The plan is proceeding nicely. No, I don’t mean whichever plan one prefers to insure the vegetable president’s second term or replace him with Michelle Obama, either of which would result in grave peril for the Republic. I’m talking about the plan of whatever group is propping Joe up. It’s insidious, it’s devastating to our country, invisible unless one is paying close attention, and it’s picking up speed.
Occasionally hints of it pop to the surface, either because one of its elements has fallen out of sync or due to unexpected synergistic effects that force its effects into the open.
An example would be the cascade failure of four banks this past March. Silvergate Capital, a medium-sized California bank catering to well-heeled entrepreneurs, announced on March 8 that it would cease operations after failing to recover from losses in cryptocurrency markets and new challenges (read: higher costs and interest rates) in the bond market. This announcement created panic in the incestuous world of California’s Big Money. The immediate victim was Silicon Valley Bank, which announced a sale of two billion dollars’ worth of bonds at a steep loss to satisfy withdrawal requests – a classic “bank run.” Federal regulators closed the bank on March 10 when it was no longer able to meet those continuing requests.
The next domino was Signature Bank, another crypto-happy financial institution overinvested in bonds that was caught out by the Fed’s move to raise rates. Squeezed by low returns for its investments and higher rates for refinance, it collapsed on March 12. Silicon Valley and Signature banks were, respectively, the second- and third-largest US bank failures on record, according to Forbes.
The last bank to fail was First Republic, another California institution with an exclusive clientele. Its collapse lasted more than a month and was worthy of the hammiest of Shakespearean scenery-chewers. It burned through $30 billion in US taxpayer-guaranteed rescue funds from 11 other banks, and taxpayers will have to shell out billions more for guarantees of deposits above the advertised FDIC limit – meaning they are for rich, elite clients of these banks.
Losses from this financial catastrophe dwarf those of the 2008 real estate collapse. But there’s way more in the wings: a commercial real estate collapse which will affect almost every financial institution in this country. All of them have substantial CRE holdings. After all, they were considered a “widows and orphans” asset: what could go wrong? Plenty, as it turns out. And I’m willing to bet few of you even noticed. You certainly weren’t supposed to.
The wreckge will be absorbed by the few remaining large firms as their predecessors have been. And those mega-firms will be subjected to more federal regulation and control to avoid future “errors.” You know, like Dodd-Frank was supposed to prevent the 2008 collapse or the “Inflation Prevention Act” was to, um, prevent inflation. But really, to insure that there is no American institution beyond Washington’s control. Or to use an antique phrase, “Nothing above the state.”
There are other elements of the plan. According to the US Census Bureau, in 2019 there were 6.1 million firms with employees in the US; 98% had 100 employees or less. There were also 27 million non-employer small businesses, meaning they were one-person firms. By 2022 we were back at the 2019 number of firms, but according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, only 87% of the jobs lost to the COVID shutdown will be recovered even by 2031. Small business growth will continue to be slow. Meanwhile, mega-firms like Apple, Nvidia, BlackRock, Morgan Stanley WalMart and Amazon continue to vacuum up talent and opportunities. As with the financial sector, soon much of the rest of our economy will consist of giants and ants, thanks to the many shutdowns of Dr. Faucci, onerous new “green” regulations and incessant meddling. But that’s okay. Control is much easier with fewer actors to lean on to “cooperate.” Because nothing can be outside the state’s reach.
There’s the media part. We now know, thanks in part to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, about the government’s censorship-by-proxy in the formerly open market of ideas known as the Internet. When someone with regulatory power shows up in the front office carrying a list of “suggestions” about who’s offering “dangerous ideas” smart people understand that it’s a little like Al Capone remarking that one has a nice little business and that “it would be a shame if something happened to it…” The “suggestions” aren’t really suggestions. They’re an offer one can’t refuse. Added to the largely bootlicking legacy media which has become for all intents and purposes a stenographic pool for the Democrat Party, what we now have with few exceptions is a monolithic media synchronized by Washington to stifle any non-approved or heterodox ideas. In other words, “nothing against the state.”
Then there are the crises, foreign and domestic. The southern border, open despite the protestations of Alejandro “Baghdad Bob” Mayorkas, through which eight million unvetted people have entered the country illegally from who knows where for who knows what purpose over the past two and a half years. That was all good fun for the northern blue-state sanctuaries who sanctimoniously announced that “all are welcome” until those nasty deplorable red-state types started sharing the problems that massive illegal entry caused. Then it got ugly quick. But there’s still little attention to the fact that the Biden administration has been shifting illegal entrants around in massive numbers since the beginning; that wouldn’t fit the narrative of all this misery being caused by two Ultra-Super-Maga governors who want to create chaos.
Internationally there’s the imbroglio with Ukraine, which Democrats want to provide with enough weaponry to prevent a loss, while refusing weapons which would allow the possibility of a win. Because turmoil is better. And the economic and military confrontation with China which has untold repercussions around the world. Here, too the administration seems paralyzed; either by an inability to measure and analyze or by Chinese cash, it’s difficult to say. But that too is okay, because it feeds a sense of crisis – like the open border. And in Democrat-land, one never lets a crisis go to waste, to borrow from Barack Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod.
Put all of the above in a pot, boil it down to the essence. What is the one goal toward which all elements of Washington’s bureaucracy, the Democrat party, its current president and its loyal sycophants in the media and academy of the Left have been toiling? A single-party state. Think California, New York City or Chicago, but on a national level. Assembled by consolidation, regulation and threats; midwifed by crises that Democrats caused and for which they will soon offer supposed cures. Their solutions will involve the three elements first proposed by Benito Mussolini: “Nothing above the State; nothing outside the State; nothing against the State.”
We all know the rest of that story.
