History Repeating

 By way of reinforcement and update of my previous post called, "What Does A Carney Do?", check out this article of how invested Trump, and by extension the USA, now are in the digital currency scam. The article tells us that economist Paul Krugman says that the digital currency market value rests on "nothing but technobabble and libertarian derp." Does that make you feel secure? Not me. 

Now, if you haven't exceeded your free article limit at Forbes this month, go ahead and read our current PM's views on digital currency and if he gets elected (which it looks like he will) how invested CANADA will soon be in it. 

Cryptocurrency, which Trump likes, and CBDC, which Carney likes, are the same but slightly different. I doubt it would take much convincing to get Trump on board with a central bank backed digital currency once Carney explains that it could make him infinitely richer and more powerful than the crypto currency backed by technobabble and derp that he is investing in now. And as I said in my former post, this is what I'd expect from 4 years of these two crooks in charge of our countries. Carney will likely get elected based largely on his fake anti-Trump stance but we are already seeing signs of THAT facade breaking down. Maybe this was part of their "constructive, productive" conversation and part of their future "comprehensive negotiations." I doubt it will be long before they're smoking cigars, drinking snifters of port, and screwing our taxpayers together.

*** I have to sneak this in here before posting: This I am writing about a week after writing the above and imagining that Carney and Trump now ARE smoking those cigars and sipping that port. All the while people like the Blundell twerp I referenced before are PRAISING Carney for pulling off some ingenious money moving that actually hurt Trump. The explanation you will probably have seen posted by some anti-Conservative friends on Facebook by now is straight out of the past. The past when money was backed by concrete items like gold or government bonds. Nowadays, as explained in previous posts, banks just print money or pull it out of the air or some other fundamental orifice. Essentially the explanation is that Carney bought up US Treasury bonds while Trump was crashing the economy. He also told the leaders (central bankers) of other cuntries to do the same. I doubt it was only bonds they bought, they could have been investing in almost anything since everything was diving in price as the stock markets plummeted. The idea that Blundell and others are trying to push (and they know is bullshit) is that selling them off en masse would hurt Trump and the US so he'd better smarten up and by golly he did! What a bunch of heroes! 

Here's what probably REALLY happened: That little meeting between Trump and Carney was an agreement that included Trump blustering about Tariffs all over the place and causing the stock market crash (which even I had predicted). What I hadn't predicted was that it would be just a taste of things to come. It was an illustration of how easily they could make piles and piles of dough for the rich people in their countries and others. It was probably arranged that Trump would postpone or cancel the tariffs causing a stock market recovery and allowing the governments to sell what they had bought cheaply for tremendous gain. He would announce the time to buy the cheap stocks somehow... maybe a social media post like "THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!" This is just classic stock market manipulation and it's yet another crime the convict in chief has committed and will get away with. Do I even need to type that exactly NONE of these massive gains would be distributed to any citizens but the already filthy rich? 

Trump and Carney both probably made themselves tidy little sums - something Trump's not good at doing. This undoubtedly cemented the love between the central banks of these countries and Trump rather than hurting him. The tariffs are still only on hold and this pattern could repeat itself to a much greater extent when the tariffs are back on the table. It also will be related to Trump that this is peanuts compared to what they could do with CBDC. But they needed his trust before making that jump. They probably have it now cuz what does Trump trust more than piles of money? And the most delicious part of it all is that Carney will get elected by accusing Trump of market manipulation among other things in his posturing against him. Like Trump conjured this up on his own!

And in case you are now saying, "Yeah but Dave, it DID hurt Trump. How's he going to recover the losses?" Easy. Same way any financial crash is "recovered from" nowadays. Print more money that is backed by nothing causing the NON - filthy rich to pay for it all. This is just recent history repeating itself. 

The current political shenanigans bring a song to my head. I hear Shirley Bassey saying it's all just a little bit of history repeating. 

There are a lot of people dancing right now, but do we know who's singing? Let's go back... waaay back to 1890. This is when Trump's hero President William McKinley was doing something remarkably similar to what is happening now. How similar you ask? I'll tell you a few things that will undoubtedly ring bells for everybody and I'll tell you some results of these things that really ought to ring warning bells, alarms, emergency sirens, and danger Will Robinsons. 

Canada was a young nation with our first PM John A. Macdonald who had been elected in 1867, was getting old, and probably wasn't going to win the upcoming election. He resigned in 1873 after getting busted for taking bribes but got re-elected in 1878 cuz - what do you expect from a PM? Honestly! The US was a bit older and well-established and thought their northern neighbors were a good source of raw materials. One example of our "trade" then is the fishing ships that stole wood and water from us while pretending to fish. But Canada was doing the exact same thing in Minnesota. "Reciprocal tariffs" of the 1890's trade war actually included colourful entrepreneurs like "timber pirates." I dunno, to me it seems somehow more honest than the entrepreneurs of today who just move money around in such an impersonal way scamming billions from the working stiffs of the middle and lower classes. 

What I'm getting at is our current situation with that tariffying menace to the south is shockingly similar to what we had in 1890. Here's a summary of just a few of the similarities.  Back then the tariffs backfired but part of the reason for that is they didn't have the stability of the central bank behind them. That would only come a couple presidents later along with the beloved income tax. Basically charging your own people directly instead of making it look like you are charging other countries but are charging your own people directly. And how did Woodrow Wilson get away with the temporary/permanent income tax? A huge crisis. WWI. Anyway, let's not get too far ahead. What McKinley DID have was the backing of the richest man in the world. 

Andrew Carnegie was not in cars or tech like Elon Musk because they were not the huge industries of the time, steel was. Steel was important to railway, building, and military construction. Carnegie was a "robber baron" abusing the workers, extending their hours and cutting their pay, and notably busting unions in the 1880's and 1890's. In his "The Gospel of Wealth" he wrote about his version of trickle-down economics which clashed with his earlier belief that "amassing wealth was one of the worst species of idolatry." He clearly caught what I call in this blog the "money disease," but toward the end of his life he found some sort of cure and gave a LOT to charity which is the ONLY significant way in the history of economics that wealth trickles down from the ultra rich to the poor. Carnegie can be partially forgiven for his late life philanthropy, but I can't see Trump or Musk ever doing that. Back to our history lesson...

Carnegie used strategies of vertical and horizontal integration, basically buying all the raw materials and shipping and absorbing competing companies respectively, along with some market manipulation in concert with other robber barons in oil (Rockefeller), and banking (J.P. Morgan), to make his vast fortune. He supported McKinley's tariffs as part of his protectionist efforts to eliminate foreign steel companies as competitors. He also liked the idea of Canada becoming a friendlier (US state) source of raw materials. 

The McKinley-Carnegie partnership was pretty similar to the Trump-Musk axis of evil we see today and so was their market manipulation. It also involved the central bank (personified by JP "Jupiter" Morgan) and a financial crisis - the worst to that point in American history. The stock market crash of 1893 was largely triggered by Canada's failure to become a state going so far as to re-elect the aging and unpopular Macdonald who won on the platform of "Canada Strong" and the counteractions of business diversion away from the US to Europe. Lower trade with Canada, and lower trade with Europe, which was now being supplied largely by Canada, and the bankers' scrupulous maintenance of the gold standard in favour of just pulling money out of their asses, caused a bank run. This triggered a proposal by Morgan and some other banks to purchase gold in exchange for - you guessed it, government bonds. This stabilized the US money supply and virtually instituted JP Morgan as the central bank of the time. Not the first, mind you, Andrew Jackson dismantled the 2nd Bank of the US in 1832 for being subversive and dangerous to the rights and liberties of the people. He was so right!

In fact, in 1901 McKinley made a speech on the virtues of dropping the tariffs and protectionism in favour of diversifying international trade once again (with Canada and Europe). It might as well have been entitled "This Tariff Shit Don't Work." He was assassinated the day after the speech by a dude who was one of MANY people who had been adversely affected by the tariffs and economic policies of the times and resorted to anarchy. Leon F. Czolgosz worked at a wire mill (steel) in Cleveland where the wages had been cut resulting in a strike. He eventually was fired and blacklisted but got his job back as Fred Nieman (nobody). He was so affected by the inequality between workers and the wealthy that he quit work and got more involved in the anarchist movement. 

Are you noticing any parallels yet? More to come...

Morgan, now the central bank, merged some railroads into a huge hideous conglomeration and did the same with steel by, with Carnegie, forming US Steel the first billion-dollar corporation ever. Unfortunately for them, McKinley's replacement, Teddy Roosevelt, was a strong believer in antitrust and limiting monopolies. This, and some more unscrupulous banking, led to the 1907 financial crisis which was averted by the "central bank" (JP Morgan) bailing out the banks that were failing to meet the demands of the panicked public demanding their savings back. How did he do it? You're starting to get this aren't you? More bonds. ... and a further monopolization of the steel industry by US Steel. Some even accused JP Morgan and others of manufacturing the panic to increase their profits, which they humongously did. But, now I'm just GIVING you parallels, it was never proven. 

This created a "need" for a central bank to be the lender of last resort so that scheisters like Morgan couldn't do such things in the future. What Morgan did and what central banks do now is vulture capitalism and it's been repeated over and over again. It's going on now if you ask me. If you have the time, read about it here: chrome-extension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://teachdemocracy.org/images/pdf/jpmorgan.pdf

It's all just a little bit of history repeating.