Tag Archives: Elites

What foreign policy elites really think about you, by Kelley Beaucar Vlacos

Posted on January 9, 2023 | Leave a comment

They think you’re supposed to shut up and let them run things. From Kelley Beaucar Vlacos at responsiblestatecraft.org:

If public opinion doesn’t match up with the Washington program then it must be wrong, misunderstood, or worse, irrelevant

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Foreign Policy, Geopolitics, Governments, History, Media, Politics

Tagged ,

I Used to Be Disgusted, Now I’m Just Tired, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on December 1, 2022 | Leave a comment

Some of us are tired of being disgusted. Relief is coming, though; a system as corrupt as ours can’t survive forever. From Charles Hugh Smith at dailyreckoning.com:

I Used to Be Disgusted, Now I'm Just Tired

The midterm elections, the “most important elections of our lifetimes,” are over. Whoever won, it wasn’t really going to change much. Today’s system is simply too deeply entrenched.

While the much-touted differences between America’s political parties get obsessive, hysterical attention, the sameness of Imperial corruption, waste and squalor regardless of who’s in power gets little notice.

Scrape away the differences — mostly in domestic and cultural issues — and we see the dead hand of Imperial Corruption is on the tiller.

The core of Imperial Corruption is the disconnect between the nation’s ideals of representational democracy and open markets and the sordid reality: elites serve their interests by corrupting both democracy and open markets.

Elites Against Democracy

Unfettered democracy and markets cannot be controlled by a tiny, self-serving elite. Stripped of corruption, democracy and markets are free-for-alls that are constantly evolving. This open-ended dynamism is the beating heart of both democracy and open markets.

But the dynamic adaptive churn of unfettered representative democracy and open markets are anathema to insiders, vested interests and elites. Each has gained asymmetric power by subverting democracy and markets to serve their private interests. They’ve destroyed the system’s natural dynamism.

When “competition” has been reduced to two telecoms, two healthcare insurers, two pork processors, etc., the system has been stripped of adaptability and resilience.

Democracy has been replaced by an auction of political power to the highest bidder.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Collapse, Crime, Government, Politics

Tagged ,

The Worst and the Stupidest? By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on August 26, 2022 | Leave a comment

The so-called elites despise you but want you to love them. From Victor Davis Hanson at amgreatness.com:

Our elites are now viewed with the disdain they have earned on their own merits. And they are none too happy about it.

Elites have always been ambiguous about the muscular classes who replace their tires, paint their homes, and cook their food. And the masses who tend to them likewise have been ambivalent about those who hire them: appreciative of the work and pay, but also either a bit envious of those with seemingly unlimited resources or turned off by perceived superciliousness arising from their status and affluence.

Yet the divide has grown far wider in the 21st century. Globalization fueled the separation in a number of ways.

One, outsourcing and offshoring eroded the rust-belt interior, while enriching the two coasts. The former lost good-paying jobs, while the latter found new markets in investment, tech, insurance, law, media, academia, entertainment, sports, and the arts making them billions rather than mere millions.

So, the problem was one of both geography and class. Half the country looked to Asia and Europe for profits and indeed cultural “diversity,” while the other half stuck with tradition, values, and custom—as they became poorer.

The elite found in the truly poor—neglecting their old union-member, blue-collar Democratic base—an outlet for their guilt, noblesse oblige, condescension at a safe distance, call it what you will. The poor if kept distant were fetishized, while the middle class was demonized for lacking the taste of the professional classes, and romance of the far distant underclass.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Government, Politics, Society

Tagged

10 Promising Signs That The Insidious Mind-Control-Matrix The Elite Have Created Is Starting To Crumble, by Michael Snyder

Posted on August 4, 2022 | Leave a comment

Perhaps its not as easy to fool all the people all the time as they thought. From Michael Snyder at zerohedge.com:

Are we witnessing the start of some sort of a mass awakening in the western world?  For years, I have been writing about the extremely complex systems that are designed to shape and control what we think.  Today, the vast majority of the “news” and “entertainment” that most of us consume is controlled by just a very small handful of immensely powerful corporations.  And of course those corporations are ultimately owned and controlled by the elite of the world.  To a very large degree, the elite have been able to determine what we focus on, what we think about current events, and how we feel about the world around us.  For such a long time, most of the population would take whatever narratives that were pushed upon them by their corporate overlords as the gospel truth, and that always greatly frustrated me.  Fortunately, there are indications that times are changing.

In order for any society to function effectively, there must be a high level of trust.

Unfortunately for the elite, we simply do not trust them anymore.

Trust in our politicians has fallen to an all-time low.

Trust in the media has fallen to an all-time low.

Trust in our corporations has fallen to an all-time low.

Trust in our health care system has fallen to an all-time low.

Trust in our education system has fallen to an all-time low.

Trust in the tech industry has fallen to an all-time low.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Crime

Tagged ,

Elite Deciders Versus the Freedom to Choose, by Bill Bonner

Posted on September 8, 2021 | Leave a comment

They know who should be running your life and it sure as hell isn’t you. From Bill Bonner at rogueeconomics.com:

YOUGHAL, IRELAND – Our subject this week is freedom.

“What is it worth?” is the question on the table.

“Not much,” is the answer from most of America’s intelligentsia. The elite, that is. It maintains that freedom should not be allowed to get in the way of What It Wants Now.

It wanted the War in Afghanistan… and for 20 years, it hijacked the nation’s wealth to pay for it – $2.3 trillion worth, according to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

It wanted the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terror, the Wall Street Bailout… then the COVID-19 Bailout. All of these were sold as “investments” that would give us a better future.

What American citizen – however civic minded – would have willingly paid for these things? Very few.

And had they been good investments, they would have paid dividends. Instead, year after year, the money goes out the door and into the pockets of the elite… adding $27 trillion to the nation’s debt since 1980.

About the Elite…

And now, the elite is advertising even bigger “investments” – to change the planet’s climate… and bring equity (whatever that is) to all.

But the elite is running into trouble. Inflation is on the upswing. It will have to bring that under control by raising rates and curtailing its big-borrowing, big-spending, big-printing plans.

Can it turn around? Can it back off?

We need to do more thinking about “the elite.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Business, Civil Liberties, Economics, Economy, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Tyranny

Tagged ,

The Age of Over-Abundant Elites, by Mark E. Jeftovic

Posted on April 22, 2021 | Leave a comment

If the Covid scare fizzles out, which it looks like it might , they’ll go back to climate. From Mark E. Jeftovic at bombthrower.com:

I’ve been reading Peter Turchin’s “Ages of Discord”, which tries to look at patterns of societal strife that he found in previous, pre-industrial civilizations such as Rome and France, and examine how it holds up in a post-industrial era. It bears some resemblance to other cycle theories like Strauss and Howe’s “Fourth Turning” or other long-wave models like Kondratiev Waves (K-Waves). The basic premise behind these ideas are that societies undergo cyclical or pendulum-like dynamics between relatively steady states of prosperity and stability, the internal dynamics of which then produce the conditions that precipitate reversions into turbulent periods of strife and chaotic change.

The important thing to keep in mind is that to that the likes of Turchin and other historical statisticians, the periods of societal discord that they try to map may look like this:

Turchin: Long-term dynamics of sociopolitical instability in France, 800–1700 (data from Sorokin 1937).

But when experienced in real life look more like this

St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, 1572 by François Dubois

If there’s one thing in this highly polarized world that everybody probably does agree on it’s that we are almost certainly already in one of these periods of discord right now.

What I’m finding most interesting from Turchin’s take on this isn’t that periods of stability are not terminated by resource depletion (a la the climate alarmists), or any other “limits to growth” per se. While population growth in pre-industrial societies may bump up against “neo-Malthusian” limits, it sets up a counter-cyclical decline in population growth. How these forces interact in a transition from stability to chaos is that an over-abundance of elites creates a situation of the political class splitting into factions and fighting over the spoils of what is now a shrinking pie in terms of real economic wealth:

 “According to this theory, population growth in excess of the productivity gains of the land has several effects on social institutions. First, it leads to persistent price inflation, falling real wages, rural misery, urban migration, and increased frequency of food riots and wage protests.

Second, rapid expansion of population results in elite overproduction—an increased number of aspirants for the limited supply of elite positions. Increased intra-elite competition leads to the formation of rival patronage networks vying for state rewards. As a result, elites become riven by increasing rivalry and factionalism.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Civil Liberties, Collapse, Environment, Governments, Insurrection, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged ,

The Conman Elites That Want To “Save Us” From The Coronavirus, by Brandon Smith

Posted on May 21, 2020 | 1 comment

Beware of those who hold themselves out as our saviors from the coronavirus. From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

Last week the Federal Reserve released a report predicting that the next print on GDP numbers will likely show a loss 34.9% in the second quarter. This is the biggest GDP plunge since the Great Depression; even the crash of 2008 doesn’t compare.  And when we take into account the fact that the Fed artificially boosts GDP calculations by adding in many non-productive government programs, we have to ask, what are the REAL losses above and beyond what the Fed admits to?

With the supply chain in disarray, many companies (like Apple) are trying to shift their manufacturing base to dodge the pandemic. Of course, none of them want to bring factories back to the US; there’s simply no incentive to do so. And, the small business sector has been crushed by the shutdowns, with the vast majority of those seeking bailout loans still waiting for aid and over 20.5 million employees laid off in April alone.

Needless to say, the economy has been severely affected. The problem is that many people are being led to believe that this event has been triggered by the virus outbreak alone. This is a lie. As I noted back in February in my article ‘Global Centralization Is The Cause Of The Crisis – Not The Cure’, the collapse of the Everything Bubble was well underway long before the pandemic. The crash was started by the Federal Reserve hiking rates into economic weakness at the end of 2018, puncturing the bubble and setting the liquidity crisis in motion.

The pandemic is just the icing on the cake of a collapse that was going to happen anyway. It is also a convenient scapegoat, because now the banking elites are going to escape all the blame for the crash and the public is going to hyperfocus on the coronavirus as the culprit.

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Business, Civil Liberties, Crime, Cronyism, Governments, Media, Medicine, Propaganda

Tagged , , , , , ,

Political and Social Conflict Is Accelerating: Here’s Why, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on November 19, 2019 | Leave a comment

The old fiat-debt black magic isn’t working too well anymore. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

All the status quo “fixes” only hasten the collapse of the status quo.

That economic, social and political conflict is accelerating is self-evident.What’s open to debate are the core drivers of conflict / disorder /unraveling.

Here’s the core self-reinforcing dynamic in my view:

1. The status quo elites can no longer mask soaring costs of essentials nor soaring wealth / income inequality between the top .01% (Oligarchs), the top 9.99% who enrich the Oligarchs with their discretionary spending and technocratic/managerial labor, and the bottom 90% who are rapidly losing ground on all fronts: economic, social and political.

2. The elites’ “fixes” to the social / political conflicts unleashed by the rigged financial system and winner take most economic order are politically expedient, meaning they don’t actually address the sources of conflict, they merely paper them over with PR as a means of preserving the elites’ wealth and power.

Continue reading →

Leave a comment

Posted in Banking, Collapse, Cronyism, Currencies, Debt, Financial markets, Governments, Insurrection, Money, Politics

Tagged , ,

Wealthy Elitists Freak Out As Hordes Of Homeless People Take Over Their Neighborhoods All Over The West Coast, by Michael Snyder

Posted on May 1, 2019 | 1 comment

It’s so much easier to be a “humanitarian” with somebody else’s time, money, and property. From Michael Snyder at theeconomicollapseblog.com:

The elite are very “tolerant” of the homeless until they start showing up in their own neighborhoods.  Even though the mainstream media keeps telling us that the U.S. economy is “booming”, the number of Americans living on the streets continues to grow very rapidly, and this is particularly true in our major west coast cities.  More than half a million Americans will sleep on the streets of our cities tonight, and they need help, care and shelter.  Sadly, as economic conditions deteriorate that number is likely to double or even triple.  Of course many among the elite are all in favor of doing something for the homeless, as long as they don’t have to be anywhere around them.

For example, let’s talk about what is going on in Los Angeles.  No city on the west coast has a bigger problem with homelessness than L.A. does, and many in the homeless population enjoy camping out on the beautiful beaches in the L.A. area at night.

But of course many of the elite that paid millions of dollars for beachfront property are not too thrilled about this.  Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten was a key symbol of anti-establishment rebellion in the 1970s, but now he is freaking out because homeless people are making life very difficult for him and his wife in Venice Beach, and what he recently told Newsweek’s Paula Froelich is making headlines all over the nation…

He told her the homeless situation in his swanky LA neighborhood is so bad that thieves are tearing the bars from the windows of his multimillion-dollar home, lobbing bricks, setting up unsightly tent cities and littering the beach with syringes.

“A couple of weeks ago I had a problem,” the former punk prince opined. “They came over the gate and put their tent inside, right in front of the front door. It’s like . . . the audacity. And if you complain, what are you? Oh, one of the establishment elite? No, I’m a bloke that’s worked hard for his money and I expect to be able to use my own front door.”

Continue reading →

1 Comment

Posted in Crime, Governments

Tagged , , , ,

Counterfeit Elitism, by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on February 6, 2018 | Leave a comment

High blown credentials do not an elite make, at least in the sense of what “elite” used to mean: someone with superior qualities over the general run of humanity. From Victor Davis at amgreatness.com:

Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:

Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.

Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.

Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.

Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.

“Elite” is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it.

To continue reading: Counterfeit Elitism

Leave a comment

Posted in Government, Investigations, Media

Tagged , ,