Is America On The Revolution Contagion Hit List ?

One by one they are being mowed down. First it was the Tunisia uprising, and Ben Ali, regime chief since 1987, flees the country. Then swiftly following is the Egyptian revolution, and Hosni Mubarak, regime head thug for 30 years, flees the country. Now quickly coming to a boil are two more head thugs and their long lived, stable empires - Muammar Qaddafi in Libya, in power since he tangled with Reagan, and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, who together with his father has ruled for 40 years. What the heck is happening? These multi-decade power brokers are being dismantled in a matter of months.

It could be a good bit Iran stirring up malcontent for its own geopolitical advantage as many claim. But they have to have a big groundwork of simmering malcontent to begin with. What is all this malcontent and why is it detonating so easily now? I think a lot of it has to do simply with two things - the food shortage and the tech revolution. How so? Well the basic problem with all these people is that they live under the iron boot of freedom repression and forced poverty. They have been for many years, but now the developing food crisis is touching off violence and the smartphone revolution, which I've been predicting since 2009, is greatly facilitating it. The typical revolutionary in these countries has been described as having "a rock in one hand and a cell phone in the other". The thugs can censor the news and lie all they want, but the average Joe in all these places can now learn and organize via phone, and they aren't taking whatever the thugs are giving out anymore.

So what does all this have to do with a similar revolution here in America? Aren't we richer than that and with a better government? Well, I don't know. We may be experiencing the same thing only at a much higher level of comfort. Instead of Ben Ali's regime running things, we have had Ben Bernanke's regime running things for decades. If you include his "fathers" going all the way back to the 1913 founding of the Fed, these thugs have had their way for a hundred years. And what is the result? - big banks too big to fail (or be prosecuted for crimes against the average Joe). Times are still not too good for main street, but excellent for Wall Street. Our fed induced debt burden is now poised to drown our middle class, and our middle class is grabbing a rock in one hand and a smartphone in the other.

Like the fleeing thugs the global Tea Partiers are targeting, the central banker/economy planner elite of the US :

a) say to the other countries, you need us for stability. It would be chaos without us

b) rule by brute military force

c) have a fast growing share of their country's wealth in the hands of a privileged few - oil revenue in Saudi Arabia, financial weapons of mass destruction in the US

The Tea Party revolution in the last election seems to have said the time for this is up. Real government spending cutters were elected. Wisconsin's state senators fleeing the state over the budget battle feels a little like Mubarak fleeing Egypt.

The average Joe American does not want point (a) above as our economic plan. Point (a) was cleverly illustrated by Peter Schiff's story about Consumer Island. He tells the tale of a shipwreck leaving a group of some Asians, Brazilians, and an American on an island. To survive they had to divide up the jobs. One Asian was given the job of fishing. Another was given the job of hunting in the middle of the island. And the Brazilian was given the job of gathering the fire wood. The American was given the job of eating. So they all had jobs and at the end of the day, they all gathered around and the American would eat. But he would save enough for the others so that they could repeat the next day.

China and many others may just boot the American off the island if we don't soon stop chasing capitalism and the entrepreneurial spirit out from our borders with government-knows-best economy-by-committee Five Year Plans. We are becoming the global village idiots, not just of energy policy, but of every other kind of policy. And this is a prime mover in the bull market in gold and silver. Gold's price is a judgment on the soundness of the reserve currency and the government example being set by it.

I was struck by what Donald Trump said to Piers Morgan recently on his CNN show. I'm not a fan of Trump or his possible run for the presidency. But in discussing his international dealings, Trump pointed out a key problem that he says he, or somebody, needs to fix. Referring to the nations around the world, he kept repeating "they don't respect us".

"A wise and frugal government which shall leave men free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned - this is the sum of good government."

These words could well have been said by anyone on Consumer Island or any Tea Party revolutionary. But they were said by Thomas Jefferson.