This is the turning point

The saying "the worm has turned" refers to the moment when the downtrodden have finally had enough, and turn on their powerful oppressors.

The worms have finally turned against the privileged elites -- who have benefited so greatly from globalization, corruption, central bank stimulus and the profiteering of state-enforced cartels. It doesn’t matter as much as the punditry assumes whether they are turning Left or Right; the important thing is that the powerless have finally started challenging their privileged overlords.

Though the Powers That Be will attempt to placate or suppress the Revolt of the Powerless, the genies of political disunity and social disorder cannot be put back in the bottle. It took a generation of rising inequality, corruption and the erosion of opportunity to create a society of the protected (the haves) and the unprotected (the have-nots), and rubber-stamping more regulations and distributing Universal Basic Income (UBI) will not rebalance a system that is irrevocably out of balance.

But the rise of resistance, as yet nascent, is only half the story: economic trends and cycles are turning as well, and even if the worms remain passively underground, these reversals will disrupt the status quo. The dominant narrative--the rightness, goodness and sustainability of endless growth of consumption and debt--will unravel, and the internal contradictions of this New Gilded Age (widening wealth/income/power inequality) will finally burst through the thin façade of stability that’s been patched together over the past nine years of “recovery.”

Eight Key Trends/Cycles Are Turning

Here’s the thing about trends and cycles: when they inevitably lose altitude or reverse, we rush around trying to identify the cause. All sorts of theories are put forth, but as a general rule, it rarely boils down to one dynamic.

Consider the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire. Efforts to identify the cause go back hundreds of years, and include everything from barbarian invasions to the use of lead pipes to deliver water.

A new book, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, pins a significant part of the responsibility on climate change and pandemic diseases—system-wide dynamics that slowly sapped Rome’s vigor, food supplies, capital and labor force.  Not only that, but cooling weather patterns in Eurasia may have been behind the westward movement of the mobile tribes (the Huns and Mongolians) that pushed existing tribes on Rome’s borders into Roman territories—the so-called Barbarian Invasions.

The point here is that systemic trends and cycles are often causally connected and tend to reinforce each other. This is how a stable, wealthy and resilient society gets hollowed out: trends end and cycles reverse, and forces that added stability, capital and resilience when they were working together are slowly replaced by forces that erode the foundations of wealth and stability.

In the current era, eight interconnected trends/cycles are either reaching the end of their run or reversing:

  1. Central bank distortion/manipulation of markets.
  2. The business cycle of credit/debt expansion and contraction.
  3. The yield/interest rate cycle.
  4. The commodity cycle.
  5. The stock market cycle.
  6. Regulation.
  7. Globalization.
  8. Demographics.

Each of these would need a short book to do the topic even partial justice, but let’s summarize each trend/cycle.

Let’s stipulate that technology isn’t a cycle or a trend; its disruptions of existing sectors and institutions accelerate and decelerate over time, but it is woven inseparably into all the trends and cycles listed above.   That said, the emergence of some new technology doesn’t mean the business cycle will be repealed for all time; cycles and trends are influenced by Human Wetware V1.0, an OS developed between 100,000 and 160,000 years ago and still in Version One.

Resource depletion is another background to these trends and cycles: robots and drones will not restore depleted ground water or bring back ocean fisheries.

Central Bank Distortion / Manipulation of Markets

Minus the $21 trillion in central bank asset purchases and trillions more in liquidity/credit programs, would the global economy be growing and global markets be at nosebleed heights? We all know the answer is "no."

Central banks have engineered a "recovery" that looks real enough on the surface, but what are its foundations? Gamed statistics and manipulated markets—in other words, controlling not just the narrative but the information available to market participants.  To achieve the desired outcome—rising equity markets, near-zero bond yields and incentivizing the purchase of risk-on assets—central banks have distorted market information and mechanisms.

The returns on this coordinated distortion are diminishing.  The “buzz” from the initial injections has faded, and now that the monetary authorities are trying to wean the markets off of their drug, the markets have lost the ability to discover the price of assets, risk and capital on their own.

No wonder volatility is rising.

Flooding the economy with trillions in new stimulus worked wonders in the initial stage, but after 9 years, the unintended consequences are metastasizing.

Goosing asset valuations higher in service of “the wealth effect” has widened wealth/ income inequality, creating a New Gilded Age of a few haves and many have-nots. The benefits of the central bank punch bowl—near-zero interest rates, leverage and access to unlimited credit--are reserved for those few at the top of the wealth-power pyramid; very little of the stupendous wealth created out of thin air has trickled down to the bottom 95%.

The relentless rise in asset valuations has pushed homes out of reach of those living in desirable urban/suburban markets, and exposed buyers to the risks of an inevitable reversion to the mean, i.e. a collapse of bubble prices back to historical norms.

Capital is not incentivized to invest in productivity or communities for the long haul; the incentives are for stock buybacks and short-term leveraged speculative bets, forms of mal-investment that hollow out the productive real economy is favor of a momentum-driven financialization boom.

Much of the political resistance troubling the status quo can be traced directly to central bank policies that have exacerbated the New Gilded Age inequalities and excesses. If the central banks can’t find the will to reduce their distortions in service of the few, the political will of the many will do it for them.

The Business Cycle of Credit Expansion & Contraction

The business cycle is a basic structure of any economy based on credit and flows of capital seeking the highest available returns at the lowest available risk. In the expansion stage, households and enterprises borrow more money to boost production and satisfy unmet demand.  Speculators find opportunities in new enterprises and new markets.

In the contraction phase, all the inevitable excesses of freely available credit come home to roost. Marginal investments in new production fail to become profitable and go bust. Marginal household borrowers default, and speculators who bet the farm on momentum plays watch their capital evaporate like mist in Death Valley.

When too much income is being devoted to servicing existing debt, there’s no more net income available to support additional borrowing. Lenders facing losses due to defaults tighten lending standards, and credit—and thus the economy—contracts.

This cycle is an essential dynamic of capitalism.  Central banks have attempted to eliminate the contraction phase that acts as the immune system, washing out bad debt and marginal borrowers.  This has left the economy saddled with “zombie” corporations and debtors that would be liquidated if monetary policies weren’t enabling their feeble survival.

But even the most powerful central banks can’t force firms and individuals to borrow more money when it no longer makes sense to do so. And keeping zombie banks, corporations and households on life support weakens the financial system by piling up the equivalent of dead wood in the forest. When the inevitable conflagration of bad debt catches fire, many of the healthy trees will also be consumed in the flames.

The Yield / Interest Rate Cycle

Many observers are confident interest rates cannot rise due to the deflationary forces in play. Indeed, they predict a future decline in rates back to zero. Perhaps, but history suggests interest rates typically move in long cycles of roughly two or three decades. The current downtrend in rates dates back to 1981, which means the current trend is pushing 40 years. That’s stretching the historical boundaries.

As noted earlier, trends change and then we seek the causes. Interest rates are rising, and perhaps we need no explanation other than reversion to the mean.

The Commodity Cycle

Compared to the stock market (the S&P 500), commodities are at their cyclical lows. As to what happens next, we need only look at a single chart, courtesy of Incrementum AG:

The Stock Market Cycle

We’re implicitly being told that stock markets can loft higher forever, as long as central banks are pumping out the financial stimulus. But nothing goes up forever; valuations get stretched, marginal buyers disappear and doubts about the continuing efficacy of central bank distortions creep in.

The typical Bull Market has a leading sector.  Starting with the mass-market Industrial Revolution in the 19th century, leaders tend to be new industries: railroads, radio, computers, the Internet, etc., or existing industries that have been revolutionized by some innovation: for example, banks freed from regulatory oversight discovered subprime mortgages in the 2000s.

The current leaders—the so-called FAANG stocks—are getting tired.  The tech leaders have reached a scale where growth must slow; the expansion of Facebook from 100 million users to 1 billion was a 10-fold increase; the expansion from 1 billion to 2 billion, a double. Are there even another billion potential users with the bandwidth, devices and interest to join? How much additional revenue can be extracted by selling the data of increasingly marginal users?

The same issues of scale are sapping the growth of Apple, Google, et al.  What happens when Apple has already sold an iPhone to everyone with the means and interest to own one?

There is now political pushback against the quasi-monopolies of big tech. Politicians are being forced to “do something,” i.e. increase regulations, whether they accomplish the intended goal or not.

Valuations and profits are at the top of their respective cycles, the leaders are faltering, victims of their own dominance, and central banks are feeling pressured to reduce the punch bowl of free money for financiers.

Regulation

Democracy is no longer about solving real problems and being held accountable; it’s all about persuading the public that all is well, or distracting them with ginned up controversies. Incumbents get re-elected because they vacuum up enough campaign contributions to buy influence via the mass (corporate) media. They have little incentive to respond to voters, so they don’t.

What they can do is look like they’re doing something other than protecting the cartels and financiers that fund their permanent re-election campaigns. So they propose more regulations, most of which fail to achieve the desired results but succeed in burdening legitimate enterprises to the point of failure. Small enterprises simply fold up when the exhausted owners can no longer bear the burdens and corporations offshore everything that’s over-regulated.

The neoliberal ideology held that the many would benefit if regulations limiting enterprise were eased, and when done judiciously and with common sense, this has functioned as designed. But in the corrupt form of governance that dominates the global economy, regulatory capture means regulations protect cartels and insiders from competition.  Insiders have rigged the system so they can punish competitors and let their cronies off the hook.

The useful regulations protecting the many from the exploitation of the few are being buried by counter-productive “do something” regulations and regulatory moats that protect cartels and insiders.

Globalization

Global trade has a long history, stretching back to the Bronze Age (1500 B.C.). Like every other market, it expands and contracts as conditions change.  The emergence of China (and other nations) since the mid-1980s greatly expanded global trade and capital flows. This distributed new income and prosperity to hundreds of millions of people, and yet it also concentrated much of the newfound wealth in the hands of the few and left many behind.

Nothing goes up forever, not even globalization.  Those left behind are starting to wonder if the good of globalization outweighs the costs.

Demographics

If high-population-growth Africa is set aside, the world’s working age populace is perched on the precipice of decline while the populace of retirees is exploding, not just in the developed world but in the developing world.

 Although many put their hopes on robots generating unlimited wealth that will support the elderly and free the working age populace from labor, the more likely prospect is an economy that cannot fulfill the promises made to retirees back when the worker-retiree ratio was 10-to-1 and not the present-day 2-to-1.

Chris Hamilton has written three excellent explorations of demographics that cover the basics. The bottom line is the trend of rapidly-expanding workforces and modest numbers of dependent retirees has reversed:

To underscore this point, chew on this sobering projection: in the US, for the first time ever, retirees will outnumber kids within just 20 years.

Time To Take Action

So as these 8 key trends and cycles change, what can we as individuals do?

In Part 2: 6 Essential Strategies For Prospering Through The Next Crisis, we detail specific steps to take with your money, your career, your lifestyle, your possessions and your mindset that will dramatically improve your odds of ending up on the winning side of these cycle reversals.

But time is of the essence. Preparation has value only if done in advance, and the turning point is upon us.

Click here to read Part 2 of this report (free executive summary, enrollment required for full access)

Trump branded a tyrant, but did Obama outdo him on deportations?

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MSNBC and CNN want you to think the president is a new Hitler launching another Holocaust. But the actual deportation numbers are nowhere near what they claim.

Former MSNBC host Chris Matthews, in an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta, compared Trump’s immigration policies to Adolf Hitler’s Holocaust. He claimed that Hitler didn’t bother with German law — he just hauled people off to death camps in Poland and Hungary. Apparently, that’s what Trump is doing now by deporting MS-13 gang members to El Salvador.

Symone Sanders took it a step further. The MSNBC host suggested that deporting gang-affiliated noncitizens is simply the first step toward deporting black Americans. I’ll wait while you try to do that math.

The debate is about control — weaponizing the courts, twisting language, and using moral panic to silence dissent.

Media mouthpieces like Sanders and Matthews are just the latest examples of the left’s Pavlovian tribalism when it comes to Trump and immigration. Just say the word “Trump,” and people froth at the mouth before they even hear the sentence. While the media cries “Hitler,” the numbers say otherwise. And numbers don’t lie — the narrative does.

Numbers don’t lie

The real “deporter in chief” isn’t Trump. It was President Bill Clinton, who sent back 12.3 million people during his presidency — 11.4 million returns and nearly 900,000 formal removals. President George W. Bush, likewise, presided over 10.3 million deportations — 8.3 million returns and two million removals. Even President Barack Obama, the progressive darling, oversaw 5.5 million deportations, including more than three million formal removals.

So how does Donald Trump stack up? Between 2017 and 2021, Trump deported somewhere between 1.5 million and two million people — dramatically fewer than Obama, Bush, or Clinton. In his current term so far, Trump has deported between 100,000 and 138,000 people. Yes, that’s assertive for a first term — but it's still fewer than Biden was deporting toward the end of his presidency.

The numbers simply don’t support the hysteria.

Who's the “dictator” here? Trump is deporting fewer people, with more legal oversight, and still being compared to history’s most reviled tyrant. Apparently, sending MS-13 gang members — violent criminals — back to their country of origin is now equivalent to genocide.

It’s not about immigration

This debate stopped being about immigration a long time ago. It’s now about control — about weaponizing the courts, twisting language, and using moral panic to silence dissent. It’s about turning Donald Trump into the villain of every story, facts be damned.

If the numbers mattered, we’d be having a very different national conversation. We’d be asking why Bill Clinton deported six times as many people as Trump and never got labeled a fascist. We’d be questioning why Barack Obama’s record-setting removals didn’t spark cries of ethnic cleansing. And we’d be wondering why Trump, whose enforcement was relatively modest by comparison, triggered lawsuits, media hysteria, and endless Nazi analogies.

But facts don’t drive this narrative. The villain does. And in this script, Trump plays the villain — even when he does far less than the so-called heroes who came before him.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Exposed: America’s ancient power grid is a national security disaster

Allan Tannenbaum / Contributor | Getty Images

If America wants to remain a global leader in the coming decades, we need more energy fast.

It's no secret that Glenn is an advocate for the safe and ethical use of AI, not because he wants it, but because he knows it’s coming whether we like it or not. Our only option is to shape AI on our terms, not those of our adversaries. America has to win the AI Race if we want to maintain our stability and security, and to do that, we need more energy.

AI demands dozens—if not hundreds—of new server farms, each requiring vast amounts of electricity. The problem is, America lacks the power plants to generate the required electricity, nor do we have a power grid capable of handling the added load. We must overcome these hurdles quickly to outpace China and other foreign competitors.

Outdated Power Grid

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Our power grid is ancient, slowly buckling under the stress of our modern machines. AAI’s energy demands could collapse it without a major upgrade. The last significant overhaul occurred under FDR nearly a century ago, when he connected rural America to electricity. Since then, we’ve patched the system piecemeal, but it’s still the same grid from the 1930s. Over 70 percent of the powerlines are 30 years old or older, and circuit breakers and other vital components are in similar condition. Most people wouldn't trust a dishwasher that was 30 years old, and yet much of our grid relies on technology from the era of VHS tapes.

Upgrading the grid would prevent cascading failures, rolling blackouts, and even EMP attacks. It would also enable new AI server farms while ensuring reliable power for all.

A Need for Energy

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Earlier this month, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt appeared before Congress as part of an AI panel and claimed that by 2030, the U.S. will need to add 96 gigawatts to our national power production to meet AI-driven demand. While some experts question this figure, the message is clear: We must rapidly expand power production. But where will this energy come from?

As much as eco nuts would love to power the world with sunshine and rainbows, we need a much more reliable and significantly more efficient power source if we want to meet our electricity goals. Nuclear power—efficient, powerful, and clean—is the answer. It’s time to shed outdated fears of atomic energy and embrace the superior electricity source. Building and maintaining new nuclear plants, along with upgraded infrastructure, would create thousands of high-paying American jobs. Nuclear energy will fuel AI, boost the economy, and modernize America’s decaying infrastructure.

A Bold Step into the Future

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This is President Trump’s chance to leave a historic mark on America, restoring our role as global leaders and innovators. Just as FDR’s power grid and plants made America the dominant force of the 20th century, Trump could upgrade our infrastructure to secure dominance in the 21st century. Visionary leadership must cut red tape and spark excitement in the industry. This is how Trump can make America great again.

POLL: Did astronomers discover PROOF of alien life?

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Are we alone in the universe?

It's no secret that Glenn keeps one eye on the cosmos, searching for any signs of ET. Late last week, a team of astronomers at the University of Cambridge made an exciting discovery that could change how we view the universe. The astronomers were monitoring a distant planet, K2-18b, when the James Webb Space Telescope detected dimethyl sulfide and dimethyl disulfide, two atmospheric gases believed only to be generated by living organisms. The planet, which is just over two and a half times larger than Earth, orbits within the "habitable zone" of its star, meaning the presence of liquid water on its surface is possible, further supporting the possibility that life exists on this distant world.

Unfortunately, humans won't be able to visit K2-18b to see for ourselves anytime soon, as the planet is about 124 light-years from Earth. This means that even if we had rockets that could travel at the speed of light, it would still take 124 years to reach the potentially verdant planet. Even if humans made the long trek to K2-18b, they would be faced with an even more intense challenge upon arrival: Gravity. Assuming K2-18b has a similar density to Earth, its increased size would also mean it would have increased gravity, two and a half times as much gravity, to be exact. This would make it very difficult, if not impossible, for humans to live or explore the surface without serious technological support. But who knows, give Elon Musk and SpaceX a few years, and we might be ready to seek out new life (and maybe even new civilizations).

But Glenn wants to know what you think. Could K2-18b harbor life on its distant surface? Could alien astronomers be peering back at us from across the cosmos? Would you be willing to boldly go where no man has gone before? Let us know in the poll below:

Could there be life on K2-18b?

Could there be an alien civilization thriving on K2-18b?

Will humans develop the technology to one day explore distant worlds?

Would you sign up for a trip to an alien world?

Is K2-18b just another cold rock in space?

Our children are sick, and Big Pharma claims to be the cure, but is RFK Jr. closer to proving they are the disease?

For years, neurological disorders in our children have been on the rise. One in nine children in the U.S. has been diagnosed with ADHD, and between 2016 and 2022, more than one million kids were told they suffer from the disorder. Similarly, autism diagnoses have increased by 175 percent over the past decade. RFK Jr. pledged to investigate the rising rates of neurological disorders as Secretary of Health and Human Services, and this week, he announced a major initiative.

Earlier this week, RFK Jr. announced that the HHS has embarked on a massive testing and research effort to uncover the root causes of autism and the sharp spike in recent diagnoses. The HHS Secretary vowed that the results will be available by September of this year, leaving many skeptical about the study's rigor. Conversely, some speculate that the HHS may have unpublished studies revealing critical insights into these disorders, just waiting to see the light of day.

Glenn brought up a recent article by the Daily Wire referencing a New York Times piece in which experts questioned the legitimacy of ADHD diagnoses. Glenn agreed and suggested that people are just wired differently; they learn, work, and study differently, and the cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all school system simply fails to accommodate everyone.

New York Times' ADHD Admission

Bloomberg / Contributor | Getty Images

Earlier this week, the New York Times published an article that made a shocking admission: there are no concrete biological markers for ADHD. The clinical definition of ADHD is no longer supported by the evidence, and there are no physical, genetic, or chemical identifiers for the disorder, nor is there any real way to test for it. The paper also admitted that people diagnosed with ADHD would suddenly find that they no longer had any symptoms after a change of environment, profession, or field of study. This suggests that "ADHD" might simply be a matter of interests and skills, not a chronic brain sickness.

The most horrifying implication of this admission is that millions of people, including children, have been prescribed heavy mind-altering drugs for years for a disorder that lacks real evidence of its very existence. These drugs are serious business and include products such as Adderall, Ritalin, and Desoxyn. All of these drugs are considered "Schedule II," which is a drug classification that puts them on the same level as cocaine, PCP, and fentanyl. Notably, Desoxyn is chemically identical to methamphetamine, differing only in its production in regulated laboratories rather than illegal settings.

Worse yet, studies show that these medications, like Desoxyn, often provide no long-term benefits. Testing demonstrated that in the short term, there were some positive effects, but after 36 months, there was no discernible difference in symptoms between people who were medicated and those who were not. For decades, we have been giving our children hardcore drugs with no evidence of them working or even that the disorder exists.

RFK Jr's Autism Study

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Autism rates are on the rise, and RFK Jr. is going to get to the bottom of it. In the year 2000, approximately one in 150 children was diagnosed with autism, but only 20 years later, the rate had increased to one in 36. While some claim that this is simply due to more accurate testing, RFK Jr. doesn't buy it and is determined to discover what is the underlying cause. He is an outspoken critic of vaccines, asserting that the true scope of their side effects has been buried by greed and corruption to sell more vaccines.

RFK Jr. doesn't plan on stopping at vaccines. Similar to ADHD, RFK Jr. suspects other environmental factors could increase of autism or exacerbate symptoms. Factors like diet, water quality, air pollution, and parenting approaches are all under investigation. It's time to bring clarity to the neurological disorders that plague our nation, cut through the corruption, and reveal the healing truth.

Neurological Intervention

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Big Pharma has been all too happy to sit back and watch as the rate of neurological disorders climbs, adding to the ever-growing list of permanent patients who are led to believe that their only choice is to shell out endless money for treatments, prescriptions, and doctor visits. Rather than encouraging lifestyle changes to improve our well-being, they push ongoing medication and costly treatments.

All RFK Jr. is doing is asking questions, and yet the backlash from the "experts" is so immense that one can't help but wonder what they could be hiding. Both Glenn and RFK Jr. have their suspicions of Big Pharma, and the upcoming HHS study might be one of the most important steps to making America healthy again.