scapegoat Archives - The Automatic Earth

Normalcy Migration

Oct 042021

October 4, 2021 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 5:15 pm Finance Tagged with: central banking, depersonalization, John Day, scapegoat, Third Reich, unvaccinated 21 Responses »

Paul Gauguin Apatarao 1893

I was working on something else, check back later, and then I saw this comment by Automatic Earth resident physician John Day, about to lose his job because doctors are not supposed to have their own opinions and judgments either about medical procedures these days, let alone refuse a vaccine. Even if they’ve been working their nuts off for 30 years. Boy, do we live in strange times.

Simply thought John’s words might help someone somewhere realize they’re not alone. And it also made me realize -once more- what a great community has spontaneously grown at the Automatic Earth over the last 20 months. Where else on earth do you find that? And how can you not want to join?

John Day: When people think of Nazi Germany they typically think of 1939 to 1945, so when I liken the depersonalization of “the unvaccinated” in the west today, to how Jews and other minorities were treated under the Third Reich, I am taken to task. Today is more like 1932 than 1939, still pre-war, with the way forward not yet clear. The US is not Germany, and is not even the UK. Analogies can only be taken so far, but the process of depersonalizing a group of people, to blame them for things going bad, is a standard operating procedure.

• It has to become normal to blame the scapegoat group. Everybody has to know.
• It has to be common and accepted knowledge that this group made our current problems.
• It looks to me like this is still in beta testing with blaming the COVID-unvaccinated.

The US government today is more like the floundering Weimar republic in 1932, with divisions, and lack of a clear, guiding vision for the country. In 1932 the Weimar Republic did not have a majority in government, but it had the largest minority. Close upon its heels were the National Socialists and the Communist Party. The national Socialists and Communists were in opposition, and considered a political alliance. They did align on some things. Positions were not too different to reconcile, and the Deutschmark was not yet into hyperinflation.

With the ongoing global great depression, the Deutschmark, unmoored from gold by necessity, and based on a property bubble, started inflating away so rapidly that it was an economic crisis. People were desperate for a solution. The US is not there yet, but it looks like it is on the horizon. The world does not need to pay the US for dollars. Other global trade arrangements can be made. Dark-money trades move a lot of $100 bills around, and have for a long time, but gold works, and always has.

Gold and physical cash working as currency is a problem for global central bankers. They probably have a much better idea of how much dark-commerce is going on than we do. They launder the drug-money, for instance. They would prefer a cut of every single transaction. What central bankers openly want is global digital currency, under their control, for every participant and for every transaction. The vaccine-passports are an opportune pathway into that for Central Banking. Blaming the unvaccinated enough for COVID to enact widespread digital vaccine passports looks like a concept that needs widespread acceptance as normal, for it to be the go-to solution in the upcoming reset. If the global digital currency function of vaccine-passports were in place when the global financial system collapsed, it could be built up as a solution.

To me it seems that people don’t invent completely new solutions in a crisis. Rather, they press into service whatever they have that can be made to work. If cash and gold are eliminated, and only electronic transactions are possible, then global central bank digital currency can be made to look like the only alternative. Most people would prefer cash, which gives them autonomy, if they think about it.

Most people don’t have to think about it much these days. Credit cards work. In a crisis, people do think a lot more about their options and how they can protect their options and defend their resources from further predation. Before the overt crisis of global economic reset, here in the partly-contrived crisis of COVID-Pandemic-Unending, we might give careful thought to our positions in society, to how much normalcy migration we should roll-over for and permit.

I am not a victim, and I am sorry if I appeared to present my human experience recently in a way that made me seem that way, or seem as if I were putting on the identity-cloak of victimhood. I have intentionally decided to stand, immediately, with a scapegoated group, not least because I believe the group is right to resist conformity pressure, but because now is the time when a firm stance, before the onset of a real crisis, might be the most influential on the future course of society.

If we resist the normalization of unfair scapegoating every time it is attempted, then we resist being divided against each other by the owners. When the crisis hits in earnest, they need us to be divided against each other, in order to maintain their positions of power and ownership over us and over the physical world and it’s life forms. I am able to stand firmly against vaccine-mandates and vaccine passports because the kids are all in their careers, we own the house in Yoakum, and have low taxes there, I have vegetable gardens, and we have been practicing different life patterns, growing, harvesting, storing and preparing food.

We have modest retirement savings, no debts, and are about to get the attic insulation updated, the last major maintenance project on the homestead. The plumbing, electrical wiring, roofing, flooring, internal and external repair and paint have all been done, roughly in that order. It is a sturdy 1957 house, which has withstood every storm since then without appreciable damage. Jenny’s position as a school librarian does not appear threatened. We are able to subsist on her salary alone.

I am doing everything I can to ease the transition of care for my patients at what began in 1970 as a free-clinic, and what is now a largish Federally Qualified Health Center. I may or may not be employable, and I have learned better than to think I could run a business long ago. It’s not my nature. The near future is in a fog bank. Things are not usually this way. We need to not run into an iceberg while we await the lifting of the fog, and the improvement of visibility.

There is a lot that we can do each day which is productive and useful to ourselves and others. Much of it is really mundane, but it facilitates human repatterning, which is our own self-guided migration of normalcy. We can even choose to migrate towards historical normalcy. It might be a good start.

This Saturday Jenny and I experimented with the new technique of shelling black-eyed peas, which Dan and I worked out last weekend on the dried black beans, which had been very slow going for hand shelling. We harvested about 6 five-gallon buckets in June, and managed to shell 3 of those since then. Some people stomp black beans on a threshing floor (messy). The most promising technique I found online was to put them in a burlap bag, beat it mercilessly, then pour the loose beans out of it.

We experimented with that. The sharp black bean pods poked out through the burlap, spear-like. Wrong kind of burlap bag? The beans didn’t pour out so well, either, and the beating process seemed like we could do better. Dan started pounding the black bean pods in the 5 gallon bucket with an axe handle, not hard, just tap, tap, tapping. That seemed to be working pretty well. I did some hand mangling to loosen up remaining beans, and picked off a lot of the chaff from the top.

Dan had dropped the axe head down by then, which seemed to work better-still. We processed all 3 buckets pretty quickly, while working this out, then poured the buckets into a clean wheelbarrow, across the brisk wind of a fan, which blew away the chaff. We cut our processing time to about 10-20%, which made it look ok to grow black beans again, though we will experiment with pinto beans next spring.

The black-eyed peas did not respond well to the pounding-in-bucket technique. The pods seem to be more flexible, less dry and crispy. The “peas” don’t separate out easily that way, but they do separate out well by hand, just splitting the dry pod and stripping the (African) beans out with one’s fingers. The traditional way seems to be fairly efficient for low tech. Weevils mess with that. Old world beans are poorly defended against new world weevils. The wind-winnowing step works after hand shelling. They are a lot easier to hand shell than black beans are. Some pods shell easier than others. Some beans are bigger than others. Some varieties seem more resistant to weevils than others. One would desire large pods, with large beans, which shell easily, and are minimally susceptible to weevil damage.

[..] It is late in the season to judge weevil susceptibility, having planted in July (gave up on Mackey Peas). Both kinds shell readily when dried. The Purple hull peas are much larger, so the same amount of shelling get more dried “peas”. They taste fine, but the smaller Red ripper “peas” have a nice, appealing nutty flavor. We will have to see how they do against weevils next summer.

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London Bridge is (Broken) Down

May 072017

May 7, 2017 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 6:46 pm Finance Tagged with: anarchy, blame, Corbyn, division, Juncker, Macron, May, Queen, scapegoat, toxic 5 Responses »

J.M.W. Turner Old London Bridge 1794

The French election, won just now by Emmanuel Macron, put several segments of the French population opposite one another in a pretty fierce contest. And that contest will continue. Because Macron won’t be able to lift the French economy out of its doldrums any more than Le Pen could have, or than Trump can life the US, and the new president will have the honor of presiding over a further and deepening downturn. The French political dividing line was aptly described by Simon Kuper recently:

The ultra-nationalist writer Charles Maurras believed there were “two Frances”. The one he loved was the “pays réel”, the real country: a rural France of church clocks, traditions and native people fused with their ancestral soil. Maurras loathed the “pays légal”, the legal country: the secular republic, which he thought was run by functionaries conspiring for alien interests.

Maurras was born in 1868 and died in 1952. But if he returned on Sunday to witness the French presidential run-off, he would instantly recognise both candidates. He would cast Emmanuel Macron as the incarnation of the “legal France” and Marine Le Pen as embodying the “real” one.

Maurras may have been a questionable character, but that description is not half bad. Once enough people in the country understand the failure of ‘legal’ France, they will want ‘real’ France back. That will be true in countries all over Europe; to a large extent it already is. Marine Le Pen summed up the key issue really well a few days ago when she said of the country post election: “France will be led by a woman, me or Mrs. Merkel.”

There is only one reason the French people would ever tolerate Germany having an outsized influence in their politics and economics: that they feel they benefit from it financially. And yes, if you put it that way, it’s already quite something that they haven’t revolted more and earlier.

The generous unemployment benefits are undoubtedly part of that. But those can’t last. And since the Germans owe their influence in Paris to the EU, it’s obvious how the French will feel they can stop that influence. And then the EU will turn out to be not a peacemaker, but the opposite.

Still, as much as France is divided, and as serious as that division is, the country is a shining beacon of unity compared to the UK, where the dividing lines are as manifold as they are laced with toxins. The snap election PM Theresa May called, in just over a month, can do nothing to resolve any of it. That means the EU can do what they want in the Brexit negotiations. Which will therefore be an unparalleled disaster for May and the UK.

The EU can and will ‘have its way’ with the UK for one simple reason: the United Kingdom is anything but United. It makes no difference what the EU does to the UK, the British won’t blame them for it. They will blame each other instead. No matter what happens these days, the British always know in advance who’s to blame, and it’s never themselves; it’s always another group of Brits.

The Tories are deeply divided between pro- and anti-Brexit forces. Labour is divided along those same lines, and adds pro- and anti-Corbyn sentiments for good measure. Other parties don’t really matter much, but they have similar dividing lines as well.

Anti-Corbyn Labour MPs have convinced themselves they know better than pro-Corbyn party members. They’ve kept claiming for so long that Corbyn is unelectable it’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy. They’ll be lucky not to face the fate of their former brethren in François Hollande’s Parti Socialiste, who ended up with just 6% of the vote in the 1st round of the French elections.

PM Theresa May called the snap election for June 8 to hide some of the divisions behind, to make them appear less relevant, or even to profit from them and grab more power. But the very fact that Brexit was voted in, already makes the election nigh irrelevant.

Whoever wins, and it looks certain to be May herself. will open themselves to being scapegoated in a big way. Which won’t keep them from seeking victory, because the loser can expect the same fate. The trenches have been dug, and deeply. Governable? Don’t count on it. It feels more like 40 years later we’re back to Johnny Rotten ‘singing’ Anarchy in the UK.

If May threatens to leave the EU ‘cold’ and trigger a ‘Hard Brexit’, she will simultaneously trigger a whole lot more, and much wider, divisions in the country (or is that countries?!), and that’s even without mentioning an entire minefield of legal, and potentially constitutional, issues. The latter especially because Britain doesn’t have an actual -written- constitution.

For Brussels, it’s easy pickings, and pick they will. This week, they casually raised the UK’s cost of leaving the EU to €100 billion, from estimates varying from €40 billion to €60 billion before. Paddy Power and its equally powerful bookie ilk soon won’t be taking any bets below, say, €150 billion. In that regard, and many others, the EU will do to the UK what it is doing to Greece.

The only way to stand up against that is to show a common front. But there will be no such thing in the Divided Kingdom, not for a long time. Everyone has their favorite scapegoat, for some it’s Nigel Farage, for others David Cameron, George Osborne, Tony Blair, Jeremy Corbyn or Theresa May. And nobody is going to leave their blame trenches. They’re the only places they feel somewhat comfortable, less scared, in.

Theresa May, if the polls are to be believed -and given the divisions we might for once-, will have to sit down and negotiate with the multi-headed Hydra that is the EU, ‘strengthened’ by a major election victory, but she will find it the ultimate Pyrrhic victory, because Brussels will have a ball playing her divided ‘nation’.

Scotland can probably easily be seduced with the carrot of EU membership, but more importantly, Juncker and his people can cast doubt on the entire Brexit vote, and they will have many interested takers.

The Brexit negotiations will take at least 2 years. But it could be 3 or 4 years, who knows? May has no power over that duration, unless she walks. She won’t. And as things are drawn out, Juncker et al have all the time and opportunities they want to tell both May and the British public that Brussels has no intention of punishing them, but will have to do so anyway.

After all, Brexit is a threat to the entire European project, and all the leaders of the 27 remaining nations, as well as the vast majority of their domestic opposition parties, are behind that project, no questions asked. And the many thousands of people working their very well-paid jobs in Brussels and Strasbourg are not too critical either.

All in all, the British need to wake up and smell the roses as long as there are any left, and before they have been replaced with less savory odors. Or they will have to seriously wonder whether the Kingdom, united or not, can outlive the Queen, aka the London Bridge.

“London Bridge is Down” was recently revealed as the secret UK government code for the moment the Queen dies.

Debt Rattle August 4 2015

Aug 042015

August 4, 2015 Posted by Raúl Ilargi Meijer at 9:01 am Finance Tagged with: Banks, China, climate change, commodities, Greece, refugees, scapegoat, stocks, swarm 2 Responses »

DPC “Unloading fish at ‘T’ wharf, Boston, Mass.” 1903

• The Real Message Of Plunging Commodities (Michael Pento)

• China’s Latest Warning to Equity Investors: No Big Sell Orders (Bloomberg)

• China Looks For Scapegoats In Continued Stock Market Decline (Fortune)

• US Hedge Fund Citadel Has Account Suspended in China (NY Times)

• Greek Banks Lose 30% For Second Day In A Row, Stocks Down 4.5% (Reuters, FT)

• Greek Stocks Plunge Most in Decades as Market Reopens to Crisis (Bloomberg)

• Greek Traders See No End to Stock Trauma (Bloomberg)

• Greece’s Battered Economy Threatens To Sink Further (Reuters)

• Greek Tragedy – by Christos Tsiolkas (Yanis Varoufakis)

• Greece Is Still Doomed Without Debt Relief (Bloomberg Ed.)

• Why The Eurozone Was Always Doomed To Fail (Fortune)

• The Eurozone’s Death by a Thousand Bailouts (Newsweek)

• Greece Unlikely To Ask For More ECB Liquidity For Weeks (Reuters)

• Varoufakis Vindicated While Lagarde Emerges As A Loser (MarketWatch)

• Former Libor ‘Ringmaster’ Hayes Gets 14 Years for Libor Rigging (Bloomberg)

• Puerto Rico Government Defaults On Bond Payment (BBC)

• Catalunya Calls Early Polls In Fresh Independence Challenge (France24)

• Homeownership: The Generation That Had It So Good (Guardian)

• Obama Puts Climate Change On Nation’s Political Agenda (DFP Ed.)

• Shale Gas Is Loser In Obama Climate Plan (FT)

• In Case It Implied That God Had Sent The Migrants (Frankie Boyle)

“..the Chinese government wasted $20 trillion worth of credit digging holes to mollify the fallout from the Great Recession of 2007..”

• The Real Message Of Plunging Commodities (Michael Pento)

The Chinese stock market recently saw its biggest selloff in eight years as the dramatic 8.5% fall in Shanghai “A” shares also rattled markets around the world. For the past few weeks, China has been balancing its desire to keep the equity market from a complete meltdown, while still courting the international investment community with hopes of being a dominant player in the capital and currency markets. But recently, the IMF warned China’s government about its concern over limiting investors’ freedom to take equity out of financial markets. These concerns were raised when the IMF met with officials in to discuss the chances of including the yuan in the fund’s basket of currencies, also known as Special Drawing Rights.

As China tries to balance the demise of its equity bubble while still keeping the illusion of free markets intact, two delusional narratives have started to circulate around Wall Street. The first such Wall Street-inspired delusion is that the collapsing Shanghai stock market will have no effect on the underlying Chinese economy. However, even though China’s 260 million trading accounts may be a relatively small%age of its total population, it’s also the richest and most productive portion of its citizenry, which also happens to be equal to the entire U.S. population in 1993. And Chinese GDP growth accounts for 1/3 of total global growth. Therefore, we can already find the manifestation of slowing Chinese growth from the nascent fall in equity prices.

For example, the profit of China’s industrial firms fell 0.3% in June from a year earlier. That followed a 0.6% gain in May and a 2.6% jump in April. For the first half of 2015, industrial profits were down 0.7% from a year earlier. China’s producer price index fell 4.8% in June, the 39th straight monthly decline. In fact, the economy is headed for its poorest overall performance in a quarter of a century. The second fallacy is that Wall Street believes in the TV commercial that claims what happens in Las Vegas stays in Vegas. Or, in this case, what happens to the Chinese economy stays in China. But the truth is that the meltdown in China is already spreading all around the Asia-Pacific region. For example, Taiwan’s year-over-year export growth has hit multi-year lows due to collapsing trade with China.

But perhaps the biggest indicator of the magnitude of China’s slowdown can be found in the global commodities market. Most pundits are trying to link the recent selloff in commodities strictly to the rising dollar as measured by the Dollar Index (DXY). But that index is actually down about 3% since March. During that time, the rout in precious and base metals, as well as energy and agriculture, has greatly accelerated. We see the Bloomberg Commodities index now at a 13-year low. Copper is down 28% for the year, tin is down 30%, and nickel is down 44%. And then we have gold. Last week, China dumped four tons on the market, causing the price of the precious metal to fall almost 4% within a matter of seconds. This had little to do with the value of the dollar on the DXY, but it was rather mostly about the waning demand in China from its imploding economy and the need to sell what you can when capital controls are in place.

[..] The true message of plunging commodity markets is that the Chinese government wasted $20 trillion worth of credit digging holes to mollify the fallout from the Great Recession of 2007, primarily creating a huge fixed-asset bubble with little economic viability. And then it forced another $1.2 trillion in margin debt to engender a consumption-based economy, primarily by creating a stock-market bubble after the fixed-asset bubble strategy began to fail miserably.