Dear Xi Jinping (And The Rest Of the CCP)

We know you are in a pretty bad predicament of your own making, Xi.  The virus you infected the world with and then tried your darnedest to keep out is now finally coming back to give you a big dose of karma.  And your iron-fisted totalitarian "Zero Covid" (lol) strategy is now collapsing as we speak, and your people are finally fighting back.  Here's how you can come as close as you possibly can to saving face:

1. End the lockdowns immediately and open up, cold turkey.  Yesterday. 
2. Have plenty of vitamins, HCQ, Ivermectin, budesonide, and stuff like that ready for the inevitable virus surge.  Because your population's natural immunity has been weakened by nearly three years of this nonsense, and your vaccines are kind of a joke.  (Not like ours are really much better, of course.)
3. Apologize and make whole everyone you have wronged as best you can.  (Tall order, we know.)
4. STEP DOWN.

And don't let the door hit you on the way out!

Sincerely, 

The Rest of the World

P.S.  You really do look a lot like Winnie the Pooh.

DECEMBER UPDATE:  Looks like Xi and the CCP finally ended their inane and insane Zero Covid policy.   That goes to show that protests actually work.

The Verdict Is In: Sweden Wins!

After two an a half years, we can now see more clearly just how effective, or, not, the various pandemic strategies were.  We are please to note that the country we were rooting for the hardest, Sweden, has come out the winner with their light touch, no-lockdown approach.  That was according to their ranking in terms of all-cause percent excess deaths over the whole pandemic from 2020 through mid-2022, and they came out the best of all countries examined in the study, and yes, even better than their vaunted Nordic neighbors (even Iceland).  Really.

As for Belarus, Nicaragua, Tanzania, Uruguay, and Brazil, who also eschewed lockdowns (Nicaragua even encouraged mass gatherings), those countries were not listed, but a cursory look at their excess all-cause mortality shows that their numbers varied but were similar to or lower than their stricter neighbors.  And as we noted previously, while the USA did abysmally overall in terms of excess deaths, the 12 US states that never locked down at all generally did better overall than their stricter neighbors and the national average.  And Florida, when adjusted for age, outperformed New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and even California, and was ultimately an average state overall.

DECEMBER UPDATE:  Looks like now even China's ultimate lockdown failure is yet another way Sweden (and Belarus, Nicaragua, Tanzania, South Dakota, Florida, etc.) has been vindicated.

It has been said, "you either do China, or you do Sweden (etc.), as anything in between will do more harm than good in the long run".  Now, it seems that the first five words of that are no longer true, if they ever really were.

QED

A Very Prescient Video From The 1930s

Watch it for yourselves on Rumble.  You really need to sit down when watching it:

Link is here.

Don't Do "The Volcker" Again!

As the FERAL Reserve is committed to raising interest rates no matter the cost, even if it means deliberately engineering a recession, in an attempt to quash the worst inflation in 40 years, we would like to warn them as follows:

Stand. Down. NOW.  And prepare to reverse course a full 180 degrees, and soon.

And the same goes for their Quantitative Tightening (QT) as well, which of course amplifies the effect of raising interest rates by literally sucking money out of the economy, thus shrinking the money supply.  And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that, since there is exponentially more debt in the overall economy in 2022 compared with 1982, even a fairly modest increase in interest rates can have a much larger adverse effect now compared to back then.

Paul Volcker, former Fed chairman, (in)famously raised interest rates as high as 20% in the early 1980s, and it technically "worked" to quash inflation.  But it came at a terrible price:  not only a pair of really bad recessions with millions of jobs lost, but the resulting damage also inflicted serious sequelae upon the broader working class that persist to this day as well, both in the USA as well as abroad.  The first time, one could say it was naive at best.  Doing "The Volcker" a second time, however, would be downright stupid, if not utterly malicious, narcissistic, and even sadistic.

And the USA was actually one of the luckier countries.  Canada, for example, set interest rates even higher still, and kept them higher for longer than the USA, and they got even higher and more persistent unemployment as result, and inflation persisted longer as well.  It was a complete lose-lose proposition for them.  So don't do it again!

As the old adage goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.  And this particular tool is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, or burning down the house to roast a pig.  And worse, it is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job.  Most inflations, including this one especially, are caused by shortages of goods and services.  The only real cure is to solve the shortages, something higher interest rates simply cannot do no matter HOW high they are (at best it reduces demand and squeezes "inflationary psychology" out the system, and at worst it simply exacerbates the "cost-push" side of inflation when kept too high for too long).

And Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes that governments can easily solve shortages by purchasing at a premium whatever goods or services happen to be in short supply, which incentives production, and then re-selling them (or giving them away) at a loss.  Higher interest rates do absolutely zilch for that.

Of course, we would not have gotten into this situation had our "leaders" not imposed  lockdowns in a futile attempt to control an airborne respiratory virus, and then tried to paper over the inevitable and predictable consequences by printing ludicrous and unprecedented amounts of money that overwhelmingly went toward further enriching the already ultra-rich.  Had we instead adopted the time-tested "flu strategy" from the get-go, with or without a more moderate stimulus package for We the People, we would not have gotten in this predicament in the first place.  Yes, there may have been some leftover problems in the bond markets and especially the repo market from 2019, and the virus would have been somewhat disruptive to the economy, (like the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics), but nothing even in the same league as what happened with lockdowns.  And from what we have learned the hard way, death rates would have been about the same or even lower.

(No really, cumulative excess all-cause death rates for countries, states, and communities that largely ignored the virus, or at least eschewed lockdowns and more-restrictive NPIs, were actually within error bounds or even lower than for their much stricter neighbors or national/regional averages.)

When you try to "burn the village to save it", eventually the village will return the favor.  It is simply the law of cause and effect, also known as karma.  Sooner or later, you always reap what you sow.  And as the saying goes, hindsight is quite literally 2020.  Will the Fed answer the "clue phone"?

UPDATE:  The Brownstone Institute has an excellent article discussing how the combination of lockdowns and the aftermath (forced massive supply crunch) + stimulus (massive demand boost), followed by the Russia-Ukraine war and sanctions, unleashed the worst inflation in 40 years.  You mean you can't just paper over a massive supply crunch with more demand?  And that war and sanctions are both negative-sum games in which everyone loses to one degree or another?  Gee, who woulda thunk it?

The money supply has been shrinking at a record pace in recent months, thanks to the FERAL Reserve's Quantitative Tightening.  Usually a shrinking money supply portends recession, historically speaking. 

Of course, the other elephant in the room is corporate greed.  They ultra-rich and mega-corporations are taking in record profits, so it is not simply that they are passing higher costs of doing business onto the customers.  An excess profits tax would be the best way to curtail this sort of inflation, as would a one-off wealth tax on like richest folks, much like several countries did after WWII.  Keep in mind that Trump himself actually proposed such a wealth tax back in 1999, and not a trivial one either, so the MAGA crowd would be truly hypocritical to oppose it.

Have We Been Too Harsh On The Degrowth Movement?

In a recent previous article, we discussed the potential perils and pitfalls of the degrowth movement, and then at the end added an update.  We may have been a tad too harsh on some of the degrowth advocates as such, particularly Jason Hickel, by lumping them all together.  While our roadmaps for how to get there may diverge, our ultimate goals at least seems to be more or less the same as Hickel's (though that's not necessarily true of some of the other degrowth advocates out there).  Ditto for Charles Eisenstein and Kate Raworth, as well as Herman Daly, Joe Millwald-Hopkins and Yarnick Oswald.  They are some very insightful folks.

The TSAP still sees our own plan as being a more feasible roadmap towards that goal, as counterintuitive as that may sound.  Abundance is the one thing capitalism cannot survive for long, while forced austerity will not kill the beast, but rather merely weaken it a bit before it mutates further into a new variant of some sort due to selective pressure.

The system is the underlying problem here.  We essentially have three choices: 1) allow it to catastrophically fail in the future via business as usual, 2) force it to catastrophically fail sooner via austerity, or 3) humanely euthanize it via abundance ASAP.  And it's obvious which one we should choose.

So what exactly will post-capitalism ultimately look like when the dust finally settles?  The TSAP doesn't claim to know the details.  But eventually it will very likely organically evolve into something like a gift economy to one degree or another, as well as a steady-state economy of course.

One thing is absolutely certain, though:  if we are to create an economy that no longer has to "grow or die", we must first phase out and eventually abolish usury entirely.  That means that interest and all other kinds of fees for the mere use of money will need to be officially capped at ZERO, period.  To avoid seizing up the financial markets and crashing the economy, set a "sinking lid" at, say, ten percent APR, and then gradually lower the cap each year until zero is reached.  Usury has ultimately led to the financialization of the economy, inflation, worsening inequality, and just about every other social problem that has a name.  There is a reason why it used to be considered such a sin.  Let's make it history.

Also, as the late, great Buckminster Fuller famously noted all the way back in 1970:

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.

The glorified form of OCD that calls itself the Protestant Work Ethic (TM) will need to desist along with that other outmoded 19th century relic, conspicuous consumption, as they are both ultimately two sides of the same coin.  That means we will need a Universal Basic Income (UBI) with no strings attached as a prerequisite and precondition for any serious attempt at degrowth or post-growth.

Oh, and by the way:  unless the population also shrinks as well at least as fast as the economy does, degrowth is, ipso facto, fundamentally an exercise in futility.  That is true both from an economic perspective as well as an ecological perspective.  Fortunately, that can be done ethically and effectively via female empowerment and poverty reduction, as well as readily available access to birth control.  No coercion required.  The outmoded "everybody must procreate" myth needs to end yesterday as well.

And finally, before we can even consider degrowth in earnest, we would first need to get out of the destructive rut we are currently in.  Just like we needed to get out of the previous protracted rut of the Great Recession a decade ago.  The so-called "Green New Deal" is really only a lighter shade of brown as opposed to truly green, but it is nonetheless a decent way to get out of a rut while redesigning the economy for degrowth towards a steady-state economy.

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  It should go without saying that the TSAP does NOT support anything even remotely resembling a lockdown, including, but not limited to, a "climate lockdown".  That is evil and illiberal to the max, and not only that, it wouldn't even work in the long run.  Thus, in no uncertain terms, we will support degrowth if and only if the individual rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are fully guaranteed, and the disastrous response to the pandemic is not even remotely considered as a model.

2023 UPDATE:  A new article points out that capitalism and degrowth are NOT at all mutually exclusive, and the former can easily co-opt and even thrive under the latter.  So those who love the idea of degrowth but loathe capitalism may be in for a very rude awakening to say the least. 

See also here as well for why degrowth is currently "a slogan in search of a program", as the late Herman Daly would say, and why we will still need to have some flavor of a Green New Deal either way.

Are The Kids OK? We Already Know The Answer

One year after the novel experimental gene therapies that "self-identify" as "vaccines" were "authorized" for children under 12, it looks like our suspicion was indeed correct that it was a big mistake to do so, and history will NOT be kind at all to those who did it.

The ever-insightful Dr. Peter McCullough got permanently banned from Twitter recently for daring to expose the unvarnished truth about what these jabs were doing to kids (and adults too, but especially kids).  Steve Kirsch, who also got banned long ago, posted on his Substack an excellent article about exactly what it was in his final tweet that got McCullough banned forever.  It was a link to a video on Rumble by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation.  And it was apparently such an eye-opener that the powers that be felt it had to be forcibly silenced and memory-holed.  

But the funny thing about the truth is, it can't stay hidden and memory-holed forever.  Sooner or later, it always comes out.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant. 

"Financialization" Of The Economy Is Simply Usury By Another Name

The TSAP in a previous article wrote how the root cause of virtually all of the social and economic ills of the past half-century are a result of the "financialization" of the economy.  That is, when the financial sector (often known colloquially by the synecdoche of "Wall Street" or "The Banksters") takes on a massively outsized share of the economy and effectively becomes its master rather than its servant.  This occurred since 1971 when our "leaders" in Washington basically sold out to the 0.01% financial oligarchy, and made the conscious decision to have the lion's share of all newly created post-gold standard dollars flow directly from the printing press (or more accurately, keyboard) to Wall Street rather than to We the People.  The financial sector then used such massive excess money as leverage to further consolidate their power and control over the rest of us, and as they say, the rest is history.

But of course, it actually goes much deeper than that.  Professor Richard Westra had actually written a whole book back in 2016 about the deeper root causes of all of this financialization and the extreme inequality that has resulted.  And it turns out, there really is nothing new under the sun, but rather it is simply a newly-unleashed (and somewhat more sophisticated) reincarnation of the very ancient practice of usury.  He does not mince words here:

Usury laid medieval society to waste. Western civilization was saved by the rise of capitalism, which tamed the activities of money lending, and endowed them with socially redeeming value, tethering finance to expanding production of material goods and increased social wealth. Now, as the 21st century begins, bloating tides of money with no possibility of ever being converted into real capital wash over the world. Finance again has turned to its dark side, using money to make money with no socially redeeming purpose. Such is the endgame of economies managed by capitalists without capitalism. As Marx foresaw, capitalist society, like all others, is destined to be outpaced by history as the conditions of its existence decompose and become a drag on the human future. Either we will succeed in bringing about new politico-economic structures—or civilization will collapse into barbarism, just as usury broke it down in the past.

In other words, usury (broadly defined as the charging of any sort of fees for the mere use of money, thus using money to make money) has paradoxically both saved Western Civilization from itself once, but is now devouring that very same civilization.  In fact, Westra's book is titled, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door to Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole.  It is not even really capitalism anymore, as this financialization has fundamentally changed the rules of the game, turning it into "casino capitalism".  It explains not only the ever-increasing inequality that characterizes the postmodern era, but also debt slavery, wage slavery, inflation, and even the inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell which eventually kills its host.  After all, without economic growth, there can be no interest payments, thus the "grow or die" paradigm reigns supreme.  All for the benefit of the oligarchs at the top.  Ellen Brown had also made similar observations as well in her book, Web of Debt, as has the American Monetary Institute as well.

Even Aristotle himself talked about it back then, and not favorably at all.  Can you say, ipse dixit?

Contrary to its proponents, usury does NOT create wealth, because it does not actually create anything of value.  Rather, it literally does nothing more than milk existing wealth, much like a casino does.  Thus, it is inherently a zero-sum game at best.  Worse, in the long run, it acts as a slow poison and ultimately becomes a wealth-destroying negative-sum game, cannibalizing the real economy over time.

After all, while banks do create the principal of a loan out of thin air every day, they don't create the interest that must be paid back, which has to come from somewhere.  And that "somewhere" is, of course, the real physical economy.  Thus results a cascade of perpetual debt, artificial scarcity, and an ever-yawning chasm between the haves and have-nots, which then gets blamed on anything and everything but its actual root cause.  But "pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain", say the mainstream economists.  Move along, nothing to see here folks....

There is thus a very good reason why the practice was banned or restricted throughout a large chunk of history, and why practically all major religions have at some point or another considered it to be a sin to one degree or another (and some still do to this day).  And only in the past half-century or so has it been allowed to proceed with almost no restrictions at all.  In 1978, for example, the federal usury cap on interest rates was lifted, followed by further deregulation of Wall Street, and again, as they say, the rest is history.

Thus, it would behoove America (and the world) to ultimately phase out the practice of usury.  Set a binding cap on all interest rates and similar financial fees that are charged to individual borrowers (but crucially, no limit on the reverse, such as savings accounts and government bonds, as that would not really be usury), say 10%, and make it a "sinking lid" that gradually drops each year until it ultimately reaches zero.  Also, phase out the practice of fractional-reserve banking in favor of full-reserve banking, by gradually raising the reserve ratio each year until it reaches 100%. Make the FERAL Reserve truly FEDERAL instead.  Bring back the ancient practice of debt jubilees as well.  And of course, reverse the deregulation of Wall Street that has occurred since the 1970s.  And finally, make it so any newly-created money goes first to We the People before it even reaches the big banks at all.

Additionally, the global scam of poorer countries being forced to borrow at interest (usually in a foreign currency, which makes it that much worse for them) from the oligarchs in rich countries, trapped in perpetual debt and thus manipulated for their resources, also needs to end as well.  Yesterday, full stop. World Bank and IMF, we're looking at YOU.

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  The ever-insightful Jared A. Brock has an excellent article about the inherent unsustainability of usury (and rent-seeking in general) here as well.