Steve Bull's Blog, page 14
June 27, 2024
The pervasive belief in the eternal progress of mankind has been a crucial, driving element of Western liberalism for generations. It is starting to break down.
The most powerful force in Western politics today is a cultural virus that is always chewing away at our instincts for self-preservation. It is why millions of people support infinity wind turbines and infinity solar panels, even if these make their electricity more expensive and less reliable. It is related to out-group identification and the cultural fetish for victim minorities, and thus explains the popular impulses that permit mass migration. At the broadest level, this force accounts for an important phenomenon in modern politics, whereby millions of people support policies that make their lives objectively worse, while parties responsible for these policies appear utterly immune to their own failures, if they are not actively rewarded for them.
You might call this force “expectant progressivism.” It is the quiet, unstudied belief that things are always getting better, more just, more abundant, more enlightened, more advanced and more human-rightsey. Expectant progressives view the past teleologically, as one massive Whig-historical fable, and they regard their political preferences as investments in moral futures. They aim to put their names on the next brave innovations in social and economic justice while these are still culturally cheap – that is to say, controversial and disputed. Once these innovations become new cornerstones in the liberal consensus, the expectant progressives will be able to cash in on their far-sighted, humanitarian convictions. They will enjoy the privilege of proclaiming that they were, once again, on the right side of history.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Bring Back Capitalism
A new generation of unscrupulous political leaders and Wall Street hucksters has come up with a brilliant plan to outwit the populist revolt: pretending to be critics of capitalism
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink tells Fox Business host Liz Claman how climate change killed the IguanodonRaise your hand if you saw this headline from the New York Times last week coming:
The name of Bret Stephens may be the one most associated with “markets” in media. Even his struggle-sessionish “I was wrong about climate change” piece in 2022 came with a caveat that witnessing melting glaciers in Greenland just reinforced “my belief that markets, not government, provide the cure.” Seeing an article about capitalism failing the middle class above his byline is like reading “Grammer is Overrayted” by William Safire, or “Globalism: It Doesn’t Float My Plane” by Thomas Friedman. In the end Stephens tried to say something in defense of markets, but in a bizarre reversal from 15 years ago, such protestations now need to be couched as indictments of the profit motive, especially in papers like the Times, whose upscale readers are continuing their preposterous pose of socialist chic.
The mainstream press was once home to reflexive, often hysterical defenses of the free-market system. Op-ed pages saw even the CEOs of firms caught trading against their own clients defended as “wealth creators” who did “God’s work” for a “social purpose.” No more. Now, even the very wealthy give performative speeches about the pitfalls of capitalism, corporate-funded think-tanks routinely decry its failures, and polls on sites like Fast Company even show that 35% of “C-suite executives” react negatively to the word, “capitalism.” What gives? The only headline I recall in recent years that unironically cheered the capitalist idea was a Washington Post op-ed from last summer: “Elon Musk’s Twitter Failure Shows Capitalism is Working.”
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Dollar Doom Is a Slow Burn!
It will be a LONG time coming.
Photo by Jp Valery on UnsplashOne article highlighted below brings out a point that I made two years ago when everyone in the alternative press was writing (as many still are) about how the BRICS nations were determined to replace the US dollar as a global currency:
In early June, a rumour began to circulate — which was widely reported in the Indian press as true — that the government of Saudi Arabia had allowed its petro-dollar agreement with the United States to lapse.
This non-exclusive arrangement between the two countries never required the Saudis to limit their oil sales to dollars or to recycle their oil profits exclusively in U.S. Treasury securities (of which it holds a considerable $135.9 billion) and Western banks.
Indeed, the Saudis are free to sell oil in multiple currencies, such as the Euro, and participate in digital currency platforms such as mBridge, a trial initiative of the Bank of International Settlements and the central banks of China, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Nonetheless, the rumour that this decades-long petrodollar agreement had come to an end reflects the widespread expectation that a seismic shift in the financial system will overturn the rule of the Dollar-Wall Street regime. It was a false rumour, but it carried within it a truth about the possibilities of a post-dollar or de-dollarised world.
While I would disagree with the downtrend destination for the dollar in the last line, the rest confirms what I’ve said in the past two years about the dollar not being replaced with a BRICS currency (or any other currency) anytime soon, though many of my own readers may wish it would be. Collapse of the dollar is not imminent, though the collapse of anything is eventually inevitable.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Odds Are High You’re Going To Need Your Survival Supplies In The Next Few Years
In 2020 at the onset of the covid pandemic scare and right before the lockdowns I’ll never forget going on a grocery run on a Friday afternoon only to find near empty roads and near empty stores. The few other people shopping had a glassy stare in their eyes, like they were dazed or shell-shocked. For me and those I know that prep, it was just another day; for those that hadn’t prepped it was a nightmare of uncertainty.
In Montana we didn’t pay much heed to the lockdowns after the first month. In three months everything was basically back to normal except for the mask mandates which most people ignored. With more data available on the virus it was clear that the chance of death was greatly exaggerated. What scared us far more was the pervasive talk of vaccine passports in 2021. The proposed state and federal restrictions on people that refused to take the jab were familiar – This was the beginning of full blown tyranny unless we stood firm.
In the meantime there was a public rush to buy up as many necessities as they could afford. And of course, the covid stimulus measures helped to trigger a stagflationary crisis that had already been building in the US for many years.
In the face of so many potential threats preppers were still well protected. If vaccine passports became the norm and access to public places was blocked then we had food storage to get us through for a long time to come. If the buying panic and inflation led to a supply chain disaster then we were ready, along with the guns and ammo and training needed to keep what we had. If a fight was coming then we had the means to defend ourselves.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Wiki-Gate”: Julian Assange Was Framed by the People Who Supported Him
1. Julian Assange is Free, but “Freedom of Speech has Passed”
Julian Assange left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June. He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK.
We must acknowledge the “dodgy nature” of the negotiations with the US DOJ: The deal reached on June 24, was that Assange:
“agrees to plead guilty to ONE felony related to the disclosure of national security information in exchange for his release from Belmarsh Prison in the United Kingdom” (Common Dreams, June 24, 2024)
Holding the Assange Court Case in a Remote “Territorial Court” in the Northern Mariana Islands. Why?
The Northern Mariana are remote islands of 50,000 inhabitants in the Pacific North of Guam which belong to the U.S. Commonwealth.
Confirmed by media reports (CBS, BBC): Assange will not spend time in US custody. He will receive “credit for the time spent incarcerated in the UK”.
“Assange will return to Australia, according to a letter from the Justice Department”.
H is guilty plea to only ONE charge is slated to be finalized in the “Remote” “District C ourt” of the Northern Mariana Islands on June 26.
[image error]The Criminalization of Justice? Threat to the First Amendment
What is the End-Game of Assange’s “guilty plea” to be decided upon at the hearings of the “Territorial Court’ of the Northern Mariana Islands?
Assange had agreed to plead guilty to “one felony for conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information related to U.S. national defense”, as outlined in a DOJ Letter together with other documents (filed in U.S. District Court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. territory in the Pacific)
…click on the link above to read the rest of the article…
Assange Is Free, But Justice Has Not Been Done
Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
Julian Assange is free. As of this writing he is en route to the Northern Mariana Islands, a remote US territory in the western Pacific, to finalize a plea deal with the US government which will see him sentenced to time served in Belmarsh Prison. Barring any shady shenanigans from the empire in the process, he will then return to his home country of Australia a free man.
Importantly, according to experts I’ve seen commenting on this astonishing new development it doesn’t appear that his plea deal will set any new legal precedents that will be harmful to journalists going forward. Joe Lauria reports the following for Consortium News:
“Bruce Afran, a U.S. constitutional lawyer, told Consortium News that a plea deal does not create a legal precedent. Therefore Assange’s deal would not jeopardize journalists in the future of being prosecuted for accepting and publishing classified information from a source because of Assange’s agreeing to such a charge.”
https://x.com/Stella_Assange/status/1805393089819033890I’ve obviously got a lot of big feels about all this, having followed this important case so closely for so long and having put so much work into writing about it. There’s so very, very much work to be done in our collective struggle to liberate the world from the talons of the imperial murder machine, but I am overjoyed for Assange and his family, and it feels good to mark a solid win in this fight.
None of this undoes the unforgivable evils the empire inflicted in its persecution of Julian Assange however, or reverses the worldwide damage that has been done by making a public example of him to show what happens to a journalist who tells inconvenient truths about the world’s most powerful government.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Exposed: How Climate Racketeers Aim to Force Us into Smart Gulags
In Australia and NZ, “managed retreat” schemes could force people out of homes that “climate change” models render “uninsurable”
Shocking evidence is emerging from Australia and New Zealand of how the climate scam is being used to impose a techno-totalitarian smart-city future.The criminocratic global imperialists often use their Commonwealth colonies to try out the most insidious escalations of their tyranny – think of Canada, New Zealand and Australia during Covid.
We can therefore assume that this is going to be the blueprint for the roll-out of their Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda across the world.
The sinister scheme in question, called “Managed Retreat”, has been exposed by independent researcher Kate Mason on her excellent Substack blog aimed at “deconstructing 4IR narratives”.
The idea is that exaggerated “modelling” of the imagined effects of “climate change” is being used to define certain areas as unsuitable for human settlement.
Working hand in hand with the state is the insurance industry – long a central part of the corrupt criminocratic empire – which deems homes in these areas to be “uninsurable”.
Banks are also playing their part (of course!) saying they are unwilling to provide mortgages for these “uninsurable” properties.
In her latest article, Kate refers to a TV report about Kensington Banks, near Melbourne city centre, which has been newly declared a flood zone.
She writes: “Property prices are expected to plummet by 20 percent. I think that’s rather conservative – who is going to buy in a flood zone? Unless it’s a developer who will raze it all to the ground and build a Smart Resilient complex”.
Meanwhile, in New Zealand, residents are up in arms about attempts to impose “retreat” from coastal areas under the pretext of a predicted rise in sea levels.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Canada, The Unexpected Winner in the Global Oil Boom
Canada’s oil output is booming as producers ramp up projects and extraction amid expanded market access and narrowing discounts of the Canadian heavy crude to the U.S. benchmark.
The Trans Mountain Expansion Project, now finally completed and operational after years of delays, is changing the fortunes of the oil sands producers in Alberta, giving them access to markets in Asia and the U.S. West Coast.
Constrained for years due to insufficient egress, Canada’s oil now has nearly 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) of additional market access. The expanded Trans Mountain pipeline is tripling the capacity of the original pipeline to 890,000 bpd from 300,000 bpd to carry crude from Alberta’s oil sands to British Columbia on the Pacific Coast.
And producers are taking advantage of this. They began ramping up production at the end of last year in anticipation of the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) start in the first half of this year. Canadian oil firms now get more bang for their buck as the discount of Western Canada Select (WCS), the benchmark for Canadian heavy crude sold at Hardisty in Alberta, has narrowed relative to the U.S. crude oil benchmark, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) in recent weeks.
Moreover, the production increases in the oil sands are the result of the expansion of operational projects with existing infrastructure, so the capital expenditure – which is very high for this type of crude extraction – has been lower than for building projects from scratch.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Debt Brakes and Treaty Requirements About to Smash the EU
The EU has launched an Excessive Debt Proceeding against France. It won’t stop there.
Debt Proceedings
Please note the EU Rebukes France, Italy and Others Over Excessive Debt.
The assessments of the 27 EU states’ budgets and economies will be published by the European Commission on Wednesday, with France, Italy and Belgium among the member states to be reprimanded over their accumulated excessive new debt.
The Commission said it was satisfied that “the opening of a deficit-based excessive deficit procedure is warranted” in the case of seven countries. The group also included Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia.
The EU suspended debt and deficit regulations to help countries cope with the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The rules are now back in place and now any EU country going over debt and deficit limits run the risk of legal action.
EU’s Golden Rules
According to the reformed rules, an EU member state’s debt may not exceed 60% of gross domestic product (GDP).
Highly indebted EU countries with debt levels over 90% of GDP have to reduce their debt ratio by one percentage point annually, countries
Additionally, the general government deficit — the shortfall between government revenue and spending — must be kept below 3%.
According to the commission’s economic forecast, France is at -5.5%, Italy is at -4.4% and Belgium is at -4.4% and will breach this deficit limit in 2024.
Austria, Finland, Estonia, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia also have deficits that are too high according to the rules. Spain is at exactly -3.0%.
Snap Elections
French President Emmanuel Macron was hammered in the European Parliamentary elections as expected in this corner, and generally elsewhere.
Winners: The Far Right
Losers: Renew Europe (Macron), and the Greens.
The response by Macron caught everyone off guard. He dissolved parliament and called for snap elections.
…click on the above to read the rest of the article…
U.S. Government Historical Debt
Chart of the Week #7
Over the years, meeting people from all walks of life, I’ve noticed something: when you bring up the massive U.S. debt that’s starting to take over our whole economy, some just shrug and say, “Well, the U.S. has always had a ton of debt — it’s just how things are, nothing to be too surprised about.”
When I come across this line of thinking, I like to whip out the following chart. Take a look. It shows the U.S. government’s debt since 1790.
What you’ll notice right away is that government debt was pretty much nonexistent from the early days of our country until about halfway through the 20th century.
But this situation changed in the second half of the century, first gradually and then alarmingly. This happened with the expansion of federal government spending under Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson’s, Richard Nixon. And debt just kept snowballing since.
That said, President Biden really took it to levels we hadn’t seen before.
In the years since taking office in 2021, Biden went on a trillion-dollar spending spree with stimulus projects like the American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act.
The unmistakable result of such policies is the current national debt standing at $34.8 trillion — more than a quarter-million dollars for every household — compared to “just” $27.8 trillion in 2021.
Come to think of it… “standing” may not be the best word. The U.S. government debt never stands still; it grows relentlessly with every passing moment. Here’s a link if you want to watch it go up live, but be warned, it’s quite disturbing.
![[image error]](https://www.globalresearch.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Screenshot-2024-06-25-at-12.20.24%E2%AFPM.png){kind=link}