Historian Niall Ferguson likens the US situation circa 2024 to a “late, Soviet America.”
He notes that in 1990, observers were noticing a “ghastly and tragic... loss of morality” within the USSR. “Apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching,” were running wild. Nearly half the population thought that theirs was an “unjust society.” USSR leaders were old party hacks...
The Soviet economy was largely fake... almost all of it directly or indirectly controlled by the Communist Party. The government ran chronic deficits... supporting a bloated military that looked powerful, on paper, but couldn’t win a war.
“Sound familiar?” asks Ferguson:
"Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979."
Bill Bonner
Attention antifa and transtifa and insurrectionists who hate ICE:
Nearly every state has specific statutes that criminalize willfully interrupting or disturbing a religious assembly or worship service. These laws protect the right of people to gather and practice their religion without intentional interference.
Let the Minneapolis arrests begin.
As revealed in a 1955 research and development program memo from the CIA’s Technical Services Staff/Chemical Division, the MK Ultra objectives went far beyond interrogation tools. They envisioned a arsenal of covert chemicals designed to manipulate behavior on a massive scale, administered without detection to render people compliant, confused, or crippled.
Here’s the smoking gun: the memo’s explicit list of desired substances and methods, quoted verbatim from the declassified records:
Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so that they may be used for malingering, etc.
Materials which will render the ...
Janet Yellen shocked the banking world when she said that America's “needed belt tightening is significant—larger than in most programs supported by the International Monetary Fund."
Yes, even larger than the bankrupt nations now beholden to the IMF, which demands a kind of austerity Americans might not survive. Examples:
By 2010, Greek debt had spiraled to 130% of GDP and climbing. No one was willing to lend them money anymore... forcing the IMF to swoop in with a "rescue" package that came with brutal strings attached.
Pensions were slashed by 40%. Public sector wages were frozen, then cut. Over 150,000 government workers were laid off. State assets—airports, ports, utilities—were sold off at fire-sale prices to foreign investors.
Greece's economy contracted by 25%. Youth unemployment hit 60%. An entire generation was hollowed out.
Argentina has been through the IMF wringer multiple times; in fact in in 2018, Argentina received the largest bailout in IMF history: $57 billion....