Insurrection For Real

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

"The Democrat agenda is to legalize crime and criminalize the middle class."

- Stephen Miller

Not to put too fine a point on it: but whenever a lawfare ninja of the Democratic Party utters the phrase "our democracy," you must know that they are completely full of shit. For sure, they do not mean anything remotely related to an American commonweal, as understood by people of sound mind and good faith.

What they mean by "our democracy" is the state as a racketeering operation run for the sole benefit of their party members, along with the ruthless power to annihilate their opponents and critics.

Norm Eisen, Democratic Party Lawfare Ninja Supreme

The war-cry "our democracy" only signifies how degenerate they have become. Though they yearn to win control of Congress in these midterm elections by any means necessary, the party's actual prospects are not so great, having nominated a pack of obvious morons and reprobates such as Abdul el-Sayed (MI), James Talarico (TX), Angie Nixon (FL), Troy Jackson (ME), and Peggy Flanagan (MN) for the US Senate.

Now, it appears that President Donald Trump is determined to clean up our fraud-ridden election process this year, one way or another. Hopes are nearly dead for Congress passing a comprehensive election reform law, the SAVE Act, so he has looked to other measures. One is a procedure for the US Postal Service to match and track mail-in ballots to real persons with actual addresses listed on state voter rolls. The matter is still working through courts. The DOJ's Civil Rights Division has pledged to send about 1000 election monitors to polling places around the country as "observers," which could obviate arrant shenanigans like the broken toilet ploy in Fulton County, GA, 2020.

Mr. Trump could go further, as discussed here recently, and declare a National Security Executive Order with more exacting rules such as requiring proof of citizenship and photo ID at the polls, and reporting election results no later than the day following the election. The Democratic Party is fighting desperately to prevent any changes to current procedure with so much room for fraud.

The effort is led by chief lawfare ninja Norm Eisen, who is associated with several activist NGOs: the States United Democracy Center (founder); State Democracy Defenders PAC; Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW); the Brookings Institution; plus his own pro bono litigation practice, Norma Eisen PLLC.

Eisen enjoys many millions of dollars in backing that have enabled him to file hundreds of court cases against Trump administration actions, including the recent suits against the US Postal Service mail-in ballot plan. His own NGOs are backed by hundreds of other NGOs both here and globally, many of which have been involved in color revolutions in foreign countries. Eisen himself has played a part in many episodes of the long-running color revolution here in the USA, including RussiaGate, the 2020 fake impeachment, and the Jan-6 House Committee. All that could be described in totality as a seditious coup attempt - and it's all currently under investigation by several federal grand juries.

Likewise, lawfare ninja Marc Elias, who operates his election activities through Democracy Docket (founder); the Free election Fund; the Democracy Forward Foundation (board chair); We the Action; plus his own firm, the Elias Law Group. He was formerly a lawyer with the DC law firm Perkins Coie, through which he served as general counsel to the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. He shepherded the Steele Dossier into the Intel apparatus and around the news media.

All that is a prelude to a disturbing roll-out of events that anyone paying attention can see coming this fall.

The Democratic Party has massive resources not just to stall and obstruct pre-election reform, but to mount a vicious resistance after the fact if it doesn't produce their desired result. They could go as far as to repudiate the election, refuse to accept its results. If the president does issue that NatSec EO prior to the election, blue state officials could refuse to hold elections under new rules. Thirty states have already refused to comply with DOJ demands to submit their official voter rolls for evaluation. Some of the aforementioned activist NGOs have promised post-election street actions (demonstrations that could easily turn into riots).

In the face of that, you can foresee the necessity of the president having to invoke the Insurrection Act of 1878 (10 U.S.C. §§ 251-255). The act provides an exception to the Posse Commitatus Act, also 1878, which forbids the use of the US military to act as police inside the USA. Under the Insurrection Act, the president can federalize states' national guard units to enforce federal law or protect constitutional rights when ordinary civilian means are not enough.

The Act has been used before in our history about thirty times by fifteen presidents, including the Great Railway Strike of 1877 (Pres. Hayes); the Pullman Strike of 1894 (Pres. Cleveland); the Little Rock School Desegregation resistance of 1957 (Pres. Eisenhower sent in the 82nd Airborne). Pres. Lyndon Johnson invoked it three times: the Selma to Montgomery March of 1965; the Detroit riots of 1967; and the riots that followed the Assassination of Martin Luther King, 1968. Pres. George H. W. Bush used it in 1994 to quell the Rodney King Riots in Los Angeles.

If Mr. Trump invokes the Insurrection Act around any violence or organized election rebellion this year, he will invite the Democrats to label him an autocrat, a tyrant, a wannabe king, as they have been taunting him and goading him with for years. Let's suppose that will be enough to inflame the party's activists. I think you can see how this lays the groundwork for something that looks like a new civil war. The repudiation of election results by blue states would be enough.

Know this: it won't work. It will result in charges of sedition and many Democratic officials will be arrested and charged, probably some governors. It will be a really ugly episode in our history, but we'll get through it. Of course, it will be the end of the Democratic Party.

Tyler Durden Fri, 09/04/2026 - 16:20
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Insurrection For Real

The Elephant In The Canadian Room

Authored by Victor Davis Hanson via American Greatness,

At first glance, the current American-Canadian trade "war" is absurd. We are neighbors with a long history of close friendship, speak the same language (for the most part), and spring from the same British civilization.

Nearly one million Canadians reside in the United States.

Given the two countries' natural affinities, Canadians are nearly indistinguishable from Americans.

Both sides have reasonable grievances over trade policy.

Americans don't like Canada's perennial trade surpluses of more than $50 billion in a supposedly free-trade zone.

They resent the fact that non-free-market China exports subsidized cheap steel and aluminum through Canada, giving Canadian auto and truck exports a price advantage.

The United States also objects to Canada imposing a surcharge on American digital media companies to subsidize Canadian Indigenous and French-language content.

Americans further resent Prime Minister Mark Carney's backing out of an apparent deal at the eleventh hour. He apparently hoped to gin up Canadian nationalism on the eve of two key elections in Alberta and Quebec by attacking Trump, who is unpopular in Canada.

Ascendant separatist movements in both provinces threaten to unravel the Canadian nation.

Moreover, Carney expects the dispute to damage Trump on the eve of the U.S. midterm elections, which might reduce his leverage over Canada.

Canada, in turn, resents American demands concerning its importation of Chinese goods as an infringement upon its sovereignty.

It increasingly believes that the sheer size of the United States next door - 13 times larger in nominal GDP and nine times larger in population - threatens to overwhelm Canada's unique culture.

Canada maintains that its trade surplus results largely from U.S. imports of Canadian oil sands petroleum - a mutually beneficial arrangement. It is also tired of Trump's trolling and mockery.

But even these differences could easily be resolved, given our centuries of friendship.

So what is the unspoken source of the acrimony?

The United States is leaping ahead of other Western countries in ways few anticipated several decades ago, while Canada is stagnating.

America is the world's largest producer of oil and natural gas.

Its technology, software, biotechnology, digital media, satellite, and numerous other companies dominate global rankings.

American GDP is roughly $10 trillion larger than either China's or the European Union's. Yet China has four times the population of the United States, while the European Union has 100 million more people.

The U.S. military is the world's most lethal and is now being rebuilt with even greater defense spending.

Moreover, the United States has not been shy about warning its Western friends that their socialist paradigms and leftist policies threaten their very existence.

The EU suffers from unsustainably low fertility.

Massive and often illegal immigration threatens the very culture and values of Europe.

Green hysteria has nearly wrecked the German and British economies.

Until Russia invaded Ukraine and Trump began his harangues, European NATO members were de facto disarming.

Yet Canada - especially under the globalist prime ministers Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney - has adopted much of this ossified European model.

The result is a sluggish economy. Also left unspoken is Canada's growing reliance on the U.S. market, American continental defenses, and the general goodwill of the United States.

Until last year, Canada had refused to honor its NATO commitment to spend 2 percent of GDP on defense.

It has thrown open its border even as the United States is closing its own.

Some 45 percent of Canadian residents are either foreign-born or the children of immigrants.

The majority come from impoverished, non-Western countries and immediately depend upon a vast social welfare system that the present anemic economy cannot sustain.

Utopian think tanks speak grandly of a Canadian "Century Initiative" that would bring in enough immigrants to increase the population to 100 million. But sheer numbers will hardly remedy the country's underlying demographic and economic stagnation.

How mostly non-Western immigrants are to be integrated, assimilated, and acculturated in a country that has forsaken anything remotely resembling the idea of a melting pot is never explained.

The tragic irony is that Canada once punched well above its demographic weight, with a formidable military and a dynamic economy.

Not anymore. Its per capita GDP is now among the lowest in the industrialized West.

Yet Canada has the fifth-largest oil and natural-gas reserves in the world, even as green restrictions and provincial infighting nullify those natural advantages.

In timber, metals, and mineral resources, Canada ranks among the world's top five nations.

Apparently, Canada believes that opening its economy, insisting upon legal, meritocratic, diverse, and measured immigration, and fully developing its natural wealth would be a bitter medicine worse than even its present maladies.

For all America's unsolicited advice and tough-love attitude, the United States would prefer a strong Canadian partner to a dependent one.

That growing asymmetry explains much of this otherwise inexplicable melodrama.

Tyler Durden Thu, 09/03/2026 - 16:20
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The Elephant In The Canadian Room

Market Valuation: Expensive CAPE Or Cheap PEG?

Authored by Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The S&P 500’s Shiller CAPE ratio just hit 41. Since 1881, the market valuation has been more expensive under CAPE only once. That was during the final months of the dot-com bubble. At the same time the CAPE is ringing warning bells, the PEG ratio, which measures price relative to expected earnings growth, is at its lowest level in at least three decades, possibly its cheapest reading ever.

One market valuation says run for cover while another says bargain. Both market valuation tools use data from the same 500 S&P companies but interpret the market completely differently.

Confusing, yes, but the disagreement between the two charts comes down to one question: Is the past a better predictor of the future than the wisdom of Wall Street?

To answer our question, we’ll first summarize what each ratio measures, then dig into expected growth versus historical growth, the culprit behind the big difference in the two graphs.  

CAPE Isn’t Perfect

The P/E ratio is one of the most quoted market valuation gauges for stocks and stock indexes. While valuable, it rests on one bold and often wrong assumption: future earnings will match past earnings. In other words, it doesn’t capture how earnings may change.

For the CAPE valuation, the assumption is similar, but instead of using the most recent one year of earnings to assess value, it uses ten years of earnings. This better smooths earnings, reducing the impact of short periods of economic volatility.  But it has the same vulnerability, assuming the future will be just like the past.

P/E tends to be most useful for comparing companies with similar earnings growth, but it is less useful when analyzing high-growth companies or those with the potential to change their growth trajectory.

Despite its flaws, the CAPE valuation strongly correlates with future market returns, as shown in the graph below comparing CAPE valuations and forward ten-year S&P 500 returns. While the CAPE provides a good indicator of expected returns over the full next ten years, it doesn’t provide a roadmap for the monthly and annual returns that make up the period.

The PEG Ratio

The PEG ratio builds on the P/E ratio framework but uses future earnings growth estimates instead of prior realized earnings. Because it uses estimates, it can change rapidly.  

The PEG ratio calculation is the forward P/E divided by the expected 3–5-year earnings growth.

To better appreciate today’s PEG ratio, we break down the numerator, forward P/E, and the denominator, G (3-5-year growth estimates).

Forward P/E

The numerator in the PEG ratio is the forward P/E. Instead of using the trailing twelve months of earnings as in the traditional P/E ratio, the forward P/E uses earnings estimates for the coming twelve months. Thus, its value depends heavily on how well Wall Street can predict earnings for the coming 12 months.  

We can analyze the effectiveness of one-year earnings forecasts in a couple of different ways.

First, we can compare the trailing 12-month P/E to the forward P/E and imply expected earnings for the next year. We can then compare the implied earnings with actual earnings. Using this method, the top two charts below show that Wall Street almost always overestimates earnings and by a wide margin at times.

The second way to grade Wall Street’s forecasting ability is to compare final one-year forecasts with those made at the start of the period. The graph below reinforces the graphs above: Wall Street tends to overestimate earnings.  EPS estimates were reduced in nine of the ten years spanning 2016 through 2025.  However, the trend has changed with 2026 and 2027 estimates trending higher than original forecasts.

G: 3- 5 Year Expected Earnings Growth

Forecasting earnings for just 12 months forward is extremely difficult for Wall Street professionals. Accordingly, forecasting three- to five-years of earnings growth (G in the PEG ratio) is much trickier and more error-prone.

(Note: for this article, we use four-year expected earnings growth to balance out the three-to-five-year range of estimates.)

To assess the effectiveness of longer term forecasts, we can use historical PEG and forward P/E ratios to back out an implied four-year growth rate. As we did with one-year estimates, we then compare that to the actual four-year growth that ensued.

The graph below shows there is very little correlation between four-year earnings growth estimates and actual growth. As we saw with one-year estimates, the market overestimated earnings far more often than it underestimated them.

Deciphering Today’s PEG Ratio

The graph below shows the market PEG valuation and its two components- forward P/E and 3-5 year earnings estimates.

The middle graph shows the forward P/E (the numerator) is stretched, indicating a relatively expensive valuation. Despite the forward P/E, the PEG ratio in the top graph is cheap because the longer-term earnings growth estimate shown in the bottom graph is at its highest level since at least 1995. The takeaway is that the PEG ratio is cheap entirely because of strong earnings-growth forecasts.

The G Is Concentrated

The hardest part of analyzing the “G” in the PEG ratio is the abnormal divergence in recent earnings trends and earnings expectations between a few large tech companies and the large majority of other S&P 500 companies.

Second-quarter earnings results exemplify this problem. In a mid-July summary of the quarter, with roughly a third of the stocks in the index still to report, FactSet reported the Magnificent 7 was growing earnings 31.1% year over year versus a blended rate near 25% for the index. Only a few weeks later, on August 7, the quarter’s growth rate more than doubled to 50.4%.

Most of that acceleration traced back to two companies. Alphabet and Amazon, both large earnings contributors, reported significant non-operating gains. Alphabet reported a $98 billion mark-up in its equity portfolio primarily due to SpaceX, and Amazon added a $53 billion gain largely from Anthropic. Strip out those gains, and FactSet’s blended growth rate for the S&P 500 falls from 50.4% to 32.0%. Two companies, out of five hundred, are worth eighteen full percentage points of index earnings growth.

This leads to a big question. Can ten or so large-cap technology companies carry earnings growth for a 500-company index? Hyperscalers are on pace to spend roughly $700 billion on AI infrastructure in 2026 and are projected to top $1 trillion in 2027. That spending shows up today as reported capex and, eventually, as revenue for a small number of companies selling the chips, the cloud capacity, and the construction and power systems supporting it. It does not contribute much to the earnings growth for the other companies in the index.

Is The Market Rich Or Cheap?

Think of this market valuation conundrum between PEG and CAPE like your favorite sports team that’s been mediocre for a decade. Ten years of results argue that your expectations for next season should be minimal.  But during the offseason, the team signed a few all-stars, and a reasonable fan would bump up their expectations regardless of the last ten years.

The historical losing record is real, and so is the upgraded roster. The substantial growth estimates are making a big bet that the new players will significantly help the team. The question investors need to ask is whether they will help generate more wins than the market expects.

So, how should investors think about today’s stock market valuations? The answer likely sits between rich and cheap. If earnings keep growing rapidly alongside AI spending, the market, in aggregate, may be fairly priced despite CAPE’s warning. But a recession, or a slowdown in planned AI spending, is a real risk to that outcome.

That said, while the optimism embedded in the PEG ratio carries downside risks, we must also consider that AI’s productivity gains will eventually spread to other S&P 500 companies. The open questions are when, how much, and most importantly for pricing today’s market, how that eventual payoff compares to what’s already priced in.

Summary

CAPE uses historical realized data to value stocks.  You can debate whether the past decade is a fair guide for valuing stocks, but you can’t debate whether the earnings in CAPE’s denominator are real; they are.

PEG asks you to rely on one-year and three-to-five-year earnings estimates.  This leaves the obvious question of how much current forecasts deserve to be trusted. The historical answer, as we showed, is not very much.

Nine of the last ten annual EPS estimates were revised lower before they were finished. Thirty years’ worth of four-year growth estimates show no statistical relationship to the growth that followed.

However, today’s outlook is trickier than in the past, as the expected growth making today’s PEG ratio look so cheap is disproportionately concentrated in a small handful of companies. That earnings growth concentration hinges on AI, a powerful innovation that could be an economic game changer.

PEG says market valuations are cheap while CAPE says they are expensive. CAPE is a report card on what already happened. PEG is a bet on what happens next. Keep that distinction in mind, and the two market valuation charts stop contradicting each other.

Tyler Durden Wed, 09/02/2026 - 15:05
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Market Valuation: Expensive CAPE Or Cheap PEG?

Pentagon Launches Grok And ChatGPT For Military Use

Authored by Timothy Frudd via The Epoch Times,

The Department of War announced the launch of two new artificial intelligence (AI) platforms for military use on Aug. 31, expanding the department's platform of AI assistants for military personnel.

Starshield AI's Grok for Government and OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil were both added to the War Department's GenAI.mil generative AI platform on Monday. The Aug. 31 launch came months after the Pentagon announced a partnership with OpenAI to deploy AI models on the Pentagon's classified networks and a partnership with Elon Musk's xAI service to assist personnel with controlled unclassified information.

Announcing the launch of Starshield AI's Grok for Government, the War Department said the AI tool would enable the military to execute missions faster and with more precision in multiple operational contexts. Examples of such contexts include supply chain management for logisticians and market research analysis for acquisition professionals.

The Pentagon said Starshield AI's Grok for Government would provide military personnel with "immediate productivity gains, stronger knowledge continuity, and more secure and efficient collaboration." Capabilities department personnel will have access to include adaptive reasoning modes, customizable workspaces, deep-thinking inference, persistent projects, and reusable "playbooks."

Starshield AI's Grok for Government was accredited for controlled unclassified information at impact level five, a designation given to unclassified information that still requires security safeguards. It was also engineered for "secure, consistent enterprise use," according to the War Department.

With the addition of Starshield AI's Grok for Government to the department's GenAI.mil platform, the Pentagon said military members would have access to another "top-tier generative AI tool." The Pentagon also said the addition of another AI tool would promote a "vibrant" AI ecosystem for the United States and would eliminate its dependence on a single AI provider.

The War Department also announced Monday that it had launched OpenAI's ChatGPT Mil as part of its GenAI.mil platform. Like Starshield AI's Grok for Government, OpenAI's ChatGPT was accredited for controlled unclassified information at impact level five.

"ChatGPT Mil brings a familiar commercial experience into the Department's secure environment, tailored to warfighter needs," the Pentagon said. "The core experience centers on chat, files, projects, and custom GPTs, with additional features sequenced over time."

The department said ChatGPT Mil will support document-heavy unclassified work, including planning, logistics, administration, and policy. Built to support more than 3 million personnel, the AI platform will increase the speed of routine tasks and allow personnel to concentrate on "more critical projects across the Joint Force," the Pentagon said.

"Integrating ChatGPT Mil into GenAI.mil alongside existing frontier AI capabilities establishes a robust, multi-model ecosystem for the warfighter," it added.

The Epoch Times reached out to Starshield AI and OpenAI for comment but did not receive a response before publication time.

The War Department confirmed Monday that more than 1.7 million of its more than 3 million personnel have been onboarded for the department's generative AI platform since GenAI.mil was launched nine months ago.

The launch of the two AI tools for use by War Department personnel comes after the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency warned in June that unauthorized "shadow AI" tools could cause data leaks and lead to other security risks.

"Shadow AI encompasses two distinct threat vectors: the intentional use of external commercial or private [large language models], and the activation of embedded AI features within existing government and sensitive networks that have not yet been fully evaluated for security risks," the agency wrote in an assessment.

"When bypassing traditional security controls, both vectors create a massive, unmonitored attack surface where new risks outpace current technical safeguards and governance."

Tyler Durden Tue, 09/01/2026 - 14:20
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Pentagon Launches Grok And ChatGPT For Military Use

Rickards: The Dollar's Not Dying

Authored by James Rickards via The Daily Reckoning,

Last week's financial media was full of apocalyptic headlines: "$40 trillion in national debt!" "U.S. debt in a doom loop!" "The end of the dollar is near!"

Gold and bitcoin soared in lockstep with the dollar doom and gloom. If you took the headlines at face value, one would assume the dollar was already toast and U.S. Treasuries were worth no more than digital confetti.

The truth is that the dollar's position as the leading reserve currency is not in jeopardy. Of course, foreign exchange reserves are not simply piles of currency. They are largely held in liquid financial assets, including U.S. Treasury securities denominated in dollars.

Dollar-denominated assets will dominate global reserves for decades to come.

The reason is simple. There are few sovereign bond markets with the size, liquidity and depth of the U.S. Treasury market. Other large government bond markets, including Japan and major European markets, do not offer the same combination of scale and liquidity. King dollar will remain king.

This does not mean interest rates won't rise or inflation won't increase. Both are likely. But neither means the end of the dollar. It just means the Treasury pays more to borrow and you pay more at the gas pump and grocery store.

So, there are problems in the dollar bond markets, but debasement-trade hysteria is not a useful way to understand them.

BESSENT GOES AFTER THE BOND MARKET

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has just announced a plan to address higher interest rates in U.S. Treasury securities markets and, by extension, mortgage and credit card markets. It has both long-term and short-term components.

One short-term component involves U.S. support for Japan's efforts to prop up the yen, including joint currency intervention and potential greater use of the Federal Reserve's FIMA Repo Facility. That facility allows Japan to borrow dollars against its U.S. Treasury holdings rather than selling those securities outright.

In turn, that could take pressure off U.S. interest rates. Japan is the world's largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, with about $1.12 trillion as of June.

Another short-term component is for the Treasury to purchase longer-dated Treasury securities, specifically those in the 10- to 30-year sectors. The Treasury recently announced that it will at least double the size of certain scheduled buyback operations from $2 billion to $4 billion, with the possibility of going higher.

Treasury has also relied heavily on short-term maturities such as one-month, three-month and six-month Treasury bills in its overall financing mix. These Treasury bills generally carry lower interest rates than longer-dated notes and bonds. Greater reliance on shorter maturities can lower U.S. interest expense, at least in the short run.

Treasury bills are also prized by dealers and hedge funds because they are highly liquid and are widely used as collateral in financial transactions. Supporting liquidity at the long end while maintaining a large supply of short-term Treasury securities makes sense. Why it is causing such hysteria in the media is a bit of a mystery.

BESSENT'S 3-3-3 GAMBIT

The longer-term component of the Bessent Plan is sometimes referred to as the Three Arrows.

The first arrow is to keep annual deficits at 3.0% or less of GDP. The second arrow is to achieve GDP growth of 3.0% or more. The third arrow is to increase U.S. energy production by the equivalent of 3 million barrels of oil per day.

That's where the shorthand 3-3-3 comes from: a 3% deficit, 3% real GDP growth and 3 million additional barrels of oil equivalent per day.

Since oil output does not directly impact fiscal policy, we can leave that to one side in our analysis. The deficit and GDP growth targets, however, are critical.

The metric that really matters in terms of whether investors have confidence in U.S. Treasury securities is the U.S. debt-to-GDP ratio. It's silly to hyperventilate about $40 trillion as the U.S. national debt unless you put that number in the context of the GDP available to finance and roll over the debt.

Right now, gross U.S. federal debt is roughly 123% of GDP. That's the result of approximately $40 trillion of debt divided by roughly $32.5 trillion of annualized nominal GDP. That ratio is near the highest levels in U.S. history.

High debt-to-GDP ratios can be a drag on growth and leave governments with less room to respond to crises. A ratio of 60% is much more comfortable. A ratio of 30% is more comfortable still. The previous postwar high was reached around the end of World War II.

The annual deficit will not go down to zero. That's a fantasy. The level of U.S. national debt will also not go down anytime soon. That's another fantasy.

But that doesn't matter.

What does matter is whether the debt-to-GDP ratio goes down.

The way to do that is to grow the economy faster than the debt. If you can do that, the ratio goes down even if the debt goes up. That's Bessent's plan. That's what he meant when he said the U.S. could "grow its way out" of the debt problem. In theory, he was right.

For example, let's say annual deficits are $2 trillion so that a year from now the national debt will be $42 trillion. That's a 5.0% increase in the national debt.

But if GDP grows from $32.5 trillion to $34.5 trillion, that's a 6.2% increase. The debt-to-GDP ratio drops from roughly 123% to 121.7%. That's still high, but it's lower than the year before.

That's all the so-called bond market vigilantes need to see. As long as the debt-to-GDP ratio is coming down, bond investors have reason to retain confidence in U.S. Treasuries and the U.S. dollar.

The U.S. has done this before. The gross federal debt-to-GDP ratio reached roughly 119% in 1946 and was down to about 31% by 1980. That process took more than three decades and occurred under both parties using a combination of fiscal and monetary policy, strong nominal growth and inflation.

During that period, the national debt increased substantially. But GDP increased by more than 1,000%. And that was the key. If GDP grows faster than debt, the ratio comes down and America's fiscal position improves.

HERE'S THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

So, that's the plan. But there's a dirty little secret that Bessent has not emphasized.

When the government computes debt-to-GDP ratios, it's using nominal numbers, not numbers adjusted for inflation.

In the example above, GDP grew by about 6.2% while the national debt grew by 5.0%. That lowers the ratio, but it does not reveal how much of the GDP growth was real and how much was inflation.

The 6.2% nominal growth could have been 4.2% real growth plus 2.0% inflation. That's fairly healthy. But it could have been 2.2% real growth plus 4.0% inflation.

At 4.0% annual inflation, the purchasing power of the dollar is cut roughly in half in about 18 years and cut in half again over the next 18 years. That kind of inflation can destroy your net worth and income if you're not prepared.

So, how much inflation is included in the Bessent Plan? Secretary Bessent didn't say.

Investors should assume the worst.

The U.S. has had difficulty sustaining real growth of more than about 2.0% per year on average since the global financial crisis. If we need roughly 6.0% nominal growth to outrun the growth in debt and if we can only produce 2.0% real growth per year, then the difference has to come from inflation.

That could mean 4.0% inflation.

That's not a policy preference. It's just fifth-grade math.

In describing how the U.S. lowered its debt-to-GDP ratio dramatically between the end of World War II and 1980, I conveniently omitted the fact that consumer prices rose about 50% between 1977 and 1981.

That's one way the U.S. government took care of the debt problem.

I lived through that period. It was a fun time if you owned gold or real estate, if you used leverage and if you had a job that gave you a raise every few months.

It was not a fun time if you depended on fixed-income streams like annuities, insurance policies, pension plans or Social Security.

Which side of that trade are you on?

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Mon, 08/31/2026 - 15:00
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Rickards: The Dollar's Not Dying

The Mother Of All Mean Reversions: Commodities Have Never Been This Cheap Versus Stocks

Across Wall Street, from Barclays and UBS to HSBC, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, a common view is taking shape: physical scarcity is emerging across multiple commodity classes, driving prices sharply higher and signaling a broader hard-asset squeeze.

Last week, UBS strategist Sagar Khandelwal issued a similar call heard across Wall Street, telling clients to “position for a commodity upcycle.”

On Saturday, Christopher LaFemina, who heads Jefferies’ global metals and mining research and is one of Wall Street’s veteran commodity experts, told clients that commodities remain historically cheap relative to US stocks.

LaFemina compared the S&P GSCI with the S&P 500, showing the ratio hovering near its lowest level in more than five decades. Similar troughs emerged during the Nifty Fifty and dot-com bubbles before commodities sharply outperformed stocks.

Previous upcycles in the ratio coincided with the 1970s oil embargo and inflation shock, the Gulf War, and the 2008 oil-price surge. Today’s depressed reading comes as retail and institutional investors remain bullish up to their eyeballs on hyperscalers and memory stocks while remaining highly concentrated in a handful of other AI names. And really, what could go wrong if the AI boom begins to deflate?

The trough in the ratio comes as traders ignore commodity markets, where the theme of scarce physical resources is rearing its ugly head:

• Got Hard Assets? UBS Says "Position For A Commodity Upcycle" As Global Scarcity Emerges
• Barclays Warns Next Commodity Shock Is Taking Shape: What You Need To Know
• "Buffers Running Down Quickly": HSBC Warns Next Global Food Shock Brewing
• The AI Boom Runs On Tungsten, But Global Supplies Are "Running On Empty"

Agricultural prices are soaring; copper is trading above $14,000 per ton in London; tungsten is above $3,000 per ton; uranium is back above $90 per pound; and many other critical materials (seen as the building blocks for the AI boom) are surging as demand accelerates. Electrification, AI buildout demand, rising power consumption, geopolitical fragmentation, including China’s weaponization of export supplies (tungsten and germanium), and years of underinvestment are colliding to create a perfect storm of constrained supplies across energy, metals, and other raw materials.

Agricultural commodities have just broken decisively above nearly 20 years of resistance.

And this is happening while:

▪️Diesel prices approach all-time highs
▪️Mortgage rates hover near 7%, with housing already deeply unaffordable
▪️Wealth inequality stands near historic… pic.twitter.com/rgJfZgUPBC

— Otavio (Tavi) Costa (@TaviCosta) August 29, 2026

"The 10-year rolling change in the US dollar remains one of the most important macro developments in the world today," Azuria Capital's Otavio Costa wrote on X. 

The 10-year rolling change in the US dollar remains one of the most important macro developments in the world today.

We are likely witnessing the beginning of a secular decline in the dollar — a necessary adjustment to the significant trade deficit the US economy faces today.… pic.twitter.com/uWqXcX3QUr

— Otavio (Tavi) Costa (@TaviCosta) August 30, 2026

It's time to focus on "scarcity in the physical world," according to veteran commodities strategist Jeff Currie, who also warned, "The illusion of abundance is likely behind us."

Tyler Durden Sun, 08/30/2026 - 16:20
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The Mother Of All Mean Reversions: Commodities Have Never Been This Cheap Versus Stocks

"Profound Game-Changer": Musk Launching New Turbine Blade Factory To Solve Shortage Threatening AI Boom

SpaceX is making an aggressive push into the power generation market, with The Information reporting that Elon Musk is preparing to address one of the most critical bottlenecks threatening America's data-center buildout: the shortage of advanced gas turbine components, particularly the blades and vanes needed to power massive data center campuses.

SpaceX is laying the groundwork for a new factory in Bastrop, Texas, that would manufacture high-temperature blades and vanes for industrial gas turbines. The move could allow Musk to circumvent the severe turbine blade shortage that has pushed availability toward 2030.

On X, Musk responded to the report, saying, "The limiting factor for nat gas turbine production is casting the blades & vanes. By doing in-house casting at SpaceX, we can accelerate nat gas turbines coming online by up to 18 months, which is a profound game-changer."

SpaceX and Tesla are each building 100GW/year of solar production capacity as fast as possible, but natural gas will still be needed to supplement and bootstrap solar for several years.

The limiting factor for nat gas turbine production is casting the blades & vanes. By doing…

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 29, 2026

Musk previously warned about the shortage during a recent podcast, saying, "Turbines are sold out through 2030. In order to bring enough power online, SpaceX and Tesla will probably have to make the turbine blades and vanes internally. There are only three casting companies in the world that make these, and they're massively backlogged."

ELON MUSK: “Turbines are sold out through 2030. In order to bring enough power online, SpaceX and Tesla will probably have to make the turbine blades and vanes internally. There are only three casting companies in the world that make these, and they’re massively backlogged.” pic.twitter.com/YlKHznBXhK

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) August 29, 2026

A Federal Trade Commission filing shows that Musk has acquired APR Energy, a provider of mobile gas turbine power plants used by data centers, utilities, and industrial customers.

Musk's acquisition of APR Energy also gives him access to a mobile fleet built around GE TM2500 and Mitsubishi FT8 turbines, which typically produce 20-35 MW per unit.

SpaceX is targeting roughly 10 gigawatts of AI computing capacity by the end of 2027, while Musk has said the company wants substantially more power and cooling infrastructure.

Consensus estimate is that ~15GW of AI compute produced in 2027 cannot be turned on in 2027.

This is harder than just finding power, as you also need to build out all the transformers, wiring, liquid-cooling, (massive) chillers & complex networking. https://t.co/cRXJ1Wrkri

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 29, 2026

This all signals that Musk views the turbine shortage as a direct threat to SpaceX's data center buildout timeline. Rather than wait on constrained outside suppliers, he is moving aggressively to vertically integrate another critical layer of the AI infrastructure stack across his business empire.

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"Profound Game-Changer": Musk Launching New Turbine Blade Factory To Solve Shortage Threatening AI Boom

Barclays Warns Next Commodity Shock Is Taking Shape: What You Need To Know

Wall Street coverage of a record-breaking Super El Niño is only growing as agricultural commodities break out. Yet the rally extends well beyond the agricultural complex, with industrial metals and other critical materials showing signs of tightness in physical markets.

Whether it is veteran commodities strategist Jeff Currie turning bullish or UBS urging clients this week to "position for a commodity upcycle," the message is becoming louder: Commodity markets are tightening as adverse weather, years of underinvestment, declining inventories, and China's restrictions on critical-material exports converge into what appears to be an emerging supply shock. 

Focusing on the agricultural complex, Craig Rye, a sustainable investing research analyst at Barclays, wrote in a note on Friday that El Niño is strengthening in the tropical Pacific, threatening to disrupt global agriculture, energy production, and industrial commodity markets. 

Rye cited new multi-model forecasts from the International Research Institute for Climate and Society showing that the El Niño index could peak near 3.2 degrees Celsius between late 2026 and early 2027. If realized, the event would be about 15% stronger than the 2015-16 Super El Niño.

Rye explained:

Rising confidence in a historic El Niño increases the likelihood of significant disruptions across agricultural, energy and industrial commodity markets. Historical El Niño events have often been associated with

Rye expects the largest near-term risks concentrated in weather-sensitive agricultural commodities. Palm oil, coconut oil and rubber could climb 30% to 40% over the next 18 months, while robusta coffee could rise 20% to 30%. Rice prices may advance 10% to 20% as drought threatens crops and water supplies across Southeast Asia and parts of Central America.

He warned that the supply shock could then spread into industrial commodities, expecting aluminum and copper to gain as much as 20% over 18 months, while thermal coal could surge 20% to 40%. Mining disruptions, reduced hydropower generation and shifting electricity demand would amplify the effects of drought and extreme weather.

Rye identified Bunge and Archer-Daniels-Midland as potential agricultural beneficiaries. Norsk Hydro, South32 and Rio Tinto could benefit from higher aluminum prices, while Freeport-McMoRan, Hudbay Minerals, First Quantum Minerals and Southern Copper offer exposure to the bank's bullish copper scenario.

The most important reads this week: 

1. "Dark" Tanker Fleet Shatters Iran's Hormuz Stranglehold As Gulf Oil Exports Top Two-Thirds Of Pre-War Level

2. Got Hard Assets? UBS Says "Position For A Commodity Upcycle" As Global Scarcity Emerges

3. Zinc Hits Four-Year High As "Extremely Thin" Physical Supply Fuels Squeeze

4. US Tungsten Scrap Export Ban Takes Effect As Global Supply Crisis Deepens

5. Wheat Futs Surge To Three-Year High As JPMorgan, HSBC Warn Global Food Shock Is Brewing

6. "Buffers Running Down Quickly": HSBC Warns Next Global Food Shock Brewing

7. Uranium Awakens From Five-Month Slumber As UBS Warns Market Is "Tightening Structurally"

8. The AI Boom Runs On Tungsten, But Global Supplies Are "Running On Empty"

9. Diesel Crack Spread Madness Deepens As Jefferies Finds No Easy Exit From Russia's Refining Crisis

Across all commodities, here are the latest X trends: 

1. Warsh Jackson Hole smash: gold -3%, silver -3% to -4.5%

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh's hawkish JH remarks (inflation "not meaningfully" improved, 2% target firm, hike still live) sent COMEX gold down ~$130-$150 to ~$4,478-$4,530 and silver off $2-$3 to the mid-$60s. Dollar to a 2-week high; 10y near 4.7%. @AstraInsights: gold's 2nd-worst Jackson Hole reaction on record (behind 1990). 

2. Hormuz "open" vs IRGC reality check — oil weekly loss on a contested narrative

WTI/Brent booked ~4-6.5% weekly losses as traders priced in more Hormuz throughput and a possible US-Iran off-ramp. Weekend X counters: @Currentreport1 (video of queued ships; IRGC accuses US of talking the strait open to cap prices); @MenchOsint (UAE-managed tanker ELLIE turned around after attempting the US-backed southern corridor). 

3. Venezuela 65-billion-barrel "deal" goes viral on X

@GuntherEagleman and copy-accounts pushing Trump/Rubio/Hegseth + Delcy Rodríguez pact: majority US control of 65bn barrels, 17 fields, $100bn private capex, "zero taxpayer cost." High engagement overnight; pushback thread from @EmmaRincon (4.8k likes) that the interlocutor choice hands the Latin left a decade of ammo. Capital Economics already asking what a US-Venezuela heavy-sour deal does to Canadian/Mexican barrels. 

4. Wheat to a 3-year high as Black Sea crisis deepens

WSJ tape and @staunovo: wheat jumped ~3% Friday toward $7.60-$7.83 as strikes hit grain ships and export terminals. Region still ~1/3 of global wheat exports. 

5. Europe gas storage winter-panic: EU ~63%, Germany ~51%, NL ~44%

Guardian (Sat) + OilPrice: EU stores ~63% late August vs ~80% seasonal norm; lowest for the date in ~13-20 years. Qatar LNG force-majeure hangover from the Iran war; TTF still ~€66-70. Henry Hub ~$2.87 is a different planet. 

6. Copper still near records; El Niño hitting mine-to-port chains

LME copper ninth weekly gain into record zone (~$14.2-$14.5k/t) even as Friday faded. @robert_ivanhoe: Chile flood outages + PNG drought starving Ok Tedi river shipments. AI/data-center + grid demand vs falling grades. 

7. Zinc four-year high on collapsing inventories

@steve_hanke: zinc at a four-year high as mine disruptions bite; LME inventories cited down ~65% YTD and lowest since Apr 2023. Friday pullback from the spike but weekly still green. 

8. Crack-spread / product vs crude divergence

RBOB +2% Friday while WTI was flat-to-down. Heating oil also firmer. 

9. Palladium spike (+5% Friday) while gold/silver dumped

Palladium ripped as gold and silver were smashed — a split inside precious/PGMs. Why ZH: auto/catalyst + Russia-supply overlay vs rate-sensitive bullion. Unusual relative-value print.

10. Silver technical break after $71-$72 rejection

Silver printed a $72 high then confirmed a double-top / failed breakout into the mid-$60s. Gold/silver ratio still elevated. 

11. Iran exported ~90mn barrels during the ceasefire window

@MarioNawfal citing President Pezeshkian: ~90mn bbl / ~$6.5bn exported during the post-MoU ceasefire. 

12. Saxo weekly: scarcity rally broadening — then energy decoupled

Ole Hansen (28 Aug): barrels-to-bushels-to-bullion scarcity theme; precious +~15% in August before the Warsh flush; copper/zinc exceptions in industrials; energy the odd man out as Hormuz hopes grew. 

13. Cocoa melt-up (ICE/London +7-8% Friday)

Cocoa ripped several percent into the weekend after an already violent year. 

14. Tin two-month high — Indonesia licenses + AI/memory demand

CNBC-TV18 commodity desk: tin bid on Indonesian export-license cuts and chip/AI demand. 

15. Capital Economics: "Beyond Hormuz — path back to an oil glut"

House view that traders have already priced a lot of the Gulf-export recovery; residual Q3/Q4 volatility then glut. 

16. Asia crude imports still not showing a Hormuz rebound

Investing.com/Paraskova: Asia expected to take roughly July-like volumes in August; ship-tracking optimism has not yet shown up in Asian arrivals. 

17. US-Iran talks off / sanctions still tightening — two-way oil risk

Trump told mediators he will not return to June ceasefire terms; new sanctions packages still in the tape even as prices fell. 

18. Uranium holding ~$90 as energy complex bifurcates

U3O8 around $89-90, modest weekly green while crude sold off. 

19. Treasury buybacks vs Warsh hike-talk — policy schizophrenia trade

X gold accounts hammering the contradiction: Treasury long-bond buybacks to cap yields vs a Fed chair threatening hikes. 

20. Weekend positioning: dip-buy gold vs fade oil-peace

Retail/pro X split — gold CTAs and stackers calling the Warsh smash a "hide the debasement" hit; oil bulls warning Hormuz AIS games. Next catalysts: JOLTS, ISM, payrolls, any IRGC/tanker incident, Venezuela legal text. 

A look at the Quantix Commodity Index Total Return shows that the broad commodity complex has surged to a record high, gaining more than 22.5% since late June. The index tracks 24 US-dollar-denominated futures across energy, agriculture, livestock, industrial metals, and precious metals, suggesting the rally is no longer confined to a single corner of the physical world.

Currie's warned last week that "scarcity in the physical world" is reemerging. 

Currie's conclusion was very blunt: "The illusion of abundance is likely behind us."

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Barclays Warns Next Commodity Shock Is Taking Shape: What You Need To Know

You Should Feel Good About The Flock Debate

Authored by Connor O'Keeffe

In a year as chaotic, violent, and economically destructive as this one has been, it is interesting that, to many Americans, the great villain of 2026 is turning out to be a traffic camera.

But, indeed, we are seeing visceral, cross-partisan opposition to so-called Flock cameras—named after the leading manufacturer of these automated license plate readers—take hold in communities across the country. And that opposition is, to be sure, entirely legitimate.

Flock’s camera networks are based on the idea that, while it would obviously be illegal and unconstitutional for law enforcement at any and all levels to put GPS trackers in everyone’s cars, it would be legal for a cop standing on some street corner to report that they had seen a specific vehicle drive by if it later turned out that that car had either been stolen or used to commit a crime.

But, taking that idea that public observations are not violations of privacy, Flock and similar companies help set up networks of cameras that record and register the license plate, make and model, and identifiable details of every single passing vehicle into a timestamped and searchable national database. And, as more and more of these cameras are added to streets and parking lots all over the country, and they, therefore, get harder and harder to avoid, the data the government has access to becomes essentially indistinguishable from what they would have if there were government GPS trackers in all of our cars.

There are currently around 120,000 of these cameras across forty-nine states, with more being added every day. And the American people are not happy about it.

In a genuine grassroots movement spreading primarily through local Facebook groups and the like, with little coverage outside local media, concerned citizens are doing everything from pressuring local lawmakers to rescind their contracts with Flock Safety to donning masks and cutting the cameras down with electric saws.

And this opposition is starting to have some success. More than fifty jurisdictions have ended their relationships with Flock after local backlash. And, after Flock tried and failed for months to get the wider public to view organizations that track the location of these cameras as terrorists because some have used those locations to avoid, disable, or destroy some, the company announced last week that it was implementing several changes to try and defuse the public anger.

Starting next year, Flock says it plans to cut the default retention period for data stored on their system from 30 days down to 7 days, require its government clients to use the internal system for detecting unusual or potentially abusive searches, require all searches to be tied with a specific case code (with emergency exceptions getting automatically flagged for review), and a few other changes meant to at least appear like they’re addressing the public’s concerns. And Flock has also already removed all federal agencies from its nationwide search database in an earlier public concession.

It’s notable that a government contractor that does no direct business with the public feels this pressured by that public to change its behavior. But even more notable is how ineffective the normal propaganda that gets rolled out to justify these kinds of advancements in government surveillance has been this time around.

The familiar tropes that government officials are only gathering this kind of data on all of us because it’s crucial for our safety or that it only ought to bother us if we’re criminals with something to hide are not just falling on deaf ears, they’re being widely ridiculed.

That’s certainly, in part, because there have already been plenty of documented cases of police officers and government officials using the Flock database to track the activities of romantic partners, ex-partners, people now dating their ex-partners, and more. All of that, of course, constitutes warrantless government surveillance for the personal interest of the officials with access to the technology, without even the semblance of a legitimate investigation. There have also been several dangerous, nearly-life-threatening cases of drivers being pursued and held at gunpoint because Flock cameras mistakenly identified them as criminal suspects.

But what’s really driving the widespread rage is not how the cameras are currently being used, or misused. It’s how they could be used in the future.

People across the political spectrum are concerned about this technology being used for everything from detecting stay-at-home order violations in a future pandemic to rounding up and deporting people because the government doesn’t like their political opinions. This is a remarkably healthy mindset for the public to hold. Basically, don’t let the government grab power you wouldn’t trust your political enemies to wield.

But also, this is why the controversy surrounding Flock cameras has grown so large and why it’s quickly emerging as one of the major political issues ahead of the midterms. It’s not really about the specific workings of this one brand of automated license plate readers. It’s because the public’s presumption that our elites and institutions are acting in good faith has completely evaporated.

The American people do not trust the people in charge enough to be reassured by promises about how this new surveillance infrastructure will be used. And that is good. Because we should not trust the people in charge. They have, fortunately, made that very clear in recent years—which is why we’re seeing such a political revolt against incumbents.

But, going back, all the government power grabs that have brought us to this point—the PATRIOT Act, the invasion of Iraq, the banker bailouts, the insurance industry bailout known as Obamacare, the covid lockdowns, and more—all of it was only possible because enough of the public fell for the lie that the government was acting in their interest.

The fanatical opposition to Flock cameras is evidence that that lie isn’t working right now. Let’s hope that lesson is not easily unlearned.

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You Should Feel Good About The Flock Debate

FDA Approves 3 New COVID-19 Vaccines

Authored by Zachary Stieber via The Epoch Times,

The Food and Drug Administration on Aug. 27 approved COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer, Moderna, and Sanofi.

A nurse prepares to give a COVID-19 vaccine to a child in Denver, Colo., on Nov. 3, 2021. (Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)

The new shots from Pfizer and Moderna use the messenger ribonucleic acid (mRNA) platform and target the XFG strain, a subvariant of the JN.1 variant.

Regulators also cleared a COVID-19 vaccine shot from Sanofi that targets the XFG strain and does not use mRNA technology.

The approval is for people aged 65 and older, as well as people aged 12 to 64 who have one or more underlying conditions such as obesity that officials say puts them at higher risk of severe COVID-19.

Regulators have been approving updated COVID-19 vaccines for several years, in a bid to better match circulating strains. The previous versions of the vaccines were estimated to provide 58 percent protection against hospitalization, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The FDA did not announce the approvals in a press release, as it has done in the past.

The FDA and its parent agency, the Department of Health and Human Services, did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been critical of mRNA vaccines against respiratory diseases, saying they don't work well.

Manufacturers are going to run single-arm studies evaluating the shots in humans, according to FDA documents. The companies were going to be made to run placebo-controlled trials, but officials released them from that requirement "because of operational and feasibility challenges," the documents said.

FDA officials in 2025 said that new placebo-controlled trials were imperative to determine how well the COVID-19 vaccines actually performed, given it has been years since such trials were conducted. Pfizer and Moderna committed to running placebo-controlled trials, as did Novavax, which has since licensed its COVID-19 vaccine to Sanofi.

A sign in a pharmacy advertises the COVID-19 vaccine as the nation marks the fifth anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City on March 11, 2025. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

The basis of the approvals was largely not detailed in the documents. During an advisory meeting in the spring, the vaccine manufacturers presented data from animal testing, but no data from human testing. The FDA's vaccine advisory committee then recommended the next round of COVID-19 vaccines target XFG.

Uptake of COVID-19 vaccines has plummeted in recent years. Just 17.5 percent of adults and 10 percent of children received a shot in late 2025 or early 2026, according to the CDC.

COVID-19 infections are growing or likely growing in 47 states, the CDC said in modeling estimates released this month.

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FDA Approves 3 New COVID-19 Vaccines

Welcome To FAFOland

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Clusterfuck Nation,

". . . the worse they become, the more they blame you for it."

- El Gato Malo on the Lefty-left

As the Democratic Party pulls out all the stops to make itself ridiculous, their proxy warriors in the federal judiciary play chicken with the executive branch on sane, uniform standards for mail-in ballots. The Democrats don't want sane, uniform standards for mail-in ballots because they are insane. They want to "defend Democracy" with mail-in ballot chaos. Democracy is their flabby rubric for any artifice or subterfuge that beats a path to power so they can continue their racketeering operations. Yes, it's that simple.

The president issued executive order (EO) 14399 in March directing the Postmaster General to make rules for federal mail-in / absentee ballots where chaos and cheating have prevailed since the Covid prank was used to vastly expand mail-in voting. These new rules include a standard envelope with a bar code to establish a coherent, trackable chain-of-custody for each ballot. Mail-in ballots have become the preferred vehicle for voter fraud based on motor-voter registration of non-citizens, "harvesting" of untrackable ballots, drop-box stuffing, and vote-counting machine shenanigans.

The EO requires states to submit lists of their voters to whom they intend to send mail-in ballots. The USPS is ordered to transmit mail-in ballots only from qualified voters listed on the state rolls, that is, matching ballots to qualified voters at real mailing addresses. Twenty-four states have sued to block all this. They refuse to submit their state's voter rolls to the USPS. The lawsuit landed magically in the Boston court of Democratic Party activist federal judge Indira Talwani, who has blocked, lifted, and re-blocked the EO - reversing her own decisions. In the course of all that, SCOTUS ruled that Judge Talwani made procedural errors.

The matter remains unresolved. The point of all the legal rigmarole is to delay action so as to invoke the Purcell principle (from SCOTUS, 2006, Purcell v. Gonzalez), which established a judicial protocol (not a statute) that federal courts should avoid changing election rules close to elections. In other words, it's a judicial suggestion. The case involving the twenty-four states could return to SCOTUS, or SCOTUS could decline based on Purcell.

Meanwhile, Congress does not return to full session (with the Senate) until September 14. Chances are slim-to-zero that they will manage to pass the SAVE Act, or that its provisions would be allowed to apply to the midterm election if, somehow, they did pass it. This leaves the president with only one option: to issue a National Security (NatSec) Executive Order to provide for coherent election procedure. That might include the provisions in the SAVE Act - voter ID, proof of citizenship - but could even go further to ban computerized tabulation machines, greatly restrict absentee ballots, and require results within twenty-four hours of one-only election day. Maybe even place ICE agents at polling places . . . the horror!

Such a NatSec EO would be immune from lawsuits in the federal court. On January 6, 2017 outgoing Homeland Security Sec'y Jeh Johnson (Obama admin) declared election infrastructure a critical part of government facilities "vital to our national interests." In September, 2018, President Trump declared a national emergency (EO 13848) over the threat of foreign interference in US elections. Under the National Emergencies Act of 1976 (50 U.S.C. § 1622), a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress is necessary to overturn such an EO. That September 2018 national emergency declaration was continued officially by "Joe Biden" and remains in-force. Good luck with that, Democrats.

Okay, so what happens then, when Mr. Trump invokes that NatSec EO on emergency election procedure sometime in mid-September after Congress fails?

I will tell you: a constitutional crisis.

The Democratic-led blue states will refuse to participate in the election. Yeah, they'll go that far - because they are insane.

The president will respond forcefully, invoking the federal Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article VI, Clause 2), which states that federal law avails over the states. States can't nullify or contradict it. The president might have to arrest some Democratic governors and hasten them into special military courts on insurrection charges. Henceforth, this will be known as the FAFO protocol.

Will there be riots?

Probably, though just now Treasury Secretary Bessent is apparently considering the termination of tax exemptions - loss of 501(c)(3) status - for George Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), and the Southern Poverty Law Center, and others who finance street actions by the Lefty-left. No money for snack shacks, water bottles, and Froggie costumes.

Will the country survive the trauma?

I think so. The election will be held one way or another, even if it's a month late. If anything, the midterm election might be the tombstone of the Democratic Party. The way things are tending, they've got nothing left but insurrection, and that's probably not a winning move. Mr. Trump apparently loves renaming things geographical. Maybe he can change the USA to FAFOland.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.

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Welcome To FAFOland

New Jersey May Pay Home Battery Owners To Help Grid When Demand Surges

New Jersey officials are weighing a plan that would allow homeowners to use batteries as emergency energy backups and a way to earn extra money. Under the proposal, storage systems installed at customers' homes could join a virtual power plant program, helping the grid when electricity demand surges and paying participants for taking part.

On July 15, the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities issued a straw proposal for a two-year, technology-neutral VPP. The state's electric distribution companies would oversee it, and it would need to launch no later than July 1, 2027 Utility Dive reported.

In its transitional form, the Cool Down notes that the program would cover customer-sited batteries as well as other distributed energy resources. Officials are also looking ahead to a market-based, open-access VPP tariff for 2029 and beyond. Where rules allow, participants could combine payments for local grid services with wholesale market revenue from PJM Interconnection.

For NJ residents curious what a battery setup could look like for your own home, it may be worth exploring EnergySage's free tools to compare home battery storage options and get competitive installation estimates. EnergySage has teamed up with the electrification brand Qmerit to guarantee you get the best price on home battery storage solutions. Those who want a small-scale backup option, Pila is worth checking out. Its plug-and-play batteries are priced at a fraction of what whole-home backup systems cost.

For homeowners, battery storage is one of the best tools for riding out blackouts because it can keep critical equipment such as lights, refrigerators, medical devices, and internet service operating when grid power fails.

Batteries can also trim power bills by saving solar energy or low-cost electricity for use later, and they can help households move closer to off-grid living or rely less on their utilities.

As opposed to large power plants, VPPs let utilities and grid operators draw on many smaller devices at the same time. That can ease pressure on a grid during peak-demand periods and reduce pollution derived from fossil-fuel-based plants.

The BPU said any program should be guided by principles including fair design, technology-neutral rules, equal access for aggregators, and coordination among programs so participants are not compensated twice for the same service, Utility Dive reported.

The straw proposal carries out a directive in Executive Order No. 2, which Gov. Mikie Sherrill issued in January. It called for a VPP program to be created within 180 days and pushed for broader participation by distributed energy resources in the PJM Interconnection capacity market. At a July 30 stakeholder meeting, Tim Fagan, manager for planning and evaluation at Public Service Enterprise Group New Jersey, said the utility is developing a VPP offer that would include an upfront incentive of roughly $5,000 for an 8-kilowatt residential battery.

Participants could cover the remaining installation cost through an on-bill repayment program if they agree to allow a battery to discharge during peak-shaving events, Utility Dive reported.

Andrew Bayne, manager for energy efficiency programs at Pepco Holdings, said Delmarva Power's Delaware "bring your own battery" pilot is providing participants with an estimated $1,080 per year in performance payments sent by direct deposit instead of bill credits.

Such programs are examining how often batteries can be dispatched, which compensation level is enough to keep customers enrolled, and how straightforward the signup process must be for household participation.

Bayne said utilities still need to know whether "that juice [is] worth the squeeze for the customer — is that $1,000 a year worth it? … These devices behave differently when you call upon them."

In the latest update, UtilityDive reports that eligible customers of Atlantic City Electric, Jersey Central Power & Light, Public Service Electric & Gas and Rockland Electric could receive up to $200/kW per year over a 10-year term to dispatch energy stored in small-scale batteries during periods of grid stress under the procurement proposed last week by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities.

The proposal targets up to 150 MW of behind-the-meter energy storage capacity that can reliably discharge during dispatch events called by the four electric distribution companies, which will administer capacity enrolled in their service territories. The BPU will host a virtual stakeholder meeting on Sept. 3 to solicit feedback.

The procurement is the first capacity block of the second phase of the Garden State Energy Storage Program, a statutory framework that requires New Jersey to deploy 2 GW of bulk and distributed energy storage capacity by 2030. The BPU is halfway to meeting that goal after procuring a combined 1 GW of transmission-connected storage in the program’s two-block first phase earlier this year.

In a statement, BPU President Ben Hertz-Shargel tied the Aug. 17 proposal to an executive order signed by Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill shortly after taking office on Jan. 20. It directed the BPU to issue solicitations for new solar and storage capacity and to begin developing a virtual power plant program open to third-party energy suppliers.

“The Garden State Energy Storage Program advances Governor Sherrill’s Executive Order No. 2 by growing energy storage deployments in-state to meet growing energy demand while improving affordability and resilience,” Hertz-Shargel said.

Residential and small commercial batteries would be eligible to participate in a temporary, technology-neutral VPP program that will begin next year and run for two years before transitioning into a market-based, open-access VPP tariff in 2029, the BPU said last month in a separate straw proposal. 

The BPU refers to the capacity discussed in last week’s straw proposal as “Distributed Storage Capacity Block 1.” Its primary objective is to reduce peak demand on New Jersey’s electric distribution system through coordinated discharge, which “will help avoid future capacity obligations and system costs, thereby accruing savings to all residential customers,” according to the straw proposal.

The proposal envisions the four electric distribution companies calling dispatch events to mitigate local congestion, distribution-level thermal constraints and other abnormal grid conditions. The BPU said it looked at similar programs in other states and conducted its own gap analysis to arrive at the $200/kW maximum annual incentive, which it said factors in “the private resilience value of residential energy storage systems.”

“This decision reflects [BPU staff’s] assessment that many consumers have some willingness to pay for resilience and thus do not require an incentive high enough to render the net cost of battery back-up power [to] zero,” the BPU said.

Tyler Durden Thu, 08/27/2026 - 14:40
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