Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

We are facing a corporate debt bomb that is far, far greater than what we faced in 2008, and we are being warned that this “unexploded bomb” will “amplify everything” once the financial system starts melting down.

Thanks to exceedingly low interest rates, over the last decade U.S. corporations have been able to go on the greatest corporate debt binge in history. It has been a tremendous “boom”, but it has also set the stage for a tremendous “bust”. Large corporations all over the country are now really struggling to deal with their colossal debt burdens, and defaults on the riskiest class of corporate debt are on pace to hit their highest level since 2008. Everyone can see that a major corporate debt disaster is looming, but nobody seems to know how to stop it.

At this point, companies listed on our stock exchanges have accumulated a total of almost 10 trillion dollars of debt. That is equivalent to approximately 47 percent of U.S. GDP…

A decade of historically low interest rates has allowed companies to sell record amounts of bonds to investors, sending total U.S. corporate debt to nearly $10 trillion, or a record 47% of the overall economy.

In recent weeks, the Federal Reserve, the International Monetary Fund and major institutional investors such as BlackRock and American Funds all have sounded the alarm about the mounting corporate obligations.

We have never witnessed a corporate debt crisis of this magnitude.

Corporate debt is up a whopping 52 percent since 2008, and this bubble is continually growing.

And actually the 10 trillion dollar figure is the most conservative number out there. Because if you add in all other forms of corporate debt, the grand total comes to 15.5 trillion dollars. The following comes from Forbes…

Total corporate debt is actually much higher. Adding the debt of small medium sized enterprises, family businesses, and other business which are not listed in stock exchanges ads another $5.5 trillion. In other words, total US corporate debt is $15.5 trillion, 74% of US GDP.

Needless to say, this mountain of corporate debt is definitely not sustainable, and I have already noted that defaults are rising. One expert recently explained that all of this debt is “an exploded bomb” and that at some point something will come along to “trigger the explosion”…

“We are sitting on the top of an unexploded bomb, and we really don’t know what will trigger the explosion,” said Emre Tiftik, a debt specialist at the Institute of International Finance, an industry association.

Right now a lot of large corporations are so maxed out that they can barely service their debts. So when things start getting really bad for the economy, we could be facing a wave of defaults unlike anything we have ever seen before.

When asked about what this will mean during the next recession, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania warned that it will “make everything happen faster, larger, worse”…

“It’s going to amplify everything,” said Krista Schwarz, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. “It’s going to make everything happen faster, larger, worse. The recession would just be that much deeper.”

It sounds like she could be a writer for The Economic Collapse Blog.

Of course I am being a bit silly, but the truth is that there is nothing silly about the giant mountain of debt that our society is facing.

In addition to our looming corporate debt crisis, U.S. consumers are 14 trillion dollars in debt, state and local government debt levels are at record highs, and the U.S. national debt just hit the 23 trillion dollar mark.

If you can believe it, we have actually added another 1.3 trillion dollars to the national debt just since last Thanksgiving…

The federal debt has increased by $1,303,466.578.471.45 since last Thanksgiving, according to data released by the U.S. Treasury.

That is the largest Thanksgiving-to-Thanksgiving increase in the debt in nine years. The last time the debt increased more from Thanksgiving to Thanksgiving was in 2010, when it increased by $1,785,995,360,978.10.

It also equals approximately $10,137.48 per household in the United States.

Adding 1.3 trillion dollars to the national debt in 12 months while things are still relatively stable is utter insanity, and what we are doing to future generations of Americans is beyond criminal.

And we aren’t even spending the money well. In fact, Senator Rand Paul continues to document how we are wasting money in some of the most ridiculous ways imaginable…

Sen. Rand Paul is continuing to expose the rampant waste of tax dollars by our government agencies. In a special Fall edition of his Waste Report, the Kentucky senator highlights some of the most wasteful expenditures of our federal government, including a half-a-million-dollar toilet nobody could use and a $22 million project to bring Serbian cheeses up to international standards.

“Once again, The Waste Report takes a closer look at just some of what the federal government is doing with the American people’s hard-earned money, this time including stories of it continuing to turn over so many taxpayer dollars to the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, funding research that involves hooking Zebrafish on nicotine, buying textbooks for Afghan students that are subpar or sitting in warehouses, and more in a list that totals over $230 million,” states a press release from Sen. Paul’s office.

Of course it isn’t just the United States that is drowning under an ocean of red ink. As Bloomberg has detailed, when you total up all forms of debt in the world it comes to a grand total of 250 trillion dollars…

Zombie companies in China. Crippling student bills in America. Sky-high mortgages in Australia. Another default scare in Argentina.

A decade of easy money has left the world with a record $250 trillion of government, corporate and household debt. That’s almost three times global economic output and equates to about $32,500 for every man, woman and child on earth.

So if you have a household of four, your share comes to $130,000.

Are you ready to pay up?

In the end, all of this debt will never be paid off. Instead, the bubble will just keep ballooning until it inevitably bursts.

And when it finally bursts, many are warning of a complete and total meltdown. In fact, Rick Ackerman believes that “a Mad Max scenario” is likely…

Ackerman contends, “I am a little more bearish than that. I see a Mad Max scenario as inevitable. . . . I try not to think about it because we’ve all got lives to live and kids to raise. . . . When you go back to the calculous of deflation and that every penny of every debt must be paid, if not by the borrower then by the lender, we have already put ourselves into a condition where Social Security is going to fail. Medicare is going to fail. All the ‘just-in-time’ deliveries are going to be in jeopardy. Food from the grocery stores, one day shipping from Amazon, I don’t see how all these things can continue to operate in a condition other than in the false prosperity that we have now. We are at the pinnacle of affluence.”

I haven’t been able to find anyone that can logically argue that the road that we are currently on has a positive ending.

The truth is that we are headed for complete and total disaster, and the only real debate is about how long it will take for us to get there.

So enjoy these moments of relative stability while you still can, because it is only a matter of time before we go over the precipice.

Authored by Alasdair Macleod via GoldMoney.com,

The legal formalisation of the creation of bank credit commenced with England’s 1844 Bank Charter Act. It has led to a regular cycle of expansion and collapse of outstanding bank credit.

Erroneously attributed to business, the origin of the boom and bust cycle is found in bank credit. Monetary policy evolved with attempts to control the cycle with added intervention, leading to the abandonment of sound money.

Today, we face infinite monetary inflation as a final solution to 150 years of monetary failures. The coming systemic and monetary collapse will probably mark the end of cycles of bank credit expansion as we know it, and the final collapse of fiat currencies.

This article is based on a speech I gave on Monday to the Ludwig von Mises Institute Europe in Brussels.

Introduction

So that we can understand the financial and banking challenges ahead of us, this article provides an historical and technical background. But we must first get an important definition right, and that is the cause of the periodic cycle of boom and bust. The cycle of economic activity is not a trade or business cycle, but a credit cycle. It is caused by fractional reserve banking and by banks loaning money into existence. The effect on business is then observed but is not the underlying cause.

Modern banking has its roots in England’s Bank Charter Act of 1844, which led to the practice of loaning money into existence, commonly described as fractional reserve banking. Fractional reserve banking is defined as making loans and taking in customer deposits in quantities that are multiples of the bank’s own capital. Case law in the wake of the 1844 Act, having more regard to the status quo as established precedent than the fundamentals of property law, ruled that irregular deposits (deposits for safekeeping) were no different from a loan. Judge Lord Cottenham’s judgment in Foley v. Hill (1848) 2 HLC 28 is a judicial decision relating to the fundamental nature of a bank which held in effect that:

“The money placed in the custody of the banker is to all intents and purposes, the money of the banker, to do with it as he pleases. He is guilty of no breach of trust in employing it. He is not answerable to the principal if he puts it into jeopardy, if he engages in haphazardous speculation….”

This was undoubtedly the most important ruling of the last two centuries over money. Today, we know of nothing else other than legally confirmed fractional reserve banking. However, sound or honest banking with banks acting as custodians had existed in the centuries before the 1844 Act and any corruption of the custody status was regarded as fraudulent.

This decision has shaped global banking to this day. It created a fundamental flaw in the gold-backed sound money system, whereby the Bank of England, as a prototype central bank, could only issue extra sterling backed entirely by gold. Meanwhile, a commercial bank could loan money into existence, the drawdown of which created deposit balances. The creation of these deposits on a system-wide basis meant that any excesses and deficiencies between banks were easily reconciled through interbank lending.

Bankers’ groupthink and the credit cycle

While an individual bank could expand its balance sheet, the implications of all banks doing the same may have escaped the early banking pioneers operating under the 1844 act. Thus, when their balance sheets expanded to a multiple of the bank’s own capital, there was little cause for concern. After all, so long as a bank paid attention to its reputation it would always have access to the informal interbank market. And so long as it can call in its loans at short notice, the duration mismatch between funding by cash deposits and its loan book would be minimised.

Since the Bank Charter Act, experience has shown the expansion of bank credit leads to a cycle of credit expansion, over-expansion, and then sudden contraction. The scale of bank lending was determined by its management, with lenders tending to be as much influenced by their own crowd psychology as by a holistic view of risk. Of course, the expansion of bank credit inflates economic activity, spreading a warm feeling of improving economic prospects and feeding back into increasing the bankers’ confidence even further. It then appears safe and reasonable to take on yet more lending business without increasing the bank’s capital.

With profits rapidly increasing due to lending being a multiple of the bank’s own capital, confident bankers begin to think strategically. They reduce their lending margins to attract business they believe to be important to their bank’s long-term future, knowing they can expand credit further against a background of improving economic conditions to compensate for lower margins. They begin to protect margins by borrowing short from depositors and offering businesses term loans, reaping the benefits of a rising slope in the yield curve.

The availability of cheap finance encourages businesses in turn to enhance their profits by increasing the ratio of debt to equity in their businesses and by funding business expansion through debt. By now, a bank is likely to be raking in net interest on loan business amounting to eight or ten times its own capital. This means that an interest margin of a net two per cent is a 20% return to the bank’s shareholders.

There is nothing like profitable success to boost confidence, and the line between it and overconfidence is naturally fuzzed by hubris. The crowd psychology fuelled by a successful banking business leads to an availability of credit too great for decent borrowers to avail for themselves, so inevitably credit expansion becomes a financing opportunity for poorly thought out loan propositions.

Having oversupplied the market with credit, banks begin to expand their interests in other directions. They finance businesses abroad, oblivious to the fact that they have less control over collateral and legal redress generally. They expand by entering other lines of banking-related business, assuming their skills as bankers can be extended into those other business lines profitably. A near-contemporary example was Deutsche Bank’s failed expansion into global investment banking and principal trading in foreign securities and commodities. And who can forget Royal Bank of Scotland’s bid for ABN-Amro, just as the credit cycle peaked before the last credit crisis.

At the time when their balance sheets have expanded to many multiples of their own capital, the banking crowd then finds itself with lending margins too low to compensate for risk. Bad debts arising from their more aggressive lending decisions begin to materialise. One bank beginning to draw in its horns, as it perceives it is out on a limb, can probably be weathered by the system. But other bankers will stop and think about their own risks, bearing in mind operational gearing works two ways.

It may be marked by an unexpected event, or just an apparent loss of bullish momentum. With bad debts beginning to have an impact, groupthink quickly takes bankers from being greedy for more business to fearful of it. Initially, banks stop offering circulating credit, the overdraft facility that lubricates business activity. But former lending decisions begin to be exposed as bad when the credit tap is turned off and investments in foreign lands begin to reflect their true risks. Lending in the interbank market dries up for the banks with poor or marginal reputations, and banks begin to report losses. Greed turns rapidly to fear.

The cycle of bank credit expansion then descends into a lending crisis with increasing numbers of banks exposed as having taken on bad loans and becoming insolvent. A slump in business activity ensues. With frightening rapidity, all the hope and hype created by monetary expansion is destroyed by its contraction.

Before central banking evolved into acting as the representative and regulator for licensed banks, the credit cycle described above threw up some classic examples. Overend Gurney was the largest discount house in the world, trading in bills of exchange before it made long-term investments and became illiquid. When the railway boom faltered in 1866 it collapsed. Bank rate rose to 10% and there were widespread failures. Then there was the Baring crisis in 1890. Poor investments in Argentina led to the bank’s near bankruptcy. The Argentine economy slumped, as did the Brazilian which had its own credit bubble. This time, a consortium of other banks rescued Barings. Nathan Rothschild remarked that if Barings hadn’t been rescued the entire banking system in London would have collapsed.

Out of Barings came the action of a central bank acting as lender of last resort, famously foreseen and promoted by Walter Bagehot.

In the nineteenth century it became clear that crowd psychology in the banks, the balance of greed and fear over lending, drove a repeating cycle of credit boom and slump. With the passage of time bankers recovering their poise from the previous slump forgot its lessons and rhymed the same mistakes all over again. Analysts promoting theories of stock market cycles and cycles of economic activity need look no further for the underlying cause.

In the absence of credit expansion, businesses would come and go in random fashion. The coordinated expansion of credit changed that, with businesses being bunched into being created at the same time, and then all failing at the same time. The process of creative destruction went from unnoticed market evolution to becoming a periodic violent event. Monetary institutions still ignore the benefits of events being random. Instead they double down, coordinating their interventions on a global scale with the inevitable consequence of making the credit cycle even more pronounced.

It is a huge mistake to call this repeating cycle a business cycle. It implies it is down to the failure of free markets, of capitalism, when in fact it is entirely due to monetary and credit inflation licensed and promoted by governments and central banks.

The rise of central banking

Following the Barings crisis in 1890 the concept of a lender of last resort was widely seen to be a solution to the extremes of free markets. Initially, this meant that the bank nominated by the government to represent it in financial markets and to oversee the supply of bank notes took on a role of coordinating the rescue of a bank in difficulty, in order to stop it becoming a full-blown financial crisis. When the gold standard applied, this was the practical limitation of a central bank’s role.

This was the general situation before the First World War. In fact, even under the gold standard there was significant inflation of base money in the background. Between 1850 and 1914 above ground gold stocks increased from about 5,000 tonnes to nearly 24,000 tonnes. Not all of it went into monetary gold, but the amount that did was decided by the economic actors that used money, not the monetary planners as is the case today.

It was against this background that the US Federal Reserve Bank was founded in December 1913. Following WW1, it became a powerful institution under the leadership of Benjamin Strong. Those early post-war years were turbulent times: due to war time inflationary financing, wholesale prices had doubled in the US between 1914-1920, while the UK’s had trebled. This was followed by a post-war slump and by mid-1921 unemployment in the UK soared to 25%. In the US, the Fordney-McCumber tariffs of 1922 restricted European debtors from trading with America, necessary to pay down their dollar debts. A number of countries descended into hyperinflation, and the Dawes plan designed to bail out the Europeans followed in 1924.

While America remained on a gold standard, Britain had suspended it, only going back on to it in 1925. While the politicians decided overall policy, it was left to central bankers such as Strong at the Fed and Montague Norman at the Bank of England to manage the fallout. Their relationship was the most tangible evidence of central banks beginning to cooperate with each other in the interests of mutual financial stability.

With the backing of ample gold reserves, Strong was an advocate of price targeting through the management of money supply, particularly following the 1920-21 slump. His inflationary policies assisted the management of the dollar-sterling exchange rate, supporting sterling which at that time was not backed by gold. Strong also made attempts to develop a discount market in the US, which inflated credit markets further. One way and another, with the Fed following expansionary money policies and commercial bankers becoming more confident of lending prospects, monetary inflation fuelled what came to be known as the roaring twenties.

That came to a sharp halt in October 1929 when the credit cycle turned, and the stock market crashed. Top to bottom, that month saw the Dow fall 35%. The trigger was Congress agreeing to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act on 30 October, widely recognised at the time as a suicide note for the economy and markets, by raising trade tariffs to an average of 60% from the Fordney-McCumber average of 38%. President Hoover signed it into law the following June and by mid-1932 Wall Street had fallen 89%.

With such a clear signal to the bankers it is not surprising they drew in their horns, contracting credit, indiscriminatingly bankrupting their customers. All the expansion of bank credit since 1920 was reversed by 1934. Small banks went bankrupt in their thousands, overwhelmed by bad debts, particularly in the agricultural sector, as well as through loss of confidence among their depositors.

The depression of the 1930s overshadowed politics in the capitalist economies for the next forty years. Instead of learning the lessons of the destruction wrought through cycles of bank credit, economists doubled down arguing more monetary and credit inflation was the solution. To help economic sentiment recover, Keynes favoured deficit spending by governments to take up the slack. He recommended a move away from savers being the suppliers of capital for investment, with the state taking a more active role in managing the economy through deficit spending and monetary inflation.

The printing of money, particularly dollars, continued under the guise of gold convertibility during the post-war Bretton Woods system. America had enormous gold reserves; by 1957 they were over 20,000 tonnes – one third of estimated above-ground gold stocks at that time. It felt secure in financing first the Korean then the Vietnam wars by printing dollars for export. Unsurprisingly, this led to the failure of the London gold pool in the late 1960s and President Nixon suspending the fig-leaf of dollar convertibility into gold in August 1971.

Once the dollar was freed from the discipline of gold, the repeating cycle of bank credit was augmented by the unfettered inflation of base money, a process that has continued to this day.

The current position

Since the turn of the millennium there have been two global bank credit crises: the first was the deflation of the dot-com bubble in 2001-02, and the second the 2008-09 financial crisis that wiped out Lehman. It was clear from these events that the debate over moral hazard was resolved in favour of supporting not just the banks, but big business and stock market valuations as well. Furthermore, America’s budget deficits were becoming a permanent feature.

The cyclical rhythm of bank credit expansion and crisis was taking place against a background of increasing wealth transfer from the productive sector by means of an underlying monetary inflation. The beneficiaries have been the government and non-productive finance as well as large speculators in the form of hedge funds. The evidence of this transfer of wealth through the effect on the general level of consumer prices was increasingly suppressed by statistical method. While the official consumer price inflation indicator has been pegged between one or two per cent, independent analysts (Shadowstats and Chapwood Index) reckon the true figure is closer to ten per cent.

That being the case, the use of a realistic price deflator tells us that the US economy, and presumably others, in recent years have been contracting in real terms. Furthermore, GDP, nominal or real, is an appalling indicator of economic progress, being no more than a measurement of the increasing quantities of government funny-money inflating the economy. It does not tell us how that money is used and the benefits that actually flow from it, nor the degree of price distortion it generates.

It is hard to avoid concluding that manipulating the statistics to hide the evidence is the last throw of the fiat currency dice, just as the Emperor Diocletian collapsed the Roman economy by suppressing evidence of rising prices through his edict on maximum prices in 301 AD.

This brings us to the current position, which is increasing looking like being on the edge of another cyclical crisis. If so, it marks the end of a period of far greater monetary and credit expansion than seen in previous cycles, coinciding with a Smoot-Hawley lookalike in the trade war between the two largest global economies.

The following big-picture factors are relevant to the likely timing for a credit crisis:

• Global debt has accumulated to an estimated $255 trillion, up from about $173 trillion at the time of the Lehman crisis An alarming proportion of it is unproductive, being government, consumer borrowing, and funding for financial speculation as well as owed by unviable businesses.
• With annual debt payments already accounting for most of the US budget deficit and that deficit getting larger, any rise in dollar interest rates would be ruinous for Federal government finances. Eurozone governments are in a similarly precarious financial position. Governments are ensnared in a classic debt trap.
• An estimated $17 trillion of global bonds are negative yielding, which is unprecedented. This is a market distortion so extreme that it cannot be normalised without widespread financial disruption and debtor destruction. There is no exit from this condition.
• The repo market crisis in New York indicates the banking system is in intensive care. The start of it coincided with the completion of the sale of Deutsche Bank’s prime dealership to BNP. It would be understandable if large deposits failed to transfer with the business and went to rivals instead. The problem has continued, indicating senior bankers’ groupthink is already turning from greed to fear.
• US bank exposure to collateralised loan obligations and the leveraged loan market, comprised mainly of junk loans and bonds, is the equivalent of most of the estimated $1.9 trillion sum of bank capital. It confirms this article’s thesis that the level of ignorance over banking risk is late stage for the bank credit cycle and likely to be catastrophic.
• The share prices of Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank indicate they are not just insolvent but will need to be rescued – and soon. Banks in other Eurozone jurisdictions are in a similar situation. However, all Eurozone countries have passed bail-in laws and do not expect to bail out individual banks. The upshot is at the first sign of a bail-in being considered, a flight of large deposits will very likely be triggered and bank bond prices for all Eurozone issuers will collapse. The room for error in crisis management by central banks is considerably greater than at the time of the Lehman crisis eleven years ago.

The forthcoming credit crisis could repeat 1929-32

An extreme amount of monetary creation over the last ten years and the US-China trade war over the last two is horribly reminiscent of late 1929, when the combination of the end of the credit cycle and escalating trade protectionism combined to wreak financial destruction on a global scale. We face a possible repeat of the 1929-32 experience and the depression that followed. The long-term expansion of global trade has already come to a halt. The secondary impact on economies such as Germany’s is beyond question.

Even if a halt to the trade war between the US and China is agreed in the coming weeks, the crisis has been triggered and our empirical evidence suggests it will get worse. It appears that common sense on trade policies is unlikely to prevail, because the conflict is far deeper than just trade, with the Hong Kong riots as part of the overall picture.

The Chinese believe America has destabilised Hong Kong with good reason: the US Treasury has become dependent to receiving the lion’s share of international portfolio flows to support the dollar and finance the US budget deficit, and China’s own investment demands are a threat. With the dollar’s hegemony under attack and China seeking those same portfolio flows to invest in her own infrastructure projects through the Hong Kong Shanghai Connect link, Hong Kong had to be destabilised.

For this and other reasons, trade tariffs are only part of a wider financial war, which is increasingly likely to escalate further rather than abate. With his trade policies having backfired badly, President Trump is now under pressure with time running out ahead of the election in a year’s time. He is threatened with impeachment by Congress over the Ukraine affair, and his popularity ahead of an election year remains subdued. He has even appealed to Jay Powell, Chairman at the Fed, to introduce negative interest rates to boost the economy. Backing down over China is unlikely, because it would be a presidential policy failure.

What will the developing crisis look like?

Clearly, central banks will respond to the next credit crisis with an even greater expansion of money quantity than at the time of the Lehman crisis eleven years ago. The consequence of this monetary inflation seems certain to lead to an even greater rate of loss of purchasing power for fiat currencies than currently indicated by independent assessments of price inflation.

Monetary inflation is likely to be directed at resolving two broad problems: providing a safety net for the banks and big businesses, as well as funding rising government deficits. Therefore, the amount of quantitative easing, which will be central to satisfying these objectives, will soar.

The effect on markets will differ from being a rerun of the 1929-32 example in one key respect. Ninety years ago, the two major currencies, the dollar and sterling, were on a gold exchange standard, which meant that during the crisis asset and commodity prices were effectively measured in gold. Today, there is no gold backing and prices will be measured in expanding quantities of fiat currency.

Prices measured in fiat currencies will be determined ultimately by the course of monetary policy. But in real terms, the outlook is for a repeat of the conditions that afflicted markets and economies during and following the 1929 Wall Street crash. A further difference from the depression years is that today western governments have extensive legal obligations to provide their citizens with welfare, the cost of which is escalating in real terms. Add to this the cost of rising unemployment and a decline in tax revenue and we can see that government deficits and debts will increase rapidly even in a moderate recession.

This brings us to an additional problem, likely to be evident in a secondary phase of the credit crisis. As it becomes obvious that the purchasing power of fiat currencies is being undermined at a rate which is impossible to conceal through statistical method, the discounted value of future money reflected in its time preference will rise irrespective of interest rate policy. Consequently, borrowers will be faced with rising interest rates to compensate for both increasing time preference and the additional loan risk faced by lending to different classes of borrowers.

Besides closing off virtually all debt financing for businesses and increasingly indebted consumers, this will play havoc with governments accustomed to borrowing at suppressed or even negative interest rates. Prices for existing bonds will collapse, and banks loaded up with government debt to benefit from Basle regulations will find their slender capital, if they have any left, will be quickly eroded.

The world of fiat currencies faces no less than its last hurrah. Indeed, some of the more prescient central bankers appear concerned the current system is running out of road, with the dollar as the world’s reserve currency no longer fit for this purpose. They want to find a means of resetting everything, exploring solutions such as digitising currency through blockchains, doing away with cash, and finding other avenues to try to control the vagaries of free markets.

None of them will work, because even a new form of money will be required to rescue government finances and prevent financial and economic failure through inflation. The accelerating pace of monetary creation to address these problems will remain the one problem central to the failure of a system of credit and monetary creation: the impossibility of resolving the debt trap that has ensnared us all.

Just as Germany found in 1923, monetary inflation as a means of funding government and other economic liabilities is a process that rapidly gets out of its control. Eventually, people understand the debasement fraud and begin to dispose of the fiat currency as rapidly as possible. It then has no value.

The ending of the fiat currency regime is bound to terminate the repeating cycles of bank credit legitimised since 1844. The socialism of money through inflationary debasement will be exposed as a fraud perpetrated on ordinary people.

Authored by James Bovard via The Future of Freedom Foundation,

Police in Tempe, Arizona, announced plans in July for a “positive-ticketing” campaign to pull over drivers who had violated no traffic laws. A Phoenix TV station reported that the police would give the people they targeted free soft-drink coupons for Circle K as a reward for their “good driving behavior.” Police in other areas have run similar programs in recent years but the TV news report on Tempe’s plan spurred a torrent of testy Tweets:

“Keep your hands on the wheel and don’t make any sudden moves while you are being rewarded, it could cost you your life.”

“We gunned him down…. well, he refused to stop for his coupon. Self defense. Case dismissed.”

“Um, WHAT?!? They better not stop me for driving legally cause that’s illegal! #harassment”

“What if you don’t stop?”

“Cops to profile for illegal immigrants under the guise of campaign to promote good driving.”

“There goes probable cause right out the window. Police state 101.”

“I would get a panic attack. My reward for driving well is not dying. That’s all I want.”

“Unless it’s a ruse to illegally search your vehicles. And if they notice anything out of line during the mock pullover you’ll be arrested.”

“What’s next? Are they going to start walking into people’s houses to congratulate them for not breaking the law?”

One commenter suggested he could be fined for “resisting a coupon” for free drinks.

A few months before its “positive ticketing campaign” announcement, Tempe police were harshly criticized after one of their officers shot a 14-year-old boy in the back, killing him as he was running away while holding a replica airsoft pistol. An Arizona ACLU employee summarized the situation on Twitter:

“Tempe cops: the community doesn’t trust us after we shot and killed an unarmed teen (sic) what do we do

Community: stop killing us

Tempe cops: FREE THIRSTBUSTERS AND UNREASONABLE STOPS”

The Tempe Police Department responded to the uproar by issuing a statement stating that they never intended to pull over motorists without good cause. Instead, the free-coupon program would be targeted to pedestrians, bicyclists, and skateboarders. But the furious reaction of people across the nation signaled the profound distrust of police.

This is presidential campaign season, and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg claims that he will be able to end the pervasive distrust of the police. In one of the first candidate debates, he said he is “determined to bring about a day when” any driver, white or black, has “a feeling not of fear but of safety” when he sees a police officer approaching.

And how would Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, achieve this profound change? He has not yet detailed his panacea. Perhaps he believes that sensitivity training or racial consciousness-raising classes could do the trick. But Buttigieg has ignored the real source of the problem: politicians have given police so much power that citizens naturally fear them.

Arresting anyone

In 2001, the Supreme Court ruled that police can justifiably arrest anyone believed to have “committed even a very minor criminal offense.” That case involved Gail Atwater, a Texas mother who was driving slowly near her home but, because her children were not wearing seatbelts, she was taken away by an abusive cop whose shouting left her children “terrified and hysterical.” A majority of Supreme Court justices recognized that “Atwater’s claim to live free of pointless indignity and confinement clearly outweighs anything the City can raise against it specific to her case” — but upheld the arrest anyhow.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor warned that “such unbounded discretion carries with it grave potential for abuse.” Unfortunately, there are endless pretexts for people to be arrested nowadays because federal, state, and local politicians and officials have criminalized daily life with hundreds of thousands of edicts. Capt. Steve Powell of the Colorado State Patrol commented, “Ninety percent of the cars out there are doing something that you can pull them over for. There are a jillion reasons people can be stopped — taillights, windshields cracked, any number of things.” Gerard Arenberg, executive director of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, told me in the 1990s, “We have so damn many laws, you can’t drive the streets without breaking the law. I could write you a hundred tickets depending on what you said to me when I stopped you.”

Justice O’Connor noted in her dissent that the Fourth Amendment “guarantees the right to be free from ‘unreasonable searches and seizures.’” But when politicians have enacted endless laws that make almost everyone a criminal, then the Fourth Amendment is practically null and void.

Asset-forfeiture laws give police sweeping arbitrary power over Americans’ wallets, cars, and homes. Indiana Solicitor General Thomas Fisher told the Supreme Court in 2018 that the government is entitled to confiscate cars that exceed speed limits by 5 miles per hour — a standard that would justify seizing most vehicles. Between 2001 and 2014, lawmen seized more than $2.5 billion in cash from 60,000 travelers on the nation’s highways — with no criminal charges in the vast majority of cases, the Washington Post reported.

Police have been trained to confiscate private property of drivers by absurdly claiming that “trash on the floor of a vehicle, abundant energy drinks, or air fresheners hanging from rearview mirrors” are signs of criminal activity. Blacks and Hispanics have been victimized far more often by such laws. Tenaha, Texas, police ran an operation that stopped and plundered almost anyone passing through their East Texas locale. The names of the court filings capture Tenaha’s voraciousness, such as State of Texas v. One Gold Crucifix. “The police had confiscated a simple gold cross that a woman wore around her neck after pulling her over for a minor traffic violation. No contraband was reported, no criminal charges were filed, and no traffic ticket was issued,” the New Yorker noted. If drivers “refused to part with their money, officers threatened to arrest them on false money laundering charges and other serious felonies,” an ACLU lawsuit charged. Tenaha police stopped a 27-year-old black man who worked as a chicken slicer in a Tysons plant in Arkansas and fleeced him of $3,900 after detecting him “driving too close to the white line.”

Subverting the Fourth Amendment

Police have gutted the Fourth Amendment with dogs that will give them a positive alert almost any time they seek a pretext to forcibly search someone’s vehicle. The fact that canines are sometimes trained to give false alerts is irrelevant as long as the government always wins. Canine alerts to currency are routinely used to justify seizures even though most U.S. currency has trace amounts of drug contamination. For 30 years, the courts have condemned the abuses based on currency seizures due to dog alerts. But the official robberies continue.

There is a long history of federal, state, and local officials partnering to fabricate pretexts to stop drivers. From 1992 through 2013, the Drug Enforcement Administration illegally commandeered the phone records of all Americans who called most of the foreign nations in the world, as USA Today revealed in 2015. To keep its phone-record seizures secret, the DEA partnered with local police to concoct phony reasons for traffic stops that sometimes included staging fake auto accidents and even car thefts. Why should citizens trust law-enforcement agencies that engaged in decades of systemic fraud? If bureaucrats and cops gave themselves an unlimited right to lie regarding the source of their evidence, what other lies have they permitted themselves in the war against any American who possesses substances of which politicians disapprove?

Uncle Sam has brought the surveillance state to the nearest police car dashboard. Federal grants have enabled many states and localities to equip police cars with license-plate scanners that provide plenty of bogus pretexts to harass hapless drivers.

License-plate readers often misread plates. Brian Hofer was pulled off Interstate 80 in California and handcuffed and held at gunpoint after his rental vehicle was misreported as stolen. Hofer commented in 2019, “I’m sitting ice-cold and saying nothing because I do not want any itchy trigger fingers.” With an error rate approaching 10 percent, license-plate readers effectively generate potentially thousands of false accusations each day.

Subverting the Second Amendment

Local officials exploit surveillance data to subvert the Second Amendment. John Filippidis was driving with his family through Maryland when he was pulled over by a Maryland transportation policeman outside a Baltimore tunnel. The policeman ordered Filippidis out of his car and angrily demanded to know where his gun was. Filippidis has a Right to Carry (RTC) permit from Florida — where he had left his firearm. Police spent hours questioning him and searching his minivan before permitting him to move on, leaving his wife and daughters utterly distraught. Maryland police have targeted and rigorously searched other out-of-state drivers with RTC permits (which Maryland does not recognize). Federal grants enabled Maryland to equip hundreds of police cars with license-plate scanners that create almost 100 million records per year detailing exactly where and when each vehicle travels.

The war on drugs and its endless crackdowns and intrusions spurred far more distrust of police but politicians learned nothing from its debacles. Sixteen states have raised the smoking age to 21, and there is a push (supported by Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell) to dictate a federal smoking age of 21. Why not simply issue a federal mandate for an annual additional 10 million unnecessary confrontations between police and youth? Criminalizing private vices is the surest way to make law enforcement a public menace.

Citizens are wary of police cars in their rear-view mirrors because politicians and judges made average Americans legally inferior to anyone with a badge and a gun. Police almost always receive legal immunity when they unjustifiably shoot people — it is practically a perk of their job. The existence of video footage from dashboard cams and police cameras is helping to ravage the final remnants of police credibility in many areas. The pervasive cover-ups and lies that follow dubious killings by police do more to spur wariness than a million “Officer Friendly” public-service announcements can counteract.

The best way to encourage citizens to have “a feeling not of fear but of safety” when they see a cop is to repeal legions of laws empowering police to unjustifiably accost and wrongfully subjugate peaceful citizens. But that is unlikely to happen as long as most politicians are more interested in power than in domestic tranquility.

Millions of Americans receive a surprise medical bill every year, bankrupting families and raising health care costs for everyone.

RT’s Keiser Report says the reality of America where people live paycheck to paycheck is “legalized plunder.”

The health industry is one of the largest employers in the entire nation, Stacy Herbert says, explaining that around 19 percent of the US GDP is hospital care, medical spending, and so-called health care.

“America is essentially a corrupt hospital disguised as a country,” Max Keiser says. So-called medical billing professionals are “the greatest at sending out bills for services they don’t provide. They don’t provide health care, they just simply extract wealth.”

Max says the health industry “extracts people’s money from their pockets, similar to the energy industry extracting oil and gas from the Earth,” but makes them “a lot more ill.”

Authored by Chris Calton via The Mises Institute,

In 1984, as part of Ronald Reagan’s renewed war on drugs, the Drug Enforcement Administration launched Operation Pipeline. This program was inspired by the strategies employed by state troopers in New Mexico who, after pulling somebody over, asked specific questions designed to determine whether the driver might be a drug trafficker. Combined with the financial incentives of federal grants for drug enforcement and civil asset forfeiture laws, state and local police had strong new incentives to find reasons to stop vehicles and search for drugs. Operation Pipeline was meant, in part, to train officers how to legally harass drivers.

The problem, of course, was the pesky Fourth Amendment, which prohibited warrantless searches without probable cause. The “probable cause” requirement for warrantless searches is conspicuously open to interpretation, but it imposed important constraints on police harassment by placing the burden of proof on the officer to produce specific facts to justify his suspicion. In 1968, however, the Supreme Court granted the first exemption to this constraint by establishing the “stop-and-frisk” rule. In Terry v. Ohio, the Court ruled that as long as a “reasonably prudent man” would believe that a suspect might be armed, the burden of proof to show probable cause is unnecessary.

The ruling was justified out of concern for officer safety, but it paved the way for Operation Pipeline sixteen years later. The shift from “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion,” a criterion officers could more easily meet in court, was a sufficient precedent for strategically designed traffic-stop questions to establish legally valid suspicion for vehicle drug searches. Theoretically, the courts could still strike the practice down as unconstitutional, but the Terry case proved this unlikely.

Still, there were many constitutional questions for the Supreme Court to work out. Unsurprisingly, the court served as “loyal foot soldiers” in the Drug war, as Justice Stevens put it, by sanctioning virtually every tactic the police invented, no matter how egregiously it violated civil liberties.

The first important ruling on roadway privacy came in 1991. In Florida v. Bostick, two officers boarded a Greyhound bus in Fort Lauderdale and woke up a sleeping passenger named Terrance Bostick. When the officers asked permission to search Bostick’s bags, he complied, despite possessing a pound of cocaine. However, when Bostick went to court, his attorney’s argued that the police officers had neither probable cause nor reasonable suspicion to justify the search of Bostick’s luggage, and therefore the cocaine should be inadmissible in court. Florida’s State Supreme Court ruled in Bostick’s favor, claiming that bus searches are inherently unconstitutional because the police did not allow passengers to leave the bus during the raid. The case went to the US Supreme Court who reversed the decision, claiming that even though the officers were effectively holding Bostick and other passengers hostage, “a reasonable person” would have felt perfectly comfortable denying armed police officers the right to search his luggage.

With this ruling, the loose “reasonable suspicion” requirement expanded officer prerogative in any situation in which they could show that their searches were voluntary. This changed the way officers were trained to give orders. Like contestants on Jeopardy, officers were taught to give their orders in the form of a question— “Will you put your hands against the wall while we search you?” for example. The courts made this easier by interpreting silence as consent, establishing “consent searches” as standard and legal police practices.

Although Florida v. Bostick took place on a bus as part of highway monitoring activities, the ruling did not clarify any legal boundaries for traffic stops. This came five years later in the case Whren v. United States. After pulling Michael Whren over, a police officer arrested him for possession of crack cocaine. By the officer’s own admission, he pulled Whren over because he suspected him of possessing drugs, but officially, the stop was justified because Whren failed to use his turn signal. The defense argued that the Fourth Amendment prohibited the use of a minor traffic violation as a pretext for a drug search, so the drugs should be inadmissible in court.

The Supreme Court unanimously upheld Whren’s conviction, though, establishing two important precedents. First, they declared that the officer’s intentions are irrelevant as long as there is any objective criteria that could justify the traffic stop — and given the endless list of traffic laws, this ruling effectively grants officers unlimited discretion in pulling drivers over. Second, the decision settled the legal debate over “pretext stops,” the use of minor traffic violations as a pretext for vehicle drug searches.

Even after the Whren ruling, civilians still theoretically have the right to refuse searches, based on the absurd notion that a “reasonable person” would feel free to deny an officer’s request, as established by Bostick. A few months after Whren, though, the Ohio court implicitly rejected the Bostick ruling. After Robert Robinette was pulled over for speeding, he consented to a search of his vehicle— illustrating the tactics of both pretext stops and consent searches in the Drug War. When officers discovered a small amount of cannabis and a single amphetamine pill, they arrested Robinette. Because Ohio v. Robinette reached the state court prior to the final Whren ruling, the pretext stop controversy was still an open question, which made the case viable. But what made the Robinette case important was that the Ohio court pushed back against the Bostick argument by stipulating that for a reasonable person to feel comfortable denying consent to a search, the officers had to inform the driver that they had the right to refuse. It was this stipulation that took Robinette to the higher court, at which point SCOTUS overturned the ruling for being “unrealistic.”

According to SCOTUS, it is more realistic for an untrained civilian to know their rights, which are apparently subject to constant change, than it is for professional police officers to inform drivers of their rights to refuse a search. Taking these expectations to a new extreme, the 2001 case Atwater v. Lago Vista ruled that officers had the legal right to arrest drivers who violated misdemeanor traffic stops, even if the punishment for the violation was a fine, rather than jail time. With this ruling, the court’s imaginary “reasonable person” would presumably know that if they refused to consent to a drug search, they faced the risk of being handcuffed for whatever petty infraction got them pulled over. None of this matters in the twisted logic of the criminal justice system, of course.

To complete the remarkable expansion of highway monitoring prerogatives, the 2004 case Illinois v Caballesruled that it did not legally constitute a search, regardless of consent or pretext, for officers to walk drug-sniffing dogs around a person’s vehicle. Given the precedents established in the previous cases, it may seem that this ruling added no discretionary power the police did not already possess, but this is not quite true. Checkpoints are usually justified as searching for drunk drivers, but they have also been established to randomly verify that drivers have valid licenses, vehicle registrations, and car insurance. In some cases, as James Bovard has noted, the police had no qualms admitting that the true reason for the checkpoints was random drug searches. But sobriety checkpoints fail to meet even the loose requirements of pretext stops, and every now and then, police run into civilians who actually know their rights and refuse to consent to searches. In the Cabellas ruling, the court claimed that drug dogs do not violate the Fourth Amendment, and if the dog signals the presence of drugs, the officers have probable cause to search the vehicle without consent. Even after a recent case has demonstrated that drug-sniffing dogs have a roughly fifty percent accuracy rate, the courts have continued to uphold the practice.

The result is that the police now enjoy unlimited reign in harassing, searching, and arresting drivers. Motivated by civil forfeiture laws that empower them to confiscate civilian property without charging the victim with a crime, the police have institutionalized the practice of conducting mass road stops as means of searching civilians for property to confiscate (a practice recently curtailed by a SCOTUS ruling, but not eliminated). Highway robbery has been legally sanctioned and encouraged by all branches of the federal government, so that state and local police forces can only accurately be understood is roadway pirates.

Authored by Guy Milliere via The Gatestone Institute,

Paris, Champs-Élysées. July 14. Bastille Day. Just before the military parade begins, President Emmanuel Macron comes down the avenue in an official car to greet the crowd. Thousands of people gathered along the avenue shout “Macron resign”, boo and hurl insults.

At the end of the parade, a few dozen people release yellow balloons into the sky and distribute leaflets saying “The yellow vests are not dead.”The police disperse them, quickly and firmly. Moments later, hundreds of “Antifa” anarchists arrive, throw security barriers on the roadway to erect barricades, start fires and smash the storefronts of several shops. The police have a rough time mastering the situation, but early in the evening, after a few hours, they restore the calm.

A few hours later, thousands of young Arabs from the suburbs gather near the Arc de Triomphe. They have apparently come to “celebrate” in their own way the victory of an Algerian soccer team. More storefronts are smashed, more shops looted. Algerian flags are everywhere. Slogans are belted out: “Long live Algeria”, “France is ours”, “Death to France”. Signs bearing street names are replaced by signs bearing the name of Abd El Kader, the religious and military leader who fought against the French army at the time of the colonization of Algeria. The police limit themselves to stemming the violence in the hope that it will not spread.

Around midnight, three leaders of the “yellow vest” movement come out of a police station and tell a TV reporter that they were arrested early that morning and imprisoned for the rest of the day. Their lawyer states that they did nothing wrong and were just “preventively” arrested. He emphasizes that a law passed in February 2019 allows the French police to arrest any person suspected of going to a demonstration; no authorization from a judge is necessary and no appeal possible.

On Friday, July 19, the Algerian soccer team wins again. More young Arabs gathernear Arc de Triomphe to “celebrate” again. The damage is even greater than eight days before. More police show up; they do almost nothing.

On July 12, two days before Bastille Day, several hundred self-declared African illegal migrants enter the Pantheon, the monument that houses the graves of heroes who played major roles in the history of France. There, the migrants announce the birth of the “Black Vest movement”. They demand the “regularization” of all illegal immigrants on French territory and free housing for each of them. The police show up but decline to intervene. Most of the demonstrators leave peacefully. A few who insult the police are arrested.

France today is a country adrift. Unrest and lawlessness continue to gain ground. Disorder has become part of daily life. Polls show that a large majority for the poor; the way he crushed the “yellow vest” movement, and for his not having paid even the slightest attention to the protesters’ smallest demands, such as the right to hold a citizens’ referendumlike those in Switzerland. Macron can no longer go anywhere in public without risking displays of anger.

The “yellow vests” seem finally to have stopped demonstrating and given up: too many were maimed or hurt. Their discontent, however, is still there. It seems waiting to explode again.

The French police appear ferocious when dealing with peaceful protesters, but barely able to prevent groups such as “Antifa” from causing violence. Therefore, now at the end of each demonstration, “Antifa” show up. The French police seem particularly cautious when having to deal with young Arabs and illegal migrants. The police have been given orders. They know that young Arabs and illegal migrants could create large-scale riots. Three months ago, in Grenoble, the police were pursuing some young Arabs on a stolen motorcycle, who were accused of theft. While fleeing, they had an accident. Five days of mayhem began.

President Macron looks like an authoritarian leader when he faces the disgruntled poor. He never says he is sorry for those who have lost an eye or a hand or suffered irreversible brain damage from extreme police brutality. Instead, he asked the French parliament to pass a law that almost completely abolishes the right to protest, the presumption of innocence and that allows the arrest of anyone, anywhere, even without cause. The law was passed.

In June, the French parliament passed another law, severely punishing anyone who says or writes something that might contain “hate speech”.The law is so vague that an American legal scholar, Jonathan Turley, felt compelled to react. “France has now become one of the biggest international threats to freedom of speech”, he wrote.

Macron does not appear authoritarian, however, with violent anarchists. When facing young Arabs and illegal migrants, he looks positively weak.

He knows what the former interior minister, Gérard Collomb, said in November 2018, while resigning from government:

“Communities in France are engaging in conflict with one another more and more and it is becoming very violent… today we live side by side, I fear that tomorrow it will be face to face”.

Macron also knows what former President François Hollande said after serving his term as president: “France is on the verge of partition”.

Macron knows that the partition of France already exists. Most Arabs and Africans live in no-go zones, apart from the rest of the population, where they accept the presence of non-Arabs and non-Africans less and less. They do that France will belong to them. Reports show that most seem filled with a deep rejection of France and Western civilization. An increasing number seem to place their religion above their citizenship; many seem radicalized and ready to fight.

Macron seems not to want to fight. Instead, he has chosen to appease them. He is single-mindedly pursuing his plans to institutionalize Islam in France. Three months ago, the Muslim Association for Islam of France (AMIF) was created. One branch will handle the cultural expansion of Islam and take charge of “the fight against anti-Muslim racism”. Another branch will be responsible for programs that train imams and build mosques. This autumn, a “Council of Imams of France” will be established. The main leaders of the AMIF are (or were until recently) membersof the Muslim Brotherhood, a movement designated as a terrorist organization in Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — but not in France.

Macron is aware of the demographic data. They show that the Muslim population in France will grow significantly in the coming years. (The economist Charles Gave wrote recently that by 2057, France will have a Muslim majority). Macron can see that it will soon be impossible for anyone to be elected President without relying on the Muslim vote, so he acts accordingly.

Macron apparently sees that the discontent that gave birth to the “yellow vest” movement still is there. He appears to think that repression will be enough to prevent any further uprising, and so does nothing to remedy the causes of the discontent.

The “yellow vest” movement was born of a revolt against exorbitantly on most highways — and more speed-detection cameras; a sharp rise in the penalties on tickets, as well as complex and expensive annual motor vehicle controls. French taxes on fuels recently rose again and are now the highest in Europe (70% of the price paid at the pump). Other measures against the use of automobiles and motorists still in force are especially painful for the poor. They were already chased from the suburbs by intolerant newcomers, and now have to live — and drive — even farther from where they work.

Macron has made no decision to remedy the disastrous economic situation in France. When he was elected, taxes, duties and social charges represented almost 50% of GDP. Government spending represented 57% of GDP (the highest among developed countries). The ratio of national debt to GDP was almost 100%.

Taxes, duties, social charges and government spending remain at the same level now as when Macron came in. The debt-to-GDP ratio is 100% and growing. The French economy is not creating jobs. Poverty remains extremely high: 14% of the population earn less than 855 euros ($950) a month.

Macron pays no attention to the growing cultural disaster also seizing the country. The educational system is crumbling. An increasing percentage of students graduate from high school without knowing how to write a sentence free of errors that make incomprehensible anything they write. Christianity is that ravaged the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris was officially an “accident,” but it was only one of the many Christian religious buildings in the country that were recently destroyed. Every week, churches are vandalized — to the general indifference of the public. In just the first half of 2019, 22 churches burned down.

The main concern of Macron and the French government seems not to be the risk of riots, the public’s discontent, the disappearance of Christianity, the disastrous economic situation, or Islamization and its consequences. Instead, it is climate change. Although the amount of France’s carbon dioxide emissions is infinitesimal(less than 1% of the global total), combatting “human-induced climate change” appears Macron’s absolute priority.

A Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, age 16, — nevertheless the guru of the “fight for the climate” in Europe — was recently a speech, promising that the “irreversible destruction” of the planet will begin very soon. She a Prize of Freedom, just created, which will be given each year to people “fighting for the values ​​of those who landed in Normandy in 1944 to liberate Europe”. It is probably reasonable to assume that not one of those who landed in Normandy in 1944 thought he was fighting to save the climate. Such minor details, however, seem beyond Macron and the parliamentarians who support him.

Macron and the French government also seem unconcerned that Jews — driven by the rise of anti-Semitism, and understandably worried about court decisions infused with the spirit of submission to violent Islam — continue to flee from France.

Kobili Traore, the man who murdered Sarah Halimi in 2017 while chanting surasfrom the Qur’an and shouting that the Jews are Sheitan (Arabic for “Satan”) was found not guilty. Traore had apparently smoked cannabis before the murder, so the judges decided that he was not responsible for his acts. Traore will soon be released from prison; what happens if he smokes cannabis again?

A few weeks after the murder of Halimi, three members of a Jewish family were assaulted, tortured and held hostage in their home by a group of five men who said that “Jews have money” and “Jews must pay”. The men were arrested; all were Muslim. The judge who indicted them announced that their actions were “not anti-Semitic”.

On July 25, 2019 when the Israeli soccer team Maccabi Haifa was competing in Strasbourg, the French government limited the number of Israeli supporters in the stadium to 600, not one more. A thousand had bought plane tickets to come to France to attend the match. The French government also banned the waving of Israeli flags at the game or anywhere in the city. Nonetheless, in the name of “free speech”, the French Department of the Interior permitted anti-Israeli demonstrations in front of the stadium, and Palestinian flags and banners saying “Death to Israel” were there. The day before the match, at a restaurant near the stadium, some Israelis were violently attacked. “The demonstrations against Israel are approved in the name of freedom of expression, but the authorities forbid supporters of Maccabi Haifa to raise the Israeli flag, it is unacceptable,” said Aliza Ben Nun, Israel’s ambassador to France.

The other day, a plane full of French Jews leaving France arrived in Israel. More French Jews will soon go. The departure of Jews to Israel entails sacrifices: some French real estate agents take advantage of the wish of many Jewish families to leave, so they buy and sell properties owned by Jews at a price far lower than their market value.

Macron will remain as president until May 2022. Several leaders of the parties of the center-left (such as the Socialist Party) and center-right (The Republicans) joined The Republic on the Move, the party he created two years ago. After that, the Socialist Party and The Republicans electorally collapsed. Macron’s main opponent in 2022 is likely to be the same as in 2017: Marine Le Pen, the leader of the populist National Rally.

Although Macron is widely unpopular and widely hated, he will probably use the same slogans as in 2017: that he is the last bastion of hope against “chaos” and “fascism.” He has a strong chance of being elected again. Anyone who reads the political program of the National Rally can see that Le Pen is not a fascist. Also, anyone who looks at the situation in France may wonder if France has not already begun to sink into chaos.

The sad situation that reigns in France is not all that different from that in many other , “there is a cultural and identity crisis. The West no longer knows what it is, because it does not know and does not want to know what shaped it, what constituted it, what it was and what it is. (…) This self-asphyxiation leads naturally to a decadence that opens the way to new barbaric civilizations.”