RUDOLF STEINER: DWELLER ON THE THRESHOLD

Posted on February 27, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Gary Lachman

The most enigmatic figure to emerge from the “occult revival” of the early twentieth century was also the most successful, the Austrian “spiritual scientist” Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). Although many of his contemporaries were outwardly more eccentric – think of Madame Blavatsky, Gurdjieff or Aleister Crowley – it’s precisely Steiner’s sobriety that is so striking, making him seem somewhat out of place in the often flamboyant world of the esoteric.

We generally associate ideas of the occult, higher consciousness and spiritual worlds with exotic, extraordinary characters with something of the trickster about them; Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and Crowley would certainly fall into this category. Steiner was precisely the opposite. Standing at the lectern with his pince-nez in hand, he projected an image of irreproachable rectitude. Steiner was earnestness incarnate, his one gesture of bohemian extravagance the flowing bow ties he was fond of wearing, a remnant of his early student days. Where Blavatsky, Gurdjieff and Crowley each took pains to present a formidable self-image, there was something simple and peasant-like about Steiner. Combined with this wholesomeness was an encyclopedic erudition. If we were to use an archetype to describe Steiner, it would have to be that of “the Professor” – or more precisely, “the Doctor,” as he was known by those around him. Commenting on her magnum opus, The Secret Doctrine, Madame Blavatsky once remarked that she “wrote, wrote, wrote” like the Wandering Jew “walks, walks, walks.” Steiner too wrote a great deal, but his main mode of disseminating his ideas was lecturing, and in the years between 1900 and 1925, he lectured, lectured, lectured, delivering more than 6,000 talks across Europe.

In a dry and often pedantic style, Steiner informed his audience of the results of his spiritual research, his “supersensible” readings of the occult history of the world made available to him through what is called “the Akashic Record.” In matter-of-facts terms, he introduced them to his teaching, Anthroposophy, telling them along the way about ancient Atlantis, life after death, astral and etheric bodies, the true meaning of Christianity and much, much more. Yet this humble, self-effacing character became one of the most influential, and simultaneously vilified, forces in the spiritual and cultural life of early twentieth century Europe, and his ideas are still relevant today.

Steiner’s efforts to lead “the Spiritual in the human being to the Spiritual in the Universe” have produced remarkably concrete results. Since his death, more than 1,000 schools around the world work with Steiner’s pedagogical principles, not to mention the many special-needs schools, working along lines developed by Steiner a century ago. There are also the hundreds of “bio-dynamic” farms, employing Steiner’s agricultural insights, developed decades in advance of our interest in ecology and organic foods. The practical application of Steiner’s ideas had also informed very successful avenues in holistic healing, the arts, architecture, economics, religion and other areas.

Given these achievements in the “real world,” which certainly exceed those of other esoteric teachers, why isn’t Steiner better known? You would reasonably expect the average educated person to have some idea of who, say, Jung is, or Krishnamurti, or the Dalai Lama; possibly even Blavatsky, Gurdjieff or Crowley. But Steiner? He remains something of a mystery, a name associated with a handful of different disciplines and endeavours, but not solidly linked to any one thing. He remains, as one of his most eloquent apologists, the Inkling Owen Barfield, called him “the best kept secret of the twentieth century.” It’s certainly time that he was better known.

Rudolf Steiner was born on 27 February 1861, in the small rural town of Kraljevec in what was then Hungary but is today part of Croatia. His father was a telegraph operator for the Southern Austrian Railway, and Steiner spent his first years amidst magnificent scenery: mountain ranges and green plains were his playgrounds. Steiner felt that it was significant that he grew up in a part of Europe where East meets West, as it was also significant that childhood had an equal measure of natural beauty and modern technology – at the time, both the railways and the telegraph were relatively new innovations.

In Knowledge of the Higher Worlds and its Attainment (1905), Steiner relates that a crucial experience on the path of higher consciousness is an encounter with the Guardian of the Threshold, a spiritual being embodying one’s unredeemed karma. Well before his career as an esoteric teacher, Steiner was himself a dweller on several thresholds, having one foot in the mysteries of nature, the other in the methodology of science. It was this combination of mystic visionary and disciplined thinker that gave Steiner’s later career its peculiar character.

When Steiner was eight, his father was transferred to Neudörfl, near the border with Lower Austria. An argument with the local teacher led his father to educate the boy himself, and this meant that he spent a great deal of time on his own at the railway station where his father worked. Young Steiner was deeply introverted; as he admits in his Autobiography (1925), he had great difficulty relating to the outer world. He also had an inquisitive mind and was obsessed with many questions the adults he knew seemed unable to answer. This subjectivity might have taken a morbid turn were it not for his discovery of mathematics. When Steiner came upon a book of geometry, it was a revelation. “That one can work out forms which are seen purely inwardly, independent of the outer senses, gave me a feeling of deep contentment. I found consolation for the loneliness caused by the many unanswered questions. To be able to grasp something purely spiritual brought me an inner joy. I know that through geometry I first experienced happiness.”¹

Steiner’s joy upon discovering geometry may strike us as odd, yet the experience was essential in getting him through an early crisis. What impressed Steiner so greatly about geometry was that it seemed to offer proof that within the mind there existed a kind of “soul space,” an inner equivalent of the external space of the natural world. The soul space was “the setting for spiritual beings and events.” Thoughts for the young Steiner were not “mere pictures we form of things”; they were rather the “revelations of a spiritual world seen on the stage of the soul.” Geometry, Steiner believed, although produced by the human mind, had an objective reality independent of it, and for him this meant that the soul space in which it was revealed was also real.²

Rather precocious stuff, perhaps, but Steiner’s early years included an event that made him question the outer world’s monopoly on reality.

A Paranormal Encounter

One day at the railway station, he had a paranormal experience, an early manifestation of his psychic abilities. Sitting in the waiting room, he saw a strange woman enter; although he didn’t know her, he felt she resembled other members of his family. Standing in the middle of the room, the woman spoke to the boy. “Try to help me as much as you can – now as well as in later life,” she said. Then she walked into the stove and disappeared. Steiner decided not to tell his parents, afraid that they would scold him for lying. But he noticed that his father was sad, and he later discovered that a female relative who lived in the neighbouring town had committed suicide at the same time that he had had his vision.

This early experience marks for Steiner the beginning of a life-long involvement with the dead. Much of his later esoteric teaching involves accounts of the soul’s experiences in the afterlife and of the machinery of karma and reincarnation, the balancing of the spiritual books that casts the departed back into the stream of life in order to complete their tasks. While other boys of his age were fantasising about the Austrian equivalent of cowboys and Indians, Steiner was preoccupied with the reality of the spirit worlds and the soul’s encounter with the beings that inhabit them.

Later, as a young man, Steiner would on two occasions have unusual opportunities to verify some of his ideas about the meaning of death. Twice he would come into intimate contact with families in which the father was a recluse who would die soon after Steiner made their acquaintance. Yet on both occasions, although never actually meeting the man, Steiner formed a profound intuitive relation with the deceased, so deep and insightful in fact that he was asked by both families to give the funeral orations. Later still, during his years as an esoteric teacher, Steiner informed his followers that one means of helping the dead in their spiritual journeys was to read to them from his writings.

When Steiner was eighteen, his father was transferred once again, this time to Inzersdorf. His new location had the advantage of being close to Vienna, and it was decided that Steiner would study at the Technical School there. Although he had leanings toward literature and philosophy, he chose instead to work towards becoming a science teacher.

One day on the train to Vienna, he met a man who would have a profound influence on his life. Felix Koguzki was a herb-gatherer who travelled to Vienna regularly to sell his wares. It’s not known how they fell into conversation, but the teenaged Steiner soon discovered that this simple, uneducated man had strange experiences like his own, and a deep, personal knowledge of the other worlds. He was the first person with whom he could speak about his spiritual visions, and their talks boosted Steiner’s confidence; more than likely, they also convinced him that he wasn’t crazy.

Meeting a Master

Around the same time, Steiner had an encounter with another individual whose name has not come down to us. Steiner refers to him only as “the Master.” The French writer Edouard Schuré, author of the bestselling The Great Initiates (1889), and later a friend and follower of Steiner, remarked that the Master was “one of those potent personalities who are on Earth to fulfil a mission under the mask of some homely occupation.” Steiner had by this time read widely in philosophy, specifically the German Idealists, and had worked his way through Hegel, Schelling and several others, absorbing Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason during his history class, which bored him. Steiner was obsessed, then and later, with refuting scientific materialism, and this became the impulse that drove his philosophical studies.

Although he doesn’t mention this episode in his Autobiography, in a lecture given in Berlin in 1913, Steiner spoke of the experience. Speaking in the third person, he told his audience: “from that time onward a soul-life began to develop in the boy which made him entirely conscious of worlds from which not only external trees or mountain speak to the human soul, but also the Beings who live behind them…”³

What little we know of the Master is that he pointed out some passages in the work of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of Kant’s most important followers, which helped Steiner in his quest. Fichte’s work focused on the centrality of the human ego, the “I,” the locus of consciousness and the self that scientific materialism argued was mere illusion. Steiner’s spiritual experiences convinced him that this was palpably false and the “I,” rather than being an illusion, was a concrete, irreducible reality. For the next twenty years, until Steiner’s re-invention as a spiritual leader, his work would focus on developing a methodical epistemology proving this fact.

Introduction to Goethe

The single most important influence on his ideas, however, was the work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Goethe is best known for his drama Faust (1808-1832), which takes a cautionary tale about a pact with the Devil and transforms it into an archetype of Western consciousness. Although he’s never enjoyed the same reputation among English speakers, Goethe is one of the Olympians of Western literature, sharing the top shelf with Plato, Dante and Shakespeare (Jung too thought Goethe a key figure, even to the extent of sometimes believing he was an illegitimate descendent of the great man.) Often regarded as the last true Renaissance man, Goethe was not just a giant of literature but also a statesman, traveller, and most important for Steiner, a scientist, making important contributions to botany, anatomy, mineralogy, and optics. Through his literature tutor Karl Schröer, who opened his mind to Goethe’s importance, Steiner was offered what must have seemed the chance of a lifetime. At twenty-two, he was head-hunted as the editor of Goethe’s scientific writings for a major edition of the polymath’s work.

For an unknown rural scholar to be offered such a position might seem unusual, but the general consensus on Goethe’s scientific musings at this point was that they were useless as science and dreary as literature; in truth, no one else wanted the job of editing them. Aside from his early success in proving that the human upper jaw contained the intermaxillary bone found in other mammals – Goethe was, in a different way, an evolutionist long before Darwin – most scientists found Goethe’s attempts to disprove Newton’s theory of colour, or to demonstrate the existence of what he called the Urpflanze, the archetypal plant from which others emerged, muddleheaded if not insane.

Yet for Steiner, Goethe’s science was the prototype for what would become his own phenomenology of the spirit worlds. Instead of the conventional scientist’s cold, dispassionate eye regarding the world as mere matter, passive to his intrusions, Goethe called instead for “objective imagination,” an active participation in the reality under scrutiny. The subjectivity of the scientist – his state of consciousness – was vastly more important than the increasingly hair-splitting exactitude provided by his instruments. This “objective imagination” became for Steiner the basis for his own “supersensible cognition.”

Encountering Nietzsche

Steiner’s work on Goethe opened many doors. One led to Weimar, Goethe’s city, where he was asked to work on the Goethe Archive, another prestigious task. Although Steiner found few congenial colleagues, the work had other compensations. He was introduced to the city’s literary and cultural life and made many acquaintances. One in particular led to a momentous meeting. Elizabeth Forster Nietzsche, sister of the ill-fated philosopher, approached Steiner to work with her in establishing a Nietzsche Archive. This led to Elizabeth introducing Steiner to her brother, who had been insane from syphilis for several years. Elizabeth had taken to dressing the defenceless Friedrich in a toga, and positioning him by the window, where his blank stare and unkempt appearance provided the impression of a great prophet. Steiner, aware of Nietzsche’s madness, was nevertheless impressed – not with the figure before him, but with its spiritual aura. He saw Nietzsche’s soul “hovering over his head, infinitely beautiful in its spiritual sight…” It was a soul that “brought from former lives on Earth golden riches of great spirituality…”⁴

If mention of Nietzsche’s “soul” brimming with “golden riches of great spirituality” suggests to readers familiar with the author of Beyond Good and Evil and The Antichrist that Steiner was as ignorant of Nietzsche’s philosophy as his sister Elizabeth notoriously was, they should have a look at Steiner’s book Friedrich Nietzsche: Fighter for Freedom (1895), a remarkable perceptive study which at times even reads like Nietzsche. Throughout his career, Steiner had an uncanny knack for entering into and defending the ideas of thinkers with whom he had profound disagreements – like the staunch materialist Ernst Haeckel – a critical sympathy that often led to much misunderstanding.

When his work at Weimar was ending, rather than embark on academic career (Steiner had received his doctorate in philosophy during his stay and could easily have found a comfortable niche somewhere), he decided instead to move to Berlin, home of Germany’s nascent avant-garde. He had by this time published what many believe to be his most important book, The Philosophy of Freedom (1894), an exhilarating, if often difficult work of epistemology which Steiner believed established beyond doubt the reality of the human “I.” Others, like the influential philosopher Eduard von Hartmann, author of the once immensely popular The Philosophy of the Unconscious, were less convinced and suggested he had muddled the question. Steiner, however, was undaunted and believed he had a mission to disseminate his ideas. He also needed to find work. Although his followers tend to see Steiner’s life as the undeviating unfolding of a pre-ordained destiny – and Steiner himself, we must admit, contributes to this belief – like the rest of us, he was looking for his place in the world and the means to get on in it. He was also filled – rightly so – with the conviction of his own genius. The literary and cultural world of Berlin might offer opportunities not available elsewhere.

Steiner, however, made the thoroughly impractical decision of buying a moribund periodical, The Magazine for Literature. His previous brief catastrophic experience in Vienna as an editor of a political magazine seemingly forgotten, Steiner proceeded to run the already failing Magazine for Literature into the ground, alienating its readers with his persistent exhortations regarding the spiritual life. In the age of Strindberg, Wilde, Ibsen, Wedekind, and Shaw, Steiner’s idealism seemed a stale leftover from a forgotten time.

Yet, although he bemoaned the burden destiny had placed on him, Steiner seems to have enjoyed hobnobbing with bohemians: his acquaintances include poets, playwrights, novelists and political activists. In fact, his reputation among the demi-monde caused academics to cancel their subscriptions, and Steiner earned the unique distinction of being the one esoteric teacher – as far as I know – to have a periodical banned in Czarist Russia, because its editor was known to socialise with anarchists.

It was also in Berlin that Steiner married his first wife, although one gets the impression that the relationship with Anna Eunicke was little more than platonic. Anna had been Steiner’s landlady in Weimar, and when he moved to Berlin she followed him. There he moved in with her again, and, almost as an afterthought, married her in 1899 in a civil ceremony. (It was in the Eunicke household in Weimar that Steiner had had one of his experiences with the death of a reclusive father.) Anna, not particularly well-educated or cultured, was apparently very happy to have Herr Doctor Steiner under her roof; Steiner, for his part, thus avoided the “misery of living alone,” as well as that of the cheap lodgings and bad food he had endured up till then. Anna was ten years older than Rudolf, and their relationship raises the question of Steiner’s sexuality, of which there is no mention in the entire 406 pages of his Autobiography. I do have it on the authority of one Steiner scholar, Christopher Bamford, that the Doctor was indeed celibate.

Berlin & Theosophy

But it was in Berlin that Steiner’s real career began. For a time he seemed willing to speak to any group who would listen to him. He lectured on history and other subjects at the Workingman’s College, surreptitiously slipping large doses of Idealism to budding Marxist materialists. He also lectured to the Giordano Bruno Society and The Coming Day, a quasi-Nietzschean cultural group. He managed, however, to alienate all of this (as well as Anna Eunicke, whom he soon left) when he accepted a request to lecture to the Berlin Theosophical Society. For years, Steiner had tried to express his insights into the spiritual worlds under the cover of philosopher. Now, at the turn of the century and the age of forty, he decided to forgo the camouflage and speak directly of his experiences.

Steiner quickly rose to prominence among the Theosophists and was soon made head of the society’s branch. One member of his audience was particularly struck. Marie von Sivers, who became Steiner’s second wife in 1914, was a Baltic Russian actress. She asked if it weren’t time for a new spiritual movement to arise in Europe. More to the point, didn’t Steiner think he should lead it? Steiner did, but he insisted that any such movement would be firmly based on Western esoteric sources. Steiner had recently passed through a spiritual crisis which convinced him that the “Christ event” was the single most important incident in human history. He had no time for “Eastern wisdom” or mystic Mahatmas. He more or less adopted the cosmic evolutionary framework of Madame Blavatsky’s Secret Doctrine and informed it with large helpings of German Idealist philosophy and Christian mysticism, developing a peculiarly idiosyncratic neo-Rosicrucian system of esoteric thought, aided by his own readings of the Akashic Record. In light of this it’s difficult to ignore the occult historian James Webb’s remark that Steiner joined the Theosophical Society in order to take it over.

His relationship to the society was rocky, and in 1913 he and its head, the ex-Fabian Annie Besant, came to rhetorical blows over C.W. Leadbeater’s advocacy of the Indian boy Krishnamurti as the second coming of Christ. Steiner was disgusted at the idea, and even more so at Leadbeater’s known paedophilic predilections. He demanded Besant’s resignation; she retaliated by ex-communicating him. Steiner left with much of his flock – by this time several thousand – and started his own group, the Anthroposophical Society. As opposed to Theosophy, which spoke of the wisdom of the gods, anthroposophy was concerned with the wisdom of the human being.

Building a New Movement & the Goetheanum

Practically the first thing Steiner did was to build a temple for his new movement. Land was secured in Dornach, Switzerland, and during WWI Steiner gathered a community of followers from several different countries to construct the Goetheanum, a weirdly beautiful fusion of art nouveau and Expressionist architecture that Steiner himself designed. His lecturing was curtailed by the fighting, but his greatest popularity came with the war’s end. Steiner’s plan to reconstruct Europe, The Threefold Commonwealth (1922), sold some 80,000 copies in its first edition, and audiences for his public appearances were now in the thousands; on one occasion the crowds outside a Berlin auditorium were so great they stopped traffic.

This period, however, also saw the start of the anti-Steiner campaign that would plague him henceforth. Practically everybody hated him: Catholics, Protestants, Marxists, proto-Nazis, not to mention other esotericists. There were at least two attempts on his life, and the number of occult attacks fomented by the “black brotherhoods” is unknown. One clear victory from this time was the establishment of the first Steiner school in Stuttgart in 1919. Based on pedagogical principles developed over decades of tutoring – in Vienna he had cured a retarded hydrocephalic boy to the extent that child grew up to earn a medical degree – Steiner’s educational ideas earned him deserved renown, and an international reputation among experts that continues today.

Steiner endured vilification in the press and disruption at his lectures with equanimity, but one victim of the attacks was, many believe, the Goetheanum, which burned to the ground on New Year’s Eve 1922. Arson by right-wing proto-Nazis is the common assumption, although an electrical fault remains a possibility. In any case, a decade’s effort, not to mention an architectural wonder, was lost overnight: the building was made of the same wood as that used in making violins and burned fiercely. Steiner took the tragedy as a sign that some changes in the society were necessary. His original occult teachings, based on the idea of an evolution of consciousness and the ability to achieve “supersensible thinking,” were, he felt, obscured by the success of subsequent initiatives.

Steiner education, the Christian Community (a religious group using Steiner’s ideas), the Threefold Movement for social change, eurythmy – a form of what he called “visible speech” – and newer developments like bio-dynamic farming and anthroposophical medicine were taking centre stage. Steiner had attracted many younger followers after the war, eager to rebuild society, and these clashed with his older, more esoterically inclined devotees. Bickering within the Anthroposophical Society, whose numbers had swollen in the post-war years, threatened to undo much that had been achieved. On the first anniversary of the Goetheanum’s destruction, Steiner announced plans for a second temple; it stands today in Dornach, defiantly made of concrete. He also told his followers that he was reconstructing the society as well. Although he had not previously even been a member of the society, remaining only its spiritual guide and adviser, he now declared himself president of the newly formed General Anthroposophical Society which, although most successful in Germany, today has branches around the world.

Ahriman & Coming World Inferno

Steiner’s last years were spent in sowing as many seeds as possible for future work; they were also darkened by his belief in a coming world conflagration, when the archangel Michael, overseer of the current stage of human consciousness, would face off against the power of Ahriman, a spiritual being who seeks to prevent humanity’s development. Steiner spoke ominously of the incarnation of Ahriman, an Antichrist-like figure, whose display of miraculous powers would precede a catastrophic “war of all against all.” Steiner believed this unavoidable destiny would take some time to unfold – Ahriman is scheduled to arrive in the 3000s – yet many of his followers suspect that in recent years the process has been speeded up. Steiner himself had grave doubts about the growing pace of technological development, warning his followers that materialist science gains its great power through unwittingly releasing Ahrimanic entities. In his last communications, Steiner called on his followers to develop their consciousness in order to rise above nature to the same extent that technology sank below it. He also gave series of lectures about karma and its work in human history.

Steiner died on 30 March 1925. He had been ill for at least a year with an undisclosed stomach ailment, although there is some speculation he had been poisoned. He continued lecturing until it was physically impossible for him to do so, and his followers were astounded when, on the evening of his last scheduled lecture, they found a note saying that it had to be cancelled because of the Doctor’s health. Nothing like this had ever happened before. The Doctor, they believed, was invulnerable.

The exact nature of Steiner’s illness remains unknown, but it is clear that his inability to refuse help to those who came to him was a key factor. Along with his public and private lectures, and his practical work as a teacher, architect, and agriculturalist, Steiner made himself available to any who needed his counsel. For many years, he had practically no free time, and wherever he went his hotel room saw a constant stream of visitors including, on one occasion, Franz Kafka. Some asked about their astral bodies; others their diet or their marriages; Kafka asked about his writing. Steiner advised them all, giving little bits of himself to thousands. He was, as the Russian novelist Andrei Biely, a follower, once remarked, “a giant of the power of kindness.”⁵ It’s not hard to see how such solicitude would eventually wear anyone down.

In the end, it’s difficult to give an exact assessment of a man whose work combines cogent criticisms of Kant with accounts of life in Atlantis. But this “mild, gentle, good, kindly man,” whose achievement in “humanitarian terms is remarkable and enduring,” as the psychiatrist Anthony Storr wrote of Steiner in his study of gurus, Feet of Clay, remains, for devotees and non-initiate alike, something of an enigma.

Desperate Americans Who Can’t Afford Housing Are Becoming “Modern-Day Nomads” …But Not By Choice

Posted on February 26, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Robert Wheeler

Source: The Organic Prepper

A recent story floating around mainstream media regarding “modern-day nomads” reads like a contemporary article on Henry David Thoreau. It shares stories of people looking to downsize their life and live simply and stories of people who have fallen on hard times, unable to afford rent.

However, what is lacking is the exposure of the dark underbelly of the “modern-day nomad” culture. In other words, they neglect to mention the fact that the enormous growth of the “modern-day nomad” is rooted in the fact that the world economy has all but collapsed, now mired in a global economic depression of unemployment, low wages, and personal financial catastrophes.

While it sounds romantic, it’s often rooted in desperation.

Nevertheless, some of the stories begin in the following way:

If you look closely on city streets, campgrounds, and stretches of desert run by the Bureau of Land Management, you’ll see more Americans living in vehicles than ever before. It was never their plan.

“I wasn’t prepared when I had to move into my SUV. The transmission was going. I had no money saved. I was really scared,” said April Craren, 52, bundled in blankets atop a cot inside her new minivan, a 2003 Toyota Sienna.

She flipped the camera on her phone to show me the camp stove she uses to make coffee and her view of the sun rising over the Colorado River. She has no toilet, shower, or refrigeration.

After separating from her husband, April found herself homeless in June 2020, exacerbating the depressive disorder for which she receives $1,100 a month in disability benefits.

“I could have gotten an apartment but in a crappy unsafe place with no money to do anything at all,” she explained.

Last year, where April lived in Nixa, Missouri, the average rent for an apartment was $762, slightly less than the national average. Like nearly half of American renters, she would have been crippled by the cost.

It’s not surprising, then, that job loss, divorce, or, say, the sudden onset of global health or financial crisis can push so many over the edge.

Many Americans have found themselves trapped in a spiral of poverty from which they simply can’t recover.

It doesn’t sound so bad to those of us with minimalist persuasions

At 52, April Craren didn’t choose this life. It was thrust upon her by unfortunate life circumstances. Craren couldn’t afford the exorbitant rent that is now average across the country on a fixed income. (Partly due to inflation but mostly due to the housing crash in 2008.)

The coordination of lockdowns and COVID restrictions have plunged the world into a deep depression of which we are only beginning to see. Even Wall Street couldn’t have caused this much damage.

“If the Great Recession was a crack in the system, Covid and climate change will be the chasm,” says Bob Wells, the nomad who plays himself in the film Nomadland. Thankfully, Wells was able to help Craren adopt her lifestyle so she can now survive as a “nomad” through his Home On Wheels Alliance.

Wells’s lifestyle was a choice. But the newfound interest in the nomadic lifestyle is not a choice for many.

From Yahoo:

Realizing he had something valuable to share, he bought the domain name Cheap RV Living in 2005. He posted tips and tricks about better vehicle-dwelling, but what he was really offering was a road map to a better life.

Four years later, when close to 10 million Americans were displaced after the Great Recession, traffic to his site exploded. Finding himself at the center of a growing online community, he decided to create a meet-up in Quartzsite, Arizona. He dubbed it the Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (RTR), and in January 2011, 45 vehicles showed up. Eight years later, an estimated 10,000 vehicles convened for what was said to be the largest nomad gathering in the world.

The event’s explosive growth is undoubtedly a reflection of America’s increasing interest in van life as an answer to the affordable housing crisis, an idea made accessible by Bob on his YouTube channel, also named Cheap RV Living, created in 2015.

The “increasing interest in van life” that Yahoo News refers to is not some petit-bourgeois fantasy being realized by privileged middle-class white kids, able to go home at any time. It is the necessity of formerly middle class, working-class, and poor people all across America who are out of work or are working but cannot afford housing.

Minimalism is a legitimate lifestyle for some; others have no choice

For many, this culture of minimalism is genuinely how they wish to live. Nomads have a genuine desire to see empty overconsumption come to an end. However, we can not ignore that minimalism is being promoted to prepare the Western population who are used to high living standards to accept those that are much lower.

Why do you think we continually see articles promoting insects as a legitimate dining option? Why are The Great Reset promoters at the World Economic Forum telling the public that they will soon own nothing and learn to love it?

Being a nomad doesn’t mean you can’t be prepared.

For those who are already nomads, whether by choice or forced by economic circumstance, it might be helpful to know that there are many prepping options available to you. There is no need to be left to the mercy of wherever you are right now.

I highly encourage you to access Daisy Luther’s article, “There’s Another Option Besides Hunkering Down and Bugging Out: Nomadic Living.” It will give you the perspective of someone who has voluntarily experienced and lived the nomadic lifestyle while also the mindset of remaining prepared for anything and everything.

At the rate the Great Reset is taking shape, many of us may find ourselves embracing the nomadic lifestyle, willingly or not.

Have you considered nomadic living?

Reuters, BBC, and Bellingcat participated in covert UK Foreign Office-funded programs to “weaken Russia,” leaked docs reveal

Posted on February 25, 2021 by Reid Mukai

New leaked documents show Reuters’ and the BBC’s involvement in covert UK FCO programs to effect “attitudinal change” and “weaken the Russian state’s influence,” alongside intel contractors and Bellingcat.

By Max Blumenthal

Source: The Grayzone

The UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) have sponsored Reuters and the BBC to conduct a series of covert programs aimed at promoting regime change inside Russia and undermining its government across Eastern Europe and Central Asia, according to a series of leaked documents.

The leaked materials show the Thomson Reuters Foundation and BBC Media Action participating in a covert information warfare campaign aimed at countering Russia. Working through a shadowy department within the UK FCO known as the Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD), the media organizations operated alongside a collection of intelligence contractors in a secret entity known simply as “the Consortium.”

Through training programs of Russian journalists overseen by Reuters, the British Foreign Office sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”

“These revelations show that when MPs were railing about Russia, British agents were using the BBC and Reuters to deploy precisely the same tactics that politicians and media commentators were accusing Russia of using,” Chris Williamson, a former UK Labour MP who attempted to apply public scrutiny to the CDMD’s covert activities and was stonewalled on national security grounds, told The Grayzone.

“The BBC and Reuters portray themselves as an unimpeachable, impartial, and authoritative source of world news,” Williamson continued, “but both are now hugely compromised by these disclosures. Double standards like this just bring establishment politicians and corporate media hacks into further disrepute.”

Thomson Reuters Foundation spokesperson Jenny Vereker implicitly confirmed the authenticity of the leaked documents in an emailed response to questions from The Grayzone. However, she contended, “The inference that the Thomson Reuters Foundation was engaged in ‘secret activities’ is inaccurate and misrepresents our work in the public interest. We have for decades openly supported a free press and have worked to help journalists globally to develop the skills needed to report with independence.”

The tranche of leaked files closely resemble UK FCO-related documented released between 2018 and 2020 by a hacking collective calling itself Anonymous. The same source has claimed credit for obtaining the latest round of documents.

The Grayzone reported in October 2020 on leaked materials released by Anonymous which exposed a massive propaganda campaign funded by the UK FCO to cultivate support for regime change in Syria. Soon after, the Foreign Office claimed its computer systems had been penetrated by hackers, thus confirming their authenticity.

The new leaks illustrate in alarming detail how Reuters and the BBC – two of the largest and most distinguished news organizations in the world – attempted to answer the British foreign ministry’s call for help in improving its “ability to respond and to promote our message across Russia,” and to “counter the Russian government’s narrative.” Among the UK FCO’s stated goals, according to the director of the CDMD, was to “weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbours.”

Reuters and the BBC solicited multimillion-dollar contracts to advance the British state’s interventionist aims, promising to cultivate Russian journalists through FCO-funded tours and training sessions, establish influence networks in and around Russia, and promote pro-NATO narratives in Russian-speaking regions.

In several proposals to the British Foreign Office, Reuters boasted of a global influence network of 15,000 journalists and staff, including 400 inside Russia.

The UK FCO projects were carried out covertly, and in partnership with purportedly independent, high-profile online media outfits including Bellingcat, Meduza, and the Pussy Riot-founded Mediazona. Bellingcat’s participation apparently included a UK FCO intervention in North Macedonia’s 2019 elections on behalf of the pro-NATO candidate.

The intelligence contractors that oversaw that operation, the Zinc Network, boasted of establishing “a network of YouTubers in Russia and Central Asia” while “supporting participants [to] make and receive international payments without being registered as external sources of funding.” The firm also touted its ability to “activate a range of content” to support anti-government protests inside Russia.

The new documents provide critical background on the role of NATO member states like the UK in influencing the color revolution-style protests waged in Belarus in 2020, and raise unsettling questions about the intrigue and unrest surrounding jailed Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny.

Further, the materials cast serious doubt on the independence of two of the world’s largest and most prestigious media organizations, revealing Reuters and the BBC as apparent intelligence cut-outs feasting at the trough of a British national security state that their news operations are increasingly averse to scrutinizing.

Reuters solicits secret British Foreign Office contract to infiltrate Russian media

A series of official documents declassified in January 2020 revealed that Reuters was secretly funded by the British government throughout the 1960s and 1970s to assist an anti-Soviet propaganda organization run by the MI6 intelligence agency. The UK government used the BBC as a pass-through to conceal payments to the news group.

The revelation prompted a Reuters spokesman to declare that “the arrangement in 1969 [with the MI6] was not in keeping with our Trust Principles and we would not do this today.”

The Trust Principles outline a mission of “preserving [Reuters’] independence, integrity, and freedom from bias in the gathering and dissemination of information and news.”

In its own statement of values, the BBC proclaims, “Trust is the foundation of the BBC. We’re independent, impartial and honest.”

However, the newly leaked documents analyzed by The Grayzone appear to reveal that both Reuters and the BBC are engaged yet again in a non-transparent relationship with the UK’s foreign ministry to counter and undermine Russia.

In 2017, the non-profit arm of the Reuters media empire, the Thomson Reuters Foundation (TRF), delivered a formal tender offering to “enter into a Contract with the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, as represented by the British Embassy Moscow, for the provision of a project ‘Capacity Building in Russian Media.’” The letter was signed by Reuters CEO Monique Ville on July 31, 2017.

Reuters’ tender was a response to a call for bids by the FCO, which sought help in implementing “a programme of themed tours to the UK by Russian journalists and online influencers.”

Working through the British Embassy in Moscow, the FCO sought to produce an “attitudinal change in the participants,” promoting a “positive impact” on their “perception of the UK.”

In 2019, the FCO put forward a similar initiative, this time articulating a more aggressive plan to “counter the Russian government’s narrative and domination of the media and information space.” In effect, the British government was seeking to infiltrate Russian media and propagate its own narrative through an influence network of Russian journalists trained in the UK.

Reuters responded to both calls by the FCO with detailed tenders. In its first bid, the media giant boasted of establishing a global network of 15,000 journalists and bloggers through “capacity building interventions.” In Russia, it claimed at least 400 journalists had been cultivated through its training programs.

Reuters claimed to have performed 10 previous training tours for 80 Russian journalists on behalf of the British embassy in Moscow. It proposed eight more, promising to promote “UK cultural and political values” and “create a network of journalists across Russia” bonded together by a shared “interest in British affairs.”

Reuters’ tender highlighted the institutional prejudices and interventionist agenda that underlined its training programs. Detailing a series of UK FCO-funded programs dedicated to “countering Russian state-funded propaganda,” Reuters conflated Russian government narratives with extremism. Ironically, it referred to its own efforts at weakening them as “unbiased journalism.”

At the same time, Reuters appeared to recognize that its covert collaboration with the British Embassy in Moscow was highly provocative and potentially destructive to diplomatic relations. Recounting a UK FCO-funded tour it ran for Russian journalists in the midst of the Sergei Skripal affair, after the British government accused Moscow of poisoning a turncoat Russian intelligence officer who spied for Britain, the tender stated, “[Thomson Reuters Foundation] was in constant communication with the British Embassy in Moscow, to assess levels of risk, including reputational risk to the embassy.”

The mention by Reuters of the Belarusian TV Station Belsat, and its particular relevance “to the UK Government Strategy’s capacity to detect and counter the spread of Russian information” was notable. While describing itself as “the first independent television channel in Belarus,” Belsat is, as the Reuters tender makes clear, a vehicle of NATO influence.

Based in Poland and funded by the Polish Foreign Ministry and other EU governments, Belsat played an influential role in promoting the color revolution-style protests that erupted in May 2020 to demand the ouster of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko.

Ultimately, Reuters’ bid appears to have been successful, as it received a July 2019 contract with the FCO’s Conflict, Stability & Security Fund (CSSF). But neither entity seemed to want the public to know about their collaboration on a project designed to counter Russia. The contract was marked “Strictly Confidential.”

“Weaken the Russian state’s influence”

The programs exposed through the latest leak of documents operate under the auspices of a shadowy division of the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office called Counter Disinformation & Media Development (CDMD). Led by an intelligence operative named Andy Pryce, the program has shrouded in secrecy.

Indeed, the British government has denied freedom of information requests about the division’s budget and stonewalled members of parliament like Chris Williamson who sought data about its budget and agenda, citing national security to block their demands for information.

“When I tried to probe further,” former MP Williamson told The Grayzone, “ministers refused to let me have access to any documents or correspondence relating to this organization’s activities. I was told that releasing this information could ‘disrupt and undermine the program’s effectiveness.’”

During a meeting convened in London on June 26, 2018, Pryce outlined a new FCO program “to weaken the Russian State’s influence on its near neighbors.” He solicited a consortium of firms to assist the British state in establishing new and seemingly independent media outlets to counter Russian government-backed media in Moscow’s immediate sphere of influence, and to amplify the messaging of NATO-aligned governments.

Justified on the basis of Russia’s supposed intention to “sow disunity and course[sic] disruption to democratic processes,” the campaign Pryce laid out was more aggressive and far-reaching than anything Russia has been caught doing in the West.

Pryce emphasized that secrecy was of the essence, warning that “some grantees will not wish to be linked to the FCO.”

A year later, the FCO’s CDMD division outlined a program to run through 2022 at a cost of $8.3 million to the British taxpayer. It aimed to establish new outlets and support preexisting media operations “to counter Russia’s efforts to sow disunity” and “increase resilience to hostile Kremlin messaging in the Baltic states.”

Thus the British government set out with an array of intelligence contractors to dominate Baltic media with pro-NATO messaging – and perhaps sow some disunity of its own.

As seen below, the BBC placed an apparently successful bid to participate in the covert Baltic program through its non-profit arm, known as BBC Media Action.

The BBC also proposed to participate in a separate UK FCO media propaganda program in Ukraine, Moldova, and Georgia. It named Reuters and a now-defunct intelligence contractor called Aktis Strategy, which participated in previous FCO CDMD programs, as key allies in its consortium.

The BBC identified local partners like Hromadske, a Kiev-based broadcast network born in the midst of the so-called Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” in 2014 that relied on ultra-nationalist muscle to remove an elected president and install a pro-NATO regime. Hromadske materialized almost overnight with seed money and logistical support from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and billionaire media mogul Pierre Omidyar’s Network Fund.

BBC Media Action proposed working through Aktis to cultivate and grow pro-NATO media in conflict areas like the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, where a proxy war has raged since 2014 between the Western-backed Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatists. It was textbook information warfare, weaponizing broadcast media to turn the tide of battle in a protracted, grinding conflict.

The UK FCO propaganda campaign warned that “Kremlin-affiliated structures” could undermine the project if it was exposed. For a media organization that claims to place trust at the heart of its charter of values, the BBC was certainly operating under a high degree of secrecy.

The UK FCO’s meddling in Eastern Europe and the Baltics created a feeding frenzy among contractors seeking to provide “capacity building” and media development assistance on Russia’s periphery. Among the bidders were Reuters and veteran FCO contractors that had participated in an array of information warfare campaigns from Syria to the British home front.

The Consortium

Among the intelligence contractors bidding to participate in the UK FCO-funded Consortium were the Zinc Network and Albany Communications. As journalist Kit Klarenberg noted in a February 18 report on the recent FCO leaks, these firms “boast staff possessed of [security] clearances, individuals who previously served at the highest levels of government, the military and security services. They furthermore have extensive experience in conducting information warfare operations on London’s behalf the world over.”

Previously known as Breakthrough, Zinc has contracted for the UK Home Office to covertly implement media projects propagandizing British Muslims under the auspices of the Prevent de-radicalization initiative. In Australia, Zinc was caught running a clandestine program to promote support for government policies among Muslims.

Ben Norton reported for The Grayzone on Albany’s record of “secur[ing] the participation of an extensive local network of over 55 stringers, reporters and videographers” to influence media narratives and advance Western regime-change goals in Syria, while conducting public relations services on behalf of extremist Syrian militias funded by NATO member states and Gulf monarchies to destabilize the country.

In its bid for the UK FCO media program in the Baltic region, Albany proposed a series of satirical “interactive games” like “Putin Bingo” to encourage opposition to the Russian government and exploit “frustrations experienced by Russians in the EU.”

Albany pitched a Latvia-based outlet called Meduza as “a leading proponent of these games.” A top website among Russian opposition supporters, Meduza has received financial support from the Swedish government and several billionaire-backed pro-NATO foundations.

As a UK FCO contractor, the Zinc Network said it was “delivering audience segmentation and targeting support” not only to Meduza, but also to Mediazona, a supposedly independent media venture founded by two members of the anti-Kremlin performance art group Pussy Riot.

One of Mediazona’s founders, Nadya Tolokonnikova, shared a stage with former US President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Foundation’s 2015 conference. The following year, Tolokonnikova trashed now-imprisoned Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, claiming, “He’s connected with the Russian government, and I feel that he’s proud of it.”

Besides delivering “targeting support” for “independent” outlets pushing the right line against the Kremlin, Zinc proposed leveraging UK FCO funding into a program of direct payments and gaming Google search results in their favor. The intelligence cut-out was explicit about its desire to reduce the search visibility of the Russian government-backed broadcaster RT.com.

The UK covertly funded and managed a network of Russian YouTubers and “activated” anti-government protest content

In a document marked “private and confidential,” Zinc revealed the Consortium’s role in setting up a “YouTuber network” in Russia and Central Asia designed to propagate the message of the UK and its NATO allies.

According to Zinc, the Consortium was “supporting participants mak[ing] and receiv[ing] international payments without being registered as external sources of funding,” presumably to circumvent Russian registration requirements for foreign-funded media outfits.

Zinc also helped the YouTube influencers “develop editorial strategies to deliver key messages” while working “to keep their involvement confidential.” And it carried out its entire program of covert propaganda in the name of “promoting media integrity and democratic values.”

Perhaps the most prominent Russian YouTube influencer is Alexei Navalny, a previously marginal nationalist opposition figure who was nominated for a Nobel Prize after becoming the target of a high-profile poisoning incident that brought relations between Russia and the West to its post-Cold War nadir.

The Russian government’s sentencing of Navalny to a 2.5-year prison term for evading parole has inspired a new wave of anti-government protests. Back in 2018, Navalny personally co-sponsored national demonstrations against the banning of the encrypted messaging app Telegram.

In its bid for a UK FCO contract, Zinc revealed that it played a behind-the-scenes role “to activate a range of content within 12 hours of the recent telegram protests.” Whether those activities involved Navalny or his immediate network was unclear, but the private disclosure by Zinc appeared confirm that British intelligence played a role in amplifying the 2018 protests.

Russian intelligence services have released sting video footage showing Vladimir Ashurkov, the executive director of Navalny’s FBK anti-corruption organization, meeting in 2013 with a suspected British MI6 agent named James William Thomas Ford, who was operating out of the British embassy in Moscow. During the rendezvous, Ashurkov can be heard asking for 10 to 20 million dollars to generate “quite a different picture” of the political landscape.

In 2018, Ashurkov’s name appeared in leaked documents exposing a covert, UK FCO influence network called the Integrity Initiative. As The Grayzone reported, the Integrity Initiative operated behind the cover of a think tank called the Institute for Statecraft, which concealed its own location through a fake office in Scotland.

Run by a group of military intelligence officers, the secret propaganda group worked through clusters of media and political influencers to escalate tensions between the West and Russia. Listed among the London cluster of anti-Russian influencers was Ashurkov.

The Integrity Initiative’s military directors outlined their agenda in stark, unequivocal terms. As the leaked memo below illustrates, they aimed to exploit the media, think tanks and their influence network to stir up as much hysteria about Russia’s supposedly malign influence as possible. Since they embarked on their covert campaign, nearly all their wishes have come true.

Bellingcat joins the Zinc Network, allegedly meddles in Moldova’s elections

After Alexei Navalny’s poisoning, he collaborated with the UK-based “open source” journalism outfit Bellingcat to pin the crime on Russia’s FSB intelligence services. Though it is well established that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, a US government entity that supports regime-change operations around the globe, the fact has never appeared in the reams of fawning profiles that corporate media outlets, including Reuters, have published about the organization.

Bellingcat’s role as a partner in the Zinc Network’s UK FCO-funded EXPOSE Consortium may add an additional layer of suspicion about the outlet’s claim to independence.

Indeed, Bellingcat was listed in leaked 2018 documents as a key member of Zinc’s “Network of NGOs.” Among the members in the network was the Institute for Statecraft, the front for the Integrity Initiative.

Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins has vehemently denied accepting funding from the UK FCO or collaborating with it. But after Zinc documents leaked in early 2019, Higgins disclosed that some version of the Zinc proposal had received the green light from the Foreign Office.

Christian Triebbert, a Bellingcat staff member who was named as a potential trainer by the Zinc documents, and who now heads the New York Times’ video investigations unit, claimed the program consisted of benign workshops on “digital research and verification skills.”

What he and Higgins did not mention, however, was that Bellingcat had apparently been dispatched by the Zinc Network to “respond” to the 2019 parliamentary elections in North Macedonia. Stakes were high as the elections were likely to determine whether the tiny country would enter NATO and join the EU. The pro-NATO candidate triumphed, and not without a little help from the British Foreign Office and its allies.

According to the Zinc proposal, Bellingcat provided training to the Most Network, a Macedonian media outlet. It was joined by DFR Lab, a project of the NATO- and US government-funded Atlantic Council in Washington, DC.

After apparently participating in the covert UK FCO-funded intervention in North Macedonia, Bellingcat published an article ahead of the country’s 2020 parliamentary elections entitled, “Russia’s interference in North Macedonia.”

Several Zinc Network documents list Reuters as a member of the UK FCO-funded Consortium media intervention in the Baltic states.

Asked by The Grayzone how Reuters’ participation in UK FCO-funded programs aimed at countering Russia conformed to the news organization’s Trust Principles, spokesperson Jenny Vereker stated, “This funding supports our independent work to assist journalists and journalism all over the world, as part of our mission to strengthen a free and vibrant global media ecosystem to support a plurality of voices and preserve the flow of accurate and independent information. This is because accurate and balanced news coverage is a crucial pillar of any free, fair and informed society.”

In recent years, the BBC and Reuters have played an increasingly aggressive part in demonizing the governments of countries where London and Washington are seeking regime change. Meanwhile, high-profile online investigative outlets like Bellingcat have sprouted up seemingly overnight to assist these efforts.

With the release of the UK FCO documents, questions must be raised about whether these esteemed news organizations are truly the independent and ethical journalistic entities they claim to be. While they hammer away at “authoritarian” states and malign Russian activities, they have little to say about the machinations of the powerful Western governments in their immediate midst. Perhaps they are reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them.

The Top 10% Is Doing Just Fine, The Middle Class Is Dying on the Vine

Posted on February 24, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Please study these charts as a means of understanding the inevitability of economic stagnation and a revolt of the decapitalized middle class.

I’ve been covering the decline of America’s middle class for over a decade with charts, data and commentary on the social depression that has accompanied the decline.

While there are many mutually reinforcing dynamics in this 45-year decline–demographics, global energy costs, financialization and globalization, to name a few– one term describes the accelerating erosion of America’s middle class: decapitalization.

To understand decapitalization, we need to start with the fundamentals of any economy between labor (wages) and capital and between investment and speculation. Although it’s tempting to oversimplify and demonize one or the other of these basics (speculators bad! etc.), they each provide an essential role in a healthy economy, one which is in dynamic equilibrium, a state analogous to a healthy ecosystem with constantly changing interactions of numerous species, individuals and inputs (weather, etc.). This variability enables the order of fluctuations (to use Ilya Prigogine’s profound phrase), a dynamic stability / equilibrium.

If labor’s share of the economy drops too low, the workforce cannot consume enough to support their households and the economy as a whole. If capital can no longer earn an attractive return, investment dries up and production stagnates. If speculators are not allowed to take on risk, liquidity dries up and risk crushes investment. But if speculation becomes the foundation of the economy’s “growth,” then the inevitable collapse of speculative bubbles will crash the economy.

In modern social-capitalist systems, the core stabilizer of the system is the wage-earning middle class which provides the stable workforce driving production and the stable pool of consumers needed to borrow money and consume enough to soak up the production of goods and services at a profit to producers.

Without a stable, dominant middle class, capital has few opportunities to invest in productive capacity. Without a stable, dominant middle class, the economy stagnates and is prone to collapse as it is far from equilibrium.

The process of middle class decline is best explained as decapitalization because the middle class is fundamentally a means of transforming labor into capital via savings and investment. The traditional ladder of social mobility from the working class to the middle class is one of capitalizing work: time and savings are invested in higher education, in effect capitalizing future labor by increasing productivity.

Capital isn’t limited to cash, land or tools; in an information economy, knowledge and skills are also capital, as is the social capital of social networking and relationships formed with mentors, suppliers, lenders, colleagues, investors, etc.

The second way to capitalize work is to save earnings and invest the savings in assets that produce income or gain value: a house, land, rental property, small business and income-producing financial assets such as bonds or dividend-paying stocks.

Thrift, investing, long-term planning and deferred consumption are all essential to capitalizing work by turning that labor into income-producing assets. As the household’s ownership of these assets that yield unearned income rises, so does their income and wealth. These increase the financial security of the household and build a nestegg which can be passed down to the next generation, improving their security via inheritance of income-producing assets.

As long as productivity is increasing the value of their labor, the middle class can leverage future earnings into assets by borrowing money to invest in assets: to buy a house, a mortgage is borrowed against future earnings. As long as the mortgage is a fixed-interest loan and income can be expected to rise with productivity, then this is a win-win situation: capital earns a predictable, low-risk return from the mortgage and the middle class household has stake in a family home, an asset which acts as a savings mechanism as the mortgage slowly pays down the debt and increases the household’s home equity–a form of savings.

The processes of decapitalization have upended this entire structure. In the systems context outlined above, our economy is out of balance and far from equilibrium and thus prone to collapse.

For the bottom 90%, which of course includes the middle class however you define it, it’s increasingly difficult to capitalize labor into capital. There are a number of factors driving this decapitalization:

1. Wages’ share of the national income has continued a five-decade downtrend. (See chart below) National income since 1973 has shifted from labor (wages) to capital and more specifically, to debt and speculative gaming of the system, a.k.a. financialization.

Total household income in the U.S. in 2018 was $17.6 trillion. The decline in wages’ share of the national income from 1973 to 2018 is about 8.5%, which equals $1.5 trillion, the sum shifted from labor to capital every year. (See chart below)(source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/216756/us-personal-income/)

No, this is not a typo. As this RAND report documents, $50 trillion has been siphoned from labor (the lower 90% of the workforce) to the Financial Aristocracy and their technocrat lackeys (the top 10%) who own the vast majority of the capital (see charts below): Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.

2. Within the workforce, wages have shifted to the top 10% who now earn 50% of all taxable income. (See RAND chart below) Financialization and globalization have decapitalized the skills of entire sectors of the workforce as automation and offshoring reduced the human capital of workers’ skills and experience and the value of their social capital. When the entire industry is offshored, skills and professional relationships lose their market value.

In a fully globalized economy, every worker producing tradable goods/services is competing with the entire global workforce, a reality that reduces wages in high-cost developed nations such as the U.S.

Financialization has heavily rewarded workers with specialized gaming the financial system skills and devalued every other skill as only the skills of financialization are highly profitable in a globalized, financialized economy.

3. As the high-wage jobs and capital shifted to coastal urban centers, middle class owners of homes and capital elsewhere saw the value of their assets decline. If a home valued at $100,000 in the late 1990s is now worth $150,000, the owners lost ground even with “official” inflation. In terms of real-world purchasing power, their home actually lost significant value in the past 23 years.

Meanwhile, middle class owners who bought their home in a coastal hot-spot for $100,000 23 years ago are now enjoying home valuations close to $1 million. Homes, along with every other asset, have been shifted into a casino where almost everyone is sorted into winners and losers, less often by skill and more often by luck.

For those who were too young to buy in 1997, sorry–the opportunity to buy a home for three times average middle class income is gone. The lucky generation who bought in the late 1990s in booming coastal magnets for global capital joined the top 10% and their colleagues in less desirable regions lost ground.

4. As capital siphoned off income and appreciation from labor (human and social capital), the gains accruing to capital accelerated. Those who already owned income-producing assets reaped both income and asset appreciation gains as yields on savings collapsed to near-zero as the Federal Reserve and other central banks dropped yields to near-zero in 2009 and kept them low for the following 13 years.

This had two devastating effects on the middle class: hundreds of billions of dollars that once flowed to savers and money markets disappeared, swallowed by the banks as a direct (and intentional) effect of the Fed’s ZIRP (zero-interest rate policy).

Since the Fed destroyed low-risk yields, anyone seeking any real yield (i.e. above inflation) would have to enter the casino and compete with hedge funds, insiders and the Financial Aristocracy. Very few middle class workers have the skills and experience to beat the pros in the casino, and so income and wealth accrued to those who already owned capital.

This is a key reason why the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. Those with capital accrued the majority of gains in income and wealth, leaving the bottom 90% in the dust.

A recent Foreign Affairs essay Monopoly Versus Democracy included these stunning statistics:

Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans. (emphasis added.)

The 3% of income from capital collected by the bottom 90%–which includes the middle class– is basically signal noise: the middle class collects inconsequential crumbs of income from capital.

Prior to the Fed’s ZIRP and financialization of the economy, the middle class could both collect income from capital they owned and they could afford to acquire assets that yielded low-risk solid returns. Now they can do neither. Even worse, the puchasing power of their labor continues to decline, leaving them less able to save and buy assets.

This is why The Top 10% Is Doing Just Fine, The Middle Class Is Dying on the Vine. Please study these charts as a means of understanding the inevitability of economic stagnation and a revolt of the decapitalized middle class.

Two for Tuesday

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Reid Mukai

Sole

The Q-Word: Weapon of Choice for Smearing Opponents

Posted on February 23, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Trevor Scott FitzGibbon

Source: Consortium News

One of the most effective information-operation weapons during the 2016 presidential election was to smear political targets as “Russian bots” working on behalf of the Kremlin. Journalists were de-platformed, presidential candidates were smeared, and lives were immeasurably damaged.

The art of attacking political targets by using open-sourced guilt-by-association is not new — nor is using Russians as foils. Joseph McCarthy and his ilk did it in the 1950s with “red-baiting” and the FBI tried to do it to Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King Jr. and others. Today that disgraceful tactic has reemerged. The smear du jour is to accuse someone of supporting the insane QAnon conspiracy — even if they don’t.

Assassinating the character of political opponents for “supporting” Q has migrated from dubious online provocateurs to television news programming. Suddenly, it seems as if every other word out of certain hosts and pundits on cable news shows begins with “Q,” and that a majority of Democrats sit around the dinner table every night discussing the conspiracy and how it is impacting Timmy’s fourth-grade class.

Ironically, according to the most recent Pew Research Center poll, while close to half the country has heard of QAnon, the majority of them are Democrats. Awareness of Q increased dramatically from 23 percent in March to 47 percent in September.

One reason for this is that the effort to hype the fringe conspiracy group has grown quickly. Increasingly, money flows to digital mercenaries to shame and cyberstalk not only individual targets but entire voting blocs.

QAnon is an idea with no structure, no chain of command and no rules. Anybody can pick up a YouTube channel or another social media account and claim to be an anonymous insider — and exploit and project whatever insane claim they want to make. With the rise of social media and recruitment of virtual reality and “gaming” technologists, these consultants have provided new mediums and taken the art of smearing to a new level. From slanderous TED Talks to inaccurate documentaries that defame individuals who have nothing to do with QAnon, the damage to the target can be severe. Often, those making the allegations are reliant on discredited sources.

But we cannot outlaw people who say crazy things. Whether it’s antifa in Portland, outrageous conspiracies from Q, or the Westboro Baptist Church protesting at funerals, the First Amendment protects problematic speech.

Increasingly, and regardless of your political affiliation, if you’re not echoing the establishment narrative, you are vulnerable to attack.

Discrediting Former Intel Members

Q character assassination has also been used in an attempt to discredit some of America’s most well-respected former members of the intelligence community, including Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity. The targeting of VIPS members is strategic. One of them is former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who chaired National Intelligence Estimates and prepared the President’s Daily Brief for Presidents Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan. Another is former NSA technologist Bill Binney, who has also been targeted as part of the “top leadership” of Q.

For a refresher, VIPS is the group that correctly debunked from the outset the bogus “Russiagate” narrative that permeated the Trump presidency. VIPS’ report was spotlighted in The Nation with a story headlined “A New Report Raises Big Questions About Last Year’s DNC Hack.” For that criticism, these leaders were accused of working with Russia. Fast-forward to 2021 and the exact same leaders are accused of being members of the Q brain trust.

Another troubling trend is the use of foreign operatives to drive the defamation of Americans. For example, one defamer lives in Mexico while another, who lives in Europe, is a self-described former member of a fringe group known as Anonymous. It begs the question, “Who pays them?”

And what’s the potential risk in all of this as a society? Those targeted in this way can potentially lose their business, their home, their friends. All because some misguided or politically motivated cyber-mercenary on contract from Washington, D.C., or a foreign country decides to do it.

Many of the same powerful forces who drove Russiagate are the same operatives now driving the Q smears, colluding with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook to do their bidding. I’ve spoken out publicly and repeatedly against Q because I believe it is a dangerous psychological operation that harms those brainwashed by it and the innocent affected by it.

But for the past few months on social media and cable TV, there has been a dramatic uptick of pundits and shady online operatives turning Q accusations into modern-day Salem witch trials. Q is now a talking point, and painting someone with that brush can completely discredit them — even those who are innocent of the allegation.

On some days, it seems that America has entered the sort of dystopia Aldous Huxley described in his classic novel Brave New World. If this doesn’t give you pause, it should.

Viral Inequality: From Jeff Bezos to the struggle of Indian Farmers

Posted on February 22, 2021 by Reid Mukai

Billionaires have profited enormously from lockdown, whilst mega corporations are buying out and shutting down independent stores and farms.

By Colin Todhunter

Source: OffGuardian

According to a new report by Oxfam, ‘The Inequality Virus’, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020. Their total wealth now stands at $11.95tn.

The world’s 10 richest billionaires have collectively seen their wealth increase by $540bn over this period. In September 2020, Jeff Bezos could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID.

At the same time, hundreds of millions of people will lose (have lost) their jobs and face destitution and hunger. It is estimated that the total number of people living in poverty could have increased by between 200 million and 500 million in 2020. The number of people living in poverty might not return even to its pre-crisis level for over a decade.

Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and head of Reliance Industries, which specialises in petrol, retail and telecommunications, doubled his wealth between March and October 2020. He now has $78.3bn. The average increase in Ambani’s wealth in just over four days represented more than the combined annual wages of all of Reliance Industries’ 195,000 employees.

The Oxfam report states that lockdown in India resulted in the country’s billionaires increasing their wealth by around 35 per cent. At the same time, 84 per cent of households suffered varying degrees of income loss. Some 170,000 people lost their jobs every hour in April 2020 alone.

The authors also noted that income increases for India’s top 100 billionaires since March 2020 was enough to give each of the 138 million poorest people a cheque for 94,045 rupees.

The report went on to state:

…it would take an unskilled worker 10,000 years to make what Ambani made in an hour during the pandemic…and three years to make what Ambani made in a second.”

During lockdown and after, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers in the cities (who had no option but to escape the country’s avoidable but deepening agrarian crisis) were left without jobs, money, food or shelter.

It is clear that COVID has been used as cover for consolidating the power of the unimaginably rich. But plans for boosting their power and wealth will not stop there. One of the most lucrative sectors for these people is agrifood.

More than 60 per cent of India’s almost 1.4 billion population rely (directly or indirectly) on agriculture for their livelihood. Aside from foreign interests, Mukesh Ambani and fellow billionaire Gautam Adani (India’s second richest person with major agribusiness interests) are set to benefit most from the recently passed farm bills that will lead to the wholesale corporatisation of the agrifood sector.

CORPORATE CONSOLIDATION

A recent article on the grain.org website, ‘Digital control: how big tech moves into food and farming (and what it means)’, describes how Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and others are closing in on the global agrifood sector while the likes of Bayer, Syngenta, Corteva and Cargill are cementing their stranglehold.

The tech giants entry into the sector will increasingly lead to a mutually beneficial integration between the companies that supply products to farmers (pesticides, seeds, fertilisers, tractors, drones, etc) and those that control the flow of data and have access to digital (cloud) infrastructure and food consumers. This system is based on corporate centralisation and concentration (monopolisation).

Grain notes that in India global corporations are also colonising the retail space through e-commerce. Walmart entered into India in 2016 by a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com which, in 2018, was followed by a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon now control almost two-thirds of India’s digital retail sector.

Amazon and Walmart are using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to lure customers towards their online platforms. According to Grain, when the two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during a Diwali festival sales blitz, India’s small retailers called out in desperation for a boycott of online shopping.

In 2020, Facebook and the US-based private equity concern KKR committed over US$7 billion to Reliance Jio, the digital store of one of India’s biggest retail chains. Customers will soon be able to shop at Reliance Jio through Facebook’s chat application, WhatsApp.

The plan for retail is clear: the eradication of millions of small traders and retailers and neighbourhood mom and pop shops. It is similar in agriculture.

The aim is to buy up rural land, amalgamate it and roll out a system of chemically-drenched farmerless farms owned or controlled by financial speculators, the high-tech giants and traditional agribusiness concerns. The end-game is a system of contract farming that serves the interests of big tech, big agribusiness and big retail. Smallholder peasant agriculture is regarded as an impediment to be replaced by large industrial-scale farms.

This model will be based on driverless tractors, drones, genetically engineered/lab-produced food and all data pertaining to land, water, weather, seeds and soils patented and often pirated from peasant farmers.

Farmers possess centuries of accumulated knowledge that once gone will never be got back. Corporatisation of the sector has already destroyed or undermined functioning agrarian ecosystems that draw on centuries of traditional knowledge and are increasingly recognised as valid approaches to secure food security.

And what of the hundreds of millions to be displaced in order to fill the pockets of the billionaire owners of these corporations? Driven to cities to face a future of joblessness: mere ‘collateral damage’ resulting from a short-sighted system of dispossessive predatory capitalism that destroys the link between humans, ecology and nature to boost the bottom line of the immensely rich.

IMPERIAL INTENT

India’s agrifood sector has been on the radar of global corporations for decades. With deep market penetration and near saturation having been achieved by agribusiness in the US and elsewhere, India represents an opportunity for expansion and maintaining business viability and all-important profit growth. And by teaming up with the high-tech players in Silicon Valley, multi-billion dollar data management markets are being created. From data and knowledge to land, weather and seeds, capitalism is compelled to eventually commodify (patent and own) all aspects of life and nature.

Foreign agricapital is applying enormous pressure on India to scrap its meagre (in comparison to the richer nations) agricultural subsidies. The public distribution system and publicly held buffer stocks constitute an obstacle to the profit-driven requirements of global agribusiness interests.

Such interests require India to become dependent on imports (alleviating the overproduction problem of Western agricapital – the vast stocks of grains that it already dumps on the Global South) and to restructure its own agriculture for growing crops (fruit, vegetables) that consumers in the richer countries demand. Instead of holding physical buffer stocks for its own use, India would hold foreign exchange reserves and purchase food stocks from global traders.

Successive administrations have made the country dependent on volatile flows of foreign capital via foreign direct investment (and loans). The fear of capital flight is ever present. Policies are often governed by the drive to attract and retain these inflows. This financialisation of agriculture serves to undermine the nation’s food security, placing it at the mercy of unforeseen global events (conflict, oil prices, public health crises) international commodity speculators and unstable foreign investment.

Current agricultural ‘reforms’ are part of a broader process of imperialism’s increasing capture of the Indian economy, which has led to its recolonization by foreign corporations as a result of neoliberalisation which began in 1991. By reducing public sector buffer stocks and introducing corporate-dictated contract farming and full-scale neoliberal marketisation for the sale and procurement of produce, India will be sacrificing its farmers and its own food security for the benefit of a handful of unscrupulous billionaires.

As independent cultivators are bankrupted, the aim is that land will eventually be amalgamated to facilitate large-scale industrial cultivation. Indeed, a recent piece on the Research Unit for Political Economy site, ‘The Kisans Are Right: Their Land Is At Stake‘, describes how the Indian government is ascertaining which land is owned by whom with the ultimate aim of making it easier to eventually sell it off (to foreign investors and agribusiness). Other developments are also part of the plan (such as the Karnataka Land Reform Act), which will make it easier for business to purchase agricultural land.

India could eventually see institutional investors with no connection to farming (pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowment funds and investments from governments, banks, insurance companies and high net worth individuals) purchasing land. This is an increasing trend globally and, again, India represents a huge potential market. The funds have no connection to farming, have no interest in food security and are involved just to make profit from land.

The recent farm bills – if not repealed – will impose the neoliberal shock therapy of dispossession and dependency, finally clearing the way to restructure the agri-food sector. The massive inequalities and injustices that have resulted from the COVID-related lockdowns are a mere taste of what is to come.

The hundreds of thousands of farmers who have been on the streets protesting against these bills are at the vanguard of the pushback – they cannot afford to fail. There is too much at stake.

ACCORDING TO THE FATHER OF PROPAGANDA AN INVISIBLE GOVERNMENT CONTROLS OUR MINDS WITH A THOUGHT PRISON

Posted on February 21, 2021 by Reid Mukai

By Sigmund Fraud

Source: Waking Times

“Who are the men who without our realizing it, give us our ideas, tell us whom to admire and whom to despise, what to believe about the ownership of public utilities, about the tariff, about the price of rubber, about the Dawes Plan, about immigration; who tell us how our houses should be designed, what furniture we should put in them, what menus we should serve on our table, what kind of shirts we must wear, what sports we should indulge in, what plays we should see, what charities we should support, what pictures we should admire, what slang we should affect, what jokes we should laugh at?” ~ Edward Bernays, Propaganda

Authored by Edward Bernays and published in 1928, the book Propaganda still holds its position as the gold standard for influencing and manipulating public behavior. Drawing on his expertise in psychology while using the language of manipulation, Bernays pioneered social engineering via mass media, and his work lives on in the distorted, statist, consumer world we have today.

But who are the ones behind the curtain telling us what to think by directing our attention onto the things which serve interests?

Interestingly, chapter III of Propaganda is titled, ‘The New Propagandists, and is devoted to explaining why the controls for mass manipulation are so closely guarded by a relatively tiny elite who sit in the shadows, out of the public eye, choosing what we are to see and to think, even controlling the politicians we elect to represent us.

If we set out to make a list of the men and women who, because of their position in public life, might fairly be called the molders of public opinion we could quickly arrive at an extended list of persons mentioned in “Who’s Who…”

Such a list would comprise several thousand persons. But it is well known that many of these leaders are themselves led, sometimes by persons whose names are known to few.

Such persons typify in the public mind the type of ruler associated with the phrase invisible government.

An invisible government of corporate titans and behind the scenes influencers who’s mark on culture cannot be understated today. Bernays continues:

The invisible government tends to be concentrated in the hands of the few because of the expense of manipulating the social machinery which controls the opinions and habits of the masses.

The public relations counsel, then, is the agent who, working with modern media communication and the group formation of society, brings an idea to the consciousness of the public. But he is a great deal more than that. He is concerned with courses of action, doctrines, systems and opinions, and the securing of public support for them.

Ultimately, the goal of this type of mass-produced, pop-culture propaganda is to weaken the individual’s ability to think critically, thereby creating an environment where many people look to one another for approval, always second-guessing their own faculties. When this happens, the strength of the collective group begins to take form and multiply, and ideas can be implanted into the popular culture, taking root in the form of widespread conformist behavior.

“Thinking critically means making reasoned judgments that are logical and well thought out. It is a way of thinking in which one doesn’t simply accept all arguments and conclusions to which one is exposed without questioning the arguments and conclusions. It requires curiosity, skepticism and humility. People who use critical thinking are the ones who say things such as, “How do you know that?” “Is this conclusion based on evidence or gut feelings?” and “Are there alternative possibilities when given new pieces of information?”” [Source]

Final Thoughts

The takeaway here is that not much has changed in 100 years of corporate/statist American culture, other than the technical capacity to scale this ever upward. Our lives are still heavily influenced by the likes of the described by Bernays. There is one advantage we do have now, however, as technology has given us greater access to the truth and we are now free to split from the matrix psychologically by understanding what it is and how it influences our lives. If we choose to do so, that is, if we choose to take the red pill.

In order to understand your life and your mission here on earth in the short time you have, it is imperative to learn to see the thought prison that has been built around you, and to actively circumnavigate it. Free-thinking is being stamped out by the propagandists, but our human tendency is to crave freedom, and with the aid of truth, we are more powerful than the control matrix and the invisible government.

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