Civil Disobedience
I came of age in the 1970’s, a decade that is indelibly etched into my brain in so many ways. It was a wonderful analog world where you listened communally to the music you loved whether it was the FM radio on the school bus blasting America’s “Horse with no Name” or getting together with a bunch of friends to listen to the new Led Zeppelin album. Just like that “new car smell”, new vinyl albums had their own special scent that heightened your anticipation for the musical brilliance you were about to experience with your friends. It really was “That 70’s Show.” Now, kids listen to music with their ear pods in their own little separate customized audio world. Sure, they can share appreciation with their digital friends with a ‘like’ on social media, but it just ain’t the same. When I explain that communal music listening experience with my kids, they just don’t get how that could be fun or better than what they have. I’m done explaining. You had to be there.
Most great music reflects the times it is created in, and the 1970’s were an overflowing garden of abundance for song writers. At the start of the decade, Richard Nixon was President, and we were still entangled in the Vietnam war. In response to the money printing to support the “Great Society” social programs from the 1960’s, America experienced incredible monetary inflation and a subsequent long recession that wrecked many businesses and hurt countless individuals. In response, Nixon introduced wage and price controls and removed the US dollar from the gold standard in 1971, which he said was just temporary until they could reform the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement that established the post-WW2 economic order. Of course, those reforms never came and thus was born the era of fiat currencies which we live in today.
Against a background of these disastrous policies, the 1970’s was characterized by a new form of economic turbulence, that was coined “stagflation”, or simultaneous high inflation and economic stagnation. When economists encounter something they don’t understand, they tend to give it a name and then try to develop theories around why it exists and how to manipulate it. Stagflation was the reason there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for a growing number of college graduates, who with limited job prospects and the threat of the Vietnam War draft, decided to vent their anger on college campuses
Predictably, songwriters were right there to add the background music to fuel these protests. Bands like Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young wrote their hit “Ohio” in response to the 1970 killing of student protesters by national guard troops at Kent State University.
Tin soldiers and Nixon's comin'
We're finally on our own
This summer I hear the drummin'
Four dead in Ohio
By the mid-70’s, stagflation was ripping and a new music genre emerged as American youth protested the no-opportunity, economic train wreck, along with the perceived excesses of highly produced rock like Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles and America (still three of my faves). These new songs were fast-paced, hard-edged and short with stripped down instrumentation and often political, anti-establishment lyrics. It embraced an ethos of “I don’t need your system, I’ll do it myself”, with many bands self-producing and distributing their music through independent record labels. They built their audience from the grassroots, with lots of high-energy performances in small clubs with iconic names like The Ramones, The Sex Pistols, The Clash and The Damned. Lots of two-word names. Simple. Just like their songs.
By now you probably know that I’m referring to punk music and I became a big fan. When I say, “a fan”, I mean a closet fan. I didn’t have a colored mohawk hairdo or safety pins as earrings. I admired from the outside, while I still listened to Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith with my non-punk buddies. Also, punks didn’t tend to do well with the ladies, at least the ones I could take home to my parents. Still, I was drawn to the music and the topics it addressed. I was too young to really understand the protest songs of the 1960’s, but in the 70’s I started paying attention to the world around me, which I discovered wasn’t pretty with its 20% mortgage rates and long gas lines.
In retrospect, I think listening to punk music helped shape my libertarian political views. It made me aware of the power of simplicity, self-sustainability and the dangers of centralized political and economic control. Music and the arts have always been an important form of civil disobedience to help alert us when things get out of balance. I think most Americans would agree our country is out of balance in many ways including unsustainable government deficits and debt, income and wealth inequality, and serious political divisions. These problems are exacerbated by the COVID pandemic where government lockdown policies are putting enormous pressure on the health of individuals, schools, families, and small businesses.
I consider punk music and culture to have been a form of civil disobedience, just like Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie before him. Then there was Rosa Parks, whose 1955 arrest for defying immoral Jim Crowe segregation laws , sparked a righteous movement for civil rights for African Americans. The power of Martin Luther King Jr and his approach of non-violent protest and willingness to be peacefully arrested, was vital to his effectiveness. This is in sharp contrast to his contemporary Malcom X who did not disavow violence and was far less successful.
Protests are themselves a form of protected free speech, but they can morph into violations of the law as we saw this summer with the Antifa and BLM protests that turned violent. Violence itself is neither good nor evil my opinion. That might seem a little hypocritical for someone who calls himself a Christian, but can anyone really argue that the American Civil War or World War Two were not righteous wars against clear and present evil? I think most would agree that America is a seriously divided nation, having been through another very contentious and close presidential election, the results of which have done nothing to bridge the divide. We’ve got problems by the boatload and the natives are getting restless.
Henry David Thoreau, the writer, poet and philosopher, believed that the U.S. government, with all its faults, was not the worst and even had some admirable qualities. But he felt we could and should insist on better. He wrote the following in his famous essay “Resistance to Civil Government,” “The progress from an absolute to a limited monarchy, from a limited monarchy to a democracy, is a progress toward a true respect for the individual.... Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man? There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him accordingly."
Let me offer up the following examples of issues that are fostering simmering anger with tens of millions of American citizens, that are fertile ground for the emergence of mass civil disobedience in this country. A few weeks ago, in my Brave New World podcast, I described what is being referred to as “The Great Reset.” It was announced at a meeting this past June hosted by the World Economic Forum (WEF), by a group of the world’s most powerful corporate and government leaders who propose to “reset” the global economy. Instead of traditional capitalism, this group thinks countries should forfeit big parts of their sovereignty to global institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the United Nations and the World Health Organization, who would re-order society through mechanisms like wealth taxes, additional regulations and massive new government programs like the Green New Deal. They argue this needs to happen for the world to combat what they say are the most important global problems of climate change, racism and income inequality. Noble goals for sure except that all of this requires most of us to relinquish a good chunk of our individual freedoms in the name of “the greater good.” Hmm.
One of the main talking points of the June 2020 WEF meeting was that the COVID pandemic has created an important “opportunity” to implement the vision of the radical transformation of capitalism. “We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this crisis — its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change,” said Prince Charles at the meeting. My wife and I have been binge watching, The Crown, which confirms that Prince Charles is a spoiled buffoon and prime facie evidence of the bad effects of inbreeding. But everyone realizes that COVID-19 lockdowns cannot last forever so these elites will pivot to their new crisis that will require the necessary permanent expansion of government power: that would be climate change. His Highness went on to say, “The threat of climate change has been more gradual [than COVID-19]—but it’s devastating reality for many people and their livelihoods around the world, and its greater potential to disrupt, surpasses even that of COVID-19.”
Here are some of the goals of the post-COVID Great Reset in an October 2020 whitepaper published by the Word Economic Forum:
· An acceleration of digitized work processes, leading to 84% of all work processes as digital, or virtual / video conferences.
· 83% of people working remotely – i.e. no more interaction between colleagues – absolute social distancing, separation of humanity from the human contact.
· About 50% of all tasks are planned to be automated – in other words, human input will be drastically diminished, even while remote working.
· Accelerate the digitization of upskilling / reskilling (e.g. education technology providers) – 42% of skill upgrading or training for new skills will be digitized, in other words, no human contact – all on computer, Artificial Intelligence (AI), algorithms.
· Accelerate the implementation of upskilling / reskilling programs – 35% of skills are planned to be “re-tooled” – i.e. existing skills are planned to be abandoned
· Accelerate organizational restructuring – 34% of current organizational set-ups will be “restructured’ – meaning existing organizational structures will be declared obsolete – to make space for new sets of organizational frameworks, digital structures that provide complete control over all activities.
· Temporary reassignment of workers to different tasks – this is expected to touch 30% of the work force. That also means completely different pay-scales –probably unlivable wages, which would make the also planned “universal basic income” – a wage that allows you to barely survive, an obvious need. But it would make you totally dependent on the system – a digital system, where you have no control.
· Temporarily reduce workforce – they estimate this to affect 28% of the population. It is an additional unemployment figure, in disguise, as the “temporary” will never come back to full-time.
· Permanently reduce workforce – 13% permanently reduced workforce.
· In response, they would temporarily increase the workforce by 5% – but there is no reference to what type of workforce – probably unskilled labor that sooner or later will also be replaced by automation.
· They then admit that a mere 1% of the workforce will become permanent. Hmm. I wonder who those people will be?
Folks all of this translates to the following: The job of the average American worker will be to train computer algorithms to do their jobs, and when they are trained, that job will be gone. This explains why some of the radical left politicians are advocating for Universal Basic Income (UBI). Because your jobs will be gone. In its place, will be a meager handout that keeps you dependent on the government. No thanks.
We have oodles of easy-to-find evidence including what I have provided here to prove that the Great Reset is real and being taken seriously by the most powerful people on earth. So why do many in the media deny it exists? Just last week the New York Times wrote a piece entitled, “The baseless ‘Great Reset’ conspiracy theory rises.” In a November speech to the United Nations, Justin Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada, stated that,
"This Pandemic has provided an opportunity for a RESET. This is our chance to accelerate our pre-pandemic efforts to re-imagine economic systems that address global challenges like extreme poverty, inequality and climate change."
However, after being called out by members of the Canadian Parliament for his anti-free market views, Trudeau completely denied this position in an interview where he said, “We are seeing lots of people falling prey to disinformation and if conservative Members of Parliament want to talk about conspiracy theories, that’s their choice.” We have the video of him talking about moving forward with the Great Reset. Does Justin Trudeau think we are all that stupid?
And then there is modern day James Bond villain Klaus Schwab, the founder and chairman of the World Economic Forum, who literally endorses these ideas in his book, “COVID-19: The Great RESET”. Among the breathtaking policies he advocates is the use of implantable microchips in our brain that will be “the cornerstone of a transhumanist agenda that will merge man with machine.” This scarily sounds like the pre-crime programs in the movie Minority-Report.
Now hold that thought as we talk about the emerging COVID vaccines we all will be expected to take. Moderna is a pharma company backed by Bill Gates that received nearly $1 billion from the federal government this year to develop their mRNA vaccine. The vaccine is delivered with what is called a prickly patch system, which is essentially a small Band-Aid like patch with lots of micro needles that allows people to self-administer the vaccine painlessly. Along with the vaccine, an enzyme called Luciferase is injected into the patient. I’m not kidding. This is the real name. Now, Luciferase occurs naturally in fireflies which means it glows when oxidized. This subtle light that would now be radiating from beneath the skin and could be read by a mobile scanner to provide data about how the antibodies are forming in the blood. Seems like a smart innovation. But history shows that technology can be used for good or bad. Imagine a scenario where millions of Americans will have a permanent light tattoo or brand that can be read digitally. Is it hard to imagine that brand being required for travel, or to go to school, or to enter a public place or do just about anything else you can think of? Sounds like the early prototype of Klaus Schwab’s brain micro-chips. Now, I’m not an anti-vaxer but I think I’ll steer clear of the prickly patch and stick with a regular syringe. And only then after millions of others have taken it so I know what the side-effects are.
And how about the latest technology to improve the surveillance the government already does on its citizens? My friend Ted “the last name in the phonebook” Zwijacz alerted me to this, and we were both sad that it came from the US Air Force. Ted and I met each other at the Air Force Academy, a place where, comically, I met guys who expanded my punk music horizons. Go figure! Anyway, the USAF contracted with a DC-based tech company call SignalFrame to develop software that can access smartphones, and then jump off to access any other wireless or Bluetooth device in the vicinity. To quote the November 27 issue of the Wall Street Journal, the smartphone is used “as a window into usage of hundreds of millions of computers, routers, fitness trackers, modern automobiles and other networked devices, known collectively as the ‘Internet of Things’.”
The Feds already know your geographical location via the GPS signal from the cellular tower to your mobile device. Edward Snowden alerted us years ago to that nasty little part of the 2001 Patriot Act. Like Nixon’s “temporary” suspension of the dollar gold standard, the government harvesting of our mobile phone data was just temporary until the terrorist threat was over. Riigght! With this new SignalFrame tech, now they’d know what you are doing and with whom. It would allow the Feds to see all the owners of cellphones in the vicinity of a political gathering, where they are gathering, where they might be heading. They could infiltrate the router in your home WiFi, your Amazon Alexa, your Fitbit, your automobile, your pacemaker, and listen to all your Zoom conference calls.
As a quick aside, I’ll share some simple tips for good digital security hygiene you should consider. The iPhone is the best in terms of privacy control, so spend the extra money. Next, always keep your Bluetooth and Location Services OFF unless you actually need them. When you’re done, turn the off again. This is a huge easily fixed vulnerability for most people including most of my friends and family who apparently cannot do without the questionable convenience of “always discoverable.” There are host of privacy controls with the iPhone and I won’t go through them all but the big ones are not allowing cookies in your browser and turning off access to photos and contacts to all but the most essential apps. Next, get yourself a good VPN and password manager. I recommend NordVPN which provides both for two devices (e.g. phone and laptop) for $30 per year. Worth it. Finally, get an anti-phishing software for your email. Email phishing is by far the biggest vulnerability hackers initially exploit to infiltrate target systems. I highly recommend Inky, not because the founder is my friend Dave Baggett, but because it really is the best product by far on the market.
So, does watching your career disappear, or being constantly spied on by the government and their Big Tech cronies, or struggling to pay bills with a meager government handout in a currency that steadily loses its value, or lurching from one lockdown to another as the COVID crisis becomes the new normal, make you angry? These things are not conspiracy theory rants. This is the plan of many in the prior presidential administration, and more so in the incoming administration. This stuff is already underway. Is this enough for you take to the streets and shout the famous words uttered by Howard Beale in the dystopian 1976 movie, Network. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore?”
Ray Dalio, the hugely successful hedge fund manager of Bridgewater Associates, is widely recognized as one of the biggest financial and economic brains out there. He has parlayed this into a net worth exceeding $20 billion. Professional investors that are successful assimilate data from many different sources to make educated guesses on how to invest capital. These data come from both current and historical sources. Ray has done us all a great service with his recent essay published on LinkedIn that I encourage you all to read.
This essay compares the United States today with periods of history over the last 500 years characterized by the empires of Great Britain, the Netherlands, India, China and others. His approach and findings are very similar those in one of my favorite books, The Fourth Turning, which I also highly recommend. Both writers describe how human history repeats in roughly 100-year cycles that can be measured. It takes the form of a sine wave which is illustrated in the chart below from Mr. Dalio.
And here’s one from The Fourth Turning book. I talk in mor depth about these cyclical concepts in my book.
Dalio believes that historical cycles are baked into the cake and are driven by three big forces; The long-term money and debt cycle, the domestic wealth and power cycle and the international wealth and power cycle. Here is his summary of rise of fall of empires.
“To summarize, around the upward trend of productivity gains that produce rising wealth and better living standards, there are cycles that produce
1. prosperous periods of building, in which the country is fundamentally strong because there are:
a. relatively low levels of indebtedness
b. relatively small wealth, values, and political gaps,
c. people working effectively together to produce prosperity
d. good education and infrastructure,
e. strong and capable leadership, and
f. a peaceful world order that is guided by one or more dominant world powers.
These are the prosperous and enjoyable periods. When they are taken to excess, which they always are, the excesses lead to:
2. Depressing periods of destruction and restructuring, in which the country’s fundamental weaknesses of
a. high levels of indebtedness,
b. large wealth, values, and political gaps
c. different factions of people unable to work well together,
d. poor education and poor infrastructure, and
e. the struggle to maintain an overextended empire under the challenge of emerging powerful rivals lead to a painful period of fighting, destruction, and then a restructuring that establishes a new order, setting the stage for a new period of building”
Dalio clearly believes America is unfortunately at the end of the great cycle where all the bad things happen. The overwhelming majority of us are not prepared for what is coming because we’ve not seen anything like it in our lifetime, and we are prone not to believe in dire outcomes if we haven’t already experienced it. This is a fatal human flaw. This is where history comes in handy, but we’ve mostly stopped teaching history seriously in our schools and, as the old adage goes, “Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”
If this bleak future is to be averted or its effects reduced, we have work to do and that work starts with refusing to buckle under the coercion of centralized power and reclaiming our bottom-up federalist system. This means a little civil disobedience is in order. By all accounts, it looks like this is already underway. Robby Dinero, the owner of Athletes Unleashed gym in Orchard Park, New York, tore up a $15,000 fine from the Erie County Health Department during a live TV interview. He got hit with the hefty fine after a confrontation in which roughly 50 business owners attending a meeting inside the gym refused to allow a pair of sheriffs and a health inspector entry to the building without a warrant. Yesterday, three people were arrested as protests disrupted a Boise ID health department meeting announcing more lockdowns. Similar protests are happening in Italy, Germany, France and the UK. Last week Argentina erupted where thousands protested government's handling of the pandemic and the economic effect of lockdowns. And COVID could not have come at a worse time for Argentina which is among the most corrupt nations in the world where former President Kristian Kirchner and her business cronies have stolen billions.
And finally, today seventeen of our states attorneys general have joined Texas in petitioning the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to overturn the results of the 2020 election. They are challenging the election procedures carried out in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin which resulted in illegal votes being counted and legal votes not being counted. Now even if these states are right that there was systemic and coordinated election fraud, and there appears to be some evidence, the court will have to decide whether the fraud or violation of procedures rises to a level to overturn a presidential election. It would be unprecedented for SCOTUS to overturn the election and I am sure it would unleash an instant whirlwind of protests, many violent, from the same folks we saw in the streets this summer. I doubt SCOTUS will do this which will result in 74 million citizens feeling their vote was disenfranchised. What will they do? Either way, half the citizens of this country will add mistrust of elections to its existing mistrust of government, schools, big tech and the media. This is serious business especially in the midst of a devastating economic shock caused by pandemic lockdowns. Meanwhile, stock market soars to record highs? This is Alice in Wonderland stuff.
While I mostly agree with Ray Dalio’s assessment of a dangerously declining America, I try to think more optimistically in that I believe (maybe foolishly) that if enough of citizens become aware of how they are being played for fools, they can rise up and force government and society to veer away from its worst impulses. The concepts in my book, Locally Grown: The Art of Sustainable Government, are all about helping form a vision for the country that is more equitable and sustainable, without destroying the vital constitutional principles of individual liberty that made us great in the first-place.
So, it’s important that middle-class, middle ground Americans who represent the majority of our center-right nation stand up and be counted. We see the blatant hypocrisy of elected leaders who force citizens to stay in their homes while they visit hair salons and fancy restaurants. We see senators trading stocks of companies over which they have regulatory authority. We see a member of the House Intelligence Committee falsely accusing a sitting President for being a Russian stooge while he carried on a romantic relationship with an actual Chinese spy who raised money for his campaigns. We see the son and brother of the President-elect being investigated since 2018 by the FBI for money laundering and tax evasion around Chinese business deals, which was treated as a conspiracy theory by the media before the election. We finally see in plain view how we are being lied to and stolen from. We see how deep the swamp really is. This is what an empire in decline looks like. Let’s stand up and shout it together. “We’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore.” And with that my friends, I will leave you with the words of one of my favorite 1970’s protest anthems by The Who. Remember, United We Stand, Divided We Fall, Each one for the other, and All for All.