Category Archives: Corruption

America’s Fatal Synergies

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

America’s financial system and state are themselves the problems, yet neither system is capable of recognizing this or unwinding their fatal synergies.

why do some systems/states emerge from crises stronger while similar systems/states collapse? Put another way: take two very similar political-social-economic systems/nation-states and two very similar crises, and why does one system not just survive but emerge better adapted while the other system/state fails?

The answer lies in what author Geoffrey Parker termed Fatal Synergies and Benign Synergies in his book Global Crisis: War, Climate Change, & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. Synergy results from “interactions that produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.” In other words, 2 + 2 + 2 + 2 = 8 is linear, while synergy is 2 X 2 X 2 X 2 = 16.

Given that the core function of states is the distribution of resources, capital and agency, we can distill the difference between Fatal Synergies and Benign Synergies into two questions:

1. What problems cannot be resolved by the financial system/state, no matter how many reforms are thrown at them?

2. Which groups have a meaningful voice in decision-making / governance and which groups are effectively voiceless / powerless?

The first question identifies the structural weak points in the system. These weak points could have any number of sources: they could be perverse incentives embedded in the system, elites caught up in their own enrichment, or even a willful blindness to the nature of the crisis threatening the system.

Here’s an example in the U.S. system: corporations reap $2.4 trillion in profits annually, roughly 15% of the nation’s entire output. Politicians need millions of dollars in campaign contributions to win elections. Those seeking political influence have not just billions but tens of billions. Those needing to distribute political favors will do so for mere millions.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens:

“I’d say that contrary to what decades of political science research might lead you to believe, ordinary citizens have virtually no influence over what their government does in the United States. And economic elites and interest groups, especially those representing business, have a substantial degree of influence. Government policy-making over the last few decades reflects the preferences of those groups — of economic elites and of organized interests.”

This asymmetry cannot be overcome. Indeed, the past 40 years have witnessed an increasing concentration of wealth and power in corporations and their lobbyists and a decline of political influence of the masses to near-zero. Every reform has failed to slow this momentum, which is constructed of incentives to maximize profits, gain political favors and win elections.

In a similar fashion, the Imperial Presidency has gained power at the expense of Congress for decades–a reality that scholars bemoan but the reforms allowed by the system are unable to stop. So we have endless wars of choice without a declaration of war by Congress, one of the core powers of the elected body.

An analogy to these systemic weak points is the synergies of an organism’s essential organs: if any one organ fails, the organism dies even though the other organs are working just fine. In other words, any system is only as robust as its weakest essential component/process.

Whatever problems the system is incapable of resolving have the potential to bring down the system once they interact synergistically.

The second question identifies how many groups have been suppressed, silenced or ignored by those at the top of the heap. If these groups have an essential role in the system as producers, consumers and taxpayers, their demand to have a say in decisions that directly affect them is natural.

Another group with understandable frustrations at being left out of the decision-making are those in the educated upper classes whose expectations of roles in the top tier were encouraged by their families, society and training. When these expectations are not met because there are no longer enough slots in the top tier for the rapidly proliferating upper classes, the group left out in the cold has the time, education and motivation to demand a voice.

In other words, those denied access to resources, capital and agency who felt entitled to this access will not be as easily silenced as those who accept their low status and restricted access to resources, capital and agency as “the natural order of things.”

All the groups that are denied a voice and access to resources, capital and agency are in effect a sealed pressure cooker atop a flame. The pressure builds and builds without any apparent consequence until it explodes.

The more that power is concentrated in the hands of the few, the greater the desperation of the groups who are locked out of power. As their desperation rises, some of these groups are willing to go to whatever lengths are necessary to effect change.

The process of explosive demands for change erupting is difficult to manage once released. The system’s essential subsystems may be destabilized–the equivalent of organ failure–and once destabilized, it’s often no longer possible to restore the previous stability.

In this environment, the common good falls by the wayside and the system collapses.

In the context I’ve laid out, Fatal Synergies arise when access to resources, capital and agency are limited by elite hoarding or massive declines in available resources and capital.

Beneficial Synergies arise when whatever resources and capital are available are shared, if not equitably, at least in a process in which every group affected by the distribution has a voice in public decision-making.

Fatal Synergies arise when the identity of each group is based not on shared values and cooperation but on unyielding resistance to competing claims on the nation’s wealth and income.

Beneficial Synergies arise when all groups have a voice and a say in the process of distribution, even if it is limited.

Crises reveal the problems the system is incapable of resolving. How we respond to those constraints and weak points is the difference between Fatal Synergies and collapse and Beneficial Synergies that generate successful evolutionary responses to pressing selective pressures: simply put, “adapt or die.”

America’s financial system and state are themselves the problems, yet neither system is capable of recognizing this or unwinding their fatal synergies.

What’s Changed and What Hasn’t in a Tumultuous Year

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Inequality is America’s Monster Id, and we’re continuing to fuel its future rampage daily.

What’s changed and what hasn’t in the past year? What hasn’t changed is easy:

1. Wealth / income inequality is still increasing. (see chart #1 below)

2. Wages / labor’s share of the economy is still plummeting as financial speculation’s share has soared. (see chart #2 below)

What’s changed is also obvious:

1. Money velocity has cratered. (see chart #3 below)

2. Federal borrowing / spending has skyrocketed, pushing federal debt to unprecedented levels. (see chart #4 below)

3. Speculation has reached the society-wide mania level. This is evidenced by record margin debt levels, record levels of financial assets compared to GDP and many other indicators. (see chart #5 below)

Interestingly, every one of historian Peter Turchin’s 3-point Political Stress Index is now checked. Recall that these are core drivers of consequential social disorder, the kind that leads to empires collapsing, the overthrow of ruling elites, social revolutions, etc.

1. Stagnating real wages (i.e. adjusted for real-world inflation): check

2. Overproduction of parasitic elites: double-triple check

3. Deterioration of central state finances: check

But what about social changes? This is an interesting topic because social changes are less easily tracked (few even ask relevant questions and compile the data). Social trends are often more difficult to discern, as surveys may not track actual changes in behavior: people may give answers they reckon are expected or acceptable.

Here are four long-term trends that may have been accelerated by the pandemic:

1. The residents of overcrowded tourist destinations are sick of tourists and are demanding limits that protect increasingly fragile environments and resident quality of life.

Here’s a typical observation of a resident in Hawaii now that tourists are coming back:

Sunday I saw a group of 30 spring break tourists littering the beach with red cups and bottles of alcohol and trash. They had a table full of booze on the beach and were happily leaving their trash everywhere. No masks and no cares for Hawaii. When they left, instead of using the beach access they all climbed over the fence into someone’s yard because it saved them a minute of walking.

No I don’t miss tourists.

This is a global phenomenon. The absence of tourists has awakened a powerful sense that the profits (which flow into elite hands, not local economies) have taken precedence over the protection of what makes the destination worth visiting.

2. Work from home is here to stay. The benefits are too personal and powerful. Corporations demanding a return to long commutes and central offices will find their most productive employees are giving them “take this job and shove it” notices as they find positions with companies that understand that you can’t turn back the clock or ignore the benefits of flexible schedules.

3. Consumer behaviors have changed and are continuing to change. This is not just an expansion of home delivery; it’s a re-appraisal of big-ticket spending on concerts, entertainment, sports events and many other sectors that depend solely on free-spending consumers who ignore the recent doubling or tripling of prices.

4. Perceptions of the wealthy are changing. I touched on this topic in The Coming War on Wealth and the Wealthy (1/5/21) and The Coming Revolt of the Middle Class (1/27/21). Inequality is America’s Monster Id, and we’re continuing to fuel its future rampage daily.

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

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By Robert J. Burrowes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Resistance So Far: Individual Scholars and Groups

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

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

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

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

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

The Resistance So Far: Health Professionals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Resistance So Far: Legal

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

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

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

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

The Resistance So Far: Police and Military

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Resistance So Far: ‘Ordinary’ People

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Earth Pledge

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Wherefore Art Thou Ghislaine Maxwell? And who are your friends?

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By Philip Giraldi

Source: The Unz Review

It is now going on a year and a half since “financier” and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein died, allegedly by hanging himself in a New York City prison. Since that time it has surfaced that there were a number of “administrative” errors in the jail, meaning that Epstein was not being observed or on suicide watch even though he had reportedly attempted to kill himself previously. The suspicion that Epstein was working for Israel’s external intelligence agency Mossad or for its military intelligence counterpart also seemed confirmed through both Israeli and American sources. A recent book Epstein: Dead Men Tell No Tales written by Ari Ben-Menashe the former Israeli intelligence officer who actually ran the Epstein operation, described inter alia how Epstein was blackmailing prominent politicians on behalf of Israeli intelligence. Epstein had been working directly for the Israeli government since the 1980’s and his operation, which was funded by Israel and also by prominent American Jews, was a classic “honey-trap” which used underage girls as bait to attract well-known politicians from around the world, a list that included Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton. The politicians would be photographed and video recorded when they were in bed with the girls. Afterwards, they would be approached and asked to do favors for Israel.

It doesn’t take much to pull what is already known together and ask the question “Who among the celebrities and top-level politicians that Epstein cultivated were actually Israeli spies?” And of course there is a subplot. Assuming that Epstein was in fact involved in recruiting and/or running high level American agents in an “influence operation” that may have involved blackmail it is possible to come to the conclusion that he was killed in prison and that the suicide story was just a convenient cover-up. The Epstein case remains “open” and under investigation though it doesn’t seem that anything is actually happening, the sure sign that someone powerful in the Establishment is making sure that nothing incriminating surfaces. Indeed, there already exists some evidence that Epstein was being protected when he was convicted in Florida of sex crimes in 2008 and was given a sentence that was little more than a slap on the wrist. After the fact, the U.S. Attorney for Miami Alexander Acosta involved in the case reported that the arrest and sentencing were above his pay grade, that he had been told that Epstein “’belonged to intelligence’, and to leave it alone” a comment that apparently has never been pursued by investigators.

That the Epstein investigation appears to be in reverse gear suggests that one or more powerful Americans are still not implicated in the case but are concerned that that might change, but there remains an accessory to what went on at the Epstein mansion in Manhattan and on his private island in the Caribbean. That would be Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently in prison in the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn and will be tried in July. Like the Epstein story in general, she has largely dropped off the media screen and one has to wonder what “get out of jail free” card she might be holding.

It has long been assumed that Epstein video recorded the sexual encounters with the underage girls that he used in his intelligence activity to blackmail prominent politicians among others. It has been suspected that Ghislaine has at least some of those tapes hidden in a secret location and may be using them to cut a deal with investigators and prosecutors. It now appears that she briefly discussed the tapes with CBS News 60 Minutes producer Ira Rosen, also making clear that there were tapes of both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. The conversation took place in 2016 and she reportedly told Rosen that, given Trump’s involvement in the upcoming election, she would not release any information derived from the tapes relating to Clinton until after the election and she would only do so while also exposing Trump. Up until now, she has done neither.

It has long been known that Epstein knew both the ex-and future presidents, though both have denied knowing the sex offender well for obvious reasons. Clinton, for example, flew on Epstein’s Lolita Express private 727 at least 26 times and his presence at Epstein’s island refuge has also been well documented. Trump clearly knew Epstein but has denied having any contact with him after his registration as a sex offender in 2008.

Ghislaine, for her part, was allegedly recruited young girls for Epstein to exploit and was a partner in his activity, though she has denied any guilt. Numerous victims say otherwise. Her lawyers have tried a number of ploys to free her, including claims that she had been abused by prison staff and that the jury being selected to try her will be “too white.” Her brother Ian claimed last week that she is enduring “brutal and degrading treatment” in prison with four guards watching her at all times. He added that she has lost 20 pounds and “ability to concentrate.”

Ghislaine also offered to post a $28.5 million bail or a $5 million bond for home arrest in which she would wear an ankle monitor, but the judge decided that given her extensive resources she constitutes a considerable flight risk even if she turns in her American, British and French passports. She would also be able to flee to Israel based on her father Robert’s religion and service to that country and Israel does not normally extradite.

The most interesting aspect of the arrest, imprisonment and trial of Ghislaine Maxwell is what it does not do. She basically is being tried on whether it can be confirmed that she was a “pimp” for Jeffrey Epstein. Her father was an Israeli intelligence asset and it is believed that he made the connection between Epstein and the Jewish state’s military intelligence. But no one in that New York court room in July will be asking that. Nor will there be any revelations about Epstein’s “intelligence connection” nor of the possibility that the Israelis had their hooks in both a former and a future American president. None of that will be on the table and meanwhile Ghislaine might have those possibly incriminating tapes squirreled away somewhere. That is the really important stuff that I would like to have the answers to. The fact that the answers are not forthcoming sounds a bit like a cover-up, doesn’t it?

Stagflation Subterfuge: The Real Disaster Hidden By The Pandemic

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Increasing Inflation Means Economic Recovery?

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

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

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

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

 

It’s Not About The Pandemic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Inflation In More Than Just Housing

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

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

 

Pandemic Lockdowns Are Just An Excuse

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

The Biggest Threat In The History Of American Society

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

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

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

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

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

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

By Colin Todhunter

Source: OffGuardian

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

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

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

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

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

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

The report went on to state:

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

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

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

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

CORPORATE CONSOLIDATION

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMPERIAL INTENT

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Globalists Are Gonna Need A Bigger Virus As Economic Fraud Is Exposed

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Jaws (1975) |  [ Universal / The Kobal Collection ]


By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

It is a general rule that corrupt economies tend to operate on faith and not on fundamentals. And to be clear, it’s not so much about naive faith that the system is stable or functional. No, it’s more about the masses having faith that the corruption and instability will never be derailed. Most people are not as stupid as the establishment and central bankers think they are – Almost everyone knows the system is broken, they just refuse to consider the possibility that the fraud will be disrupted, or that it will be allowed to fail.

The old mantra “too big to fail” is a lie. NOTHING is too big to fail, and that includes the US economy, the dollar and the elaborate Kabuki theater that keeps them both afloat. All it takes is a single moment, an epiphany that the Ponzi scheme is unsustainable rather than unstoppable.

I’m reminded specifically of the inflationary crisis of Argentina in 2001 – 2002.

Argentina’s economy was highly dependent on foreign capital inflows, and its currency peg to the US dollar, not to mention they were precariously reliant on support from the IMF. The IMF openly validated the government of Argentina and their currency peg model, but foreign capital began to decline and the peg became unsustainable. Without tangible growth in manufacturing and a strong middle class, an economy cannot survive for long. A top down system based on illusory “financial products” and creative accounting is doomed to crash eventually.

All it took was for the IMF to criticize the policies they initially endorsed and announced that they were removing financial aid, and all hell broke loose in Argentina.

Almost overnight the Argentina peso plunged in value, interest rates spiked and inflation struck hard. People poured into the streets and civil unrest erupted. The IMF would later admit it made “errors” in its handling of the Argentina situation, but this was simply spin control designed to protect them from further scrutiny. The IMF avoided most of the blame and has been growing into a monstrous global centralization machine ever since.

I think we are witnessing the beginning of a similar end of mass faith in fraud in the US. The recent Robinhood short squeeze event as well as the current decoupling of physical silver prices from the paper ETF market have accelerated the timetable. Not surprisingly, these moves have forced the establishment to intervene to some extent to essentially stop renegade traders from freely investing. Accusations are flying and deplatforming has ensued. The idea that the system is a functional fraud is gone; The world now knows it is a dysfunctional fraud, and collapse cannot be very far behind.

Furthermore the collusion between banks, hedge funds and Big Tech is blatantly revealed. These relationships are supposed to remain hidden in the ether. They are obvious to anyone with any financial knowledge and sense, but they aren’t supposed to be wielded in the open. Conspirators aren’t supposed to admit to the conspiracy? Right?

Some people might say the establishment has been forced to unmask by activists. Maybe. But, as I have been warning for many years, when criminals start openly admitting to their crimes it is probably because they think that it’s too late for anyone to do anything about it.

The point is, bankers and globalists have ways of avoiding responsibility for the disasters they engineer. When the con-game breaks, they always have patsies to take the fall.

This sets up a bizarre dynamic in which the money elites that constructed the economy like a time-bomb are treated like victims (or heroes) and the people telling the truth about the fraud are treated like villains and criminals. Are activist stock market traders and silver market guerrillas to blame for any crisis that erupts in the near future? No, of course not, but they will be blamed anyway.

That said, propaganda narratives and scapegoats may not be enough to save the bankers this time. They will never allow a major fiscal crash to develop in a vacuum. They need more cover, and they need to have the means to lock down the public to prevent civil unrest or rebellion from spilling over into their backyards. I have long suspected that the covid pandemic is a useful tool in this regard. As I noted in my article ‘How Viral Pandemic Benefits The Globalist Agenda’, published in January of 2020:

“Even if a pandemic does not kill a large number of people, it still disrupts international travel, it disrupts exports and imports, it disrupts consumer behavior and retail sales, and it disrupts domestic trade. If it does kill a large number of people, and if the Chinese government’s response is any indication, it could result in global martial law. With many economies including the US economy already in a precarious balancing act of historic debt vs. crashing demand and useless central bank repo market intervention, there is little chance that the system can withstand such a tsunami…”

As we all know, medical martial law in the name of “public health” is being established in most countries regardless of the actual death rate. The insane globalist rantings of the World Economic Forum and Klaus Schwab have been very revealing; Schwab and other elites have even called the pandemic a “perfect opportunity” to execute there agenda for the “Great Reset”.

However, the globalists are highly fallible, and mistakes in judgment have been made. During the Event 201 pandemic wargame on a coronavirus outbreak (conveniently held two months before the real thing happened), the elites forecast at least 65 million initial deaths globally from such a virus. We are a year into the pandemic and nowhere near that kind of death rate. In fact, the death rate is so minuscule (0.26%), that the public is beginning to realize the lockdown mandates are pointless.

In the US, conservative states are moving on and keeping their economies wide open. Half the population is refusing to take the vaccines, and many members of law enforcement are refusing to implement lockdown policies. I don’t think this is what the globalists expected at all. They needed mass fear and they are getting mass defiance.

They’re going to need a bigger threat, or a bigger virus.

This is why I have been repeatedly warning that the talk of reopenings by Biden and other democrats is going to be very short lived. I have predicted that Biden will attempt a federal lockdown similar to the Level 4 lockdowns used in Europe and Australia after a couple of months of relative calm. I based this prediction on the covid “mutation” narrative being spread right now by the mainstream media and establishment cronies like Anthony Fauci. It is not hard to see where this is headed.

The globalists must have the “legal” option of restricting public movement as well as large gatherings, and they must have the option of surveillance on individuals 24/7 through contact tracing. This is the only way to prevent rebellion against the Reset and rising anger due to economic turmoil. The veil has been lifted, the conspiracy is being widely broadcast. Martial law alone would only inspire more dissent, medical tyranny in the name of “saving lives” is the ONLY play the globalists have. They have to have help from a large portion of the citizenry, so they must maintain the appearance that they are operating from the moral high ground.

The covid mutation story is clearly the next play, and Bank of America economists appear to agree with me. They recently stated that they see little optimism in terms of a reopening of the economy, and that hard lockdowns will return, possibly in March or April.

Another factor to consider is that the economic crash will have to reach a peak soon because Joe Biden now resides in the White House. If the crash happens in the near term, activist investors can be blamed, Trump can be blamed, and conservatives and liberty activists can be blamed. If the crash happens a year or two from now, only Biden and the globalists will get the blame.

Without lockdowns and scapegoats the scenario will end very badly for the globalists. It might end badly for them anyway. Be ready for more chaos by Spring; I suspect the elites are getting desperate, and if they allow America to go back to normal and for the pandemic to end with a whimper they will never get another chance at their precious Reset.