America’s Super-Rich See Their Wealth Rise by $282 Billion in Three Weeks of Pandemic

Posted on May 21, 2020 by Reid Mukai

America’s billionaires have accrued more wealth in the past three weeks alone than they made in total prior to 1980.

By Alan Macleod

A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies found that, while tens of millions of Americans have lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic, America’s ultra-wealthy elite have seen their net worth surge by $282 billion in just 23 days. This is despite the fact that the economy is expected to contract by 40 percent this quarter. The report also noted that between 1980 and 2020 the tax obligations of America’s billionaires, measured as a percentage of their wealth, decreased by 79 percent. In the last 30 years, U.S. billionaire wealth soared by over 1100 percent while median household wealth increased by barely five percent. In 1990, the total wealth held by America’s billionaire class was $240 billion; today that number stands at $2.95 trillion. Thus, America’s billionaires accrued more wealth in just the past three weeks than they made in total prior to 1980. As a result, just three people – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Berkshire Hathaway’s Warren Buffet – own as much wealth as the bottom half of all U.S. households combined.

The Institute for Policy Studies’ report paints a picture of a modern day oligarchy, where the super-rich have captured legislative and executive power, controlling what laws are passed. The report discusses what it labels a new “wealth defense industry” – where “billionaires are paying millions to dodge billions in taxes,” with teams of accountants, lawyers, lobbyists and asset managers helping them conceal their vast fortunes in tax havens and so-called charitable trusts. The result has been crippled social programs and a decrease in living standards and even a sustained drop in life expectancy – something rarely seen in history outside of major wars or famines. Few Americans believe their children will be better off than they were. Statistics suggest they are right.

Billionaires very theatrically donate a fraction of what they used to give back in taxes, making sure to generate maximum publicity for their actions. And they secure positive coverage of themselves by stepping in to keep influential news organizations afloat. A December investigation by MintPress found that Gates had donated over $9 million to The Guardian, over $3 million to NBC Universal, over $4.5 million to NPR, $1 million to Al-Jazeera, and a staggering $49 million to the BBC’s Media Action program. Some, like Bezos, prefer to simply outright purchase news organizations themselves, changing the editorial stance to unquestioning loyalty to their new owners.

The spike in billionaire wealth comes amid an unprecedented economic crash; 26.5 million Americans have filed for unemployment over the last five weeks, and that number is expected to continue to rise dramatically. While the super-rich are holed up in their mansions and yachts, the 49-62 million Americans designated as “essential workers” must continue to risk their lives to keep society functioning, even as many of them do not even earn as much as the $600 weekly increase in unemployment benefits the CARES act stipulates. Many low paid workers, such as grocery store employees, have already fallen sick and died. The mother of one 27-year-old Maryland worker who contracted COVID-19 and died received her daughter’s last paycheck. It amounted to $20.64.

Amazon staff, directly employed by Bezos, also risk their lives for measly pay. One third of all Amazon workers in Arizona, for example, are enrolled in the food stamps program, their wages so low that they cannot afford to pay for food. The vast contrast in the effect that COVID-19 has had on the super wealthy versus the rest of us has many concluding that billionaires’ wealth and the poverty of the rest of the world are two sides of the same coin: that the reason people working full-time still cannot afford a house or even to eat is the same reason people like Bezos control more wealth than many countries. Bezos’ solution to his employees’ hunger has been to set up a charity and ask for public donations to help his desperate workers.

The majority of millennials, most of them shut out from attaining the American dream, already prefer socialism to capitalism, taking a dim view of the latter. The latest news that the billionaire class is laughing all the way to the bank during a period of intense economic suffering is unlikely to improve their disposition.

Alan MacLeod is a Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent. He has also contributed to Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, Common Dreams the American Herald Tribune and The Canary.

Corporate Looting as ‘Rescue Plan,’ Robber Barons as ‘Saviors’

Posted on May 20, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Joshua Cho

Source: FAIR.org

For a perfect illustration of how corporate media function as ruling class propaganda, watch how they spin a titanic upward redistribution of wealth as a “rescue plan” for the US economy, and paint a robber baron like US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin as a “savior” of the American public.

In discussions of the (officially) estimated $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act—the largest government spending program in US history—before it was signed into law on March 27, corporate media largely abandoned the pretense of serving as watchdogs on behalf of the public in order to advocate for protecting and enriching the fortunes of their owners.

Instead of scrutinizing the bill as the robbery in progress that it is—as an understandable story with identifiable victims and victimizers—corporate media sold the CARES Act as an urgent necessity required to combat the coronavirus pandemic for everyone. Like the previous corporate bailout during the Great Recession (Extra!, 1/09), corporate media avoided raising questions about the necessity of having the government bail out large corporations, or whether the bill could be restructured to serve people rather than profits.

According to the Committee for a Responsible Budget, while the CARES Act dedicated $290 billion in direct payments to people and $260 billion in expanded unemployment benefits, it dedicated $300 billion in tax breaks and $875 billion in loans to big and small businesses—more than two dollars for corporations for every dollar for people, in other words.

When corporate media reported on negotiations and deliberations over the CARES Act, they either hailed it as a bipartisan achievement, or else shamed politicians who accurately pointed out that it overwhelmingly benefited corporations at the expense of workers. On the day the CARES Act was signed into law, NPR (3/27/20) praised the bill as “the largest rescue package in American history and a major bipartisan victory for Congress.”

Reporting in real-time, the Washington Post (3/24/20) spun the CARES Act as an attempt to “address the coronavirus crisis,” with the aim of “flooding the economy with capital to revive businesses and households.” When there was Democratic pushback over the Senate GOP bill for being “disproportionately tilted toward helping companies,” the Post described this as “partisan rancor and posturing on Capitol Hill” that blocked “the rescue bill.” The Post concern-trolled those who supported better legislation, and derided House Democrats’ putative attempts to chart their own “competing piece of legislation,” because “it could take even longer to arrive at a bipartisan consensus that can pass both chambers and get signed into law.”

The New York Times (3/22/20) made it clear that protecting workers and imposing conditions on handing out trillions in taxpayer dollars were frivolous reasons to oppose the legislation, as the Times cast Senate Democrats as villains for ostensibly opposing the bill because it “failed to adequately protect workers or impose strict enough restrictions on bailed-out businesses.” The Times described the “party-line vote” as a “stunning setback” for both the Trump administration’s “ambitious timeline” and “the rescue package,” and warned Democrats that they “risked a political backlash” if “they are seen as obstructing progress on a measure that is widely regarded as crucial to aid desperate Americans and buttress a flagging economy.”

The Times also drew parallels to the “spectacle in 2008,” when the House defeated a “$700 billion Wall Street bailout that aimed to stabilize the financial system amid a global meltdown.” Even in 2020, the Times is still spinning the upward redistribution of wealth from taxpayers to the big banks that caused the crisis as an ostensible success that saved what corporate media consider to be “the economy” (Extra!, 10/10).

Days later, the Times’ “As Coronavirus Spread, Largest Stimulus in History United a Polarized Senate” (3/26/20) spun the 96-to-0 Senate vote in favor of the bill as a heroic bipartisan compromise on legislation “intended to get the nation through the crippling economic and health disruptions being inflicted on the world by the coronavirus.” The Times leaned into corporate media’s civility fetish designed to demobilize opposition to the Trump regime (FAIR.org, 8/1/18, 12/22/19) when it depicted Democratic opposition to Senate Republicans’ “corporate giveaway” legislation as politically reckless and harmful to the country’s interests:

It was a shocking and politically perilous decision in the middle of a paralyzing national crisis, a moment when lawmakers are traditionally expected to put aside differences for the good of the country, or face a political backlash.

By contrast, in the false balance endemic in news coverage in the Trump era, the Times portrayed Senate Republicans as reasonable leaders who were “willing to momentarily abandon their small-government zeal” in the interest of “sealing a quick deal with Democrats” (GQ, 12/10/19; Washington Post, 4/27/12). Though the legislation didn’t include a necessary suspension of rent, utility and mortgage payments, or guarantee monthly payments, as advised by many economists, the Times spun it as a legislative victory for Senate Democrats:

In the end, Democrats won what they saw as significant improvements in the measure through their resistance, including added funding for healthcare and unemployment, along with more direct money to states. A key addition was tougher oversight on the corporate bailout fund, including an inspector general and congressionally appointed board to monitor it, disclosure requirements for businesses that benefited, and a prohibition on any of the money going to Mr. Trump’s family or his properties — although they could still potentially benefit from other provisions.

The problem with this triumphant Democratic Resistance^TM narrative is that it happens to be false. Politico’s report (3/26/20) on the negotiations over what it also hailed as a “rescue package” revealed that the final bill largely reflected the Senate Republicans’ “unemployment insurance and direct payments schemes” as “originally outlined,” with Sen. Mitch McConnell claiming that the CARES Act was a bill that was “largely, not entirely but largely, produced by Republicans in consultation with the Democratic minority.”

The Democratic leadership’s lack of concern with proper oversight of the bailout funds was also exposed when Speaker Nancy Pelosi chose her first-term congressmember friend Donna Shalala as part of the five-member oversight panel, despite her numerous conflicts of interest, evident lack of expertise or reported interest in the job (American Prospect, 4/18/20).

The American Prospect’s David Dayen has done some of the best reporting on the CARES Act, and he’s observed (3/25/20) how means-testing the $1,200 stimulus payments by basing it off IRS data in 2018 and 2019 was designed to limit the number of Americans who can receive it. The miserly one-time $1,200 stimulus payment will primarily reach Americans who already have direct deposit information on file with the IRS, with the unbanked (who happen to be the poorest) having to wait up to four months for paper checks, and who will be lucky to remain at the same address during that time without a suspension of rent payments.

While Democratic leaders like Pelosi opposed emergency universal basic income—and delayed payments to set up a bureaucracy ostensibly dedicated to make sure wealthy Americans don’t get anything—the richest Americans are in fact receiving an average stimulus payment of $1.7 million in the form of a millionaire tax cut.

Dayen has noted how the official “$500 billion” provided by the CARES Act to bailout large corporations is actually underreporting the enormity of the federal government’s corporate giveaway, as Trump regime officials like Larry Kudlow and Steve Mnuchin admitted their intent to leverage the Federal Reserve’s emergency lending authority to turn $500 billion into a $4.5 trillion money cannon aimed at large corporations.

What was in actuality a $6 trillion spending package had few conditions attached to the largesse given to large corporations, as the money can still go to mergers, executive compensation and paying dividends to shareholders, with no requirement that they keep employing workers to receive this handout.

It’s hard to overstate the injustice and scale of this upward redistribution of wealth. Commenting on 2008’s bailout, economist Richard Wolff (Guardian, 11/4/13) pointed out how funding the bailout through borrowing money effectively transfers wealth upward from regular taxpayers to rich bondholders, because the government is borrowing money from—and paying interest to—large corporations and the rich that it could have taxed them for instead. Rather than letting shareholders be wiped out first, according to the ostensible rules of capitalism—where they are supposed to bear the risk, instead of the government—the government is shoveling money to tax-dodging corporations like Boeing who admit to not needing these funds.

By borrowing the money for a program that prioritizes saving the rich, rather than printing money to fund an emergency universal basic income for the people like Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s proposal, the government is effectively paying the rich for saving them. The fact that these viable alternative stimulus proposals weren’t enacted is inexcusable. Especially when the Federal Reserve is hinting its willingness to increase the money supply by buying unlimited debt to fund the CARES Act, the fact that the necessary funds magically appear to fund corporate bailouts instead of necessary social programs (like Medicare for All) exposes the “How are you going to pay for it?” talking point as a fraud (Extra!, 6/12).

Pam and Russ Martens of Wall Street on Parade (3/26/20) observed how the CARES Act also allows the Fed to create “Special Purpose Vehicles” and hide this money from their balance sheets, allowing them to avoid the FOIA requests used to the expose the enormity of the $29 trillion bailout from 2008, in addition to repealing public meeting and recordkeeping requirements for Fed-related programs. This allows the Fed to evade transparency and accountability by holding meetings in secret.

But when corporate media aren’t busy spinning massive corporate robbery of taxpayer money as a rescue package for “the economy,” they’re busy spinning robber barons like Mnuchin as heroic “saviors” instead. Reuters’ “This Is No 2008: Mnuchin Borrows From Paulson’s Economic Crisis Playbook” (3/20/20) depicted Mnuchin as an unlikely hero thrust into the role of solving the US’ economic woes, as they reported:

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin has stepped into the breach as the Trump administration’s point man to rescue the economy from coronavirus devastation, taking on the role his former Goldman Sachs boss, Hank Paulson, played over a decade ago.

Mnuchin has closely followed the financial crisis playbook used by Paulson when he led the Treasury Department in 2008, reactivating Federal Reserve credit market backstops and asking Congress for $1 trillion to prop up companies and consumers as the economy grinds to a halt due to the spread of the virus.

Apparently, for Reuters, there is only one “playbook” to be followed for all economic crises: massive taxpayer-funded giveaways to large corporations, and crumbs for everyone else. The report contained praise from official sources praising Mnuchin for being “pragmatic” and “rising to the occasion,” with few questions beyond whether he can succeed in his noble mission, as Reuters wondered whether Mnuchin can “strong-arm executives or influence President Donald Trump to take the drastic steps the unprecedented crisis may demand.” Whether Mnuchin and the Trump regime are actually trying to “rescue the economy” is apparently unquestionable, even though Mnuchin would dismiss record-breaking levels of unemployment as “not relevant” only a few days later (Common Dreams, 3/26/20).

The Wall Street Journal’s “How Mnuchin Became Washington’s Indispensable Crisis Manager” (3/31/20) also peddled this fictitious savior narrative when it reported that “Mnuchin has become Washington’s indispensable deal-maker in trying to keep the crisis from throwing the world’s largest economy into the deepest downturn since the Great Depression,” while shepherding “a pair of rescue bills through Congress.”

The Journal depicted Mnuchin’s ability to retain Trump’s confidence while working with Democrats as something that will be “all the more needed in the weeks ahead as the pandemic is expected to worsen,” in order to “get things done in partisan Washington.” Those “skills” didn’t seem to manifest when additional funding for state and local governments, and expanded food stamp benefits needed to rescue people, were left out of the “Phase 3.5” coronavirus legislation last week (Intercept, 4/22/20).

The Washington Post’s “The Dealmaker’s Dealmaker: Mnuchin Steps In as Trump’s Negotiator, but President’s Doubts Linger With Economy in Crisis” (3/27/20) also praised Mnuchin’s efforts to “bridge divides” and forge bipartisan “agreements.” While to the Post’s credit, the piece noted how the “Treasury Department’s demands have often appeared to represent the interests of big business rather than workers,” its overall thrust was encapsulated by its subhead: “Can his economic rescue plan quickly stabilize an economy headed toward calamity?”

The New York Times’ “How Powell and Mnuchin Became the Duo in Charge of Saving the Economy” (3/31/20) reported on Mnuchin’s “vital partnership” with Fed chair Jerome Powell, echoed the “unlikely hero” narrative, and described their efforts as “critical not only to workers and businesses,” but also to Trump’s “re-election” chances:

The coronavirus poses the most significant economic threat since at least 2008, thrusting Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Powell into key roles in determining whether the United States economy suffers a short, manageable slowdown or enters a deep and painful recession.

When the Times briefly acknowledged concerns about the massive concentration in power and newfound influence in Powell and Mnuchin’s hands, and questions about the integrity of the “oversight” process, it treated the CARES Act favoring big corporations over workers as a hypothetical scenario, rather than a plain fact.

In a unique situation where workers and small business owners have the shared interest in not being wiped out by the pandemic, how else does one characterize the disproportionately stricter conditions placed on small businesses to retain workers to receive bailout money—while big corporations have no such limitations—except as a plan to save big corporations over workers? The Times’ later reports (4/22/20, 4/26/20) on big corporations receiving bailout money intended for small businesses, and receiving concierge service for coronavirus aid at their expense, should’ve been predictable—as it was to some observers in real time (American Prospect, 3/25/20).

Throughout this coverage, it’s quite telling who counts as “the economy” and what measures are considered “necessary” or “adequate,” because it reveals who corporate media consider to be disposable (working class America), and who needs “saving” (large corporations and the American oligarchy). With the CARES Act, corporate media reversed the narrative in a truly Orwellian fashion, portraying corporate looting of the Treasury as necessary to “rescue the economy,” while the main questions regarding “savior” officials like Mnuchin are whether his plans to “save the economy” can succeed. When 26 million Americans lost their jobs between March 18 and April 22, while the wealth of US billionaires increased by $308 billion (more than 10%), there’s no other way to look at corporate media spin as anything but ruling class propaganda to legitimize saving capital while letting people die (In These Times, 4/6/20).

What Does the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Want?

Posted on May 19, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Bill Willers

Source: Dissident Voice

There’s an interview of Bill Gates in which Gates reveals more than he might have intended. Rosemary Frei details many of the Orwellian aspects of Gates’ plans. In particular, consider these comments by Gates from disparate parts of the interview:

It’s [Covid19] quite infectious, way more infectious than MERS or SARS were. It’s not as fatal as they were ….. Nothing like this has ever happened to the economy in our lifetimes. But money — ya know — bringing the economy back and doing money — that’s more of a reversible thing than bringing people back to life. So we’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension — huge pain — in order to minimize the pain in the disease and death dimensions.

Gates is misleading. To admit that Covid19 is “not as fatal” as MERS or SARS is to state that it is less virulent — that the clinical symptoms are not as serious. “More infectious” only means more transmissible, which says nothing about the presence or absence of illness symptoms. So, what is arguably nothing more than a bad flu season is being used to justify the crashing of the economy. Who, exactly, is the “we” in Gates’ “We’re going to take the pain in the economic dimension”? Certainly not billionaire Gates. And wouldn’t “We’re going to…..” indicate that he was involved in the lockdown decision?

Out in the land, countless millions of Americans are seeing their lives put to a ruin beyond salvage. Thousands of small businesses — a life’s work for many — will not survive. In Spring of 2016, mainstream media was reporting that 40% of Americans were unable to come up with $400 to cover an emergency situation. Such a lack of financial cushion is to be barely above outright poverty. Imagine their terror now that their meager income has been further diminished by the lockdown. Gates, a tech genius, either does not comprehend the level of tragedy he advocates, or he does not care. It is no secret that extreme dread, when prolonged, is disastrous to one’s health.

Without detailed research one could not prove that many more Americans will die as a result of the lockdown than of Covid-19, but considering the countless ripple effects throughout the many interdependencies within a complex civilization, reason and experience lead one quickly to that conclusion. There will be mass anxiety, depression, seeking the respite from pain provided by alcohol, frayed nerves leading to violence, and sheer desperation driving many to consider crime in a last ditch effort to hold body and soul together.

Within the interview, Gates drops a bomb: “Eventually, what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person, because you don’t want people moving around the world, where you have some countries that won’t have a control sadly.” What kind of “certificates”? What he actually has in mind may be revealed in a report of this past December that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was funding research at MIT in the development of a “Tattoo ID”, to be injected with vaccinations and available for anonymous detection. In time, the failure to have the appropriate identifying tattoo for any given year, and for any given virus officially declared dangerous, would most certainly be used to control individual freedom of movement. This should trigger every thinking person’s attention, particularly as it is reported that Gates refused to have his own children vaccinated.

Ernst Wolff is a German journalist focused on international finance and its ramifications. His March 20, 2020 interview (Here posted March 30 with English subtitles) is worth viewing. He reports that funding and control for the World Health Organization (WHO) began a shift in the 1970s from nation states to the pharmaceutical industry and private foundations. In time, major support was coming from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Now, Gates’ power within the WHO is unmatched, having given him the status akin to that of a head of state, not only at the WHO, but also at the G20, a collective of world leaders concerned with issues of global importance. At the same time, it is startling that Event201, a “pandemic exercise” hosted by the World Economic Forum and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, took place a scant four months before the Covid19 outbreak and the lockdown decision.

The fact that Gates acknowledged that Covid19 is not as virulent as other viruses of recent history is by itself reason to view the extreme move of economic lockdown, and the isolation of individuals, with suspicion, as is the absence on mainstream media of the voices of dissenting epidemiologists of impeccable reputation. There is also the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, of which the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is an “investor and partner”. Its mission: “to stimulate and accelerate the development of vaccines against emerging infectious diseases and enable access to these vaccines for people during outbreaks.”

Bill Gates, with a personal fortune nearly a tenth of a trillion dollars, has placed himself at the forefront of decision-making regarding viral epidemics. His stated interest is the production of vaccines. With a world induced to his way of thinking, the stage is set for acceptance of annual mass vaccinations, a situation that would insure profits for the pharmaceutical industry that are not only astronomical, but also certain to be perpetual. In any given year, a new viral “strain” could, as with Covid19, be given a catchy title, and its death statistics, whether genuine or forged, drilled by media to instill mass dread. In certain situations, vaccination might be made mandatory — in the interest of humanity, of course. In any event, when WHO speaks, it is Bill Gates’ voice, and the interests of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that are being heard.

Death: A Simple Idea with a Powerful Punch

Posted on May 17, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Edward Curtin

Source: Off-Guardian

Since death is one idea that has no history except as an idea and not a reality any of us have experienced, it is the most frightening idea there is and also quite simple. It is the ultimate unknown. It has always haunted human beings, whether consciously or unconsciously.

It lies at the root of war, violence, religion, art, love, and civilization. The good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly, why we like to win and not lose, pass and not fail, “pass on” and not die. It is so funny and so sad. We would be lost without it, even when we feel lost when thinking about it. And it is fundamental for understanding the action and reaction to Covid-19.

Societies have always been people banded together in the face of death. And since people are not just physical beings but symbolic creatures who can think and imagine the past and the future, societies are necessarily mythic symbol systems whose job is not only to protect people physically, but symbolically as well.

Sometimes, however, the protection is a protection racket with racketeers holding people hostage to fabricated fears that keep them locked in a living-death.

Thus death, this most potent imaginative idea and reality that doesn’t exist except as a mystery about which anything we say is speculation, can be used for good and evil, depending on who controls society.

Death is the great fear, the human haunting that hangs by a thread over life like the sword of Damocles.

In 1944 in a newspaper column, George Orwell made an astute remark:

There is little doubt that the modern cult of power worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. If death ends everything, it becomes much harder to believe that you can be in the right even if you are defeated…. I would say that the decay in the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilization.

Beliefs, of course, like “personal immortality” and all others, such as the recent rise in the belief in atheism, which is as much a belief as belief in God, are, partially at least, relative to time and place, and develop out of social storytelling. The “hard facts” on which many feel their lives and security rest are themselves dependent upon the symbols which give them legitimacy.

Reality is indeed precarious with society suspended by a web of myths and symbols. It is through cultural and social symbol systems that society’s meaning is transmitted to individuals, and it is within the symbol systems that the control and release of action resides.

In today’s electronic mass media world, those who control the mass media that control the narrative flow – the storytelling – control the majority’s beliefs and actions.

Since society is held together by this myth system – the beliefs and values people live for and live by – that sustains it, societies have always had to offer symbolic “answers” to death. For without a meaningful symbolic for coming to terms with death, human action would be stymied and people would be reduced to what the psychiatrist Allan Wheelis termed “intense, preoccupying yearning.”

Today we can hear such yearning everywhere.

Shortly after Orwell made his prescient comment in The Tribune, nuclear weapons were developed and used by the United States to kill hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese civilians. With those weapons and their use, the ages-old symbolic narrative of life and death was transformed in a flash.

“The significance of the possibility of nuclear death is that it radically affects the meaning of death, of immortality, of life itself,” wrote Hans Morgenthau.

The traditional symbolic sources that once served to allow humans to transcend death were fundamentally undercut, and the search for new modes of death transcendence was carried on beneath the portentous covering of the nuclear umbrella.

A qualitative transformation in the meaning of human existence was thus brought about as humans, who had the weapons, replaced the belief in God as the holder of the power over life and death, since nuclear war could result in the extinction of human life, leaving no one left to die.

This is our world today, and it is where the Covid-19 story takes place. A world not just of nuclear fear, but a host of other fears constantly inflamed by the mass media that hypnotize people through the conjuring of death-fear.

In his great work on group psychology, Freud showed us how it was not just mental contagion and the herd instinct that got people to join in group behavior. People could be induced to become little children and obey their leaders because they have “an extreme passion for authority.”

When leaders speak, the children hear the inner voices of their parents telling them to be careful, be very careful, the bogeyman is everywhere, so listen and obey. Freud, the Jewish atheist, and Dostoevsky, the Russian Orthodox Christian, were in agreement about people’s desire to give up their freedom to authority figures who would allegedly shelter them within their warm embrace.

The easiest way to do this is to convince people that death is stalking them, for the bogeyman is always death in one form or another.

It works to get people to support the terrifying sadism of wars against fabricated “others,” who are always portrayed as aliens who are out to kill the good people.

It works to get people to give up their freedoms out of fear of “terrorists,” who are said to slide and hide in the interstices of everyday life, ready to pounce and kill at any moment.

And it works to get people to obey orders to protect themselves from terrifying viruses that are lying in wait everywhere to strike them dead.

In his novel The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky said that people want miracles, mystery, and authority, not freedom. His Grand Inquisitor, while a fictional creation, lives on in reality.

For the Grand Inquisitor represents those power elites across the world who wish to cower people into accepting their dicta on Covid-19 as truth without questioning its logic or rationale.

To question has become an act of insubordination deserving death by censorship or the defiling of one’s name via the term “conspiracy theorist,” a name used by the CIA to dismiss anyone questioning its murder of President Kennedy. Death comes in many forms, and the fear of it has always been used by the powerful to render the common people speechless and obedient.

How can any thinking person, anyone not totally crippled by fear, not question what is going on with the coronavirus disaster when reading what Peter Koenig, a thirty-year veteran economist of the World Bank and World Health Organization, writes in his article The Farce and Diabolical Agenda of a ‘Universal Lockdown’:

The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.

There is no coincidence. There were a number of preparatory events, all pointing into the direction of a worldwide monumental historic disaster. It started at least 10 years ago – probably considerably earlier – with the infamous 2010 Rockefeller Report, which painted the first phase of a monstrous Plan, called the “Lock Step” scenario. Among the last preparatory moves for the “pandemic” was Event 201, held in NYC on 18 October 2019.

The event was sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) and the World Economic Forum (WEF), the club of the rich and powerful that meets every January in Davos, Switzerland. Participating were a number of pharmaceuticals (vaccine interest groups), as well as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s of the US and – of China.

One of the objectives of Event 201 was a computer simulation of a corona virus pandemic. The simulated virus was called SARS-2-nCoV, or later 2019-nCoV. The simulation results were disastrous, killing 65 million people in 18 months and plunging the stock market by more than 30% — causing untold unemployment and bankruptcies. Precisely the scenario of which we are now living the beginning.

The Lock Step scenario foresees a number of ghastly and disturbing events or components of The Plan to be implemented by the so called Agenda ID2020, a Bill Gates creation, fully integrated into the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) – target date for completion – 2030 (also called Agenda 2030, the hidden agenda unknown to most of the UN members), the same target date for completion of the Agenda ID02020.

I ask the question but I am afraid I know the answer: miracle, mystery, and authority usually defeat evidence and simple logic. Fear of death and free thought scare children. The Grand Inquisitor lives on:

But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree unanimously to bow down to it.

Death: A simple idea with such a powerful punch.

No, This Is Not Another 1929, 1973, 1987, 2000, or 2008

Posted on May 15, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Basing one’s decisions on analogs from the past is entering a fool’s paradise of folly.

Like addicts who cannot control their cravings, financial analysts cannot stop themselves from seeking some analog situation in the past which will clarify the swirling chaos in their crystal balls. So we’ve been swamped with charts overlaying recent stock market action over 1929, 1987,2000 and 2008–though the closest analogy is actually the Oil Shock of 1973, an exogenous shock to a weakening, fragile economy.

But the reality is there is no analogous situation in the past to the present, and so all the predictions based on past performance will be misleading. The chartists and analysts claim that all markets act on the same patterns, which are reflections of human nature, and so seeking correlations of volatility and valuation that “worked” in the past will work in 2020.

Does anyone really believe the correlations of the past decade or two are high-probability predictors of the future as the entire brittle construct of fictional capital and extremes of globalization and financialization all unravel at once?

Here are a few of the many consequential differences between all previous recessions and the current situation:

1. Households have never been so dependent on debt as a substitute for stagnating wages.

2. Real earnings (adjusted for inflation) have never been so stagnant for the bottom 90% for so long.

3. Corporations have never been so dependent on debt (selling bonds or taking on loans) to fund money-losing operations (see Netflix) or stock buybacks designed to saddle the company with debt service expenses to enrich insiders.

4. The stock market has never been so dependent on what amounts to fraud–stock buybacks–to push valuations higher.

5. The economy has never been so dependent on absurdly overvalued stock valuations to prop up pension funds and the spending of the top 10% who own 85% of all stocks, i.e. “the wealth effect.”

6. The economy and the stock market have never been so dependent on central bank free money for financiers and corporations, money creation for the few at the expense of the many, what amounts to an embezzlement scheme.

7. Federal statistics have never been so gamed, rigged or distorted to support a neofeudal agenda of claiming a level of wide-spread prosperity that is entirely fictitious.

8. Major sectors of the economy have never been such rackets, i.e. cartels and quasi-monopolies that use obscure pricing and manipulation of government mandates to maximize profits while the quality and quantity of the goods and services they produce declines.

9. The economy has never been in such thrall to sociopaths who have mastered the exploitation of the letter of the law while completely overturning the spirit of the law.

10. Households and companies have never been so dependent on “free money” gained from asset appreciation based on speculation, not an actual increase in productivity or value.

11. The ascendancy of self-interest as the one organizing directive in politics and finance has never been so complete, and the resulting moral rot never more pervasive.

12. The dependence on fictitious capital masquerading as “wealth” has never been greater.

13. The dependence on simulacra, simulations and false fronts to hide the decay of trust, credibility, transparency and accountability has never been so pervasive and complete.

14. The corrupt linkage of political power, media ownership, “national security” agencies and corporate power has never been so widely accepted as “normal” and “unavoidable.”

15. Primary institutions such as higher education, healthcare and national defense have never been so dysfunctional, ineffective, sclerotic, resistant to reform or costly.

16. The economy has never been so dependent on constant central bank manipulation of the stock and housing markets.

17. The economy has never been so fragile or brittle, and so dependent on convenient fictions to stave off a crash in asset valuations.

18. Never before in U.S. history have the most valuable corporations all been engaged in selling goods and services that actively reduce productivity and human happiness.

This is only a selection of a much longer list, but you get the idea. Basing one’s decisions on analogs from the past is entering a fool’s paradise of folly.

Why Post-Coronavirus America Will Have Massive Poverty

Posted on May 13, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Eric Zuesse

Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

The way that Congress and the President structured America’s coronavirus bailout legislation, the protections that go to the super-wealthy start immediately, but the protections that go to the neediest — the soaring numbers of unemployed, the increasingly endangered medical workers, etc. — require documentation which is creating delays that might soon cause many of these individuals to lose their homes, their cars, even their lives.

On April 17th, Matt Taibbi headlined “The Trickle-Up Bailout” and he noted that:

As we head into the second month of pandemic lockdown, two parallel narratives are developing about the financial rescue.

In one, ordinary people receive aid through programs that are piecemeal, complex, and riddled with conditions.

A law freezing evictions applies to holders of government-backed mortgages only. “Disaster grants” are coming more slowly and in smaller amounts than expected; small businesses were disappointed to learn from the SBA early last week that aid would be limited to $1000 per employee.

That’s typical.

As I had already explained on April 14th:

America’s bailout package to overcome the coronavirus ‘recession’ is twofold:

One part is printing money for employees and consumers, so that they won’t be thrown out onto the streets for non-payment of debts such as mortgages, car-loans, credit cards, and student loans.

Another part is printing money for bondholders and stockholders, so that their investments will still have value and there won’t be panicked selling of them as corporations accumulate soaring losses because consumers are staying home and are cutting way back on expenses.

The top-down part of the bailout (the part for investors) will merely add to the wealth of the already-wealthy, while everybody else sinks financially into oblivion. (On April 9th, the Zero Hedge financial site explained in detail why even bailing out the airlines would hurt the economy more than help the economy.) The top-down part supplies the money to the corporations instead of to their employees and consumers, and is therefore supply-boosting instead of demand-boosting. Supplying money to the corporations that the Government selects to protect will enable those corporations to buy up assets and corporations which during the crisis are being auctioned off by the ones that go out of business, and this will leave the nation’s wealth in even fewer hands than before the epidemic struck.

The bottom-up part (the part for workers and consumers) will be exactly the opposite of that: it will help prevent another Great Depression. By boosting purchases, instead of bailing-out billionaires and such, it will enable the economy to keep functioning, and it will not increase the concentration of wealth.

However, employees and consumers don’t have many lobbyists, but billionaires do, and billionaires also own (through political donations and lobbyists) almost all members of Congress (and also the mainstream press), and they not only own, but are represented by, one inside the White House, who is surrounded there by others, and by representatives of others, so that the concerns of the wealthiest will be very well represented by America’s Government, and will end up dominating the bailouts, so that only the insiders, who are well-connected in Washington, will be protected. (And Joe Biden would be no improvement over Donald Trump, though his rhetoric is different.)

Already, we see, in the ‘news’-reports, that there is ‘chaos’ etc. in the U.S. Government’s response to the crisis, but what’s not being reported in the mainstream ‘news’-media is that there very much is method to this seeming madness, and it is the method of the well-practiced and well-funded takers, definitely not of their victims, from whom they (and their Government) have been, and now increasingly are, taking. The takers own the Deep State, and are protected by it. The vast bulk of the bailouts will go to them. The vast bulk of the bailouts will go to suppliers (investors), not to their workers and consumers.

So, as a general rule: the more that a person’s income depends upon investments, and the less that it depends upon their labor (wages), the more fully that the bailouts will compensate for the losses they’ll be suffering as a result of the coronavirus disruptions.

Here is a breakdown of the incomes that the super-rich receive (mainly from investments), versus the incomes that everybody else receive:

As can easily be seen there, only the super-rich (the top 1%, and most especially the top 0.1%) receive the majority of their incomes from investments (“Business income” and “Capital income”). Everybody else receives it mainly from “compensation” (wages), “retirement income,” and “Transfer income” (welfare).

Most of the benefits to the top 0.1% will be coming by means of monetary policy, via the Federal Reserve, not by means of fiscal policy — such as the payments to the unemployed (which are subject to many delays) and such as the $1,200-per-adult grants (which were the fastest to be paid because it’s the “helicopter money” that buys votes for the political incumbents, all of whom had voted for the bailouts).

The bailouts’ widely publicized part is the $2.2 trillion, since that includes whatever the public gets. However, that part is the smaller portion of the entire program. As CBS News reported on March 24th, “Top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow said the price tag of economic stimulus amounts to roughly $6 trillion, which includes $2 trillion for direct assistance, and roughly $4 trillion in Federal Reserve lending power. Kudlow said this will be the single-largest such Main Street financial package in the history of the country.” Kudlow said it at a White House press conference. He mentioned there just in passing (at 1:36), that it’s a “six trillion-dollar program, four trillion dollars in lending power from the Fed, that’s a six trillion-dollar package …,” and the reporters in the White House press corps didn’t ask him anything about the Fed’s part, the $4 trillion portion (the program’s part that protects the billionaires); they evidently didn’t care about that, but only about the $2.2 trillion, which is actually the PR decoration on this $6T cake — the $2.2T that the public is interested in, the bait-part of the entire bailout-program. (Its hook won’t sink in until the readers’ children and grandchildren will be paying for it via their taxes in a stripped America.) However, on March 26th, Wall Street on Parade (WSP) — the best investigative-reporting source about Wall Street — headlined “Stimulus Bill Allows Federal Reserve to Conduct Meetings in Secret; Gives Fed $454 Billion Slush Fund for Wall Street Bailouts” and disclosed that even what Kudlow had called “Main Street” (the $2.2T part) included much for Wall Street; and WSP then rhetorically asked, “Why does the Federal Reserve need $454 billion from the U.S. taxpayer to bail out Wall Street when it has the power to create money out of thin air and has already dumped more than $9 trillion cumulatively in revolving loans to prop up Wall Street’s trading houses since September 17, 2019 – long before there was any diagnosis of coronavirus anywhere in the world?” They promptly answered this: “The Fed needs that money to create more Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) — the same device used by Enron to hide its toxic debt off its balance sheet before it went belly up.” Furthermore, the $454 billion, which WSP called “the money the Treasury is handing over to the Fed” is what CBS had reported “would result in ‘$4 trillion in Federal Reserve lending power’.” And U.S. taxpayers are guaranteeing 100% of these loans to investors — so, it’s “heads you win, tails we lose,” for taxpayers addressing billionaires, and “heads we win, tails you lose,” for billionaires addressing taxpayers. The billionaires win, the public loses. But the billionaires’ media don’t mention this fact, that investors get the guarantees, while the public takes all of the risks. However, what is an “investment” for, if non-investors are receiving its risks? It’s just legalized crime. And these are huge risks, and all or most of the $454 billion that the U.S. is lending to the Fed to guarantee private investors’ investments could be destroyed in the coronavirus-crisis. This is far more socialism for the super-rich than for the bottom 99%. The billionaires love socialism when they’re the ones who are getting the bailouts — the public taking on the risks that investors are supposed to assume. The issue for billionaires isn’t “socialism versus capitalism,” like they always say; it’s actually “socialism for us, and capitalism for everybody else.” That’s not “survival of the fittest,” for the wealthiest class; it’s instead their ordering their politicians to: protect our wealth, no matter what the cost to the public could turn out to be. And that’s precisely what the President and Congress did. Kudlow, however, said, instead, that the “package” would produce “a good rebound in the second half of the year.” Maybe for the billionaires it would.

Kudlow was simply being consistent with his own prior record. On 10 December 2007, he had headlined in National Review, “Bush Boom Continues: You can call it Goldilocks 2.0. But you can’t call it a recession.” And he closed by saying, “This sort of fiscal and monetary coordination will continue the Bush boom for years to come.” He’s good for the billionaires; and, so, today, he’s President Trump’s top economic advisor. He’s up there, because he’s wrong — not because he’s right. (If he had been right, he wouldn’t be there.)

After the immediate crisis is over, America will have a top 0.1% who are unscathed and whose mega-corporations will be selling not only what they had been selling before, but selling virtually everything that sells in the post-coronavirus world. For examples: what mom-and-pop businesses (including restaurants, B&Bs, etc.) had previously been selling, will, in the future, be supplied (to the extent that it remains being supplied at all) by McDonalds, Starbucks, Marriott, Amazon, Target, Walmart, and other megacorporations (controlled by billionaires), which will have been receiving, from the Fed, and from the Treasury, whatever they needed in order to carry their investors through the crisis-period. (And who are those investors? Look at that chart above, the recipients mainly of “Business income” and “Capital income” — the chief recipients of dividends, interest, and capital gains incomes.)

Furthermore: after the crisis, commercial real estate will be super-cheap, because of all the bankrupted mom-and-pop businesses. Wages also will decline, as the public become increasingly desperate, and the billionaires win increasing market-power. Therefore, not only will the megacorporations be selling a larger percentage of the national output, but their expenses will go down.

Consequently: America will have lots more poor people, and lots wealthier billionaires.

This, however, will be only a temporary situation, because the enormous spread of poverty will result in greatly decreased taxes coming into all levels of the U.S. Government. Bridges will collapse, potholes will proliferate, unendowed colleges will close, nervous breakdowns and heart-attacks will increase, and thus the public won’t be able to spend as much as they were spending before the crisis hit. And, so, although the megacorporations will be selling a larger percentage of national output, that national output will decline, because of the spreading poverty. Therefore, even the billionaires won’t necessarily become richer than they were before the crisis hit.

All of this outcome is unnecessary and results from corruption. The only reason why there is any bailout, at all, for investors (in anything other than pass-through entities), is the pervasive governmental corruption at the very top. If there were no corruption, then the only bailouts would be to individuals and pass-through businesses (which are individuals) — the “bottom-up” bailouts. America is a very corrupt country at the top, and that is the reason why it will collapse in the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis.

Ultimately, when the wealth-inequality is so extreme, the billionaires are selling mainly to each other, and the necessities for the public are less and less profitable to sell at all. The outcome will therefore be economic collapse, and perhaps even revolution.

The basic way to evaluate how well or poorly a nation’s Government is performing in this crisis is the country’s ratio of coronavirus cases to its total population, but if a given country has not yet reached its peak in its daily number of new cases, then that country’s ratio is probably still rising, in which instance, that country’s performance will probably turn out to have been less good than this ratio currently is showing it to be. And, conversely, the lower this ratio is, the better the performance of that country’s Government is shown to be in responding to Covid-19.

Here are the ten nations that have the largest numbers of cases at the present time, and the ratio of that number to their total population; and also shown here is the date when the daily number of new cases peaked (because if it hasn’t yet peaked, then this crucial ratio will probably be rising in that country):

Ratio of total cases divided by total population (the lower this number, the better):

USA = 740,928/330,000,000 = 0.00224523636 not yet peaked

SPAIN = 195,944/46,940,000 = 0.00417435023 peaked March 26th

ITALY = 178,972/60,360,000 = 0.0029650762 peaked March 19th

FRANCE = 152,578/66,990,000 = 0.00227762352 peaked April 3rd

GERMANY = 144,387/83,020,000 = 0.00173918332 peaked March 27th

UK = 120,067/66,650,000 = 0.00180145536 peaked April 10th

TURKEY = 86,306/82,000,000 = 0.00105251219 peaked April 11th

CHINA = 82,735/1,393,000,000 = 0.00005939339 peaked February 12th

IRAN = 82,211/81,800,000 = 0.00100502444 peaked March 30th

RUSSIA = 42,853/144,500,000 = 0.00029656055 not yet peaked

In addition, the following major countries might especially be noted, since the main reason they aren’t on that list is their being outstandingly good performers:

JAPAN = 10,797/126,500,000 = 0.00008535177 peaked April 11th

S. KOREA = 10,661/51,640,000 =0.00020644848 peaked March 3rd

The worst of all these performers appear currently to be, though not yet in any clear order: USA, Spain, and Italy.

The best appear to be, in order: China, Japan, and S. Korea.

The U.S. press has recently been particularly praising Denmark’s performance, and noting that Denmark’s coronavirus emergency legislation is more socialistic than Sweden’s is. However, both of those Scandinavian countries actually have very similar actual performance, thus far, in this crisis. In Denmark, the focus of the emergency legislation was on “saving jobs,” instead of on protecting investors. It’s a democratic socialist country, perhaps the most equalitarian in the world. Of course, that’s the exact opposite of dictatorial capitalism (fascism), which became America’s system after FDR died in 1945, and increasingly thereafter (hyper-imperialistic, military-industrial-complex or “MIC” dominated, like fascist regimes usually are), perpetrating coups and invasions, destroying Iran, Iraq, and many other countries, in order to expand its power and the wealth of its billionaires (like the fascist countries had done going into WW II). No cases of coronavirus-19 were reported in Denmark until February 27th. Denmark unanimously passed its emergency law on March 13th — drastically different bailout legislation from the one that America subsequently passed — in order to deal with the crisis. The daily number of Denmark’s new Covid-19 cases peaked on April 7th, and has been declining since that time. Its neighbor Sweden peaked on April 8th. Sweden’s emergency legislation is less strict about lockdowns, but relies more on individual discretion. However, since Sweden, like Denmark, is a democratic socialist country, individuals needn’t worry about paying medical bills, nor about being paid while on sick-leave. So, employees aren’t desperate to return to their places of work, such as in America; and, therefore, these countries don’t spread the infection as readily as in the U.S. and are thus far less likely to have recurring peaks and delayed terminations of the coronavirus crisis. (By contrast: in America, where losing one’s job can mean losing one’s health care, even sick employees may be inclined to stay on the job and perhaps infect customers.) And there are no corporate bailouts in either Denmark’s or Sweden’s legislation. Denmark’s Finance Minister, the Social Democrat (or democratic socialist) Nicolai Wammen was interviewed for 15 minutes on March 27th, by Christiane Amanpour, and he explained Denmark’s emergency law, which was overwhelmingly bottom-up, not top-down (such as America’s is).

Here, therefore, is the actual performance, thus far, of both of those two countries:

DENMARK = 7,384/5,806,000 = 0.00127178780 peaked April 7th

SWEDEN = 14,385/10,230,000 = 0.00140615835 peaked April 8th

Both of them are reasonably comparable to Germany, UK, Turkey, and Iran, but not as good as S. Korea, and not nearly as good as the two best, China and Japan.

In the final analysis, China and Japan could turn out to have the least-corrupt and best-run Governments; and the most corrupt Governments could turn out to be USA, Spain, and Italy. However, the performances of Brazil and some other nations in the southern hemisphere might yet turn out to be even worse than those of USA, Spain, and Italy, because the winter season has’t yet reached there.

On April 16th, Wall Street on Parade headlined “Here Are the Contracts Showing How $4.5 Trillion in Stimulus Was Outsourced to Wall Street” and described — and documented — what the Wall Street Journal and the rest of the financial press would not, which is the U.S. Government’s legalized money-laundering operation, via the Fed, transferring onto the American public almost all of the losses that America’s billionaires will be suffering from the coronavirus crash. Back on 21 January 2020, WSP described this money-laundering, in its earlier 2008 embodiment, this way: “The epic financial collapse on Wall Street in 2008 was, reduced to its basic terms, simply the end game of Wall Street banks’ efforts to monetize their frauds.” They noted: “On April 9, 2019, the nonprofit Wall Street watchdog, Better Markets, released a study titled: “Wall Street’s Six Biggest Bailed-Out Banks: Their RAP Sheets & Their Ongoing Crime Spree.” It should have made headlines on the front pages of every major newspaper in the U.S. Instead, it was effectively ignored by mainstream media.” (Incidentally: Obama repeatedly promised to prosecute banksters, but secretly protected them and prosecuted none of them, though their crimes had been monstrous. The billionaires’ thefts from the public are entirely bipartisan, supported by over 95% of Congress — the billionaires own the Presidents and members of Congress, and not only own virtually all of the news-media.) On April 20th, America’s National Public Radio (NPR) broadcast “Amid Pandemic, Italian Prosecutors Warn That Mafia Groups Are Cementing Their Power” and reported that Mafia bosses were buying up cheap some of Italy’s suddenly desperate small businesses. If the same thing is being done by America’s billionaires, that’s not yet being reported by their press — perhaps it will instead be reported by Italy’s press.

The Federal Reserve are controlled by and represent the banksters — Wall Street — who not only skim on their own accounts but work with and for the billionaires, some of whom are themselves banksters, but many of whom are operating hedge funds, private equity funds, and all types of FORTUNE 500 companies. Basically, Wall Street works for the billionaires. The billionaires run practically everything in America, except Main Street.

In the upcoming June 2020 issue of the neoconservative (pro-U.S.-imperialist) Democratic Party U.S. magazine, The Atlantic, their George Packer banners “We Are Living in a Failed State: The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.” That magazine blames this “failed state” on the (neoconservative) Republican Party, and so Packer’s phrase there “a dysfunctional government” links to an anti-Republican article, by one of the top officials in the liberal neoconserative U.S. Administration of the Democrat Barack Obama, titled “How Trump Designed His White House to Fail.” However, the actual cause of the gradual collapse, since 1945, of what had been U.S. President FDR’s largely democratic U.S.A., is the billionaires who own both Parties — it is bipartisan. This rot comes from both Parties’ billionaires. (The particular propaganda-operation, The Atlantic, happens to be controlled by the same Democratic Party billionaire who controls Apple corporation.) No billionaire will publish the reality. For example, Packer’s article said: “The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it [‘a bitterness toward the political class’]. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system.” The presumption there is that the only way to restore the economy after a crash is to bail out the country’s billionaires. It’s a timely message, at this moment when the billionaires require their Government to bail them out, yet again. (I recently proposed one way to reduce the billionaires’ dictatorship over America.)

On April 17th, WSP headlined “Americans Are Paying a Tragic Price for Allowing Five Banks to Control the U.S. Economy” and closed by urging: “Americans need to use this time at home to call their Senators and Reps in Congress and demand the separation of federally-insured, deposit-taking banks from the casinos on Wall Street. We’re talking about nothing less than the survival of this country.” Needless to say, the ultimate beneficiaries of this public largesse — to America’s billionaires — don’t desire to publicize such writings, any more than they desire to publicize to the public their offshore bank accounts.

Unlike so much that’s in the billionaires’ ‘news’, the facts that are reported here are solidly documented (and linked-to), but the billionaires don’t report these facts. Thus, the masses don’t know these facts, and so the mass-violence, when it comes, won’t be focused against the billionaires. What you’re reading, here, is being kept secret by (not being published by) the billionaires’ media. So — if only to spread word that the cause of this is not “the Chinese” or “foreigners” or “the Jews” or some other amorphous ethnicity, who aren’t actually to blame — please email the URL (the web-address) atop this article, to all of your friends, as “FYI:”. It might stir some interesting conversations, especially if all the ‘news’ that they know comes from America’s billionaires — the same people who fund the country’s successful politicians, each and every election-year. The American Revolution did not come about by misinformed people. It came about by informed people. Misinformed people create only more problems.

So, that’s “FYI.” And thanks for reading here.

COVID-19: Breaking the Lockdown, Defeating the Coup, Averting Extinction

Posted on May 11, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Robert J. Burrowes

Using its fora such as the World Economic Forum – see ‘Strategic Intelligence ’ – and its agents (particularly the World Health Organization, the pharmaceutical industry, governments, the medical industry and corporate media) the global elite continues to tighten its grip on the human population, bombarding us with COVID-19 propaganda to heighten people’s fear while introducing new and/or extending existing restrictions to conceal the many measures being taken to execute their ongoing coup against humanity. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’.

Simultaneously, the lengthy list of honest health professionals explaining the truth about COVID-19’s threat to our health – ‘the lethality of Covid19 is between 0.1% and 0.37%, which is in the range of a severe influenza (flu)’ – and the modest measures that should have been taken, and might still be taken, to deal with it are given no exposure in the ‘occupied’ public space controlled by the corporate media. See, for example, ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’, ‘Global Covid-19 Case Fatality Rates’, ‘12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic’, ‘Swedish expert: why lockdowns are the wrong policy’, ‘Censored Doc Doubles Down’ and ‘Top Italian Researcher Reveals the Global Fraud of COVID-19’.

And those analysts describing the ongoing encroachments on our rights, freedoms, political participation and economic security (with the adverse impacts on the latter now imminently threatening the death of millions of people in the global south due to the collapse in the global economy), and what we can do about these encroachments, are similarly excluded. After all, the corporate media serves its master, the global elite, not those who consume its propaganda presented as ‘news’. See, for example, ‘COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker’, ‘Coronavirus – The Aftermath. A Coming Mega-Depression…’, ‘Video: COVID-19: Closing Down the Economy Is Not the Solution’, ‘The COVID-19 “Economic Holocaust”… Bankrupting the Nation. “The Shut-In Economy”’ and ‘WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’.

Among the elite measures taken, the lockdowns have been the most damaging with far-reaching adverse psychological, social, political and economic consequences including rapid rises in the incidence of anxiety, depression, alcoholism, violence against children and women in the home, unemployment, poverty and many thousands more deaths, not from COVID-19, than would have otherwise occurred. For thoughtful consideration of the issues in relation to the Lockdowns that questions the official narrative and response, and explains the excess death rate precipitated among vulnerable people that they are causing, see ‘Coronavirus Lockdown and What You Are Not Being Told – Part 1’, ‘Coronavirus Lockdown and What You Are Not Being Told – Part 2’ and ‘LOKIN-20: The Lockdown Regime Causes Increasing Health Concerns’.

More importantly, the lockdowns have provided exceptional ‘cover’ to conceal the many measures being taken to advance the elite coup, which I have summarized previously – see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ and ‘The Psychology of the COVID-19 Coup: The Elite, their Victims and those who Resist’ – and for which the evidence simply continues to accumulate. See, for example, ‘Criminal Big-Pharma Put in Charge of Covid-19 “Vaccine”’, ‘PM says COVIDSafe app is Australia’s “ticket” to ending virus rules’ and ‘Coronavirus tracing app COVIDSafe released by Government to halt spread of COVID-19 in Australia’.

In addition, the lockdowns have interrupted a vast range of ongoing nonviolent resistance campaigns directed at tackling one or more aspects of the interrelated threats to human survival. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’.

Tragically, too, these threats have been inadvertently exacerbated by COVID-19. But it is not the virus itself that has exacerbated the threat. It has been the ill-advised responses to COVID-19 that have resulted in a sudden and dramatic reduction in industrial activity. As Professor Guy McPherson explains in his just-published peer-reviewed paper ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’:

Coincident with industrial activity adding to greenhouse gases that warm the planet, industrial activity simultaneously cools the planet by adding aerosols to the atmosphere. These aerosols block incoming sunlight, thereby keeping cool our pale blue dot. Reducing industrial activity by as little as 35 percent is expected to cause a global-average temperature rise of 1 degree Celsius within a few weeks, according to research on the aerosol masking effect…. The ongoing reduction in industrial activity as a result of COVID-19 almost certainly leads to loss of habitat for human animals, hence putting us on the fast track to human extinction.

Responding Powerfully

Given this triple-fronted assault – the lockdowns (and associated measures), the coup and the sudden and dramatic reduction of industrial activity coupled with the interruption of activist campaigns to address the imminent threats to human survival – let me now identify how people are increasingly resisting and how we can make this resistance more strategically effective, with any outcome subject to one enormous proviso.

Whether or not we have enough time is now certainly beyond our control.

One response has been to gather the evidence of what is happening in relation to COVID-19 and to present this in various (mainstream and progressive) news fora so that the evidence can be more widely shared, even if sometimes these articles and videos are removed by the elite’s censoring agents such as Youtube. For just one example of this, see ‘Censored Doc Doubles Down’.

Another response has been to compile some of the carefully researched evidence of what form an appropriate response to COVID-19 should take and to present this to governments. See the UK Free People Alliance’s ‘An open letter to the Prime Minister’.

A third response has been to take nonviolent action to resist the lockdown and act out some of those rights and freedoms – such as the rights to freedom of assembly and movement – that we previously took for granted.

While there has already been considerable nonviolent resistance to some COVID-19 measures taken by governments, particularly in relation to the national lockdowns – see ‘Protesting the Lockdowns is Getting Going – #endthelockdown’, ‘Lockdown Protest in North Carolina Called “non-essential activity” by Raleigh Police’ in which it is recorded that the ‘ReopenNC’s Facebook group is now approaching 40,000 members’ and ‘Protest or Silence of the Lambs – Protest Update for May 2, 2020’ – many of these actions have been categorized and documented by Professor Erica Chenoweth and her colleagues. See ‘The global pandemic has spawned new forms of activism – and they’re flourishing’, ‘Methods of Dissent & Collective Action Under COVID – A Crowdsourced List’ and ‘Collective Action & Dissent under COVID’.

While I am fully supportive of these efforts to resist, I would like to enhance them by adding three related dimensions for consideration by those activists planning what to do.

First, when tactical choices are made, I would 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. This is important because existing actions will have little impact on key underlying measures, such as those to advance the fourth industrial revolution – see, for example, ‘Meet The Companies Poised To Build The Kushner-Backed “Coronavirus Surveillance System”’ and ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision ’ – being taken by the elite.

Second, I would 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.

Third, I would 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, even if we trust that we have more time than Professor McPherson and his colleagues suggest, 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 seemingly being used to tackle COVID-19 – and to act powerfully in response.

To that end, I have identified the appropriate political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’ – and set out a basic list of 26 strategic goals for achieving this purpose (which will also play a vital role in tackling key threats to human survival). The first eleven of these strategic goals are as follows:

(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity, such as an image of several people of different genders/races/religions/abilities/classes holding hands.

(2) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting all corporate media outlets (television, radio, newspapers, Google, Facebook, Twitter…) and by seeking news from progressive news outlets committed to telling the truth.

(3) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by withdrawing all funds from the corporate banks that are supporting the coup and to deposit their money in local community banks or credit unions.

(4) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting the medical and pharmaceutical industries – including by conscientiously refusing to submit to vaccination – and by seeking health advice and treatment from natural therapists. (If you are unfamiliar with the different philosophies underpinning these approaches, and hence why many natural therapies are so much more effective, there is a straightforward explanation here: ‘Pasteur vs. Bechamp: An Alternative View of Infectious Disease’.)

(5) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting corporate supermarkets and by supporting small and family businesses, and local markets.

(6) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in other locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For this item and many subsequent, see the list of possible nonviolent actions in the document ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.

(7) To cause the workers [in trade unions or labor organizations T1, T2, T…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include withdrawing labor from an elite-controlled bank, media, pharmaceutical or other corporation operating in your country.

(8) To cause the small farmers and farmworkers [in organizations F1, F2, F…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include distributing farm produce through (existing or created) grassroots networks to small and family businesses as well as local markets rather than through corporate supply chains.

(9) To cause the indigenous peoples [in organizations IP1,IP2, IP…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include utilizing indigenous knowledge to improve local self-reliance in food production and in other ways.

(10) To cause the soldiers and military police [in army units AU1, AU2, AU… and MP1, MP2, MP…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

(11) To cause the police [in police units P1, P2, P…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

You can read all 26 of the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic A ims ’.

Remaining pages on the 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’ and how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

Importantly, too, as more people become aware of the deeper strands of what is taking place, such as the more intrusive surveillance that is already occurring under the guise of keeping us ‘safe’ from COVID-19 – see, for example, ‘PM says COVIDSafe app is Australia’s “ticket” to ending virus rules’ and ‘Coronavirus tracing app COVIDSafe released by Government to halt spread of COVID-19 in Australia’ – the energy to break the lockdowns and resist the coup 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 or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist.

Equally importantly however, as I mentioned above, given the pressing (and, possibly, now uncontainable) threat of human extinction but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider accelerated participation in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth ’. This project also explains how to take full advantage of non-monetary forms of community where goods and services are exchanged directly, without money as a medium of exchange. Money only has value in certain types of economy and these types of economy must be superseded if humans are to survive.

In addition, for those nonviolent activists concerned about tackling the climate and/or other threats to human survival – including those in relation to the environment and war – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Strategic Aims.

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:

I will listen deeply to children. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.
I will not travel by plane
I will not travel by car
I will not eat meat and fish
I will only eat organically/biodynamically grown food
I will minimize the amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my ownership and use of electronic devices
I will not buy rainforest timber
I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
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
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
I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Humanity has reached the most critical point in its history. Using COVID-19 as ‘cover’, the global elite is conducting a coup to take vastly greater control of our lives.

However, because the global elite is insane, it cannot perceive, in any meaningful way, the extent of the damage it is inflicting on us but also the Earth (which, of course, has equally profound consequences for them). See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ and, for more detail, ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice ’.

It has done this, at phenomenal cost – in lost rights, freedoms and economic security – to people all over the world. And it has done it precisely at the time when humanity faces the gravest series of interrelated threats to its survival which will drive us to extinction, absent a powerful response (and possibly even with one), very soon now.

Perhaps, as some highly respected commentators have suggested, the coup has been conducted now because the elite expects to survive on a heavily degraded but substantially depopulated Earth. See, for example, ‘Bill Gates talks about “vaccines to reduce population”’ and ‘Coronavirus – The Aftermath. A Coming Mega-Depression…’.

As Peter Koenig reports it: ‘Population reduction is among the goals of the elite within the WEF, the Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Morgans – and a few more. The objective: fewer people (a small elite) can live longer and better with the reduced and limited resources Mother Earth is generously offering.’ See ‘The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”’.

However, if those scientists who are concerned about the diminished aerosol masking effect caused by the global industrial shutdown are right, the coup is also triggering a rapid increase in global temperature (which, among other adverse outcomes, will accelerate the release of methane from the Arctic) and even the elite will have no habitable Earth on which to survive.

The fight for human survival has entered its final stage.

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 You Should Oppose The Censorship Of David Icke (Hint: It’s Got Nothing To Do With Icke)

Posted on May 10, 2020 by Reid Mukai

By Caitlin Johnstone

Source: Waking Times

Within 48 hours both Facebook and then Youtube have deleted the accounts of David Icke for posting “content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS.” Other platforms may soon fall in suit, as they did with Alex Jones in 2018.

This article is not about David Icke. I will say it again in italics for the especially dense: this article is not about David Icke. This article is about why we shouldn’t be okay with monopolistic billionaire-owned Silicon Valley tech giants with extensive ties to US government agencies controlling human communication.

I know next to nothing about David Icke, and I have done exactly zero research into his views for this article; for all I know he’s every bit the raving lunatic the narrative managers say he is. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory. Making this conversation about Icke and his views distracts from the very important topic we need to actually focus on discussing.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant.” https://t.co/KFA8jC6XiY

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) April 30, 2020

Journalist Matt Taibbi recently wrote an excellent essay about the dangers inherent in the increased demand we’ve been seeing for more censorship and deplatforming during the coronavirus pandemic, correctly arguing that more authoritarian control over the ideas people are allowed to discuss is vastly more dangerous than the ideas themselves.

“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant,” Taibbi writes. “It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.”

“Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous,” says Taibbi.

Taibbi argues against the increasingly normalized trend of elevating “authoritative” content while silencing content which does not wear that magical label in an attempt to fight disinformation. If you examine which content is considered “authoritative”, you’ll find a bunch of outlets who have consistently lied to the world about war after war, who spent years promoting the baseless conspiracy theory that Vladimir Putin had infiltrated and secured control over the executive branch of the US government, who consistently normalize a status quo which is wholly incompatible with the surviving and thriving of life on this planet.

Two weeks after the Atlantic Council explained to us that we need to be propagandized for our own good, Facebook announces a new partnership with the Atlantic Council to make sure we're getting the right kinds of information.https://t.co/aXwHvxdREX https://t.co/3CkVtvBs0s pic.twitter.com/sEz52VjNTe

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) May 17, 2018

Google, who owns Youtube, has been financially intertwined with US intelligence agencies since its very inception when it received research grants from the CIA and NSA for mass surveillance. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has called on the government to take “a more active role” in regulating “harmful content”, and has been actively collaborating with government agencies and government-funded think tanks to decide what content to remove. Social media executives are now routinely called before government hearings and lectured about the need to increase censorship under the implicit threat of antitrust cases being brought to bear. These massive corporations now consistently censor with an extreme bias against governments which refuse to bow to the demands of the US government and its allies.

In 2017, representatives of Facebook, Twitter, and Google were instructed on the US Senate floor that it is their responsibility to “quell information rebellions” and adopt a “mission statement” expressing their commitment to “prevent the fomenting of discord.”

“Civil wars don’t start with gunshots, they start with words,” the representatives were told. “America’s war with itself has already begun. We all must act now on the social media battlefield to quell information rebellions that can quickly lead to violent confrontations and easily transform us into the Divided States of America.”

Whenever anyone objects to censorship on these massive platforms they’re always told that those platforms are private companies who are free to do what they like on their private property, but how “private” is a corporation that is interlaced with government power with increasing inseparability? The reality is that in a corporatist system of government with vanishingly few meaningful distinctions between corporate power and state power, corporate censorship is state censorship.

Narrative Managers Argue China-Like Internet Censorship Is Needed

"The only difference between @TheAtlantic article and something you might read on a libertarian site is that this article argues that all of these regulations on speech are a good thing."https://t.co/aXhhlQY366

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) April 27, 2020

Proponents of increased internet censorship have already openly conceded this point. A recent Atlantic article by two legal professors subtitled “In the debate over freedom versus control of the global network, China was largely correct, and the U.S. was wrong”, the case is made that western internet censorship will necessarily involve a collaboration with “private” corporations and government power.

“As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China,” the article’s authors favorably argue. “Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.”

Apart from the fact that they are here claiming that increasingly authoritarian speech control is good and necessary, these two bootlickers are absolutely correct. Human communication is indeed being controlled using the so-called “private sector” to circumvent constitutional limitations which prohibit the government from censoring speech directly.

These Silicon Valley tech corporations have ensured their continued monopolistic dominance by demonstrating their willingness to collaborate with establishment power structures, so there are no platforms of anywhere near the same size and influence that people can move to if they don’t feel like letting government-tied plutocrats police what thoughts are permitted to enter into their minds. This has given this corporate-government alliance the ability to control the thoughts that people are allowed to share, discuss and think about in the same way totalitarian governments can, with the false mask of freedom plastered over it.

A truly free being does not need an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to protect their mind from David Icke. A truly free being does not want an alliance of plutocrats and government agencies to exert any control whatsoever over what ideas they are permitted to share and what thoughts they are permitted to think. A truly free being opposes with all their might any attempt to lock in a paradigm where human communication (and thereby thought) is controlled by vast unaccountable power structures which benefit from the absence of dissent.

Be a truly free being. Oppose this intrusion into your mental sovereignty.

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