The destruction of the rule of law and the economy

 

Tucker Carlson points out that this appears to be the inevitable end result of the Biden administration's actions.  You should consider his words in the light of our earlier discussion this morning about how the war in Ukraine might - or might not - end, and the effect it's having on the world economy.

You wonder if looking backward many years from right now, historians will notice the remarkable coincidence in timing. Have you noticed? Here it is. At exactly the moment when the emergency powers they awarded to themselves to fight COVID started to wane, our leaders began pushing for conflict with Russia, and then, on the basis of that conflict, they assumed historic war powers.

Without even pausing, the Biden administration declared total economic war on a sovereign country. No American had been killed. The United States had not been invaded or attacked and yet, with no meaningful public debate or congressional authorization, the Biden administration destroyed that country's currency, then removed it from the international banking system that impoverished its population.

Then the administration began seizing the property of people affiliated with that country without a trial or due process of any kind, without even bothering to explain exactly what crime they had committed. No American government had ever done anything like that before. If there was one thing the U.S. government long stood for, it was the rule of law. The integrity of the system was always the most important thing, but not anymore.

That turned out to be an era, and that era is gone. Because the target is Russia, very few Americans have noticed any of this. They support it. Virtually no one has paused to ask him or herself where this might be going. How long until our leaders do something similar to their domestic enemies here in the United States? How long before they accuse you of collusion or disloyalty or some other hard-to-define crime, declare you an enemy of the state and then confiscate your bank account?

Something very much like that just happened in Canada. We don't imagine it could happen here. Mostly, we just don't think about it. What we think about is Ukraine and that's the other thing that's changed. The tech monopolies now exert a level of control over American public opinion that has no precedent in all of history ... The medieval church had less command over society's emotions than Facebook and Google and Twitter now do.  

For the past two years, you have watched these companies, above all, define who you, as an American, must hate ... each new crisis is carefully stage-managed from Silicon Valley at the direction of the White House. How does the human brain compete with this? How does it understand it? Well, it doesn't. Clarity and perspective become impossible. In the hysteria, even the recent past just evaporates.  

The morning that Russia invaded Ukraine, you may have been talking about a lot of different things — COVID, or crime, or the southern border. Not anymore. Much to relief for the White House, all of those topics have been forgotten, maybe forever. No population has ever been more skillfully manipulated than our population is being manipulated right now, but even with the tech monopolies on the case full-time, there are limits, some topics cannot be hidden, and inflation is one of them.

Carlson goes on to show how the White House and US financial authorities are trying to "spin" inflation as the fault of Russia, rather than the result of decades of fiscal mismanagement and policy errors inflicted on us by both major US political parties.

What is the root of the inflation? If you want to know the answer to that question, the fastest way to get it is to check to see what politicians are denying. Whatever they claim is not the cause of inflation almost certainly is the cause of inflation ... when you reach a state as we are now, you really have only two options. You can pretend it's not happening, or you can blame someone else for it, and the White House is trying both ... Americans understand the state of the economy because they live within it. They pay for things. So, if you're going to lie about its cause, you're going to have to do better than just pretending it's not going on. You're going to have to blame somebody else...

. . .

It was the White House, and we should say the Congress' reaction to the invasion, that is roiling our economy. That's true. So among many other things, the White House just banned Russian oil imports, for example. Oil prices immediately rose. That's what happens when you shake up a market like that. Americans immediately suffered. We were told, many people told us, it's worth it because this is a moral victory against Putin, and some people took solace in this, but you have to wonder, how exactly is this a moral victory against Putin? Think about it for a minute.

Russia is a major oil producer ... That would mean that higher oil prices help Putin. They make Putin, and the Saudis, and the Venezuelans, and Iran much, much richer. Why? Because Russia can still sell its oil in global markets because the world has not joined our boycott. What does this tell you? It tells you that the loser in this policy is not Vladimir Putin. He's the winner. It's the United States, and it's not just oil.

Thanks to the Biden administration's mismanagement, commodities across the board are up dramatically — potash, fertilizers, wheat — huge. Nickel went up 250 percent in two days. Who's going to pay for all this? You are. This is the biggest tax increase of your life, and, by the way, it could very easily get worse. Why? Because oil is traded in U.S. dollars. Ever hear the term petrodollars?

Why would the rest of the world continue to trade oil in U.S. dollars, a fact that greatly benefits us, when there's uncertainty imposed by political forces on oil markets? ... there will be new and competing markets in which oil is traded in something other than U.S. dollars, and that's a massive loss for us.

Here's the bigger truth: Our global financial systems benefit us. That may not be fair, but it's true, and they're the basis of our wealth. So, if you destroy them in an effort to get Putin, who are you really destroying? You're destroying the United States, and that's exactly what they've done. When you attack and destabilize the global financial systems, to restate, you are attacking and destabilizing the United States, not Putin.

You can't see this right now, because there's so much hysteria being ginned up by the media, particularly on social media, but when that hysteria lifts, when the cloud finally evaporates, it will be obvious that the Biden administration's response to the invasion of Ukraine is the single-most damaging thing any American president has ever done to this country and to the world — not to Putin — to us and to a lot of small countries that didn't deserve it.

There's more at the link.  Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.

I highly recommend that you read the entire article linked above, or watch the embedded video below.

When you think about it, it's almost impossible to disagree with a single word of Mr. Carlson's summation.  American Thinker called it "Perhaps Tucker Carlson's most profound monologue ever", and I can't contradict them.  The Biden administration, and those pulling its strings, are destroying the last vestiges of the rule of law, in the context of current international events.  We need not be surprised if (when?) they try to do the same to suppress internal dissent, and/or try to manipulate future election results in the same way as the 2020 elections were manipulated, distorted and nullified.  In case you missed it, it looks like they're getting ready to try to do precisely that.

The powers that be think that they hold the whip hand;  that they can do what they like, and either persuade or coerce the American people into obedience.  I hope and pray there are enough Americans who won't accept that, and who'll resist such politically-imposed slavery.  Are there?  I guess we'll soon find out.

Peter