The Elite Seeks to Entrench Its Power taken from our ‘On Target Newsletter’ issue no 267
In the past American presidents have used the first of their four-year terms to do the nasty stuff, pushing through unpopular changes, saving the nice bits for closer to next elections. Joe Biden is doing the opposite. He’s immediately spending or trying to spend public money on a scale so lavish that it’s comparable to mobilizing for a world war. What’s going on?
The Biden administration is gambling that it can use its wafer-thin control of federal government to force through measures that will entrench Democrats’ defences against the rising threat from populist Republicans. Time is short because in the mid-term elections only 18 months away the Democrats could easily lose control.
My friend Bill Bonner says Hillary Clinton “made one of the most tone-deaf political blunders in history by referring to these people as ‘deplorables’. Over the years those deplorables have drifted towards the Republicans.”
From a classical conservative perspective, Donald Trump made little sense with his policies and proposals. “But when it came to the cultural notes, he seemed to have perfect pitch”
Since the 1990s the two parties have switched. Republicans “now represent the working class and the hustling, small-business-owning petite bourgeoisie. The Democrats are now the party of the Grand Bourgeoisie – big business, the rich, the elite, the media, the universities and the government itself (including the Pentagon).
“The trouble with this realignment, from the Democrats’ perspective is that there are relatively more deplorable voters than elite voters.”
They are attacking this problem with several initiatives to tilt the balance of power…
► Seeking to pack the Supreme Court by adding four judges sympathetic to its interests. “Fortunately that idea seems to be going nowhere, with several Democratic senators facing re-election afraid to touch it.”
► Seeking to pack Congress by giving the District of Columbia, the capital city of Washington, statehood. With that would come two senators and one congressional representative. The three new hacks would be reliable, guaranteed votes for the Democrats. However that effort is also unlikely to pass.
► The massive fiscal spending plans that aim “to win back working-class votes by handing out good-paying jobs in the ‘infrastructure’ boondoggle [only a small percentage of which will actually be for infrastructure]… along with free schooling and other giveaways in the ‘families’ programme.
“It might work.”
OT 267 22 May 2021
The US government is pumping money and credit into the economy on a mindblowing scale equated with a war-time splurge. The excuse is that it needs to counter the damage done by the pandemic, but the Biden administration views it as an opportunity to pour money into its favoured interests – voters, welfare, public services.
Commodity prices are surging and there’s the prospect of demand for some natural resources exceeding supplies for years to come. Some leading investment advisers now say that we’re in the early stages of another “super-cycle.”
There are four reasons why international fund managers’ pessimism about Europe could be wrong, argues JP Morgan’s chief market strategist for the region, Karen Ward:
The Pentagon has awarded $30 million to Australia’s Lynas – the world’s leading specialist outside China in mining rare earths – to develop a processing facility in Texas.
Prices of commodities are surging despite the fact that economies, many of them still in the grip of lockdowns, are still far from full recovery from the pandemic.
War risk is “consistently underestimated by money people” says FT commentator John Dizard following the escalation of tensions between China and Taiwan. The latter runs itself as a highly successful independent nation, but China insists it is a breakaway province that it is determined to recover.
