MAGA!

Authored by James Rickards via DailyReckoning.com,

Make Argentina Great Again — MAGA!

Political outsider Javier Milei won Argentina’s presidential election over the weekend, in a development that’s shocked the world.

Though his policy prescriptions are different than Trump’s in many respects, Milei is basically the Argentinian version of Donald Trump because of his anti-establishment, “drain the swamp” rhetoric.

You can liken Milei’s election to Trump’s 2016 election and Brexit. It’s a popular rejection of globalism and the neoliberal global order.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Argentina joined the BRICS nations in August, which will formally take effect in January.

As I’ve written about extensively, the BRICS nations are challenging dollar hegemony and the Western-dominated global financial system.

“Anarcho-Capitalist”

Milei has identified as an “anarcho-capitalist,” which is essentially free market libertarianism taken to the extreme. That means the elimination of the state and privatization of all the state’s functions.

It’s about as anti-establishment as you can get.

Needless to say, he wants to eliminate Argentina’s version of the Fed! I wish him luck. He’ll need it. Let’s just say he faces an uphill battle, like Trump did after he was elected in 2016.

That someone who identifies as an anarcho-capitalist can win an election in Argentina is remarkable in itself (Milei won in a 56%-44% landslide).

Since the middle of the 20th century, Argentina has been governed largely by left-wing politics. It’s not exactly fertile soil for extreme libertarianism.

But when your country’s suffering economically and your annualized inflation rate is approaching 150%, you might want to throw the bums out and try something different.

By the way, most people might not realize it but Argentina was once a very wealthy nation. In fact, there was a saying that if someone was very wealthy, he was “as rich as an Argentine.”

That phrase is obviously long out of date. But let’s stick to the election.

Voter Fraud

Argentinians vote mostly with paper ballots and election results are announced on the same day as the election. That reduces the opportunity to rig elections. It certainly doesn’t eliminate it (there have been plenty of rigged elections using paper ballots), but it reduces the possibility.

Of course, that’s how elections in the U.S. were mostly carried out until the 2020 election. But the pandemic changed how Americans voted, as they switched to mail-in voting.

That was a major invitation to fraud and other voting “irregularities,” despite media assurances that the 2020 election was the “most safe and secure election ever.”

Major countries in Europe such as France and Spain hold elections on Sundays (so no one can say they have to go to work), use paper ballots (so machines cannot rig the vote count), require in-person voting (no vote harvesting) and announce results the same evening.

So when several U.S. states adopted mass mail-in voting during the chaos of the 2020 election, while simultaneously relaxing or suspending voting safeguards such as signature verification, why should anyone be surprised that significant fraud occurred?

It seems our affection for “efficiency” and technology has played into the hands of those who actually want to subvert democracy, while claiming to do the opposite.

If you want to say there was enough fraud to swing the 2020 election toward Biden, that’s obviously controversial. But it’s almost certain that substantial fraud did take place, and that it was not the “most safe and secure election ever.”

It’s just Soviet-level propaganda to claim that it was.

The courts have been completely unwilling to get involved in election fraud cases. They usually dismiss these cases on procedural grounds, not their merit.

Meanwhile, there was ample evidence of election fraud in the 2022 midterm elections…

Ongoing Fraud

In Maricopa County, Arizona (the Phoenix area), voters were given paper ballots to fill out, which were then read by scanners that electronically counted the votes.

But the paper ballots were the wrong size for the scanners and were rejected.

Those ballots were put in boxes to be hand-counted later, except they never were because the Democrat who “won” the election was in charge of elections.

Those ballots have now conveniently disappeared.

In other jurisdictions, “mail-in” ballots were received by the thousands, except that the ballots were not creased (meaning they were never mailed) and the ballots had a recurring 7:1 ratio of Democrat to Republican votes.

That’s a highly improbable ratio in any case and a near impossibility that the ratio would be uniform throughout the ballots.

And there’s no control over “vote harvesting,” which consists of collecting ballots from nursing homes and poorer neighborhoods and then delivering them en masse. How does anyone know if the ballots actually came from the sources the operatives claim?

And in a recent case in Connecticut, a judge ordered a new primary election for the mayoral race in Bridgeport because a political operative was caught on tape stuffing a drop box with mail-in ballots.

In New Jersey, Paterson City Council President Alex Mendez has been indicted for election-rigging during the 2020 election.

Mendez allegedly oversaw an operation that stole mail-in ballots from mailboxes and replaced ballots that weren’t for him.

The list goes on.

Warming up for 2024?

Meanwhile, we have evidence that vote rigging is alive and well today almost as if they’re warming up for 2024.

In Northampton County, Pennsylvania, the voting machines were “flipping” votes for one candidate to the other candidate on Election Day Nov. 7, 2023.

The problem was identified and remedied with paper ballots but who knows how many votes were miscounted before the fix was made? And, by the way, what’s wrong with Pennsylvania? It seems to be ground zero for vote rigging and fixed elections.

Getting back to the weekend’s election in Argentina, could Milei have won under the voting regime we now have in the U.S.? I don’t know. Maybe he could have, maybe he couldn’t have.

But if you want to restore faith in the U.S. elections, the best way to do it is restore paper ballots and same-day voting.

Speaking of U.S. elections, I’ve been saying for a while now that Biden will most likely not be the Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election.

Now it’s appearing more and more likely that Biden will not be the nominee.

Trump Leads Biden in Key States

A recent poll from the notoriously anit-Trump New York Times shows Trump is crushing Biden in five of the six most important swing states.

The 10 states that will decide the election are: New Hampshire, Colorado, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Virginia. You don’t have to win all 10. You probably just need to win five. And you don’t have to win big.

A 1% margin will do nicely. And you don’t even have to get over 50% of the vote to win a state if a third party is taking, say, 5% of the total vote. That’s how close the U.S. election process has become (and why it’s easy to tip the election by rigging in just a few places).

But Trump’s margins in this poll are not 1%; they’re 4% or higher. If Trump won the five states where he’s ahead in this poll plus the states he won in 2020, he’d have a landslide victory with over 300 electoral votes.

Democrats are losing their minds over these results.

They’re speaking openly about Biden announcing he won’t run. But if they plan to get Biden to drop out, they’d better hurry up…

Crooked Joe?

If the poll numbers weren’t bad enough, there’s mounting evidence coming out of Biden’s impeachment inquiry that he may be compromised.

According to a recently released memo from the House Oversight Committee, Biden received $40,000 from his brother in “laundered” funds from Chinese government-linked CEFC China Energy in 2017. This $40,000 in laundered money is on top of the $200,000 he reportedly received in 2018.

Biden clearly can’t deal with the Chinese ethically, even though he met with Xi Jinping in San Francisco last week.

As an investor, you need a game plan for this political turmoil. Investors should consider reduced equity exposure, increased allocations of cash and at least some allocations to hard assets like gold, silver, fine art and land.