With Friends Like These…..

….who needs enemies?

Note: Repost: April 5, 2023 (from original, on March 19, 2023)

On April 3, 2023 the following note appeared in my in-box, from Linkedin: "Only you can see this article. It’s been removed because it goes against our Professional Community Policies."

With no response from Linkedin re my inquiries for detailed explanation on my 'infraction,' I toned down the article in certain areas without compromising the message. Hopefully, this time, readers will enjoy this first of a 2 part series.

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About 25 years ago I uprooted my family from Chicago and headed to Europe, thinking I could re-live my Euro-Rail adventures from high school and college--this time with a family.?

Also, I speculated the financial business I had started in Chicago could gain deeper roots in a garden lacking ideas and expertise.?I arrived in Europe just after the Big Bang in London, which had tried to replicate the success in finance across the pond.?Sorry to say, after all these years, Europe is still trying to figure things out. Wall Street and Bahnhofstrasse have rarely seemed so incongruent.

At the time, the US had cache, a label worthy of its young history.?Americans were odd-balls, brash in their confidence and remarkably out of touch with all things Global.?We were an island, and we didn't need to know much about the rest of the world. We drove the dialogue, and we figured everyone else should follow the beat of our drum.

There’s a term we bandy around—'American Exceptionalism.’??Back in those earlier days, the US seemed to embody the better spirit of what this term supposedly implied.?We Americans gave off a whiff of hope and confidence, goodness and naivety, wrapped in a cloak of Consumerism and Capitalism.?Our checks never bounced, and our calling card--the US Dollar—was the holy sacrament we parceled out to everyone we met. America meant business---big business--nobody could get enough of us.

But something ominous happened along the way—in a delayed reaction that took decades to unfold--the effects of which are only now spilling forth for all to see.??The foundation of the house called America--built on commerce, currency, Military and Globalism—has begun to crumble.

For exhibit number one, I give you COVID.?As we are only now coming to understand, and contrary to the latest news, the virus did not begin in a Chinese lab in Wuhan.?In fact, it seems the virus was first funded by US taxpayers, who unwittingly gave their resources over to our military and health services to test and develop an arsenal of bio-weapons—and one of these somehow escaped from a partner lab in China. If the world wants to blame anyone, it should point its eyes toward Washington DC.?Reparations should be made payable to victims forced to take injections, payable against the credit of the US Government.

Yes, Americans still believe in their Government and NGOs, and we assume sending their taxes to 2-or 3-lettered agencies is in the best interests of the world. Americans want to believe in the goodness of their leaders and their motives.?But this is becoming a worn cog in the machine of that aforementioned term—American Exceptionalism.

Enter Big Pharma, one of the largest sub-industries to various arms of governments around the world.?We have only begun to see the fallout of the vaunted injections that have ruined the lives of swathes of the population of the Western World, including many in my own neighborhood here in Europe, who are suffering in the aftermath of these untested potions.?Still unexplained, excess deaths are becoming legend, almost certain to be written into books by historians, biographers and anthropologists responsible for digesting and cataloguing the course of our culture.

Then pivot to the incursion by Russia into the affairs of Europe through Ukraine.?As we are coming to learn, this event was long in the making, and prompted by a handful of American and European government officials who have much to gain,?and who are trying even now to force—through censorship and the scaling back of citizen rights--the belief in a story line that paints Vladimir Putin as the second coming of Satan. And, imagine, there seems to be no screenwriter worthy of pursuing such a juicy story line.??

Again, as with COVID-19, our compliant media is now promoting war and expansion of government power. Sadly, gone forever, is the LEFT of the 1960s and 70s, that protested against government and wars and mind control.? FREEDOM is no longer the Janis Joplin mantra of “nothin' left to lose.” ??For our governments, freedom has become the enemy.?The less we have, the better their prospects of carrying out schemes behind closed doors.

As an American living in Europe, and watching these events unfold—cascade is a better word--I am rightfully skeptical of my own country, and what I see emerging in Europe.?Our exceptionalism has become crass and opportunistic, and unquestioned by most of my fellow citizens.??Democracy has become road-kill.

But I am equally bewildered at the sheep roaming Europe. Amazingly, it appears my fellow Europeans are compliant and more easily led than we Americans—as crazy as this may sound.?Few in authority here in Europe are standing up to the nonsense our Governments are foisting on us.?Nobody realizes the unraveling of societies, or the mind control that social media, bred in Silicon Valley, has managed to export to the world, and in multiple languages, on our mobile phones.?Few here realize their own personal information is now the biggest global commodity.

My hope is that like the hippies of the 1960s, who rallied and sacrificed their lives to stop wars in East Asia, here in Europe, can lead the charge against this American Exceptionalism of the worst kind. Europe lacks confidence, but I find it encouraging that below the surface I can now engage more of my neighbors who have started thinking about these matters, considering them openly.?The title of this piece usually comes up in conversation.

A final note. I won’t yet address the elephant in the room—the decline of the US Dollar, the US economy, and its meaning for the world.?It's a much more ominous development that will, shortly, cause Europe and the world to go its own way. The demise of finance as we have known it may be the last nail in the coffin in the notion of American Exceptionalism. This comes in my next dispatch.???

Stay tuned.