Watching China slide toward the brink

The unravelling of the Chinese financial knot is going to have some bizarre twists and turns. (See 

China's Credit Pipeline Slams Shut: Companies Scramble For The Last Drops Of Liquidity,  http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-03-26/chinas-credit-pipeline-slams-shut-companies-scramble-last-drops-liquidity

Wikipedia reports the Communist Party of China as having 86 million people.  Wikipedia in recent years has become a field of struggle over information and truth, but let's take this as correct.  Now we learn that 2.1 million families own most of the land in China, and these families no doubt are leaders in a mass-based party which consolidated its power roughly between 1935 and 1960 by organizing the peasants to overthrow the old landlord class in the countryside (See Fanshen, by William Hinton, for a powerful and moving close-up look at this process.)  I've seen no direct evidence, but this party surely must have a lot of members who are outraged at the corruption, and at odds with the leadership over letting their power slip away into the hands of the new landlord class.  

We know millions of Chinese, not just the super rich but the medium rich as well, and no doubt among them many of these 2.1 million landlord families, are smuggling their wealth out of China, and we can deduce that they're of doubtful loyalty to their country.  Are they sending a signal of what they think is coming for them?  (I kind of hope so!)

Wikipedia lists 167 million Chinese migrant workers.  The new industrial working class draws heavily from them.  From stories in the media - for example the NYT stories on the Foxconn workers - it's hard to imagine that the CPC has any base at all among this oppressed and angry population.  

And then there have been frequent reports of local strikes and demonstrations, with estimates that these occur thousands of times a year throughout China.  Does the rank and file in the CPC sometimes participate in them?  Is there a basis anywhere for a restoration of its original role as a party of the people?

The CIA's specialty in recent years, the Color Revolution, involves penetrating a society, planting agents and client organizations (NGO's) throughout its society, and then at an opportune moment using them to detonate the society's internal contradictions and sieze power in a controlled popular uprising - to the great detriment of the masses they enroll.  Is China open enough for them to have laid this groundwork?  

China seems ripe for such an event, and the collapse of the financial system would certainly be the moment for the CIA to strike.  The Chinese people and leaders have had 25 years of watching CIA-organized or hijacked revolutions in other countries.  Their leaders' reluctance to come to Putin's defense around Ukraine perhaps suggests they may not have absorbed this lesson - or are too corrupt or frightened to care.  And what lessons have the Chinese people learned from years of reflecting on the lessons of Tieneman Square?  

The investors who comment in ZeroHedge seem to be trying to dope out how China's financial system will collapse, who the winners and losers will be, how far it will spread and how to profit from it, as though this is just an extraordinarily large "normal" financial meltdown and collapse.  Not surprising; that's what investors do.  

But they should know the situation of China is anything but normal.  With the whole world financial system going unstable, with Russia being virtually forced to bring down the petrodollar to survive, with the Empire making its moves on Russia and perhaps instigating wars and new color revolutions all along its borders, with the Empire militarily provoking China and organizing unrest in its minority regions, with China politically starting to go critically unstable due to it's internal conflicts over land, wages, corruption and pollution, the unfolding crisis in Chaina is certainly not normal.  Not even high normal.  Predictable for a little bit yet, but easily able to go chaotic.

Add to this another huge unknown: could the leadership of the Chinese government and Party propose and impose radical solutions as the system fails and collapses?  Could they take the opportunity offered by Putin's Russia to break with the Petrodollar, rein in their kleptocrats, sweep away the bubbles and bankrupt enterprises and restart the economy on a new basis? 

Or is China's leadership so bound up with the kleptocrats that it can only ride the collapse down into the abyss, until an uprising from below overthrows them?  And what kind of revolution would that be?  There are competing alternative revolutions waiting to happen. Will they merge into one big one?  Can they dodge the color revolution the US doubtlessly has planned for them?

And what role could the 86 million members of the Communist Party play?   Can China collapse back into its old communist core, or is that door closed behind them forever?  This may hinge on how much of China's old command economy, which was organically linked to that huge mass-based party, still survives. With their new and extravagant and utterly reckless capitalist system collapsing and people getting frightened and desperate, will this or a new government be able to revive the command economy through the efforts of that communist party?  

If a restoration of real Communist Party power proves impossible, because the transition to capitalism is too far gone, because the leadership is too discredited or because its member have no will to try, what story will they tell each other about it?  Will there be a great mass revulsion at the outcome of their experiment with capitalism?  Will they blame their Communist Party for the collapse of their new capitalism, turn on it and destroy it in the hope that this will cause their new system to revive?

Or could history's answer to that question be something close to a 50-50 split between pro-capitalist  and pro-CPC, pro-statist forces, with regional advantages allowing each side to consolidate a power base - in a context of mass desperation, anger and recrimination in a nuclear-armed country? 

We could talk about who we're rooting for, but here in the US all we can really do is try to keep our government and military from getting any more deeply entangled in it.

My but we live in interesting times!

Would I go back to the '70's?

My answer to "28 Points Of Comparison Between 1970s America And America Today – Which Do You Think Is Better?" by Michael Snyder, http://www.thetradingreport.com/2014/01/31/

The US of the '60's Rocked because the US Ruled. The US Ruled by the amazing productivity, health, vitality, education, ingenuity and self-confidence of our people, the amazing power of our Hollywood and Television fantasy machine, the credibility and moral authority of the nation that won World War II (in our own minds anyway,) our fabulous natural wealth, and by the ruthlessness and sheer raw terror of our armed forces.

Much of this was already starting to fray. Watergate and Vietnam had shaken us, a great reality check. But it was in the '70's that it really started to come apart.

Our health and vitality are seriously declining. The food is tainted, the medical system a fractured overpriced subsidiary of the pharmaceutical companies. Drug reactions, hospital infections and mistakes have become leading causes of death. Obesity, chronic environmental and hereditary diseases and disabilities are exploding. We're something like 40th in the world in infant mortality, 30th in maternal death rate, life expectancy is declining, and the government is lying to us about that.

Those of us with jobs are still fabulously productive but it has been turned against us, exported and used against us, and we no longer share in its fruits. Our living standard has been sinking slowly, along with the quality of the goods we consume.  That decline is accelerating now.  Our education system, once the envy of the world, is decaying into an over-priced pit of self-inflicted mediocrity, a great fear-driven job-training and debt-creation machine. Our once-fabled ingenuity, a land of back-yard tinkerers and garage entrepreneurs, has been largely lost as we've become a nation of sedentary game-players glued to our electronics devices, profoundly ignorant of how our machines and toys actually work.

Our natural wealth has been and is being squandered. Vast stretches of land are being ripped up and poisoned by fracking and strip mining. Our farm land is being destroyed by ever-increasing applications of pesticides and herbicides, the once rich living soil now a lifeless powder being washed away by acidic rain into acidifying oceans with growing dead zones no longer able to support life. Scores of aging, under-maintained nuclear plants like ticking time bombs dot the land, each a potential Fukushima. Our atmosphere, our greatest natural resource, is being poisoned.

As for terror, the US still rules by terror, whole lands live in constant fear of mercenary death squads and armed drones flying overhead, piloted by pimple-faced computer-gamers in Nevada, but now terrorizing US seems to be a growing part of its mission.

We watch helpless as the governments we elect to deal with all this ignore their mandates, Our once great democracy feels like, and is, a hollow shell, for sale to the highest bidder.  The crowds that chanted USA NUMBER ONE still chant, but it no longer the exuberant boast of a self-confident people. It almost feels like a protest now.

On a more hopeful side, the great media fantasy machine spins on but its credibility is gone. Government statistics about unemployment, growth and prices have become transparent lies.   Failed wars based on lies and coverups stand exposed. The great Security State blackmail machine stands naked.  Honest news and information still diffuses over the Internet and it's reach spreads. The contrast between our reality and the one reflected back to us by the media has gone critical. All that remains is the media-generated illusion of "all those other stupid people" who believe it.

The inflation of the '70's was a big deal. By 1973 the economy, in terms of its natural cycles of the past 200 years, was primed and ready for the next Depression. It never happened - or rather we're only getting to it now. Instead, the money supply was decoupled from any underlying real value and step by step the doors were opened to a new "bubble economy".  The financialized, monetized, privatized, leveraged-to-the-max economy that resulted is finally imploding, sucking what's left of the real economy into a black hole. 

So would I go back to the '70's? Some of us pretty much saw this all coming back then.  We had our wins, wins that mattered, but overall we were helpless to stem the tide.  Why would I want to go through that again?  Right now is sufficient unto the moment, and what comes next will be a little different because we're still here fighting.  

And at least it won't be more of the same.

Greece and the EU: why do they accept>

The curtain has been pulled back and the Greek people are confronted with the naked reality of no democracy, outcomes that cry out against fairness, logic and reason, and a spineless gaggle of "socialist" and "social democratic" politicians unable or unwilling to lead them in a fight for their very survival.  The question has to be asked: "why not?"  It is not sufficient to just dismiss those leaders as bad or worthless people.  They must have their reasons.  We all have our reasons.

I keep remembering how the Greek Prime Minister Papandreou proposed to put a bailout package to the voters, but withdrew that several days later reporting that he had been personally told "I'll kill you!" by President Sarkozy of France.  I wonder, was his capitulation simply personal cowardice? Complicity? Or bowing to Greece's reality as an enslaved nation? What would have happened had he defied Sarkozy and pushed ahead with the vote? A simple murder would not have been enough for the EU to set that right, but who else was implicitly threatened?

Then there's the Army. Greece's army is descended from the puppet forces that collaborated with Hitler and took control during the Civil War of 1946-49, with heavy British and American support.  The generals took back full power in a bloody coup in 1969, as told in the movie Z, to tame a population that was getting out of control.  It relinqueshed power under pressure in 1974 but was not defeated or purged.  

The key to understanding the collapse of Greek democracy in the face of the EU bankers may lie in the answer to the question: Whose army is it?

The denouement may perhaps lie in the hands of the junior officers and the sergeants, whose loyalties and state of mind we can only imagine.

To a fighter for safe healthy food

At times we all can feel hopeless and powerless in the face of the size, power, ruthlessness and pure evil of the corporations, of how hard it is to win little victories, how fast new threats emerge, and the illusion of a blind and apathetic public reflected back to us by the corporate media.  

People who care about and struggle over other issues are having the same experience.  Some despair, give up or grow numb out of exhaustion. 

Environmental justice, anti "tracking", global warming, workplace health and safety, nuclear power, animal rights, little victories are won.  Bank and mortgage fraud, globalization and secret trade deals, drives to privatize everything from schools to water supplies and prisons, banks financing criminal cartels and massively rigging interest rates and every market with impunity, all have come to light because they are someone's battle. But to really win/ each needs to be everyone's battle, which seems impossible.

Voting rights and voter suppression, Citizen's United and corporate personhood, big money control over every institution of government, fraudulent government statistics and media lies and censorship, the fight for the open Internet, massive government spying, a phony war on terror, militarization of local police, torture and rendition, each of these issues has come to light because thousands are engaged in them.  Victories are won, yet new outrages keep popping up while public attention flitters on to the next thing.  

Ending the wars, closing the bases, caring for the veterans, bringing the troops home, stopping the torture, rendition and executions by drone;  job creation, infrastructure, homelessness, hunger, workplace justice, the right to organize, parents' rights, welfare rights, ex-prisoners rights; each is critical to the thouands who are fighting them.  

An epidemic of discrimination is totally out of control, whole new classes of people are no longer considered for jobs,  Millions, gripped by fear of being destroyed by some employer-alert list, swallow their bile and try to "keep their noses clean." 

This same fractal-like pattern appears on almost any smaller scale - battles over the privatization of parking meters, the breakdown of a state Food Stamp system, the stealth passage of some outrageous state law overturning a just court ruling, or countless personal injustices  - new battles just keep popping up.  We feel isolated in the face of armies of cynical "suits", too overwhelmed to support each other's fights.

Meanwhile flocks of corporate-funded politicians, pundits and shock-jocks orchestrate campaigns of division, hate and self-blame, drawing on all our fears, myths and confusion, setting up and promoting phony protest movements and false leaders, Judas goats and Pied Pipers, playing on our shame,  twisting our anger back against each other and against ourselves, scapegoating, channeling and fanning our outrage, stirring up false hope and wasting our energy on dead ends.  

Consider the Million Veteran March on Washington.  Maybe two hundred Tea-Party veterans plus Sarah and Michelle got wall-to-wall press coverage for defying the barricades at the War Memorial, while the leaders of 30 national veterans groups and thousands of veterans who converged on Washington the following week to protest the very real cuts in benefits got virtually none.  

The fight for safe, wholesome food is deeply connected to all these other battles. One people fighting for our homes, our families, our very lives in thousands of battles on hundreds of fronts confronting one hydra-headed shape-shifting foe and its doctrine of unrestrained greed.  1000 streams flowing toward one ocean.  

The story of our food has rippled outward.  The seemingly-docile satisfied masses shuffling their full baskets through the checkout line know far more than you think.  Exhausted, barraged with conflicting information and misinformation, living paycheck to paycheck, yet all know something's very wrong.   Obesity, deformities, chronic illness, disability and early death surround us.  All have horror stories of bad medical care.  And all suspect the food.

Our stories - of all our struggles and what we've learned in them - are permeating outward.  Few know all the pieces but everyone knows some.  Some incident will draw us together in outrage, the way the Crash and Bank Bailout did.  Some turn of events will sweep aside all the distractions and focuses our minds on the common source of our afflictions.

In that moment, we will shed the last illusion: that the problem is "all those other stupid people" out there, sitting on their couches stuffing their faces with Devil Dogs, consuming and believing all the happy lies.  

Occupy was starting to draw us all together into one great invincible force, but it wasn't quite there yet.

Or rather, it was we, the American people, who weren't quite there yet.

We've learned a lot since then, and there will be a next time.  

Soon.

Who are all those wealthy Chinese buying US homes with cash?

From Hugh-Smith's article we could conclude that those Chinese nationals buying foreclosed properties in our cities with cash are neither agents of the Chinese government nor China's new billionaire class scheming to gain power or control over the US.  Rather they are simply criminals laundering their loot and preparing their getaway.

……………...

Two Powder Kegs Ready to Blow: China & India

Submitted by Charles Hugh-Smith of OfTwoMinds blog,

China and India are both powder kegs awaiting a spark for the same reason: systemic corruption.

…

China's "princelings" (offspring and family of the inner political circle and top apparatchiks of the Communist Party) are billionaires, not mere millionaires. A recent expose of offshore accounts held by various Chinese billionaires estimated the wealth skimmed and transferred our of China at between $1 trillion and $4 trillion: China's Epic Offshore Wealth Revealed: How Chinese Oligarchs Quietly Parked Up To $4 Trillion In The Caribbean.

Even the top number is a gross underestimate, as $4 trillion only accounts for the skim of the top layer…

... even the lowly functionary skimmer can get huge sums out of China: take a "vacation" to Macau. Buy $1 million in casino chips with your looted yuan. Lose $50,000 at the tables and then go cash in your remaining chips in U.S. dollars. Deposit the dollars in a Hong Kong or other Asian bank and then transfer the cash to L.A. or Vancouver to buy a house for cash. Repeat as necessary.

…

It has taken an enormous credit bubble of $23 trillion (The $23 Trillion Credit Bubble In China Is Starting To Collapse – What Next?) plus the monumental credit expansion of the shadow banking system in China to enable the skimming of $6 trillion by the political/financial Plutocracy….

................

CH: Hugh-Smith ends with some words of wisdom that would apply at home:

................

The spark that ignites the powder keg cannot be predicted or suppressed. Don't look to the disenfranchised peasantry as the source, though they are ready enough to cast off the Powers That Be; look to those who believed the gilded promises issued by the looters and discovered that the fruits of their labor and their hopes is disillusionment on a scale as vast as the skim looted from their nation by their self-serving leadership.

My comments on:

Warren, McGovern push for extension of jobless benefitsROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION IN WORCESTER

http://www.telegram.com/article/20140123/NEWS/301229597/0/SEARCH
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Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jim McGovern both gave fabulous presentations and responses, and made clear that they saw themselves as leading a struggle to help people survive, save the unemployment benefits, save the SNAP program and win a massive public works, green economy and infrastructure jobs program.  The press did a so-so job of reporting it, but had a nice page one photo.

Most of the comments were the usual nasty stuff.  Here's some responses.

..............

17Grey wrote 
   "well gee...... unemployment rate is down. why can't they get a job? " 

CH: Yeah, and the rate's about to drop to 6% or 5.8% as another million who have been looking with little hope are dropped from the rolls! That should make you feel even more righteous! 

..............

Independent wrote: 
   "Just create an environment for job creation and the unemployment benefits will take care of itself." 

CH: Six years into a depression, 30 years into the most massive wave of deregulation, tax cuts on the rich and corporations, privatization, de-unionization and liquidation of the welfare system perhaps that the world has ever seen, and you can still say this? How much more would it take to satisfy you? 

The endless refrain here is that things will be fine if the government just gets out of the way and lets things get back to normal. It should be obvious six years into a depression that things are not getting better, and won't until we do something different. 

The rich and powerful have won the game. They have accumulated so much power and wealth that the game doesn't work anymore. But it still feels good to them! 

Warren and McGovern are raising the demand for the direction that has not been tried yet: a massive public works program to put people back to work, and a program of closing tax loopholes, corporate welfare and tax havens, ending incentives to ship jobs overseas, prosecuting the criminal wrongdoings of the banisters and taking our money and banking systems our of their greed-blinded hands. 

A good way of describing this program: a "New Deal". 

None of this can happen if we go on waiting. It will require a massive shift of power from the corporate wealthy to the rest of us. But it has to happen. 

Six years of waiting, and the economy is stagnant and on life support, with the Fed still pumping $1 trillion a year into the financial markets, pumping up a stock market that gets ever more out of line with reality. Median income is down over 10%. The labor force is still shrinking. Expansion by borrowing can't happen; we're tapped out. The WSJ reports that Nov-Dec retail foot traffic is down 50% from 2010 to 2013. The commercial real estate and banking sectors are on the brink of a meltdown. 

The economy has to start expanding soon, or it will collapse. The banksters have prepared to save themselves with "bail-ins", like in Cyprus: confiscating their depositors' accounts - and swallowing the economy into a black hole! 

Warren and McGovern are calling us into battle for a New Deal to save our real economy, our communities and homes, friends and neighbors. 

They have offered us their leadership and voices, but they can't do it for us. We have to do it. 

..............

"jimmys" wrote: 
   "Where is Warren and McGovern's plan? They keep pointing fingers and crying but I do not see them introducing a new plan." 

What I should have answered:  They certainly talked about it at this Forum. Why didn't your newspaper, TV or radio network tell you about that? 

There is a vast silence out there in medialand about a lot of issues and events, and this non-coverage appears to be carefully crafted to create the illusion of a vast silence and passivity in the real world. Then we all get to sit around and blame all those other people out there who don't get it - and our representatives for what we didn't hear them say.

..............

"I'mRight" posted:

   "The GOVERNMENT DOES NOT CREATE JOBS! ( Except its own wasteful inefficient ones)" 

CH:  A lot of folks keep shouting this, like it's an obvious truth and anyone who disagrees is somehow bad and stupid. But it's just not true. Scream at me all you want, but governments can and do create jobs. 

Look at the Interstate Highway System. Didn't that create jobs - a lot of them? You're going to tell me those weren't real jobs?  Would those jobs have been more real if the Interstates had been built for profit by a syndicate of investors? 

This issue is important for a number of reasons.  Right now it's urgent. Private investors are just not creating jobs. Huge quantities of government and Federal Reserve money shoveled in their direction for five years has not induced them to even replace the jobs that were lost in 2008-9. There's no reason to think they're suddenly about to start producing the millions of new jobs we need. 

And if SOMEONE doesn't start producing a lot of new jobs, right quick, the whole economy will collapse in on itself! 

I know that's not what they taught you in school, but it's time to let go of all this ideological stuff and get very practical. 

Oath Keepers

My comment to the article on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) Website about the Oath Keepers

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/07/25/oath-keepers-rally-reveals-radical-politics-of-group/

I posted it below the article where it remained for several hours.  It was then marked "Under review by moderator" for several hours, and has now apparently been removed.

Maybe it was just too long.

………………………………..

OK, so we don't know which way the Oath Keeper sword will cut in a crisis, or who will be on which side around what when all the masks come off, but seriously, we need to admit we have a real and overarching problem which they are addressing in a plausible and perhaps necessary way.

We elected a President who says all the right words and does the opposite, leaving the people in a state of profound disillusionment and demoralization. Our corporate media is clearly lying and concealing the truth about any issue that poses a threat to the corporate elite, including the reality that out here on Main Street, for the 90%, there has been no economic recovery and it's still a depression, with growing poverty, hunger, mass unemployment, declining wages, union busting and a great pall of fear and dread. All the while the pundits and talking heads proclaim "It's a boom! A boom!"

The abrogation of our sovereignty by NAFTA, CAFTA, GATT and proposed in the TPP effectively overrides the power of our legislatures and courts to protect our health, safety, environment and labor rights. The legal arms of the Federal Government that prosecuted large-scale corporate and financial malfeasance have been disbanded and the banksters commit global-scale crimes with complete impunity. And the NSA spying and blackmail machine is real, vast, all-intrusive and casts a pall of fear across the land, but has apparently never stopped one terrorist attack. 

The Patriot Act and the Homeland Security Agency represent profoundly anti-democratic responses to a threat which each passing day stands more plainly exposed as an operation of our own Security State, now openly supporting the most murderous terrorists in Syria. The FIMA camps are real. There's one in my neck of the woods on Cape Cod and it looks like a giant prison, not a camp. It must have cost a fortune to build. The militarization of local police forces and accumulation by police agencies of military technology, arms and ammunition is widespread and accelerating. Virtually every terrorist plot that has been exposed and stopped in recent years - and some that have not, like our Boston Marathon bombing  - have turned out to have been hatched and abetted by FBI or CIA provocateurs or under their eyes.

Our economy is careening toward the next global meltdown, which promises to dwarf that of 2009 and will feature a collapse - already underway - of the dollar as the world reserve currency,  Preparations to replace it with a global currency - controlled by the central bankers and utterly beyond any democratic control - are well documented, but the outcome is uncertain. 

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that this vast edifice of government abuse has as its target ... us. The regular people. The 90% or the 99%. And it increasingly becomes clear that the War on Terror is about our greed-crazed corporate overlords being terrified of ... us.

In this context, what the Oath Keepers are doing looks like a sane and honorable response by members our military and police forces, mostly recruited from the children of the working people and in a sense still of us. Most grew up believing in a righteous land of freedom and democracy, and many have experienced the hypocrisy and horrors of wars waged against other freedom-loving people under false pretenses.  Among the beliefs they brought with them was the precious principle that the arms-bearing services serve a democratic state and stay out of politics. But what should be their response to a reality where democratic institutions have ceased to be effective and the rule of law is breaking down? If and when the military is unleashed upon an outraged populace, whether to obey or refuse orders will be a political choice, one way or the other.

I write as a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement - which we need to acknowledge could not have accomplished what it did without Presidents from Eisenhower to Nixon ordering a reluctant FBI and Federal prosecutors to protect it.  As a veteran of peace, anti-war, labor and electoral struggles of the '50's, 60's and 70's, I've experienced some very troubled relationships with the Federal and local police forces. Yet ultimately, with the help of the Southern Poverty Law Center and countless others, the security forces were constrained by the Constitution and the laws, and we were able to struggle in the streets, the workplaces and at the ballot boxes, sometimes advancing sometimes driven back, as free, proud people defending and exercising our rights.  How different it is now to live in a land where all that is being swept away, where so many of my former companions in struggle, grown accustomed to comfortable salaries and bound by "golden handcuffs", seem powerless or afraid to help lead the fight back.

I have followed with admiration the work and at times the heroism of the staff of the SPLC since its inception. And I admit to feeling deeply disturbed by evidence I've seen of racists, secessionists and insurrectionist groups aligning with the Oath Keepers. Yet to align with the Security State against the Oath Keepers without acknowledging the urgent truth and power in much of what they are saying and the courage of the stands they are taking feels to me like a profound misreading of the moment we are in.

At a time when the Commander in Chief, a former professor of Constitutional Law, is trashing the Constitution on almost every front, I was often inspired to see those fearless leaders of the Labor Left and Constitutionalist Right, Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul, standing together against repression, lawlessness and imperialist wars, each armed with a pocket copy of the Constitution.  I'll never share Paul's views about many vital issues, yet in the dark days ahead all of us will find our ideas about who are the "good guys" and who the "bad guys" sorely tested.