COVID19, The Great Reset & The New Normal

By Derrick Broze

Source: Activist Post

Clearly, 2020 has been unlike any previous year in the last century or so. The world is currently battling against an infodemic of propaganda spewing from the corporate media and official health authorities. Yes, people are sick and dying. However, the statistics make it clear that COVID-19 simply does not warrant a total lockdown of the planet and further destruction of the economy. 

Regardless, nations around the world are using COVID-19 as an opportunity to grab more surveillance and police state powers, institute mask and vaccine mandates, accelerate the push towards a completely digital world, enact more corporate bailouts, and generally, extreme control and involvement in citizens lives. The sheer magnitude of the COVID-19 operation is unparalleled, with the most recent similar event being the attacks of September 11, 2001. As with the 9/11 attacks, the predator class is using COVID-19 as the excuse to push plans and agendas which predate the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Even so, the COVID-19 operation is unlike any other event to take place in modern history because the results of this event are affecting people in every single nation on the planet and will continue to for years to come. Also, unlike 9/11 – which took place over the course of one morning – the COVID-19 operation is taking place daily for months on end. The effects of this constant bombardment with fear and panic are taking a toll on the hearts and minds of free people all around the world. Quite simply, the people are ready for this to end and they will do almost anything to achieve this goal. It is within this space of fear and uncertainty which the predator class has now begun to insert themselves, ready to present the “solution” to our ills.

The Great Reset

As every student of power and deception knows, the easiest way to achieve victory over your opponent is to guide them to a predetermined destination which benefits your agenda. If you can do this while convincing your opponent that they are consciously making their own choices and the path is for their own good – well, you are all but guaranteed success. I believe the evidence indicates this is the strategy we are seeing unfold during the COVID-19 operation.

The predetermined path we are being led down is known as “The Great Reset” and was announced in early June by the World Economic Forum. Regular readers will remember that on October 18, 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the WEF on a high-level pandemic exercise known as Event 201. Event 201 simulated how the world would respond to a coronavirus pandemic which swept around the planet. The simulation imagined 65 million people dying, mass lock downs, quarantines, censorship of alternative viewpoints under the guise of fighting “disinformation,” and even floated the idea of arresting people who question the pandemic narrative.

The launch of The Great Reset was supported by Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum; England’s Prince Charles; Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the UN; and Kristalina Georgieva of the International Monetary Fund. The kick-off was truly an international event with the participation of Ma Jun, the chairman of the Green Finance Committee at the China Society for Finance and Banking and a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the People’s Bank of China. The event was also supported by Bernard Looney, CEO of BP; Ajay Banga, CEO of Mastercard; and Bradford Smith, president of Microsoft.

During the launch of The Great ResetPrince Charles stated that humanity cannot waste time because we need to put nature at the heart of how we operate.” UN Secretary-General Guterres called for “more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies” that can face pandemics, climate change, and other global challenges.

In an opinion piece published in The Globe and Mail, Klaus Schwab provided more details on the goals of The Great Reset (emphasis added):

COVID-19 lockdowns may be gradually easing, but anxiety about the world’s social and economic prospects is only intensifying. There is good reason to worry: a sharp economic downturn has already begun, and we could be facing the worst depression since the 1930s. But, while this outcome is likely, it is not unavoidable.

To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.

Schwab goes on to describe several crises facing humanity, including rising government debt, unemployment, and increasing social unrest. Combined with COVID-19, these crises will leave the world less sustainable, less equal and more fragile. “We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems,” Schwab writes. He details the 3 main components of TGR agenda, specifically fairer market outcomes, investments in “equality and sustainability,” and harnessing the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

When it comes to producing “fairer market outcomes,” Schwab calls for governments to improve coordination in tax, regulatory, and fiscal policy. He also calls for upgrading trade agreements and moving towards a “stakeholder economy.” When he speaks of equality and sustainability, Schwab means that current and future government stimulus and relief packages should be used to create a new system that is “more resilient, equitable and sustainable.”  He also calls for more “green” urban infrastructure and incentivizing industries to improve their environmental record.

Finally, Schwab calls for utilizing the innovations of “the Fourth Industrial Revolution” to support public good. The 4IR is another pet project of Schwab which was first announced in December 2015. To put it simply, the 4IR is the digital panopticon of the future, where digital surveillance is omnipresent and humanity uses digital technology to alter and, hopefully, improve our lives. Sometimes known as “The Internet of Things,” this world will be powered by 5G and 6G technology.

“Ubiquitous, mobile supercomputing. Intelligent robots. Self-driving cars. Neuro-technological brain enhancements. Genetic editing. The evidence of dramatic change is all around us and it’s happening at exponential speed,” Schwab wrote for the announcement of the 4IR.

Of course, for Schwab and other globalists, the 4IR also lends itself towards more central planning and top-down control. The goal is a track and trace society where all transactions are logged, every person has a digital ID that can be tracked, and social malcontents are locked out of society via social credit scores.

In fact, much of this call for a Great Reset is already playing out. For example, Mastercard and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded GAVI recently announced a partnership with AI-powered “identity authentication” company, Trust Stamp. As MintPress News reported, “The program, which was first launched in late 2018, will see Trust Stamp’s digital identity platform integrated into the GAVI-Mastercard “Wellness Pass,” a digital vaccination record and identity system that is also linked to Mastercard’s click-to-play system that powered by its AI and machine learning technology called NuData.

This is why astute readers are skeptical when they hear Schwab say, “the pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable and more prosperous future.”

Who exactly is Schwab speaking to when he speaks of a more prosperous future? How long has this Great Reset been in the works? The answers to these questions can help us understand the true goals of this agenda.

As researcher Brandon Smith reportedChristine Lagardeformer head of the IMF, discussed a global reset as far back as 2014. “The reset is often mentioned in the same breath as ideas like “the New Multilateralism” or “the Multipolar World Order” or “the New World Order.” All of these phrases mean essentially the same thing,” Smith writes.

Smith correctly notes that the Great Reset is not a response to the pandemic, but rather, “the global reset as implemented by central banks and the BIS/IMF is the cause of the collapse. The collapse is a tool, a flamethrower burning a great hole in the forest to make way for the foundations of the globalist Ziggurat to be built.”

New Normal, Same World Order

In early July, Schwab and French author Thierry Malleret released a book outlining the vision of The Great Reset. The book, Covid-19: The Great Reset, explores what the post-pandemic world might look like. “Will there be enough collective will to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity to reimagine our world, in a bid to make it a better and more resilient one as it emerges on the other side of this crisis?,” Schwab and Malleret pondered at the release of the book. The two men believe COVID-19 triggered “momentous changes and magnified the fault lines that already beset our economies and societies.” They also predict that falling oil prices and a freeze in tourism could lead to a wave of massive anti-government demonstrations.

“One path will take us to a better world: more inclusive, more equitable and more respectful of Mother Nature. The other will take us to a world that resembles the one we just left behind – but worse and constantly dogged by nasty surprises,” the authors argue.

In the book, Schwab expands upon the initial announcement of The Great Reset. Once again he calls for the 4th Industrial Revolution and the digitalization of everything, powered by 5G technology. However, Schwab goes even further in his book, calling for rethinking the “social contract” society has with governments.

Schwab also calls for a nature based or green economy. In January 2020, the WEF released their report, Nature Risk Rising: Why the Crisis Engulfing Nature Matters for Business and the Economy, as part of their New Nature Economy series of reports. The report is “the first of a series of New Nature Economy reports, prepared through the Nature Action Agenda, a platform that aims to encourage a movement of businesses, governments, civil society, academics, innovators and youth to disrupt business-as-usual approaches.”

A second report, The Future of Nature and Business, was released in July. Once again, the WEF states that COVID-19 presents an “opportunity, to change the way we eat, live, grow, build and power our lives to achieve a carbon-neutral, ‘nature-positive’ economy and halt biodiversity loss by 2030. Business as usual is no longer an option.

In a companion report, the WEF provides some detail on what it means to change the way we eat. Another set of policy measures that would stimulate more resource-efficient food systems entail directing stimulus packages towards R&D to support the diversification away from diets based on resource intensive animal proteins, and towards four main categories of alternatives – aquatic, plant-based, insect-based and laboratory-cultured,” the report states. This push for alternatives to animal proteins has coincided with a rise in laboratory created fake meat, including products funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 

Interestingly, the companion report also calls for “corporate bailout packages for the meat sector” which “could accelerate these developments.” Coincidentally, because of COVID-19, the Trump administration awarded $15.5 billion in relief aid for the meat and dairy industry. Once again, the predictions and declarations of these global institutions appear to play out in reality as perfect as any scripted TV show.

The calls for a Great Reset greatly mimic previous programs and initiatives put forward by other globalist organizations, including the United Nations. Researcher F. William Engdahl provided much-needed clarity in a recent piece on the announcement of The Great Reset. Engdahl notes that, “the declaration by the World Economic Forum to make a Great Reset is to all indications a thinly-veiled attempt to advance the Agenda 2030 “sustainable” dystopian model, a global “Green New Deal” in the wake of the covid19 pandemic measures. Their close ties with Gates Foundation projects, with the WHO, and with the UN suggest we may soon face a far more sinister world after the covid19 pandemic fades.”

Strategic Intelligence, Strategic Partners, and Event 201

In March, the WEF launched the COVID Action Platform which is essentially a call for global government in response to COVID-19. The answer, WEF believes, is to have greater global cooperation, move away from the nation-state, and tackle the world’s problems as one international community.

Along with the launch of the Action Platform, the WEF released an impressive graphic as part of their “Strategic Intelligence” platform, which outlines the wide ranging ways their plans will effect and shape the world of the 21st century and beyond. From the media’s role in the pandemic to finding a vaccine, the graphic attempts to provide details on this centrally planned future being promoted by the WEF. I encourage all readers to spend an evening going down the rabbit hole that is the COVID Action Platform for a better understanding of where we are headed.

With the launch of The Great Reset, the WEF also launched a Strategic Intelligence graphic detailing how their plans will unfold. The Great Reset graphic details how everything from drones, blockchain, the future of energy, LGBTI inclusion, and 3D printing will play a role in the New Normal. Once again, I encourage readers to take a dive into this graphic to gain clarity on what the WEF and their partners have planned for the coming decade.

The WEF promotes itself as the “International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.” They partner with a variety of private companies, philanthropic outlets, and governments to achieve their goals. Researcher Steven Guinness recently outlined how the WEF partners with various institutions to accomplish their stated aims and how the Strategic Intelligence platform is “co-curated with leading topic experts from academia, think tanks, and international organizations.”

“‘Co-curators‘ are perhaps the most important aspect to consider here, given that they have the ability to ‘share their expertise with the Forum’s extensive network of members, partners and constituents, as well as a growing public audience,’” Guinness writes. “It is safe to assume then that when co-curators speak, members and partners of the World Economic Forum listen. This in part is how the WEF’s agenda takes shape.”

As Guinness notes, the co-curators of the Strategic Intelligence road map of the globalist vision include Harvard university, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Imperial College London, Oxford University, Yale and the European Council on Foreign Relations. Several of these institutions continue to play an influential role in shaping the narrative around COVID-19.

The WEF’s highest level of partnership is known as Strategic Partners. There are only 100 international companies listed as Strategic Partners. Each partner receives an invitation if they have “alignment with forum values.” These partners “shape the future through extensive contribution to developing and implementing Forum projects and championing public-private dialogue.”

The WEF’s Strategic Partners include Johnson & Johnson, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Bill Gates is also a long time “Agenda Contributor” for the WEF.  As mentioned above, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the WEF on the Event 201 pandemic exercise in October 2019. Johnson & Johnson were also partners in the exercise.

As TLAV has previously documented, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation operates in a similar fashion to the WEF: their publicly stated goals mask a global control agenda. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Klaus Schwab, founder of the WEF, is a former attendee and member of the Steering Committee for the secretive Bilderberg Group.

The WEF itself is akin to a more public Bilderberg Group which brings together around 3,000 business leaders, international political leaders, economists, celebrities, and journalists for a five day conference to discuss global issues. The WEF meets every January in Davos, Switzerland, to discuss their agenda. The elitism of the WEF has resulted in Schwab and his cohorts being nicknamed The Davos Class.

In January 2021 the theme of the WEF meeting will be “The Great Reset.” It’s important that we keep an eye on the WEF and their push for the Great Reset as we draw closer to election 2020 and a potential Dark Winter. Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates, and their ilk are determined to present themselves as the saviors of humanity. They are using the COVID-19 panic as an opportunity to push their agenda while selling it as the cure to our problems.

This predator class attempts to mask their true intentions with flowery language designed to lull the waking masses back to sleep. To be clear, our world is absolutely, without a doubt existing in an unsustainable paradigm. We do have growing income inequality, police violence, failing healthcare systems, and insufficient food production systems. These problems were apparent before COVID-19 and the fragility of these systems has indeed become more obvious in recent months. However, these psychopaths would prefer if we allowed them to stay in the driver’s seat as they careen us into a future of technocratic control and the end of individual liberty.

While Schwab and Gates would prefer that the people of the world submit to their vision, we must stand against this push for centralization of power and technology. The Great Reset is coming, and perhaps, it should come. We have many issues facing our species that need to be addressed. However, central planning, surveillance, and loss of individual liberty is not the answer. The answer is decentralization, opting out en masse, non-compliance, and non-participation in the systems which have brought us to this predicament.

We, as free people, must decide what path we intend to take. Will we stand by and allow the predators to seize control of all resources and power for the coming generations? Or, will we finally break free from their violent systems and initiate a Great Reset which benefits the people, from bottom to top?

The answer depends on you.

Question Everything, Come To Your Own Conclusions.

COVID-19 Does Not Exist: The Global Elite’s Campaign of Terror Against Humanity

By Robert J. Burrowes

There is no COVID-19 virus. It does not exist. If you ask any doctor or scientist in the world to show you a scientifically-verified proof that it does exist, they will not be able to show you one.

Given that it has not been scientifically established that the COVID-19 virus exists, it is therefore clear that everything being done supposedly in the effort to tackle the ‘virus’ is being done for another purpose and COVID-19 is being used to conceal this fact.

However, with the elite-driven narrative being endlessly promoted by the World Health Organisation, governments, the medical and pharmaceutical industries, along with the corporate media, the truth is being obliterated.

And the reason for this is obvious: Any serious consideration of the underlying evidence, as I have documented previously, clearly indicates that the global elite is conducting a coup against humanity and using the fear it generates around COVID-19 to distract people from paying attention to what is happening in the background. For this reason, the coup continues to gain pace with only an insignificant number of people yet aware of the coup and its ongoing and increasingly devastating impacts.

‘How is the elite doing this?’ you might ask. Far too easily, unfortunately.

In essence, key individuals in the World Health Organisation (WHO), governments, the medical and pharmaceutical industries, as well as the corporate media are lying to you about this. They are lying to you, consciously or unconsciously, for essentially one of three reasons (essentially determined by where the individual fits in relation to the elite’s ongoing execution of its coup):

1. they are lying as an outcome of their complicity in the coup (given the perceived benefits to them personally, at least in the short term),

2. they are lying as an outcome of their ignorance (by not investigating and considering the evidence for themself and submissively accepting the elite narrative), or

3. they are lying as an outcome of their fear (of the adverse personal repercussions they would expect for resisting the elite narrative that there is indeed a virus).

And, so far, the elite is successfully executing its coup because the many voices contradicting its narrative – such as those individual doctors powerful enough to present the truth about the so-called ‘virus’ – are being denied a forum in any elite-controlled outlet such as the corporate media or they are being censored (including removed from accessible sites on the internet).

If what I have written above sounds incredible given the worldwide response supposedly to tackle the ‘virus’, the evidence presented below, together with the references to further documentation, will give you plenty to consider (provided your own fear will allow you to do so).

But before presenting this evidence, it is worth being aware of some of the existing adverse impacts of the coup:

1. The sudden destruction of the global economy has impoverished tens of millions of people in industrialized societies through unemployment, making them even more vulnerable to homelessness and other misery, as well as precipitating the death of millions of people projected to die of starvation in Africa, Asia and elsewhere because of the disruption of global food production and supply. See ‘WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’ and ‘COVID-19 could kill more people through hunger than the disease itself, warns Oxfam’.

2. There has been a dramatic increase in violence against children and women all over the world and particularly in some contexts with a recent United Nations Population Fund report highlighting that an ‘additional 5.6 million child marriages can be expected because of the coronavirus pandemic, which resulted in a short-term increase in poverty and the shutdown of schools’. In addition, the ‘current pandemic is also expected to have a massive impact on the projected growth of harmful practices on women’s bodies’ including female genital mutilation (FGM). See ‘Child Marriage, FGM and Harmful Practices on Women’s Bodies to Increase Because of COVID-19’.

3. The lockdowns have imprisoned people in their homes (with its seriously adverse psychological, social and physical repercussions) and laws have been introduced regarding ‘social distancing’ and other measures (including mask-wearing which I will discuss below) that have eviscerated rights and freedoms it took centuries to win. For the details, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’.

In response to growing concerns on a number of points, 600 doctors signed a letter to US President Donald Trump to end the ‘lockdown’ – see ‘“Mass casualty incident”: 600 doctors sign letter to Trump calling for end to lockdowns over health concerns’ – which has since been signed by thousands. See ‘Literally Thousands of Doctors and Scientists Have Come Out Against Fauci’s Lockdowns Including a Nobel Prize-Winning Biophysicist. The Media Just Doesn’t Want You to Know’.

4. Despite the ‘diagnostic’ tests for COVID-19 being ‘scientifically meaningless’ – see COVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless’ – (how can they not be when there is no virus?) compulsory vaccination (again, against a non-existent virus) is being threatened – see 120 Covid-19 Vaccine Projects are Underway – in direct violation of Article 6 of the ‘Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights’ despite the extensively documented record of vaccines causing devastating harms including massive lethality. For a taste of the vast literature on this point, see ‘Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination’.

As Dr Stefan Lanka has explained about vaccines generally:

Only ignorant people who blindly trust in the state authorities who are ‘testing’ and approving the vaccines can regard vaccination as a ‘small harmless prick’. The verifiable facts demonstrate the danger and negligence of these scientists and politicians, who claim that vaccines are safe, have little or no side-effects and would protect from a disease. None of these claims is true and scientific. See ‘The Misconception Called “Virus”: Measles as an example’.

Moreover, this vaccination will be used to dramatically expand surveillance both via biometric ID and ‘immunity passes’. See ‘ID2020 and partners launch program to provide digital ID with vaccines’ and ‘Mass-Tracking COVI-PASS Immunity Passports Slated to Roll Out in 15 Countries’.

  1. Other measures to expand surveillance (apart from through vaccination) are being introduced. These include ‘contact tracing’ despite the fact that even ‘A WHO study on influenza pandemics in 2019 came to the conclusion that contact tracing is not useful from an epidemiological point of view and “is not recommended in any circumstances”.’ See ‘Facts about COVID-19’. But that is precisely the point: Contact tracing is not about epidemiological usefulness; it is about surveillance.
  2. Critically, several measures necessary to implement the so-called fourth industrial revolution, including the deployment of 5G, which will reduce human individuals to digitized identities without effective rights and freedoms, are being accelerated. See Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision.
  3. While much human activity has been brought to a standstill, this has not included any of the violence which has not only continued unchecked but has expanded. Apart from the dramatic increase in violence against children and women all over the world noted above, wars, threats of war, sanctions, the military violence of occupations in places such as Palestine, Tibet and West Papua, the structural violence that systematically exploits (that is, loots) countries in Africa, Asia and Central/South America, the ecological violence that destroys lands, oceans and atmosphere have all proceeded as usual with the caveat that there has been a reduction in the emissions of some industrial and other waste products although this is hugely problematic in one critical sense. See ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’
  4. And four distinct paths to human extinction – nuclear war, the climate catastrophe, the deployment of 5G and biodiversity collapse – have been accelerated, inadvertently or otherwise, by the coup. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

COVID-19 Does Not Exist

Despite these and many other adverse impacts already happening in response to the COVID-19 crisis, as noted at the beginning, it has never been scientifically established that the COVID-19 virus actually exists. More fundamentally, according to Dr Stefan Lanka: ‘Contrary to what most people believe, there are no pathogenic viruses.… All claims about viruses as pathogens are wrong and are based on easily recognisable, understandable and verifiable misinterpretations…. A real and complete virus does not exist anywhere in the entire “scientific” literature.’ See ‘The Misconception Called “Virus”: Measles as an example’.

To reiterate in the words of two other authors: ‘there is no original scientific evidence that definitively demonstrates that any virus is the cause of any disease’. See What Really Makes You Ill? Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong. But you can read more in ‘Dismantling the Virus Theory – The “measles virus” as an example’ and watch the video interview The Real Science of Germs: Do Viruses Cause Disease?

In addition, and specifically in relation to COVID-19, according to Dr Andrew Kaufman, ‘there is no evidence of anyone dying from any novel illness’. See ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’. So what has happened?

As Dr Kaufman explains: Early scientific papers on the subject suggested an association (not causation) between a novel coronavirus ‘with human to human transmission and severe human infection’ whereas a subsequent key ‘scientific’ paper that made a claim which helped drive the global response to COVID-19 ‘flat out lied’ about their results: ‘Following the first outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, a new coronavirus was identified as the causative agent in January 2020.’ See ‘Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19’. In fact, Dr Kaufman points out: ‘they cannot reference any science to back that up whatsoever’.

Moreover, subsequently to this paper, another article – see ‘I study viruses: How our team isolated the new coronavirus to fight the global pandemic’ – declared ‘The emergence of a new coronavirus in a market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 set in motion the pandemic we are now witnessing in 160 countries around the world’. But again, Dr Kaufman counters, ‘no evidence was provided at all’ to support this claim: ‘just flat out lies’. For the details and citation of all the scientific sources for this explanation of how the COVID-19 ‘rumour mill’ got started, see ‘The Rooster in the River of Rats’ or ‘Koch’s Postulates: Have They Been Proven for Viruses?’

Finally on this point, pathologist Dr Stoian Alexov, President of the Bulgarian Pathology Association, has stated that he and his colleagues across Europe:

have not found any evidence of any deaths from the novel coronavirus on that continent.

Dr. Stoian Alexov called the World Health Organization (WHO) a ‘criminal medical organization’ for creating worldwide fear and chaos without providing objectively verifiable proof of a pandemic.

See ‘“No one has died from the coronavirus”: Important revelations shared by Dr Stoian Alexov, President of the Bulgarian Pathology Association’.

Fortunately, as awareness of the fact that the COVID-19 virus does not exist gradually spreads, more people are challenging the official response to the engineered crisis on that basis. For example, one group of doctors has written to the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson challenging Public Health England to ‘show proof’ that a virus exists. See Challenge to Public Health England that they must show Proof that a Virus Exists which Causes COVID-19 or Declare there is No Virus and end the Vax and Trax Programmes.

But it is clear that the engineered crisis and the measures supposedly being taken to combat the non-existent ‘virus’ are being used to mask the truth, including the elite coup, and so actions aimed at elite agents, such as governments, must inevitably fail.

Unscientific Responses to the Non-existent Virus

The unscientific nature of the supposed threat posed by the ‘virus’ is, of course, matched by the unscientific response with countries imposing lockdowns suffering far worse outcomes – measured psychologically, socially, economically and otherwise – than countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Belarus and Sweden which did not follow this course. In any case, countries that did impose lockdowns could only use lies and statistical manipulation to make it appear that COVID-19 has been the cause of death among some of those who are recently deceased. For a taste of the extensive documentation, see ‘Facts about COVID-19: July 2020 Update’ and ‘COVID 19 Is A Statistical Nonsense’.

Given that the negative impacts of the lockdown are extensively documented, there have been many attempts (of many different kinds) occurring all over the world to end them already. See, for example, ‘“Mass casualty incident”: 600 doctors sign letter to Trump calling for end to lockdowns over health concerns’, ‘Vaccine Group Sues Trudeau Government for “Draconian and Unjustifiable” Response to COVID-19’ and ‘Popular Uprising against 2nd Covid Lockdown. Belgrade Liberated! The Govt Backs Down’.

But another way in which this unscientific response to the non-existent ‘virus’ is manifesting is immediately obvious if one examines the scientific evidence in relation to the effectiveness of masks in preventing cross infection. As it turns out, as explained in a long series of documented scientific studies, as distinct from the inaccurate claims promulgated by elite agents,

the research demonstrates that masks are at best ineffective, and at worst horribly counterproductive; that is, masks cannot achieve the purpose for which they are, supposedly, intended but they can achieve some very unhealthy outcomes.

But who among the general population is seeking out and considering this evidence (which the WHO, governments, the medical and pharmaceutical industries, the education systems and the corporate media are not going to present)?

For just a sample of the evidence about the ineffectiveness and dangers of wearing a mask, see the following:

‘Nevertheless, the question of the effectiveness of masks can be asked. In the case of influenza epidemics, the answer is already clear from a scientific point of view: masks in everyday life have no or very little effect. If used improperly, they can even increase the risk of infection.’ See ‘Facts about COVID-19: July 2020 Update’.

In a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the five co-authors stated ‘We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.’ See ‘Universal Masking in Hospitals in the Covid-19 Era’.

In his recent article ‘Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to COVID-19 Social Policy’ documenting the results of his research, physics professor Dr Denis G. Rancourt concludes:

No RCT [randomized controlled trial] study with verified outcome shows a benefit for HCW [health care workers] or community members in households to wearing a mask or respirator. There is no such study. There are no exceptions.

Likewise, no study exists that shows a benefit from a broad policy to wear masks in public.

Furthermore, if there were any benefit to wearing a mask, because of the blocking power against droplets and aerosol particles, then there should be more benefit from wearing a respirator (N95) compared to a surgical mask, yet several large meta-analyses, and all the RCT, prove that there is no such relative benefit.

Masks and respirators do not work.

By making mask-wearing recommendations and policies for the general public, or by expressly condoning the practice, governments have both ignored the scientific evidence and done the opposite of following the precautionary principle.

After reviewing more than 50 articles on masks in the medical literature and documenting her case, Dr Sherri Tenpenny concludes as follows:

There are NO randomized, controlled trials (RCT) with verified outcomes that show a benefit to healthcare workers or community members for wearing a mask or a respirator. There is no such definitive study. Likewise, no study exists that shows a benefit from a broad policy to wear masks in public. See ‘Coronavirus Pt 4: Masks Don’t Protect’ and, for your convenience, Tenpenny has cited the relevant passage from 35 of the articles she researched in this document: ‘Conclusion Regarding Masks: They Do Not Work’.

But if you want to read more, you can access each of the 50 articles Tenpenny cited or check out these as well: ‘Coronavirus: Face masks could increase risk of infection, medical chief warns’ and ‘Coronavirus Fact-Check #6: Does wearing a mask do anything?’

Or watch this video presentation: ‘Why Face Masks Don’t Work, According to Science’.

So if there is no virus and face masks do not work to prevent infection anyway, why are we being told to wear them and, increasingly, being terrorized into wearing them under threat of punishment if we do not? For just two of many examples, see ‘Soon, You Will Need to Wear a Mask to Enter Virtually Every Major Retail Store in America’ and ‘Total Masking: Victoria’s Coronavirus Response’.

Because the face masks, like other elements of the supposed strategy to tackle COVID-19, are simply being used to terrorize us into not resisting the ongoing elite coup. See ‘The Mask as a Symbol of Subjugation’, ‘The New (Pathologized) Totalitarianism’ and ‘The Hidden Agendas of Masks, Distancing, and Tracing’.

And it is largely working with most people projecting their fear onto the non-existent ‘virus’ and then ignorantly endeavouring to ‘protect’ themselves from it by wearing a mask (or going along with other measures supposedly intended to ‘prevent infection’).

So if you are wondering why virtually everyone is being caught up in this, there are very good psychological reasons. One of them is that virtually all humans are terrorized into obedience as children. Consequently, resisting orders from those considered to be ‘in authority’ is virtually unthinkable. I have explained this submissive obedience in the article ‘Contemplating Human Extinction Terrifies Most People: A Strategy for Survival’.

But there is another, more subtle, reason too.

COVID-19 and the Psychology of Projection

For the vast bulk of the human population, considering the fundamental evidence of what is taking place – and acknowledging that the global elite is conducting a coup against us with all that this entails – is truly terrifying. Moreover, recognizing that if we are to resist this coup, we will need to make a courageous and strategically-focused stand to defend ourselves is frightening for most people as well.

And the global elite knows this. It is for this reason that they are terrorizing us in the first place. The elite does not want people resisting the coup and it certainly does not want them resisting the coup effectively.

Hence, the global elite is exploiting our fear – by projecting it onto COVID-19 – so that we submissively go along with its coup. How is the elite doing this? Let me explain the psychology of projection, very simply.

If, when you are a child, you are scared of something but that ‘something’ is truly terrifying and inescapable – that is, you are denied any safe opportunity to feel your terror and to take action in response to it so that you can make yourself safe – your mind will precipitate one response and, if necessary, a second response to defend you in the short term.

The first response will be to significantly dampen (and possibly completely suppress) your awareness of just how terrifying the ‘something’ that is scaring you actually is so that you are not overwhelmed to such an extent that you become incapacitated. This response is intended to enable you to act powerfully to get yourself out of the terrifying situation and into a context in which you feel safe.

Ideally, following any such incident when you again feel safe, you need time to recover emotionally. Fundamentally, this means that you need time to focus on feeling the terror and other feelings that were raised during the incident so that these feelings are fully felt and expressed, rather than suppressed more deeply into your unconscious.

If, however, there is no opportunity for this emotional recovery, your mind will have no choice but to more deeply suppress your awareness of these feelings so that you can resume functioning more or less as previously. I say ‘more or less’ because you won’t be functioning precisely as previously because the unconscious terror will now be playing a part in your emotional life and, therefore, playing a part in shaping your behaviour.

However, your unconscious mind – which is enormously powerful – has not given up on enabling you to heal from the terrifying incident and, therefore, its second response is to later trick you into believing that something else, that is far less frightening, is what is really scaring you so that you can safely access and feel your terror in relation to the original incident. Your mind does this so that the terror that was initially suppressed, in order to allow you to devise and implement a strategy for immediate survival, can now be released.

By using these two responses, your mind enables you to survive in a terrifying environment so that, hopefully at some point soon, you can devise and implement a strategy to escape that environment. But also by allowing you to subsequently believe that something that is actually quite safe by comparison is what was really scaring you in the first place, it gives you the opportunity to feel your fear and act it out without (or with profoundly reduced) fear of the consequences.

In the short term, this pair of responses by your mind can enable you to survive something truly terrifying: it minimizes the risk that you will be immobilized (frozen) in terror and thus unable to survive a dangerous situation. In essence, in evolutionary terms, these responses have tremendous survival value in the short term.

If, however, you are not able to escape the truly terrifying situation in the short term and you remain trapped in the situation indefinitely, your unconscious mind will continue to both suppress awareness of the terror and ‘trick’ you into subsequently believing that it is something else that is frightening you.

Unfortunately, beyond the very short term, this mental trick is highly dysfunctional. It leads the individual to eventually ‘forget’ (deeply suppress their awareness of) the original and true source of what is terrifying them and to believe that the safe ‘target’ they unconsciously chose subsequently is actually the genuine threat.

In the jargon of psychology, this is called ‘projection’ or ‘transference’ because the victim is now blaming something other than the true cause of their terror.

This has profound societal consequences too for the simple reason that an elite can effectively nominate the ‘something’ onto which our terror is projected. And it can do this very easily by simply parading a target or ‘legitimized victim’ as terrifying which, in effect, gives ‘permission’ for us to feel scared of the target it has nominated. But in directing our fear in a certain direction, they are also invariably intent on manipulating our behaviour in response.

Historically, this has been demonstrated rather endlessly with the manipulation of our fear crucial to the achievement of certain elite ends, politically and otherwise. For example, racism (fear of other far less frightening Africans) exploded to justify the slave trade, Nazism exploited fears to mobilize Germans against far less frightening Jews (among others), Israeli leaders project the fear of Israelis to exploit far less frightening Palestinians and the entire US ‘war on terror’ has been conducted on the basis of projecting people’s unconscious terror at far less frightening Muslims. As I mentioned, however, the list of possible examples is virtually endless.

In each and every case, however, the terror exploited had its origin in something much earlier in the life of these individuals than the current circumstance exploited by elites. It had its origin during early childhood.

And this origin can be traced directly back to the parenting and teaching models virtually universally used by human beings. As I have explained many times previously, but to briefly reiterate here: virtually all human beings are terrified for the same reason: the child-raising process that sociologists like to label ‘socialization’ should be more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’. This is because from the moment of a child’s birth, parents, teachers, religious leaders and adults generally regard themselves as responsible for terrorizing the child into obedience of the commands, rules, conventions and laws that define the nature of permissible behaviour in their society.

But because evolutionary pressures do not predispose any individual to obey the will of another – for the simple reason that obedience has no evolutionary functionality – it takes enormous terrorization during childhood to ensure that the child surrenders their Self-will at the alter of obedience. To achieve this outcome and largely unknowingly, parents, teachers, religious leaders and other adults in the child’s life use a large range of behaviours from the three categories of violence that I have labeled ‘visible’ violence, ‘invisible’ violence and ‘utterly invisible’ violence. See Why Violence? and Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice.

At its most obvious, all children are routinely threatened with violence and actually punished with violence (usually in each of its three forms: ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’) for ‘disobedience’ (that is, for following their own Self-will rather than obeying orders to submit). See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

And, as preposterous as I know this sounds to those reading it for the first time: The fundamental outcome of this process is that all children end up utterly but unconsciously terrified of their parents, teachers, religious figures and other significant adults in their life.

But never given adequate safe opportunities to feel this terror, each child ends up projecting it onto something or a series of targets including those ‘legitimized victims’ approved by an elite, local or otherwise.

Hence, in the current world context, this results in the bulk of the human population submitting to direction by the global elite to project their fear onto COVID-19 and then behave as ordered, rather than pay attention to the elite coup and resist it. For summaries and documentation of the evidence in relation to each of these points, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup: Fighting for Our Humanity, Our Liberty and Our Future’ and ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

The elite does this by triggering our unconscious fear through endless reporting of the ‘threat’ posed by COVID-19, issuing warnings, announcing deaths supposedly caused by the ‘virus’ (and concealing that the death rates are not even comparable to deaths caused by a serious influenza), and placing increasingly onerous limits on our rights and freedoms (through such measures as lockdowns and mask-wearing). And because virtually everyone has so much suppressed terror and needs outlets onto which this can be projected, the coup is being conducted virtually without resistance.

As I have explained before, just because the global elite is able to do this does not mean that it is sane. In fact, it is completely insane and that is precisely why it is conducting this coup but unable to see its catastrophic outcome for the elite as well. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

So what can we do?

Well, if we are to effectively resist the elite coup and fight for human survival, it would be useful to start by giving yourself time to focus on feeling your emotional responses – fear, anger, sadness, pain, dread…. – to whatever is generating an emotional reaction: COVID-19, the elite coup, the imminent threats of extinction or anything else. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

This is necessary so that you can engage meaningfully and strategically in the effort, whatever issue you choose to fight.

So once you have a clearer sense of your emotional reactions to this knowledge and have allowed yourself time to focus on feeling these feelings, you will be in a far more powerful position to consider your response to the situation. And, depending on your interests and circumstances, there is a range of possible responses that will each make an important difference.

Fundamentally, you might consider making ‘My Promise to Children’ which will include considering what an education for your children means to you, particularly if you want powerful individuals – not ones who are submissively obedient and project their terror – who can perceive reality and resist violence. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

You might consider supporting others to become more powerful. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If you wish to strategically resist the elite coup against humanity, you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals for doing so, from here: Coup Strategic Aims.

Remaining pages on this website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel, as well as articles and videos explaining all of the vital points of strategy and tactics, such as those to help you understand ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.

Given the complexity of the configuration of this conflict, however, which involves the need to fight simultaneously to retain our essential humanity, defeat the elite coup and avert near-term human extinction, it is important that our tactical choices are strategically-oriented (as are those listed at the Strategic Aims page nominated above). Hence, three further considerations assume importance.

First, choose/design tactics that have strategic impact, that is, they fundamentally and permanently alter, in our favor, the power relationship between the elite and us.

Second, when tactical choices are made, focus them on undermining the elite coup, not just features of it, such as ‘social distancing’ or the lockdowns. At its most basic, this can be achieved by using tactical choices that mobilize people to act initially, as is happening, but then inviting them to consider taking further, more focused, action as well (such as those nominated in the strategic goals referenced above). This is important because existing actions will have little impact on key underlying measures, such as those being taken by the elite to advance the fourth industrial revolution.

Third, choose/design tactics that also have strategic impact on the greatest threats to human survival, including the collapsing biodiversity on Earth, the threat of nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and the deployment of 5G. Given the incredibly short timeframe in which we are now working to avert human extinction, while people are mobilizing it is important to use this opportunity to give them the chance to perceive the ‘big picture’ of what is taking place – beyond lockdowns and other measures supposedly being used to tackle COVID-19 – and to act powerfully in response.

Fortunately, as more people become aware of the deeper strands of what is taking place, the energy to break the lockdowns, resist other limitations on our rights and freedoms (such as contact tracing, COVID-19 testing/temperature checks, mask-wearing and vaccinations) as well as resist the coup itself will gather pace. As I have previously outlined, using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural, religious or sporting event, a nonviolent action, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist.

If you wish to focus on powerfully resisting one of the primary threats to human existence – nuclear war, the deployment of 5G, the collapse of biodiversity and/or the climate catastrophe – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Campaign Strategic Aims.

You might also consider joining those who are powerful enough to recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance as essential elements of these strategies by participating in The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth. While you over-consume or are dependent on the elite for your survival, in any way, you are vulnerable.

In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of The Peoples Charter to Create a Nonviolent World.

Or, if you want something simpler, 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 ‘virus’ that does not exist, the global elite is social engineering a massive restructuring of world society to suit their own ends. If they achieve their aim, your existence as any sort of individual with meaningful rights and freedoms will have been terminated.

Apart from these ongoing disastrous outcomes, the elite coup is also unwittingly accelerating four paths to human extinction: nuclear war, the climate catastrophe, the deployment of 5G and biodiversity collapse.

To have any chance of defeating the elite coup and fighting effectively to avert our own extinction, we must fight strategically.

Fundamentally, this means recognizing that lobbying (that is, begging) elite agents, such as governments, simply reinforces the power of the elite to control us. It is only when we take action ourselves to both build our own power (which includes that of our children and those with whom we work) while campaigning strategically to undermine the power of the global elite itself that we take crucial steps to liberate ourselves from its violence, in all of the forms that this violence takes.

Given that the elite coup is jeopardizing our individuality, our liberty and our future, it is time for us to decide whether we are human beings or a planet of sheep.

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.

Why Does It Feel Like We’re in “Life During Wartime”?

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The laughably hopeless hope is that by propping up the corpses, the populace will discern some faint flicker of life in the decaying carcasses and return to their free-spending ways.

Call it cultural synchronicity, but it increasingly feels like we’re living in the 1979 Talking Heads song Life During Wartime, which was anchored by the lyric “This Ain’t No Party, This Ain’t No Disco, This Ain’t No Foolin’ Around.” Indeed.

It also feels like Life During Wartime because the propaganda is so blatant and intense: we’re winning the war on Covid-19, and our wars on everything else, too, of course, as war is the favored metaphor and favored policy at the end of the Empire.

The ceaseless propaganda is that “a vaccine is right around the corner.” The inconvenient reality is that Corporate Insiders Pocket $1 Billion in Rush for Coronavirus VaccineWell-timed stock bets have generated big profits for senior executives and board members at companies developing vaccines and treatments.

In other words, wartime profiteering isn’t just allowed, it’s encouraged–yet another sign that we’re in the final decay/collapse phase of Imperial Pretensions.

It’s easy to mix up the propaganda and the counter-propaganda, because they’re both so extreme. There is no middle ground, only pre-packaged positions which dictate which “data” is cherry-picked to support the political partisanship that’s being defended.

Is Data Our New False Religion? (June 23, 2020)

In a world of thousands of unread papers published in hundreds of scientific journals no one even reads and a corrupt culture of “science for sale,” there’s a veritable orchard to cherry-pick.

“Robert Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet, one of the most respected professional peer reviewed publications in the world dealing with biomedical research had this to say in an editorial published by The Lancet in April of 2015:”

“The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness.”

source: What is medicine’s 5 sigma?

“And this, published in 2009, by Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine, another world leading publication in medical research:”

“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”

Skeptical of medical science reports? (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

Metaphorically speaking, the civilian populace believes “we’re winning” until the bombs start dropping on their homes. For some reason, this doesn’t feel like “winning.”

The V-shaped recovery is the propaganda war the status quo must win, for this is the narrative battle for the hearts and minds of the populace. The fear here is that should the populace lose confidence in The V-shaped recovery, they might reduce their borrowing and spending and increase their saving, dooming an economy that depends entirely on marginal spending funded by debt to keep from imploding.

As the chart of the rising wedge model of breakdown below illustrates, when big-ticket costs ratchet higher like clockwork–rent, property taxes, childcare, higher education, debt, healthcare, etc.– while income stagnates for the bottom 90%, any drop in spending, no matter how modest, breaks the system because any reduction in spending reduces tax revenues, corporate profits and debt payments below the critical threshold.

This is why the Federal Reserve is so keen on bailing out bankrupt-in-all-but-name corporations and banks: The laughably hopeless hope is that by propping up the corpses, the populace will discern some faint flicker of life in the decaying carcasses and return to their free-spending ways.

This is also why “stimulus” is being scattered from helicopters: the hope is that by substituting borrowed trillions for earned trillions, people will substitute magical thinking for clear-eyed recognition that the era of “growth” has transitioned into the era of DeGrowth, a state of affairs that signals the demise of all the bloated, sclerotic institutions operated to benefit insiders and Corporate America’s cartels and monopolies: the most protected bastions of the era, colleges and hospitals, are going broke and closing.

As Marx noted, “everything solid melts into air” when it’s no longer financially viable. Helicopter “stimulus” just creates a temporary illusion of solidity.

And then there’s the immense profitability of Big Tech pushing propaganda, partisanship, anger and indignation: If you’re not terrified about Facebook, you haven’t been paying attention.

The foundations are collapsing, but by all means, please keep your eye on the decaying corpses: didn’t an eyelid flicker in that one? I could swear that one moved its foot…

This is “life in wartime,” where the battles are waged in narratives, confidence and magical thinking.

Forget the V, W or L Recovery: Focus on N-P-B (June 29, 2020)

The Fed’s Casino Is In Flames, But Please Continue Gambling (June 18, 2020)

Our Wile E. Coyote Economy: Nothing But Financial Engineering (June 12, 2020)

Unstoppable: The Greatest Depression and the Reverse Wealth Effect (June 10, 2020)

A Bigger Picture

Baluchitherium. Gone but not forgotten.

By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

The Covid-19 virus itself didn’t run the United States into a ditch but it exposed the weakness and rot in the nation’s drive-train, and now all of us passengers on that disabled bus must decide whether to stay helplessly inside the smoldering wreckage arguing over who’s to blame, or begin a long, uncertain march down the road on our own two feet to a place of new arrangements.

In 1918, the country was lashed by a far deadlier pandemic disease at the same time it was fighting a world war, and daily life barely missed a step. The economy then was emphatically one of production, not the mere consumption of things made elsewhere in the world (exchanged for US IOUs), nor of tanning parlors, nail salons, streaming services, and Pilates studios. The economy was a mix of large, medium, and small enterprises, not just floundering giants, especially in the retail commerce of goods. We lived distributed in towns, cities not-yet-overgrown, and a distinctly rural landscape devoted to rural activities — not the vast demolition derby of entropic suburbia that has no future as a human habitat. Banking was only five percent of the economy, not the bloated matrix of rackets now swollen to more than forty percent of so-called GDP. Government at the federal and state levels was miniscule compared to the suffocating, parasitic leviathan it is now.

What happened? Like Hemingway’s old quip about a man going broke slowly and then all-at-once, we allowed everything in American life to creep into hapless giantism too cumbersome to adapt to new conditions, and suddenly conditions have changed. And now it’s all coming apart: the dying chain stores, the giant zombie companies that can only exist by borrowing money to buy back their own stocks, the auto-makers who have run out of lending schemes for non-creditworthy customers, the shale oil fracking companies that could never make a red cent, the agri-biz farmers grown morbidly obese on a diet of credit and government subsidies (just like their end-customers grew obese on engineered snack-foods), the Wall Street lords of financialization hypothecating fortunes by leveraging the stripped assets of everything not nailed down from sea to shining sea, the swelling underclass conditioned to helplessness, addiction, and vice, the inescapable ambient tyranny of media hype, propaganda, and disinformation, and, of course, the catastrophe that government has become.

Get this: none of these things now wobbling and staggering will be resurrected. They’re all going extinct, like the Baluchitherium of the Oligocene. To keep propping them up — as the Federal Reserve sedulously props up financial markets — will only promote the illusion that we don’t have to move on and conduct daily human life differently. A worldwide contraction was already underway before Covid-19 stepped onstage. The contraction was sending a very loud and clear message: gigantism went as far as it could go and now it’s up to the smaller and nimbler to carry on. Beware the promises of the sclerotic authorities asking you to remain in thrall to them — and dependent on them.

Expect these authorities to screw up even the next big exercise in their own franchise: the 2020 election. It will be the climax to a season of political hysteria and will complete the chapter of our history that left us on that smoldering big bus in the ditch. The scramble away from that disaster scene will be frightful and desperate. No matter who ends up in control of the government — or pretends to be — the same forces of contraction and decomplexifying will actually rule and you will have to act accordingly.

Many people will seek to escape the places they live now to find new homes and livelihoods elsewhere. These demographic movements are already underway. New York City is hemorrhaging much of its tax base as the wealthy flee, Chicago too, and the whole state of California. These places will be overwhelmed by functional bankruptcy, even if legal legerdemain allows them to avoid declaring it. Other states, counties and municipalities — including many suburban blobs — will also founder, meaning all the usual support systems and safety nets vanish. Many supply chains will break. Money may either be scarce or worthless, which are two ways of going broke.

Right now, start planning where you might go and what you can do. The turmoil will be filled with opportunity to find ways to be useful to other people, to devise work-arounds for ruptured systems and relationships, in getting food to people, making things they need, distributing them, fixing things that are broken where possible, and moving people and stuff from point A to point B. There will be plenty of work for people who are willing to do it. Keep in mind that it’s entirely up to you to make good choices.

Don’t despair, and if you find yourself veering toward it, get over yourself. It’s just part of becoming stronger than you thought you could be,  and the times will require it of you anyway. The offices that gave out brownie points for avouched victimhood will also be shutting down. Won’t that be a relief? Welcome to the joyful illumination that life is difficult for everybody. Who is ready for this epic journey?

THE ONLY OBSTACLE TO A HEALTHY WORLD IS GOVERNMENT SECRECY AND PROPAGANDA

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

If people in power were no longer able to hide secrets and spin lies about what’s going on in the world, all of our major problems would come to an end. Because secretive and manipulative power structures are the source of all of our major problems.

If the public could see what’s actually happening in their world, they would immediately begin using the power of their numbers to overhaul our current system. This is why our current system pours so much energy into preventing the public from seeing what’s actually happening in their world.

If it weren’t for the constant campaign of obfuscation and manipulation of public perception via veils of government secrecy and propaganda, humanity would naturally find its way out of the power-driven tribulations it now faces, as surely as you’ll avoid obstacles and hazards in your path when you are walking with your eyes open. The only problem in this case is that our eyes have not been permitted to open.

It isn’t actually necessary to hold a bunch of hard, rigid ideas about exactly what kind of society we should have, what kind of political system we should have, what kind of economic system we should have. There’s nothing wrong with promoting ideas and having preferences of course, but really if you just gave humanity the ability to navigate through its own troubles by removing the blindfolds of propaganda and power opacity, it would organically create a healthy society, and realistically such a society probably won’t look a whole lot like our mental models.

You do have the option, then, of simply promoting the end of government/political/corporate/financial opacity and the end of establishment perception management. Wanting humanity to see with clear eyes so that it can make its own informed decisions about where to take itself is a complete political position, in and of itself. You don’t have to hold any other political preferences of any kind if you don’t want to.

The desire for an end to the obfuscations and manipulations of the powerful so that humanity can find its own way is the most anti-authoritarian position you can possibly take, because it also protects the world from your own authoritarian impulses.

I personally am very leftwardly inclined and believe that if humanity had its perception management blindfolds removed it would naturally create a world where we’re all truly equal and everyone is taken care of by the collective each according to their need, but what the hell do I know? Maybe if the blindfold is removed I’d be proven wrong. I respect human sovereignty enough to want to find out, free from my own political preferences. I should not be the one making such societal decisions, society as a whole should. I just want human perception to be freed up enough to make that call.

If you choose to make the end of perception management your foremost priority, that means you push for government transparency at every opportunity and support any movement to take away secret hiding places from the powerful.

It means opposing the way the powerful bolt shut all the doors on public scrutiny of their behavior, smear anyone who speculates about what they might be up to as a crazy conspiracy theorist, and imprisons anyone who leaks information about what they’re really doing to the people.

It means you support whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden who help shine light on the things power tries to keep hidden in the dark.

It means you support WikiLeaks and Julian Assange and any journalist who helps expose the secrets of the powerful.

It means you fight the empire’s propaganda machine at every opportunity to break public trust in its manipulations.

It means you support breaking up the monolithic mass media and giving everyone the equal ability to influence the dominant narratives.

It means opposing internet censorship, since Silicon Valley plutocrats propping up the establishment their kingdoms are built upon by censoring anti-establishment voices is another way of keeping people from being shown the truth about their world.

I personally would add that it means supporting the decriminalization of psychedelics, because seeing within ourselves is just as important as seeing what’s happening in our world and entheogens can facilitate this seeing, but maybe that’s just me.

Again, there’s no harm in engaging in politics and pushing for the changes you’d like to see in your world, and there can be many benefits to doing so. But as long as people are successfully prevented from seeing and understanding what’s really happening in their world by the obfuscation of information and by the manipulation of people’s perception of that information, the status quo will always remain in place.

So in my opinion this is the most sensible point upon which to converge our energy. I personally have no interest in controlling what humanity does, and desire only that people come to see freely enough to make their own decisions.

It’s absolutely insane that information which affects us all is kept hidden away from our clear vision by secrecy and propaganda. It’s even crazier that they shame us when we wonder what’s really going on and throw us in prison when we try to find out. We must liberate ourselves from this madness so we can create a healthy world together.

Masked, Homeless, and Desolate

By Edward Curtin

Source: Off-Guardian

Personality is persona, a mask…The mask is magic…Larva means mask; or ghost…it also means mad, a case of demoniacal possession.”
Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body

Walk the streets in the United States and many countries these days and you will see streaming crowds of people possessed by demons, masked and anonymous, whose eyes look like vacuums, staring into space or out of empty sockets like the dead, afraid of their own ghosts. Fear and obedience oozes from them. Death walks the streets with people on leashes in lockstep.

That they have been the victims of a long-planned propaganda campaign to use an invisible virus to frighten them into submission and shut down the world’s economy for the global elites is beyond their ken. This is so even when the facts are there to prove otherwise.

It is a clear case, as Peter Koenig tells Michel Chossudovsky in this must-see interview, that is not a conspiracy theory but a blatant factual plan spelled out in the 2010 Rockefeller Report, the October 18, 2019 Event 201, and Agenda 21, among other places.

Who can wake the sleepwalkers up in this cowardly new world where culture and politics collude to create and exploit ignorance?

Fifty-five years ago on, July 20, 1965, Bob Dylan released his song “Like a Rolling Stone.” It arrived like a rocking jolt into the placid pop musical culture of the day. It was not about wanting to hold someone’s hand or cry in the chapel. It wasn’t mumbo-jumbo like “Wooly Bully,” the number one hit. It wasn’t like the pop pap that dominates today’s music scene. It wasn’t Woody Guthrie in slow time.

It beat you up. It attacked. It confronted you. Maybe, if you were alive then, you thought Dylan was kidding you. You thought wrong. Bitching about his going electric was a dodge. He was addressing all of us, including himself.

Still is. But who wants to hear his recent “Murder Most Foul” and read Dylan’s scathing lyrics about the assassination of JFK, the killing that started the slow decay that has resulted in such masked madness. “And please, Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” he tells us in capital letters for emphasis. Exactly what all the mainstream media have done, of course, and not by accident.

There are no alibis.

“How does it feel/To be on your own/with no direction home/A complete unknown/Like a rolling stone?”

It was in the mid-1960s when confidence in knowing where home was and how to get there disappeared into thin air. If you left mommy and daddy, could you ever get back from where you were going? Who had the directions?

Absolutes were melting and relativity was widespread. Life was wild and the CIA was planning to make it wilder and more confusing with the introduction of LSD on a vast scale. MKUltra was expanding its scope. Operation Mockingbird was singing so many tunes that heads were spinning, as planned.

The national security state killers were in the saddle, having already murdered President Kennedy and Malcolm X as they sharpened their knives for many more to come. The peace candidate, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had been elected nine months earlier with 61.1% of the popular vote and went immediately to work secretly expanding the war against Vietnam. War as an invisible virus. Who knew?

Who, but a small anti-war contingent, wanted to know?

War takes different forms, and the will to ignorance and historical amnesia endure. War is a disease. Disease is weaponized for war. In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected on a “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War and then ramped it up to monstrous proportions, only to be reelected in 1972 by carrying 49 out of 50 states.

Who wants to know now? The historian Howard Zinn once said correctly that this country’s greatest problem wasn’t disobedience but obedience.

What’s behind the masks? The lockstep?

On the same day that Dylan released “Like a Rolling Stone,” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, just back from a “fact-finding” trip to Vietnam, recommended to LBJ that U.S. troop levels in Vietnam be increased to 175,000 and that the U.S. should increase its bombing of North Vietnam dramatically.

This was the same McNamara who, in October 1963, had agreed with JFK when he signed NSAM 263 calling for the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel from Vietnam by the end of 1963 and the remainder by the end of 1965. One of the moves that got Kennedy’s head blown open.

Poor McNamara, the fog of war must have clouded his conscience, confused the poor boy, just like Secretary of State Colin Powell holding up that vile vial of “anthrax” at the United Nations on February 5, 2003 and lying to the world about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Powell recently said, “I knew I didn’t have any choice. He’s the President.” How “painful,” to use his word, it must have been for the poor guy, lying so that so many Iraqis could be slaughtered. Of course, he had no choice. These war criminals all wear masks. And have no choice.

Masks, or demonic possession, or both. You?

Also in that fateful year 1965, far out of sight and out of mind for most Americans, the CIA planned and assisted in the slaughter of more than a million Indonesians, led by their man, General Suharto. This led to the coup against President Sukarno, who two years earlier had been on good terms with JFK as they worked to solve the interrelated issues of Indonesia and Vietnam. Their meeting planned for early 1964 was cancelled in Dallas on November 22, 1963.

And the politicians and media luminaries came out in their masks and told the public that communists everywhere were out to get them.

It’s tough being on your own. It hurts to think too much. Or think for yourself, at least. To obey an authority higher than your bosses. “I was tricked” is some sort of mantra, is it not?

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all did tricks for you

Dylan was lost and disgusted when he wrote the song. His own music sickened him, which, for an artist, means he sickened himself. He had just returned from a tour of England and was sick of people telling him how much they loved his music when he didn’t. He needed to change.

What else is the point of art but change? If you’re dead, or afraid of getting dead, you aren’t going to change. You’re stuck. Stuck is dead. Why wear a mask if you know who you are?

Knowledge, or more accurately, pseudo-knowledge or mainstream media lies, is a tomb “the mystery tramp” sold to us, a place to hide to avoid pain and guilt.

I have read more books than anyone I know. It sickens me.
I know too much. That sickens me.
I sicken myself. All the news sickens me.
I know so much no one believes me.
As Francesco Serpico once told me: “It’s all lies.”
Of course. Dylan and Serpico are blood brothers.
Only art tells the truth. Real art.

Not bullshit pop art. Some say “Like a Rolling Stone” is about Edie Sedgwick, “the girl of the year” in 1965 and one of Andy Warhol’s superstars. Perhaps to a degree it is, but it’s far more than that. It’s about us.

Poor Edie was poisoned by her wealthy family at a young age and barely had a chance. She was an extreme example of a rather common American story. People poisoned in the cradle. Thinking of her got me thinking of Andy Warhol, the death obsessed hoarder, the guy who called his studio “The Factory” in a conscious or unconscious revelation of his art and persona, his wigs and masks and the hold he has had on American culture all these years. Isn’t he the ultimate celebrity?

Warhol once took my photo on a deserted street. His and my secret but this is the truth. West 47th Street on an early Sunday morning, 1980. I guess he thought he was doing art or collecting images for his museum of dead heads. When I asked him why, he said I had an interesting face.

I told him he did too, rather transparent and creepy, but I didn’t want to capture him. He was a ghost with a camera, a face like a death mask, trying to capture a bit of life. I told him I didn’t give him permission to shoot me, but he turned and walked away into the morning mist. The shooters always just walk away in pseudo-innocence.

I then went down the street to the Gotham Book Mart that was my destination and asked James Joyce why he had written “The Dead,” and Joyce, secretive as ever, quoted himself, “Ed,” he said, “Think you’re escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.” Now that was direction.

Only those who know how to play and be guided by intuition are able to escape the living tomb of so-called knowledge; what Dylan called, lifelessness. But that was from “Desolation Row,” released as the closing track of Highway 61 Revisited on August 30, 1965. The only acoustic song on the album. Slow it down to make the point another way. “Like a Rolling Stone” was the opening track.

Do you feel all alone or part of a masked gang roaming the streets incognito? Miss and Mr. Lonely, does that mask help? How do you feel?

Desolation means very lonely. From Latin, de, completely, solare, lonely.

Does that mask help? Do you feel alone together now, one of the crowd?

Do you really want to know about desolation row? It’s here. It was here in 1965, too. Only the true lonely know how it feels to really be all alone.

The Umbrella People, those who some call the deep state or secret government under whose protection all the politicians work, say they want to protect us all from death and disease. They are lying bastards who’ve gotten so many to imitate their masked ways. They can only sing a mockingbird’s song.

Listen to real singers. Dylan has arched the years, as true artists do. Who has paid close attention to what he said this year about the assassination of President Kennedy in his song, “Murder Most Foul”? Or were many caught up in the propaganda surrounding corona virus, and rather than contemplating his indictment of the U.S. government and its media accomplices, were they contemplating their navels to see if a virus had secreted itself in there. Viruses lurk everywhere, they say, and the corporate media made certain to circulate a vaccine about the truth in Dylan’s song. This is normal operating procedure.

We are still on Desolation Row.

“Take Off the Masks.” That was the title of a book by Rev. Malcolm Boyd that I reviewed long ago. He was a gay priest who decided that his mask was a lie. He came out into the light of truth. He had guts.

It is time for everyone to take off the masks. Escape from Desolation Row by seeing what’s going on behind our backs.
Listen to Dylan, long ago – today:

At midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
And they bring them to the factory
Where their heart attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row
Praise be to Nero’s Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
Everybody’s shouting
“Which side are you on?”

 

Alleged Salas Family Assailant Previously Worked for US/Israeli Intelligence-Linked Firm

The alleged gunmen who killed the son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to the Epstein-Deutsche Bank case, worked for a company of corporate spies and mercenaries with ties to intelligence and also to Deutsche Bank.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

The news of the shooting of the husband and son of Esther Salas, the judge recently assigned to oversee the Jeffrey Epstein – Deutsche Bank case, caused shock and confusion while also bringing renewed scrutiny to the Epstein scandal just a week after Epstein’s main co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, was denied bail in a separate case.

The case Salas is set to oversee is a class action lawsuit brought by Deutsche Bank investors who allege that Deutsche Bank “failed to properly monitor customers that the Bank itself deemed to be high risk, including, among others, the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.” The case came after the New York state Department of Financial Services had settled with Deutsche Bank over the bank’s failure to cut ties with Epstein-linked accounts, resulting in Deutsche Bank paying a $150 million fine. Deutsche Bank, unlike other financial institutions, failed to close all of its accounts linked to Epstein until less than a month prior to his arrest last year, even though the bank had identified him as “high risk” years before.

Beyond the tragedy of Sunday’s shooting, which claimed the life of Salas’ only child, the quick discovery of the death of the main suspect, Roy Den Hollander, of a “self-inflicted” gunshot to the head before he could be arrested or questioned by authorities has led to speculation that there is more to the official narrative of the crime than meets the eye.

With law enforcement sources now claiming that Esther Salas was not the intended target of the attack and some media reports now suggesting that Den Hollander’s motive was related to his dislike of feminism, it appears there are efforts underway to distance Sunday’s tragic shooting from Salas’ recent assignment to the Epstein case, which occurred just four days before the tragic shooting.

The most likely reason for any such “damage control” effort lies in the fact that both U.S. law enforcement investigations and mainstream media reports have consistently downplayed the connections of Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual trafficking and financial crimes to intelligence agencies in the U.S. and Israel. Similarly, Roy Den Hollander previously worked for a New York firm has been described as a “private CIA” with ties to those countries’ intelligence agencies and, also, ties to Deutsche Bank.

A Private CIA

According to his website, Den Hollander once worked for Kroll Associates Moscow Office, where he “managed and upgraded Kroll’s delivery of intelligence and security in the former Soviet Union” from 1999 to 2000. A few years prior, Kroll had won a considerable bid from the Russian government to locate money allegedly “spirited out of the country by the directors of state enterprises when they realized that privatization was inevitable.” The Kroll executives in charge of the Russian portfolio prior to Den Hollander were E. Norbett Garrett, a former CIA station chief in Cairo and Kuwait, and Joseph Rosetti, former chief of security for IBM. During that period and prior to his hiring at Kroll, Den Hollender worked as a lawyer in Russia regarding “legal and business issues, including international financing and marketing” and married a Russian woman he met during his time there that he subsequently claimed was part of the “Russian mafia.”

Founded by Jules Kroll in 1972, Kroll Associates would later become known as the “CIA of Wall Street” and “Wall Street’s Private Eye” and was alleged to be an actual front for the CIA by French intelligence agencies, according to theWashington Post. Part of the reason for this nickname, which was once a boasting point for top Kroll executives, owes to the fact that the firm frequently hired former CIA and FBI officers, as well as former members of MI6 and Mossad. K2 Intelligence, the successor to Kroll Associates founded by Jules Kroll and his son Jeremy in 2009, has similar hiring practices, counting former FBI and NSA officials among its ranks alongside former high-ranking members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency. Kroll also boasted ties to the Bush family, with Jonathan Bush (George Bush Sr.’s brother) serving on its corporate advisory board, and Kroll was also employed by Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.

Though it is mainly involved in corporate security and investigations, Kroll has also frequently investigated targets of Washington foreign policy, including Saddam Hussein, and was also the company tapped to “reorganize” Enron in 2002. Kroll Associates also has long been a subject of scrutiny for those that question the official narrative on the attacks of September 11, 2001, given that the company was put in charge of security for the World Trade Center complex from 1993 bombing up through the 2001 attacks and has no shortage of ties to companies and individuals that profited from the attacks. Kroll itself experienced a “surge in business” following the events of 9/11, a day when its top executives all avoided going to work despite ostensibly providing security for the complex.

A similar “surge in business” for Kroll followed the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq after the company’s investigations into Saddam Hussein’s and the Bath Party’s finances had been used as partial justification for the military incursion. Kroll became a major provider of mercenaries along with companies like Blackwater and DynCorp to the U.S. invasion and subsequent occupation through its subsidiary Kroll Security International. Its clients included the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which has long fronted for the CIA, and also provided mercenaries for the war in Afghanistan.

Kroll executives over the years have commented to the press on their reputation as a “private CIA” and have also noted the advantages of being a “private” as opposed to “public” intelligence agency. For instance, E. Norbett Garrett, the former CIA official turned Kroll executive, told The New Yorker in 2009 the following:

“Garrett explained the disparity between what Kroll could do and what the C.I.A. could in a place like Sudan. “They have to rely on public and covert sources,” he said. “But we can go straight to Salah Idris. He’s our client, after all. We can go straight to his friends. We can be manipulated, of course, shown incomplete information, and sometimes we have to walk away from a case if we don’t trust somebody. But we definitely have some advantages.”

Kroll Associates and the Epstein Network

Aside from Kroll Associates’ own role as a private intelligence firm, it is also worth pointing out that Jules Kroll had an odd meeting with Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine Maxwell’s father, shortly before his death, alleged by most Maxwell biographers and his family to have been a homicide. Roughly two weeks before his death, Kroll met with Maxwell at New York’s Helmsley Palace Hotel. According to a 1992 article in Vanity Fair, “Maxwell had ushered Kroll and two other men out onto the patio so that their conversation could not be overheard or bugged,” with Maxwell allegedly seeking to hire Kroll to uncover “people out to get him, to destroy his empire, to cripple him financially, and to destroy his life and business in any way they could.”

The article further notes that “the meeting broke up with Maxwell’s promising that he would send Kroll what he called “a memorandum of suspicions and unexplained events.” “Maxwell was working on this compendium,” said the  [anonymous] participant [in the meeting], “when he met his death.” Kroll Associates was never formally hired.”

Much more recently Kroll came under scrutiny after being hired by disgraced media mogul Harvey Weinstein alongside the “private Mossad for hire” firm Black Cube. Weinstein had been instructed to hire Black Cube by Ehud Barak, the former Israeli military intelligence head and Israeli Prime Minister with close ties to Jeffrey Epstein and a frequent visitor of Epstein’s residences. Weinstein hired Kroll to harass and cyberstalk women who had accused him of sexual assault. Weinstein was a one-time business partner of Jeffrey Epstein’s and the testimony of Epstein victim Maria Farmer strongly implies that Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein “shared” women, and potentially underage girls, with the film producer. The Daily Beast later reported that Epstein had used his ties to Weinstein to impress and recruit potential victims and at least one of those victims landed a role in a film produced by a Weinstein-owned company due to Epstein’s ties to Weinstein.

In addition, Kroll’s long-time executive Vice President for Operations, James Bucknam, was previously chief adviser to former FBI director Louis Freeh and is now CEO of the Freeh Group. Freeh has since become notorious for having been hired by Epstein associate, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, to “investigate” the Epstein scandal, and was also involved in the cover-up of the Penn State child molestation and abuse scandal. Freeh was also director of the FBI when the Bureau declined to investigate accusations regarding Leslie Wexner, Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein and their involvement in the sex trafficking of minors, first reported to the FBI in 1996 by Maria Farmer.

The Kroll – Deutsche Bank “Revolving Door”

After “retiring” from Kroll associates, Jules Kroll created a credit-rating agency, a field he had called just years earlier “a heck of a racket.” Named the Kroll Bond Rating Agency (KBRA), the firm was envisioned by Kroll as a “credit-rating agency on steroids,” but has failed to make a dent in the market shares of the so-called “Big Three” credit-rating agencies: Standard & Poor’s, Moody’s Investors Service, and Fitch Ratings.

Though it hasn’t managed to become a dominant force in credit ratings, KBRA has managed to be profitable and to have produced something of a “revolving door” between its senior management and Deutsche Bank executives. For instance, KBRA’s top executive in Europe, Mauricio Noé, had previously been a Managing Director of Deutsche Bank’s London branch. In another example, Vice President for Credit Structuring at Deutsche Bank in New York, Ian Ross, was previously employed by KBRA and Yee Cent Wong, managing director of KBRA for CMBS, was previously Vice President of the Credit Solutions Group at Deutsche Bank Securities. Another managing director of KBRA, Bill Baneky, had previously served as Deutsche Bank’s Vice President and National Relationship Manager. One of KBRA’s senior managing directors, Rosemary Kelley, is also a former Deutsche Bank Vice President, while another, Ken Kockenmeister, was Deutsche Bank’s Director for Large Loan Securitization and Underwriting.

While they may not be the “biggest” credit-rating agency, KBRA analysts and executives frequently speak to media outlets where they comment on the state of various businesses, Deutsche Bank among them. Given the amount of overlap between Deutsche Bank and KBRA, it is unsurprising that KBRA has lobbied in the press on Deutsche’s behalf. For instance, KBRA analyst Christopher Whalen told Business Insider in 2016 that “The problem with Deutsche Bank may be the end of Merkel’s career,” adding that “The question is does she want to be remembered for doing the right thing — which is to provide support for the bank and diffuse the situation — or does she want to be remembered for standing by when one of the largest banks in Europe failed?”

Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to Deutsche Bank go back decades, and potentially earlier. After working for Bear Stearns earlier in his career and then as a so-called “financial bounty hunter” with ties to intelligence-linked arms dealers and Wall Street, Epstein set up a Ponzi scheme with Steve Hoffenberg called Tower Financial, which collapsed in 1993 and subsequently landed Hoffenberg 20 years in prison. Epstein’s name, despite being a clear co-conspiractor, was suspiciously dropped from the case during the trial. Hoffenberg subsequently alleged that Epstein used his ill-gotten gains from Tower Financial alongside a series of suspect loans from Deutsche Bank to create his investment company.

Hoffenberg subsequently told The Observer the following:

“His lead bank is Deutsche Bank, Germany, that runs the lead on his financial trust company. They run the platform in the trading of the currencies for Epstein and with Epstein. He’s never disclosed to the investors that provide the money to Deutsche Bank his true legacy, that’s securities fraud.”

Following that point, Epstein’s financial activities, aside from his Deutsche Bank-enabled investment vehicle, were publicly conducted through Bear Stearns (until its 2008 collapse) and J.P. Morgan. When J.P. Morgan dropped Epstein as a client, he again turned to Deutsche Bank in 2013, becoming a client of the bank’s private wealth division in New York. Anti-money laundering compliance officers at the bank’s branches in New York and Florida subsequently flaggedEpstein’s accounts in 2015, in 2016 and again in 2019, creating suspicious activity reports regarding the movements of large amounts of funds tied to Epstein-linked accounts outside of the U.S.

However, the bank did not fully terminate their relationship with Epstein until June 2019, just a few weeks prior to his arrest last year. Epstein was believed to have dozens of accounts with the bank at one point and those accounts were shut down slowly over a period of several months beginning in late 2018.

Ties that Bind

The narrative emerging that Den Hollander was motivated to kill Esther Salas’ husband and sons due to his hatred of feminism is a rapid attempt to explain away a story that clearly warrants further investigation, albeit into avenues that mainstream media and powerful individuals in the public and private sectors prefer remain untouched.

As the heinous act targeting the Salas family has shown, individuals with a lot to lose are willing to go to the farthest extremes to keep the ties of Epstein to the financial sector and to intelligence out of sight and out of mind. Indeed, just last December, Epstein’s personal banker at Deutsche Bank, Thomas Bowers, the chief of Deutsche Bank’s Private Wealth Management division in New York from 2012 to 2015, was found dead in his home. His death was quickly ruled a suicide by hanging. Bowers had also signed off on “unorthodox” loans, not just for Epstein, but Donald Trump, who has his own ties to the Epstein scandal.

While some have been quick to point out that Trump (as well as his son-in-law Jared Kushner) could stand to lose from potential revelations in the Epstein-Deutsche Bank trial, there are other key power-brokers tied to both Epstein and Deutsche Bank who could also be feeling the heat. For instance, Lynn Forester de Rothschild, who became close to Epstein in the early 1990s and subsequently connected him to the Clinton White House and later to Alan Dershowitz, is intimately involved in the Deutsche Bank Microfinance Consortium.

Aside from Epstein’s use of the money, Deutsche Bank has been notorious for years as a cesspool of money launderingfor organized crime networks, paying $14.5 billion in fines in just seven years for official action taken against the bank by several governments. It is highly likely that the brutality of what happened outside the Salas family home on Sunday is more related to Deutsche Bank than Epstein, as numerous powerful individuals have ties to the embattled bank.

Even the recent move by Attorney General William Barr to remove SDNY District Attorney Geoffrey Berman from his post appears to be more related to Berman’s efforts to investigate Deutsche Bank than the Epstein scandal, as some have alleged. This is because Barr’s new pick for Berman’s old job counts Deutsche Bank among his former clients and notably defended the bank in a recent anti-money laundering probe, whereas Berman was investigating the bank (albeit for political reasons that took aim at the bank’s dealings with Trump).

While Epstein’s egregious and criminal actions targeting minors have now become public knowledge, in role in facilitating white collar crime, money laundering and financial frauds on behalf of corporations, governments and oligarchs remains sorely under-covered, despite his role in such activities preceding and continuing after his involvement in an intelligence-linked sexual blackmail operation.

It arguably remains one of the key components of the Epstein scandal, yet the most poorly understood and most under-investigated. If anything, the tragic events at the Salas family home on Sunday, and what appears to be a rapid yet shoddy cover-up of the shooter’s ties to Kroll Associates and actual motives, reveal that Epstein’s financial ties are more frightening to certain powerful individuals and institutions than his trove of sexual blackmail.

The Free Market Is A Failure

By TheHipcrimeVocab

Sorry for the deliberately click-bait-y headline, but I think this message is important to get out there.

In my discussions few months back on What is Neoliberalism, I noted that a core element of neoliberal philosophy is that markets are the only efficient, effective and rational way to distribute goods and services.

Neoliberals profess the idea that only competitive markets can allocate “scarce” resources efficiently, and that it is only such “free” markets that can lift people out of poverty and deliver broad prosperity. They pound it into our heads constantly.

Yet the Covid-19 crisis has illustrated spectacular and pervasive failures of such “free” markets all over the globe, and especially in the U.S. Instead of fairness or efficiency, we see systemic failure in every market we look: the food industry, the medical industry, the retail industry, the employment market. Resources are being destroyed and misallocated on a massive scale

Let’s start with the food industry, because food is the most important thing (nine means from anarchy, and all that). Thousands and thousands of pigs are being slaughtered, their meat left to rot, eaten by no-one, regardless of the forces of supply and demand:

The United States faces a major meat shortage due to virus infections at processing plants. It means millions of pigs could be put down without ever making it to table…

Boerboom, a third-generation hog farmer, is just one of the tens of thousands of US pork producers who are facing a stark reality: although demand for their products is high in the nation’s grocery stores, they may have to euthanise and dispose of millions of pigs due to a breakdown in the American food supply chain.

Meat shortage leaves US farmers with ‘mind-blowing’ choice (BBC)

Potatoes are sitting in Belgian warehouses and left to rot, only two short years after a drought threatened to produce a severe shortage:

Belgium: Lighthearted campaign to ‘eat more fries’ aims to lift heavy load (DW)

Meanwhile, dairy farmers in the U.S. heartland are dumping milk into the ground, to be drunk by no one.

Cows don’t shut off: Why this farmer had to dump 30,000 gallons of milk (USA Today)

In fact, the whole food situation is rather ugly, as this piece from The Guardian summarizes:

This March and April, even as an astounding 30 million Americans plunged into unemployment and food bank needs soared, farmers across the US destroyed heartbreaking amounts of food to stem mounting financial losses.

In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped lakes of fresh cow’s milk (3.7m gallons a day in early April, now about 1.5 million per day), hog and chicken farmers aborted piglets and euthanized hens by the thousands, and crop growers plowed acres of vegetables into the ground as the nation’s brittle and anarchic food supply chain began to snap and crumble.

After delays and reports of concealing worker complaints, meatpacking plants that slaughter and process hundreds of thousands of animals a day ground to a halt as coronavirus cases spread like wildfire among workers packed tightly together on dizzyingly fast assembly lines.

Meanwhile, immigrant farmworkers toiled in the eye of the coronavirus storm, working and living in crowded dangerous conditions at poverty wages; at one Washington state orchard, half the workers tested positive for Covid-19. Yet many of these hardest working of Americans were deprived of economic relief, as they are undocumented. Advocates report more farmworkers showing up at food banks – and some unable to access food aid because they can’t afford the gas to get there.

None of this is acceptable or necessary and it’s not just about Covid-19, it’s also illustrative of a deeply deregulated corporate capitalism. America’s food system meltdown amid the pandemic has been long-developing, and a primary cause is decades of corporate centralization and a chaotic array of policies designed to prop up agribusiness profits at any cost.

Farmers are destroying mountains of food. Here’s what to do about it (Guardian)

That doesn’t sound very “efficient” to me, does it? How about you? Free market fundamentalists, care to weigh in?

Meanwhile, hospitals in the United States, which one would think are the most important thing to keep open during a pandemic, are actually closing across the country. These are the very things you want most to be open! Why is this happening? Because health care in the U.S. is a profit-driven enterprise that “competes” in the free market. Because elective procedures—their cash cow—have either been suspended or postponed. U.S. hospitals are closing because they are dependent upon these elective procedures to shore up their profits, and markets rely on profits.

As the deadly virus has spread beyond urban hotspots, many more small hospitals across the country are on the verge of financial ruin as they’ve been forced to cancel elective procedures, one of the few dependable sources of revenue. Williamson Memorial and similar facilities have been struggling since long before the pandemic — at least 170 rural hospitals have shut down since 2005, according to University of North Carolina research on rural hospital closures.

But even as hospitals in cities like New York City and Detroit have been deluged with coronavirus patients, many rural facilities now have the opposite problem: their beds are near-empty, their operating rooms are silent, and they’re bleeding cash.

More than 100 hospitals and hospital systems around the country have already furloughed tens of thousands of employees, according to a tally by industry news outlet Becker’s Hospital Review. They’ve sent home nurses and support staffers who would be deemed essential under state stay-home orders.

Rural hospitals are facing financial ruin and furloughing staff during the coronavirus pandemic (CNN)

And how about allocating labor via impersonal markets? How’s that going? Well, not so well. The workers with the skills most desperately needed on the front lines during the crisis are taking pay cuts and getting laid off left and right. Instead of contributing, they are sitting at home, unable to work even if they wanted to:

At a time when medical professionals are putting their lives at risk, tens of thousands of doctors in the United States are taking large pay cuts. And even as some parts of the US are talking of desperate shortages in nursing staff, elsewhere in the country many nurses are being told to stay at home without pay.

That is because American healthcare companies are looking to cut costs as they struggle to generate revenue during the coronavirus crisis.

“Nurses are being called heroes,” Mariya Buxton says, clearly upset. “But I just really don’t feel like a hero right now because I’m not doing my part.”

Ms Buxton is a paediatric nurse in St Paul, Minnesota, but has been asked to stay at home.

At the unit at which Ms Buxton worked, and at hospitals across most of the country, medical procedures that are not deemed to be urgent have been stopped. That has meant a massive loss of income.

Coronavirus: Why so many US nurses are out of work (BBC)

It’s an ironic twist as the coronavirus pandemic sweeps the nation: The very workers tasked with treating those afflicted with the virus are losing work in droves.

Emergency room visits are down. Non-urgent surgical procedures have largely been put on hold. Health care spending fell 18% in the first three months of the year. And 1.4 million health care workers lost their jobs in April, a sharp increase from the 42,000 reported in March, according to the Labor Department. Nearly 135,000 of the April losses were in hospitals.

As Hospitals Lose Revenue, More Than A Million Health Care Workers Lose Jobs (NPR)

So it doesn’t seem like “free and open” markets are doing so well with either health care or labor.

Meanwhile, U.S. states are competing against each other for desperately needed PPE equipment, bidding up the price and preventing scarce resources from going to where they are most badly needed, which would naturally be where Covid-19 has struck the hardest:

As coronavirus testing expands and more cases of infection are being identified, doctors, nurses and other healthcare workers are scrambling to find enough medical supplies to replenish their dwindling supply.

But state and local governments across the United States are vying to purchase the same equipment, creating a competitive market for those materials that drives up prices for everyone.

“A system that’s based on state and local governments looking out for themselves and competing with other state and local governments across the nation isn’t sustainable,” said John Cohen, an ABC News contributor and former acting Undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security, “and if left to continue, we’ll certainly exacerbate the public health crisis we’re facing.”

“There’s a very real possibility,” he added, “that those state and local governments that have the most critical need won’t get the equipment they need.”

Competition among state, local governments creates bidding war for medical equipment (ABC News)

Yet neoliberals always tell us how important “competition” is in every arena of life.

Failure, failure, failure! Everywhere we look, we see failure. Pervasive, systematic failure. Resources going unused. Surpluses of food being dumped even while people go hungry and line up at food banks. Workers with necessary skills sitting at home, twiddling their thumbs. Other workers unable to even earn a living to support themselves and their families, no matter how badly they want to work. Masks and protective equipment NOT going to where they are most needed, their costs inflating, befitting no one except profiteers even as people die.

Tell me again about how the market is “efficient” at distributing resources. Tell me again about how central planning inevitably results in wasted resources, surfeits and shortages.

And here is the big, bold, underscored point:

The free-marketeers want to trumpet the market’s successes, but they don’t want to own its failures.

Free-market boosters always want to talk about the wonderful benefits of markets. How they allow multiple people to coordinate their activities across wide variations of space and time. How they allow knowledge to be distributed among many different actors. How they favor tacit knowledge that a single entity could not possess. Libraries of encomiums have been written celebrating the virtues of the “free” market. You know their names: The Provisioning of ParisEconomics in One LessonFree to ChooseI Pencil, and all of that. Much of what passes for economic “science” is simply cheerleading for markets– the bigger, freer and less-regulated the better.

Okay, fair enough.

But how about market failures? Why don’t they ever talk about that? Because if you read the economics books I cited above, you would come away with the idea that there are no market failures! That, in fact, there is no such thing. That markets, in effect, cannot fail!

If you want to own the successes, you need to own the failures.

Oh, they love, love, love to talk about central planning’s “failures”. They can’t get enough of that. They love to talk about empty shelves in the Soviet Union, long lines at supermarkets, the lack of toilet paper in Venezuela (amusingly, now a problem throughout the capitalist world), and the allegedly long waiting times in “socialized medicine” countries. We are constantly subjected to that drumbeat day after day after day. It’s part of every economics 101 course. Central planning doesn’t work. Central planning is inefficient. Central planning is “tyranny.”

But what about all that stuff I cited above?

Where are all the free-market fundamentalists now?

What is their excuse?

They’ll use special pleading. They’ll argue that it’s exceptional circumstances. That no one could have foreseen a “black swan” event like the global Covid-19 pandemic (despite numerous experts warning about it for years). They’ll tell us that markets work just fine under “normal” circumstances. They’ll say we cannot pass any kind of judgement on the failings of markets during such an unusual event.

Here’s why that argument is bullshit:

Pandemics are a real, and recurring phenomenon in human history. We’ve been incredibly fortunate that we’ve been in rare and atypical hundred-year period from 1918-1919 to today without a global pandemic or novel disease we couldn’t quickly contain and/or eradicate.

But pandemics are always—and always have always been—a societal threat, even if we’ve forgotten that fact. And the experts tell us that there will be a lot more of them in our future, with population overshoot, environmental destruction, encroachment on formerly unoccupied lands and climate change proceeding apace. What that means is this:

If your economic system can’t function properly during a pandemic, then your economic system is shit.

If your economic system only works when conditions are ideal, in fact depends upon conditions being ideal, then, your economic system doesn’t really work at all. If something like a pandemic causes it to seize up and fail, then your economic system is poorly designed and doesn’t work very well. Not only do the free markets graphed on economists’ chalkboards not exist in anywhere the real world, they apparently rely on a blissful Eden-like Arcadia to function as intended—a situation any causal glance at human history tells us is highly unusual. Any disruption and they fall like dominoes. They are about as resilient as tissue paper.

And the stresses are only going to get worse in the years ahead, with climate change making some areas uninhabitably hot, while other places are submerged under rising sea levels. And that’s before we get to the typical natural disasters like volcanic eruptions, tsunamis and earthquakes. And there will be new novel plant diseases as well, unfolding against the increasing resistance of germs to antibiotics.

Will the free market fundamentalists and libertarian market cheerleaders acknowledge this???

Don’t hold your breath.

No, they will continue to lionize “private initiative” at every opportunity, while completely ignoring the stuff I opened this post with. They’ll sweep it under the rug or, more likely, simply handwave it away. They’ll continue to say that we need to scale back government regulation and interference and let the invisible hand sort it all out.

Because discipline of modern economics as practiced today is not a science. It may not even rise to the level of a pseudoscience. It’s PR for laissez-faire capitalism.

Of course, we’ve had market failures before. They occurred all throughout the nineteenth century and during Great Depression, for example. These are well-documented. But many of the things that came out of those bygone market failures to prevent or mitigate them have been systematically and deliberately dismantled over the past generation due to rise of neoliberalism.

And now we’re paying the price.

Karl Polanyi made an important distinction between markets and Market Society. Markets are where people come together to buy, sell, and exchange surplus goods. These have existed throughout history. They are tangential to society; embedded in something larger than it. Such markets can be shut down without causing an existential threat to civilization.

But Market Society is dependent upon impersonal forces of supply and demand and functioning markets for absolutely everything in the society, from jobs to food to health care. Everything is oriented around maximizing private profits, and not human needs. Markets failing to function adequately lead to unemployment, sickness, starvation and death. Shutting them down is an existential threat to civilization.

As Dmitry Orlov wrote in his best-known work, the Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union precisely because they didn’t rely on the Market.

Naturalizing markets in this way is an abdication of both causal and moral responsibility for famines, a way to avoid reality and the ethical consequences for people in a position to change things. Markets are not given; they are predicated on a host of laws and social conventions that can, if the need arises, be changed. It makes no sense for American farmers to destroy produce they can’t sell while food banks are struggling to keep up with demand. This kind of thinking is a way for powerful people to outsource ethical choices to the market, but the market has no conscience.

Famine Is a Choice (Slate)

Now, to be clear I’m not necessarily making an argument for or against central planning as opposed to markets. That’s a different discussion.

But my core point is simply this: you cannot discuss market successes without discussing market failures. To do so is intellectually dishonest, disingenuous, and not to mention incredibly dangerous and irresponsible. If economics were a real science, instead of just PR for capitalism, it would take a look at the things I described above, and figure out ways they could have been avoided, regardless of any preconceived ideology or assumptions about the “right” way to arrange a society, or assumptions about how things “should” work. It would seek out ways for society to become, in Nassim Taleb’s terminology, “antifragile.”

But don’t hold your breath for that, either.