As a result of these psychopaths, the markets tanked, banks across the country failed (the big ones got bailed out), and millions lost their homes and jobs.
But with the crash of 2007–08, the Royalists were just warming up. Their harvesting of the United States wouldn’t be complete until a few years later.
PART 3
“Oppression, Rebellion, Reformation”
CHAPTER 7
A Revolution Denied
You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.
The beginning of the end of the Crash of 2016 begins on a cold January night in 2009—where this book begins—with the inauguration of Barack Obama.
In fact, the crash was plotted in a dining room a block off of Pennsylvania Avenue about halfway between the White House and the US Capitol. The Caucus Room, as it’s known, is across the street from the J. Edgar Hoover Building, headquarters of the FBI, right around the corner from Ford’s Theatre, where a president was killed during a time of national crisis, and two blocks north of the National Mall, which was “occupied” by the Bonus Army, during another time of national crisis, in 1931. It’s in the back end of the apartment building where Louise and I resided during the first year we lived in Washington, DC.
It was there, on the night of Inauguration Day in 2009, beneath soft track lighting and surrounded by polished cherrywood paneling, that a plot was hatched to make sure the Economic Royalists took advantage of the economic crisis, which they had caused. The stakes couldn’t be higher for them.
America was on the verge of a second New Deal. Or, a second Gilded Age. She was in the middle of a revolution.
In fact, Thomas Jefferson had predicted this revolution, and he also predicted what might happen to this nation if those Royalists in the Caucus Room won the revolution.
Jefferson’s Cycle of Revolutions
Running alongside the eighty-year cycle of Great Crashes, there’s another cycle, one of revolutions.
Because he had lived through a true revolution here, and had watched another one sputter and fail in France, Thomas Jefferson knew that periodic revolutions were necessary for America—or any democratic society—to flourish and grow.
Jefferson even suggested that “every generation” should have its own smaller form of revolution, reconfiguring the nation and its government to adapt to changing needs and changing times.
The concept of generations has played a role in many governing documents. The Iroquois Confederation’s “Great Law,” which was a major inspiration for the American Constitution, famously called for all governmental decisions to be made in the context of their impact on “the Seventh Generation” down the line into the future.
While the definition of the time period represented by a “generation” has been the subject of much speculation over the years, Thomas Jefferson recognized two clear definitions, and repeatedly said that both the Constitution and future legislators should respect each of them.
The first was the personal, familial definition of “generation”—which Jefferson put at nineteen years and today is generally considered to be around twenty years. In that context, with the first American Revolution officially beginning in 1776, today’s young people are about the twelfth generation since our nation’s birth.
The second was the generational epochs—blocks of time during which generations overlap and a major transfer of power is made from one to another, along with a period of time long enough for a major change in our understanding of government and a recalibration of our worldview.
Jefferson and his contemporaries spoke and wrote often about the obligations of each generation to its heirs, and about the political crime of any generation placing shackles (financial or legal) on future generations.
Jefferson wrote to his protégé, James Madison, the year the Constitution was ratified and our modern nation birthed: “The question, whether one generation of men has a right to bind another… is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also among the fundamental principles of every government.”109 No single generation, he wrote, has the right to saddle the next with problems or debts, and it should be obvious “that no such obligation can be transmitted” from generation to generation.
Laying out his thinking on the issue, Jefferson continued: “I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self evident, that the earth belongs in usufruct [common ownership] to the living; that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society.”
Jefferson’s logic that no person or generation should be able to bind the next one was one of his core beliefs throughout his life, and shared by most of his contemporaries. He added, “For if he could, he might during his own life, eat up the usufruct [commons] of the lands for several generations to come; then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living, which is the reverse of our principle.”
But what was most revolutionary about Jefferson’s thinking on this was the idea of generational revolutions—that the nation itself must fundamentally change roughly once every biological or epochal generation, and that even that wouldn’t prevent larger periodic political transformations of the nation. These were, he believed, not just ideals but a basic force of nature. He wrote:
On similar ground it may be proved, that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation: they may manage it, then, and what proceeds from it, as they please, during their usufruct [shared ownership]. They are masters, too, of their own persons, and consequently may govern them as they please. But persons and property make the sum of the objects of government. The constitution and the laws of their predecessors are extinguished then, in their natural course, with those whose will gave them being.
Jefferson believed that even the laws enshrined in our Constitution came with a time limit, and that once the generation that wrote those laws passed on out of power, those laws must be rewritten by the new generation, or at least every second generation.
“Every constitution, then, and every law, naturally expires at the end of thirty-four years,” Jefferson wrote. “If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, and not of right. It may be said, that the succeeding generation exercising, in fact, the power of repeal, this leaves them as free as if the constitution or law had been expressly limited to thirty-four years only.”
A revolution every twenty to thirty-four years? Could Jefferson have actually been proposing—or predicting—that?
In fact, yes.
Jefferson stressed the need for every generation to essentially produce a revolution that would turn the wheel of America forward into the new epoch. He arrived at this conclusion by understanding the weaknesses inherent in the Constitution when it was first drafted, and the need that each new generation must continue to perfect it, or at least adapt it to respond to changing times.
Jefferson noted the absurdity of a rigid Constitution—or at least an interpretation of that Constitution—that does not change as the nation grows and times change, saying, “We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors.… Let us follow no such examples, nor weakly believe that one generation is not as capable as another of taking care of itself.”