bring hundreds of billions of dollars of profit to the industry.   And if Big Pharma and its cronies have their way, they will be coming out with a slew of at best unnecessary follow-up vaccinations to address perpetually weaker, less deadly mutations (variants) of the Corona virus, in the process casting aside spreading herd immunity as nature’s best protection.  Worst of all, thousands of lives have been unnecessarily lost to the virus due to political and monetary concerns.  This is beyond reprehensible, and certainly not consistent with the Hippocratic oath that physicians take to do no harm.  Doesn’t the buck ultimately stop with them?  How about widespread malpractice, instead?  How about a disastrous Corona virus policy response not only in the US, but in most OECD nations.  Upshot: the cure is worse than the disease.

Speaking of cures, four months after Texas ended its lockdowns, mask mandates, and social distancing insanity, average daily Corona virus in the Lone Star state continue to “flatline,” making a mockery of ignorant, thuggish Biden’s “Neanderthal thinking” description of Texas Gov. Abbott’s “reopening” decision on the one hand, and double-mask Fauci’s warning that the “inexplicable” decisions by the governors of Texas and Mississippi could lead to another spike in cases on the other hand.  More importantly, it showed how ineffective the lockdown, masking-up and distancing tyranny has been.  This was also displayed by comparing sister states North and South Dakota.  The northern state largely locked-down, masked up, and “distanced” while the southern state remained unmolested.  The two states had quite similar Corona virus death per capita tallies, yet the southern state’s businesses and freedoms weren’t crushed, and stout increases in Corona virus policy triggered depressions and suicides were avoided in the southern state.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the Brits have been “good little subjects,” dutifully obeying the authorities by living a dehumanizing, masked-up life, practicing “physical distancing” for the past year, and suffering under multiple and widespread lockdowns to the point of frequent small business insolvency.  Yet despite being obedient subjects, as of March 55% of them had developed Corona virus antibodies.  Translation: lockdowns, distancing, and masks are largely ineffective, if not down right useless, in terms of preventing the spread of virus particles/the virus, just as many scientists (including initially the highly political Fauci and the WHO itself) and yours truly were convinced of all along.  Yet most politicians and bureaucrats, and the fascist companies in bed with them, have insisted, until very recently, on carrying forward this tyrannical insanity, this inhumanity, and this economic destructiveness to expand and sustain their freedom and property rights-pummeling agenda, in the process eliminating as much (Main Street/small business) competition as possible.  Sound familiar?

The politicization of science and the sheer demagoguery associated with the Corona virus in order to increasingly lord over us is “the earth is flat” stunning, frightening, and criminal.  It is all about the puppeteers controlling the “unwashed.”

This is all the more true if the highly questionable rationale, efficacy, and safety of experimental, emergency-use-only (there is no emergency) Corona virus vaccinations, which are literally being forced upon the majority of the population, often in a backhanded manner (no shot, no job; no shot, no school), are also considered.  Below some Corona virus-related articles for some flavor on how capricious, arbitrary, despotic, destructive, and insane the past 16 months have been:

What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth?
The Truth Behind the Mask – Nova Scotia Children
MASKS TODAY, MASKS TOMORROW, MASKS FOREVER!
US Navy ripped for adding face mask to bald eagle logo: ‘China, Iran, and Russia are laughing at us’
Horowitz: A group of Florida parents cultured their children’s masks and found dangerous bacteria
Corona unmasked, new facts and figures, Dr. Bhakdi and Dr. Reiss
Michigan Mask Requirement Extending to Toddlers Takes Effect, yet tyrannical Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer, who recently traveled to Florida for personal reasons despite urging Michiganders to forgo traveling to Florida over concerns of coronavirus variants, still has a 53% approval rating (at the time of the toddler diktat), begging the question of who is more insane, her or the MI voters?
Biden wears face mask outdoors to hail CDC guidelines that say you no longer need to
Arkansas mother of five children fired from job after not receiving COVID-19 vaccine: ‘They really fired me’
Why I’ll keep running with my mask on
2 More Infant Deaths Following Experimental COVID Genocide Jab During Clinical Trials In Latest CDC VAERS Report (recall that children aren’t statistically at risk to virus)
‘Durable Revenue Stream’ – Pfizer Vax Windfall Crony Capitalism At Its Worst
The Vaccine Passport Push Marches On
How the CDC is manipulating data to prop-up “vaccine effectiveness”
Michael Yeadon Interview – Former Pfizer VP Speaks Out On Dangers Of mRNA Vaccines & COVID Illusion
MODERNA VACCINE WREAKS HAVOC ON LYTTON BC AND LOCAL DOCTOR BLOWS WHISTLE! (BANNED ON YOUTUBE!)
SUCHARIT BHAKDI – FULL INTERVIEW PLANET LOCKDOWN
COVID Shots to “Decimate World Population,” Warns Dr. Bhakdi
The Gene Code Injection – an experiment on humanity – Interview with Dr. Madej
“WE’RE PLAYING WITH FIRE HERE” BY THE HIGHWIRE WITH DEL BIGTREE
MASSIVE: WORLD RENOWNED DOCTOR BLOWS LID OFF OF COVID VACCINE
GLOBAL BIOTERRORISM: DR. REINER FUELLMICH INTERVIEWS DR. PETER MCCULLOUGH
VACCINE DISASTER AHEAD
Ivy League schools mandate COVID-19 vaccines for fall (These academic institutions currently retain their vaccine mandates despite recent findings from the CDC that suggest that people ages 16-24 – the age group most college students fall into – risk potentially fatal heart inflammation by taking the Pfizer and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines)
The Truth about COVID-19; NIAID, Moderna Had COVID Vaccine Candidate in December 2019
Dr. Fauci voices support for vaccine mandates, predicts mandates are coming once FDA gives shots full approval
Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex – by Katie Herzog – Common Sense with Bari Weiss
Department of Justice Declares COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Legal —  Federal law doesn’t prohibit public agencies, private business from requiring vaccines for employees
DEADLY SHOTS! Former Pfizer Employee Confirms Poison in COVID ‘Vaccine’

 

Or, perhaps a picture describing what is going on is worth a thousand words.  This is especially true in light of the sustained masking up and vaccination and re-vaccination pressure the Coronacrats and the Davos Elites (a leftist bureaucracy in bed with plutocrats) are exerting on people the world over.  The inevitable Corona virus variants, including the Delta version — never mind that virus offshoots or variants are typically weaker than the initial strain — will come in handy for what could well be the true agenda, namely elitist one world government dictating how we live, where we live, what we get to say, what we get to buy, and even how we get to breathe and our medicine.  Given how willingly Americans and citizens surrendered their freedoms and rights under the initial Corona virus policy diktats, will renewed measures of this kind be sternly and widely opposed?  The ruling class is counting on little opposition, once again, to impose or reimpose their collectivist tyranny.

Energy policy insanity:
Let me shift to another strategic insanity of epic proportions that will literally doom leveraged output, the profits and cash flow to pay shareholders dividends and creditors interest, and our ability to feed a current global population nearing 7.9bn people.  That insanity: green cronyism/fascism — as if we didn’t already have enough geological challenges on the dense energy front, both fossil fuel (see 20 biggest oil discoveries section) and nuclear based.  Specifically, we are witnessing a disturbing attack on affordable, reliable, usable, 24/7, fossil fuel-based power generation courtesy of the destructively radical, Marxist Biden administration in this country and leftist regimes throughout the OECD world.  Call it an energy lockdown rapidly ramping up in the US; the victims will be our way of life and our “dense energy-slave” leveraged output in industry, mining, agriculture, transportation, construction, HVAC, R&D, and communications.  If this mutilation is successful, our GDP and productivity will plummet, and we will be impoverished.  Or, call it a widening green cronyism assault on the underpinnings of our economic system; for one example of festering collateral damage flavor, see the “boneyard” depiction below:
For “hit the ground running destructiveness,” consider the three early Biden administration fossil fuel energy killers: the shutdown of the Keystone Pipeline, a moratorium on all new oil and gas drilling and on coal excavation on federal land, and special climate envoy, mega crony, jet-setting John Kerry’s early March announcement that we need to do away with fossil fuels.  Drastic “pollutant” CO2 reduction is the rallying cry, even though our CO2 is currently at historically very low levels and is critical for robust green life on this planet, for oxygen generation, and for growing food for nearly 7.9bn people.  This has become a very dangerous crusade with damning impoverishment and centralization of power implications: The Biden administration is targeting a 50% reduction in C02 levels by 2030.  This would be another nail in the coffin of sustaining not only our way of life, but our current population, which would be impoverished and decimated, North Korea style.  Why?  Because such a vast, and unnatural reduction in CO2 output agenda, beyond being impossible to achieve, would be erroneously and disastrously sought through broad-based shutdowns of fossil fuel-based energy and products.  This doctrine or policy embraces,  subsidizes, and mandates non-affordable, non-scalable, non-24/7, so-called renewable forms of energy (they are neither renewable nor possible without an underlying fossil fuel energy infrastructure).  It is a highly destructive policy economically, financially, environmentally, and in terms of societal well-being and stability.

The fossil fuel (oil, natural gas, and coal) complex that the leftists and green fascists want to shut down in order to “save the planet” (from overheating) by reducing CO2 to an even lower and less planetary productive level is unachievable demagoguery whose true Marxist intention is to impoverish, and then lord over, the masses.   The fossil fuel complex is critical for our extremely leveraged output, our standard of living, hospitals, and the Internet (which consumed as much energy/emitted as much CO2 as airlines did prior to the Corona virus policy disaster).  All of the above economic achievements, capabilities, and standards depend entirely on 24/7 availability of fossil fuel-derived energy; without the harnessing dense, fossil fuels to convert heat into work via engines, turbines, and motors (one gallon of gasoline is the work equivalent of an ag worker toiling in the field for one week; one barrel of oil is the work equivalent of over one year of ag work by one person!), we wouldn’t have a “top line” (a GDP), much less a bottom line (profits with which to pay interest to bond holders and dividends to shareholders).

Fossil fuel-based drilling and extraction, and fossil fuels overall, have already been attacked via executive orders by the Biden administration and via its “infrastructure bill,” will further advantage non-scalable, unusable, and prohibitively expensive alt energy build-outs and electric cars even as the fossil fuel-based bulwark for power (electricity) generation remains under relentless policy attack.  Meanwhile, green cronies have managed to gain a foothold at the American citadel of fossil fuels, ExxonMobil, threatening to do an inside dense energy evisceration job to industry already have huge geological energy replacement challenges. In a related and sobering fashion, Germany has been on an anti-dense energy, anti-fossil fuel (very much including coal) crusade since the Fukushima nuclear power meltdown in Tokyo ten years ago.  It’s long been a disaster for German industry and consumers alike, who now face some of the highest power costs in the world, and thus don’t likely fantasize as much about domestic production expansion and on running their cars based on energy derived from windmills & solar panels as they once did, respectively.

 

“Education” policy insanity:
Control education for a few generations, and you will determine the direction of society.  After three generations of  leftist indoctrination, the die is cast for societal and political change away from facts towards propaganda; away from meritocracy and towards bureaucratic-ordained discrimination (whether race-based, sex-based, sexual orientation-based, immigrant-based, etc,); away from equality of opportunity to equality of results or so-called “equity” (a euphemism for conferring wealth, privileges, and opportunities upon some at the expense of others based upon some perceived status of victimhood); away from embracing a traditional, succoring nuclear family structure that is so vital for students’ ability to learn to attacking it; away from ethics to degeneration; and away from the academic excellence and rigor that is key to scientific and economic progress to a dumbed-down curriculum.  History shows that this is an agenda leads to Trabands instead of VWs, shortages instead of choice, and disillusionment instead of fulfillment.  To wit:

“Programs for high-achieving students are now assaulted as elitist or even racist (that word again!) because certain demographics do poorly in them. After decades of trying unsuccessfully to improve the test scores of the poor-performing demographics, educators are throwing in the towel. Because they can’t get the “right” demographics to pass the tests, they’re abolishing the tests. Elite colleges are abolishing the SAT test and gifted programs at high, middle and elementary schools, are being dismantled. Consider the harm this does to bright kids who are forced to sit in classes far lower than their academic level, and consider also the loss to society in holding those kids back from their potential.  Colleges and high schools that are not outright abolishing entrance tests are grading them on a racial curve. At Harvard, Asians need SAT scores 100 points higher than whites and 450 points higher than blacks.”

In a related fashion, Princeton offered admission to its class of 2025 to 1,498 applicants. “According to numbers provided by the University, fewer than nine percent of them (129 out of the 1498) are white American males. Of that small number many — perhaps most — are recruited athletes.  68 percent of the admitted applicants identify as “persons of color.”  14 percent identify as international students.  52 percent are female.  48 percent are male.  Putting these numbers together, we see that 82 percent of those admitted identify as “persons of color” or international students, while 18 percent are white Americans. Less than half of that small group are male.”  Effectively, then, whites, and especially white males, are being discriminated against.  This is racism.

Speaking of increasingly codified discrimination and racist insanity at schools and how this is the opposite of a color-blind, merit-based society and a grotesque and toxic misuse of the trust placed by parents in educational institutions and teachers, click on this link about dad Andrew Gutmann’s 1,700-word letter on the Brearley School or on Tucker Carlson’s sage and apt review of the topic featuring that bullseye letter from dad.  The school’s policy could just as well be called codified racism, principally against whites, courtesy of discriminatory public school indoctrination blessed by school boards from coast to coast.  Here is a comment I made to a close friend that sent me the NY Post article related to same:

Increasing numbers of people are discovering how Stalinist public schools are. I don’t think it matters one bit whether you are in a red or a blue state, a red or a blue county. The public school system is an extension of the statist/communist US government/bureaucracy (the Department of Indoctrination), and the communist foot soldiers are the leading teachers’ unions, which help assure high(er) Democratic election turnout and, I’m convinced, helped realize the most extensive voter fraud ever perpetrated in America.  More of us are getting to know personally what kind of appalling liars and demagogues department of education board members and other school faculty can be.  To add insult to injury, in Lee County public schools, CNN is piped in to each classroom from K-12 for at least one hour a day.   I know, having been a substitute teacher in Lee County for nearly two years.  As CNN propaganda is difficult to tune out, at least a portion of that time will likely be devoted to this out-of-the-closet racism, despite Gov. DeSantis’ and the Florida legislature banning “critical race theory” lectures in the classroom.

Ironically, the increasingly codified racism is being imposed largely by elitist, privileged whites that won’t get impacted by the “Apartheid” they increasingly seek to impose on the majority population, namely white Americans, which comprise roughly 68% of the American population.  More importantly, this racism it is the antithesis of Martin Luther King’s sage and proper mantra of judging men not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.  Needless to say, meritocracy should be the only criteria, not institutionalized discrimination against whites or any other race, and certainly not institutionalized equality of results, or Marxist equity.  Besides being racist tyranny, which goes against the founding principles of America and tolerant western culture at large — which took inspiration from the Enlightenment Age’s fixation on reason as the cornerstone of decisions — this kind of non-meritocracy-based admissions criteria is not how America can hope to once again become more competitive in the global market place, which would benefit all Americans’ financial and economic future, not to mention American society.

Equally ironic and a disgrace is the fact that property tax paying parents are funding the indoctrination of Marxist equity in their counties’ school districts, as the majority of property tax dollars go to funding public schools:

According to documents obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, the Loudoun County school district spent $314,000 in 2019 on coaching and training sessions hosted by The Equity Collaborative, a California-based business that works with schools to “create educational equity and social justice by addressing bias and oppression.” The business also offers six different services for schools, including a two-day “racial equity institute,” “culturally responsive practice workshops,” and “equity focused” coaching—each with a hefty price tag. The firm’s educational tools, meanwhile, include an introduction to “Critical Race Theory” and call for discussions about “oppression and education.”   (The pro-hour fee for the consultant peddling racism was $650).  “In [Critical Race Theory], racism is seen as an inherent part of American civilization, privileging white individuals over people of color in most areas of life, including education,” an Equity Collaborative study pack reads.

(If that wasn’t toxic and over the top enough, in June of this year the school board of Loudoun County fired a gym teacher that refused to affirm that a biological boy can be a girl and vice versa.)

For even more sad, hideous, and poisonous “insanity perspective,” take a closer look at how critical race theory (codified racism), and even “transgenderism,” is being taught to American toddlers under the misnomer of social justice:

In the era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, many parents are wondering when the right time is to talk to their children about social justice.  Experts say it’s never too early, and a new wave of tools and resources can help start the conversation.  You can enroll in a music class (virtually now) that develops understanding of gender and personhood.  A drag queen story time will soon be a television show. And there are more and more children’s books that discuss intersectionality and broaden representation, plus flashcards and short videos that teach parent and toddler about anti-racism ideas. Teaching children to have an equity mind-set and strive for justice is giving them a crucial skill that will help them through life,” says Nicole Stamp, a Toronto-based children’s TV writer and host who co-founded the limited-run ByUs box, a curated box of toys, books and curricula that aims to dismantle bias for kids as young as 2 years old.

Sustained indoctrination (versus education) at schools and colleges spreads widely through society, which is the Marxist Democrats goal as they seek the fundamental transformation of America.  The latest destructive canards, “critical race theory” and Marxist “equity” sadly highlight what is behind America’s educational system moving further and further away from teaching the basics and from meritocracy to an updated form of institutionalized, codified discrimination — which makes Affirmative Action look like a piker by comparison.   This regressive and oppressive movement dominates academia, politics, the media, and even the business world/board rooms.  

Societal and cultural destruction-related insanity:
(“Our world is not divided by by race, color, gender, or religion.  Our world is divided into wise people and fools.  And fools divide themselves by race, color, gender, or religion” —  Nelson Mandela)

America’s (and the West’s) culture was built on Enlightenment Age principles, Judeo-Christian ethics and morals, Lutheran improvements, a just rule of law, inalienable rights for individuals, tolerance (the antithesis of “cancel culture”), multi-racial societies (the antithesis of racist “critical race theory“), representative government working on behalf of its citizens, fair elections, a sovereign nation state run for the benefit of its citizens, free market capitalism, meritocracy, and sound money.   This most successful and freedom-securing society and culture is being torn asunder under the false Marxist pretext of improving society via top-down diktats which effectively replace the reason, freedom, openness, success, and dynamism of Western society with a centralized government’s iron fist; a fist which disenfranchises, tribalizes, Balkanizes, impoverishes, tyrannizes, makes miserable, and then rules over individuals for “the good” of an amorphous collective, from cradle to grave.

The path towards this ugly outcome is being waged in classical Marxist style via relentless and coordinated attacks on a functioning society and culture in order to foment racial, social, economic, and political unrest and dissent, in the process weakening law and order and spiking violence and crime.  Police harassment, police defunding, a lack of political backing for police forces by City Hall, and encouragement of violent protests, looting, and vandalism have led to surging crime rates throughout urban America, threatening the functioning and stability of society while severely impacting inner-city small businesses and local economies.  The massive disruption of a summer of urban riots and pillaging last year came together with widespread lockdowns to decimate countless small business.  The resulting spreading urban blight, shuttered businesses, and locked down businesses created tremendous “opportunity zones” for well-connected vulture capitalists, more flush than ever with money printing-engendered “capital.”  Those vulture capitalists were poised to purchase troubled assets and properties at pennies of the former dollar, which they did with in unprecedented terms, furthering the divide between the haves and the have-nots, between Main Street and the connected. 

These induced contortions have been Balkanizing, tribalizing, and impoverishing the average citizen, enriching the oligarchs, and taking down an erstwhile functioning society and economy.  The Marxist goal is to instigate anarchy,  which communist party elites or their ilk will put down by installing a military dictatorship to restore “law and order.”  Precisely this trajectory has been unfolding increasingly rapidly, “greased” in the US by a) the “Pravda press,” by b) accelerating the centralization of power that has been undertaken by the feds for 90 years, by ever more unconstitutional diktats spit out by administrative agencies (only the Democratic strongholds trial lawyers and colleges that hasten the collapse of freedom and inalienable rights are spared otherwise anal and debilitating regulatory oversight), by c) the Democratic party’s 2020 election rigging,  by d) the resulting Democratic control of virtually all levels of federal government power, and e) thanks to feckless Republicans’ (RINOs) failure to be both pro-active and re-active in combating the biggest coup in American election history, much less regarding the brazen corruption of the Joe Biden.  When combining the aforementioned with virtually all of America’s institutions — from courts to the media to Corporate America to schools to colleges to Hollywood — being run by Democrats embracing increasingly authoritarian government and illegal alien immigration for political reasons on the one hand, and a citizenry which increasingly has lost the ability, desire, or interest to defend individual freedom and inalienable rights on the other hand, the slippery slope to tyranny gets even slippier.  Some cases in point below.   

Who fears a society that hates itself?  Masochists of the West, unite!
The Other Virus: Learned Helplessness — What is a culture of compliance, and ever-shifting rules, doing to us?
‘It’s Been Devastating’: UMass Amherst Students Suspended For Not Wearing Masks Off-Campus
HERE WE ARE: Calgary pastor Artur Pawlowski has been arrested for holding a church service
Eric Clapton says his musician friends cut him off after he spoke out about his ‘disastrous’ vaccine side effects: ‘I just don’t hear from them anymore’
Best-Selling Devotional Has Prayer to ‘Help Me to Hate White People’
Ellen Page Shows Off Her Mutilated Body, and the Media Celebrates
North Dakota teen girl dies after random attack while skateboarding  (Imagine, dear reader, if this had been a black girl!)
Cash for illegal aliens, both those at the border and those in NYC
Your tax dollars funded campaign to bail out illegal immigrants
They Will Stop At Nothing
Biden Administration to Sue Georgia Over Election Integrity Law
Coke, Delta and Major League Baseball Have All Become Propaganda Arms Of The Democrat Party
Dozens of Companies Urge Senate to Pass Law Nationalizing U.S. Elections: Override ‘Abusive State Laws’
Delta flies in stormy skies by criticizing Georgia voting law
Lockheed, the nation’s largest defense contractor, sends key executives on a mission to deconstruct their “white male privilege”
Raytheon adopts critical race theory and tells employees to acknowledge their “privilege.”
Marin County’s Discriminatory ‘Universal Basic Income’
Bombshell Report: Disney Pushing Critical Race Theory Training On Employees  ‘These aren’t isolated incidents. This is government agencies. This is churches. This is virtually every university. This is many if not most school districts.”
The media must veto Lori Lightfoot’s racist interview policy
Crime Wave 2020: These cities smashed homicide records amid nationwide crime spike
THE WAR ON STANDARDS, WOKE U.S. ARMY EDITION — The U.S. Army apparently has decided to gender-norm scores on the test it administers for combat fitness (Is this how one defends a country?)
State employee gives shocking first-hand account of diversity, equity and inclusion training

Finally, from a trusted source in frequent contact with doctors thanks to his profession, the following utterly shocking and sobering news from two American MDs: According to its plan, the AMA will be following a host of strategies, including implementing “racial and social justice” throughout the AMA enterprise culture, systems, policies, and practices; expanding medical education to include critical race theory; and pushing toward “racial healing, reconciliation, and transformation” regarding the organization’s own “racially discriminatory” past. The AMA also makes clear that it now rejects the concepts of “equality” and “meritocracy,” which have been goals in the fields of medical science and medical care.

 

 

Conclusion:
Is America increasingly revisiting the ultimate “cancel culture” development of all time, the French Revolution — so far without the guillotine?  “The bloody and terrible French Revolution featured attacks on religion, rewriting history, toppling statues, and abandoning tradition.”  Sound familiar?  Or, could we be witnessing a rapidly metastasizing Marxist cultural/political revolution?  Both result in mayhem, anarchy, and then the iron fist.

And isn’t bastardizing or changing the meaning of words, or the language itself, often to the antithesis of the true definition/meaning, a pure propaganda tool to underpin a demagogic narrative?  A “Pravda press”-nourished and driven narrative, presided over by our thuggish, divisive, racist, incompetent, pathological, criminal, lifelong crony, liar, and cheat in chief, Biden.  A narrative which is constantly and cancerously morphing into what amounts to Marxist policies, which comprise the polar opposite of the US Constitution’s limited government, separation of powers, sound money, federalism, individual freedom, and inalienable rights protections.  They are policies that that seek to censor, cancel, and then castrate any discourse, shred any opposition, and justify redistributing, through a massive, rapacious, and capricious mob known as the US government bureaucracy, the hard won fruits of Main Street labor and investment to leeches and takers of various stripes, very much including the bureaucracy itself.  A bureaucracy which outnumbers factory workers by 85%.

After the increasingly massive currency printed up by the Fed is washed through the 2.1m strong federal bureaucracy courtesy of (non-crony) Main Street makers being further illegitimately and unconstitutionally fleeced and hobbled with all kinds of additional regulatory compliance costs and additional taxes and levies (all in the pipeline), various taker constituencies divide up the spoils.  Those rent-seeking constituencies range from from K Street to Wall Street to people (incentivized to stay) on the dole to unprecedented numbers of illegal third world aliens encouraged to rush the southern border; illegal aliens that, once state-side, are then granted amnesty and expansive social benefits at the expense of the balance sheet, functionality, cohesion, a common culture, a common language, and tranquility of the overwhelmed towns that have to take care of them.  Collectively, said takers get to gorge on what effectively amounts to one giant redistribution scheme — less politely called confiscation — from red states to blue states, from rural makers to city dwellers, from truckers to paper shufflers, from taxpayers to bureaucrats and the cronies they are in bed with, and from Republican politicians to amnesty-baiting, Balkanizing Democrats seeking one-party government from California eastward.  (The private sector mob must be jealous of the unprecedented breadth and depth of this fleecing.)

In aggregate, this constitutes legalized theft, or a transfer of property from those that accumulated it by working “60 hours a week for 20 years” to those that didn’t, be that through higher taxes, even more punitive regulatory compliance costs,  and/or thanks to climbing litigation costs thanks to a Democratic plaintiffs’ bar that feasts on low legal standards, toothless punishments for lawsuit abuse, and unconstitutional regulatory compliance insanity, vituperation, and capriciousness — which the Corona virus policy diktats made into an even more onerous ambulance-chasing shakedown racket only starting to gear up.  Such a rule of law and free market capitalism chilling environment constitutes the ultimate asphyxiation for those gifted and enterprising people that are willing to commit themselves, their time, and their resources to any strategic valuation creation or business enterprise effort, without which there is no economy, and no tax base!  Overall price stability, a predictable and equitably rule of law, incentives to risk capital, to risk so very much to come up with competitive services and products, to employ people, are punished.  The dwindling American taxpayer, foreign creditors, future generations, a wealth of nations’ trajectory, and freedom are the victims/casualties.  This is how socialism, fascism, and communism work for the elites, and punish the many.

Is Kristallnacht, revisited next for Trump voters, for red state America, and for Main Street, or did that already occur on January 6th, 2021?  We had a lengthy preview last summer, as well-financed, organized, and supported (by leading fascist power-brokers and politicians) racist, hateful BLM Marxists set ablaze cities, looted business, and attacked innocent people and shop owners across the country to illegitimately protest against racism — allegedly perpetrated by whites — in a nationwide attempt to stoke balkanizing instability as a prelude to a Kristallnacht-type of iron-fisted clampdown by the feds — or as a prelude to the horrors of the French Revolution, revisited.

Given the hateful, racist indoctrination being foisted on our kids, the growing censorship, intimidation, and radicalization, and the ongoing effort by the Democrats running all branches of the federal government (de facto including the judicial branch, either through successful, repeated intimidation or through a decades’ long tendency to legislate from the bench) to turn our elections into a total farce, freedom-loving Americans could be staring permanent, destructive, and tyrannical one-party Democratic government from coast to coast in the face.  Clearly, the Democratic-run federal government is moving to double-down on the completely fraudulent and unconstitutional 2020 election which resulted in an utterly unhinged and illegitimate president and the loss of Republican control in the Senate.  In fact, the Democrats, with RINO help from the likes of Romney and McConnell, stole the 2020 election in a manner that any B.R. dictator would be jealous of.

Speaking of doubling-down, the threat to any remaining federal election integrity that HR1 — if ultimately made law despite a very welcome initial setback — brings with it is truly frightening.  If the HR1 bill, or a reconstituted version, becomes law, then it will institutionalize one-party government to layer on top of one-party, leftist, despotic control of nearly all of American — and I dare say Western — institutions.  Such a statute would not only eviscerate what little remains of Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 after the SCOTUS refused to take up clear violations of it, but it would finish off the remaining remnants of a representative American government, and it would be the death knell for America’s nearly extinguished republican form of government.  It would institutionalize election-based tyranny by the few at the expense of the many.  No advanced, tolerant, open, and just society, much less an innovative, productive, and growing economy featuring a sound currency, can possibly survive such a metastasizing “Jonestown,” which is consuming the West.  How can growing censorship, propaganda, racism, and tyranny be equated with freedom, honesty, tolerance, meritocracy, prosperity, and happiness?  Won’t they all be deleted, too?

In short, not only is our fiscal, regulatory, and monetary policy highly destructive, but so is our behavior, which has increasingly migrated from virtuous and courageous to “turning the other cheek,” including a) not taking a stand against our modern day version of the French Revolution-light (“light” so far), also known as cancel culture, b) not fighting against the increasingly codified racism being peddled as “critical race theory” in ever more of our institutions from schools to government to Corporate America, and c) not even defending the right for their children to breathe free eight hours a day, five days a week*.   Edmund Burke said it best:

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”   

This could also be called apathy.  Will the “silent majority,” if there really is such a majority, find its voice in time to avoid what prior demagogues such as Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao have wrought once they assumed power?  You can’t regain freedom and sanity if people are ready to put up with tyranny and insanity.  We can’t regain freedom as sheeple.  Moreover, our sheer existence as “sheeple” will be increasingly threatened, as history has amply shown.

The refusal to stand tall for fairness, sanity, meritocracy, non-discrimination, and truth by a broad swath of society which won’t rise up against radicalism is the cancer which is enabling the profound political, economic, and financial destruction, which at the end of the day will result in bondage for the many, as is depicted below. I believe we are slipping from apathy to government check/printing press dependence, and bondage (iron-fisted tyranny) looks like it’s next:

In 1926 in Philadelphia, during a speech President Coolidge gave celebrating the Declaration of Independence’s 150th anniversary, he summed up the dangers of broad swaths of the American people disengaging from moral and ethical behavior, as guided by Judeo-Christian principles, with the following words:

“A spring will cease to flow if its source be dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed.  In its main features the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document.  It is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions.  Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man — these are not elements which we can see and touch.  They are ideals.  They have their source and their roots in religious convictions.  They belong to the unseen world.  Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish.  We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.”

Looks like we are collectively about as far removed from the spiritual faith and courage as we can be prior to dipping back into what has been mankind’s typical lot, one or another form of bondage, be it serfdom, a monarchy, a dictatorship, one or another form of collectivism or socialism, very much including our current fascism, where the elite inevitably seek to shed the last remaining vestiges due process rights, capitalism and nominal private property rights by instituting an even harder core variant of socialism known as communism.  Sometimes the path to bondage is instigated by oligarchs or plutocrats working in symphony with power-obsessed “public officials” to stoke anarchy and Balkanization, which they then promise to put down to restore societal order, like good little fascists bent on installing a military junta or a police state as the solution which cements the move away from individual freedom and property rights.  Is this where America and the West are heading?  Are we ripe for one or another flavor of socialism, or will we head straight into global communism or modern-day feudalism?  

Or, against all odds, against what history teaches and in defiance of society’s post “9:30 pm station” on that political cycle above, can enough of us regain civil courage, regain enough virtue, and push back against tyranny, insanity, and insolvency for the sake of our progeny, if for no other reason?  Can enough of us wake up in time?  Perhaps one citizen at a time pushing back against leftist/corporate racism, censorship, harassment, slander, and cancellation will fuel or give birth to a grass roots uprising?  Perhaps enough parents belatedly starting to go after school boards that pay consultants hundreds of thousands of dollars to teach racism is a good sign?  Perhaps parents that are starting to throw out school boards because they will no longer put up with their kids’ 8-hour daily masking up nightmare consisting of oxygen starvation, enhanced CO2 inhalation, disease exposure magnification, and psychological issues for a cohort that has virtually zero virus issues and is a poor transmitter (if any school administrator had masked up kids for eight hours a day two years ago, they would have been fired or worse for child abuse!) is an optimistic sign?  Perhaps parents starting to fight forced vaccinations of their college age kids, which essentially have zero Corona virus health risks, would be another bullish omen?  Perhaps America’s red states beginning to insist on constitutionally-codified federalism and on nullification of unconstitutional diktats from a lawless federal government offer small glimmers of hope?  Or, even unlikelier still, perhaps France will again enable codified liberty in America and thus the West in general?  Or, perhaps most unlikely of all, a climbdown from iron-fisted tyranny will stem from the most unlikely of places, the US Congress (after the 2022 elections)?  Below, please find clickable titles that address these hopeful sparks of civil courage, liberty, and sanity amidst a spreading wet blanket of tyranny, open borders, lawlessness, voter fraud, Bill of Rights usurpations, perversions, and insanity, whether the abusiveness is “monarchial,” administrative, corporate, or rule by the mob (“mobocracy”) in nature.

Citizen-led efforts (Americans and others calling out and/or rebelling against leftism, despotism, inalienable rights violations, racism, cronyism, rule by the mob, unsound medicine, debauchery, and insanity):
Lockdown-Weary New Yorkers Fled to One Free State in Droves, New Figures Show
A fearless and outspoken New York parent, Tatiana Ibrahim, blasted her school board accusing them of educational treason for teaching children to hate the police, to be labeled homophobic if they don’t agree with the LGBT agenda, and for teaching them communism
Mom who survived Mao’s China calls critical race theory America’s Cultural Revolution  (Mom: “To me, and to a lot of Chinese, it is heartbreaking that we escaped communism and now we experience communism here,” she told Fox of her strong feelings against the progressive agenda.)
Critical race theory: A dangerous illiberal ideology; It’s rooted in the pernicious and false belief that America is an irredeemably racist country
Grace Church Whistleblower — A courageous high school math teacher, Paul Rossi, blew the whistle on harm being done to students and members of the Grace Church community by neo-racism masquerading as “antiracism.”
Black father destroys critical race theory at school board meeting: ‘How did I get where I am right now if some white man kept me down?’
Mother unloads on school board over young children being taught about masturbation, anal sex, transgenderism
SICK: Parents Outraged After New York Private School Shows 1st Graders Video About Masturbation (VIDEO)
Virginia teacher placed on leave after speech disputing ‘biological boy can be a girl and vice versa’
Mandatory body cameras for teachers, not just cops!  (Take a look at this recording made by a student recently of a teacher badly abusing a student who objected to her LGBTQ+ indoctrination scheme)
A nine year old school girl rightly takes her principal and her school’s destructive, capricious, and racist policies to task 
I Refuse to Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated
THE QUEST FOR COSMIC JUSTICE
Ingraham: Your home is no longer a refuge from the radical left
Tucker: NSA planned to leak my emails to media outlets
What Happens When Doctors Can’t Tell the Truth?
Parents’ group wants Polk schools to ‘cease and desist’ forcing students to wear masks
‘Take these masks off of my child!’: Fed-up mom of kindergarten student goes off on school board for continuing mask mandate through next year
COVID-19 WE ARE THE PREY – MASS MURDER WAS PLANNED W/ DR. PETER BREGGIN, 1 OF 2 
COVID-19: WE ARE THE PREY – MASS MURDER WAS PLANNED W/ DR. PETER BREGGIN, 2 OF 2 (Confession: you will have to put up with interviewer’s verbosity in both “we are the prey” videos, but it will be worth it!  And consider starting the interview at the 6 min.-mark)
“WE’RE PLAYING WITH FIRE HERE” BY THE HIGHWIRE WITH DEL BIGTREE; Dr. Hodkinson
COVID-19 INJECTIONS AND LIFESPAN- INTERVIEW WITH DR. VLADIMIR ZELENKO
Corona unmasked; the vaccination craze
HOW SPIKE PROTEINS FROM COVID-19 INJECTIONS KILL (DELETED BY YOUTUBE)
Employer & School Disclosure Forms for Covid-19 Injections (How to fight back against forced vaccinations)
Form for Students Attending Colleges or Universities Requiring Covid-19 Injections (How to hold select institutions and individuals liable for injuries or death)
EVERYONE HATES WIND TURBINES (calling out green cronyism)
WOKE CAPITALISM: HIT BACK TWICE AS HARD
Former President Trump announces lawsuit against Facebook, Twitter and Google
Tucker Carlson Reveals Emails Exposing US Military Secretly Moving Illegal Immigrants Around The Country
Homeland Security Announces Border and Travel Restrictions for American Citizens Due to COVID, But Border Will Remain Wide Open for Illegal Aliens
The Jan. 6th Show Trials Threaten All of Us
CDC confesses: Vaccines are failing, the vaxxed can be super-spreaders, demands return to mask mandates for everyone, including the vaxxed
DEADLY SHOTS! Former Pfizer Employee Confirms Poison in COVID ‘Vaccine’

Addendum: America can’t count on a “Trump-unbound.” A Trump, should he somehow manage to get re-elected (highly unlikely because the entrenched power brokers are dead against him), that actually “walks his most important talk” concerning shrinking the government/the bureaucracy, realizing balanced budgets, releasing unimaginable records of lawlessness by governmental officials, and engaging in a “costs be damned” effort to return to some degree of constitutional fidelity.  Said differently, America can’t expect a re-elected Trump to engage in a no-holds-barred effort to rescue Main Street “makers” and job takers from an all-powerful, deeply entrenched oligarchy that runs everything and increasingly owns everything.  That will be up to us.  Either enough citizens stand tall for their constitutional rights and refuse to honor unconstitutional diktats, or nothing that the very few honest politicians — senators such as Rand Paul and Ron Johnson or representatives such as Jim Jordan and Marjorie Greene — do to try to bring back the rule of law will have any teeth.  Specifically, congressional colleagues of  those very few oath-abiding politicians will distance themselves from such efforts.  Either that, or the administrative state/the deep state that truly runs the country will once again ignore or crush efforts to return to lawful government and constitutional fidelity, and it will do so in fascistic terms.  And don’t expect relief from the very courts that have increasingly ruled from the bench and have helped hollow out the Constitution from separation of powers, sound money, federalism, Bill of Rights, and, most recently and incredibly disastrously, presidential electoral vote tally perspectives. 

A (good) general without an army can do nothing.  Informed and engaged citizens with plenty of civil courage is the single most important ingredient if there is any chance of reversing the rising tide of despotism, which is why I list it first (above).  Specifically, citizens that persistently fight against Marxist school boards’ racism, sexism, and anti-Americanism.  Citizens/shareholders have to persistently show up at Corporate America’s shareholders’ meetings to contest fascist boards’ decisions to undermine meritocracy, free market capitalism, and colorblindness.  Citizens have to persistently show up at city hall to protest bureaucratic overreach, including unconstitutional deprivations of freedom of expression, freedom of movement, property rights, and enterprise rights, i.e., the right to conduct business.  Small business owners ruined by unconstitutional lock downs need come together to file class action lawsuits against the politicians or bureaucrats that deprived them of 5th Amendment, Takings Clause, property right protections.

Clearly, freedom-loving residents of too many states and counties can no longer count on governmental fidelity to constitutions that protect the very inalienable rights that the original states insisted on at both the state and the federal level also known as the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment.  At the federal level, freedom-loving American citizens can no longer count on “Article 1” Congress to assert its constitutional primacy or its sole legislative function any more than American colonists could count on representation in London.  And, as alluded to above, freedom-loving citizens can’t count on RINOs, who constitute the vast majority of Republicans, either.  In a related manner, a friend recently sent me a comment and link:

My friend:
“The corruption is deafening: MORE EVIDENCE THAT JOE BIDEN IS CORRUPT.”

My response to him:
“Yes, it is. Joe is the head of a stinky, rotten fish called DC. Cronies like Mitch McConnell love working with him. How many Republicans are raising these damning corruption issues other than that gutsy freshman rep from Georgia, Greene?  I think it is zero.  If that doesn’t tell you everything, I don’t know what does.  It’s funny, in a sick way.  The Dems cook up Russian collusion and spend four years going after an innocent man and his family.  They impeached him twice over it.  And they are still going after him.  Meanwhile, the info about massive Biden family corruption is continuously swept under the rug not only by the Pravda press, but de facto by utterly gutless, bought off Republicans.  B.R.”

My friend wrote back:
“100%.”

In short, dear readers, we need enough citizens that aren’t like this:

 

State government-led efforts (please note that states asserting federalism against an unconstitutional federal leviathan and unsound institutions comes right after citizen initiatives in terms of tyranny fighting importance):
Governor Ron DeSantis Announces the “Combatting Violence, Disorder and Looting and Law Enforcement Protection Act”
Kansas Legislature Overrides Governor’s Veto, Bans the Election Zuck Bucks. Plus: A Win for 2A Rights   
Florida passes ban on transgenders in women’s sports, Gov. DeSantis says he’ll sign
Governor Ron DeSantis Signs Landmark Legislation to Ban Vaccine Passports and Stem Government Overreach
Gov. DeSantis Leads the Way: “These Kids Do Not Need to Be Wearing Masks… We Need to Let Them Be Kids and Let Them Act Normally”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to pardon anyone charged for defying COVID rules
Texas Sees Second-Lowest Number of COVID Cases Since Ending Restrictions 53 Days Ago
GOP-led states passing bills to block or limit critical race theory
Texas bans ‘woke philosophies’ from being taught in classrooms
Florida Bans Critical Race Theory in Schools
Judge permits massive election audit in Georgia, rules absentee ballots unsealed for examination
Missouri Gov Will Sign Bill That Protects State From Any Biden Gun Grab
Ron DeSantis Wins Big Over Cruise Line’s ‘Vaccine Passports’ – RedState
DE SANTIS RIPS SOCIAL MEDIA COMPANIES, SIGNS BILL BLOCKING BIG TECH FROM DEPLATFORMING
Texas bans COVID vaccine passports, blocks businesses from asking for vax information
BUILD THAT WALL!
From the state’s governor, Greg Abbott, June 15th, 2021: “I just signed a Resolution asserting Texas sovereignty under the 10th Amendment over all powers not granted to the federal government by the US Constitution. The Resolution officially notifies the President & Congress to cease acts of encroaching upon the powers of states.”
Arizona Gov. Overrides State University’s Rule Forcing Students to Get Vaccine – The Lid
Ron DeSantis putting on the ‘full armor of God’ to fight leftism, receives standing ovation for stirring remarks
Critical Race Theory, meet Critical Communism History: Ron DeSantis introduces plan to teach kids the evils of totalitarianism in schools 
Gov. DeSantis Tells the Feds Where to Stick Their School Mask Mandates
DeSantis Rails Against Fauci, CDC: ‘No To School Closures, No To Restrictions, And No Mandates’

 

US Congress-led efforts:
Representative Mo Brooks on Electoral College Vote Challenge
Donald Trump Awards Medal of Freedom to Jim Jordan
Marjorie Taylor Greene Calls For Biden Impeachment, Slams Hunter Biden At “America First” Rally
Marjorie Taylor Greene Urges Parents to ‘Protect’ Kids as WHO, CDC Split on COVID Vaccine
Marjorie Taylor Greene breaks silence after temporary Twitter suspension…

As a portfolio afterthought, and as a brief addendum to the “Sustained mismanagement fallout on dollar asset valuations” section, a parting thought or two: given the sadly very low odds of society escaping the last quarter of its historical cycle from apathy to dependence (UBI) back into bondage, and given the slim chances of moving from a highly destructive economic policy back to free market capitalism (also for historical reasons), you may want to consider lightening up on overvalued stocks, bonds, and real estate.  You should consider reducing your exposure to very pricey, long-duration growth stocks and long-term bonds that higher interest rates and higher inflation will clobber.  Also consider adding to your constitutional money,  namely physical gold and silver, and consider increasing your exposure to attractively-valued assets in currencies that represent free cash flow (positive trade balances and relatively small public sector deficits and debts) nations.  In other words, focus on value, increase your overseas investment exposure, and add assets that can’t be printed into existence to your investable portfolio.

In the interim, the hugely freedom, creativity, and productivity-inhibiting government, media, and Corporate America-sponsored discrimination against traditions, the nuclear family, and whites at the workplace, in society, and at school — currently known as Cancel Culture and/or Critical Race Theory — is having on America and on much of the West is obviously not just about dollars and cents.  It’s about losing sanity, tolerance, “color blindness,” diversity, meritocracy, the rule of law, property rights, and freedom.  Those attributes make a society free, an economy hum, savings possible, choice possible, and many deserving people happy, healthy, and wealthy.  Sadly, the fascistic and Marxist powers that be in government, the media, Hollywood, too many schools, and way too many colleges are doing their insane, tyrannical, and racist best to racialize and Balkanize our citizenry while they endeavor to freeze Main Street’s animal spirits and confiscate ever more of its property.  Therefore, caveat emptor, taxpayers, non-crony makers, Main Street employees, bubble level stock and bond buyers (and holders), and real estate investors counting on a continuation of artificially low interest rates, bubble valuations, and counterfeit currency-engineered growth — which isn’t growth, it’s a long-standing, wealth-transferring asset bubble from Main Street to Wall Street and K Street.

Last but not least, if the despotic forces manage to institute global communism, then there will be no more property rights, much less property, for anyone but the oligarchs and kleptocrats running the communist party, which is comprised of the “1%” elitist minority (same would hold true if we revisit widespread feudalism).  If this happens, the only remaining property that the vast majority of people will be able to call their own is their own minds, their own thoughts, and their own prayers, which no one can control.  Hopefully we can find a way to avoid such a harrowing fate, history repeating itself, from liberty to bondage, be damned.  If any republic was ever constitutionally, culturally, economically (free market capitalism, without which freedom is impossible) and societally (the civil society) conceived to resist and avoid tyranny, it is the US REPUBLIC, which is based on a well-informed, vigilant, active, freedom-loving people.  Said differently, Americans in significant numbers will have to rise up against lacking integrity in virtually all of our institutions, including in our courts and even in the military “leadership,” by insisting on reclaiming their constitutional, inalienable rights.  We will have to take back what the “kindergarten bullies” have so successfully pilfered.  A very tall order requiring tremendous and sustained civil courage by at least a committed minority of the citizenry.

Sincerely,
Dan Kurz, CFA
DK Analytics

 

*- I received one abusive response from 350 odd parents to my note to them.  Separately, at the early June graduation ceremony, some 350 maskless graduating seniors were invited, one at a time, on stage to the unmasked Estero High principal to receive a certificate and an embrace from him, yet back on campus students had to honor “social distancing” rules and mask up until the last day of scheduled classes, which took place for a week after the ceremony for non-graduating students.   I doubt that more than a few people realized, or cared about, the ironic, despotic, inhumane, and whimsical nature of of it all.

FYI: select edits, grammatical improvements/corrections, and additional links will be incorporated into this post past the initial publishing date of July 12th, 2021.  That said, neither the thrust of the piece nor the overarching message that was communicated at the initial publishing date will be altered in the slightest.

FYI: Two very special, knowledgeable, discerning, and well-read people, my nearly life-long friend, Doug, and a wonderful new friend thanks to my youtube channel subscriber good fortune, Debi, have seen fit to “shower” me with great link-based content as well as their own take/analysis on various things, a fair portion of which has found its way into this “mega-post” effort.

The obligatory boilerplate:
This commentary is not intended as investment advice or as an investment recommendation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Price and yield are subject to daily change and as of the specified date. Information provided is solely the opinion of the author at the time of writing.  Nothing in the commentary should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Information provided has been prepared from sources deemed to be reliable but is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision.  Liquid securities can fall in value.

Post publication statements, confirmations, links, etc. that I wanted to call out in a separate section (note that said content may be historical or new)
— “The immediate goal is obvious: the destruction of the remnants of capitalism in today’s mixed economy, and the establishment of a global dictatorship. This goal does not have to be inferred—many speeches and books on the subject state explicitly that the ecological crusade is a means to that end.  Ayn Rand
“The Anti-Industrial Revolution,” Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, 280
— The tough calculus of emissions and the future of EVs.  Excerpts: Investors and politicians embracing a vision of an all-electric car future believe that path will significantly reduce global carbon dioxide emissions. That’s far from clear.  A growing body of research points to the likelihood that widespread replacement of conventional cars with EVs would likely have a relatively small impact on global emissions. And it’s even possible that the outcome would increase emissions.  The issue is not primarily about the emissions resulting from producing electricity. Instead, it’s what we know and don’t know about what happens before an EV is delivered to a customer, namely, the “embodied” emissions arising from the labyrinthine supply chains to obtain and process all the materials needed to fabricate batteries.  A growing body of research points to the likelihood that widespread replacement of conventional cars with EVs would likely have a relatively small impact on global emissions. And it’s even possible that the outcome would increase emissions. All products entail embodied emissions that are “hidden” upstream in production processes, whether it’s a hamburger, a house, a smartphone or a battery. To see the implications at the macro level, credit France’s High Climate Council for a study issued last year. The analysis found that France’s claim of achieving a national decline in carbon dioxide emissions was illusory. Emissions had in fact increased and were some 70% higher than reported once the embodied emissions inherent in the country’s imports were counted.
— Billions hidden in $3.5 trillion bill to tilt election scale
— Tucker: This is one of the worst stories of our time (A marine that tells the truth about the Afghanistan debacle gets fired and imprisoned while the generals responsible get lauded and paid well for their disaster.)
— 9/27/21, Andy Lees, Macro Strategy Partnership: Last week I highlighted that the province of Jiangsu, with an economy similar in size to Canada’s USD1.8trn, is curbing electricity supplies to industry as Beijing pressures it to reduce energy usage to cut emissions. Many factories in the key manufacturing hub north of Shanghai have cut or even halted operations according to more than a dozen company executives interviewed by Bloomberg, as well as local media and researchers. The Wolfstreet website says that Beijing has imposed a number of policies on provinces and cities, which is now taking the form of suspensions or reductions in industrial electricity supply. Amongst others, this is hitting facilities that produce components for Apple, Tesla, Intel, Nvidia, Qualcomm, NXP, Infineon, and ASE Tech, along with smaller manufacturers. They are now under orders to temporarily halt production. The provinces that haven’t lived up to Beijing’s demands to reduce total energy consumption are having to hand out suspensions of industrial electricity supply; they include the provinces of Liaoning, Jilin, and Heilongjiang, according the Nikkei Asia. Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Guangdong, and other provinces are subject to restrictions on industrial electricity supply. Taiwanese companies with manufacturing operations confirmed that they have had to halt operations at some plants in China. Eson Precision Engineering, an affiliate of Foxconn and a key mechanical parts supplier for Apple and Tesla, disclosed in a filing with the Taiwan stock exchange on Sunday that it would suspend its production from Sunday until Friday at its facilities in the city of Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, in response to the city’s policy of stopping electricity supply for industrial use. (Chinese thermal coal prices (TRC1 <Commodity>) rose to CNY1440.4 a tonne).
— 9/29/21 Mark Levin exposes Democrats’ reckless schemes and lies (related to the $3.5trn — really $5.5trn — “spending bill”)
— 9/29/21 Tucker: These are the moral priorities of the Democrats (let illegal aliens in by boat load without any virus tests or vax requirements but fire Americans that refuse vax)
— 9/29/21 Mark Levin exposes Democrats’ reckless schemes and lies (related to the $3.5trn — really $5.5trn — “spending bill”)
— 9/29/21 Tucker: These are the moral priorities of the Democrats (let illegal aliens in by boat load without any virus tests or vax requirements but fire Americans that refuse vax)
— 9/30/21 Arkansas Bill Would Create Antibody Exemption for Biden Vaccine Mandates
— 10/1/21 Tucker shreds Australia’s tough COVID restrictions
— 10/1/21 NYC Restaurateurs: Business Down 40 to 60 Percent Due to Vaccine Mandate
— 10/1/21 Harvard Business School goes virtual to fight COVID outbreak among jabbed students — Of the 74 COVID cases on campus, 60 were graduate students. All of the graduate students were jabbed.
— 10/4/21 People Injured by COVID-19 Jab Share Their Horror Stories
— 10/5/21 Vermont Woman Fired, Denied Unemployment for Refusing Vaccine, Becomes Homeless and Flees to Florida 
— 10/6/21 ‘We’re in the middle of a major biological catastrophe’: COVID expert Dr. Peter McCullough 
— 10/7/21 On Tuesday’s Mark Levin Show, Attorney General Merrick Garland has no authority to label parents that protest as domestic terrorists and use the FBI to silence them. The letter from the National School Boards Association smacks of an inside job to help the Federal government further nationalize its reach into local communities. The Biden administration wants to strike fear in the hearts of parents and community members who dare assemble to question their government. If they succeed, the public will have ceded our children, our future, and our liberty to the Marxist left. Then, Manhattan Institute Senior fellow Chris Rufo calls in and explains that this is simply an outrageous attempt to politicize the DOJ even further and prosecute parents for protesting under the Patriot Act. This is a suppression tactic to infringe upon one’s Constitutional right to free speech and assembly similar to how the Obama administration used the IRS to stifle conservatives in the Tea Party movement in 2010. Later, Victor Davis Hanson, author of “The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America” joins the show to explain the fragility of citizenship. The destruction of the middle class, border security, the administrative state, and academia are contributing to the demise of American citizenship.  (In a nutshell, this is a full-bore attack on the first amendment, the ninth amendment, and the 10th amendment, namely on free speech, on uncodified inalienable rights, and on federalism– DK)
— 10/8/21 Young mom who died from COVID vaccine was coerced into receiving jab via government mandate, heartbreaking obituary says
— 10/8/21 Mark Levin RIPS AG Garland for ‘weaponizing’ FBI against parents, reveals multimillion dollar motive for CRT push: ‘This is making the FBI into the East German Stasi’
— 10/8/21 Practical Reasons Why Vaccine Injuries Are Rarely Reported   And in case “to left” disappears: https://media.mercola.com/ImageServer/Public/2021/October/PDF/vaccine-injuries-vaers-whistleblower-pdf.pdf
— 10/12/21 Why The Left Tells Lies About Christopher Columbus.  Excerpts: “At any rate, the attack on Columbus is not an isolated incident. His statues have been vandalized, or toppled, as have been the statues of Lincoln, Jefferson, Lee, and many, many others. The falsification of Columbus’ history is not an isolated case either, just look at the 1619 Project, to cite simply one of the most obvious cases, not to mention the CRT movement.  All these are actually attacks on America, on civilization. This is not hyperbole. The leftists say so. Why? Perhaps Milan Kundera, a former resident of a Communist country can best put it together: “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.” The question remains, then, whether Americans will permit this sacrilege. From what I have seen so far, yes, they already have. Their only response to this outrage has been to whine.”
— 10/12/21 Horowitz: The data is in, and we are now worse off than before the experimental shots.  Excerpts: “Finally, there is a not insignificant risk of the vaccine virus reverting to wild-type virulence, as has sometimes occurred with the oral polio vaccine—which is not intended to be fully virulent or transmissible, but which has reverted to become both neurovirulent and transmissible in rare instances. This is both a medical risk and a public perception risk; the possibility of vaccine-induced disease would be a major concern to the public.  Whether this vaccine actually sheds the spike protein onto other people is still not yet proven (although Pfizer seems to indicate it can spread through skin-to-skin contact in “inhalation”), but the principle of mass vaccination with a faulty vaccine making a virus both more transmissible and more virulent is something that is hard to deny at this point. The reality is that more people have died from COVID-19 in 2021, with most adults vaccinated (and nearly all seniors), than in 2020 when nobody was vaccinated. Something is not adding up, and perhaps those who have been dabbling in gain-of-function research in recent years have the answer.”
— 10/12/21 ‘A Definite Loser’: Ron DeSantis Rails Against Vaccine Mandates Implemented By Biden
— 10/12/21 VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: America and ‘the dying citizen.’ Excerpts: Given our privileges, affluent and leisured Americans must always ask ourselves whether as citizens we have earned what those who died at Gettysburg or on Omaha Beach bequeathed at such costs.  Refusing to stand during the national anthem is not and should not be illegal. But such blanket rejection of American customs is admittedly now a collective narcissistic tic — and hardly sustainable for the nation’s privileged to sit in disgust for a flag that their betters raised under fire on Iwo Jima for others not yet born. Sometimes citizens can do as much harm to their commonwealth by violating customs and traditions as by breaking laws. Instead, freedom requires constant reinvestment in and replenishment of a nation’s traditions and ideals. Self-criticism of one’s country is salutary to ensure needed changes, but only if Americans accept that an innately self-correcting United States does not have to be perfect to be good — and especially when, in a world of innately flawed humans and failed states, it remains far better than any of the alternatives abroad.
–10/12/21 The New Secession Movement | City Journal. The ultimate federalism answer to sustained federal government lawlessness, one which I have long called out, as in right here: https://dkanalytics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/DK-Analytics-Post-4-State-level-_nullification_-of-unconstitutional-federal-edicts-only-ASAP-recourse-7_28_15.pdf
— 10/13/21 Outraged parents say Loudoun County school board is ‘complicit’ in alleged school sexual assaults, demand resignations
— 10/14/21 Will Ron DeSantis Save Christmas?  Excerpts: The media has been very busy issuing warnings to American consumers of late. CNN told us to get ready for emptier shelves. News outlets suggested shopping early for Christmas to avoid shortages. Pictures of dozens of container ships off the West Coast that are not allowed to dock have gone viral.  What can a concerned consumer do? Head to Florida.  Last week, the Florida Ports Council put out a press release telling shippers that the state’s ports are open, staffed, and ready for business. “Florida is where your success comes in, and our seaports are the solution to ensure the cargo shipping logjam doesn’t become the grinch that stole Christmas,” said Florida Ports Council President and CEO Michael Rubin. He added, “With inflation growing, shipping and manufacturing industries can save time and money by calling on Florida ports. Why pay to moor off the coast of California, when Florida shipping lanes are open and serving as the gateway for getting goods to America’s market?”  More than 60 ships holding thousands of shipping containers were moored off the California coast when the council sent the letter. Rubin asserted, “Florida is open for business, and we are the solution to help resolve the global supply chain crisis. Instead of waiting off the coast of California, cargo vessels can offload and move their product to Florida and other discretionary markets in the same time it takes to find space in an increasingly congested California.”
— 10/15/21 Biden administration reverses all punishment of Andrew McCabe  “The Deep State takes care of its own, scoring a big victory yesterday thanks to the Biden administration defaulting, using an old trick to reverse all punishment of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who lied repeatedly to FBI officials — normally a crime that can be prosecuted severely.  That he lied is undisputed.  See this inspector general’s report.  Former attorney general Jeff Sessions fired McCabe just before his pension vested, but the thoroughly politicized Department of Justice declined to prosecute him.  Losing pay and pension rankled McCabe, so he sued.  Rather than fight McCabe in court and let a jury decide, Merrick Garland’s Justice Department has caved in completely and given McCabe everything he wanted in a “settlement agreement” that includes half a million dollars in attorney’s fees and about $200,000 in pension payments he missed plus future pension payments for the rest of his life.  Having already stepped down from his position as deputy director of the FBI — to which he was appointed by James Comey, who raised him from the ranks — McCabe will not be getting his old job back — just the cushy package of benefits and pension payments that retired senior government bureaucrats enjoy.  He joins Lois Lerner of the IRS in the ranks of guilty political hacks who escape punishment for their partisan misdeeds in office.  Me: When traitorous, felonious Andrew McCabe, who perjured himself before Congress, gets all his federal retirement and health benefits reinstated and numerous January 6th protestors get denied due process rights and are left to rot in solitary confinement, then you really know that a mob runs the country.  B.R. response, Debi.
— 10/17/21 Republican AGs Say There Is No Federal Vaccine Mandate for Private Workers, Vow to Sue
— 10/17/21 Civil War 2.0? | Power Line
— 10/17/21 Senator Johnson on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo: Biden flip flops on vaccine mandates.  KEY video on the insanity, tyranny, demagoguery, and destructiveness of the clot shot mandates.
— 10/19/21 Doctors Can Prescribe Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine Off-Label for COVID-19: Nebraska AG
— 10/19/21 On Tuesday’s Mark Levin Show, people deprived of a religious exemption for vaccinations can sue their employers. The federal government has no authority to issue any such mandate, only states have that type of police power. Professor Ken Terry writes on the legality of vaccination mandates, noting that they have quarantine powers but no precedent to force inoculations.
— 10/21/21 Goodbye Middle Class: 50 Percent Of All U.S. Workers Made $34,612.04 Or Less Last Year.  My response to this piece to two friends after one of the friends sent me the article and remarked “This guy clearly sees it:”  Yes he does. He is a smart and honest guy. I know first hand (the honesty part).  America is the third world with the reserve currency. One or the other has got to go. Sadly, it will be the reserve currency. When this happens, which could start any day, all I can think of is this: we ain’t seen nothin’ yet. The only chance of doing relatively well when this happens will be by aping Debi’s increasingly self reliant way of life in a rural setting featuring plenty of water, for which it will be too late for all of us that haven’t long embarked on this highly, highly challenging but I am sure terrifically rewarding and liberating way of life. Or, perhaps by possessing outsized stocks of physical precious metals, which should go up by at least as much as the dollar’s demise, likely substantially more, giving holders tremendous purchasing power in very difficult times, which will endure.  Now, for those one in a million that are sitting pretty on both fronts, they will be uniquely positioned to excel, i.e., if they manage to keep a low profile while simultaneously helping their troubled neighbors, in the process generating tremendous good will and inner satisfaction.  Addendum: Biden and the rest of the Dems looking to completely finish off THE REMNANTS of free market capitalism (human nature!), affordable and available energy, inalienable rights including medical privacy and choice, the rule of law, and fiscal sanity will not only kill the economy, but it will accelerate currency debasement/money printing, which will lead us off the cliff even more quickly, as in any time now.  High inflation and depressions are kissing cousins — and they are the progeny of fiat government enabled by fiat money.
— 10/17/21 Republican AGs Say There Is No Federal Vaccine Mandate for Private Workers, Vow to Sue
— 10/17/21 Civil War 2.0? | Power Line
— 10/17/21 Senator Johnson on Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo: Biden flip flops on vaccine mandates.  KEY video on the insanity, tyranny, demagoguery, and destructiveness of the clot shot mandates.
— 10/19/21 Doctors Can Prescribe Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine Off-Label for COVID-19: Nebraska AG
— 10/19/21 On Tuesday’s Mark Levin Show, people deprived of a religious exemption for vaccinations can sue their employers. The federal government has no authority to issue any such mandate, only states have that type of police power. Professor Ken Terry writes on the legality of vaccination mandates, noting that they have quarantine powers but no precedent to force inoculations
— 10/21/21 Florida Governor Calls for Special Session to Counter Vaccine, Mask Mandates
— 10/22/21 Putin Blasts Pushing Transgenderism On Children As “Simply Monstrous” In Critique Of West’s ‘Wokism’ | ZeroHedge
— 10/24/21 DeSantis Calls On Businesses To Pay For Adverse Reactions To Vaccine If They Mandate It
— 10/24/21 Biden Admin Proposes Taxing Billionaires’ ‘Theoretical Income’
— 10/25/21 ‘Life, Liberty & Levin’ host Mark Levin says the Democrat Party want to fundamentally change America
— 10/25/21 NIH Removes Language on ‘Gain-of-Function’ From Website Amid Criticism Over Funding Chinese Research
— 10/25/21 Health Care Workers Speak Out on Why They Would Rather Lose Their Jobs Than Take a COVID-19 Vaccine
— 10/26/21 The Leaky Vaccine Breakthrough Variant Is Here
— 10/27/21 FDA panel approves Pfizer’s COVID vaccine for kids ages 5-11 (an age group that has virtually zero virus death risk — how does one spell diabolical?)
— 10/27/21 Exclusive — Road Dog Trucking’s Mark Willis: Vax Mandate Worsens Existing U.S. ‘Driver Shortage’ of About 80,000

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the public school unmasking effort, all (widely shared) good things come in threes

US$:90.31; Fed’s B/S: $7.8trn; US debt: $28.3trn;  US 10-yr: 1.64%; S&P 500 P/E: 31; S&P 500: 4145;  Oil: $64.98;  Gold:$ 1,836;  Silver: $27.40

Below please find a note that I wrote, in email format, to Estero High School parents on May 13th on the heels of two email communications from Estero High School that disclosed all the recipients’ email addresses — roughly 400 people, most of them graduating seniors’ parents —  two times.  The Estero High email I responded to was titled: IMPORTANT! YOU need to LAUGH!!! Beneath my note, you will find the initial Estero High email that I decided I had to respond to, given what has transpired since last August.  Without further ado, my appeal to Estero High School parents:

Dear fellow parents:

We have indeed endured many hardships since COVID-19 really exploded on to the scene over a year ago.  The question is whether the hardships were due significantly more to the very intrusive and disruptive virus policy response or to the COVID-19 virus itself – said differently, was the cure worse than the disease?  With so many businesses lost, jobs lost, financial hardships, family lives turned upside down, sharply rising suicide rates, increased depression/mental health problems, freedom of assembly put on hold, property rights put on hold, and kids and adults masked-up either related to or comprising various aspects of the aggregate virus policy response, this is not an academic question.  Separately, is poking fun at “all that” akin to poking fun at other tragedies?  Would we poke fun at “9/11” or “the Holocaust?”

In a related manner, has the Corona virus (COVID-19 or the virus) really been a pandemic?  It was predicted in the spring of 2020 that 0.23% of people that get the Corona virus would die of it (99.8% would survive).  The 0.23%  prediction was repeated and confirmed as more data came in.  Moreover, it was ascertained relatively quickly that virtually no kids get the virus, that the Corona virus infection fatality rate of those kids that do is 0.002%* (meaning that out of 1,000,000 kids, an estimated 20 could die from it*), that kids don’t spread the virus well, and that face masks have little or no effectiveness in terms of preventing the spread of the airborne viruses (the mask lattice is way too big to constrain the virus particles), yet kids have been forced to mask-up for a whole school year.

The (sad) joke has been on us and on school-aged kids, our kids’ health, their freedom, their normal development, their psychological well-being, and their right to breathe free instead of dealing with school day-long oxygen starvation, CO2 inhalation, and a mask that traps warm, humid exhaled air as a perfect breeding ground for germs and bacteria, adding insult to copious and varied masking-up injury.

Now, my daughter Sarah, a senior, is graduating from this masking-up nightmare this year, so I don’t have much skin in the game anymore, although I have tried very hard to get my daughter unmasked at Estero High since last August, when this shameful masking-up started.  Moreover, my heart goes out to kids that may have to suffer under this cruel and useless diktat in the coming school year if the education department bureaucrats continue to prevail — think back two years, please, and ask yourself if a school administrator had forced your K-12 child to mask up all school day long, if he/she wouldn’t have been charged with “child abuse?”

If you share my stance, and you are worried about sustained masking-up that your non-graduating public school kid(s) may have to face (no pun intended), then I strongly suggest that you consider clicking on all the links I provide in this email.   The “this” links below, coupled with a family doctor masking-up medical exemption secured last October given the sustained headache, skin, and drowsiness issues my masked-up daughter was having (and still has) — an exemption which the Estero High School administrative staff refused to abide by — were the culmination of my multi-pronged, but unsuccessful, efforts to again allow Sarah to breathe free for 7 – 8 hours a day, five days a week, starting with the bus ride to school and ending once she steps off the school bus to walk home.

Yes, we all want to smile and laugh, and wouldn’t it be great if our children’s smile at school wasn’t hidden behind a useless, harmful mask and a laugh wasn’t muffled by same?

If you’d like to revisit breathing free sanity for the sake of your kids and also have a more detailed look at my backed-by-science claims in the third paragraph, you may want to give this and this (family doctor masking-up medical exemption visible here) a once-over.

Furthermore, and more importantly, if you, as concerned parents, would also like to chime in on the unmasking front, perhaps my efforts will help give you some ideas and doors to knock on, starting with your child’s school principal’s as well as reaching out to the Lee County School Board.  More and more parents are demanding unmasking of their school age kids across the country, and if enough of you make your voices heard here in SW FL, the inhumane Lee County Schools masking-up status quo can change!  Even the good governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, has belatedly reached the same conclusion: “These Kids Do Not Need to Be Wearing Masks… We Need to Let Them Be Kids and Let Them Act Normally.”  Moreover, Gov. DeSantis will pardon anyone in the Sunshine State charged for not wearing masks or not “socially distancing.”

In the sense of making your voices heard, let me close with two apt quotes.  The first is from a great philosopher: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”   The second is from a pivotal Founder and Framer: “Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

Greetings,
Dan Kurz

Post publication date addendum: I received no parental responses to my unmasking appeal proposal.  

* https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/planning-scenarios.html  (See scenario 5, 0 – 17 years old, 20 estimated deaths per 1,000,000 infections)

P.S. – I’d like to most sincerely and gratefully thank Doug S. and Debi D. for their invaluable suggestions, content input, and solidarity in this “heads up, fellow parents” endeavor.

The initial May 5th, 2021 email from Estero High School that triggered my “round three unmasking plea” effort:

Subject: IMPORTANT! YOU need to LAUGH!!!

Due to a GLOBAL PANDEMIC, we have been forced to endure many hardships. Now is the time to relax and laugh some stress off. Our very own EHS seniors are directing a one-of-a-kind show “The COVID-19 Show” that pokes fun of this crazy past year. With so many shenanigans and EHS faculty guest stars, this will surely put a smile on your face.

The link below is where you can buy tickets either in person or zoom in!

IN PERSON TICKETS: https://www.showtix4u.com/event-details/48775

ZOOM (Hang out at home and watch in your PJ’s) TICKETS: https://www.showtix4u.com/event-details/51628

We hope to see you there next week!
​Estero High School
WILDCAT PRIDE!

 

The obligatory boilerplate:
This commentary is not intended as investment advice or as an investment recommendation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Price and yield are subject to daily change and as of the specified date. Information provided is solely the opinion of the author at the time of writing.  Nothing in the commentary should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Information provided has been prepared from sources deemed to be reliable but is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision.  Liquid securities can fall in value.

 

 

US$:91.02; Fed’s  B/S: $7.8trn; US 10-yr: 1.6%;  S&P 500: 4191;  Oil: $63.79;  Gold:$ 1,771;  Silver: $25.88

Are the first, fourth, and fifth amendments going up in smoke — and with them, what remains of constitutional fidelity?

 

Here is the content food for thought: Executive Order Canceling the Constitution 

 

And here is the brief dialogue related to this ominous piece (initial email related directly below, closing email down the page):
On Apr 25, 2021, at 6:13 AM, Debi sent the following email to Doug and yours truly (more on Debi and Doug in a moment):
Oh no.  Here we go: www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/04/executive_order_canceling_the_constitution.html

After reading the piece, I responded thusly to Debi and Doug:
Devastating. If the executive order (EO) sections are accurately copied and pasted into place and things aren’t taken out of context, which is highly unlikely given this great site, then it looks like this EO drives a stake through the remaining fidelity to the first, fourth, and fifth amendments all by itself.*  A one EO Bill of Rights killer.  Utterly Stalinist.  The criminal US government just keeps getting more so as Biden turbocharges the lawless deep state/the bureaucracy that reports to him.

(* – In retrospect, after further examination, the EO sections in the American Thinker piece are valid, and they aren’t taken out of context, in your author’s view.)

Doug then chimed in with this:
Needless to say, our courts would uphold it.

 

Some additional reflection:
Doug was referring to the courts upholding Biden’s executive order on Blocking Property with Respect to Specified Harmful Foreign Activities of the Government of the Russian Federation.  After over four years of Russian collusion hoax narratives trying to take down candidate and then President Trump while detracting from what was really going on, namely profound, domestic, deep state lawlessness abetted by the American version of the Pravda press, Russia remains the despotic Democrats’ favorite scapegoat with which to mask what they are actually engaged in, and to justify further evisceration of the remaining vestiges of the US Constitution.  Even worse, the same US courts, at both the state and federal levels, that absolutely refused to take up massive and systemic voting fraud in the 2020 election on the one hand, and the rank unconstitutionality of how electors were tallied on the other hand — combined, a stolen election — are surely not going to have a go at trying to peel back Biden’s constitution-withering EOs, very much including this one.  THIS is what is so damning.  So much for federalism.  So much for separation of powers.  So much for checks and balances.  So much for upholding the very Constitution that is supposed to “ring fence” government power.

 

A few words about Doug and Debi, for the sake of context:
Doug is a nearly lifelong, invaluable friend, a highly intelligent person, and a fine lawyer with broad constitutional and historical knowledge and, as you might guess, significant familiarity with US courts.  He is also has fought the battle that is being waged against sanity and ethics/morals in his own community, specifically in his own church, which was deeply involved in and divided by a nearly decade-long slugfest against leftist depravity.  (Sometimes a “divorce” by two irreconcilable convictions/camps is the only sane way to proceed, much as I’ve long felt about the widening and deepening split between “blue” and “red” states.)

Debi subscribed to my micro youtube channel a few years ago, I believe.  She is a bright civil engineer that is keenly aware of what’s going on politically, socially, economically, and financially.  She also works heavy equipment for a living and has a farm here in SW Florida, on which she cultivates a material and growing portion of the food she needs.  She is way ahead of yours truly in terms of bracing and readying herself for the difficult road ahead as a “back in the USSR, revisited” world, which could include Stalinist style horrors, increasingly threatens.  Debi is a successful “Aussteiger” in the making, in other words.

Doug and Debi are patriots deeply concerned about our increasingly “freedom dark,” insane trajectory.  Both are engaged in trying to wake people up while preparing themselves and their families as well as possible for a challenging future.  (Speaking of insanity, did you know that in Michigan toddlers will now have to wear face masks,  or that currently in Germany there is an 8 pm curfew to keep the Corona virus, which is “hyperactive” at night, from wafting through the neighborhood into your under-house-arrest neighbor’s nostrils, or that currently in Germany 10-year old daughter Julia can only invite one youngster over to her birthday party because the second youngster could be carrying the virus and spread it, even though science tells us that youngsters don’t get or spread the virus?)

 

Closing thoughts:
Even if this post is, once again, off the beaten path, I think the topic is as timely as it is threatening, and for the following reason: not only should readers allocate, portfolio–wise, as well as possible for the inevitable stagflation that we are rapidly steering towards, but they should also be good “preppers” in the physical sense of the word, given the increasingly rapid sunsetting of individual freedom and property right protections, which are vital pillars of a broader group of inalienable (God-given) rights on the one hand, and enablers of the best possible political and economic prospects on the other hand.  In other words, prepare and position yourself to the best of your ability not only for fiat money and the economic and financial destruction that it always causes, but also for fiat government, its liberty-eliminating, impoverishing tyrannical twin.  And given that America is more than 200 years into a period of an erstwhile federalist, sound money, constitutional republic (a state that is ruled by representatives of the citizen body) featuring both democratic aspects (direct election of representatives and, after 1913, senators) and inalienable rights protections (safeguards against both monarchial government and a mobocracy), the crumbling of freedom is, sadly, “overdue.”  Instead of caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), let the citizen beware, for history is about to repeat.

 

Greetings,
Dan
www.dkanalytics.com

 

The obligatory boilerplate:
This commentary is not intended as investment advice or as an investment recommendation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Price and yield are subject to daily change and as of the specified date. Information provided is solely the opinion of the author at the time of writing.  Nothing in the commentary should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Information provided has been prepared from sources deemed to be reliable but is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision.  Liquid securities can fall in value.

 

US$:89.71; Fed’s  B/S: $7.4trn; US 10-yr: 1.05%;  S&P 500: 3772;  Oil: $50.60;  Gold:$ 1,908;  Silver: $26.86

An appeal to add teeth to Gov. DeSantis’ E.O. #20-244

The E.O. #20-244 link: https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/orders/2020/EO_20-244.pdf

Executive summary:

Post #70 was titled thusly: An on-campus unmasking request for daughter Sarah failed; round one loss to health, sanity, and tyranny.  Here is “round two,” or Post #73, “An appeal to add teeth to Gov. DeSantis’ E.O. #20-244.”  Instead of pursuing public school unmasking “Mission Impossible” with another few layers of Marxist bureaucrats that are heavily invested, career-wise, in student asphyxiation, I thought I’d “aim for the sky.”  Specifically, tap the good governor of the great state of Florida that issued the executive order (E.O.) on the shoulder directly.  In so doing, appeal to him to grant daughter Sarah a mask-free (natural) future at school.  I know the odds of success here are microscopically small, but what is there to lose other than a return to greater student health, cognitive ability, and happiness?  With a return to heightened federal government tyranny looking more threatening than ever given the November election (fraud) and today’s US senator election results in Georgia, a local and state effort to revisit a modicum of freedom and inalienable rights protections is arguably timelier than ever as a bulwark against an expanding federal government leviathan bent on eviscerating what is left of federalism and inalienable rights.  This is true both from trying to reclaim greater property rights protections (the antithesis of unconstitutional lockdowns) and in terms of trying to get a “pole vault” solution for Sarah that will help drive a wedge of uninhibited breathing sanity into a “bad, year-round Halloween mask joke.”

 

My “end run” unmasking appeal as a citizen/resident of Florida:

That effort is comprised by the email that I sent to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (governorron.desantis) on Sunday, January 3rd, 2021; confirmation of receipt of same can be found below.  That email:

Dear Governor DeSantis,

 

Thank you very much for your Executive Order #20-244 (hereafter, “E.O.”)!  Your E.O. is part of my thus far unsuccessful effort to unmask daughter Sarah Kurz at Estero High School, where she is a senior.  Specifically, this section of the your E.O. is germane:

 

 

Section 4. Suspension of COVID-19-related Individual Fines and Penalties.
This order, consistent with Executive Order 20-92, suspends the collection of fines and penalties associated with COVID-19 enforced upon individuals.

 

I well realize that you are fighting a deeply entrenched, leftist, and often despotic (unconstitutional) bureaucracy as well as politicians of a similar persuasion.  To add insult to injury, you’re going up against the press and Big Tech, which are effectively in bed with constitution-eviscerating (at the FL and federal level), unelected, unaccountable administrators and elected officials that “always get paid.”  If that weren’t enough, I’m convinced that ambulance chasing trial lawyers are also too often aligned — for monetary reasons — against your efforts to bring back freedom and personal responsibility in the COVID-19 sphere (and in numerous other spheres, obviously).

 

As a sad result, at least as per my experience in SW Florida from public schools to governmental agencies to most business establishments, your E.O. unfortunately lacks teeth.  Said differently, it is effectively over-ruled by those wanting to lord over us, or by litigation fears.  Anything that you — perhaps in concert with the Republican legislature — can do to increase fidelity to your E.O. and, by extension, increase our individual freedom, property right protections, economic prospects, and personal responsibility for our own actions would be greatly appreciated.

 

Allow me to provide you with a link related to my thus far failed effort to unmask my daughter on campus despite a) our family doctor’s medical exemption (attached), b) your E.O., c) masks’ lacking Corona virus transmission reduction efficacy, d) the substantial harm that these masks can do# if kids have to wear them over protracted periods of time, e) children’s low Corona virus transmission rates, f) the extremely low-level risk Sarah would pose to other students if she was unmasked on campus and on the school bus, and g) that virtually 100% of all school-age kids that contract the virus survive and thrive, as you have so aptly, truthfully, and wonderfully shown!

 

Please review my rejected request to unmask Sarah on the Estero High campus and while on public school buses.  The request was based on Sarah’s growing and lingering health issues since having to mask up in late August when the new school year started.  It is underpinned by our family doctor’s writings,* most especially his medical exemption, which he drafted after we sought his medical advice; his writings were then sent to the Estero High School principal via certified mail.

 

In a related manner, if you or your team think my post is worth sharing with others, given what is at stake both health-wise and constitutionally (inalienable rights or Bill of Rights protections), I would obviously be delighted if you would use it for said purpose.

 

 

In closing, I would be most delighted of all if you would see fit to write the Lee County bureaucrats** that daughter Sarah Kurz has been given a governor-based mask-wearing exemption on the Estero High School campus for the remainder of this school year – an exemption that would obviously be in sync with your E.O., our family doctor’s mask-related medical exemption (liberation), Sarah’s health, and the preponderance of evidence that supports K-12 student unmasking.

 

Sincerely and gratefully,
Dan Kurz and Sarah Kurz

 

P.S. – My mom, Elizabeth Kurz Staley, has long been a supporter of yours and has frequently contributed to your campaign requests for citizen funding (I voted for you as governor with enthusiasm, and tapped friends and neighbors on the shoulder to do same)!

 

* – Our family doctor, who issued the (unmasking) medical exemption for Sarah Kurz, requested that he remain anonymous online given how intense intimidation and retribution efforts can be for those daring to speak out against masks in a public fashion.  (FYI: while sharing our family doctor’s coordinates with Governor DeSantis/his office, I have taken them out of this public post for the reasons stated directly above.)

 

** – Email addresses of two bureaucrats that voted “no” on the requested mask exemption for Sarah Kurz followed by the email address of the Estero High School principal:  terriPH@LeeSchools.net (Terrill Hensley, “504 Committee” coordinator);  ChuckEB@LeeSchools.net (Chuck Bradley, Director of Positive Prevention),  MichealeLA@LeeSchools.net (Mike Amabile, Estero High principal)

Confirmation of email receipt by Gov. Desantis’ office:
Automatic reply: An appeal to add teeth to your E.O. #20-244 (https://www.flgov.com/wp-content/uploads/orders/2020/EO_20-244.pdf)

Thank you for contacting Governor Ron DeSantis.

Due to the volume of emails sent to the Governor, there may be a delay in responding to your e-mail. You may wish to view the Governor’s web site, [www.FLGov.com <http://www.flgov.com/> ]www.FLGov.com <http://www.flgov.com/> , which provides information on current issues and answers to frequently asked questions.

Thank you again for taking the time to contact Governor DeSantis.

Office of Governor Ron DeSantis

www.flgov.com <http://www.flgov.com> @GovRonDeSantis

Please note that under Florida law correspondence sent to the Governor’s Office, which is not confidential or exempt pursuant to chapter 119 of the Florida Statutes, is a public record made available upon request.

 

Conclusion:

Once again, at the grassroots/state level, this is just another small effort to struggle against ever-rising despotism while trying to encourage Gov. Ron DeSantis to effectively restore more freedom, free-breathing health, science over politics, sanity over insanity, normalcy over absurdity, common sense over there lack of, and property right protections over various forms of confiscation from unconstitutional, destructive lockdowns to revenue-killing, bankrupting social distancing diktats (ask restaurants or airlines or cinemas or gyms).  In short, to hearten him to give his E.O. #20-244 teeth!  Call it an appeal to incentivize the governor to preserve the remaining residuals of individual freedom and inalienable rights protections, to sustain and invigorate cost-benefit analysis in state-level public policy, and to make a stand for the most precious assets any of us have, our children and their health and well being.  In my view, it’s all “tied at the hip.” i.e., if we can get those school kids with 99.997% Corona virus survival rates unmasked as DeSantis’ E.O. clearly implies should occur (but hasn’t), it could ignite a chain reaction of “freedom insistence,” expanding our circle of liberty and economic freedom in other realms, especially as concerns Main Street’s hugely maligned small businesses, which constitute over 45% of economic activity.

Should my appeal and similar and broader appeals for a return to less Covidocracy (a leftist bureaucracy wielding plutocracy leveraging the virus threat to gain even more illegitimate control and power over the citizenry while it enriches itself at society’s expense) and more Constitutionalism fall on deaf or inactive ears at both the governmental and citizen (!!!) levels, which sadly is is highly likely, make darn sure, dear reader, that you add physical precious metals to your investable accounts as freedom, free market capitalism, productivity, output, property rights, the purchasing power of the dollar, and the (remnants of the) rule of law will get whacked even more while debt, money printing, and fascism (fiat law) continue to “go vertical on the J-curve.”

Hopefully you got something out of this likely “bookend” post!

Sincerely,
Dan Kurz, CFA
DK Analytics

 

# – SecondOpinion 🙂 on Twitter: “”First results of a Germany-wide registry mask in 25.930 children.” Impairments were reported by 68% of the parents – irritability 60% – headache 53% – difficulty concentrating 50% – less happiness 49% – malaise 42% – impaired learning 38% – fatigue 37%   https://t.co/6SjAmlFrX8 https://t.co/mv5JsiJSgv” / Twitter   This information was shared with the governor and was drawn to my attention thanks to a superb macro analyst out of London that I’ve been blessed to know and learn lots from since 2007, when he was at UBS and I was at CS.

 

The obligatory boilerplate:
This commentary is not intended as investment advice or as an investment recommendation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Price and yield are subject to daily change and as of the specified date. Information provided is solely the opinion of the author at the time of writing.  Nothing in the commentary should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Information provided has been prepared from sources deemed to be reliable but is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision.  Liquid securities can fall in value.

 

 

 

 

 

US$:90.30; Fed’s  B/S: $7.4trn; US 10-yr: 0.92%;  S&P 500: 3735;  Oil: $47.69;  Gold:$ 1,875;  Silver: $26.24

US Senator Rick Scott’s December 28th, 2020 response to my email request of him (please see post #71 for its equivalent):

Dear Mr. Kurz,

 

Thank you for contacting me regarding the 2020 election. I appreciate the opportunity to respond.

 

I believe that every legal vote must be counted fairly and that President Donald Trump has the right to fight for transparency. The media does not pick the President, voters do.

 

This election has shown us that we need major reforms to our electoral system and that is why I proposed the Verifiable, Orderly, & Timely Election Results (VOTER) Act (S. 4707).  The VOTER Act establishes uniform standards for vote-by-mail systems across the country and ensures the timely and efficient counting of ballots, with important protections to prevent fraud.  The bill creates a deadline for state election officials to tally and report the election results to avoid prolonged uncertainty in the outcome of a federal election.

 

Voting is fundamental to our democracy, and it is a sacred right that we must protect and cherish.  I always say we need 100% participation and 0% fraud in our elections.  I look forward to working with my colleagues in the Senate to get this legislation passed and ensure smooth and secure elections.

 

Again, thank you for contacting me regarding your concerns.  I am proud to represent all Floridians and I am working diligently to help get the necessary resources to Floridians to continue to combat this public health crisis.

 

Sincerely,
Rick Scott
United States Senator

I responded, about two hours ago as I pen this post — also on December 28th, 2020 —  with the following (I had to go on Senator Scott’s site to reply):

Thank you, Senator Rick Scott, for your reply.  I appreciate your stance above.

 

You correctly state:  “I believe that every legal vote must be counted fairly and that President Donald Trump has the right to fight for transparency.  The media does not pick the President, voters do.”

 

Let me expand on that: legal voters and state legislatures, via electors constitutionally and legitimately chosen, pick the president.  This has not occurred, as I’m sure you are well aware.  Instead, we’ve witnessed massive unconstitutionality and fraud related to the current presidential election.

 

While your proposed Voter Act reform is laudable, that will not help remedy the current presidential election predicament, namely the systemic breaching of election integrity and legality firewalls.

 

However, you, as a US Senator, can play a vital role today to prevent a constitutional tragedy for our challenged representative republic.  How so?  By standing up and disputing the illegitimate electoral count for candidate Biden by joining Representative Mo Brooks’ initiative on January 6^th, 2021.

 

As we are nearly out of time, and given that this is the only option left to attempt to stop a lawless presidential election from culminating in the assumption of power by an illegitimate president-elect, allow me to draw your attention to the wider appeal I’m attempting to make via a link.  The post behind that link makes precisely the same points I made to you via the email that I sent you and you responded to.  Here is that link: https://dkanalytics.com/post-71-a-plea-to-my-representatives-in-the-us-congress-to-contest-the-electoral-vote-tally/

 

Please take a moment and reassess the only opportunity left at this very late stage.  Please let me know if you will be joining Rep. Brooks’ effort.  Please be a Republican, not a RINO, so that my family, friends, and yours truly can vote for you again.  Thank you.

 

Sincerely and gratefully,
Dan Kurz

Bottom line: it ain’t over ’til it’s over.  Perhaps, just perhaps, if enough of us knock on enough RINO senator doors “like this” (more than one knock will be necessary), one of them may morph back into a Republican again, if only for a fleeting moment, but for THE moment. 

The odds are daunting here, I know, but it’s the only remaining option to try to reverse the unconstitutionality and pervasive fraud related to the 2020 presidential election.  Maybe a Senator Cruz or a Senator Lee or a Senator Paul can be motivated to contest the elector counts; after all, they purport to be constitutionalists.  If you happen to reside in their states and you share my convictions and great concern, perhaps you could make an “11th hour” appeal to them to join Rep. Mo Brooks’ initiative?  According to the US Constitution, only one US representative and one US senator needs to contest the electoral vote tally for a mandatory review of the legitimacy of same.  There are something like 30 Republican representatives that are onboard, but not one Republican senator, yet …

What is there left to lose?  Speak now or forever hold your peace, for if the “big guy” is our next president, we may all see a rather rapid disappearance of the remaining fragments of constitutional fidelity, including the 1st Amendment, and the Bill of Rights (minute mark 15) in its entirety.  Soldiers on the battlefield defending liberty have risked much, much more, thus perhaps it is not too much to ask you to engage in a last ditch effort to ward off what looks increasingly like iron-fisted despotism around the bend. 

The seldom window of (what remains of) individual freedom and inalienable rights, very much including property rights, may be at stake, not only in America, but for the world at large, for if the US Constitution can be “taken down,” so can the citadel of individual liberty and inalienable rights.  Do recall that one or another form of totalitarianism is the rule throughout history.  The individual liberty exception — our enormous, very seldom, and hard won privilege — is hanging by a thread.  Not exactly a great way to wind down the old year, much less start the new one!

(In the interim, if you haven’t already done so amidst all our political, societal, financial, extreme monetary debasement, and economic turbulence juxtaposed against bubble valuation bonds and stocks, get some physical PM insurance.)

Greetings,
Dan
DK Analytics

FYI: A few links relating to discussed topics have been added to select sections of this post after the initial publication date in an effort to better buttress the stance espoused without changing the content or the nature of the matter discussed.  Moreover, the links in the final email draft that I attempted to send Senator Scott had to be stripped in order to get my response to upload on his site.  Said have been reinserted above.

The obligatory boilerplate:
This commentary is not intended as investment advice or as an investment recommendation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Price and yield are subject to daily change and as of the specified date. Information provided is solely the opinion of the author at the time of writing.  Nothing in the commentary should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Information provided has been prepared from sources deemed to be reliable but is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision.  Liquid securities can fall in value.

US$:90.44; Fed’s  B/S: $7.4trn; US 10-yr: 0.92%;  S&P 500: 3663;  Oil: $47.36;  Gold:$ 1,873;  Silver: $25.78

A plea to my representatives in the US Congress to contest the electoral vote tally

Good morning Senator/Congressman (I just sent my first such appeal on to Senator Marco Rubio)

This is Dan Kurz emailing you.  I reside in Bonita Springs, FL.  You represent me.  I voted for you.  I’d like you to challenge the electoral vote tally when Congress meets on January 6^th, 2021 to certify the results of the presidential election.  I so doing, I would like you to join Representative Mo Brooks’ (R-AL) in this critical, constitutional undertaking.

Why?  Because of the stark unconstitutionality of numerous of the Biden electors thanks to multiple violations of Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 of the Constitution in swing states (and likely well beyond that) on the one hand, and thanks to the well-documented, massive fraud, which lacking federal and state constitutional fidelity facilitated, on the other hand.  In short, we are faced with a lawless presidential election that dare not culminate in the assumption of power by an illegitimate president-elect.

You need to stand for the Constitution and the rule of law even if the SCOTUS refuses to do so, either patronizingly or gutlessly without comment in the Pennsylvania suit or by refusing plaintiffs’ standing in the Texas suit when they most surely have it, given the federal nature of their complaint.  In fact, you need to stand for the Constitution especially because the pathetic, lawless SCOTUS won’t (do its job).

Please get back to me as to a) your stance here, b) whether you will join Representative Mo Brooks’ undertaking on January 6^th, 2021 to contest the electoral vote tally, and c) if you can’t or won’t honor my request, please explain why not.  Separately, please rest assured that future votes for you by my family, friends, and yours truly will depend on you doing the right thing here.

I look forward to a confirmation of your constitutional fidelity and ethical stance in this critical matter in order to salvage, and then strengthen, what is left of our increasingly eviscerated US Constitution, which was designed to avoid the freedom and inalienable rights robbing aspects of both an all-powerful, unaccountable, unrepresentative government and/or a mob.  This may be our last chance to avoid a full-fledged Banana Republic fate and the associated totalitarianism.  I’m counting on you to rise to the occasion; to be a Republican, not a RINO!  It’s now or never.

Thanks in advance!

Sincerely and respectfully,

Dan Kurz

P.S. — Dear reader, if you are of a similar conviction, please, please consider contacting your US government senator and representative on this very matter ASAP.  We have precious little time left to try to prevent the utterly illegitimate swearing in of the “big guy” of the treasonous Biden Crime Family.

 

FYI: An additional link has been added post publication date; neither the content nor the post’s stance were altered.  

 

The obligatory boilerplate:

This commentary is not intended as investment advice or as an investment recommendation. Past performance is not a guarantee of future results. Price and yield are subject to daily change and as of the specified date. Information provided is solely the opinion of the author at the time of writing.  Nothing in the commentary should be construed as a solicitation to buy or sell securities. Information provided has been prepared from sources deemed to be reliable but is not a complete summary or statement of all available data necessary for making an investment decision.  Liquid securities can fall in value.