Those on top don’t always stay on top.

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

Part One

Who can argue with prevailing business practices? If corporate-debt-supported stock options, wiping out competitors via regulation rather than honest competition, buying bureaucrats and politicians, endorsing the reigning ideology, and political pull are the road to riches, how can you fault the executives for taking it?

Matthew 16:26 comes to mind:

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?

The King James Bible

The executives have sold their souls and have no interest in the hard road to redemption. They’re in varying degrees of alignment with the global governance cabal for which Covid and climate change are the Trojan horses. There are the marquee names—Gates, Bezos, Dimon, Zuckerberg, Soros, Schmidt, Thiel, Musk—paid up members of the Davos cabal and irretrievably evil. Then there are the vast majority of executives, mere go-along-to-get-along pawns. Any arguments to them have to be phrased in terms of their mushy philosophy—if you can call it that—unprincipled pragmatism.

The best pragmatic argument—because it appeals to fear, an emotion stronger than greed or power lust—is Jack Ma. The people who run governments are a fickle bunch, unmoored to any concept of honor. One day you’re one of the richest men (people with things hanging down between their legs) in China, the esteemed builder of multinational technology conglomerate Alibaba, and a Communist party stalwart. The next day you’ve been “disappeared” and your company has been pulled off its pedestal by jealous functionaries. You only reappear after long reeducation and quiet contemplation of the gospel according to a totalitarian collectivist (Xi Jinping, On the Party’s Propaganda and Ideological Work, Beijing: Institute of Party History and Documentation of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, 2020, for those yearning to peruse classic communist claptrap).

If you’re a run-of-the-mill executive back in the USSA, the government in whose totalitarianism you are an accomplice may one day nationalize your company under some emergency power it’s granted itself. Don’t be surprised if your friends in government no longer take your calls. You may find yourself out of a job and stripped of your stock options. You may find yourself Jack Ma’ed for reeducation, or “disappeared” for good. Expect no sympathy or defense of your rights from your victims. Even if you’re a big-cheese member of the global cabal, bigger cheese can turn on you in an instant.

So too can financial markets and an economy built on a porous foundation of debt (ask the comrades at Evergrande). Those in-the-money stock options at Dow 35,000 will be worthless at Dow 5,000. The corporate debt that supported the stock price weighs so much heavier in a depression. Not every company can be too big to fail; not every debt-laden zombie can be saved; not every executive has enough friends in Washington.

The central bank and the Treasury swapping their fiat debt instruments—the modern version of currency debasement—isn’t an economic strategy. It’s holding a hand over your head on a cloudy day and hoping it will stop the coming rain. It won’t save the day.

Slogans aren’t a business strategy. Sustainability, diversity, equity, inclusion, green, safety, build back better, and all the other approved words and phrases are no substitute for sales, revenues, and profits—dark words from the dark past. Speaking of dark, this winter millions of people are in danger of power outages when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow, with the fossil fuel power plants that might have served as renewable energy backups decommissioned. By way of analogy, there’s no financial warmth for companies whose corporate PR drips green but whose bottom line drips red.

Bankruptcy is another dark word from the dark past. A few retrograde economists hold that it has its salutary aspects. Assets are repriced as they move from weaker to stronger hands and are redeployed in a more economically rational manner. However, corporations’ reputations for being on the cutting edge of every politically correct trend may not draw much of a bid in bankruptcy auctions, nor will the services of the executives who ran them into the ground.

Executives now in proximity to the top of the heap might want to ponder one other factor, perhaps even worry about it a bit: the rabble. In a depression the common clay won’t be too happy. They might remember who shipped the industrial base to foreign lands. And who cut payrolls and investment in new products and services. And who profited from Washington’s never-ending, fake-money fiat debt, their companies bellying up to the credit trough. And who’s been on the receiving end of the gusher of cash that’s flowed from endless war. And who sucked up to Washington excrement and faithfully peddled the party line. And who were accomplices to Biden’s abominations—the stolen 2020 election, the January 6 persecutions, Covid and climate totalitarianism, promoting the globalists’ great reset, the Afghanistan fiasco, and the invasion at the southern border.

And who canceled the skeptics and critics. Uncouth as we may be in the eyes of our would-be overlords, the Let’s Go Brandon crowd does have memories. We’re perhaps not as stupid as they think. Most of us watch TV and some of us even read and write. There’s an alternative media out there, of which SLL is a proud part, and somehow unapproved truths and criticisms keep seeping out. Search-banishing, demonetizing, and deplatforming are a leaky dike; those truths and criticisms keep seeping.

There’s talk of secession in the air, which of course the oligarchy dismisses. There may come a day when they wish they’d listened and allowed it to happen peacefully. There’s an irreconcilable division in this country between those of us who want to be left alone and the totalitarians we despise. Those who make a peaceful split impossible make a violent split inevitable.

Our side will be the betting favorite. Their side’s military hasn’t won a war since World War II, its most recent defeat to 80,000 goat herders after twenty years of war. It’s stocked with popinjays like General Mark Milley, commanding woke, intersectional troops from which the unvaccinated and politically incorrect have been culled (among them some pretty good troops). Those that remain might not be too eager to shoot family, friends, fellow Americans, and former comrades who switch to our side. And if the oligarchy is counting on police as a second line of defense—the police they’ve been demonizing, defunding, and firing for refusing the shots—they’re perhaps not as bright as reckoned.

Within the Let’s Go Brandon cohort there might be veterans who learned a thing or two about counterinsurgency warfare, having fought the same in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. There might be experts in computers, communications, drones, robots, surveillance gizmos, artificial intelligence, and all the other whiz-bang technology the oligarchy is counting on to keep us in our place. There might be a few who know something about larceny and strategic destruction, particular larceny and strategic destruction of the government’s not always well-secured technology and gizmos. If the goat herders can do it, so can we.

We know who the oligarchs are and where they work, and there’s no hiding those mansions. We’ll find the luxury boltholes. They can run but they can’t hide. Once found, we’ll respect the individual rights they’ve routinely obliterated, and grant them the due process and fair trials they’ve denied Julian Assange and other whistleblowers, the Gitmo prisoners, the January 6 defendants, and the rest of the politically unfavored now on the run or languishing in cells somewhere. Those convicted will face ruination and long sentences, and maybe worse.

Count on it, excrement, justice will be served.