The USA on the brink of civil war

In this article, the author seeks to draw our attention to a fact that is difficult for Westerners to conceive of: the American people are experiencing a crisis of civilization. They are so deeply divided that the presidential election is not just about electing a leader, but about determining what the country (empire or nation?) should be. Neither side is capable of accepting to lose, so much so that each could resort to violence to impose its point of view.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: VoltaireNet.org

As the U.S. presidential election approaches, the country is divided into two camps that suspect each other of preparing a coup d’état. On one side are the Democrats and the non-party Republicans, and on the other are the Jacksonians, who have become the majority in the Republican Party without sharing its ideology.

Remember, already in November 2016, a media manipulation company headed by the master of Agit-Prop, David Brock, raised more than 100 million dollars to destroy the image of the President-elect before he was elected [1]. Since then, before he could do anything about it, the international press has portrayed the U.S. president as incapable and an enemy of the people. Some newspapers have even called for his assassination. For almost four years, his own administration has constantly denounced him as a traitor paid by Russia and the international press has violently criticized him.

Currently, another group, the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), is planning scenarios to overthrow him in the 2020 election, whether he loses it or wins it. The case has become national in scope since TIP founder Professor Rosa Brooks leaked a lengthy article in the Washington Post to which she is a regular contributor [2].

The TIP organized four role-playing games last June. It simulated various results to anticipate the reactions of the two candidates. All the participants were Democrats and Republicans (ideologically speaking, not “Republicans” in the sense of party membership), none of them Jacksonian. Unsurprisingly, all of these personalities believe that “the Trump administration has consistently undermined basic standards of democracy and the rule of law. It has adopted many corrupt and authoritarian practices. They therefore concluded that President Trump would attempt a coup d’état and imagined that it was their duty to pre-emptively devise a “democratic” coup d’état [3].

It is a characteristic of contemporary political thought to stand up for democracy, but to reject decisions that run counter to the interests of the ruling class. Indeed, TIP members readily admit that the US electoral system they defend is profoundly “anti-democratic”. The constitution does not attribute the presidential election to citizens, but to an electoral college of 538 people appointed by the governors. The participation of citizens, which was not foreseen at independence, has gradually become the norm in practice, but only as a guide for governors. Thus, in 2000, when George W. Bush was elected, the Florida Supreme Court recalled that it did not have to know the wishes of the citizens of Florida, but only those of the 27 voters appointed by their Florida governor.

Contrary to popular belief, the U.S. Constitution does not recognize popular sovereignty, but only the sovereignty of governors. Moreover, the Electoral College designed by Thomas Jefferson has not functioned properly since 1992: the elected candidate no longer has the majority of the wishes of the citizens in the states that tilt the election [4].

The TIP has highlighted just about everything that could happen in the three months between the election and the nomination. It acknowledges that it will be very difficult to determine the results given the use of absentee voting in times of epidemic. The TIP deliberately did not explore the possibility that the Democratic Party would announce Joe Biden’s election despite an undercount and that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi would swear him in before Donald Trump could be declared the loser. In such a case, there would be two rival presidents, which would mark the beginning of a Second Civil War.

This eventuality encourages some to consider seceding, to unilaterally proclaim the independence of their state. This is particularly true on the West Coast. To prevent this process of disintegration, some advocate dividing California in order to give more members of the Electoral College to its population. However, this solution is already a stance in the national conflict because it favours popular representation at the expense of the power of the governors.

In addition, last March I mentioned the temptation of a putschist coup by some military personnel, [5] to which several high-ranking officers later referred [6].

These different points of view attest to the deep crisis that the United States is going through. The “American empire” should have disintegrated after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This did not happen. It should have reinvented itself with financial globalization. It did not. Each time, a conflict (the ethnic division of Yugoslavia, the attacks of September 11) came to rekindle the dying. It will no longer be possible to postpone the deadlines for much longer [7].

 

Translation
Roger Lagassé

 

[1] “The Clinton system to discredit Donald Trump”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Zero Hedge (USA) , Voltaire Network, 28 February 2017.

[2] “What’s the worst that could happen? The election will likely spark violence — and a constitutional crisis”, The Washington Post, September 3, 2020.

[3Preventing a disrupted presidential election and transition, Transition Integrity Project, August 3, 2020.

[4Presidential elections and majority rule, Edward B. Foley, Oxford University Press, 2020.

[5] “Putchists in the Shadow of the Coronavirus”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 31 March 2020.

[6] “The Pentagon against President Trump”, Voltaire Network, 12 June 2020. Do we risk a miltary coup?, by Colonel Richard H. Black, August 24, 2020.

[7] “United States – reformation or fracture?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Pete Kimberley, Voltaire Network, 26 October 2016.

Kushner-Linked Firm and Gig Economy Set to Reap Huge Profits as Mass Evictions Begin

By Raul Diego

Source: Mint Press News

In 2014, former Blackstone and Goldman Sachs investment banker Ryan Williams got together with his “college buddy,” Joshua Kushner – Jared’s brother – to form a real estate investment platform they called Cadre. Cadre sought to disrupt the real estate industry in the wake of the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis by tinderizing property deals through a tech platform that brought investors and sellers together. According to Williams, whose other investors include George Soros and Peter Theil, Cadre’s mission is “to level the playing field in an industry that is often tilted toward the biggest players” by taking an “offline” industry online and making it “transparent.”

A pre-Covid initiative to capitalize on its platform came in the form of the so-called “opportunity zones,” that Jared Kushner directly lobbied for inclusion in Trump’s 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act, billed as a funding mechanism to help poor and distressed communities, which turned into a multi-billion-dollar land heist by the wealthiest Americans, like the Kushner family. The pandemic lockdown protocols forced Cadre to downsize, laying off 25 percent of its workforce in March.

But now, the company is restarting its predatory engines as the home eviction wave forming on the horizon signals potential windfalls for companies like Cadre, that are in a position to profit. It is doing so by launching a pop-up banking operation called “Cadre Cash,” which will try to lure deposits from “investors” by offering a three percent annualized “reward” to finance a new round of land-grabs as millions of Americans teeter on the edge of homelessness and landlords look to unload un-rentable properties.

Another company, Civvl, is tackling a different side of the burgeoning housing crisis in America with its on-demand service model for eviction crews. Just like Uber, the Civvl app lets “frustrated property owners and banks secure foreclosed residential properties” by connecting haulers and the rentier class.

Civvl’s parent company, OnQall, specializes in mobile app platforms that monetize side-hustles like moving, cleaning and lawn care services. The eviction crew app has, predictably, drawn a storm of criticism since Motherboard‘s article on Civvl this past Monday.

“It’s fucked up that there will be struggling working-class people who will be drawn to gigs like furniture-hauling or process-serving,” exclaimed housing activist Helena Duncan, who also pointed out the clear dystopian contours evident in a scenario where working class people are paid to wage economic warfare on fellow working class people. Civvl puts up a disingenuous defense against the earned invectives, comparing itself to Monster.com. “They’re not evicting anyone,” a Civvl spokesperson told Motherboard, “they’re just the help.”

Both Cadre and Civvl are poised to make a killing as eviction moratoriums abate across the country and millions find themselves on one side or another of evictions – tenants forced onto the streets by small landlords who will have little choice but to sell in a depressed market. Only the CDC’s national eviction moratorium, issued three weeks ago, stands in the way of the avalanche of displacement and dispossession at our doorstep. But, even the risks of fines and jail time doesn’t seem to be discouraging companies like OnQall or landlords, in general.

 

Ridiculous loopholes

Cadre, in particular, is at the head of the pack of “disruptive” real estate tech platforms mostly due to the favor it enjoys in the halls of the Trump administration. “Jared was one of the key people early on. And his contributions were critical,” says Cadre CEO Ryan Williams of Jared Kushner, whose stake is worth over $50 Million, according to 2018 SEC filings.

Despite claims that Kushner sold a “substantial portion” of his shares in the company and that the president’s son-in-law has no role in the business endeavor, recent history surrounding the so-called “opportunity zones” of Trump’s Tax bill revealed Cadre’s and Kushner’s central role in a multi-billion dollar land heist by the wealthiest Americans, like the Kushner family.

Paying lip service to the same “diversity” principles Cadre’s African American founder asserts underlie his company’s vision, the more than 200 federally-designated “opportunity zones” for disadvantaged communities that resulted from the legislation, Cadre’s machine-learning and processed census data was simply serving to make a “ridiculous loophole” available to wealthy investors to buy up land at a serious discount.

The bulk of the opportunity zone funding, some of which was set up by William’s former employer and Cadre investor, Goldman Sachs, went to high-end real estate development projects in affluent areas, retail developments and luxury hotels, such as Richard Branson’s 225-room hotel in William’s home state of Louisiana, less than two miles away from one of the poorest parts of New Orleans. The project had been announced by Branson a year before the tax-cut legislation was signed into law, but nevertheless qualified to participate in the opportunity zone program.

 

Picking up the bodies

The housing catastrophe in the United States is barley gathering steam, and while many landlords and property owners still face legal challenges in cases where eviction moratoriums remain in place, the loose patchwork of laws governing property rights across the nation – not to mention foundational ideology – gives companies like Civvl and Cadre the chance to circumvent these and rely on naked power to drive people away from their homes or convince them to sell it to massive real estate concerns, like CBRE or Kushner’s rich buddies.

Civvl is confident that they can take advantage of people’s lack of knowledge about their rights to make money as the eviction middle man. Indeed, the company is betting that municipal and federal authorities will see things their way. “This is something that has to be done,” says a company spokesman. “Listen,” he continued, “if someone is killed on the street, someone needs to go pick their body up.”

 

Related Video:

Beware the Transhumanists: How ‘Being Human’ is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup

By Robert J. Burrowes

“If you tell a lie, tell a big one.”
“If you tell a lie long enough, it becomes the truth.”
“Propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident they are acting on their own free will.”
— Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Minister of Propaganda, 1933 to 1945

Transhumanism is a set of beliefs based on the premise that human beings can be improved by genetic manipulation and/or implanting technologies into the brain and body to achieve enhanced capacities. Transhumanism has a long history as an idea but since 1990 it has attracted serious attention from an increasing number of technology-lovers and early advocates are readily identified. See ‘What is Transhumanism?’

As part of his research as an investigative reporter throughout his life, which included writing a comprehensive exposé of how the AIDS hoax was perpetrated in the 1980s, in 2001 Jon Rappoport interviewed a Cold War-era propagandist-turned-anonymous-whistleblower who had spent decades working for the medical and other cartels to promote their agendas to gain increasing control over the human population. Here, in part, is what the propagandist told Rappoport:

Look at the medical cartel. Do they ever declare victory? From now until the end of time they’ll be planting stories in the press about the latest medical advance that will make life better for every person in the world. Most of it is a lie, but that doesn’t stop them. Until the planet is depopulated down to under a billion people and every one left is a robot, these cartels [elsewhere identified as energy, 
government, intelligence, media,
 medical, military,
 money] are not going to quit. And even then, with a lobotomized world, they’ll still push their propaganda. This IS 1984, and people better realize it… The medical cartel. They’re planning to take over the mind… after which PR won’t really matter.… [pp.61-62 & 87.]

The
 cartels 
were
 using 
and 
creating
 and
 bolstering 
the 
Cold 
War 
as 
a
 means 
to
 an
 end.

 Making
 what
 you
 could
 call 
the 
enemy‐game 
a
 part 
of 
the 
human 
psyche
 at
 such
 a
 level 
that 
it 
would 
maintain itself 
as 
a 
living 
myth
 that
 could
 be 
tapped 
into
 at
 any
 time
 with 
any 
enemies 
inserted 
into 
the 
line‐up.

 The 
enemies‐game 
is 
as 
old 
as
 time
 itself. 

But 
this 
was 
the 
version 
of 
the 
moment.

 To 
install
 a 
rigid 
sense 
of
 national 
security 
as 
the 
overriding 
fact or 
that 
would 
damn 
well justify
 the 
deflating
 of 
individual 
freedom 
on 
many 
fronts. 

Make
 national
 security
 the
 thing 
you
 couldn’t
 refuse….
 [p.70.]

A: 


Once
 you 
fatigue
 people
 enough 
with 
the
 strategies 
of 
1984, 
they 
are 
set 
up 
for
 the
 medicalization 
of 
society. 

Which 
is 
the 
brain 
stuff. 

The 
altering 
of 
the 
human
 brain
 with
 drugs 
and
 other 
approaches. 

Genes, 
perhaps. 

A 
brain‐machine
 linkup.

 Creating 
a 
different
 perception 
of 
reality. 

Externally 
applied
 electromagnetic 
fields.

 In 
which
 people
 will 
feel 
happy 
even
 though 
they 
are 
slaves.

 You
 see, 
in 
1984 
it’s really 
all 
about 
hysteria. 

The 
people 
are 
being
 driven
 into 
the 
wall 
with
 lies 
about
 wars 
and 
lies
 about 
enemies 
and 
lies 
about 
political 
structure, 
and
 the 
control 
over
 individuals 
is 
very 
harsh, 
and 
the 
leaders
 are
 not
 looking 
to 
create 
real 
happiness,
 not 
the 
fluffy 
stuff.

 Redemption,
 yes. 

Forgiveness, 
perhaps. 

The 
people 
are
 being
 fed 
pain 
and 
big 
brother 
is 
commanding
 them 
like 
a 
drill 
sergeant
 through 
their 
TV
 sets. But
 after 
that,
 after 
people 
sink 
into
 an
 acceptance 
of
 the 
delusions 
that
 are
 being 
foisted 
on 
them, 
then 
comes 
the 
science. 

The
 making
 of 
some
 kind 
of 
replica
  of
 happiness.

 The 
old
 order 
is
 1984. 

You
 can 
call 
that 
the
 Plan 
from
 the 
dawn
 of
 time
 to 
about 
1945. 

After 
that 
is 
the 
transition
 to 
Brave 
New
 World.

Q: 


And
 that’s 
why 
the 
medical 
cartel 
is 
the 
prince 
of 
the 
cartels.

A: 


The
 prince, 
the 
king.

Q:


 1984…

A: 


Leaves 
people 
with 
no 
moral
 conviction. 

It 
runs
 over
 that
 like 
a 
freight‐train.

 1984
 is 
dark. 

Brave 
New 
World 
is
 sunny 
and
 light 
and 
the 
control 
is
 applied
 so
 that
 the 
interior
 life 
changes.

Q: 


So
 you 
worked 
on 
medical 
stories.

A:


 Yes. 

Making 
the 
medical 
cartel
 look
 good, 
look
 humane,
 look 
rational, 
look
 like
 excellent 
science 
that 
works. 

Especially 
psychiatry
 and
 neurology.

 And
  pharmacology.

 That 
became 
a 
major 
job 
for 
me. Because…they’re 
experimenting
 on
 the 
human 
race, 
and 
they 
want
 their 
horrible 
mistakes 
which
 are
 legion,
 to
 look
 like
 advances
 and 
good
 science
 at 
every 
step
 until 
they
 get 
it 
right,
 until 
they
 have 
your
 brain 
in 
their 
hands 
from
 cradle 
to 
grave. [p.71.]

As noted earlier, the words above were penned in 2001. If you would like to read the full transcript of the interview, which offers a reasonably accurate explanation of what is happening around the world at the moment, you can do so in ‘The Matrix Revealed Volume 1, Jon Rappoport Interviews Ellis Medavoy (Part 1 of 3)’.

And if you would like to read about the AIDS hoax (‘caused’ by the non-existent HIV) and how it was done, using much of the same formula being used to perpetrate the elite’s Covid-19 hoax (‘caused’ by the non-existent SARS-CoV-2), you can do so in AIDS Inc.: Scandal of the Century.

Unfortunately, the Covid-19 hoax is being played for stakes that are infinitely higher than they were during the AIDS hoax.

After 200,000 years of Homo Sapiens, the species is about to ‘evolve’ rapidly and profoundly. But it won’t be a natural evolution. And it won’t be an improvement unless you don’t like the many qualities that make humans human, biologically and socially.

If the transhumanists have their way, individual human identity will vanish along with human volition. Homo Sapiens will be superseded by ‘Homo Cyborg’.

If this all sounds like science fiction or just plain ridiculous, let me invite you to consider the evidence below.

As ‘warned’ by scientist Andrew Herr in an article – see ‘This Scientist Wants Tomorrow’s Troops to Be Mutant-Powered’ – published in 2012:

Greater strength and endurance. Enhanced thinking. Better teamwork. New classes of genetic weaponry, able to subvert DNA. Not long from now, the technology could exist to routinely enhance – and undermine – people’s minds and bodies using a wide range of chemical, neurological, genetic and behavioral techniques.

It’s warfare waged at the evolutionary level. And it’s coming sooner than many people think.

Well, that time has arrived. The thin edge of the wedge, if we keep allowing it to happen, is the various restrictions and technologies being introduced under cover of Covid-19 which are supposedly being used to tackle the ‘virus’.

However, just as in the ‘AIDS epidemic’ when no (HIV) virus was ever scientifically demonstrated to exist, there is zero science to prove the existence of the ‘virus’ labeled SARS-CoV-2. Instead, this elite coup is designed and being conducted to achieve a profound transformation in the nature of the human individual and human society, including a substantial ‘depopulation’. Moreover, it is proceeding rapidly because it entails a complexity and depth that is not easy to comprehend but also because it seems so preposterous that few people are inclined to contemplate the possibility objectively. Joseph Goebbels knew why. For some of the detail of essential elements of this coup, see ‘Covid-19 Does Not Exist: The Global Elite’s Campaign of Terror Against Humanity’ and ‘Halting our Descent into Tyranny: Defeating the Global Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.

But for another recent comprehensive history and critique of the coup being conducted by the ‘billionaire’s club’, see Dr. Jacob Nordangård’s insightful article ‘Analysis: Globalists’ reboot of the world and their plans for us’ which opens with the following words:

The Corona crisis is the trigger for a global coup d’état of monumental dimensions. It is the beginning of a new era, with a new international economic order that risks completely destroying human freedoms. Tyrants have now taken over to forcibly steer us into a ‘climate smart’ and ‘healthy’ world through the World Economic Forum’s new techno-totalitarian roadmap – ‘The Great Reset’.

In this article, however, I want to focus on the agenda of the transhumanists under cover of this coup and what this would mean for Homo Sapiens unless it is stopped.

Technotyranny

In one of his videos about the Covid-19 coup – watch ‘This Couldn’t Possibly Happen. Could it?’ the transcript for which can be accessed by clicking the ‘Health’ tab after entering his website – the UK’s Dr Vernon Coleman explains the sinister agenda of the technological control sought by the transhumanists:

If you were a mad doctor and you wanted to control an individual it would be a doddle.
You’d just tell them you were giving them an injection to protect them against the flu or something like that and in the syringe there would be a little receiver. And then you’d stick a transmitter on the roof of the house across the road from where they lived.

And then you could send messages to make them do whatever you wanted them to do. You could make them sad or angry or happy or contented. You could make them run or fight or just spend all day in bed.

Remember, that’s what Dr Delgado was doing over half a century ago. It’s nothing new.

Of course, if you wanted to do the same thing for lots of people you’d need a whole lot of people to help you….

And you’d need something to inject into people. A medicine of some kind for example.

And then you’d need someone good at software to help with all the transmitting and the receiving and you’d need people with access to lots of tall poles or roofs where they could put the transmitter things.

But none of that would be any good unless you had a reason for injecting people. You can’t just go around injecting millions of people for no reason.

Ideally, you’d need them all to be frightened of something so that they were keen to let you inject them. And then you could put your tiny receivers into the stuff that was being injected. Or squirted up their noses or whatever.

Introducing her own careful explanation of the agenda of the transhumanists, in her video Dr. Carrie Madej opens with the following words:

So what do you think about going from human 1.0 to human 2.0?… Transhumanism… is about taking humans, as we know ourselves, and melding with artificial intelligence…. That might seem kinda cool to you, we might have some superhuman abilities… that’s the idea, that’s what you see in sci-fi movies… Thinking about this topic… I [had thought that it was] many years in the future.

However, this question, this idea is now right in this moment. We need to make a decision… because I investigated the proposed Covid-19 vaccine and this is my alarm call to the world. I looked at the pros and cons and it frightens me.

And I want you to know about this, you need to be very well informed because this new vaccine is not like your normal flu vaccine. This is something very different, this is something brand new, something completely experimental on the human race. And it’s not just about being a different vaccine. There are technologies that are being introduced with this vaccine that can change the way we live, who we are and what we are. And very quickly….

Some people… like Elon Musk, who is the founder of SpaceX and Tesla Automotive, as well as Ray Kurzweil, who is one of the bigwigs of Google, … are self-proclaimed ‘transhumanists’. They believe that we should go to human 2.0 and they are very big proponents of this. There’s a lot of other people… involved with this…. I think the easiest way to explain this to you is to go with one of the frontrunners for the vaccine and go into a little bit of the history and tell you how they want to make the vaccine and I think that will speak volumes. So, for instance, Moderna is one of the frontrunners for the Covid-19 vaccine…. Watch ‘Human 2.0 – Transhumanist Vaccine – A Wake Up Call to the World’.

If you doubt the capacity of ‘medicine’ to achieve this level of human transformation, in this video produced in August 2020, transhumanist Elon Musk explains how his Neuralink microchip will be surgically implanted into the human brain, as has already been done with animals. While he specifically mentions the chip’s capacity to monitor certain health parameters and to play you music, he does not mention its intended uses for digitization of your identity, recording of your personal data such as medical and bank records, any of its surveillance functions or its capacity for emotional, thought and behavioural control. Watch ‘This Is How Elon Musk’s Neuralink Microchip Will Be Put In Your Brain’.

As Raul Diego explains in his own article on this subject:

The most significant scientific discovery since gravity has been hiding in plain sight for nearly a decade and its destructive potential to humanity is so enormous that the biggest war machine on the planet immediately deployed its vast resources to possess and control it, financing its research and development through agencies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and HHS’ Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

The revolutionary breakthrough… [involved devising] a way to ‘reprogram’ the molecules that carry the genetic instructions for cell development in the human body, not to mention all biological lifeforms.

These molecules are called ‘messenger ribonucleic acid’ or mRNA and the newfound ability to rewrite those instructions to produce any kind of cell within a biological organism has radically changed the course of Western medicine and science, even if no one has really noticed yet. As [inventor, Professor Derek] Rossi, himself, puts it: ‘The real important discovery here was you could now use mRNA, and if you got it into the cells, then you could get the mRNA to express any protein in the cells, and this was the big thing.’ See ‘A Transhumanist Dream: A DARPA-Funded Implantable Biochip to Detect COVID-19 Could Hit Markets by 2021’.

Moreover, as Patrick Wood, who has intensively studied and reported the efforts of the transhumanists for decades, explains in a recent article – ‘The Siamese Twins of Technocracy and Transhumanism’ – and discusses in a related video – ‘Humans 2.0: GMO Vaccinations and Transhumanism’ – that draws out some of the more nuanced elements of their agenda:

Technocracy and Transhumanism have always been joined at the hip. Technocracy uses its ‘science of social engineering’ to merge technology and society. Transhumanism uses its field of NBIC to merge technology directly into humans. To put it another way, Technocracy is to society what Transhumanism is to the humans that live in it….

NBIC stands for Nano (nano-technology), Bio (bio-technology), Info (information technology) and Cogno (cognitive sciences). These four scientific disciplines remained separate avenues of study in Universities around the world until the early 1970s. Today, NBIC has become an established discipline of its own in most major universities with personnel contributed from each separate department….

All together, NBIC offers a scientific cauldron to Transhumans in their quest to create Humans 2.0….

It’s also no wonder that the upcoming vaccine for COVID-19 being produced by Moderna is also using NBIC science to accomplish a merging of the human body with advanced technology. The Trump Administration has contracted with Moderna – see ‘Trump Administration collaborates with Moderna to produce 100 million doses of COVID-19 investigational vaccine’ – to deliver 100 million doses of its investigational vaccine, ostensibly to be kitted and transported to the nation by the U.S. Military….

[Technocracy and Transhumanism are both] extremely dangerous for all of humankind and must be rejected before it is too late to stop them.

And Whitney Webb provides further insight into the elite intention in this regard. In one of her meticulously-researched articles – ‘Coronavirus Gives a Dangerous Boost to DARPA’s Darkest Agenda’ – she outlines the hidden technological agenda behind the Covid-19 coup that might well be delivered as part of any vaccination program by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). After carefully outlining the history and ‘logic’ of what is taking place – such as the development of ‘cyborg “super soldiers”’ and ‘injectable Brain Machine Interfaces (BMIs) with the capability to control one’s thoughts’ – she concludes with the chilling words:

Technology developed by the Pentagon’s controversial research branch is getting a huge boost amid the current coronavirus crisis, with little attention going to the agency’s ulterior motives for developing said technologies, their potential for weaponization or their unintended consequences.…

Those who are fearful and desperate will not care that the vaccine may include nanotechnology or have the potential to genetically modify and re-program their very being, as they will only want the current crisis that has upended the world to stop.

In this context, the current coronavirus crisis appears to be the perfect storm that will allow DARPA’s dystopian vision to take hold and burst forth from the darkest recesses of the Pentagon into full public view. DARPA’s transhumanist vision for the military and for humanity presents an unprecedented threat, not just to human freedom, but an existential threat to human existence and the building blocks of biology itself.

Of course, if you want to read how involved corporations, DARPA and other elite agencies explain it, you can do so. But unless you dig beneath the surface you will only get their sanitized accounts which, just like Elon Musk, focus on seemingly benign elements like ‘digitized identity’ and health reporting while not mentioning the technology’s capacities and intended uses for the invasion of your privacy, the recording of your personal data such as medical and bank records, any of its surveillance functions or its capacity for emotional, thought and behavioural control. See, for example, ‘Moderna’s mRNA Technology’, ‘Profusa is pioneering tissue-integrating biosensors for continuous monitoring of body chemistries’, ‘A Military-Funded Biosensor Could Be the Future of Pandemic Detection’ (which discusses the role of ‘hydrogel’) and DARPA’S ‘Developing novel, safe and efficacious treatments for COVID-19’ following its much earlier ‘In Vivo Nanoplatforms (IVN)’. For two elite presentations of the importance of your ‘digital identity’, see ‘The Need for Good Digital ID is Universal’ and ‘ID2020 and partners launch program to provide digital ID with vaccines’.

What is at Stake?

As discussed above, the technology now available after decades of effort enables receiver nanochips to be sprayed, injected or otherwise implanted into human bodies. With the ongoing deployment of 5G (which includes extensive space and ground-based technologies: see ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’), just one outcome of these combined technologies is that it will be possible to direct the individual behaviour of each person so implanted. Given that the control technology will be owned by corporate executives, here is a list of examples of how the elite might direct that it be used (more or less as a ‘drone pilot’ sitting in the United States controls a drone flying in the Middle East that fires weapons on local people):

  1. The official chain of command to launch nuclear weapons can be subverted by using remote control to direct the chosen individual in a particular chain of command to order (or execute) the launch of one or more nuclear weapons at the target(s) nominated at the time(s) specified. Subordinates can be directed to follow orders they might otherwise question.
  2. ‘Cyborg soldiers’ (either as mercenaries or as members of national military forces) in groups or as individuals can be deployed anywhere to fight as ordered by those in charge of their remote controls.
  3. ‘Cyborg workers’ can be directed to work in dangerous conditions for extended periods and simply be replaced as required. Someone else nearby will have been vaccinated too and can be directed to take their place.
  4. ‘Cyborg consumers’ can be directed to purchase a particular product, irrespective of its functionality, including health or otherwise, for the person so directed. That is assuming that money is not just taken directly from their bank account, given that it will no longer be under their exclusive control.
  5. ‘Cyborg activists’ on any issue can simply to be directed to refrain from further involvement in their campaign. Or to actively take the opposite position to the one they had previously.

What can we do to halt this transhumanist agenda and the elite coup itself?

Fortunately, we can do a great deal.

For a detailed series of options on how to have strategic impact, see the end of the article ‘“Ye are Many, They are Few”: Nonviolent Resistance to the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.

Importantly, however, if you would like to be part of the campaign to defeat the elite coup and prevent implementation of the transhumanist agenda, see the list of strategic goals necessary to achieve these outcomes here: Coup Strategic Aims.

If you wish to nurture children to be far more able to critique society and elite propaganda, rather than be easily duped, 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’.

Finally, if you want a better fundamental understanding of how we reached this point, see ‘Why Violence?’, ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

Conclusion

In the elegant words of South African liberation activist Steve Biko:

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

When he uttered these words before being tortured to death in an Apartheid prison, Biko presumably did not realize the profound meaning they would acquire in 2020.

The transhuman mind will be owned and controlled by the oppressor.

If we are to avert this fate, we must struggle with clarity and purpose.

 

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.

COVID-19: Trigger for a New World Order. Economic Stagnation and Social Destruction

By Patrick Henningsen

Source: Global Research

I can remember them saying that ‘everything changed after 9/11’. It did, but certainly not for the better. I think we can all agree on that.  I remember how everyone surrendered their rights and key aspects of democracy, all in the name of ‘keeping us safe’.

Back then, world-changing decisions were made in reaction to an exaggerated threat, with sweeping ‘emergency measures’ and laws enacted. Usually, nothing good follows from a government that is making decisions and formulating permanent policy, suspending constitutions and rights – imposing all of this on a population operating from a position of fear. That much we did learn. Some of us did anyway.

In January, like a leviathan sprung forth from the titans Oceanus and Ceto in ancient Greece, the global coronavirus pandemic was born. Like 9/11, it was a disruptive event, but this time on a scale unimaginable. Whether or not one believes this was naturally-occurring or a biologically-engineered pathogen (there is every reason to believe it could be), it is beyond argument that this ‘crisis’ is and will be used to advance a multi-pronged globalist agenda, likely to feature more wars between the great powers.

Modern man is now entering realms of dystopia only imagined before by the likes of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, with more than a hint of Philip K. Dick. What makes all of this difficult for so many is that the sudden transition has been almost instantaneous, leaving people in a near callow state of bewilderment, wondering what just happened to their old life.

No matter which way this situation goes, it’s almost certain life will never be the same.

COVID Crisis

By now we should be familiar with the story: a novel coronavirus, scientifically known as SARS-CoV-2, or COVID-19, has made its way across the planet, infecting millions of people and registering over 100,000 deaths (as of the time of writing) across 180 countries. The victims of this outbreak are overwhelming elderly persons over the age of 70 and those in palliative care, most of who have severe and chronic underlying medical conditions.

Make no mistake about it – this is a disruptive event on a scale the modern world has never seen before. The shock and awe began from the moment the story broke from the Chinese city of Wuhan in Hubei Province. Global audiences were inundated with images of Chinese authorities putting hundreds of people into biological suits, hosing down the outside of buildings, before quarantining themselves in their apartments. Then began a state-sanctioned medieval-style program that western media and politicians enthusiastically dubbed a “lockdown,” a term aptly borrowed from the prison industrial complex.

Wuhan was an unforgettable spectacle which really impacted the western psyche, such that when the coronavirus made it to European and North American shores, the public was already conditioned to expect a Chinese-style response from their own governments. Not surprisingly, this is exactly what they got and, in fact, it was what they demanded.

On 12 March, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called an emergency press conference where he took to the podium, flanked by his two leading science advisors, Sir Patrick Vallace and Chris Whitty, who proceeded to explain the government plan of action which was centred around the commonly known epidemiological concept of “herd immunity.” Their strategy was a familiar one because it has been the orthodoxy in modern epidemiology – allow a virus to go through approximately 60-80% of the population in order to achieve herd immunity, naturally extinguishing the virus in a single season.

But Johnson made the fatal error of grossly overestimating the death rate at 1% of the total infected, an estimate that would have left the country with some 52 million infected and 500,000 fatalities. Of course, in hindsight, these numbers were pure fiction, but at the time everyone was so enveloped in fear that they believed the ‘experts’. Nonetheless, the herd immunity approach was more or less identical to the ‘no lockdown’ approach taken by European countries Sweden and Iceland, as well as Belarus, Mexico, and Japan. This would entail standard random sample testing nationally and for those exhibiting COVID-19 symptoms. The elderly and vulnerable people would be told to self-isolate for a period of time while studies were conducted.

‘Plan A’ didn’t last long. On 24 March, Johnson appeared on national TV, this time without his science team, to announce a nationwide lockdown – an effective shutdown of society and most of the country’s economy. The UK was now following fellow NATO member states France, Italy, Spain and others, which had already imposed draconian national lockdowns, including strict new ‘social distancing’ guidelines preventing people from being together.

It appeared that Johnson’s sudden 180º degree turn was prompted in part by an alarmist report generated by one of the government ‘expert’ teams at Imperial College London, led by controversial computer modeler Neil Ferguson who was previously responsible for the 2001 ‘Foot and Mouth’ crisis, a debacle which ended in the unnecessary culling of some six million livestock in Britain.

This time, Ferguson and his team worked their modelling magic to come up with an estimated half a million coronavirus deaths if the government did not implement “very intense social distancing and other interventions now in place.”

While the figure was completely fictional, the media seized on it, as did government officials, which fuelled fear and panic across Britain’s government-media complex. Frightened and unsure, the public accepted the authoritarian measures, but the government never gave an end date to the quarantine; it was left open-ended at the discretion of the government’s scientific coterie.

Once that bubble of fear had been sufficiently inflated, a medieval-style lockdown was a fait accompli in numerous countries including Australia and New Zealand. The impact of a full national quarantine is yet unknown, but it’s already becoming clear that it will be nothing short of cataclysmic for those countries who agreed to the voluntary self-destruction of their economies and the indefinite suspension of democracy.

It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time the United Nations, the World Health Organization (WHO), and Imperial College tried conjuring a global panic over a flu virus. Back in 2005, the “range of deaths,” the UN warned of bird flu virus H5N1, “could be anything between five and 150 million.” Officials even drafted in Imperial’s most reliable doomsayer, Neil Ferguson, to help come up with another completely fictional death toll of 200 million people. His high school level math equation was breathtaking in its over-simplicity:

“Around 40 million people died in the 1918 Spanish flu outbreak,” said Prof. Ferguson. “There are six times more people on the planet now so you could scale it up to around 200 million people probably.”

That doomsday prediction led to the culling of tens of millions of birds in Southeast Asia, but the pandemic never really materialised. In the end, human fatalities numbered in the hundreds worldwide. It was a non event.

Similar unremarkable numbers followed the global hype over the H1N1 swine flu in 2009. Thanks to the work of investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the US was caught over-inflating the number of cases – a fraudulent move that had grave implications for government policy and stoking unfounded public fear.

With COVID-19, the globalist medical industrial complex, led by WHO, hoped to repeat the previous public relations campaigns by hyping the novel coronavirus as the next Spanish Flu. This time they were given an extraordinary opportunity thanks to China which put on an incredible media performance and ‘show of strength’ in the month of January by ‘locking down’ Wuhan – inspiring western and other leaders to try the same big government approach.

However, the results would turn out economically disastrous for western ‘lockdown’ countries.

Economic Collapse

All of this is certain to trigger a protracted global recession marked by at least 12 months of negative growth, with economic and social displacement the likes of which the world has never seen before. The decision by countries like the UK, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the US to voluntarily implode their economies and place most of their populations under house arrest will have a lasting impact not only on national economies but also the global economy for years to come.

In terms of scale, the damage caused to markets and industry has already surpassed the 2008 financial crisis by orders of magnitude, and there’s no end in sight.

To ‘fight the coronavirus’ governments have imploded their real economies and replaced them with nationalised pools of finance earmarked for each section of the economy. This emergency transformation is the same as a wartime mobilisation of an economy, with a heavy focus on the medical and pharmaceutical industrial complex, the military, and selected corporate partners hand-picked by the state. This hard fusion of state and corporate interests is classic corporatism or fascism. In this brutal and constrained environment, these are some of the only institutions strong enough to remain viable.

The net effect of immediately putting millions of workers onto government welfare rolls and pushing hundreds of thousands of small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMEs) into bankruptcy will be the largest consolidation and transfer of wealth in modern history. Those with enough capital to ride out the crisis will be able to buy-up companies, and even whole industries, for literally pennies on the dollar. Monopolies like Amazon, Google and telecoms giants will consolidate and solidify their market shares as competitors gradually die off and are swallowed-up in receivership. Formerly independent contractors will now be reliant on government assistance, as will any business qualifying for government ‘relief’ grants and loans. Large corporations will now have governments covering the cost of their payrolls for the duration of the crisis.

There is no semblance of any discernible sound economic model to describe what is now happening with government printing up record amounts of money to cover the enormous cost of the shutdown. For a wealthy country like the US, the Federal Reserve Bank will simply go into overdrive, creating trillions of dollars to be released through various ‘stimulus plans’ and bailouts. The New York Fed is now pumping trillions of new dollars into banks, with the Fed also issuing ‘bridge’ loans directly to businesses. This never happened before in history. The US is also buying up unprecedented amounts of corporate stock in order to keep Wall Street afloat. With these levels of quantitative easing, there are risks of hyperinflation and other systemic problems. This may be coupled with higher food prices due to supply shortages, and stagnant wages due to a glut in the labour market after the government’s domestic scorched earth economic policies. The end result of all these bailouts (if they ever end) will be exactly as with any war in history: a rapid wholesale transfer of power, control and ownership into centralised government and the central banking cartel.

For individuals and families, this means your savings are wiped-out, your property collapses in value, and your future prospects are dim, at least in the short to midterm, and you will have no choice but to load up on personal and family debt to survive.

Before this crisis, we saw the largest wealth gap in modern history since the Gilded Age (1870–1900), with the richest 1% now owning more than half of the world’s wealth. After the first phase of this crisis, that gap may double or even triple. With SMEs wiped out, the only jobs available will be with the government or with a handful of mega-corporations.

As is often the case after any war, developed and developing countries are likely to become dependent on credit lines from either the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or from the United States itself which will have plenty of dollars and US Treasury bonds for sale or loan at near zero percent interest rates. Plenty of funny money to go around, mostly for the elites.

The shutting down of the world’s airlines – along with biosecurity and financial stagnation hitting certain sections of global trade – will severely injure the dominant system of globalisation. This will no doubt encourage already existing regional trading blocs, like ASEAN in Southeast Asia, and the African Union, leveraging their interests to create more regionalised and resilient trading networks. As physical trade and relations are codified regionally, globalisation will increase in the online digital sphere and with international e-commerce, online learning and social networking.

Now, with massive economic recession, marked by record levels of mass unemployment and debt, the balkanisation of formerly open globalisation routes, combined with a new global veil over scarcity of resources, all under a broad cloak of biological insecurity – the soil is fertile for more dismantling of democracy and a rise in fascist regimes, particularly in the West. The trend was already moving in this direction before the crisis, but now it will only accelerate.

Historically speaking, the scene is now set for another world war in which the winner sets the agenda for a ‘new world order’ going into the 21st century.

Full Spectrum Dominance: World War Footing

Just as in 1914 and the onset of World War I, the year 2020 will be a major pivot point for the early 21st century and should be seen as a tangible prelude to a new world war. There are a number of reasons why this is likely.

It is true that you can implement more change in two years of war than you can in twenty years of peace. In the case of the corona crisis, that two years was reduced to two months. Presently, events are being framed by western powers as the “global fight against an invisible enemy,” but the corona crisis has created a number of new paradigms some of which are classic precursors for war. The first and most obvious is the fact that virtually overnight, the western countries, especially NATO member states the United States, United Kingdom and France, have effectively mobilised all aspects of their country’s economy and restructured society to reflect both a wartime economy and a state of martial law. The western bloc countries are now prepared to bunker down for a long war if need be.

The threat of a biological agent presents some serious problems for a globally-embedded military as America’s. Already the US had to cancel major NATO drills in Europe, and pull some of its naval fleet into dock because of the coronavirus and fears of infecting large numbers of military personnel. Other countries may have similar issues. In this sense, the disease has severely slowed fighting across the world – one of the more unexpected, albeit welcome, tertiary benefits of the crisis.

The western powers first obvious choice for instigating either a hot or cold war is China, along with its allies. When US President Donald Trump refers to COVID-19 as “the Chinese virus,” he is signalling to his base and to the war hawks in the Republican Party that the White House is preparing a confrontation. Anti-Chinese rhetoric and media propaganda has increased substantially in the US since the onset of the corona crisis, with many Americans, particularly the right-wing, now blaming the Chinese for releasing this pestilence into the world.

After a few more months of economic destruction, social malaise and an increasing death toll in the US, the new ranks of unemployed will be demanding a scapegoat for their terrible suffering, at which time a war with China could become more viable for Washington. This could take the form of an on-off, hot-cold war which lasts for 30 or 40 years, and pulls in other major powers using proxy battlegrounds in third party countries.

For the US empire, one primary objective in confronting China would be to disrupt and possibly derail Beijing’s historic infrastructure and economic development known as the Belt and Road Initiative, designed to link Europe with Asia along various routes over land and sea. If successful, the global centre of gravity would shift away from the US and back towards Eurasia. In the event of a global depression post-corona, the US is geopolitically well-placed to weather the storm as it commands the control of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. China’s Belt and Road would effectively upend Washington’s plans for Fortress America lording it over all global markets during this new tumultuous epoch.

In some ways, the crisis has disrupted the emergence of a new multipolar world, but the imperative for multipolarism may also be propelled by the economic balkanisation and the fact that the US will continue withdrawing its military assets from stalwart outposts like the Middle East. Any US withdrawal from the world stage will be filled by other emerging powers like Russia, India, Turkey and possibly Japan. Many of these emerging powers require resources and materials, so the scramble to establish trading routes in Africa will be a post-corona feature.

The corona crisis also provides a convenient cover for the aggressive roll-out of 5G networks around the world. These look to be the backbone of a new global surveillance state able to track and record everything in real-time. Along with millions of masts in towns and cities, the network will also feature an array of new satellites with the potential to flood our atmosphere and communities with even more untested high-frequency radiation.

One World Health & Medical Martial Law

The current ‘state of war’ extends internationally with blanket travel restrictions already in place. There looks to be a rapid drive to institute a streamlined global system of mandatory digital tracking and tracing, implemented under the auspices of ‘global health’ and spearheaded by the World Health Organization (WHO). They are joined by participating governments and the transnational corporations that will roll out these new ‘health surveillance’ systems.

The real question that remains unanswered is what will happen once all the ‘lockdown’ measures are relaxed, and international air travel opens up again?

There are already noises coming from governments and organisations about requiring citizens to pass some form of ‘immunity test’ for COVID-19 to be granted freedom of movement within society by carrying an ‘immunity passport’ or digital certificate stored on a microchip or smartphone.

This dovetails with the rapid drive for a cashless society as a result of the corona scare. Due to corona contagion fears, paper money and coins are being stigmatised as ‘dirty’ with many retail outlets refusing to accept cash. Once this system is adopted domestically, it follows that these same restrictions will be extended to international travellers. Needless to say, this has grave implications for personal liberty and privacy. At present, this juggernaut seems difficult to stop.

If allowed, this new bio regime will become the de facto governance for the world’s population. Microsoft founder Bill Gates (net worth $97.8 billion) has called for a national vaccine tracking system in the US, funded in part by an estimated $100 million he and his wife Melinda’s Gates Foundation have donated to fight the coronavirus to discover ‘a fix’ as quickly as possible. Gates is already heavily invested in vaccine research, development and production and, with his wife, they are a primary driver in the proliferation of vaccines globally. Gates says he will front the investment for seven new vaccine factories around the globe, and as he told Daily Show host Trevor Noah during an interview on 2 April, “until we get the world vaccinated.”

Clearly, he has a vision for vaccinating every person on the planet, presumably for the coronavirus, or until the next big ‘outbreak’. “The only thing that really lets us go back completely to normal and feel good about sitting in stadiums with lots of other people is to create a vaccine and not just take care of our country but take that vaccine out to the global population,” said Gates.

From oligarchs like Gates, the transnational pharmaceutical corporations, and the government officials in their pocket, the warning is clear: you will not be permitted to resume ‘normal life’ until you accept the latest vaccine. And do not expect the list of newly required vaccinations to end with the novel coronavirus. Once this first precedent is set, countries dependent on international travel and trade will be forced to adopt the regulatory framework of this new ‘one world health’ security complex. The trail is then blazed for a constant stream of vaccine requirements to ‘fight’ various and sundry outbreaks and ‘biothreats’, be they real, exaggerated or completely fabricated. This could be another disruptive force going forward.

Combine this with naked authoritarian statements made by other self-appointed corona tsars like Dr Michael Ryan, Executive Director of WHO, who recently remarked that members of families may need to be removed from their homes by force. “Most of the transmission actually happening in many countries now, is happening in the household at family level…. In some sense, transmission has been taken off the streets and pushed back into family units. Now, we need to go and look at families to find those people who may be sick and remove them, and isolate them in a safe and dignified manner,” said Ryan.

The obvious danger here is that this new state-corporate regime will discriminate against and marginalise citizens based on their immunity records, requiring them to take a new vaccine to receive rights and privileges. This would be a complete abrogation of personal liberty and human rights, effectively turning the clock back hundreds of years – all based on what many leading doctors and epidemiologists agree is no more of a significant public health threat, in terms of infections and fatalities, than seasonal influenza.

A COVID Green New Deal?

One of the clear main political beneficiaries of a COVID-19 global shutdown has been the climate change lobby.

By forcibly shutting down millions of businesses and pulling tens of millions of cars off the road and grounding world commercial airlines, the crisis has delivered young Greta Thunberg the evidence she and her supporters need to demonstrate the virtues of a net zero carbon world in a real-life simulation.

This will also accelerate the adoption of a so-called ‘Green New Deal’ internationally, which may have less to do with saving the environment or ‘changing the climate’, and more to do with the creation of new global financial bubble based on the commodification and financialisation of Earth’s ecosphere. This is essentially a new ‘green-backed’ and fully tradeable monetary credit, bond and derivatives market.

Greta didn’t appear out of nowhere in 2018. She and her handlers have been tasked with a mission, and now in just three weeks they are very close to realising large pieces of their agenda, which also dovetails with UN Agenda 2030 sustainability goals.

Who’s Winning: Globalism or Nationalism?

Another unexpected byproduct of this crisis has been a number of European Union member states kicking Brussels to the curb, either for not reacting fast enough to help, or simply for not releasing enough funds for struggling public institutions and businesses. As a result, countries like Italy and Poland are exerting their nationalist power over Brussels’ relatively weak and ineffectual response to requested assistance from members states.

At the same time, this new global control grid lends itself towards the implementation of a world government structure to be used to fund an international regime that regulates and adjudicates problems, as well as manage future ‘outbreaks’. In late March, former British PM and Chancellor, Gordon Brown, called for world leaders to create a provisional global government body in order to tackle the coronavirus pandemic and manage the global economic collapse.

Whatever geopolitical and social engineering agendas were already in motion before the crisis, you can be sure that the coronavirus has accelerated many of them.

In terms of power-grabs, this is the embodiment of “never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Oh, and don’t forget –it’s really all about saving lives. 

 

*

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Patrick Henningsen is the founder and editor of the news and analysis website 21st Century Wire, and is an independent foreign and political affairs analyst for RT International. He is also the host of the SUNDAY WIRE radio program which airs live every Sunday on the Alternate Current Radio Network. Learn more about this author at: http://www.patrickhenningsen.com

Notes

1. Professor who predicted 500,000 Britons could die from coronavirus and prompted Boris Johnson to order lockdown accused of having ‘patchy record of modelling pandemics’, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8164121/Professor-predicted-500-000-Britons-die-coronavirus-accused-having-patchy-record.html

2. Return of the oppressed, aeon.co/essays/history-tells-us-where-the-wealth-gap-leads

3. Is an ‘immunity certificate’ the way to get out of coronavirus lockdown?, edition.cnn.com/2020/04/03/health/immunity-passport-coronavirus-lockdown-intl/index.html

4. The first steps after lockdown ends: How will Spain return to normal life?, english.elpais.com/society/2020-04-05/the-first-steps-after-lockdown-ends-how-will-spain-return-to-normal-life.html

5. Bill Gates Calls For National Tracking System For Coronavirus During Reddit AMA, www.forbes.com/sites/mattperez/2020/03/18/bill-gates-calls-for-national-tracking-system-for-coronavirus-during-reddit-ama/

6. Bill Gates on Fighting Coronavirus – The Daily Social Distancing Show (YouTube), www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyFT8qXcOrM

7. The coronavirus is washing over the U.S. These factors will determine how bad it gets in each community, www.statnews.com/2020/04/01/coronavirus-how-bad-it-gets-different-communities/

8. Gordon Brown calls for global government to tackle coronavirus, www.theguardian.com/politics/2020/mar/26/gordon-brown-calls-for-global-government-to-tackle-coronavirus

An Unprecedented 1,640 CEOs Departed in 2019; Now Execs Are Dumping Stock at Highest Pace Since 2006

By Pam Martens and Russ Martens

Source: Wall Street on Parade

A rather fascinating picture is emerging that suggests that things were not as rosy in the U.S. economic landscape prior to the pandemic as President Donald Trump and his Director of the National Economic Council, Larry Kudlow, would have the public believe.

Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. has been tracking CEO departures for the past 12 years. Its Vice President, Andrew Challenger, called the numbers for 2019 “staggering.” It was the highest number since their surveys began in 2002. A total of 1,640 CEOs headed for the exits last year. That was 156 more CEOs than those who left their post in 2008 – the year that Wall Street blazed a scorched earth trail through the U.S. economy.

The number of CEOs that did not leave on their own accord last year was 101 out of the 1,640. According to the study, 15 CEOs left over allegations of professional misconduct; 20 left amid a scandal, “typically under investigations for financial wrongdoing or other legal issues”; 24 saw their positions terminated; 39 left due to a merger or acquisition; 3 left due to bankruptcy.

CEOs of old, established companies have the clearest view of what is happening in the overall economy. They can compare sales growth to prior years and prior decades. They can spot negative or positive trends in the economy far ahead of the economic reports that the federal government releases to the public.

When an outsized number of CEOs decide to cash out their stock options, grab their golden parachutes, and flee their corner offices – something smells.

On top of that fishy smell comes a report from TrimTabs Investment Research that corporate insiders have reaped more than $50 billion in stock sales since May, putting insider selling on a pace not seen since 2006 – two years before the stock market and economic crash of 2008.

The above two reports on corporate executive behavior are compatible with Wall Street On Parade’s reports that show that the current financial crisis began in the fall of 2019 – months before the first case of COVID-19 had emerged anywhere in the world. What triggered the financial crisis? The same kind of liquidity crisis on Wall Street that ushered in the crisis of 2008. (See Wall Street’s Financial Crisis Preceded COVID-19: Chart and Timeline and our archive of more than 100 articles on the financial crisis of 2019/2020 here.)

Why does it matter when the financial crisis began? It’s critically important for the following reasons.

First, the U.S. national debt has exploded to $26.69 trillion. To wrap your mind around this explosion of the national debt, you need some historical perspective. At the beginning of the Bill Clinton Presidency in January 1993, the U.S. national debt stood at $4 trillion. At that point, the United States was more than 200 years old. During that 200 years, the U.S. had financed the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, World Wars I and II and the Vietnam War. The country had also been through the greatest economic collapse in its history, the Great Depression, which required a multitude of fiscal spending programs.

It took more than two centuries for the U.S. national debt to reach $4 trillion but in just the past 27 years the national debt has grown by more than $22 trillion – more than a five-fold increase in less than three decades.

This staggering amount of debt puts the nation at risk of a future credit downgrade and cripples its ability to adequately deal with the financial struggles of its citizens during the worst health and financial crisis in a century.

One of the key reasons for this mushrooming debt was the Wall Street financial crisis of 2008 which required massive fiscal spending to keep the economy from sinking into a depression.

But no serious steps were taken by Congress to reform Wall Street. Derivatives remain largely unregulatedDark Pools are still trading in darkness. Wall Street continues to pay credit rating agencies to rate their toxic debt piles. Off balance sheet casinos run rampant at the largest Wall Street banks. Obscene pay for performance via stock options continues to incentive CEOs and CFOs to massage earnings.

The biggest unaddressed problem is the critical need to restore the Glass-Steagall Act. All of the dangers cited above can, and do, bring down an entire financial institution as we learned in 2008. But with the restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, the giant, federally-insured, deposit-taking banks would be completely separated from the Wall Street casino investment banks.

This handful of mega banks that hold the majority of deposits in this country are too critical to keeping credit flowing to businesses and consumers to be run by the Wall Street bet-the-ranch mentality. These banks are simply too big to be bailed out again.

When Citigroup was disintegrating from all of the evils mentioned above from 2007 to 2010, this is what it took to resuscitate its sinking hull: $45 billion in capital infusions from the U.S. Treasury; over $300 billion in asset guarantees from the federal government; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) guaranteed $5.75 billion of its senior unsecured debt and $26 billion of its commercial paper and interbank deposits; and the Federal Reserve secretly, with no authorization or even awareness of Congress, made a cumulative $2.5 trillion in below-market rate loans to Citigroup from 2007 through at least the middle of 2010, according to an audit by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

And, finally, acknowledging that this latest financial crisis began prior to the pandemic shines a bright light on the incompetency of the Federal Reserve to manage these Wall Street behemoth banks. It’s simply an insane regulatory model to have a bank regulator with the ability to create money out of thin air that can secretly create and spend $29 trillion bailing out the banks to cover up its own incompetency. That’s what happened from 2007 to 2010 and is in the process of happening again. (See The Fed Has Pumped $9 Trillion into Wall Street Over the Past Six Months, But Mnuchin Says “This Isn’t Like the Financial Crisis”.)

 

“Bipartisan” Washington Insiders Reveal Their Plan for Chaos if Trump Wins the Election

A group of “bipartisan” neoconservative Republicans and establishment Democrats have been “simulating” multiple catastrophic scenarios for the 2020 election, including a simulation where a clear victory by the incumbent provokes “unprecedented” measures, which the Biden campaign could take to foil a new Trump inauguration.

By Whitney Webb

Source: Unlimited Hangout

A group of Democratic Party insiders and former Obama and Clinton era officials as well as a cadre of “Never Trump” neoconservative Republicans have spent the past few months conducting simulations and “war games” regarding different 2020 election “doomsday” scenarios.

Per several media reports on the group, called the Transition Integrity Project (TIP), they justify these exercises as specifically preparing for a scenario where President Trump loses the 2020 election and refuses to leave office, potentially resulting in a constitutional crisis. However, according to TIP’s own documents, even their simulations involving a “clear win” for Trump in the upcoming election resulted in a constitutional crisis, as they predicted that the Biden campaign would make bold moves aimed at securing the presidency, regardless of the election result.

This is particularly troubling given that TIP has considerable ties to the Obama administration, where Biden served as Vice President, as well as several groups that are adamantly pro-Biden in addition to the Biden campaign itself. Indeed, the fact that a group of openly pro-Biden Washington insiders and former government officials have gamed out scenarios for possible election outcomes and their aftermath, all of which either ended with Biden becoming president or a constitutional crisis, suggest that powerful forces influencing the Biden campaign are pushing the former Vice President to refuse to concede the election even if he loses.

This, of course, gravely undercuts the TIP’s claim to be ensuring “integrity” in the presidential transition process and instead suggests that the group is openly planning on how to ensure that Trump leaves office regardless of the result or to manufacture the very constitutional crisis they claim to be preventing through their simulations.

Such concerns are only magnified by the recent claims made by the 2016 Democratic presidential candidate and former Secretary of State under Obama, Hillary Clinton, that Biden “should not concede under any circumstances.” “I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch, and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is,” Clinton continued during an interview with Showtime a little over a week ago. The results of the TIP’s simulations notably echo Clinton’s claims that Biden will “eventually” win if the process to determine the election outcome is “dragged out.”

The Uniparty’s “war games”

Members of the TIP met in June to conduct four “war games” that simulated “a dark 11 weeks between Election Day and Inauguration Day” in which “Trump and his Republican allies used every apparatus of government — the Postal Service, state lawmakers, the Justice Department, federal agents, and the military — to hold onto power, and Democrats took to the courts and the streets to try to stop it,” according to a report from The Boston Globe. However, one of those simulations, which examined what would transpire between Election Day and Inauguration Day in the event of a “clear Trump win,” shows that the TIP simulated not only how Republicans could use every option at their disposal to “hold onto power”, but also how Democrats could do so if the 2020 election result is not in their favor.

While some, mostly right-leaning media outlets, such as this article from The National Pulse, did note that the TIP’s simulations involved the Biden campaign refusing to concede, the actual document from TIP on the exercises revealed the specific moves the Biden campaign would take following a “clear win” for the Trump campaign. Unsurprisingly, these moves would greatly exacerbate current political tensions in the United States, an end result that the TIP claims they were created to avoid, gravely undercutting the official justification for their simulations as well as the group’s official reason for existing.

In the TIP’s “clear Trump win” scenario (see page 17), Joe Biden – played in the war game by John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign manager and chief of staff to former President Bill Clinton – retracted his election night concession and subsequently convinced “three states with Democratic governors – North Carolina, Wisconsin and Michigan – to ask for recounts.” Then, the governors of Wisconsin and Michigan “sent separate slates of electors to counter those sent by the state legislature” to the Electoral College, which Trump had won, in an attempt to undermine, if not prevent, that win.

Next, “the Biden campaign encouraged Western states, particularly California but also Oregon and Washington, and collectively known as “Cascadia,” to secede from the Union unless Congressional Republications agreed to a set of structural reforms. (emphasis added)” Subsequently, “with advice from [former] President Obama,” the Biden campaign laid out those “reforms” as the following:

  1. Give statehood to Washington, DC and Puerto Rico
  2. Divide California into five states “to more accurately represent its population in the Senate”
  3. Require Supreme Court justices to retire at 70
  4. Eliminate the Electoral College

In other words, these “structural reforms” involve the creation of what essentially amounts to having the U.S. by composed 56 states, with the new states set to ensure a perpetual majority for Democrats, as only Democrat-majority areas (DC, Puerto Rico and California) are given statehood. Notably, in other scenarios where Biden won the Electoral College, Democrats did not support its elimination.

Also notable is the fact that, in this simulation, the TIP blamed the Trump campaign for the Democrats’ decision to take the “provocative, unprecedented actions” laid out above, asserting that Trump’s campaign had “created the conditions to force the Biden campaign” into taking these actions by doing things like giving “an interview to The Intercept in which he [Trump] stated that he would have lost the election if Bernie Sanders had been nominated” instead of Biden as the Democratic presidential candidate.

The TIP also claimed that the Trump campaign would seek to paint these “provocative, unpredecented actions” as “the Democrats attempting to orchestrate an illegal coup,” despite the fact that that is essentially what those actions entail. Indeed, in other simulations where the Trump campaign behaved along these lines, the TIP’s rhetoric about this category of extreme actions is decidedly different.

Yet, the simulated actions of the Biden campaign in this scenario did not end there, as the Biden campaign subsequently “provoked a breakdown in the joint session of Congress [on January 6th] by getting the House of Representatives to agree to award the presidency to Biden,” adding that this was “based on the alternative pro-Biden submissions sent by pro-Biden governors.” The Republican party obviously did not consent, noting that Trump had won the election through his Electoral College victory. The “clear Trump win” election simulation ended with no president-elect being inaugurated on January 20, with the TIP noting “it was unclear what the military would do in this situation.”

Of course, some TIP members, including its co-founder Rosa Brooks – a former advisor to the Obama era Pentagon and currently a fellow at the “New America” think tank, have their preference for “what the military would do in this situation.” For instance, Brooks, writing less than 2 weeks after Trump’s inauguration in 2017, argued in Foreign Policy that “a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders” was one of four possibilities for removing Trump from office prior to the 2020 election.

Who is behind the TIP?

The TIP was created in late 2019, allegedly “out of concern that the Trump Administration may seek to manipulate, ignore, undermine or disrupt the 2020 presidential election and transition process.” It was co-founded by Rosa Brooks and Nils Gilman and its current director is Zoe Hudson. Brooks, as previously mentioned, was an advisor to the Pentagon and the Hillary Clinton-led State Department during the Obama administration. She was also previously the general counsel to the President of the Open Society Institute, part of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), a controversial organization funded by billionaire George Soros. Zoe Hudson, who is TIP’s director, is also a former top figure at OSF, serving assenior policy analyst and liaison between the foundations and the U.S. government for 11 years.

OSF ties to the TIP are a red flag for a number of reasons, namely due to the fact that OSF and other Soros-funded organizations played a critical role in fomenting so-called “color revolutions” to overthrow non-aligned governments, particularly during the Obama administration. Examples of OSF’s ties to these manufactured “revolutions” include Ukraine in 2014 and the “Arab Spring,” which began in 2011 and saw several governments in the Middle East and North Africa that were troublesome to Western interests conveniently removed from power.

Subsequent leaked emails revealed the cozy ties between Soros and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, including one email where Soros directed Clinton’s policy with respect to unrest in Albania, telling her that two things need to be done urgently,” which were to “bring the full weight of the international community to bear on Prime Minister Berisha” and appoint a senior European official as mediator.” Both “urgent” tasks were subsequently performed by Clinton, presumably at Soros’ behest.

In addition to her ties to the Obama administration and OSF, Brooks is currently a scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute, where she focuses on “the relationship between the military and domestic policing” and also Georgetown’s Innovative Policing Program. She is a currently a key player in the documented OSF-led push to “capitalize” off of legitimate calls for police reform to justify the creation of a federalized police force under the guise of defunding and/or eliminating local police departments. Brooks’ interest in the “blurring line” between military and police is notable given her past advocacy of a military coup to remove Trump from office and the TIP’s subsequent conclusion that the military “may” have to step in if Trump manages to win the 2020 election, per the group’s “war games” described above.

Brooks is also a senior fellow at the think tank New America. New America’s mission statement notes that the organization is focused on “honestly confronting the challenges caused by rapid technological and social change, and seizing the opportunities those changes create.” It is largely funded by Silicon Valley billionaires, including Bill Gates (Microsoft), Eric Schmidt (Google), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Jeffrey Skoll and Pierre Omidyar (eBay). In addition, it has received millions directly from the U.S. State Department to research “ranking digital rights.” Notably, of these funders, Reid Hoffman was caught “meddling” in the most recent Democratic primary to undercut Bernie Sanders’ candidacy during the Iowa caucus and while others, such as Eric Schmidt and Pierre Omidyar, are known for their cozy ties to the Clinton family and even ties to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign.

The Never Trumpers

Aside from Brooks, the other co-founder of TIP is Nils Gilman, the current Vice President of Programs at the Berggruen Institute and, prior to that, worked for Salesforce, a major tech company and government contractor. Gilman is particularly focused on artificial intelligence and transhumanism, recently telling the New York Times that his work at the Berggruen Institute is focused on “building [a] transnational networks of philosophers + technologists + policy-makers + artists who are thinking about how A.I. and gene-editing are transfiguring what it means to be human.” Nicholas Berggruen, for whom the Berggruen Institute is named, is part of the billionaire-led faction, alongside Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman and Eric Schmidt, who seek to develop A.I. and the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in conjunction with the political leaders and economic elite of China.

They are critics and rivals of those in the “nationalist” camp with respect to A.I. and China, who instead prefer to aggressively “leapfrog” China’s A.I. capabilities in order to maintain U.S. global hegemony as opposed to a “new order” promoted by Berggreun, Schmidt, Schwarzman and Henry Kissinger, another key member of the “cooperation” faction. The battle over the U.S.’ future A.I. policy with respect to China appears to be a major yet widely overlooked reason for some of the antipathy towards Trump by those in the “cooperation” faction, including those who employ TIP’s founders, given Trump’s tendency to, at least publicly, support “America First” policies and increased tensions with China. In contrast, the Biden family is invested in Chinese A.I. companies, suggesting that Biden would be more willing to pursue the interests of the “cooperation” faction than Trump.

While the identities of the TIP’s founders and current director have been made public, the full member list of the TIP has not. However, the TIP’s “sister” organization, called The National Task Force on Election Crises (NTFEC), does have a public membership list and several of its members are also known to be part of the TIP. Some of these overlapping members include Michael Chertoff, former head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Michael Steele, former chairman of the RNC and Lawrence Wilkerson, chief of staff to former Secretary of State, Colin Powell. Chertoff, Steele and Wilkerson, though Republicans, are part of the so-called “Never Trump” Republican faction, as are the TIP’s other known Republican members. Thus, while the “bipartisan” nature of TIP may be accurate in terms of party affiliation, all of known TIP’s members – regardless of party – are united in their opposition to another term for the current president.

Other known members of the TIP include David Frum (the Atlantic), William Kristol (Project for a New American Century, The Bulwark), Max Boot (the Washington Post), Donna Brazile (ex-DNC), John Podesta (former campaign manager – Clinton 2016), Chuck Hagel (former Secretary of Defense), Reed Galen (co-founder of the Lincoln Project) and Norm Ornstein (American Enterprise Institute).

Of their known members, the most outspoken is Lawrence Wilkerson, who has fashioned himself the group’s “unofficial” spokesperson, having done the majority of media interviews promoting the group and its “war games.” In an interview in late June with journalist Paul Jay, Wilkerson notes that the TIP lacks transparency and that, aside from their “war games,” their other activities are largely confidential.

He specifically stated that:

“There is some confidentiality about what we agreed to, and what we’ve put out publicly, and who’s responsible for that, and other aspects of our doing that. The Transition Integrity Project is to this point very, very close, whole, and confidential.”

In that same interview, Wilkerson also noted that the current “combination of events” involving the recent unrest in several U.S. cities, the coronavirus crisis, the national debate over the future of policing, the economic recession and the 2020 election was the foundation for a revolution in the U.S. He told Jay that:

“I want to say this is how things like 1917 and Russia, like 1979 and Tehran, and like 1789 in France. This is how these sorts of things get started. So we’ve got to be very careful about how we deal with these things. And that worries me because we don’t have a very careful individual in the White House.”

Pre-planned chaos – who benefits?

While it certainly is possible that, in the event of a clear Biden win, President Trump could refuse to leave the White House or take other actions that would challenge the faith of many Americans in the national election system. However, while the TIP claims to be specifically concerned about this eventuality and about “safe guarding” democracy without favoring either candidate, that is clearly not the case, as their simulation of a clear Trump win shows that extreme, “undemocratic” behavior, in their view, is permissible if it prevents another four years of Trump. Yet, this clear double standard reveals that an influential group of “bipartisan” insiders are intent on creating a “constitutional crisis” if Trump wins and are planning for such a crisis regardless of the 2020 election’s results.

Well before the TIP or any of their affiliated groups emerged to conduct these doomsday election simulations, other groups were similarly engaged in “war games” that predicted complete chaos in the U.S. on election day as well as the imposition of martial law in the U.S. following the emergence of unprecedented unrest and disarray in the country.

Several of these I detailed in a series earlier this year, which mainly focused on the “Operation Blackout” simulations conducted by the U.S.-Israeli company, Cybereason. That company has considerable ties to the U.S. and Israeli intelligence and its largest investor is Softbank. Notably, Softbank is named by the Eric Schmidt-led National Security Commission on AI (NSCAI) as forming the “backbone” of a global framework of A.I.-driven companies favored by the “cooperation” faction as a means of enacting the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” in cooperation with China’s economic and political elite.

In addition to Cybereason, several mainstream media reports and a series of suspect “predictions” from U.S. intelligence and other federal agencies released last year had seeded the narrative that the 2020 election would not only fail spectacularly, but that U.S. democracy “would never recover.” Now, with the TIP’s simulations added to the mix and the advent of the previously predicted chaos throughout the country with the 2020 election just two months away, it is clear that the November 3rd election will not only be a complete disaster, but a pre-planned one.

The question then becomes, who benefits from complete chaos on and following the 2020 election? As the TIP suggested in several of their simulations, the post-election role of the military in terms of domestic policing, incidentally the exact expertise of the TIP’s co-founder Rosa Brooks, looms large, as most of the aforementioned doomsday election simulations ended with the imposition of martial law or the military “stepping in” to resolve order and oversee the transition.

The domestic framework for imposing martial law in the U.S., via “continuity of government” protocols, was activated earlier this year under the guise of the coronavirus crisis and it remains in effect. Now, a series of groups deeply tied to the Washington establishment and domestic and foreign intelligence agencies have predicted the exact ways in which to engineer a failed election and manipulate its aftermath.

Who would stand to benefit the most from the imposition of martial law in the United States? I would argue that one need look no further than the battle within Washington power factions over the future of AI, which has been deemed of critical importance to national security by the public sector, the private sector and prominent think tanks. The Schmidt-led NSCAI and other bodies determining the country’s AI policy plan to implement a series of policies that will be deeply resisted by most Americans – from the elimination of individual car ownership to the elimination of cash as well as the imposition of an Orwellian surveillance system, among other things.

All of these agendas have advanced under the guise of combatting coronavirus, but their advance can only continue to use that justification for so long. For groups like the NSCAI, Americans must welcome these AI-driven advances or else, even if it means Americans face losing their jobs or their civil liberties. Otherwise, these groups and their billionaire backers argue, the U.S. will be “left out” and “left behind” when it comes time to set the new global standards for AI technology, as the U.S. will then be left in the dust by China’s growing AI industry, which is fed by its own implementation of these technologies.

By keeping Americans angry and distracted by the partisan divide through pre-planned election chaos, a “New America” waits in the wings – one that is coming regardless of what happens on election day. That is, of course, unless Americans quickly wake up to the ruse.

Viral Fantasies of Control

By Russ Bangs

Source: Volatility

It was clear from the start that if SARS-COV-2 really posed an unusual danger which in theory merited aggressive government intervention, there was no good solution since we have only incompetent and malign systems trying to apply fundamentally wrong-headed ideologies and practices against nature at her most assertive, fluid and flexible. It was always clear that the best societies could do was to take precautions to protect the most vulnerable while otherwise letting the bug do what it certainly is going to do anyway regardless of all attempts to violently segregate and suppress it. Lockdowns accomplish nothing but to delay the inevitable while adding immense collateral harms to physical and mental health, human community and culture, and radically accelerate the economic liquidation of the people.

And yet protecting the vulnerable is the one thing most Western societies refused to do, while those same societies acted very aggressively imposing every kind of worthless measure upon the general population which is not in any special danger from the bug and which inevitably must attain herd immunity. SARS-COV-2 already was irretrievably at large long before any measures were undertaken in the West, so any possibility of limiting the range and infection rate went glimmering long ago. The only likely place to have limited the virus was at the bioweapons lab where it was engineered or modified in the first place, whether this lab be in Maryland or Wuhan. Once it was let slip from there, and once it evaded any local quarantine (it was long gone by the time any measures were taken), the game was up, nature took over and the epidemiological cycle was guaranteed to complete itself. Societies never had any option but to let nature take its course toward herd immunity.

What’s been done has been exactly upside down. It’s the vulnerable who should be shielded while nature takes its course among the general population, who go about life as usual. Dominionist-technocratic rigidity can’t prevent the cycling of Gaia in spite of the delusions of the modernist religion which is merely an updated biblical dominionism. This is especially true since Western societies began their measures far too late anyway. From the start it would’ve been best to let herd immunity develop as fast as it naturally will, at which time the virus recedes from lack of hosts and is likely to mutate in a milder direction along the way. This is the only way to bring a safer environment for all including the most vulnerable. Nothing else was going to work, while the lockdowns add a long list of purely gratuitous evils: The very high number of preventable deaths from the lockdown itself, political cover for the most extraordinary Fed interventions yet to prop up the collapsing financial system, political cover for this latest Wall Street plunder expedition empowered by the lockdown’s controlled demolition of the economy, the radical escalation of the police state, the euthanasia campaign the campaign has enabled against the sickly aged, the escalation of anti-China war propaganda, the deep trauma disorienting people into total submission and social conformity, the radical aggravation of the anti-social, anti-human atomization of the people.

Those who can’t or are unwilling to understand these concepts seem motivated by prior police-statist ideology and/or mental collapse into a state of terror caused by the propaganda campaign, but it has nothing to do with rationally deliberated concern for any public health.

Therefore any debate over what in theory would be the best response if the bug was coming but not yet here always was moot. The only rational response was for society to exert itself to protect institutions where the most vulnerable are congregated while letting nature take its course through the general population, just like any regular flu.

Instead governments did the radical opposite of this, imposing general lockdowns while doing nothing real, only sham, to protect nursing homes and hospitals. As a result those became slaughterhouses. At the same time the pointless lockdowns are causing tremendous ancillary health harms and will kill more than the bug itself.

Yet even now most still believe that lockdowns and similar measures are worthy and that the bug can be stopped short of cycling thruout the population.

From day one this has been as true of “alternative” types as it is of the mainstream. Both equally heeded the propaganda call to “Stampede!” and joined the technocrat-led chorus howling the imperative, “We Have to DO Something!!” From there it follows as religious doctrine that there must exist a Good Solution when in fact no such thing exists. For most problems and crises the dissenters’ alleged Good Solution is different from that of the mainstream, but in the case of Covid they’re in lock step. Indeed the pre-existing alternative establishment largely has dissolved itself back into the mainstream, very likely permanently. Just as most individual “anti-authoritarians” have their personal fetishes which cause them to metastasize to a tyrannical advocacy, so the Covid Death Cult has proven to be the road back to authoritarian mainstream home for almost all erstwhile “dissidents”. Their regression to the neoliberal mainstream in the cases of Trump Derangement and Brexit were mere rehearsals.

Many among the apostates still cherish the Stalinesque fantasy that from the Covid apocalypse and the ashes of humanity it leaves behind will arise the phoenix day of a new city of social justice and ecological sustainability. According to this vision, the closer the economic civilization comes to totalitarianism and ecological collapse the closer it comes to a utopian transformation from all that’s bad to all that’s good. (Stalin imparted the dogma that the worse the class struggle gets, the closer society is to the communist revolution.) This is one reason why almost all leftists, “anti-authoritarians”, anti-imperialists have ardently embraced the Death Cult and acted as propagandists for it – they believe in doing so they’re speeding the descent of their version of Revelation’s New City.

But there’s no reason to believe in such daydreams. The globalist corporate system deliberately used the Covid propaganda pretext in order to undertake the controlled demolition of the global economy, precisely in order artificially to generate the conditions for a new round of elementary capitalist accumulation. The economic civilization, a metastatic cancer dependent on “growth” in order to sustain itself at all, always needs a bleeding boundary where it is rending and destroying hitherto unassimilated “resources” in order to turn them into commodities. At the limits of the globe, where the civilization has long since found itself, it can only rip open old wounds, destroy parts of itself in order to render them capable of being re-assimilated in new bouts of cancer-growth. This disaster capitalism most often has used war or economic collapse as its agent of destruction, but disasters like Hurricane Katrina or hoax disasters like Covid-19 also serve. This current, most extreme campaign of disaster capitalism is also being called the Great Reset, exactly the right term: Global capitalism, more broadly the economic civilization itself, is collapsing of its own top-heavy parasite finance extrusion and desperately has needed a reset, a vast newly devastated zone where it again can recycle its rampage. This is why the system seized upon the objectively mild Covid-19 epidemic to launch a global propaganda campaign fraudulently depicting it as a lethal pandemic, in order to gain the political pretext to lock down, i.e. deliberately demolish, the global economy which was on the verge of chaotic collapse.

Therefore any economic slowdown effects, and any environmental and social benefits which went along with this slowdown were purely incidental. Nor is there any prospect I can see of any new movement arising to turn these to pivotal social effect. No one, and least of all the leftist alternative types, actually wants any significant degrowth, any significant dismantling of the economic civilization. On the contrary all political factions agree the system must resume with all the ecocidal and mass homicidal violence of which it’s capable. There’s no constituency for any alternative path. On the contrary all system factions which purport to want a more ecologically harmonious path are touting the Green Capitalist, Green New Deal, Green Cancer/”Growth” fraud, which simply means business as usual, albeit with a “green” tone.

So there’s no way to turn the Covid-19 to “progressive” effect. This demolishes the apostates’ only constructive rationale for their adherence to the cult. (How ironic and psychopathic that they accuse Covid skeptics and dissenters of being willing to let people die, when they’re the ones who, in the same breath where they conjure the specter of millions dying also evoke utopian visions of what goodness will come of this. Not to mention that most of the deaths which have transpired were victims of the lockdownists’ own euthanasia campaign.)

There will be no control of the Coronavirus and no control of the destiny of social humanity under the boot of the terror-lockdown campaign other than in the direction of police state tyranny amid general economic devastation. This will be the direction, if the people continue to allow it and continue to embrace or obey the cult.

How big corporations are draining the life out of a sick America

If today’s companies were truly offering a fair return to the taxpayers who built their businesses, they’d be doing a lot more to ensure that all Americans have the means to support their families.

By Paul Buchheit

Source: Nation of Change

When Dr. Jonas Salk was asked about a patent on his polio vaccine in 1955, he said, “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?” When Gilead Sciences recently developed an anti-Covid drug for about $12 per treatment, they set the price at $3,200.

As Republicans and business leaders decry the word ‘social’ as anti-American, they continue to promote the free-market “winner take all” philosophy that has caused over half of our nation to try to survive without adequate health care and life savings and job opportunities. Our richest corporations are much to blame. A review of the facts should make this clear.

They continue to cheat on taxes

After building their businesses on 70 years of taxpayer-funded research and development, six dominant tech companies (Apple, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Netflix), which together are worth over $7 trillion, have avoided over a hundred billion dollars in taxes over the past decade.

The profits of some of the largest U.S. corporations are surging in this pandemic year of sickness and death. And the levels of fraud and deceit keep growing along with the profits. A shocking analysis by the Tax Justice Network concludes that “Multinational firms operating around the world are shifting over $1 trillion in profits every year to corporate tax havens.” A trillion dollars a year, lost to the people in need of jobs and food and housing.

They’ve rigged the system

Fifty years of lobbying against their own tax responsibilities has borne fruit for the big corporations. First of all, the corporate tax rate has dropped from about 35 percent to a low of 11 percent in 2019.

Secondly, the payroll tax has been used to make up the corporate shortfall. In the past fifty years the corporate percent of tax revenue from major sources has decreased from 23 percent to 7 percent. The payroll tax percent has increased from 24 percent to 39 percent. Corporations have drastically cut their taxes while putting more of the tax burden on workers.

It gets more insidious. In the past ten years Republicans have waged an anti-IRS campaign, slashing the budget of one of the most productive and cost-effective government agencies, and eliminating the positions of highly specialized employees who might have been expected to go after the largest corporations and the biggest cheaters.

And it gets personal. According to the IRS’ own Taxpayer Advocate, the average U.S. household pays $3,000 per year to make up for the delinquents and deadbeats.

Their greed reached new heights

With the 2017 corporate tax cuts came the lofty assurances that money would be freed up for new investment in jobs and R&D. So what happened? Hypocrisy happened. In the following year S&P 500 companies set a new record for buying back their stock to artificially boost stock prices for management and investors — a practice that was illegal until the Reagan years. While about a third of S&P companies are now curtailing stock buybacks in response to the pandemic, others have depleted so much of their funds that they have turned to the pandemic-inspired CARES Act for relief to “distressed industries.”

Start with the airlines. The Big Four spent $42.5 billion on buybacks between 2014 and 2019, and now they’re asking for $50 billion in bailout money. Delta CEO Ed Bastian had the audacity to say “the owners of a business deserve a return, too.” Boeing, which was actually borrowing money to buy back stock, is now asking for a $17 billion bailout from taxpayers.

Merck, whose 1950s slogan was “Medicine is for people, not for profits,” spent $10 billion on R&D in 2018 and $14 billion on share repurchases and dividends.

At Home Depot, according to the Roosevelt Institute and the National Employment Law Project, the money spent on buybacks could have boosted the average employee’s salary by $18,000 a year.

And fast food giants including KFC, Wendy’s, and Papa John’s, who, according to the New York Times, had spent great sums of money on buybacks, now need $145 billion of taxpayer funding to avoid mass layoffs.

They show disdain for the American worker

Stock buybacks are only part of the corporate trend to diminish the state of the worker. Automation is eliminating millions of jobs. The old argument that the loss of jobs to technology has always been followed by a new and better class of work becomes meaningless when the machines start doing our thinking for us. And when the changes are occurring at such a rapid pace. A McKinsey report states: “Those earlier workforce transformations took place over many decades, allowing older workers to retire and new entrants to the workforce to transition to the growing industries. But the speed of change today is potentially faster.” The speed of change is faster still because of the loss of jobs during the Covid pandemic.

Common arguments in favor of the tech companies are that (1) they’re making a lot of people rich, and (2) they’re providing all of us with remarkable products. Well, they’re making about 20% of Americans rich. And their products are a result of 70 years of taxpayer-funded research and development, much of it by government agencies. If today’s companies were truly offering a fair return to the taxpayers who built their businesses, they’d be doing a lot more to ensure that all Americans have the means to support their families.