Tag Archives: Trade War

Guest Column: Trade War Distraction

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Trade war provides perfect cover for the elitist engineered global reset
by Brandon Smith [via column for Bob Livingston News]

Over the past several months, I have been examining the underlying or hidden motivations behind the currently expanding global trade war, including the impressive level of cognitive dissonance surrounding the issue. The initial reaction in conservative circles was unfortunately denial, with many refusing to call the situation a “trade war” at all and some predicting an end to the conflict before it began. Obviously the assumptions are proving incorrect.

Now that acceptance of the trade war as a reality is setting in, the Trump bandwagon is doubling down and embracing blind enthusiasm for what they assume will be a victorious outcome, no matter how long it takes. Though the team-geopolitics mentality is enticing, I don’t find much in the facts and evidence department to support the notion of America winning a global trade war. As I outlined in my article America’s Debt Dependence Makes It An Easy Economic Target, as long as the U.S. retains historic levels of debt on government, corporate and consumer levels, and as long as we remain addicted to either foreign investment in that debt, trade war opponents have all the ammunition they need.

The argument I now see regurgitated over and over is that this trade war has actually been going on for decades, and only now do we “have a president with the guts to do something about it.” I’m not sure where this nonsense meme was started, but it’s everywhere.

The U.S. has not been engaged in a trade war “for decades,” not with China or any other nation. It has been involved in a subversive trade arrangement which benefits the elitists on both sides of the world while the common people suffer. Only in the past year have we seen a “trade war” develop, but even now, it is a staged war that will once again empower international banks and global elites. Continue reading →

Guest Column: We Owe it to Everybody

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America’s massive debts make true recovery impossible
by writing for Bob Livingston Alerts

Link to original here.
There is a classic denial tactic that many people use when confronted with negative facts about a subject they have a personal attachment to.  I would call it “deferral denial” — a psychological postponing of reality.

For example, point out the fundamentals on the U.S. economy such as the fact that unemployment is not below 4 percent but actually closer to 20 percent when you factor in U-6 measurements including the record 96 million people not counted because they have run out of unemployment benefits. Or point out that true consumer inflation in the U.S. is not around 3 percent as the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Labor Statistics claims, but closer to 10 percent according to the way CPI used to be calculated before the government rigged the numbers.  For a large part of the public including a lot of economic analysts, there is perhaps a momentary acceptance of the danger, but then an immediate deferral — “Well, maybe things will get worse down the road, 10 or 20 years from now, but it’s not that bad today…”

This is cognitive dissonance at its finest. The economy is in steep decline now, but the mind in denial says “it could be worse,” and this is how you get entire populations caught completely off guard by a financial crash. They could have easily seen the signs, but they desperately wanted to believe that all bad things happen in some illusory future, not today. Continue reading →