American Pulp Fiction
Prologue – The End is the Beginning
I love movies that start at the end and work their way back. One of my favorites, Pulp Fiction, is Quentin Tarantino's magnum opus. It’s a black comedy based around the criminal underworld of Los Angeles. It weaves several stories together and presents them in a non-linear story arc. The opening scene takes place in a diner, where a couple are discussing their business of robbery over lunch. They decide that the diner they are at is perfect for their next job; a conclusion that doesn't play out until the very end of the film. At the end of the film, the couple's attempted robbery of the diner is brought to a halt when they demand that Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) hands over a briefcase he is guarding at his table. Of course, the importance of this briefcase is featured throughout the film, resulting in an intense finale between Jules, Vincent (John Travolta) and the thieving couple. Suffice it to say, the couple does not leave with the briefcase, but they do leave with their lives. And a little money courtesy of Jules, the shepherd.
There are other great movies that start at the ending like American Beauty, Pan's Labyrinth, the 1979 musical Quadrophenia by the Who, and the classic Forest Gump. There is a poetic simplicity in getting right to punchline, or most of it, at the beginning so the audience knows right way what they are dealing with. It’s the hook. In that artistic spirit, I begin this blog near the end, leaving enough room to postulate a couple of different endings in the future. I deviate from my normal “just the facts” approach to paint a dystopic near-future presidential election story that seems outrageous. This is an experiment so hang in there, as the story winds through fact, fiction and a surprise ending that will blow your mind. Here goes.
Scene 1 – Pistols at Dawn
It’s early morning November 4, 2020 and all the TV networks project Donald Trump as the 46th President with a comfortable Electoral College victory of 286-252 although he once again narrowly lost the popular vote to Joe Biden. The GOP also held the Senate and the Democrats maintained their majority in the House. Fox News was the first to call the election for Trump but as soon as CNN grudgingly projected a Trump win a couple hours later, there were reports of wide-spread civil unrest in many large American cities. Portland, which had been under non-stop protest since May, erupted with black-masked protesters burning and looting buildings with an intensity far exceeding the summer protests. Reports of rifle wielding protesters protecting rioters were everywhere. Police response was negligible as they were instructed by Portland’s Mayor Ted Wheeler to stand down.
As the sun broke on the new day, similar scenes were underway in Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Minneapolis. The normal morning commute into the cities was replaced by traffic jams of residents trying to leave the cities. Hundreds of protesters were blocking entrances to La Guardia and JFK airports, creating a “no way out of here” narrative reminiscent of the 1981 sci-fi film “Escape from New York.” Some Democrats accused the Trump campaign of planting provocateurs into the protests throughout the country to insure they turned violent, although no evidence was presented. CNN and MSNBC and other left-leaning media outlets quickly began loudly promoting that narrative. They were supported by Facebook and Twitter who filtered any content trying to debunk this narrative.
Echoing his campaign theme of “law and order”, President Trump asked the mayors and governors of the states and cities under siege if they needed help and all of them roundly refused federal help. Seeing the growing violence, President Trump invoked the Insurrection Act to quell the violence with federal troops as Presidents Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Eisenhower, Kennedy and George Bush had done before him. A few members of the GOP pressed President Trump to “go slow” with federal intervention so they wouldn’t lose the support of the few moderate Democrats left in Congress they needed to declare Trump’s victory as legitimate. The President still sent troops into the worst areas like Portland and Chicago but restrained himself from other cities.
Meanwhile, under immense pressure from his party, Joe Biden retracted his concession on election night. They reasoned that it was time to capitalize on the public outrage that, for the third time in 20 years, a Democratic Presidential nominee won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College. Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Barrack Obama took to the airwaves to exhort Americans to wait to accept the results of the election because all the ballots were not counted. North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan and other states with Democrat governors were under siege by an army of lawyers challenging every mail-in ballot that was rejected. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer seemed to be on TV non-stop accusing the Trump campaign of voter suppression. When asked by a brave CNN talking head what evidence they had of the suppression, Nancy Pelosi exploded on-air at the audacity of her statements being questioned. CNN had to cut the interview short because of the Mrs. Pelosi’s expletives.
On November 5th, The Biden campaign officially asked for recounts. Shortly after, the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan sent separate slates of electors to counter those sent by the state legislatures. The Biden campaign encouraged California, Oregon and Washington, collectively given the new name of “Cascadia”, to secede from the Union unless Congressional Republicans agreed to back several enormous structural changes to the America system to ensure a popular vote majority rule, presumably by the Democrats. With advice from Barrack Obama, the Biden campaign submitted a proposal to do the following:
1. Give statehood Washington DC and Puerto Rico
2. Divide California in 5 new states which would increase House Reps and add 10 new Senators.
3. Require Supreme Court Justices to retire at 70
4. Eliminate the Electoral College to ensure the candidate who won the popular vote becomes President.
As violent civil unrest spread across American cities and into some suburbs, the GOP and Trump campaign rejected the Democrat extortion. Fox News covered the continued mass exodus from blue states to the relative safety of red states. Real Estate prices in Florida, Texas, Utah and Wyoming exploded as nearly all available inventory was scooped up in bidding wars. The GOP answered the Democrats demands with the statement that most, if not all, of the changes required constitutional amendments, to which the Democrats responded that they would be happy to convene a Constitutional Convention. For its part, President Trump took to the airwaves to characterize the Democrats as trying to stage an illegal coup. His campaign team was furiously portraying President-elect Trump as a unifier. He held a rally at the Lincoln Memorial where he promised to establish a commission to review electoral rules. Of course, he flooded Twitter with promises to restore safety and security in the face of radical groups supporting Joe Biden and trying to destroy America.
By Thanksgiving, a full-blown Constitutional Crisis was underway. Twitter shut down President Trumps account and his only outlet to the American people was Fox News, whose ratings exploded. Each time President Trump spoke on Fox became an all-time record for viewership for any TV event in history. As expected the stock market was in free-fall with the Nasdaq, S&P and Dow all down more than 50% since election day. Americans were nervously grateful for the Thanksgiving holiday to escape the mind-bending events they were witnessing. COVID became an afterthought, as polling showed that Americans, while still divided on the election, were 90% against the protests, violence and economic wreckage they were experiencing.
As the Great Constitutional Crisis grinded on, the stock market swung wildly as traders bet on how this dangerous game would end. The military patiently stood by not declaring any allegiance but rather putting troops on high-alert in Asia and Europe in an effort to discourage Russia and China from taking advantage of the crisis. A not very Merry Christmas came and went and, on January 6 , 2021, Team Biden provoked a breakdown in the joint session of Congress by getting the House of Representatives to agree to award the Presidency to Biden based on the alternative pro-Biden submissions sent by the governors in Michigan and Wisconsin. Vice President-elect Mike Pence, serving as President of the Senate, and the GOP refused to accept this, declaring that Trump was re-elected because of Electoral College victory as the Constitution proscribed. This partisan division continued as January 20 arrived without agreement on who the Commander-in-Chief was to be after high noon of that day. The Democrats claimed that the Constitution provided for this impasse by proscribing that the House of Representatives elect a President. As the clock ticked to 11:59 AM, some members in the House Chamber swear they saw Nancy Pelosi’s face briefly transform to a smiling Jules from Pulp Fiction, brandishing his silver Colt 9 mm reciting his famous bible soliloquy from Ezekiel 25:17:
“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the
Inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in
The name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of
Darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost
Children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious
Anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know
My name is the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon thee."
Scene 2 – The Grand Bargain
Federal debt as a percentage of the U.S. economy has climbed to its highest level since World War II and will exceed it next year, thanks to the enormous $3 trillion fiscal response to the coronavirus pandemic. The Congressional Budget Office says that federal debt held by the public will exceed 100% of U.S. gross domestic product, by the end of October. That puts the U.S. in the company of a handful of nations with debt loads that exceed their economies, including Japan, Italy and Greece.
But in yet another of the ongoing swindles that that our governing elites perpetrate on its unsuspecting citizens, they drastically under count the real “national debt” and hope we don’t notice. Unlike Japan, Italy and Greece and the rest of the world, the United States has three levels of government, Local, State and Federal, and they all issue their own debt with the main difference being that, unlike federal, state and local governments cannot print money to pay it back. Do we really think the U.S. will allow California and New York City to declare bankruptcy? And there are those supposedly “independent” agencies of the government like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which finance over 90% of home mortgages and federal student loan guarantees which cover 98% of the market. Can you say monopoly? Of course, state and local government have their version of agency debt for bridges, roads, airports and the like. All told, that represents over $42 trillion in public indebtedness across all levels of government. Compared to a GDP that is forecast to shrink 4.6% in 2020, this leaves us with a Debt-GDP ratio of 210%.
But as Steve Jobs used to say at his new product launch spectacles, “But wait, there’s more.” Mandatory spending on Social Security, Medicare, Welfare, public employee pensions, and interest on debt already represents more than 2/3 of total government spending and will automatically increase by about 5.5% annually. That means multi-trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. Every year the US Treasury publishes its “FINANCIAL REPORT OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT”. In the most recent 2019 report, it starkly states the challenge in front of us;
“The long-term fiscal projections indicate that the government’s Debt-to-GDP ratio will rise from 79% in 2019 to 474% over the 75-year projection period, and will continue to rise thereafter, if current policy is kept in place. The projections in this Financial Report show that current policy is not sustainable.”
The report calculates these unfunded liabilities to be about $126 trillion over the 75 year time horizon. Generously assuming there will be future drastic policy changes to cut spending, let’s assume only 58% of that number as a contingent liability on the government balance sheet. The table below shows the #realgovernmentdebt to be 575% of GDP. If the policies of free college for all, free healthcare for all and The Green New Deal are enacted into law, the Federal Reserve won’t be able to print the money fast enough. Keep in mind how our government conceals the truth to focus our gaze on only Federal Public Debt-to-GDP, a still horrific 100% of our entire economy. The truth is more than five times worse. The table below shows the gory details:
Some might argue that the top personal tax rate in the 1950s was 91% and our economy was booming. The reality is that in the 1950s the top 1% of households paid an effective tax rate of 42% with all the loopholes in the tax code. This is according to a September 2017 paper, Distributional National Accounts: Methods and Estimates for the United States, by economist Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman. According to the IRS, as of 2016, the top 10% of US households earned 46% of national income and paid 70% of the federal income taxes, and half of the country paid no federal income taxes.
The math is pretty straightforward to expose the lie that taxing the rich is the solution to all our government problems. I did an analysis using data from the CBO, the IRS, and the Federal Reserve combined with findings from a 2007 study, The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates Based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks, by President Obama’s top economic advisor Christina Romer. Her study showed a strong statistical inverse relationship between taxes and economic health. Ms. Romer found that each 1% increase in taxes as a percentage of GDP lowers real GDP by about 3% after two years.
Inverse Relationship between Taxation and Economic Health
My analysis starts with the fact that nearly ALL of our federal income tax revenue is currently allocated to mandatory social spending and interest on the national debt, which increases like clockwork by 5.5% every year. This means that the rest of our government spending, including defense, education, research, environmental, etc., must be financed by issuing more debt, which in turn increases the mandatory interest payments on that debt. From that basis, my analysis shows a temporary 5-year benefit from doubling taxes on the top 5% of earners and rolling back the Trump corporate tax cuts. After that, the gap between mandatory spending and tax revenue goes negative as far as the eye can see, which means ever higher issuance of national debt and higher taxes on the bottom 99%. Sound sustainable?
The DC crowd assume the American people are dumb enough to believe that individuals and corporations will behave the same way in a high-tax versus a low-tax environment. They don’t tell you that everyone pays higher taxes in the form of lost jobs and opportunity as government spending crowds out the private sector economy. This defies history, modern economic theory, and common sense. The truth is, taxing high earners will not come close to solving our spending problem; in fact, it will make it a lot worse. My analysis shows that closing the long-term funding gap without cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits would require either, doubling income-tax rates for every citizen, or eliminating nearly every remaining federal function.
Once again history provides the example. Confiscatory taxation was a main cause of the fall of the Roman Empire. For hundreds of years, Rome financed its burgeoning public expenditures by conquest. By the third century, the costs of defending the borders of their vast empire from the encroaching Barbarian hordes required massive tax increases to the point where farmers stopped working and abandoned their land in exchange for receiving public entitlements. When the government became aware of this behavior, they forced farmers to continue working their land under penalty of imprisonment. Some parents sold their children into slavery to avoid torture for non-payment of taxes. This ushered in a downward spiral with citizens losing trust in their institutions and many fleeing the empire or welcoming the Barbarians in dethroning their corrupt government.
Scene 3 – The Exorbitant Privilege
So here we are, America the Beautiful sitting inside a gilded financial box of our own making only 75 years after we created the new post-WW2 global order at Bretton Woods, NH. The bargain was simple and very effective. American military might would protect rules-based global free trade and, in exchange, the rest of the world would use American dollars to transact that trade. So, France wanting to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, had to acquire US dollars to purchase it. This required France to go on the newly created Foreign Exchange markets and buy dollars with its francs. Thus, was the status of the U.S. dollar as the world’s “reserve currency”, backed by gold until President Nixon eliminated the dollar convertibility to gold in 1971. Countries were redeeming their dollars for gold to combat inflation at a rate that would have quickly depleted our gold reserves. Nixon’s bold move also ushered in a long period of “Stagflation”, an unholy combination of high inflation and stagnant economic growth. As a child of the 1970s, I remember gas shortages and 15% mortgage rates and I am happy that I was a kid and not having to raise a family during those times.
The US dollar has the “exorbitant privilege” of being the world’s reserve currency. As economist Barry Eichengreen summarized: “It costs only a few cents for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing to produce a $100 bill, but other countries have to pony up $100 of actual goods in order to obtain one.” One of the important ways that other countries “pony up” is by buying our debt. According to the IMF, almost 40% of global debt is denominated in US dollars. Many developing countries that want to borrow money, are required by their lenders to borrow in US dollars. They don’t want to be paid back in sketchy Argentine pesos or Nigerian Naira. So, the phenomenon at play here is that there continues to be a ravenous global demand for dollars to conduct trade and repay US dollar-denominated debt.
Hopefully, you can see that when the dollar gets stronger and/or US interest rates rise, this creates a problem for the rest of the world. As the dollar gets stronger, global trade tends to weaken. A weaker currency makes imports more expensive, cutting into household and business budgets. But traditional economic theory teaches that more expensive imports should be good for domestic companies and their employees since a devalued currency means their exports are now cheaper. This means a country’s cheaper currency should mean more jobs in that country which is good for their economy.
This dynamic was at the center of China’s rise to a world power as US foreign policy encouraged them to abandon the Communist Party’s complete control of the economy which it held until the late 1970s. The Grand Bargain was, in exchange for China significantly transforming it’s economy and promising to follow global trade rules through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the US would conduct more trade with China to help it build it’s economy. As China reformed, over time it would be allowed to join the WTO and all the rules that went with that. The result? According to the US Census, the United States has accumulated $5.5 trillion in trade deficits with China since the beginning of record keeping in 1985. That massive trade deficit was great for China who employed many people who would work for far less money than Americans making cheap goods to sell back to us through Walmart. However, the net effect was that millions of good paying American middle class jobs disappeared as whole industries like textiles and plastics were destroyed.
Big consulting firms like McKinsey cheered businesses on to build supply chains in China because they had become a reliable trading partner whose manufacturing sophistication and expertise was rapidly increasing. This was often by stealing American intellectual property as we now see. American business elites were thrilled with this bargain because their profits increased from the cheap labor and the stock market soared. American politicians loved that China was buying massive amount of Treasury securities which allowed Washington DC to print more government checks for those millions of citizens whose jobs now existed in China. No problem. We can just retrain those folks. As America transitioned from manufacturing to service, technology and entertainment economy, new goliath companies emerged to control the flow of digital information that powered this new economy. First companies like IBM, Microsoft and Walmart enabled and presided over this new economic order. Then Google, Facebook, and Amazon became the most valuable companies on earth, by outsourcing their supply chains to China, becoming more efficient through automation and employing fewer people. China was happy to buy more American debt to finance its trade, and DC was happy to continue borrowing from them to fund the growing entitlement state that resulted from an ever decreasing American workforce. China’s economy experienced unabated rapid growth for 40 years, as the US economy lurched between boom and bust cycles as the benefits of American capitalism inured to fewer and fewer people.
And now, in the midst of the clear strategy of our Federal Reserve to “monetize” our debt (i.e. print new money to pay off old debt), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is doing a rational thing by selling its Treasury securities. This week, the state-run Chinese newspaper, The Global Times, announced that it would reduce it’s holdings by 20% to $800 billion. This is an acceleration of the gradual reduction that has been underway since 2013, but they added that they may dump all Treasury holdings in the event of a “military conflict." Ten years ago, this sort of pronouncement might have sent shock waves through world markets, but the Federal Reserve just demonstrated that it can buy 3 times that amount as a pandemic response without repercussions in the capital markets.
The CCP cites it worries about continuing massive US government deficits will reduce the value of their $3 trillion of foreign exchange reserves and they would be right to worry about. That’s exactly the Fed strategy. For this reason, China and Russia have been shouting for years about the need to replace the US dollar as the global reserve currency. They want the IMF to create a reserve currency “that is disconnected from individual nations and is able to remain stable in the long run, thus removing the inherent deficiencies caused by using credit-based national currencies." In 2016, the Chinese renminbi became another one of the world's reserve currencies and the world's central banks currently hold $221 billion worth, according to the IMF. That's a fraction of the $6.8 trillion held in U.S. dollars but it will continue to grow in the future. Unless we reform our government, our “exorbitant” privilege has a shorter shelf life than we think.
Presidential administrations from Ronald Reagan through Barrack Obama were on board with the Grand Bargain reasoning that, as China saw the benefits of capitalism and free markets, it would magically usher in democracy into the middle-kingdom. This completely ignores China’s 5,000 years of being ruled by emperors who fought their way to the top. There is no history of rights for the individual as we know it. The CCP is just another imperial dynasty and President Xi is the Emperor.
Scene 4 – PT Barnum comes to town
In 2016, a bombastic, orange-maned PT Barnum character came out of nowhere to defy all political odds. It started by defeating 16 well-known professional politicians to become the unlikely GOP Presidential nominee. Stunned, the DC establishment weaponized the US Intelligence apparatus with a Soviet-Style misinformation campaign against Donald Trump. He campaigned on “draining the DC Swamp” and restoring middle class American jobs by upending the Grand Bargain with China. Then the unspeakable happened. Trump won a solid majority of the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote, to become the 45th President. The DC establishment on both sides of the aisle were beyond shocked. How could America elect such a stark, inexperienced, deplorable populist outsider, over so many more qualified choices? All the experts and elites with their money and media apparatus were fantastically wrong. Apparently there were more deplorables than they thought.
Immediately the DC counter-insurgency went into action. They had a Plan B and that included infiltrating the incoming administration to ensure a steady flow of leaks to suit their Russian collusion narrative. They used falsified FISA warrants to continue the surveillance as the media shouted the narrative. This culminated in a failed impeachment attempt that gave us more questions than answers. All sorts of unethical, illegal and unconstitutional attempts to subvert a presidential election and duly elected President. He is a difficult, polarizing character but that doesn’t justify what the DC establishment has done to Mr. Trump. They always forget, what goes around, comes around. All of this is bad for our democracy.
Meanwhile Mr. Trump has used Twitter and his podium to spout vitriol against his enemies foreign and domestic, real or perceived. Not quite presidential to say the least, and the main reason I didn’t vote for him in 2016. (I voted for Gary Johnson.) In retrospect, President Trump seems skilled in the art of illusion to distract his enemies with the shiny objects of his bellowing public narcissism, while doing some pretty good things behind the scenes. These include reducing regulation, cutting taxes, reforming prison sentencing, re-establishing our sovereign right to control immigration, appointing record numbers of federal judges, unmasking America’s previously coddled adversaries, beginning to re-establish our manufacturing base. Here’s what else I’ve observed; a fast growing American economy that got people back to work in record numbers, middle class and minority wages rising to levels not seen in a generation, and record stock markets. Any hope of addressing problems created by the Grand Bargain, and shepherding America back to sustainability, must include a growing economy. I view these as positive for both my family and the average Joe.
But I understand the animus many have towards President Trump. His public speaking style, or lack of it, is often hard to take. But I have some significant policy differences also. How he abandoned Syria to the murderous Assad-Russia-Iran coalition was disgraceful. While I understand that some of our international partners haven’t always held up their side of the bargain, we cannot ditch them entirely. Leaving the TPP was a mistake. Wealthy citizens didn’t need a tax cut and, in fact, needed a tax hike. As I discuss in my book, we need a 10% across the board reduction in ALL government spending and a 7% increase in tax revenue to change the fiscal momentum begin to crawl back to sustainability. Yes, that means serious entitlement and welfare reform which drives two thirds of our spending. We have barely heard a peep from Mr. Trump on entitlement reform.
Scene 3 – Trouble Comes to Town
Not to complicate matters further but things have, ahem, changed since February. Captain Trips came screaming out of his bat cave in Wuhan China to unleash a global pandemic. OK, it wasn’t the apocalypse like in Stephen King’s, “The Stand”, but it was the worst one of these we’d seen in over a century. We literally shut down most of our economy and told people to stay inside. It took a massive $3 trillion federal government stimulus and ramped up money printing by the Fed to forestall compete disaster. There were all kinds of poor responses to the pandemic by leaders and experts around the world, in this country, including President Trump. While there are legitimate policy differences on the pandemic, we are lucky to still have somewhat of a federalist structure left so that our 50 states can experiment with different approaches and we can all learn what works. However, any policy must be driven by honest cost-benefit analysis that excludes politics.
Finally, we have violent civil unrest in our streets triggered by the killing on May 25, 2020, of George Floyd, a 46-year-old black American man, during an arrest for allegedly using a counterfeit bill. A white police officer, knelt on Floyd's neck for several minutes while Floyd was handcuffed and lying face down, repeatedly saying "I can't breathe". The arrest and death of Floyd was captured on video and quickly went viral. It unleashed a wave of protests and violent civil unrest against perceived systemic racism within police departments around the country.
At the risk of being perceived as unwoke or racist, I think we need to explore ALL the facts before we just accept such a claim as being true. The autopsy report revealed that Mr. Floyd had a fatal level of Fentanyl and Methamphetamine in his system at the time of his death although it didn’t cite the drugs as a cause of death. Maybe the drugs had something to do with his resisting arrest. Floyd also spent five years behind bars in 2009 for an assault and robbery two years earlier, and before that, had been convicted of charges ranging from theft with a firearm to drugs. While he was certainly no angel, he didn’t deserve to die from a police arrest.
The cops that killed George Floyd should be and are being prosecuted. But do they represent most cops? What are the facts? Police departments appropriately focus their resources where crime actually occurs. According to the FBI, African-Americans account for more than 52% of murders, 54% of robberies, 41% of illegal weapons possession, 33% of aggravated assaults and 29% of rapes. All of these are significantly more than their 13.4% of the population. Sadly, most of these crimes happen in African-American neighborhoods and even more sadly, against fellow African Americans. The job of police is to protect the overwhelming majority of law-abiding citizens. Despite this data, there are many African-Americans who have witnessed or experienced some form of racism with their interactions with police. If it can be proven that anyone in the law enforcement community is guilty of racism, they should be punished accordingly. But this country has made great strides in civil rights including many law enforcement reforms designed to provide accountability for police. The number of black police officers and police chiefs is consistent with African American share of the population. Whites are twice as likely to be killed by police than blacks. Claiming systemic racism exists in every police department in America is a serious charge, and one that warrants a lot of hard evidence to justify violent civil unrest. Calls to “defund the police”, as the Mayors of NYC and Los Angeles are considering, is definitely not the answer. It’s a recipe for chaos and would do immense harm to all of us, and especially the very communities they are trying to protect. We cannot let that happen.
And now comes another presidential election with 47-year career politician, former VP Joe Biden challenging President Trump. Mr. Biden seems a pleasant enough guy who, like Mr. Trump, has a history of being a little too “handsy” with the ladies. I think it’s fair to say that he has been an architect and supporter of The Grand Bargain during his career. He was chosen as the nominee thinking that he would be viewed as a moderate to balance the hard leftward drift of his party. But he supports his party’s platform which is a lot of things, but moderate isn’t one of them. His supporters unfortunately include a loud and powerful coalition of hardened radical leftists and political opportunists who believe that America is irredeemably racist and must be pulled up root and stem and re-ordered with them in charge. They are joined by lots of good and well-meaning citizens who just want us all to get along, and have had enough of Donald Trump. They’ll hold their nose and vote for Joe, just as many will do the same for Mr. Trump.
OK. We are caught up and near the end of the movie. The stage is set for the great battle of our time that will (hopefully) be settled in 52 days. Huge, unpayable, and bi-partisan government debt looms on the horizon, with massively more promised. Most of the nation that doesn’t have the ability to financially engineer their protection from this inflation-causing whale, will be victims of the destruction of the purchasing power of their earnings and savings. On November 3, citizens will vote for their savior in what proves to be a close contest. However, the unfortunate fact is that neither Biden nor Trump will be able to forestall the reckoning that has been building for the past 75 years. We are where we are because we voted for this stuff for decades.
Epilogue – Planned Chaos
Well hopefully your eyes and ears are not bugging out reading or listening to this piece. The point of the shock and awe was to emphasize how much our republic is at risk. As crazy as the beginning of my story is, it isn’t my story. Rather it was one of the 4 scenarios presented by the Transition Integrity Project (or TIP), a group created by attorney and former Obama administration executive Rosa Brooks. Brooks also serves as senior fellow at New America Foundation whose funders include billionaires George Soros, Bill Gates (Microsoft), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn/Netflix), Eric Schmidt (Google) and Pierre Omidyar (Ebay). By it’s own admission, TIP is virulently anti-Trump and believes that the American Electoral College is, in their words “profoundly anti-democratic, and that numerous long-standing practices also function to create structural biases in our voting system.”
Here is a description quoted from their confidential Aug 3, 2020 findings document, entitled “Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition,” that was leaked to the press:
“In June 2020, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP) convened a bipartisan group of over 100 current and former senior government and campaign leaders and other experts in a series of 2020 election crisis scenario planning exercises. The results of all four table-top exercises were alarming. We assess with a high degree of likelihood that November’s elections will be marked by a chaotic legal and political landscape. We also assess that the President Trump is likely to contest the result by both legal and extra-legal means, in an attempt to hold onto power.”
Members of the TIP met in June to conduct four (4) “war games” that simulated a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day. The four scenarios were:
1. Ambiguous result - outcome of the election remains unclear from election night
2. Clear Biden win - Biden wins outright in the Electoral College and the popular vote
3. Clear Trump win – Trump wins the Electoral College but narrowly loses the popular vote
4. Narrow Biden win - Biden leads with less than 1% of the popular vote the day after the election but is predicted to win 278 electoral votes.
My story uses the details of the scenario 3 in the game play, with a few plausible artistic embellishments to keep things interesting. Three of the scenarios predict a constitutional crisis with widespread civil unrest, ending with the military playing a role in the transition of power. I find it interesting that TIP didn’t include a scenario where Trump wins both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Would that also include widespread violence and civil unrest?
I suppose it’s possible that President Trump refuses to leave the White House in the event of a clear Biden win. However, while the TIP claims to be specifically concerned about this scenario and about protecting democracy without favoring either candidate, that is clearly not the case. Their war game simulation of a clear Trump win shows that extreme, “undemocratic” behavior is acceptable if it prevents another four years of Trump. This clear double standard reveals that an influential group of the DC establishment is planning on creating a “constitutional crisis” if Trump wins regardless of the 2020 election’s results.
Long before TIP conducted these crisis election simulations, other groups were engaged in “war games” that predicted complete chaos on election day including the imposition of martial law in the U.S. following the emergence of unprecedented unrest and disarray in the country. One of these is “Operation Blackout” simulations conducted by the U.S.-Israeli company, CybeReason. The company has close ties to U.S. and Israeli intelligence and its largest investor is Softbank. Softbank is named by the Eric Schmidt-led National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI), as forming the “backbone” of a global framework of AI-driven companies that will usher in the “Fourth Industrial Revolution.” This will be done in cooperation with China’s economic and political elite. With 2020 election less than two months away, it seems plausible that November 3rd will not only be a disaster, but a pre-planned one.
The question then becomes, who benefits from this election chaos? As the TIP suggested in several of their simulations, the post-election role of the military in terms of domestic policing becomes critical. Coincidentally, this type military-supported coup is the exact expertise of the TIP’s co-founder Rosa Brooks with her work with George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, which was a key player in the recent Ukrainian and Arab Spring revolutions.
The domestic framework for imposing martial law in the U.S., via “continuity of government” protocols, was activated earlier this year under the guise of the coronavirus crisis and it remains in effect. Now, a series of groups deeply tied to the DC establishment and domestic and foreign intelligence agencies have predicted the exact ways to engineer a failed election and manipulate its aftermath.
Who would stand to benefit the most from the imposition of martial law in the United States? I think we need to look no further than the battle within DC power factions over the future of AI, which has been deemed of critical importance to national security by the public sector, the private sector and prominent think tanks. The Eric Schmidt-led National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) and other bodies will determine an AI policy that surely will be strongly resisted by most Americans. Things like the elimination of individual car ownership, the elimination of cash and the imposition of a Brave New World surveillance system, among other things. These agendas have moved ahead under the guise of combating COVID, but the COVID cover has an expiration date. This also makes the resistance by political and business technology elites to fully re-open the economy more understandable. For groups like the NSCAI, Americans must welcome these AI-driven advances or else, even if it means losing their jobs or civil liberties. Otherwise, these groups and their billionaire backers argue, the United States will be “left behind” by China in setting the new global standards for AI technologies. I guess this is more important than freedom if you’re a tech billionaire who stands to benefit massively from this Orwellian transformation of America.
By keeping Americans angry, distracted, and divided through COVID and planned election chaos, a “New America” waits in the wings – one that is coming regardless of what happens on election day. That is unless Americans quickly wake up to the near and present danger that is at our gate.