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https://brownstone.org/articles/we-failed-the-freedom-test/

We Failed the Freedom Test

The remedy is worse than the disease.

Francis Bacon

The government never cedes power willingly.

Neither should we.

If the Covid-19 debacle taught us one thing it is that, as Justice Neil Gorsuch acknowledged, “Rule by indefinite emergency edict risks leaving all of us with a shell of a democracy and civil liberties just as hollow.”

Unfortunately, we still haven’t learned.

We’re still allowing ourselves to be fully distracted by circus politics and a constant barrage of bad news screaming for attention.

Four years after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, which gave world governments (including our own) a convenient excuse for expanding their powers, abusing their authority, and further oppressing their constituents, there’s something being concocted in the dens of power.

The danger of martial law persists.

Any government so willing to weaponize one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers and justify all manner of government tyranny in the so-called name of national security will not hesitate to override the Constitution and lockdown the nation again.

You’d better get ready, because that so-called crisis could be anything: civil unrest, national emergencies, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

Covid-19 was a test to see how quickly the populace would march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked, and how little resistance the citizenry would offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

“We the people” failed that test spectacularly.

Characterized by Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” the government’s Covid-19 response to the Covid-19 pandemic constituted a massively intrusive, coercive and authoritarian assault on the right of individual sovereignty over one’s life, self, and private property.

In a statement attached to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Arizona v. Mayorkas, a case that challenged whether the government could continue to use it pandemic powers even after declaring the public health emergency over, Gorsuch provided a catalog of the many ways in which the government used Covid-19 to massively overreach its authority and suppress civil liberties:

Executive officials across the country issued emergency decrees on a breathtaking scale.Governors and local leaders imposed lockdown orders forcing people to remain in their homes. They shuttered businesses and schools, public and private. They closed churches even as they allowed casinos and other favored businesses to carry on. They threatened violators not just with civil penalties but with criminal sanctions too. They surveilled church parking lots, recorded license plates, and issued notices warning that attendance at even outdoor services satisfying all state social-distancing and hygiene requirements could amount to criminal conduct. They divided cities and neighborhoods into color-coded zones, forced individuals to fight for their freedoms in court on emergency timetables, and then changed their color-coded schemes when defeat in court seemed imminent.

Truly, the government’s (federal and state) handling of the Covid-19 pandemic delivered a knockout blow to our civil liberties, empowering the police state to flex its powers by way of a bevy of lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc.

What started off as an experiment in social distancing in order to flatten the curve of an unknown virus (and not overwhelm the nation’s hospitals or expose the most vulnerable to unavoidable loss of life scenarios) quickly became strongly worded suggestions for citizens to voluntarily stay at home and strong-armed house arrest orders with penalties in place for non-compliance.

Every day brought a drastic new set of restrictions by government bodies (most have been delivered by way of executive orders) at the local, state and federal level that were eager to flex their muscles for the so-called “good” of the populace.

There was talk of mass testing for Covid-19 antibodies, screening checkpoints, mass surveillance in order to carry out contact tracing, immunity passports to allow those who have recovered from the virus to move around more freely, snitch tip lines for reporting “rule breakers” to the authorities, and heavy fines and jail time for those who dared to venture out without a mask, congregate in worship without the government’s blessing, or re-open their businesses without the government’s say-so.

It was even suggested that government officials should mandate mass vaccinations and “ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.”

Those tactics were already being used abroad.

In Italy, the unvaccinated were banned from restaurants, bars and public transportation, and faced suspensions from work and monthly fines. Similarly, France banned the unvaccinated from most public venues.

In Austria, anyone who had not complied with the vaccine mandate faced fines up to $4100. Police were to be authorized to carry out routine checks and demand proof of vaccination, with penalties of as much as $685 for failure to do so.

In China, which adopted a zero tolerance, “zero Covid” strategy, whole cities—some with populations in the tens of millions—were forced into home lockdowns for weeks on end, resulting in mass shortages of food and household supplies. Reports surfaced of residents “trading cigarettes for cabbage, dishwashing liquid for apples and sanitary pads for a small pile of vegetables. One resident traded a Nintendo Switch console for a packet of instant noodles and two steamed buns.”

For those unfortunate enough to contract Covid-19, China constructed “quarantine camps” throughout the country: massive complexes boasting thousands of small, metal boxes containing little more than a bed and a toilet. Detainees—including children, pregnant women, and the elderly— were reportedly ordered to leave their homes in the middle of the night, transported to the quarantine camps in buses and held in isolation.

If this last scenario sounds chillingly familiar, it should.

Eighty years ago, another authoritarian regime established more than 44,000 quarantine camps for those perceived as “enemies of the state”: racially inferior, politically unacceptable, or simply noncompliant.

While the majority of those imprisoned in the Nazi concentration camps, forced labor camps, incarceration sites and ghettos were Jews, there were also Polish nationals, gypsies, Russians, political dissidents, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.

Culturally, we have become so fixated on the mass murders of Jewish prisoners by the Nazis that we overlook the fact that the purpose of these concentration camps were initially intended to “incarcerate and intimidate the leaders of political, social, and cultural movements that the Nazis perceived to be a threat to the survival of the regime.”

How do you get from there to here, from Auschwitz concentration camps to Covid quarantine centers?

You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to connect the dots.

You just have to recognize the truth in the warning: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

This is about what happens when good, generally decent people—distracted by manufactured crises, polarizing politics, and fighting that divides the populace into warring “us vs. them” camps—fail to take note of the looming danger that threatens to wipe freedom from the map and place us all in chains.

It’s about what happens when any government is empowered to adopt a comply-or-suffer-the-consequences mindset that is enforced through mandates, lockdowns, penalties, detention centers, martial law, and a disregard for the rights of the individual.

This is the slippery slope: a government empowered to restrict movements, limit individual liberty, and isolate “undesirables” to prevent the spread of a disease is a government that has the power to lockdown a country, label whole segments of the population a danger to national security, and force those undesirables—a.k.a. extremists, dissidents, troublemakers, etc.—into isolation so they don’t contaminate the rest of the populace.

The slippery slope begins with propaganda campaigns about the public good being more important than individual liberty, and it ends with lockdowns and concentration camps.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the danger signs are everywhere.

Covid-19 was merely one crisis in a long series of crises that the government has shamelessly exploited in order to justify its power grabs and acclimate the citizenry to a state of martial law disguised as emergency powers.

Everything I have warned about for years—government overreach, invasive surveillance, martial law, abuse of powers, militarized police, weaponized technology used to track and control the citizenry, and so on—has become part of the government’s arsenal of terrifying lockdown powers should the need arise.

What we should be bracing for is: what comes next?

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https://brownstone.org/articles/the-meltdown-of-commercial-real-estate/

The Meltdown of Commercial Real Estate

 

In case you’ve still got money in a bank, Bloomberg is warning that defaults in commercial real estate loans could “topple” hundreds of US banks.

Leaving taxpayers on the hook for trillions in losses.

The note, by Senior Editor James Crombie, walks us through the festering hellscape that is commercial real estate.

To set the mood, a new study predicts that nearly half of downtown Pittsburgh office space could be vacant in 4 years. Major cities like San Francisco are already sporting zombie-apocalypse downtowns, with abandoned office buildings baking in the sun.

So what happened? 

The Fed’s yo-yo interest rates first flooded real estate with low rates and cheap money. Which were overbuilt. 

Then came the lockdowns, which forced millions to figure out new workday patterns. People liked foregoing the long commute (not to mention the free money). Despite every effort, downtown businesses have not been able to get all workers back. 

These days, everyone talks about hybrid models of working, some in-person and some remote. But judging from observation, remote is winning. In any case, even a 30 percent reduction in the footprint of office space once the leases are renewed could topple the entire sector. 

The restaurant and retail sectors of downtown feel the pinch, with more closures all the time. Adding to the pressure are absurd levels of inflation and ever-riskier streets on matters of personal security. Put it all together and there is ever less reason to slog to the office. 

When the Fed panic-hiked interest rates in the 2021 inflation, that put trillions of commercial real estate underwater even without other factors. Add to that crime, inflation, plus remote work, and you have a dangerous mix that could toppled cities as we know them. 

This could mimic and elaborate upon last year’s bank crisis, where falling bond prices panicked depositors. That crisis only stopped when Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chairman Jerome Powell effectively bailed out every bank in America with sweetheart loans written on fictitious asset values along with unlimited taxpayer guarantees through the comically underfunded FDIC.

By the way, the FDIC is essentially guaranteeing over $20 trillion in deposits on just over $100 billion. So they’ve got a half-penny on the dollar.

Without those government pre-bailouts, one paper last year by researchers at Stanford and Columbia estimated that 1,619 US banks – about a third of them – could be at risk of failure.

The problem is that nothing was actually fixed. In fact, it’s getting worse. For the simple reason that as the months roll by there’s more and more debt coming due.

And that brings us to Crombie, who notes that there’s $929 billion of commercial real estate debt coming due in the next 9 and a half months.

That’s up 28% from last year, and it’s getting bigger every day as banks pretend loans are still healthy by effectively adding missed payments.

We’re starting to see glitches in the matrix; New York Community Bank just went through a near-death experience over its garbage portfolio of commercial real estate loans, dropping almost 80% before it was bailed out by vulture investors while the megabanks hover like megavultures.

More will come. Potentially a lot more: a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research estimated that up to 385 American banks could fail over commercial real estate loans alone.

These would overwhelmingly be small regional banks, who typically hold a third of their assets in commercial real estate loans.

They hold so much because they know their local markets best, but the Fed poisoned that chalice by flooding easy money to developers.

For now we’re only seeing the sickest banks dropping out of the herd. That could dramatically accelerate as that $1 trillion plus in loans come due.

Commercial real estate delinquency rates have already jumped to 6 and a half percent – up 30% in a matter of months. Rates of distress in office loans just hit 11%.

When the smoke clears, we could lose dozens, even hundreds, of regional banks. Going by the last time with savings and loans, taxpayers ate 80% of the losses.

Meaning you could be on the hook for trillions, while the megabanks gorge on the carcass.

Slashing interest rates could staunch the bleeding. But with inflation marching up every month – currently at 5 and a half percent annualized – that’s not going to happen.

....

https://informationclearinghouse.blog/2024/03/28/its-hard-to-run-an-empire-these-days/14/

It’s hard to run an empire these days  

As I was saying to Diocletian over Prosecco just last week, it is hard to run an empire these days. You have to lie to people more or less incessantly to keep the troops minding the perimeter in supplies. No falsehood is too preposterous to gain the public’s acquiescence. At times you have to deceive even the Senate. 

“Ah, yes, the solons,” the old persecutor replied. “It is mere ceremony with them. You can keep the senators in the dark if protecting the arcana imperii requires it. They usually prefer this, indeed. As for the vox populi, one must occasionally feign to hear it, but there is no need to pay any attention.”

“Son of a bitch,” I exclaimed, quoting the current guardian of America’s imperial secrets. “You’ve got the Biden regime to a ‘T.’” 

Did he ever, the crafty autocrat.  

There is nothing new about lying to Americans to get the empire’s business done. It was 76 years ago last week that President Truman won public acceptance for Washington’s endless postwar interventions in his famous “scare hell out of the American people” speech to Congress. It was 60 years ago this August that President Johnson faked the Gulf of Tonkin incident to justify sending ground troops to Vietnam. As for cutting the dolts on Capitol Hill out of the loop, we have been talking about the imperial presidency since Arthur Schlesinger coined the term in the latter days of the Nixon administration. 

Three-quarters of a century later, Joe “New Ideas” Biden has altered course not one minute on the policy cliques’ compass.  

It has been objectionable enough in many quarters that the Biden White House has sent two on-the-record shipments of weapons to Israel for use in its genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza since the Israel Occupation Forces—we’re renaming these barbarians—began their siege last autumn. These were for $106 million and $147.5 million; in each case the administration invoked emergency authority to bypass the mandated congressional approval. 

At this point, a decisive majority of Americans want President Biden to force Israel to declare a ceasefire—which, as everyone knows, he could do in a trice. In a poll conducted Feb, 27 to Mar. 1 for the Center for Economic and Policy Research, more than half of those surveyed thought the U.S. should stop all arms shipments to Israel—“no more U.S. money for the Netanyahu war machine,” as Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, put it.  

But never mind the populus and never mind Congress. The former are to be ignored and there are various ways to circumvent the latter. The Washington Post reported in its Mar. 6 editions that, as arms sales to the apartheid state grew more politically perilous, Biden’s policy people have covertly authorized more than 100 separate, under-the-radar shipments. We do not know the value of these, but each has been small enough to require no legislative authorization. 

No debate, no disclosure. We know about these transfers now only because regime officials told Congress about them in “a recent classified briefing.” Before that, Congress didn’t know anything about the shipments, either—although this seems highly unlikely. I do not see how Capitol Hill could be unaware of an op of this magnitude. My surmise is that legislators were perfectly happy once again to surrender their responsibilities to the imperial presidency. That recent classified briefing made page one of The Post because this is the national security state’s way of easing the public into the picture.    

These shipments are obviously counter to the spirit of the law, if not its letter. But no one in the administration has felt compelled to offer an explanation since The Post’s piece appeared, to say nothing of an apology for deceiving a public increasingly critical of the regime’s Israel policy. Congress has raised not the slightest objection—Congress, as in the 435 representatives and 50 senators elected and paid to represent your interests and mine. 

Cut to historical flashback. 

Diocletian’s reign, from 284 to 305 C.E., was noted for a few things. He executed thousands of Christians and burned a lot of churches while also seeing to numerous constitutional and administrative reforms intended to make the imperial throne more imperial. The Roman Senate continued to convene in a building Diocletian fashioned for the purpose. But there were no more fictions or illusions attaching to its powers. One of his reforms was to make sure it had none in matters of state. The body once responsible for Roman law was down to housekeeping chores and sheer ritual. 

We do not yet have official permission to conclude publicly that Ukraine has lost America’s proxy war with Russia—that remains among our Great Unsayables. But we are allowed—encouraged, indeed—to talk about how desperately the Kyiv regime needs more American guns if it is to stop Russian advances and—I love this part—reverse them and win the war. 

In the Mar. 8 edition of Foreign Affairs, this headline: “Time is Running Out in Ukraine.” And this subhead, well-crafted to preserve the necessary degree of delusion: “Kyiv Cannot Capitalize on Russian Military Weakness Without U.S. Aid.” You can read the rest of Dara Massicot’s essay here if you insist, but the display language as just quoted is what Foreign Affairs wants you to know, or think you know: The $60.1 billion in additional support the Biden regime proposes will save the day and Congress must stop blocking it. 

This has become something like the running theme on Ukraine since the Council on Foreign Relations, which publishes Foreign Affairs, announced it a couple of weeks back. It is now O.K. to suggest the conflict that has literally destroyed yet another nation and another people in the U.S. imperium’s cause has reached “a stalemate,” but only if it quickly follows that more weaponry is necessary to keep the thieves and neo–Nazis in Kyiv going. Stalemates can be overcome, you see. You only get to lose once, at which point you don’t need more guns. 

On Mar. 14 The New York Times published “America Pulls Back from Ukraine” in its daily feature called The Morning. “What the war may look like if Ukraine does not receive more U.S. support,” is the subhead this time. Same story: All will be lost if the U.S. does not send Ukraine more war matériel tout de suite. All can be gained if it does. 

You know, it is one thing for a Dara Massicot to go on about the desperate need for the U.S. to ship Kyiv more weapons. That is her job at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and we can leave Ms. Massicot to her war-is-peace paradox. It is entirely another for a New York desk reporter at The Times to do the same. As you read German Lopez’s “report,” keep in mind: You are not reading journalism. You are reading a clerk for the policy cliques normalizing the latter’s desire to resupply Ukraine as our incontrovertible reality. 

Sound journalism must have multiple sources, as any first-year J–school student can tell you. Lopez’s is a one-source story allowing of no other perspective on the war other than the official perspective as the Biden regime tries to shake loose the dough from Congress. What is vastly worse, the one source Lopez quotes is not even the usual administration official who cannot be named because of the “sensitivity” of something or other. No, the source is “my colleague Julian Barnes, who covers the war.”

Wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh-wait. First, Julian Barnes does not cover the war. From The Times’s Washington bureau he covers what the regime wants the public to think about the war, full stop. Second, where do The Times’s editors get off having one reporter quote another reporter as the authority in a story when the quoted reporter is lock-and-stock repeating—uncritically, without qualification, in roughly the same  language—what the administration declares at every press conference concerning the Ukraine war and in every public statement?   

“With an aid package, the Ukrainians will have a much better chance of solidifying their defenses, holding the line. And in some places, they may be able to retake territory,” Barnes tells Lopez. “So it falls on the U.S. to supply Ukraine.”

He’s an original thinker, our Julian. You have to give him this. 

I have long speculated that the many Massicots, Barneses, and Lopezes among us may get dressed every morning in the same locker room, so similar are the things they say. I wondered this again when, a day after The Times piece appeared, The Washington Post published “U.S. anticipates grim course for Ukraine if aid bill dies in Congress.” I tell you, if you switched the bylines on The Times and Post pieces not even the reporters would notice.

These people are doing not more, not less than getting the imperium’s lying done for it. Three cases in point:

One, if U.S. weaponry is so critical to the war as is proclaimed, this is no longer Ukraine’s war, if ever it was. It is America’s, yours and mine. 

Two, Ukraine has not stalemated the Russians. If Kyiv has not already lost Washington’s proxy war—my assessment—it is losing it in slow motion with no prospect of reversing this outcome. 

Three, we have a lie of omission. The Biden regime has already allocated an all-in total of roughly $75 billion for the Kyiv regime’s war effort, according to figures Foreign Affairs published recently. This equals Russia’s 2022 defense budget and compares with the $84 billion in Moscow’s 2023 budget—this before the $60.1 billion Biden now wants. 

Given that the reported record indicates more than half of what the U.S. has already sent appears to have been either stolen or black-marketed, I have questions for Messrs. Barnes and Lopez and the squad of reporters the Washington Post bylined. Where is the analysis here, if crooked pols and military officers are stealing aid Kyiv says it needs to fight Russian forces? Where is even a mention of this obvious factor in the course of the war? Where are the editors in New York and Washington who should insist their reporters address this question? And if they can report that theft is not such a factor, where is your story telling us why all the thievery has not mattered?

There is one assertion in these pieces—finally, something—that distinguishes one from the others. The Post story, taking things further than The Times or Foreign Affairs, reports that “absent more American military support, ‘countless lives’ will be lost this year as Kyiv struggles to stave off collapse.” This comes from the usual unnamed “senior official,” who tells The Post, “Here’s the bottom line: Even if Ukraine holds on, what we really are saying is that we are going to leverage countless lives in order to do that.”

Do we all understand? Ending support for a war that is already lost or is ineluctably headed that way will not save lives: It will cost lives. The interior logic here is that it is out of the question for Kyiv to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Moscow, as the Kremlin has proposed on numerous occasions. This has long been advanced as another “normalized” reality. It is, once again, one thing for an administration official to make this repellent case and entirely another for reporters to repeat it uncritically. 

The Biden regime is stuck this time having to deal with lawmakers tired of sending money to crooks. And the media clerks who are supposed to cover it are stuck lying to the public in the service of the regime’s case. Are we surprised to read, here and there, that the policy cliques are already considering ways to circumvent Congress once again?