Loading ...THE WORLD ACCORDING TO TOM
WOW..I finally joined Luongo’s Patreon website.
I am absolutely spellbound by this essay.
It’s paywalled so I am posting it in the Comment Section . It’s a Luong Luongo Post
Be sure to take the time to quietly sit and read this. Not on the fly. Not while distracted.
To Me This is a Masterpiece . Brilliance
A REPUBLIC, IF YOU CAN KEEP IT
THEY WANT THEIR COLONIES BACK
Famously, Benjamin Franklin, walking out of the
Constitutional Convention of 1787, was asked what the
members had produced, “a monarchy or a republic?” He
replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
Now, like so much of the mythology surrounding the founding
of the United States, the accuracy of this story is suspect but
what isn’t is the sentiment. Franklin understood the dynamics
which would pull at the fragile compact between the States and
that its success lay with the men who safeguarded it.
The Constitution had its detractors, and its ratification was only
the beginning of the fledgling country’s problems. Franklin
knew the only reason why that meeting even took place was
because the colonists took advantage of the deep divisions
within the power structures of Eighteenth-century Europe.
Without the help of the French government and others, which
Franklin was instrumental in procuring, and their animosity
towards the English, the idea of colonial independence would
have likely died stillborn.
Today, more than two hundred and thirty years later, the US has
survived multiple attempts to undermine it by foreign powers.
I’m neither the person nor is this the venue to recount those
attempts and their motivations, but there is value in looking at
this tension between former colonies and former masters that
has never been resolved.
I’ve stated I think this is a major motivation driving the chaos
and confusion we’ve experienced politically and economically
over the past five years of writing this newsletter.
Today, less than three months out from the mid-term elections,
we are watching what it looks like when colonizer is faced with
the colonies finally breaking free for real.
While we may have won the war for independence from
England when Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown and
established official political autonomy, the history is a lot
messier, since Europe was and still is, the US’s major trading
partner with deep cultural and ethnic ties.
That said, what’s playing out today around the world is a kind
of final revolution against the old European colonial powers.
From the Wall St. to Beijing, Moscow to Mumbai, the response
this year to the outbreak of global economic war has been a
hardening of their resistance rather than the expected
fracturing.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in late February it set in motion a
series of decisions for everyone the world over. Each country
had to ask themselves, who would they ultimately trust to ally
with.
The collection of transnational oligarchs and financiers
centered around old European money who I like to call The
Davos Crowd who have always tried to drive global policy
through bribes and sowing division?
Or each other and force a massive realignment of capital out of
the old money centers in City of London, Amsterdam, and New
York?
Davos is a metaphor ultimately for the insatiable thirst for
power and privilege among old monied elites who believe they
can always manipulate the natural ebb and flow of capital
around the world to their advantage.
This culminates every eighty years or so in a major
conflagration — whether by design or accident is up to you to
decide. I tend to side on a mixture of both.
I think it is safe to say that six months into this new global war,
the colonies have chosen to stand together rather than be
picked off one by one, and that includes the most pivotal of all
countries, the United States itself.
United, We Fall
The biggest problem in analyzing the current situation is
working out where the US is. Whose side is the US on, the
colonies or Davos? Too many analysts, especially foreign ones
tend to default to a simple answer based on a united US
oligarchy.
But that is a very bad assumption, and it leads to a faulty, and
ultimately jingoistic, analysis. There are always factions
fighting among themselves locally, even if you personally don’t
understand who they are.
At some point, when the country or system that supports it
reaches a critical juncture, previously suppressed factions grow
a spine and make their voices heard.
Since the US is the 800 lb. gorilla in the geopolitical room it’s
easy to get lost in it, especially since US policy is so terrible and
frustrating to people with any semblance of morality.
Most Americans are not bloodthirsty colonizers, even though
they sadly fund, through taxation and inflation, hundreds of
bases around the world supposedly to keep the global peace.
It’s easy to get so angry and cynical that all you can see is the
evil done in your name and wish it all burned to the ground.
No matter how hard we try to influence our political system to
stop the plundering, all we can ever do, at best, is slow it down
– like backing populists like Ron Paul which led to the Trump
presidency – and force the naked corruption out into the open.
The dichotomy in analyzing the US’s role in this war is that we
understand the US is a massive thing that needs to be humbled
and its corrupt institutions reformed and downsized. On the
other hand, as a legal construct, harkening back to Franklin, the
US is an outright miracle whose founding ideas and principles
need to remain in place in some form to resist the creeping
moral relativism of the rest of the world.
This is the crux of the problem. It is this tension that is being
manipulated into another civil war by old European colonizers.
And this is where Davos’ control over the White House,
Congress and the alphabet soup agencies – FBI, CIA, DOJ, etc. –
is at its most effective.
This is how they undermined the
Trump presidency, how they get
legislation passed that has no
business being written no less
brought for a vote. It’s how they
enforce media complicity to
manufacture consent for policies
and programs which are obviously counter-productive to the
people they are trying to convince.
It’s how they harass and marginalize any dissident who grows
too big in countering their messaging.
And despite the non-stop harassment and persecution they still
have not been able to break the people’s support for former
President Donald Trump. Trump is still the GOP frontrunner
for 2024, whether you or I like it or not.
Their fear of this man is so complete they will stop at nothing
to keep him from running. It tells you just how weak their hold
on our political system is when they are this scared of someone
so ineffective while actually in office.
Make no mistake, the Republic that Franklin et.al. drafted in
1787 and ratified in 1789 is on its last legs. One of the
hallmarks of our system is the peaceful transfer of power from
one government to the next. And despite the endless pearl
clutching about January 6th, 2021, that is what happened
fourteen days later.
Trump advocated for and abided by that. But the Biden
Administration whose agenda of Lenin’s grinding out the
middle class between the twin millstones of “inflation and
taxation” were never satisfied with just deposing Trump.
Trump, for his part, refuses to back down and has smartly set
himself up as a martyr for the Republic by forcing the Biden
administration’s hand when they raided his home at Mar-aLago in Palm Beach, Florida on August 8th.
One political party going after a former president like this just
over 90 days out from a major election was a line no one had
ever crossed before in American history. It is the signal that
there is no line Davos will not cross to undermine Americans’
faith in their political institutions.
The issue here isn’t about whether the FBI was justified in
raiding Trump’s home. This was simply an exercise of raw
power against a political opponent meant to chill all dissent to
their rule.
The message was clear: “We will burn the US to the ground
before giving up our control of it. You have been warned.”
Now, from where I sit this move brings up a lot of questions.
Why would they feel the need to send that message? Whose
power do they actually fear?
It’s not the people’s power, they’ve mostly stolen that to the
point of making any kind of resistance irrelevant.
This raid already signals they aren’t worried about the midterm elections. If they were then they wouldn’t be obsessed
with stopping Trump from running in 2024. They know that
whatever happens in November they will still control the
Executive Branch, and, unlike Trump in 2016, they know how
to use it to their fullest potential.
So, stopping Trump who now has 1) some clue as to how to
wield Executive power and 2) a
big vendetta against those that
stole the 2020 election, is truly
their raison d’être at this point. It
is their strategic focus and
weakness.
But, even saying that puts too
much credit in Trump’s hands. I
don’t believe Trump is that savvy to just be riding some
remnant of his populist roots. There has had to have been
some other shift which makes him that terrifying in 2024.
Can the FBI Raid the Fed?
What started for me in June 2021 as a crazy question based on
a small thing buried in an FOMC policy meeting statement
(raising Reverse Repo Payout Rates 0.05% over the Fed Funds
rate) has grown into a fully formed thesis for how to break
Davos and end the reign of Europe’s old colonial powers for the
foreseeable future.
That question is: Could the Fed be the vanguard of US
resistance to Davos by taking away their control over US
monetary policy?
The how they do this is complicated, but it boils down to Davos’
real power is in controlling the Fed through the offshore dollar
markets, so-called Eurodollars. When the Fed raises rates it
does so for the whole globe.
The limit is not so much the Fiscal deficits domestically but the
transmission of offshore banking stress back onto US banks
exposed to overseas dollar-based debt indexed to LIBOR – The
London InterBank Offer Rate.
LIBOR was the benchmark lending rate for the entire dollar
world until 2017 with the introduction of SOFR – Secured
Overnight Funding Rate
Now with SOFR the benchmark for US debt and not LIBOR,
when the Fed raises rates and creates turmoil in Eurodollar
markets, it doesn’t necessarily create turmoil here in the US.
It may, but the direct link has been severed.
This was the strongest piece of blackmail old Europe’s colonial
powers held over the US since the end of WWII. That blackmail
has been called. There comes a point where the “blackmailer”
asks for too much and it’s simply cheaper for the “blackmailed”
to come clean.
For US banks and the Fed, Klaus Schwab’s obsession with
Central Bank Digital Currencies – CBDCs – to end commercial
banking completely was pushing the blackmail too hard. This is
why I expect the Fed to keep upping the pressure on Europe
until something breaks completely.
Given that the rest of the world is also sick of old colonial
Europe, this confluence of incentives should play out as I’ve
discussed in the past.
The US Empire is an echo of the British Empire and those of
continental Europe. Their power always rested on currency
manipulation. It was never ideological. It was always just an
expression of their
entitlement to power.
This imperial impulse has
morphed with the times,
as technology opened new
ways to disguise theft
through taxation and
inflation.
But the current system
has run its course. We’ve
reached the limit of piling
new debt on top of old
and everyone believing
the value of that debt
balances with the tangible
assets they are supposed
to represent.
That’s why default for
many is inevitable. The
question now is who will default to whom.
When I looked at the landscape and realized that the US dollar
reserve standard was always just a proxy for non-US interests
as expressed through the Eurodollar markets, that’s when I
realized my crazy question was the key to unlocking what was
really happening.
US commercial banking interests have the means to decouple
the US finally from the colonial powers of Europe whose old
wealth was the collateral for our rise as a financial and military
power post-World War II.
That wealth, however, has been squandered over these last
eighty years erecting a new architecture of colonial control, the
European Union. Some of the oldest banks in the world reside
in Europe and they are now the most vulnerable to attack.
The Davos Crowd wants to bankrupt everyone else to ensure
they are the last one’s standing.
That’s what the Great Reset is to them. Metaphorically
speaking, they are calling in of all those loans made to the
world and forcing everyone to accept a massive default while
they get to keep skimming a vig off the world’s labor
If the Fed was down with this plan, why did they, at the July
meeting, again raise interest rates by 75 basis points (0.75%)?
Why not conduct monetary policy the same way the Biden
Administration conducts domestic policy?
With the current rally in equities, the Fed can and will raise
again aggressively in September.
The Fed Funds rate is now 2.25% when most analysts never
thought the Fed could go much past 1%. Now they are
screaming the Fed pivoted by signaling only 3.5% by the end of
2022.
The ECB was forced to raise rates back to 0%. The euro hit
parity with the US dollar.
The FBI can raid a former president’s house on the orders of a
corrupt Attorney General, but it is another thing to think they
can issue a search warrant on the FOMC. Real power doesn’t
reside in getting bureaucrats to sign off on bogus search
warrants.
Real power comes from setting the price of money which
determines who writes the checks of the enforcers.
What we are witnessing is the very not-peaceful transfer of
power from the colonizers
of Europe to a colony who
had the temerity to say no
almost 250 years ago.
The rest of the former
colonies in Asia, Africa,
the Middle East and
Eastern Europe are
following the lead of the
unconquered former
empires of Russia and
China in building a new
architecture without
Davos and Europe at the
center.
It’s not so much a divide
and conquer strategy as a
“use the division in the
West to support their
declarations of independence” strategy in the aftermath of
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
We’re all Republicans Now
Davos and Europe will not go down without a fight. They are
striking back at forces of sovereignty within both the US and
Europe itself.
The fight for Tory leadership in the U.K. is emblematic of this,
with Defense Secretary Liz Truss clearly the voice of a UScentric Britain running against City of London silver spoon Rishi
Sunak.
I’ll have more to say next month about the upcoming election in
Italy but suffice it to say Davos will try to deny an easy victory
for pro-Italian populists.
With the Russians grinding out small victories in Ukraine
forcing political strife back onto Europe as its energy woes
worsen, Davos is now caught having to pivot away from EU
support for the war. Too bad for them Russia no longer cares
what they say, only how much they pay for oil, gas, and food.
Meanwhile, China stays out of everyone’s way while deploying
capital across Asia and the Middle East. China’s refusal to
break with Russia is why Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan; to gauge
Chinese response while further erecting a barrier between them
and the US. Who benefits from a US/Chinese trade spat?
Not China. Not the US. Europe.
Chinese Premier Xi Jinping’s first foreign visit outside of China
in nearly three years was to visit Saudi Arabia, less than a
month after Joe Biden visited. They weren’t discussing finer
points of Go strategy, folks.
These players are all saying the same thing to Davos. We’re not
letting you colonize us again. China and Russia both
understand who financed attacks on them in the past, the same
people launching attacks on them now, the British and
European aristocracy through their American proxies.
The Democrats intend to leave the incoming GOP congress with
a complete mess tying up all government business for two more
years. They are intent on driving a further wedge between
Americans and radicalizing as many of them as possible – both
left and right.
The intended effect is to accelerate secession movements within
the US, which, sadly too many are cheering on now.
The Biden administration is pursuing policy designed to
decrease the US’s standing abroad while sowing division at
home.
This division is intended to freeze capital around the world, to
prop up zombie European banks. But the Fed and the US banks
are winning their fight against the EU and the ECB. Europe’s
ability to create credit dollars through its banks has collapsed.
The Fed can inflict maximum pain for Europe’s financial
markets and minimal pain for the US economy for far longer
than most are handicapping.
Davos never retreats without leaving poison pills in its wake as
well as Hobson’s choices for those who bested them. I see a
full-blown political fight for the future of the Republic in 2023
and beyond.
Davos needs to break the fifty-state compact. So, no matter
what happens, either they steal the election in 2024 and force
the Red States to secede or accede to Trump/DeSantis winning
and then goading the Northeast and the Left Coast to do so.
The US is a unique thing, the Constitution a marvel of political
technology. For humanity to survive these vindictive and
petulant would-be commissars of their more perfect
technocratic union, the US must not give into division and civil
war until Davos is a distant memory, but that is exactly what I
see on the horizon with the way the Democrats are acting.
They will continue to push the bounds of political and
institutional decorum to discredit the US in the eyes of the
world, turning it from the ‘shining house on the hill’ to the
‘smoking ruin against a setting sun.’
Thanks to Franklin and the rest of the Founders, they built a
house strong enough to withstand these assaults. But it’s dirty
and shabby. It’s in serious need of repair, not a new coat of
paint. For now, however, it is still one worth keeping, in body
not only in spirit
One can see this playing out in London.
Go to Canary Wharf, and the City of London banking area, where all the European banks hang out. Its like a city within a city.
They think they run the whole country, and voted against Brexit.
Outside the City of London the people have had a gutful, of the colonizers, and voted for Brexit.