The American Terror State

By Donald Monaco

Source: Global Research

On February 26, 2021, imperial President Joe Biden ordered the bombing of “Iranian backed militias” in Syria. Biden’s action was rationalized as “retaliation” for rocket attacks on American troops in Iraq that killed a mercenary contractor and injured a U.S. soldier.  

Missing from coverage in the corporate media was any mention of the illegal U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Syria.  The occupation was simply airbrushed from discussion.  By so doing, reality is inverted.  Victim is portrayed as aggressor and aggressor as victim.

From the standpoint of international law, aggressive military action taken by occupation forces cannot be termed self-defense.  Yet political elites and media propagandists finesse basic truths by detaching U.S. forces from the context of illegal invasion and occupation.  They assume the military has a ‘right’ to be deployed anywhere in the world.

Paradoxically, the militias assaulted by the United States have been fighting ISIS, once again exposing the ‘war on terror’ as a massive lie.  The same militia forces Biden attacked were once led by Iranian General Soleimani, who was assassinated by Trump, further demonstrating the genuine purpose of military deployment which is to destabilize regimes targeted as unfriendly, meaning not subservient to the Washington.

Almost simultaneously, the Biden administration signaled that there would be no punishment of Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman, who was identified by the CIA as having given the order to assassinate Washington Post journalist, Jamal Khashoggi.

Also, unsurprisingly, the Biden administration announced that it would appeal a British magistrate’s decision not to extradite Julian Assange to the United States for prosecution under the espionage act.  Assange languishes in a British prison pending the appeal.  His transgression? Exposing U.S. war crimes in Iraq.

The pattern is clear.  Any action that supports U.S. global hegemony is justified, while any opposition is criminalized and repressed.

The core mission of the American terror state is to make the world safe for U.S. corporate profiteering.  A corollary imperative is to prevent any challenge to U.S. global domination.

First, the United States is a permanent warfare state that fights perpetual wars for perpetual profits.  The profits accrue to the “merchants of death” who sell their wares within the iron triangle of a military-industrial-complex that guarantees a massive return on capital investments.  The process is known as “military Keynesianism.”  Corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, General Dynamics, and Boeing provide the arms for a global military empire to defend the global corporate empire.  Profits also flow to members of congress who own stock in the defense industry.

The permanent warfare state also allows profits to accumulate for corporations that exploit the world’s land, labor, and resources by protecting their access to foreign markets.  Corporations such as World Mineral Inc, Peabody Energy, Rio Tinto, General Motors, Lithium Americas, AES, and Blackberry Ltd in the mineral extraction industry, Exxon Mobile, ConocoPhillips, and Chevron in the energy industry, Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, and Microsoft in the technology industry, General Motors, Ford, and Tesla in the automotive industry, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, and Pfizer in the pharmaceutical industry, and Walmart, Amazon, and Costco in the retail industry all operate in the global market.

Commercial banks such as JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America in the banking industry, Wall Street investment firms led by JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley in the financial industry, and private equity firms such as The Blackstone Group, The Carlyle Group, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts Co, and TPG Capital in the investment management industry finance global corporate transactions.

U.S. Fortune 500 companies made $14.2 trillion in revenues during 2020 and held an estimated $2.6 trillion offshore to avoid paying taxes.  The largest American corporations made billions of dollars in profits while laying off thousands of workers during the coronavirus lockdown.  Billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, and their cohorts increased their net worth by half a trillion dollars during a pandemic that saw 8 million people join the ranks of 38.1 million poor Americans.  Another 93.6 million live close to the poverty level in the richest nation on earth.

Second, any country that wants to control its own land, labor, and resources by implementing an agenda of economic nationalism becomes a barrier to free trade, globalization, and the neoliberal economic paradigm that emphasizes privatization and deregulation of economies for the benefit of private capital.  Countries that do not throw themselves open to foreign investment are punished by crippling economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. Department of Treasury.

Third, the neoliberal economic agenda of free market privatization drives the neoconservative political agenda of American global hegemony as justified by Bush Jr.’s “Preemptive War on Terror,” Obama’s “Humanitarian Intervention,” Trump’s “America First,” and Biden’s “Advancement of Democracy” ideologies.

Neoconservatives dominate the foreign policy establishment.  Besides protecting U.S. empire, they are rabidly pro-Israel.  The neocons conflate the interests of the United States with the interests of Israel, ignoring George Washington’s admonition to avoid “foreign entanglements.”  They want the United States to go to war with Iran, as they understand that the destruction of resistance to Zionist colonization in Palestine can only be accomplished by defeating Tehran.

Other Middle Eastern and North African countries that supported the Palestinian cause and had large reserves of oil coveted by empire, were decimated by implementation of a neoconservative plan to attack seven Muslim countries in five years, beginning with Iraq and ending with Iran.

George W. Bush, the Texas oil man, Dick Cheney, former Chief Executive Officer of Halliburton, and a rat’s nest of neoconservatives led by Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Richard Perle, and I. Lewis Libby decimated Iraq.

Barack Obama, the University of Chicago law professor and Nobel Peace Prize winner and neoconservative Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, destroyed Syria and turned Libya into a failed state that resulted in the enslavement of Black Africans.

Donald Trump, the real estate mogul and celebrity show host and Mike Pompeo, neoconservative war hawk and Secretary of State, continued the occupations of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, supported Saudi Arabia’s genocidal war in Yemen, recognized Israel’s annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights, moved the U.S. embassy to the occupied city of Jerusalem and offered the Palestinians the “Deal of the Century” that was promptly rejected.

Despite his rhetoric, Trump failed to stand-up to the military-industrial-complex by ending ongoing U.S. wars.

Finally, Joe Biden, a self-professed Zionist, supported every U.S. war to come down the pike during his tenure as U.S. senator and vice-president, making him a warmonger.

The policies of empire are planned in the corridors of the Council on Foreign Relations, Heritage Foundation, Rand Corporation, Center for Strategic and International Studies, American Enterprise Institute and a myriad array of pro-war institutes that function within the policy formulation network financed by the corporate rich.

The matrix of power in the United States is strikingly transparent.  The corporate rich own the country.  The political class protects their property and their empire by pursuing the interests of oligarchic masters as defined by ‘experts’ in the policy formulation network.  Academic and media elites rationalize the need for an empire that is never called by its proper name.

The costs of empire paid by the American people are staggering.

A study conducted by the Watson Institute of International & Public Affairs at Brown University concluded that the United States has spent $6.4 trillion on war since 9/11.

The National Defense Authorization Act of 2021 allocated $740 Billion for the military and prohibited President Trump from withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and Iraq.  Joseph Biden works within in the same institutional framework that enmeshed his predecessor.  The Biden administration is considering troop re-deployment to confront Russia and China.  But no return of troops to the United States is contemplated.

The United States currently has over 1.3 million active-duty troops, with 450,000 stationed on over 800 military bases in 70 countries around the world. Special military operations are being conducted in 141 countries.  U.S. global military presence escalated under both the Obama and Trump administrations.

As U.S. military presence increases around the world, so do the crimes of empire.  Obama prosecuted drone warfare that killed approximately 5,000 innocent civilians.  Trump escalated drone strikes.   Obama launched 1,878 attacks during his eight years in office.  Trump ordered 2,243 strikes during his four-year tenure in the White House while concealing deaths that occurred as the result of attacks.

Since 9/11 the U.S. has killed an estimated 6 million people in wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen.  At least 37 million people have been displaced by U.S. wars.  The U.S. has bombed 9 countries since 9/11 adding to the list of 24 other nations it bombed after World War II.  Exactly 80 countries have been subjected to U.S. counter-terrorism operations during the “war on terror.”  Behind the statistics lies an ocean of human suffering.

The monumental questions of peace and war in the United States will not be decided by an election.  They will ultimately be decided by a revolt.  The shell-game of American politics wherein populist rhetoric is used to conceal plutocratic governance is bankrupt.

The United States is a militarized terror state.  The magnitude of violence perpetrated by the U.S. government has become so routine that perpetual war is normalized.  The question remains, how long will the American people continue to be slaves of a terror state?

Mass Vaccination Amidst A Pandemic Creates An Irrepressible Monster

By Geert Vanden Bossche and Raúl Ilargi Meijer

Source:  The Automatic Earth

This is a open letter by a virologist named Geert Vanden Bossche. It may well be the scariest thing I’ve read on Covid19 so far. It took me a long time to edit it, there were hundreds of spelling mistakes. If any are left (no doubt), blame me.

Core: the vaccination campaigns and “measures” presently employed are the worst thing we could do: they only serve to make us weaker and the virus stronger, “turning a relatively harmless virus into a bioweapon of mass destruction” that will “wipe out large parts of our human population”.

 

Geert Vanden Bossche, DMV, PhD, independent virologist and vaccine expert, formerly employed at GAVI and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

To all authorities, scientists and experts around the world, to whom this concerns: the entire world population.

 

I am all but an anti-vaxxer. As a scientist I do not usually appeal to any platform of this kind to make a stand on vaccine-related topics. As a dedicated virologist and vaccine expert I only make an exception when health authorities allow vaccines to be administered in ways that threaten public health, most certainly when scientific evidence is being ignored. The present extremely critical situation forces me to spread this emergency call. As the unprecedented extent of human intervention in the Covid-19 pandemic is now at risk of resulting in a global catastrophe without equal, this call cannot sound loudly and strongly enough.

As stated, I am not against vaccination. On the contrary, I can assure you that each of the current vaccines have been designed, developed and manufactured by brilliant and competent scientists. However, this type of prophylactic vaccines are completely inappropriate, and even highly dangerous, when used in mass vaccination campaigns during a viral pandemic. Vaccinologists, scientists and clinicians are blinded by the positive short-term effects in individual patients, but don’t seem to bother about the disastrous consequences for global health. Unless I am scientifically proven wrong, it is difficult to understand how current human interventions will prevent circulating variants from turning into a wild monster.

Racing against the clock, I am completing my scientific manuscript, the publication of which is, unfortunately, likely to come too late given the ever increasing threat from rapidly spreading, highly infectious variants. This is why I decided to already post a summary of my findings as well as my keynote speech at the recent Vaccine Summit in Ohio on LinkedIn. Last Monday, I provided international health organizations, including the WHO, with my analysis of the current pandemic as based on scientifically informed insights in the immune biology of Covid-19. Given the level of emergency, I urged them to consider my concerns and to initiate a debate on the detrimental consequences of further ‘viral immune escape’. For those who are no experts in this field, I am attaching below a more accessible and comprehensible version of the science behind this insidious phenomenon.

While there is no time to spare, I have not received any feedback thus far. Experts and politicians have remained silent while obviously still eager to talk about relaxing infection prevention rules and ‘springtime freedom’. My statements are based on nothing else but science. They shall only be contradicted by science. While one can barely make any incorrect scientific statements without being criticized by peers, it seems like the elite of scientists who are currently advising our world leaders prefer to stay silent. Sufficient scientific evidence has been brought to the table.

Unfortunately, it remains untouched by those who have the power to act. How long can one ignore the problem when there is at present massive evidence that viral immune escape is now threatening humanity? We can hardly say we didn’t know – or were not warned. In this agonizing letter I put all of my reputation and credibility at stake. I expect from you, guardians of mankind, at least the same. It is of utmost urgency. Do open the debate. By all means: turn the tide!

The key question is: why does nobody seem to bother about viral immune escape? Let me try to explain this by means of a more easily understood phenomenon: Antimicrobial resistance. One can easily extrapolate this scourge to resistance to our self-made ‘antiviral antibiotics’. Indeed, antibodies (Abs) produced by our own immune system can be considered self-made antiviral antibiotics, regardless of whether they are part of our innate immune system (so-called ‘natural’ Abs’) or elicited in response to specific pathogens (resulting in so-called ‘acquired’ Abs). Natural Abs are not germ-specific whereas acquired Abs are specifically directed at the invading pathogen. At birth, our innate immune system is ‘unexperienced’ but well-established. It protects us from a multitude of pathogens, thereby preventing these pathogens from causing disease. As the innate immune system cannot remember the pathogens it encountered (innate immunity has no so-called ‘immunological memory’), we can only continue to rely on it provided we keep it ‘trained’ well enough. Training is achieved by regular exposure to a myriad of environmental agents, including pathogens.

However, as we age, we will increasingly face situations where our innate immunity (often called ‘the first line of immune defense’) is not strong enough to halt the pathogen at the portal of entry (mostly mucosal barriers like respiratory or intestinal epithelia). When this happens, the immune system has to rely on more specialized effectors of our immune system (i.e., antigen-specific Abs and T cells) to fight the pathogen. So, as we grow up, we increasingly mount pathogen-specific immunity, including highly specific Abs. As those have stronger affinity for the pathogen (e.g., virus) and can reach high concentrations, they can quite easily outcompete our natural Abs for binding to the pathogen/virus. It is precisely this type of highly specific, high affinity Abs that current Covid-19 vaccines are inducing. Of course, the noble purpose of these Abs is to protect us against Covid-19. So, why then should there be a major concern using these vaccines to fight Covid-19? Well, similar to the rules applying to classical antimicrobial antibiotics, it is paramount that our self-made ‘antiviral antibiotics’ are made available in sufficient concentration and are tailored at the specific features of our enemy.

This is why in case of bacterial disease it is critical to not only choose the right type of antibiotic (based on the results from an antibiogram) but to also take the antibiotic for long enough (according to the prescription). Failure to comply with these requirements is at risk of granting microbes a chance to survive and hence, may cause the disease to flare up. A very similar mechanism may also apply to viruses, especially to viruses that can easily and rapidly mutate (which is, for example, the case with Coronaviruses); when the pressure exerted by the army’s (read: population’s) immune defense starts to threaten viral replication and transmission, the virus will take on another coat so that it can no longer be easily recognized and, therefore, attacked by the host immune system. The virus is now able to escape immunity (so-called: ‘immune escape’). However, the virus can only rely on this strategy provided it still has room enough to replicate.

Viruses, in contrast to the majority of bacteria, must rely on living host cells to replicate. This is why the occurrence of ‘escape mutants’ isn’t too worrisome as long as the likelihood for these variants to rapidly find another host is quite remote. However, that’s not particularly the case during a viral pandemic! During a pandemic, the virus is spreading all over the globe with many subjects shedding and transmitting the virus (even including asymptomatic ‘carriers’). The higher the viral load, the higher the likelihood for the virus to bump into subjects who haven’t been infected yet or who were infected but didn’t develop symptoms. Unless they are sufficiently protected by their innate immune defense (through natural Abs), they will catch Covid-19 disease as they cannot rely on other, i.e., acquired Abs. It has been extensively reported, indeed, that the increase in S (spike)-specific Abs in asymptomatically infected people is rather limited and only short-lived.

Furthermore, these Abs have not achieved full maturity. The combination of viral infection on a background of suboptimal Ab maturity and concentration enables the virus to select mutations allowing it to escape the immune pressure. The selection of those mutations preferably occurs in the S protein as this is the viral protein that is responsible for viral infectiousness. As the selected mutations endow the virus with increased infectious capacity, it now becomes much easier for the virus to cause severe disease in infected subjects. The more people develop symptomatic disease, the better the virus can secure its propagation and perpetuation (people who get severe disease will shed more virus and for a longer period of time than asymptomatically infected subjects do). Unfortunately enough, the short-lived rise in S-specific Abs does, however, suffice to bypass people’s innate/natural Ab. Those are put out of business as their affinity for S is lower than the affinity of S-specific Abs.

This is to say that with an increasing rate of infection in the population, the number of subjects who get infected while experiencing a momentary increase in S-specific Abs will steadily increase. Consequently, the number of subjects who get infected while experiencing a momentary decrease in their innate immunity will increase. As a result, a steadily increasing number of subjects will become more susceptible to getting severe disease instead of showing only mild symptoms (i.e., limited to the upper respiratory tract) or no symptoms at all. During a pandemic, especially youngsters will be affected by this evolution as their natural Abs are not yet largely suppressed by a panoply of ‘acquired’, antigen-specific Abs.

Natural Abs, and natural immunity in general, play a critical role in protecting us from pathogens as they constitute our first line of immune defense. In contrast to acquired immunity, innate immune responses protect against a large spectrum of pathogens (so don’t compromise or sacrifice your innate immune defense!). Because natural Abs and innate immune cells recognize a diversified spectrum of foreign (i.e., non-self) agents (only some of which have pathogenic potential), it’s important, indeed, to keep it sufficiently exposed to environmental challenges. By keeping the innate immune system (which, unfortunately, has no memory!) TRAINED, we can much more easily resist germs which have real pathogenic potential. It has, for example, been reported and scientifically proven that exposure to other, quite harmless Coronaviruses causing a ‘common cold ’ can provide protection, although short-lived, against Covid-19 and its loyal henchmen (i.e., the more infectious variants).

Suppression of innate immunity, especially in the younger age groups, can, therefore, become very problematic. There can be no doubt that lack of exposure due to stringent containment measures implemented as of the beginning of the pandemic has not been beneficial to keeping people’s innate immune system well trained. As if this was not already heavily compromising innate immune defense in this population segment, there comes yet another force into play that will dramatically enhance morbidity and mortality rates in the younger age groups: MASS VACCINATION of the ELDERLY. The more extensively the later age group will be vaccinated and hence, protected, the more the virus is forced to continue causing disease in younger age groups. This is only going to be possible provided it escapes to the S-specific Abs that are momentarily raised in previously asymptomatically infected subjects. If the virus manages to do so, it can benefit from the (momentarily) suppressed innate immunity, thereby causing disease in an increasing number of these subjects and ensuring its own propagation. Selecting targeted mutations in the S protein is, therefore, the way to go in order for the virus to enhance its infectiousness in candidates that are prone to getting the disease because of a transient weakness of their innate immune defense.

But in the meantime, we’re also facing a huge problem in vaccinated people as they’re now more and more confronted with infectious variants displaying a type of S protein that is increasingly different from the S edition comprised with the vaccine (the later edition originates from the original, much less infectious strain at the beginning of the pandemic). The more variants become infectious (i.e., as a result of blocking access of the virus to the vaccinated segment of the population), the less vaccinal Abs will protect. Already now, lack of protection is leading to viral shedding and transmission in vaccine recipients who are exposed to these more infectious strains (which, by the way, increasingly dominate the field). This is how we are currently turning vaccines into asymptomatic carriers shedding infectious variants.

At some point, in a likely very near future, it’s going to become more profitable (in term of ‘return on selection investment’) for the virus to just add another few mutations (maybe just one or two) to the S protein of viral variants (already endowed with multiple mutations enhancing infectiousness) in an attempt to further strengthen its binding to the receptor (ACE-2) expressed on the surface of permissive epithelial cells. This will now allow the new variant to outcompete vaccinal Abs for binding to the ACE receptor. This is to say that at this stage, it would only take very few additional targeted mutations within the viral receptor-binding domain to fully resist S-specific anti-Covid-19 Abs, regardless whether the latter are elicited by the vaccine or by natural infecition. At that stage, the virus will, indeed, have managed to gain access to a huge reservoir of subjects who have now become highly susceptible to disease as their S-specific Abs have now become useless in terms of protection but still manage to provide for long-lived suppression of their innate immunity (i.e., natural infection, and especially vaccination, elicit relatively long-lived specific Ab titers). The susceptible reservoir comprises both, vaccinated people and those who’re left with sufficient S-specific Abs due to previous Covid-19 disease).

So, MISSION ACCOMPLISHED for Covid-19 but a DISASTROUS SITUATION for all vaccinated subjects and Covid-19 seropositive people as they’ve now lost both, their acquired and innate immune defense against Covid-19 (while highly infectious strains are circulating!). That’s “one small step for the virus, one giant catastrophe for mankind”, which is to say that we’ll have whipped up the virus in the younger population up to a level that it now takes little effort for Covid-19 to transform into a highly infectious virus that completely ignores both the innate arm of our immune system as well as the adaptive/acquired one (regardless of whether the acquired Abs resulted from vaccination or natural infection). The effort for the virus is now becoming even more negligible given that many vaccine recipients are now exposed to highly infectious viral variants while having received only a single shot of the vaccine.

Hence, they are endowed with Abs that have not yet acquired optimal functionality. There is no need to explain that this is just going to further enhance immune escape. Basically, we’ll very soon be confronted with a super-infectious virus that completely resists our most precious defense mechanism: The human immune system. From all of the above, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine how the consequences of the extensive and erroneous human intervention in this pandemic are not going to wipe out large parts of our human population. One could only think of very few other strategies to achieve the same level of efficiency in turning a relatively harmless virus into a bioweapon of mass destruction. It’s certainly also worth mentioning that mutations in the S protein (i.e., exactly the same protein that is subject to selection of escape mutations) are known to enable Coronaviruses to cross species barriers.

This is to say that the risk that vaccine-mediated immune escape could allow the virus to jump to other animal species, especially industrial livestock (e.g., pig and poultry farms), is not negligible. These species are already known to host several different Coronaviruses and are usually housed in farms with high stocking density. Similar to the situation with influenza virus, these species could then serve as an additional reservoir for SARS-COVID-2 virus. As pathogens have co-evolved with the host immune system, natural pandemics of acute self-limiting viral infections have been shaped such as to take a toll on human lives that is not higher than strictly required. Due to human intervention, the course of this pandemic has been thoroughly disturbed as of the very beginning. Widespread and stringent infection prevention measures combined with mass vaccination campaigns using inadequate vaccines will undoubtedly lead to a situation where the pandemic is getting increasingly ‘out of control’. Paradoxically, the only intervention that could offer a perspective to end this pandemic (other than to let it run its disastrous course) is …VACCINATION.

Of course, the type of vaccines to be used would be completely different of conventional vaccines in that they’re not inducing the usual suspects, i.e., B and T cells, but NK (Natural Killer) cells. There is, indeed, compelling scientific evidence that these cells play a key role in facilitating complete elimination of Covid-19 at an early stage of infection in asymptomatically infected subjects. NK cells are part of the cellular arm of our innate immune system and, like natural Abs, they are capable of recognizing and attacking a broad and diversified spectrum of pathogenic agents. There is a sound scientific rationale to assume that it is possible to ‘prime’ NK cells in ways for them to recognize and kill Coronaviruses at large (include all their variants) at an early stage of infection. NK cells have increasingly been described to be endowed with the capacity to acquire immunological memory. By educating these cells in ways that enable them to durably recognize and target Coronavirus-infected cells, our immune system could be perfectly armed for a targeted attack to the universe of Coronaviruses prior to exposure. As NK cell-based immune defense provides sterilizing immunity and allows for broad spectrum and fast protection, it is reasonable to assume that harnessing our innate immune cells is going to be the only type of human intervention left to halt the dangerous spread of highly infectious Covid-19 variants.

If we, human beings, are committed to perpetuating our species, we have no choice left but to eradicate these highly infectious viral variants. This will, indeed, require large vaccination campaigns. However, NK cell-based vaccines will primarily enable our natural immunity to be better prepared (memory!) and to induce herd immunity (which is exactly the opposite of what current Covid-19 vaccines do as those increasingly turn vaccine recipients into asymptomatic carriers who are shedding virus). So, there is not one second left for gears to be switched and to replace the current killer vaccines by life-saving vaccines. I am appealing to the WHO and all stakeholders involved, no matter their conviction, to immediately declare such action as THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT PUBLIC HEALTH EMERGENCY OF INTERNATIONAL CONCERN.

 

Author: Geert Vanden Bossche, DVM, PhD (March 6, 2021) – https://www.linkedin.com/in/geertvandenbossche/

Defeating The Global Elite’s Coup D’état: The Great Reset

By Robert J. Burrowes

Worldwide, international organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO), governments and the corporate media, acting as agents of the global elite, continue their efforts to preoccupy the human population with measures supposedly being taken to address the non-existent virus labelled SARS-CoV-2.

For just two of the most recent of the ever-lengthening list of documents and videos demonstrating non-existence of the virus, see ‘COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’ and ‘Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)’.

Unfortunately, this lie is succeeding in distracting the vast bulk of the human population from the ongoing elite coup to take complete control – politically, economically, socially, spiritually and even physically – of the human population under the guise of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’. See ‘The Great Reset’ and ‘Now is the time for a “great reset”’.

Hence, the elite coup – which includes implementation of the technological measures necessary to facilitate the fourth industrial revolution as well as the agenda of the transhumanists – now rapidly gathers pace, at enormous cost to the human population and our prospects for survival.

In brief, this coup has many facets notably including the deployment of 5G to enable comprehensive surveillance, digital ID (possibly implanted in your brain: see ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” Is Being Re-Engineered by the Elite’s Coup’) linked to your bank account and health records, a social credit ID that will end up dictating every facet of your life, the digitization of money, robotization of the workforce and the military as well as, in the words of Dr Joseph Mercola, the complete transformation ‘of government, energy and finance to food, medicine, real estate, policing – even how we interact with our fellow human beings. The globalist technocracy is using the COVID-19 pandemic to bypass democratic accountability, override opposition, accelerate their agenda and to impose it on the public against our will.’ See ‘Who Pressed the Great Reset Button?’

But for a more detailed summary of the essential details of this coup, see ‘Corrupt Science and Elite Power: Your Techno-Slavery is Now Imminent’. For a summary of the enormous and increasing costs, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’. And for the evidence of the coup’s adverse impact on human survival prospects, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

However, while the bulk of the human population remains unaware of what is being planned for us, or naively believes the sanitised version of events presented by elite agents – such as the World Health Organization, governments, official medical spokespeople and the corporate media – enough people are concerned about the serious threats to humanity’s future or, at least, about the very damaging impacts of the lockdowns and other measures such as the ‘gene-altering injectables’ being marketed as ‘vaccinations’, that resistance to this elite coup is also gathering pace. And while this is an encouraging sign, the resistance being conducted so far falls well short of what is necessary given the imminence, multifaceted nature and enormity of the threats.

As a result, Homo sapiens rushes headlong to the cliff-edges of both tyranny and extinction.

So who is resisting, how are they doing so and what else must be done to defeat this coup?

The Resistance So Far: Individual Scholars and Groups

Of course a substantial number of individuals and groups have made the effort to investigate and analyse what is happening ‘beneath the surface’ of this coup and these efforts have resulted in a multitude of documents and videos such as these, for example:

This interview of Catherine Austin Fitts for the film ‘Planet Lockdown’.

This video ‘“The New Normal” New documentary exploring the origin and purpose behind the covid narrative’.

This latest video by Professor Michel Chossudovsky: ‘The 2021 Worldwide Corona Crisis’. Or you can read his article ‘The 2020 Worldwide Corona Crisis: Destroying Civil Society, Engineered Economic Depression, Global Coup d’État and the “Great Reset”’.

And this article by Dr Joseph Mercola which explains the network of organizations centrally involved in ‘The Web of Players Trying to Silence Truth’.

The Resistance So Far: Health Professionals

Many health professionals and others have been consistently exposing the lies that underpin the official narrative being promulgated by the (badly misnamed) World Health Organization, the United Nations, the World Economic Forum, national governments and the corporate media. One outcome of this effort to educate people was the formation of the World Freedom Alliance, which you can join.

Another initiative, undertaken by the 1,500 members of United Health Professionals, was to issue an initial ALERT on 26 August 2020, titled ‘STOP to: terror, madness, manipulation, dictatorship, lies and the biggest health scam of the 21th century’. They urged an immediate halt ‘to all crazy and disproportionate measures that have been taken since the beginning to fight SARS-CoV-2 (lockdown, blocking the economy and education, social distancing, wearing of masks for all, etc.) because they are totally unjustified, are not based on any scientific evidence and violate the basic principles of evidence-based medicine.’ Subsequent alerts of a similar nature have followed.

Other initiatives, among many, have included this recent video by 33 doctors warning against getting the experimental vaccines. Watch ‘33 doctors around the world issue dire warning, to not get the covid vaccine’.

Leo Hohmann simply reminds us that Dr. Tal Zaks, the chief medical officer at Moderna, admitted in 2017 that ‘We are actually hacking the software of life’ thus ‘totally debunking the establishment media’s lie that mRNA vaccines don’t alter your genetic code’ when that, of course, is the actual purpose of messenger RNA vaccines. See ‘Moderna’s top scientist: “We are actually hacking the software of life”’.

Other authors make a point of highlighting the high death rate among those vaccinated, even on official sites which clearly understate the extent of the problem. See, for example, ‘460 Dead 243,612 Reported Injuries from COVID19 Vaccines Reported in the U.K.’ and ‘COVID Vaccine Injury Reports Grow in Number, But Trends Remain Consistent’.

An earlier report noted that the US was forced to change official guidelines in response to the enormous vaccine injury rate. See ‘CDC Issues New Guidelines, Launches Probe After 1000s Negatively-Affected Following COVID-19 Vaccination’.

And Denmark, Iceland and Norway have simply halted administration of the vaccine ‘after reports of blood clots among some people who had received the inoculation’. See ‘COVID: Several European countries halt use of AstraZeneca vaccine’.

If the above doesn’t have you questioning the elite-driven narrative, check out this website with its multitude of videos challenging elite dogma in relation to the ‘virus’: ‘Questioning Covid’.

Of course, you will find very little of the above in the corporate media, with its huge advertising revenue from the major pharmaceutical corporations giving them no incentive to risk losing this income by telling the truth.

The Resistance So Far: Legal

Another series of initiatives is the ongoing efforts to challenge the legal basis of the lockdowns and other official policies supposedly in response to the virus. Watch, for example, Dr. Reiner Fuellmich outline the basis of one legal challenge in ‘“Crimes Against Humanity”: The German Corona Investigation. “The PCR Pandemic”’ and see these two documents submitted to governments in Australia by the Concerned Lawyers Network: ‘Re: Notice of Liability & Potential Claims, 6 November 2020’ and ‘Re: Notice of Liability & Potential Claims, 11 December 2020’.

One challenge has been posed by scholars and a judge drawing attention to the ways in which forced mask-wearing and forced vaccines violate The Nuremberg Code, 1947. See, for example, Judge Anna Von Reitz’s ‘A Plague of Liars’ and Makia Freeman’s ‘Do Mandatory Masks and Vaccines Break the 10 Points of the Nuremberg Code?’

Two of the legal challenges under way in the United States are those being conducted by New Mexico Attorney Ana Garner against declaration of the public health emergency and mandatory administration of the unapproved experimental injectables. Watch ‘It’s Here: First Court Case Against Mandatory Vaccination – Attorney Interview’.

Of course, there are other legal challenges taking place in various countries but, again, you won’t hear much about them in the corporate media.

The Resistance So Far: Police and Military

Police and military personnel around the world have also taken a stand in defence of human freedoms won long ago but now under siege once again.

For example, police in Spain formed Policías Por La Libertad (‘Police for Freedom’) and this is now spreading around the world, including to Australia, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States, for example.

The mission of this international movement is to re-humanise our societies, bringing back trust and unity between the security forces and the people. The peaceful marches, events, campaigns and content created by Police For Freedom aim to educate people about their human rights, civil liberties, constitutional rights as well as the ethical code of conduct for the police and security forces.

We are colleagues from different occupations who want to continue to carry out our work based on our personal and professional ethics, without being influenced by fears, deceptive narratives, immoral rules or differences of opinion.

The Association of French Reserve Army Officers issued their extensive and damning report ‘Investigative Report on the Covid-19 Pandemic and its Relationship to SARS-CoV-2 and other Factors’ in May 2020. Its conclusion noted that ‘The management of the health “crisis” seems to be a pretext for a totalitarian global takeover’ and includes the ‘intention to impose a global cryptocurrency, a vaccine with nano-chips and a subcutaneous electronic chip’ with ‘5G installations, both terrestrial and aerial (Elon Musk’s satellites in low-Earth orbit)… clearly part of this “total war” project.’

Of course, plenty of military personnel are simply resisting vaccination personally, given the long history of abuse of service personnel with experimental ‘vaccinations’. At one US base, ‘as little as 30 percent of personnel are accepting the vaccine’. See ‘A THIRD of all military personnel are refusing to receive the COVID-19 vaccine with alarmed commanders aiming to make the shot mandatory “as soon as possible”’.

The Resistance So Far: ‘Ordinary’ People

Resistance to one or other features of the coup by individuals, communities, businesses and religious organizations, despite being largely ignored or denigrated by the corporate media, has been considerable with plenty of demonstrations, street theatre and other nonviolent actions documented all over the world. For just one article outlining some of the resistance in Europe last year, see this summary: ‘Anti-Lockdown Protests All Across Europe’.

But perusal of the progressive media will quickly reveal some of the many initiatives undertaken by activists and others who have no trouble ‘seeing through’ the fog of lies and misinformation with which certain international agencies, governments, tame medical personnel and the corporate media are deluging us. For example, you can watch ‘10,000 Protesters In Vienna March Against Coronavirus Restrictions’.

More recently, this resistance has gathered pace considerably, including among the small business community. For example, in mid-January restaurant-owners in Italy, other parts of Europe, Mexico and elsewhere opened their doors in defiance of lockdown measures reminding people that collective civil disobedience of any magnitude is extraordinarily difficult to stop. See ‘“I Am Open”: 50,000 Italian Restaurant Owners Plan to Ignore Lockdown’.

And, more broadly, hundreds of Polish businesses reopened in January as well. See ‘Lockdown Rebellion: Highlanders in Poland’s “Winter Capital” to Reopen Hundreds of Businesses’. https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2021/01/14/lockdown-rebellion-highlanders-polands-winter-capital-reopen-hundreds-businesses/

Such is the resistance taking place across Europe, that some prominent commentators have been led to ask ‘Is a Revolutionary Movement Developing in Europe? Rejecting the Lockdown and the Mask’.

Are you reading about any of this in the corporate media?

What Can We Do to Halt ‘The Great Reset’ and Defend Ourselves against the Elite Coup?

Understanding the many elements of what is taking place and, therefore, what is necessary to address it effectively, is the first step to responding powerfully.

Important points in this understanding include two I have made above: The global elite is driving what is happening and, using the ‘virus’ (for which there is no documented scientific proof in existence) as a ‘cover story’, is conducting a coup to take complete control of our lives.

But there is a third, and deeper, point that it is vital to understand: This coup has only proceeded this far because existing parenting, educational and religious practices indoctrinate and terrorize children into a lifetime of submissive obedience. Hence, the bulk of the human population is too (unconsciously) frightened to even question the elite-driven narrative, let alone seek out and analyze the evidence for themselves and then act powerfully in response. For detailed explanations, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

So if we are to succeed in defeating this elite coup, we must be strategically thoughtful in how we approach it.

This is why it is important to point out that entreaties to key international organizations and governments, as well as legal challenges, must ultimately fail. The global elite operates without official constraint, well beyond the ‘rule of law’ and has long controlled all key international organizations as well as governments and legal systems (and the medical and pharmaceutical industries, for that matter) so that they serve elite interests. Therefore, initiatives directed at these elite agents will inevitably come to nought, as history has repeatedly demonstrated. See, for example, ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.

So while I acknowledge the sincerity and genuine effort being put into such activities as lobbying politicians and legal challenges, for example, unless sufficient people are willing to take action that fundamentally undermines the power that enables the global elite to implement its agenda, humanity faces a dark future. It is for this reason that, once again, I outline below the measures that are necessary for us to succeed.

Hence, if you would like to be part of the campaign to defeat the elite coup, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve this outcome, and other aspects of this campaign, starting here: Coup Strategic Aims.

Anita McKone has presented a simpler version, with explanations and examples of actions you can take, here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’. Her song, of the same title, can be heard here: ‘We are Human, We are Free’.

If you wish to focus on resisting the deployment of 5G – the central pillar that will enable so many of the technological measures of the coup to be implemented while causing enormous other harm in the process – scroll down ‘Campaign Strategic Aims’.

To undertake action that is strategically-focused, it will be useful if more people understand the principles and practice of nonviolent action, which can be taught by some nonviolence educators around the world. See, for example, ‘Nonviolent Action/Strategy Workshops in Australia’.

If you wish to campaign to avert one or more of the four most immediate paths to human extinction, you can see a list of strategic goals for doing so here: Campaign Strategic Aims.

If you wish to nurture children to be better equipped to understand what is happening and far more able to critique it and act powerfully, see ‘My Promise to Children’.

If you wish to reduce your vulnerability to elite control, consider joining those who recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance by participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

More simply, if you like, you might consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

Out of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge that:

  1. I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
  2. I will not travel by plane
  3. I will not travel by car
  4. I will not eat meat and fish
  5. I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
  6. I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
  7. I will not own or use a mobile (cell) phone
  8. I will not buy rainforest timber
  9. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  10. I will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or insurance companies that provide any service to corporations involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or weapons
  11. I will not accept employment from, or invest in, any organization that supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the biosphere
  12. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  13. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  14. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Under cover of a non-existent virus and pandemic, the global elite is now implementing a coup that has been carefully planned and prepared over several decades: It is the logical culmination of a millennia-long process of consolidation and expansion of elite control, at the expense of humanity and the biosphere. I have briefly outlined this history in ‘Why Activists Fail’.

If you question the sanity of the global elite for doing this, you are right to do so. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

The fundamental aim of this elite coup, readily discernible by reading their documentation over the past 50 years, is to substantially reduce the human population and keep those still alive, subject to permanent surveillance as well as mind and behavioural control, as ‘techno-slaves’.

If you wish to resist this fate for humanity, you are welcome to join us.

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.

The New Normal’s Religion of ‘Techno-Voodooism’ has Bewitched the World

If Covid-19 has been a boon for anyone, that would be Big Business and Big Tech – overblowing fears, widening the wealth gap and facilitating global control through all-powerful technology the world now depends on.

By Dr. Mathew Maavak

Source: Covert Geopolitics

What happens when systems cross the threshold of peak complexity and can no longer be improved in their current forms?

Decision-makers can commission competing models in order to pick a winner. This however calls for patience, prudence and sound oversight. Alternately, they can pounce on a fantastical blueprint that will supposedly gel via Artificial Intelligence and get to play monopoly at the same time. An all-in-one solution!

Such thinking was precisely what beleaguered the F-35 combat aircraft program with its estimated $1.7 trillion in lifetime costs. After 20 years of troubled development, the stealth fighter’s problems have become so insurmountable that there is talk in the US Air Force of considering a clean slate fighter jet program to replace its ageing F-16s.

The F-35 illustrates the other barely-analysed pandemic infecting our world – that of ‘technological voodooism’ (coined by the author for want of a better term).

Returns on investments these days are no longer measured by healthy profits generated by proven products. The devotees of techno-voodooism are essentially totalitarians who believe that not just markets, but the world itself, must be reorganized and monopolized by an enlightened few in a smart era called the Great Reset. The prime agency promoting this technopia is the World Economic Forum (WEF) which has promised a wonderful world where we will “own nothing” and yet “be happy.”

The outcome thus far has been societal meltdowns, malfunctioning jets in the skies and iRobot Roomba vacuums that meander aimlessly on the floor. The modern adage ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ may have been lost on iRobot’s C-Suite executives. Roomba machines use artificial intelligence to scan room size, identify obstacles and remember the most efficient routes for cleaning.” But the quest for greater efficiency and profits at lesser costs – a process which Buckminster Fuller called ‘ephemeralization’ more than 80 years ago – has resulted in smart updates and berserk gadgets. Even after the vacuum is reset, IoT connectivity ensures that the robot is updated back to its state of regression.

Now, imagine the consequences of similar systems breakdowns worldwide? For starters, consider the point of singularity when robot chefs are updated with a new definition of what constitutes meat? A berserk Roomba machine can at least be switched off and plopped down as a paperweight. That is not an option for Boeing 737 MAX 8 planes which reportedly used artificial intelligence to bend aerodynamic laws on the cheap.

The string of Boeing disasters – as well as other failures mentioned thus far – has not deterred the merchants of techno-voodooism. Instead, every new crisis is seen as an opportunity for AI-mediated quick fixes and big profits. Remember Big Tech’s apocalyptic Covid-19 projections of the previous year?

Pseudosciences, based on the chimera of smart systems have been allowed to run amok, emboldening the WEF to claim that Covid-19 “lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world.” Tell that to the tens of millions of small businesses who have lost their livelihoods to multinational corporations. Just how did cities improve with the archipelago of trash that piled up during lockdowns? What about the environmental impacts which happen to be a pet peeve of the WEF?

It is not just cities that have supposedly “improved” with Covid-19. Bill Gates is now the largest owner of farmland in the United States – coincidentally at a time when lockdowns have worsened food security and incomes among the poor. Logically, this great humanitarian could have matched his suite of predictive analytics software with owned farmland capacity to alleviate lockdown-induced hunger, but Gates is reportedly too busy promoting synthetic beef and vaccines.

The global ‘coronapsychosis’ has in fact accelerated wealth fractionation at the expense of the mid-to-low income classes. Just 655 people now own $4 trillion in wealth, while 200 million can’t cover a $1,000 expense in the United States alone. Imagine the sheer numbers of the impoverished worldwide, especially in nations bonded to the Anglo-American compact?

As for Covid-19 itself, inconvenient facts are routinely censored or shadow-banned by AI-powered social media platforms and search engines. Annual flu deaths in the US – which the British Medical Journal once questioned whether it was more PR than science – have surprisingly disappeared from official health statistics due to the pandemic.

Big Tech will not allow us to question the efficacy of vaccines developed in the West. After all, Artificial Intelligence has seemingly accelerated the development of vaccines that would have otherwise taken years or decades to research, test and deploy.

We should not ask why dozens of people (as of early February) had contracted a rare blood disorder after taking vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna. Or why there is an alarming number of deaths from Norway to Spain to the Netherlands post-vaccination? Or even how thousands of Israelis could test positive for Covid-19 despite receiving Pfizer/BioNTech jabs?

The Covid-19 vaccination figures in Israel are so alarming that two researchers have even called the fiasco “a new Holocaust.” Yet, the Israeli government wants local authorities to maintain a database of its vaccine refuseniks. (The Nazis, too, once maintained a meticulous database of “undesirables” in localities they were about to occupy, but that historical parallel is lost on today’s lamestream media).

Supine Governments

Techno-voodooism did not emerge in a vacuum. It thrived in tandem with ‘inclusivity’ and ‘sustainability’ programs which, in turn, handed the reins of power, scholarship and opinion-making to a horde of half-wits worldwide. This is one reason why governments, backed by spineless bureaucrats and academics, are increasingly surrendering national sovereignties to Big Tech.

One can imagine the quid pro quo: A post-retirement sinecure; jobs for children and relatives; and coding opportunities for trolls who push the Big Tech agenda. No wonder planes are falling from the skies and a raft of disasters await humanity throughout this decade.

Europe is an exemplar in this regard. Its leaders are now worried that Apple and Google may end up issuing Covid-19 health certificates before the union can reach a consensus. Isn’t that the job of sovereign governments with taxpayer-funded healthcare systems? But this trend is getting more sordid by the day.

Bureaucrats are falling over each other to gift vaccine roadmaps and distributions systems to Big Tech because their AI-driven systems can supposedly deliver optimal outcomes. They should just pick Bill Gates’ concept of using mosquitoes as airborne syringes. Call it a bang for the bite!

These shameless capitulations are not limited to the healthcare sector alone. Entire government machineries are gradually hived off to Big Tech. The trailblazing US state of Nevada may even allow tech giants to set up their own governments. These entities can impose taxes, form school districts and even run the judicial system. The first such ‘smart city’ may break ground as early as 2022. What could possibly go wrong?

In the final analysis, while the author argues that Artificial Intelligence and smart systems have real, sectoral potentials, these have been hijacked by the techno-voodooism of Big Tech. We should therefore brace ourselves for a very turbulent decade!

Stagflation Subterfuge: The Real Disaster Hidden By The Pandemic

By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

In recent economic news, headlines are being dominated by concerns over rising bond yields. Increased bond yields are a sign of a possible spike in inflation and, logically, they call for the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates in order to prevent that inflation.

Higher bond yields also mean there is a competitive alternative to stocks for investors – both factors that could trigger a plunge in the stock market.

If one studies the real history behind the stock market crash during the Great Depression, they will find that it was the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes that caused and prolonged the disaster after they had created an environment of cheap and easy money throughout the 1920s. Former Chairman Ben Bernanke openly admitted the Fed was responsible back in 2002 in a speech honoring Milton Friedman. He stated:

“In short, according to Friedman and Schwartz, because of institutional changes and misguided doctrines, the banking panics of the Great Contraction were much more severe and widespread than would have normally occurred during a downturn. Let me end my talk by abusing slightly my status as an official representative of the Federal Reserve. I would like to say to Milton and Anna: Regarding the Great Depression. You’re right, we did it. We’re very sorry. But thanks to you, we won’t do it again.”

This then raises the question – inflation or deflation? Will the Fed “do it again?”

Probably not in exactly the same way, but we will see elements of both inflation and deflation soon in the form of stagflation.

It’s a Catch-22 that the central bank has created, and many (including myself) believe that the Fed has created the conundrum deliberately. All central banks are tied together by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the BIS is a globalist institution through and through. The globalist agenda seeks to trigger what they call the “Great Reset,” a complete reformation of the global economy and capitalism into a single one world socialist system… managed by the globalists themselves, of course.

In my view the Fed has always been a kind of institutional suicide bomber; its job is to self-destruct at the right moment and take the U.S. economy down with it, all in the name of spreading its cult-like globalist ideology.

The only unknown at this point is how they will go about their sabotage. Will the central bank continue to allow inflation to explode the cost of living in the U.S., or will they intervene with higher interest rates and allow stock markets to crash?

Either way, we face a serious economic crisis in the near future.

 

Increasing Inflation Means Economic Recovery?

Mainstream economists will often argue that rising yields and inflation are a “good thing.” They claim this is a sign of rapid economic recovery. I disagree.

If “inflation” was the same as “recovery,” then there would not have been total economic collapses in Argentina in 2002, in Yugoslavia in 1994, or in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s.

I do not see recovery. What I see is the rapid devaluation of the dollar’s buying power due to massive fiat printing through stimulus measures. The Fed and the U.S. government are buying a short-term surge in economic activity, but at a hidden cost. This is a condition that the Dollar Index does not even begin to address, but obvious in prices of necessary goods and commodities.

Keep in mind that all of this is being done in the name of responding to the pandemic. The pandemic is the ultimate excuse for the active destruction of the U.S. economy. Stimulus measures have devolved into helicopter money being thrown about haphazardly as billions are siphoned primarily by major corporations and through fraud. People who are clamoring for a $2,000 relief check from the government have no idea that corporate welfare has been ongoing for the past year along with billions in retroactive tax refunds. All of that money printing is going to cause damage somewhere. It cannot be avoided.

 

It’s Not About The Pandemic

Let’s make something clear first: The pandemic is NOT the reason for the stimulus flood. The pandemic did very little to hurt actual business in the U.S. Rather, it was the lockdowns that did most of the damage.

Think about that for a moment – federal and state governments crushed the economy through lockdowns, then offered the solution of vast stimulus measures. This in turn is destroying financial stability and generating rapid price inflation.

Conservative states and counties that refused to shut down are recovering at a much faster pace than leftist states which imposed draconian restrictions on citizens. Yet, the lockdowns did nothing to stop the spread of COVID-19 in blue states. So, the lockdowns accomplished no discernible advantage for the public, but they did give the central bank a perfect rationale to further erode the dollar.

This resulting price inflation is something that not even the red states can escape.

For example, home prices are rapidly expanding beyond the market bubble of 2006. This is partially due to millions of people participating in perhaps the largest migration in the U.S. since the Great Depression. Anyone who is able is moving away from major cities into suburban and rural areas. But, home prices also have a historic habit of inflating along with currency devaluation. The cost of maintaining and remodeling an older home, or building a new home, rises as the prices of commodities like lumber inflate.

And lumber prices are certainly inflating! Softwood lumber prices are up at least 110% from a year ago, and are climbing as much as 10% in a week.

Home rentals also do not escape inflation, as the rising cost of maintaining properties forces landlords to increase rents. The only places where rents are decreasing are major cities that Americans are seeking to flee, such as New York and San Francisco.

 

Inflation In More Than Just Housing

The majority of commodities continue to see price inflation across the board. Food and energy prices have been creeping higher for the past year. Governments are once again blaming the pandemic and “stresses on the supply chain,” which may have been a believable claim nine months ago, but not today. Anything to hide the fact that all that stimulus has inflationary consequences.

Dollar devaluation is the most visible in terms of imported goods. In other words, it costs more dollars to buy goods outside the U.S. as the value of the dollar falls. And since the majority of U.S. retail is supplied by foreign producers, this means that average American consumers will suffer the brunt of inflationary consequences. Public stress and anger will be high.

 

Pandemic Lockdowns Are Just An Excuse

This is why the COVID-19 lockdowns must continue and the pandemic fear factory must remain active. The globalists need a cover event for the Reset and they need to keep the citizenry under control, and the pandemic can be blamed for just about anything. I think this is why we are already seeing the media hyping the existence of “COVID mutations.” Do not be surprised if the Biden Administration tries to implement a national lockdown sometime this year in the name of stopping the spread of a “more deadly” COVID-19 variant.

It won’t matter that the previous lockdowns were useless and all the data shows that keeping the economy open is a superior policy. It might seem like logic is going completely out the window, but there is a very logical reason for what is happening in the minds of globalists.

Stagflation comes into play through losses in certain sectors of the economy, high unemployment and the inability of wages to keep up with costs.

There is the continued dismantling of the small business sector, which, again, I believe is being destroyed deliberately. It’s not a mistake that small businesses were predominantly targeted as “non-essential” during the lockdowns. It’s also not a coincidence that the majority of COVID-19 PPP loans went to big box corporations while small businesses received almost nothing. The small business sector is being erased, leaving only the corporate sector to provide for consumers.

This may be why Democrats are so adamant about raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. Wages are already rising according to market demand and region. The average non-skilled worker in the U.S. is making around $11 an hour. There is no need for the government to interfere, unless they have ulterior motives.

A $15 minimum wage would likely crush what’s left of small businesses, and only corporations that are receiving the bulk of stimulus dollars will be able to afford to pay workers the higher rate. On top of that, years from now the government could claim they “took action” to front-run stagflation by increasing people’s pay. But a $15 minimum wage is most useful to the establishment in the short term because it muddies the waters on the inflation issue.

Prices will continue to rise due to dollar devaluation, but the media and government will say that it has nothing to do with the dollar and everything to do with companies raising shelf prices to offset increased labor costs.

 

The Biggest Threat In The History Of American Society

I suspect that the establishment will do everything in its power to distract the public from the biggest threat in the history of American society – the stagflationary time bomb.

If they admit to its existence then the public could prepare for it, and they don’t want that. If Americans were to decentralize their local economies, support local small businesses instead of big box retailers, start producing necessities for themselves, and if they started developing currency alternatives like local scrip backed by commodities… then they would be able to survive a national financial crisis.

In fact, I guarantee that any community, county or state that takes these steps will immediately be targeted by the federal government, further revealing the truth: The establishment wants the public to suffer.

They want economic disaster. They do not want people to have the option of taking care of themselves. They need people scared, desperate and malleable, or they will never achieve their Reset agenda.

Is the American Dream Still Alive? (Infographic)

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The post-WWII United States was at the peak of its soft power. One of its pillars was the American Dream. Every American could expect that his children would be better off – better off in every respect: healthier, longer-lived, better educated, happier, richer – than he was. Seventy years later, this dream seems to be blown to bits.

Lee Camp: It’s Time for Major Wealth Redistribution — Yes, I Mean It.

No need to be all apologetic about it, either, since we would just be reclaiming the trillions taken by the billionaires.

By Lee Camp

Source: ScheerPost.org

It’s time for wealth redistribution. There, I said it.

I know it’s the third rail of politics, but I’m not running for a damn thing, which makes me free to speak the truth. (Well, I am running for president of my neighborhood elementary school’s PTA, but I’m pretty sure I’ll win easily since my campaign slogan is “Extend the school day to 20 hours because we don’t want to deal with those little monsters. You take ‘em!” . . . Well, I’ll win as long as they don’t find out I don’t have a child.)

Anyway, we desperately need wealth redistribution. And before anyone starts yelling something about Joseph Stalin, here’s the part that’s going to blow your mind — in the United States we’ve already had wealth redistribution for decades.

Fifty trillion dollars has been redistributed from the poorest Americans to the top one percent over the past several decades. That’s right, a new study shows the richest people in the world have stolen trillions from average Americans. To put this in easier to access terms — you know how mad you get when someone takes the last donut? Well, imagine that multiplied by 50 trillion. (Quick reminder: If you make $40,000 a year, it would take you 1.25 Billion years to make $50 trillion.)

The new study reveals, “…that the cumulative tab for our four-decade-long experiment in radical inequality has grown to over $47 trillion from 1975 through 2018. At a recent pace of about $2.5 trillion a year, that number we estimate crossed the $50 trillion mark by early 2020.”

And to be clear, this money has been stolen from nearly every American. Had income distribution and buying power remained the same as it was from the end of World War II to 1975, ” . . . the aggregate annual income of Americans earning below the 90th percentile would have been $2.5 trillion higher in the year 2018 alone. That is … enough to pay every single working American in the bottom nine deciles an additional $1,144 a month. Every month. Every single year.”

The richest people in America are pilfering over $1,100 from you personally and everyone you know every single month of every single year. Just imagine what each living soul in America could do with an extra $13,700 per year — how many people that would feed, how much less stressful their lives would be, how many fewer foreclosures there would be, and how many more people would get the healthcare they need. Yet every time the most modest tax increases are proposed on the richest Americans, or every time someone so much as mumbles about putting in a public jungle gym or putting in filters to take the metal chunks out of the water or fixing the holes in our bridges that are bigger than the ones in Maria Bartiromo’s head — every time someone brings up these common sense solutions, the elites of our society (who own the media outlets and the levers of the state and the law enforcement and the courts) start screaming from their wine-soaked ski resort orgy balconies, “That’s wealth redistribution! That’s class war!”

Meanwhile, most so-called “progressives” tip-toe around this subject, saying things like, “Well, we just want to slightly increase the taxes on the giant swimming pools filled with money of the wealthiest people. It would only impact people with billions of dollars, which is only a few individuals. We’re sorry. We’re so sorry to ask for this, Mr. Boss Man. Please forgive us.”

Enough of the pussy-footing. It’s time to demand true, full-on wealth redistribution. It’s time to say to the billionaires, “We’re taking your shit, and we’re giving it back to the society you stole it from. We’re taking your cars and your marble statues of your own ass and your boats that park inside your other boats and your emerald bathtubs filled with naked man servants and your inbred cross eyed ugly-ass dogs! . . . But you can keep your children. We don’t want those sociopaths in training. But other than that, we’re taking your stuff because this level of inequality is what most rational economists call ‘fucking nuts’.”

I will however give one caveat to make this go smoother. We only take back everything over $10 million. It’s estimated that there are about 1.4 million American households who have over $10 million. So that means what I’m proposing would impact less than one-half of one percent of Americans. The average American has never even met someone with over $10 million unless they shook Jim Carrey’s hand one time on a sidewalk in New York.

So we — the 99 percent — would take everything over $10 million from the people who have over $10 million. And we would give it out with the bottom 50 percent getting the vast majority of it. This means 99.5 percent of Americans would benefit from this redistribution of wealth. So, before you argue against this idea — Remember: you benefit. You would receive money. Because I promise there is no one with over $10 million reading this column right now, unless one banker accidentally clicked on this because it was next to the Wall Street Journal in his Twitter feed.

Do you need more numbers to hammer home the point? The billionaires in this country have increased their wealth by over $1.3 Trillion, an increase of 44 percent, just since the beginning of the pandemic.

One out of every three people in America have had trouble paying their bills during this pandemic.

Nearly 15 million people have lost their healthcare coverage just since the beginning of this pandemic.

And if you are the one person with over $10 million reading this, don’t give me that horse shit about, “I worked for that money. I earned that money.” No, no, no, no, you did not earn over $10 million. I know you didn’t because that’s impossible. It’s madness. It’s Gary Busey inside Charlie Sheen inside Ted Nugent. Taking the laws of physics into account, there is no way you worked a thousand times harder than a janitor or a sanitation worker or a nurse or a busboy or a fluffer or a fluffer’s second assistant fluffer intern. It’s physically impossible that you worked a thousand times harder than every “essential worker.” (Yes, fluffers are essential.)

What you did was merely take advantage of a system that is set up to exploit the vast majority of the society while most people don’t even realize what happened. That’s what you did because you’re a sociopath. Indeed, most of the Americans with over $10 million are sociopaths. They would kick a puppy down a flight of stairs into the teeth of a wool thresher if it meant they could make an extra $1,000. But I will acknowledge that not all of them are sociopaths. Some of them are relatively okay people working inside a breathtakingly corrupt system. So for the ones who are sociopaths, why should we feel bad for taking their wealth — over $10 million — and redistributing it? (They’re sociopaths after all. Lest we forget: they kick puppies.)

And then for the other ones, who are not sociopaths but still have over $10 million, they’re not going suffer because at the end of the day, they still have ten million goddamn dollars! It’s not like they’d suddenly be scraping by, clothing their children with cardboard boxes painted to look like shirts and bow ties.

So the next time someone says to you, “You can’t raise the taxes on the top 1% because that’s class war. It’s redistribution of wealth,” don’t respond the way most squishy liberals respond — “Ummm, ahhh, errr, no, uhhhh, I’m sorry.” Instead respond, “You’re damn right it is! I want redistribution of wealth. I want a nonviolent class war — because it has been done to the rest of us for the past 50 years at least. We have been exploited and abused, beaten down and defeated, kicked and slapped and scratched and drained and sucked dry and extracted and even burgled!” (Oh man, do I hate being burgled.)

Now is our time to fight back against this terrible machine that has allowed this unbelievable level of exploitation. Screw this system that allows some people to have enough money to end world hunger (literally Jeff Bezos could end world hunger many times over) and yet never do it, while other individuals sleep on a bench hoping no one steals their one box of cereal in the night. To put my conclusion into more sophisticated academic language — Fuck that.

This is an abusive relationship, and it’s time to get out.

What “Normal” Are We Returning To? The Depression Nobody Dares Acknowledge

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Perhaps we need an honest national dialog about declining expectations, rising inequality, social depression and the failure of the status quo.

Even as the chirpy happy-talk of a return to normal floods the airwaves, what nobody dares acknowledge is that “normal” for a rising number of Americans is the social depression of downward mobility and social defeat.

Downward mobility is not a new trend–it’s simply accelerating. As this RAND Corporation report documents, ( Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018) $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.

Time magazine’s article on the report is remarkably direct: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% — And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure.

“The $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn’t inevitable; it was a choice–a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people.”

I’ve been digging into downward mobility and social depression for years: Are You Really Middle Class?

The reality is that the middle class has been reduced to the sliver just below the top 5%–if we use the standards of the prosperous 1960s as a baseline.

The downward mobility isn’t just financial–it’s a decline in political power, control of one’s work and ownership of income-producing assets. This article reminds us of what the middle class once represented: What Middle Class? How bourgeois America is getting recast as a proletariat.

This reappraisal of the American Dream is also triggering a reappraisal of the middle class in the decades of widespread prosperity: The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?

Downward mobility excels in creating and distributing what I term social defeat: In my lexicon, social defeat is the spectrum of anxiety, insecurity, chronic stress, fear and powerlessness that accompanies declining financial security and social status.

Downward mobility and social defeat lead to social depression. Here are the conditions that characterize social depression:

1. High expectations of endlessly rising prosperity instilled as a birthright no longer align with economy reality.

2. Part-time and unemployed people are marginalized, not just financially but socially.

3. Widening income/wealth disparity as those in the top 10% pull away from the bottom 90%.

4. A systemic decline in social/economic mobility as it becomes increasingly difficult to move from dependence on the state or one’s parents to financial independence.

5. A widening disconnect between higher education and employment: a college/university degree no longer guarantees a stable, good-paying job.

6. A failure in the Status Quo institutions and mainstream media to recognize social depression as a reality.

7. A systemic failure of imagination within state and private-sector institutions on how to address social depression issues.

8. The abandonment of middle class aspirations: young people no longer aspire to (or cannot afford) consumerist status symbols such as luxury autos or conventional homeownership.

9. A generational abandonment of marriage, families and independent households as these are no longer affordable to those with part-time or unstable employment.

10. A loss of hope in the young generations as a result of the above conditions.

The rising tide of collective anger arising from social depression is visible in many places: road rage, violent street clashes between groups seething for a fight, the destruction of friendships for holding “incorrect” ideological views, and so on.

A coarsening of the entire social order is increasingly visible: The Age of Rudeness.

Depressive thoughts (and the emotions they generate) tend to be self-reinforcing, and this is why it’s so difficult to break out of depression once in its grip.

One part of the healing process is to expose the sources of anger that we are repressing. As psychiatrist Karen Horney explained in her 1950 masterwork, Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Towards Self-Realization, anger at ourselves sometimes arises from our failure to live up to the many “shoulds” we’ve internalized, and the idealized track we’ve laid out for ourselves and our lives.

The article The American Dream Is Killing Us does a good job of explaining how our failure to obtain the expected rewards of “doing all the right things” (getting a college degree, working hard, etc.) breeds resentment and despair.

Since we did the “right things,” the system “should” deliver the financial rewards and security we expected. This systemic failure to deliver the promised rewards is eroding the social contract and social cohesion. Fewer and fewer people have a stake in the system.

We are increasingly angry at the system, but we reserve some anger for ourselves, because the mass-media trumpets how well the economy is doing and how some people are doing extremely well. Naturally, we wonder, why them and not us? The failure is thus internalized.

One response to this sense that the system no longer works as advertised is to seek the relative comfort of echo chambers–places we can go to hear confirmation that this systemic stagnation is the opposing ideological camp’s fault.

Part of the American Exceptionalism we hear so much about is a can-do optimism: set your mind to it and everything is possible.

The failure to prosper as anticipated is generating a range of negative emotions that are “un-American”: complaining that you didn’t get a high-paying secure job despite having a college degree (or advanced degree) sounds like sour-grapes: the message is you didn’t work hard enough, you didn’t get the right diploma, etc.

It can’t be the system that’s failed, right? I discuss this in my book Why Our Status Quo Failed and Is Beyond Reform: the top 10% who are benefiting mightily dominate politics and the media, and their assumption is: the system is working great for me, so it must be working great for everyone. This implicit narrative carries an implicit accusation that any failure is the fault of the individual, not the system.

The inability to express our despair and anger generates depression. Some people will redouble their efforts, others will seek to lay the blame on “the other” (some external group) and others will give up. What few people will do is look at the sources of systemic injustice and inequality.

Perhaps we need an honest national dialog about declining expectations, rising inequality and the failure of the status quo that avoids polarization and the internalization trap (i.e. it’s your own fault you’re not well-off).

We need to value honesty above fake happy-talk. Once we can speak honestly, there will be a foundation for optimism.