Category Archives: Economics

Europe Is Killing Itself With Its Russian Sanctions

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

The sharp rise in natural gas price in Europe is entirely due to Western hysteria and stupidity. According to the EU’s own data, Europe is dependent on Russia for 46% of its natural gas. In the face of such extraordinary dependency on Russian energy, the moronic European “leaders” are falling all over themselves imposing impotent sanctions on Russia.  The idiotic German Chancellor actually punished the German people for Russia’s recognition of the Donbass republics by “cancelling” the Nord 2 pipeline.  This foolish act was a prime reason for the hysteria that has caused a sharp rise in prices.  The price rise helps Russia–if she continues to supply Europe with energy.  It hurts Europe and whoever financed the Nord 2 pipeline. If the pipeline sits not operating, it cannot produce a revenue stream to service the capital invested in the pipeline.  I do not know who financed the pipeline. If it was Germany, then the chancellor’s sanctions on Russia have twice injured the Germans.

The EU’s 46% dependency on Russian natural gas is independent of the Nord 2 pipeline, the opening of which has been on hold due to Washington’s pressure on Germany. Therefore, the rise in gas price is not due to a reduction of supply, but due to speculation that Russia will reduce or cut off supply. Europe is served by other pipelines.  What if Russia responds to the EU’s “sanctions” by closing the pipelines that deliver 46% of Europe’s natural gas?  What would Europe’s fate be?

Russia has accepted sanctions without replying in kind.  Perhaps it is time for Russia to impose sanctions to teach the West a lesson.

In my opinion there is no reason for Russia to deplete its own energy resources by sharing them with its European enemies.  Perhaps the Russian government’s idea was that energy sales would be a source of foreign exchange earnings and that providing Europe with energy was in the interest of good relations with the West.

Now that the West has demonstrated that the West has no interest in good relations with Russia there is no point in the Russian energy sales.  As I pointed out ( https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/02/22/russia-and-china-should-go-their-own-way/ ) Russia has no need for foreign exchange.  The Russian central bank can finance Russian economic development with no need of foreign involvement.  Russia’s holdings of instruments denominated in dollars or euros would just be confiscated by sanctions.

To summarize:  Europe brought the high energy price on itself with its thoughtless sanctions; the high prices benefit Russia and hurt Europe; Russia should consider turning off all natural gas to Europe and conserve its energy source for its own and China’s development.

Europe is nothing but a thorn in Russia’s side, a collection of Washington’s puppets.  Russia owes Europe nothing. 

Sino-Russia Energy Deals to Defeat US/NATO Expansionism

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By Salman Rafi Sheikh

Source: New Eastern Outlook

While the recent meeting between Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi in Beijing may not in itself be an extra-ordinary event, its significance against the backdrop of the on-going tussle between Russia and the US/NATO is quite unmistakable – not only for Russia itself, but for the US/NATO as well. Even though Russia does not really need China’s help to defend its sovereignty militarily or otherwise, it remains that China’s open support for Russia’s stance against the US plan to push NATO into Ukraine as a geo-political tool does debunk the US propaganda of Russian “isolation.” More than anything else, China’s growing strategic alliance allows Russia a great opportunity to withstand possible Western sanctions, or European decision to reduce its supply of gas from Russia. But co-operation in one field is often not possible without co-operation in other fields. That’s why the long joint statement issued after the meeting laid a lot of stress on jointly opposing Western plans to destabilise regions adjacent to mainland China and Russia i.e., Ukraine, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. As the sides reiterated:

“The sides oppose further enlargement of NATO and call on the North Atlantic Alliance to abandon its ideologized cold war approaches, to respect the sovereignty, security and interests of other countries, the diversity of their civilizational, cultural and historical backgrounds, and to exercise a fair and objective attitude towards the peaceful development of other States.”

While the fact that both Russia and China oppose Western expansionism both via NATO or anti-China AUKUS (Australia, United Kingdom and United States) treaty has already unsettled Western echelons of power, it is the growing co-operation between Russia and China in the energy sector that is most likely to defeat US designs vis-à-vis forcing Russia to submit. This is particularly significant given that the US is particularly interested in hurting Russia’s gas and oil sales. US President Biden recently said this, while standing next to his German counterpart, without mincing any words only recently on February 7:

“What everybody forgets here is Russia needs to be able to sell that gas and sell that oil.  Russia relies — a significant part of Russia’s budget — it’s the only thing they really have to export.  And if, in fact, it’s cut off, then they’re going to be hurt very badly, as well.  And it’s of consequence to them as well.  This is not just a one-way street.”

Moscow is, obviously, not unaware of this design. When Putin visited Beijing, he did not just attend the Winter Olympics; in fact, Putin signed a billion dollar oil and gas deal with Beijing. “Our oilmen have prepared very good new solutions on hydrocarbon supplies to the People’s Republic of China,” Putin said in Beijing. Besides the new deal, China also promised to ramp up Russia’s Far East exports. A new 30-year contract to supply 10 billion cubic meters (bcm) per year to China from Russia’s Far East was signed. With China supporting Russia’s stance on Ukraine, China’s increasing purchase of Russian oil and gas sent a powerful signal to the world that both superpowers will be taking care of each other’s interests against the combined strength of predatory western alliance, making their claims of punishing Russia hollow.

The announcement also comes against the backdrop of US claims that they – US and its allies – have a wide range of “tools” at their disposal to punish any state, including China, if they try to “backfill US exports controls” imposed on Russia. As Ned Price of the White House recently claimed in his press briefing:

“Putin knows that this would be of massive consequence to his country and to his economy. This – a closer relationship with the PRC, a closer relationship between Russia and the PRC – is not going to make up for that; it is not going to account for that. One final point. We have – and when I say we I mean collectively, the United States and our allies and partners – we have an array of tools that we can deploy if we see foreign companies, including those in China, doing their best to backfill U.S. export control actions, to evade them, to get around them.”

China’s deal, therefore, very clearly defies US threats, showing how the politics of sanctions – which is Washington’s favourite geo-political “tool” – cannot really deter states like China and Russia, who, too, posses enough “tools” to stage a counter-attack. The oil & gas deals are a manifestation of that counter-attack.

Even as many political pundits in the West have highlighted, the US plan against Russia cannot work unless Washington can first wean China away. The fact that Washington’s ties with Beijing are as bad as with Moscow means that Washington does not have enough geo-political capacity to dictate policies and decisions by really isolating Russia. Although it might still impose sanctions, China is unlikely to be bothered by them, thus defeating Washington’s plan to inflict an unacceptable level of damage on Russia, which also already has US$640 billion in foreign exchange reserves to withstand western sanctions.

But, as mentioned above, the real factor bothering the West is not what Russia can or might do in the wake of a conflict around Ukraine; the real factor is the almost absolute convergence between Russia and China on almost all issues of global politics – a fact duly highlighted via the said joint statement. This statement is not about their bi-lateral relations; in fact, it is an elaborate commentary on the challenges they are facing from the West and how these very challenges have transformed and elevated their ties to a level not known in the contemporary era.

Therefore, in the wake of US/European pressure on Russia and Moscow’s massive new deals with China means the Biden administration will now have to come up with a new plan to defeat Russia, or altogether drop its project. With Russia now clearly able to diversify its oil and gas deals away from Europe, the question is: can Europe itself do without Russia and without facing any economic backlash? It was only last week the UK government announced a whooping 54 per cent increase in domestic energy bills, causing a political outcry against the Johnson administration. The unnecessary war in Russia is already starting to bite back the war-wagers themselves.

How Empires Die

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

From a systems perspective, nation-states and empires arise when they are superior solutions to security compared to whatever arrangement they replace: feudalism, warlords, tribal confederations, etc.

States and empires fail when they are no longer the solution, they are the problem. As the book The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization explains, when the dissolution of the state / empire becomes the pain-reducing solution, the inhabitants withdraw their support and the empire loses its grip and expires.

As I explain in my new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal, states and markets are problem-solving structures. These structures solve problems by optimizing adaptability and beneficial synergies that reinforce one another as evolutionary advances.

The rise of the middle class is an example of beneficial synergies: as this new class gains access to credit, expertise, trade, enterprise and pricing power for their labor, they have the means to transform their labor into capital by saving earnings and investing the capital in assets, new enterprises, etc. which then generate income from capital which fuels synergistic increases in credit, expertise, assets and income from investments.

States / empires fail and expire when they elevate the fatal synergies created by self-serving elites. Rather than encourage the dynamics of adaptation–competition, transparency, accountability, experimentation and dissent– the elites suppresses these forces as threats to their monopolies, cartels and wealth.

Stripped of adaptability and beneficial synergies, the state / empire is no longer able to solve problems. It becomes the problem which cannot be resolved.

A key dynamic fueling fatal synergies is the hubristic confidence that low-cost abundance is a birthright bestowed by the state /empire, so resources can be endlessly squandered on excess and extremes of consumption and waste. The state / empire no longer focuses on securing the material sources of security (food, energy, etc.) or the accountability, competition, dissent and transparency required to solve systemic problems.

Instead, the state / empire dissolves into divisive camps seeking to protect their petty fiefdoms and expanding their wealth at the expense of the populace. The super-wealthy build $500 million yachts and palaces, politicians trade on their positions to accumulate fortunes, and corruption replaces governance.

Markets spiral into fatal synergies as low quality products and services, speculative excess, extremes of grotesque consumption and blood-soaked entertainment become “growth industries” while blackouts dim electrical grids and store shelves empty of essentials.

The market solution to everyone already owning everything is to engineer planned obsolescence into every product and form service-sector cartels that then strip services to the bone to juice profits, a.k.a. the crapification of all goods and services.

The state / empire also fails to maintain basic security and functions such as tax collection and a fair enforcement. Petty crimes are exploited by those in power (civil forfeiture) while resistance to the state is severely punished. There are two legal systems, one for the commoners and another for the elite.

The state / empire protects those profiting from the status quo and then calls this profiteering a “solution.” But this profiteering doesn’t solve any problems; it is the problem, as self-serving profiteering protects its privileges by corrupting the state, finance and the economy.

For its part, the market seeks to maximize profits in excesses of consumption, predatory lending (student loans), the wholesale destruction of quality by monopolies and cartels and extremes of speculation.Maximizing profits by any means available has no moral foundation; predatory student loans are profitable, obscure medical billing is profitable, selling products designed to fail is profitable, declaring software outdated is profitable, deceiving consumers is profitable, and so on, in an endless array of shoddy, unhealthy products, rapacious services, fraudulent overcharges, etc.

Since problems go unresolved, things fall apart and the masses veer into extremes of derangement and magical thinking: fanaticism is substituted for friendship, cults abound, common ground vanishes and all the failures of the system are papered over with Bread and Circuses, free money, gaudy entertainments and lifeless displays of conspicuous consumption that reveal the decay and degradation.

Protecting the few stripmining the system at the expense of the many is not problem-solving. It adds a layer of problems that the state /empire is incapable of resolving. Ossified, sclerotic, self-serving, corrupt, focused on virtue-signaling and the appearance of tackling problems rather than actually solving problems because some sacred cow would lose its privileges and income stream, the state / empire is the problem, not the solution.

When the state / empire loses the ability to recognize and solve core problems of security and fairness, it will be replaced by another arrangement that is more adaptable and adept at solving problems. Artifice, fantasy, magical thinking, excuses and absurd cover stories are not part of problem-solving. Problems can only be solved if reality is faced directly.

When reality is unacceptable because it negatively impacts those stripmining the system for private gain, the state / empire is already on its fatal spiral to collapse.

Can a Nation Prosper as its Institutions Fail?

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Economists focus on what can be easily measured: sales, profits, prices, tax revenues, etc. Since the decay and failure of institutions isn’t easily quantified, this decay doesn’t register in the realm of economics. Since it isn’t measured, it doesn’t exist.

But institutional decay and failure is all too real, and it begs the question: how can a society and economy thrive if its core institutions fail? The short answer is they cannot thrive, as institutions are the foundations of the social and economic orders.

As I explain in my new book, Global Crisis, National Renewal, the conventional view has a naive faith that “great leaders” can reverse institutional rot. This faith overlooks the systemic sources of institutional decay and failure which are outlined in the graphic below, The Lifecycle of Bureaucracy, a.k.a. institutions.

Leaders are constrained by the nature of centralized organizations and the incentive structure that slowly shifts from rewarding efforts to further the institution’s core mission to self-service and protecting an ossified, failing institution from outside scrutiny and reform.

As Samo Burja explains in his insightful essay, Why Civilizations Collapse, those inside institutions are by design so compartmentalized that few (if any) even recognize the institution is failing. As long as everything is glued together in each little compartment, no one grasps the entire institution has lost its way. And since no one recognizes it, no one attempts to save it.

Institutions end up advancing caretaker managers who excel at the political game of rising to the top of a sprawling institution. When the decay (or budget cuts) finally trigger a crisis, the institution has been stripped of visionaries with a bold grasp of what’s needed to restore the focus on the core mission and institute new incentives. The bold leaders quit in disgust or were sent to bureaucratic Siberia as potential threats to the status quo.

The problem is institutions fail by the very nature of their centralized design. The organization is centralized so directives flow down the chain of command, and every branch is compartmentalized to limit the power of each department and employee to disrupt the orderly flow of top-down directives.

Within this compartmentalized, top-down structure, the incentives are to follow procedures rather than get results. The rewards go to those who dutifully follow procedures rather than to those who raise the alarm about the loss of transparency, effectiveness and focus on fulfilling the mission.

The path of least resistance is to protect the existing structure and add more compartments, i.e. “mission creep.” Rather than focus on the dissipation of resources and the decline of the core mission, leaders add “feel good” missions and PR promotions of phony reforms and initiatives that bleed more resources from the core mission.

Consider the institution of democracy, which has been corrupted into an invitation-only auction of state favors and rentier skims. Democracies have another fatal flaw: politicians win re-election by promising virtually everyone something for nothing: more benefits and entitlements and lower taxes. The gap between higher costs and declining revenues will be filled by government borrowing.

All this additional borrowing will supposedly be paid by the magic of “growth”, which will expand tax revenues at a rate that exceeds the cost of borrowing.

But demographics, resource depletion and the diminishing returns of a consumer economy fueled by rapidly expanding public and private debt have sapped “growth” in fundamental ways. Ironically, borrowing and spending more to spur “growth” only hastens the diminishing returns of increasing debt to fund consumption today.

Democracies are thus optimized for rapid “growth” and are ill-suited to transition to DeGrowth, i.e. less of everything for the vast majority of the citizenry as resources become scarce and debt eats the economy alive. (DeGrowth could work to everyone’s benefit, which is the point of Global Crisis, National Renewal.)

Central banking is another failing institution. When faced with fiscal crises, central states/banks inevitably succumb to the temptation to print/borrow currency in whatever sums are needed to fill the shortfall of the moment, i.e. political expediency. This profligate creation of currency seems to be magic at first; everyone accepts the “new money” at the current value. But eventually gravity takes hold and the currency’s purchasing power declines, as the real economy (the production of goods and services) grows at rates far below the expansion of credit and currency.

Even the greatest empires in human history have been unable to resist the “easy” solution of devaluing currency as the means of fulfilling all the promises that were made in more prosperous times.

The progression of centralized power slowly but surely replaces the self-organizing, resilient, decentralized structures of civil society with tightly bound hierarchical centralized structures that are increasingly ineffective, increasingly costly and increasingly fragile, i.e. increasingly prone to failure or collapse.

The irony of institutional decay and failure is everyone inside is so busy following procedures that nobody notices the decay until the whole worm-eaten structure collapses. Look no farther than financialized asset bubbles, healthcare and education for examples of institutions in run-to-failure decline.

We are in effect so busy arranging the beach umbrellas per our instructions that we don’t notice the approaching tsunami. Can a nation prosper as its institutions decay and collapse? Only in the fantasies and magical thinking of the delusional.

The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security

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By Robert J. Burrowes

Governments around the world continue to impose an expanding sequence of measures to curtail rights and freedoms ostensibly to tackle a ‘virus’. In response, public demonstrations against these government measures are also ongoing and expanding with truck convoys the latest manifestation of this form of protest.

Unfortunately, while activists mistake these popular mobilizations for effective resistance, the Global Elite’s coup d’état against humanity gathers pace.

Concealed beneath the ‘virus’/‘vaccine’ narrative, and marketed by the World Economic Forum as the ‘Great Reset’, this coup is designed to utterly transform human society and even human life. This is because the detail outlined in the ‘Great Reset’ documentation, which anyone can investigate for themselves, clearly identifies intended changes to some 200 areas of human activity, essentially characterized as part of the ‘fourth industrial revolution’.

Beyond that, however, as a lengthening list of doctors, scientists and scholars have been warning us for some time, although their efforts are invariably heavily censored by corporate media, the injectables program is decimating the human population – see ‘Killing Off Humanity: How the Global Elite is using Eugenics and Transhumanism to Shape OurFuture’ – while ensuring that those who submit to it and survive will only do so as transhuman slaves. See ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.

Even beyond the injectables, however, the Global Elite is using a vast range of other measures to implement its ‘kill and control’ agenda.

One means of doing this has been to exploit the ‘pandemic’ (and its control measures such as lockdowns) to engineer the greatest redistribution of wealth from poor to rich in human history, thus starving to death vast numbers of people in Africa, Asia and Central/South America in the process – as the Director of the World Food Program had no trouble predicting in April 2020: see ‘WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’ – while impoverishing (and often rendering homeless) substantial numbers in industrialized economies as confidently predicted by geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar, also in April 2020. See ‘Who Profits From the Pandemic?’

Have these predictions been realized? As Oxfam has recently noted: ‘A new billionaire has been created every 26 hours since the pandemic began. The world’s 10 richest men have doubled their fortunes, while over 160 million people are projected to have been pushed into poverty.’ See ‘Inequality Kills: The unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19’.

But notable among the Elite’s other measures, including ongoing deployment of 5G which continues to devastate life generally – see ‘Deadly Rainbow: Will 5G Precipitate the Extinction of All Life on Earth?’ – are its ongoing efforts to destroy global supply chains, including those in relation to food, so that starvation functions to kill off far more than just marginalized populations but also to ensure that those left alive are compliant as the price of being ‘entitled’ to eat.

In essence, this component of their plan (which is now being rapidly implemented) is to disconnect humans from nature, herd us into ‘smart cities’ and destroy our sense of natural food; that is, destroy human culture.

Hence, using a combination of 5G, AI and blockchain technologies, the intention is to take complete control of food supply chains and get rid of natural food by creating lab-grown meat, synthetic foods and even ‘3D printed food’. Watch ‘Architecting the Beast System’ and ‘DARPA funds Soylent Green as Empty Shelves in USA – #BareShelvesBiden Trends’ and see ‘Don’t Be Fooled: Lab-Grown Meat Is a Disaster in the Making’.

If you have not been following the progressive destruction of small farmers, the consolidation of agricultural land, the relentless promotion of genetically-mutilated organisms (GMOs), the destruction of food supply chains, the hoarding of food and even the destruction of food supplies, as well as the ongoing efforts to feed you a combination of synthesized trash and insect-based food substitutes, let me briefly outline the evidence below and tell you how Mohandas K. Gandhi would respond.

Control of Food Historically
Since the neolithic revolution (the transition from hunting/gathering to farming) began unfolding 60,000 years ago – see The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia and Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture – humans have farmed open-pollinated seeds that simply allow a farmer to keep some seed harvested in one season to plant in the next. But that natural round has been progressively eroded over recent decades.

Among those who have spent considerable time drawing attention to what the Global Elite has been doing and plans for us in relation to food generally, Dr. Vandana Shiva is certainly an outstanding figure. In a series of articles and interviews over many years, Shiva and the organization she founded, Navdanya International, have pointed out how ownership of the genetic diversity of our food crops as well as agricultural land is being increasingly consolidated in the hands of fewer corporations owned by fewer individuals and how control of the food industry (from production to processing to distribution) is also being increasingly consolidated in the hands of fewer corporations and individuals.

Beyond this, Shiva has highlighted how capital and chemical intensive monoculture-based industrial agriculture is the biggest driver of species extinctions, including systematically wiping out the diversity of crops we grow and eat, and this has been transforming the very nature of the food we consume, not just by progressively eliminating this food diversity but also by aggressively introducing toxins and poisons in various forms as well as genetically-mutilated and, ultimately, synthetic foods. See ‘Gates to a Global Empire over Seed, Food, Health, Knowledge… and the Earth’ and ‘The Poison Cartel is Poisoning the World, Driving Species to Extinction, and Contributing to Hunger’.

As Shiva has pointed out, just one of the many outcomes of the aggressive marketing of genetically-mutilated seeds has been an epidemic of farmer suicides in India. See ‘How Monsanto’s GMO Creations Caused 291,000 Suicides in India’.

Another prominent figure who has drawn attention to the many dramatic reverses in the ownership, control and diversity of food and food production is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But to highlight just one of the myriad points made by Kennedy, he draws attention to a report highlighting that Bill Gates ‘has quietly made himself the largest owner of farmland in the United States.’ See ‘Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill’ and ‘Bill Gates: America’s Top Farmland Owner’.

Beyond this, researcher ‘Sam Parker’ has offered a history of the use of food as an instrument of control for the past 4,000 years beginning with the ominous words ‘The control of food for use as a weapon is an ancient practice.’ He nominates the major food conglomerates (Cargill, Continental Grain, Louis Drefuss, Bunge & Born, Andre, Archer Daniels Midland/Topfer, ConAgra, IBP, Nestle, Unilever, Philip Morris) and offers an explanation of how this food cartel, along with another three dozen food corporations, control the world’s food supply noting that, today, ‘food warfare is firmly under the control of London and New York’ and that the cartel is ‘prepared to apply a tourniquet to food production and export supplies, not only to poor nations, but to advanced sector nations as well’. See ‘The BA Cartel Part 2 (of a 3 Part Series)’.

So for those still unconcerned as humanity rapidly loses the little control it still has left of its food supply, it might be worthwhile to recall that infamous comment of Henry Kissinger: ‘Who controls the food supply controls the people.’

But whatever the threats to the food supply that have been accelerating and accumulating over recent decades, they have been dramatically compounded in the past two years.

Control of Food in the ‘Pandemic’ Era

Since the beginning of the so-called pandemic, global supply chains of goods, including food, have been severely disrupted with the intention of forcing them to collapse. This plan has been executed using a careful combination of restrictions implemented by governments, supposedly to contain spread of the non-existent virus. Primarily, it has included forcing workers out of their role in the production, transport and distribution of food supplies.

Hence, farmers have grappled with restrictions impeding their capacity to plant, tend and harvest crops or care for livestock, workers have been prevented from staffing canning and processing factories as well as abattoirs – see ‘Staff shortages due to COVID-19 taking a toll across all industries in NSW’ – truckers have been unavailable to transport foodstocks – see ‘COVID-19 vaccines still mandatory for Canadian cross-border truckers, feds say’ – wharf labourers have been unavailable to load shipping containers of food onto ships – see ‘The supply chain crisis is a jobs crisis’ – and supermarket shelves are empty as stores struggle with product and staff shortages, which is particularly challenging for those in remote communities with limited food retail outlets. See ‘Grocery store closures loom amid labour, product shortages’.

None of this has happened because a virus will kill us, because the virus does not exist. For just two of the myriad demonstrations of this point, see ‘COVID-19: The virus does not exist – it is confirmed!’ and ‘Statement On Virus Isolation (SOVI)’. And for an account of researcher Christine Massey’s fruitless search over the course of more than a year to find evidence of an isolated virus, via Freedom of Information requests to health/science institutions all over the world, see ‘164 health/science institutions globally all failed to cite even 1 record of “SARS-COV-2” purification, by anyone, anywhere, ever’.

Beyond restrictions supposedly imposed in response to the ‘virus’ threat, some natural disasters have disrupted food production and supply chains, such as when ‘unfavourable weather conditions’ reduced the expected potato harvest in Russia – see ‘Russia – 2021 saw potato production drop’ – drought was a key factor is Syria’s lowest wheat production in 50 years – see ‘Syria’s wheat production “lowest in 50 years” with fears of mass starvation: UN’ – and a flood shut down Vancouver, the largest port in Canada: ‘The floods temporarily shut down much of the movement of wheat and canola from Canada, one of the world’s biggest grain exporters’. See ‘Floods cut rail access to Canada’s Vancouver port, disrupting goods shipments’.

Moreover, some food supplies, notably including grain among other products, are being hoarded. ‘Less than 20% of the world’s population has managed to stockpile more than half of the globe’s maize and other grains, leading to steep price increases across the planet and dropping more countries into famine. The hoarding is taking place in China…. Over the past five years, China’s soybean, maize and wheat imports soared two- to twelvefold on aggressive purchases from the U.S., Brazil and other supplier nations. Imports of beef, pork, dairy and fruit jumped two- to fivefold.’ The food, including grains to be fed to farm animals, is being stored in massive food-stockpiling bases but also in container ships anchored in the port at Dalian waiting to be unloaded. See ‘China hoards over half the world’s grain, pushing up global prices’.

Other countries that traditionally supply food products just turned off the export tap early in the ‘pandemic’ to keep food supplies for domestic consumption. See ‘Countries Are Starting to Hoard Food, Threatening Global Trade’.

And food stocks are being destroyed as, for example, the ongoing worker shortages continue to serve the insidious ‘kill and control’ agenda of the elite – see ‘30,000 pigs culled on farms [in UK] as backlog remains “dire”’ – and the periodic ‘apocalyptic bird flu’ nonsense – see ‘Scientists say an apocalyptic bird flu could wipe out half of humanity’ and ‘UK: “Apocalyptic Bird Flu” Jumps to Humans as Authorities Cull Millions of Birds’ – gets yet another run and, as just one example, was used to ‘justify’ the slaughter of a million egg-laying hens in Israel. See ‘Massive New Bird Flu Outbreak Could Be 2022’s Deadly Pandemic’.

More simply, perhaps, it is easy to prevent unvaccinated farmers from delivering crops to grain silos, as happened in Australia, for example. Watch ‘Farmers, Truckers STOPPED as Food Supply Collapses’.

Beyond these problems, however, it is happening because of the interrelated nature of supply chains, including when they collapse. Farmers have been having increasing problems growing food because of the difficulties of obtaining vital inputs, ranging from fertilizers for which ‘supply chain logistics are a mess’ – see ‘Supply chain problems contribute to fertilizer worries’ – and pesticides – see ‘Pesticide industry battling supply chain challenges, working to ensure 2022 availability’ – to machine parts and other inputs – see ‘Supply chain issues hitting all segments of ag’ – as supply chains in other sectors have been shut down too.

Sometimes, there are simply no available empty containers on which to load the produce. See ‘Why there will be no end to the global container crisis anytime soon’.

And even the deployment of 5G, catastrophic for other reasons as noted above, is now exacerbating supply chain problems as it is introduced. See ‘Airlines warn of “catastrophic” crisis when new 5G service is deployed’ and ‘Why 5G Is Dangerous for Planes — and People’.

Is all of this a total surprise?
Not if you are aware of the script of the 2015 Center for American Progress simulation ‘Food Chain Reaction: A Global Food Security Game’, or have followed the progressive destruction of the food supply chain in recent years. Watch ‘Farmers Panic, Can’t Get Supplies to Grow Food’.

What Can You Do?
Fortunately, a great deal. But I gently encourage you to get on with it!

As Mohandas K. Gandhi, who was assassinated 74 years ago on 30 January 1948, was teaching more than 100 years ago, self-reliance is still the safest option, particularly when it comes to food. Whether grown in your own backyard or a community garden, and perhaps participating in a local trading scheme and/or possibly a local farmers market, individual, family and community self-reliance in food-growing is the only viable option for the near-term future if survival is among your desired personal outcomes.

If you want to grow your own food with the intention of becoming self-sufficient and you are starting from scratch, watch this recent webinar by Marjory Wildcraft, coordinator of the Grow Food Network: ‘You Can Grow Food’.

There is high quality information on growing food for vegans and vegetarians in John Jeavons’ book How to Grow More Vegetables.

In this video, the Ice Age Farmer, Christian Westbrook, interviews Marjory Wildcraft about working with the local community to establish and maintain a community food garden: ‘Building Food Security through Community – Marjory Wildcraft’.

And David Holmgren, co-originator of permaculture, offers excellent resources explaining how to create a permaculture food garden for your backyard and community at his website Holmgren Design.

But don’t forget, if you are not resisting the elite agenda overall, it won’t matter how self-reliant in food production you have become, you will be killed or enslaved by another component of the multifaceted nature of the elite plan.

Information on strategically resisting the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ is explained on the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ website and the simplest form of this strategic resistance is outlined on the one-page flyers, now available in 15languages (Czech, Danish, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Spanish & Slovak) with more in the pipeline.

If strategically resisting the ‘Great Reset’ appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group as well.

Conclusion

The global food supply chain is being systematically destroyed. This is happening as part of the overall elite agenda to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslave those left alive. Any reading of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ program and its related eugenicist and transhumanist agendas makes this clear even if, occasionally, one needs to read between the lines.

While resisting this entire agenda is an absolute necessity if humanity is to survive in the form we have existed for the past 200,000 years, our sustained resistance is going to depend on people being able to eat.

So getting organized to defend yourself and your family by growing your own food and working with like-minded people in your local community are essential elements of our survival even if, in itself, self-reliance in food production is not enough.

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

The Fed Has Triggered A Stagflationary Disaster That Will Hit Hard This Year

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.US

I don’t think I can overstate the danger that the U.S. economy is in right now as we enter 2022. While most people are caught up in the ongoing drama of Covid-19, a REAL threat looms over the nation in the form of a stagflationary tidal wave. The mainstream media is attempting to place the blame on “supply chain disruptions,” but this is a misrepresentation of the issue.

The two factors are indeed intertwined, but the reality is that inflation is the cause of supply chain disruptions, not the result of supply chain disruptions. If we look at the underlying stats for price rises in essential products we can get a clearer picture.

Before I get into my argument, I really want to stress that this is a precarious time and I suggest that people prepare accordingly. In just the past few months I have seen personal expenses rise at least 20% overall, and I’m sure it’s the same or worse for most of you. Stocking necessities and safe-haven investments with intrinsic value like physical precious metals are a good choice for protecting whatever buying power your dollars have left…

Higher prices everywhere

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) is officially at the highest levels in 40 years. CPI measurements often diminish the scale of the problem because they do not include things like food, energy and housing which are core expenses for the public. CPI calculations have also been “adjusted” over the past few decades by the government to express a more positive view on inflation. If we look at the inflation numbers at Shadowstats, calculated according to the same methods they used in the 1980’s, we see a dramatic increase in CPI which paints a more dire (but more accurate) picture.

U.S. food prices have spiked to levels not seen since 2008 at the onset of the credit and derivatives collapse that brought about tens of trillions of dollars in Federal Reserve bailouts.

If we look beyond the 2008 crisis, food costs do not see a similar jump until the 1980s. Rising food prices in the US are often obscured by creative accounting and “shrinkflation” (shrinking packages and rising prices), but if we look at global food prices the average is a 30% jump in the past year.

Rental and home prices have also gone into the stratosphere. Rental costs went up around 18% in 2021, and this is an extension of a trend that has been prevalent for the past decade. Prices have been rising for a while, it’s just that now the avalanche has accelerated.

Home prices are currently out of the range of most new potential home buyers. Values jumped 16% in the past year alone, with the average property costing $408,000. Home sales continue to remain elevated compared to two years ago despite inflating prices for one reason and one reason only – the mass migration of Americans away from the draconian mandates and bureaucracy of blue states into more conservative states.

I live in Montana, a primary destination for people relocating, and from my experience the majority of these people are conservatives seeking to escape the vaccine and lockdown mandates in places like California, New York and Illinois. They see the writing on the wall and they are trying to get ahead of the economic and social calamity that will surely befall such states.

I would also note that home sales have finally begun to flatten in the past six months but prices are not dropping, which is a trend that I think needs to be explored further because it illustrates the larger issue of stagflation.

When inflation becomes stagflation

Understand that prices are not just rising because of increased demand (demand is starting to fall in many sectors), prices are rising because of increased money supply and dollar devaluation which is not yet being reflected in the Dollar Index.

Take a look at U.S. GDP and you will see that for the past several years it has tracked in tandem with price inflation. Obviously, if prices inflate then this means people are spending more, which then leads to higher U.S. GDP; it’s like magic, right? In other words, inflation makes it seem as though U.S. GDP is always improving.

However, this has not been the case in the past couple of years.

Official GDP has flattened despite the fact that U.S. money supply and inflation have rocketed higher. What does this mean? I believe it is a sign of stagflation and a reckoning in 2022. If we examine inflation adjusted GDP numbers from Shadowstats we see that GDP has declined rather aggressively in the past couple of years.

We can also see odd tendencies in oil and gasoline prices. While it’s true that gas prices have been higher in the past, this does not address the full context of the situation. U.S. travel spending has declined 12% since 2019 and airline travel has dropped at least 21% in the past year. Average gasoline usage dropped after 2019 and still has not recovered. Yet, gas prices continue to rise? In other words, travel demand is stagnant but prices are INCREASING – this is another signal of inflationary pressures and dollar devaluation. Oil is priced in dollars globally, and therefore any inflation in the dollar will be readily visible in oil. This would help explain why pandemic paranoia and reduced travel have not caused gas prices to drop.

If the current momentum continues the majority of necessities in the U.S. will not be affordable for most people by next year. We are looking at a fast-moving decline in production along with a swift explosion in prices. In other words, a stagflationary disaster.

This is the Federal Reserve’s fault

I and many other alternative economists have been warning about the inevitable inflation/stagflation crisis for years, but the most important factor to understand is WHO is responsible this event?

The mainstream financial media is going to protect the government and the Federal Reserve at all costs during this breakdown. They are going to blame Covid, the lockdowns here and overseas as well as the supply chain bottleneck.

The Fed is the true culprit, though.

While there have been many American Presidents and other politicians that have supported the Fed in its inflationary activities, the central bank itself needs to be held accountable for the downturn that is about to occur. This is a process that started back at the founding of the Fed, but spread like cancer after the crash of 2008 and the introduction of 12+ years of stimulus and bailout measures along with near-zero interest rates.

The inflationary end-game

The pandemic is the perfect cover for the inflationary end game. In 2008 the response to the crisis was to print and pump dollars into banks and corporations in the U.S. and around the globe. This money supply was held in corporate coffers and in central banks overseas, which slowed the effects of inflation. This set the precedent for subversive stimulus policies by giving the Fed a blank check to do whatever it wanted.

In 2020, the Fed created trillions more but this time the money was injected directly into the U.S. economy through Covid stimulus checks, PPP loans and other measures. In the alternative economic field we call this “helicopter money.” These dollars triggered a massive retail buying spree in 2020, but with more dollars in the economy chasing less goods prices are now spiking much higher.

The big discussion today is whether or not the Fed will taper their asset purchases, reduce their balance sheet and raise interest rates to counter inflation?

The fact is it won’t matter; inflation/stagflation will continue or even accelerate as the Fed tapers. With a taper comes the threat of a flattening yield curve in Treasury bonds as well as the danger of bonds and dollars being dumped by foreign investors and central banks. If the trillions upon trillions of dollars being held overseas come flooding back into the U.S., inflation will continue at its current pace or erupt even higher. In fact, the world’s ownership of dollars reached a 26-year low recently. The global transition away from the dollar, toward inflation-resistant investments, has already begun.

This is not a policy error

I explained this Catch-22 threat in my recent article The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is a Weapon, Not a Policy Error. In that essay I outline the Fed’s documented history of creating economic disasters that conveniently end up benefiting their friends in the international banks.

I also explained (with evidence) how the Federal Reserve actually takes its marching orders from the Bank for International Settlements, a globalist institution which along with the International Monetary Fund and World Economic Forum is openly seeking a one-world economic system and one-world currency system.

I do not believe that the Fed’s actions are a product of ignorance or stupidity or basic greed. I do not believe the Fed is scrambling to keep the U.S. economy afloat. I believe according to the evidence that the Fed knows exactly what it is doing. The pandemic offers a perfect scapegoat for an engineered crash of the U.S. economy which the Fed is trying to facilitate.

Why? Because the more desperate people are financially, the easier they are to buy off with false promises and a loaf of bread. They are easier to control. On top of that, with the U.S. economy reduced to second- or third-world status, it is easier to sell the public on the predetermined solution – total global centralization and far less freedom.

As the stagflationary crash plays out, never forget who was really the cause of the public’s suffering. In the fog of national crisis it is easy for the establishment to shift blame and responsibility and to cloud the truth. The inflation calamity is about to get much worse, and as it does we need to rally newly awakened people to take action against the central bankers and globalists behind it.

Politics Is Dead, Here’s What Killed It

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Representational democracy–a.k.a. politics as a solution to social and economic problems–has passed away. It did not die a natural death. Politics developed a cancer very early in life (circa the early 1800s), caused by wealth outweighing public opinion. This cancer spread slowly but metastasized in the past few decades, spreading to every nook and cranny of our society and economy as “democracy” devolved into an invitation-only auction of elections and political favors.

Politics might have had a fighting chance but three forces betrayed the nation and its citizenry.

1. The Federal Reserve transferred trillions of dollars of unearned wealth into the feeding troughs of the super-wealthy and corporations, vastly increasing the wealth the top 0.01% had to buy elections and favors. The Federal Reserve cloaked its treachery with jargon– quantitative easing, stimulus, etc.–and then stabbed the nation’s representational democracy in the back.

2. The Supreme Court betrayed the nation’s representative democracy by labeling corporations buying elections and political favors a form of “free speech.” (Please don’t hurt yourself laughing too hard.) The Supreme Court’s equating wealth buying elections and favors with individual citizens’ sacrosanct right of free speech was a knife in the back of the nation and its citizenry.

3. The two political parties betrayed their traditional voter bases to kneel at the altar of corporate / elite wealth, wealth which bought elections and political favors. The Democrats, traditional champions of the workforce in the 20th century, abandoned workers in favor of serving their corporate masters, masking their betrayal with fine-sounding phrases.

The Republican Party, traditionally promoters of Big Business (Wall Street, banks, mega-corporations), had maintained a narrow but crucial interest in trust-busting (limiting monopolies) to defend free enterprise and small business from the predations of monopolies and cartels. Those days are long past; just as the Democratic Party tossed the working class overboard to the sharks, the Republican Party walked small business off the gangplank right into the voracious jaws of cartels and globalized, financialized corporate sharks.

To cloak their betrayal and treachery, the parties have pursued a divide-and-conquer distraction game, pushing half the nation into one-size-fits-all “enemies lists” with labels that have lost all meaning other than as means to promote divisiveness and rancor: Liberal and Conservative, socialist and capitalist, etc.

It’s not the citizenry who are “deplorable,” it’s the parties’ corporate-derriere-kissing toadies, lackeys, apparatchiks, purveyors of propaganda, enforcers, apologists, sycophants, grifters and “leaders” who manage to greatly increase their private wealth while “serving the public” (heh).

These three betrayals of public trust and representational democracy caused the demise of politics as a solution to social and economic problems. “Politics” has been stripped to its essence: an invitation-only auction of elections and political favors. The price to watch from the rear of the auction is $1 million; to actually place a bid, the minimum is $10 million, but the winning bids are generally much higher.

(Lobbying, campaign contributions, bogus think-tanks, and philanthro-capitalist foundations are all part of the auction funding.)

Here’s “politics” in America now: come with mega-millions or don’t even bother to show up. Choose which “enemies list” you want to be on; there’s not much choice. And don’t forget to put a flower on the grave of representational democracy.

Totalitarian Paranoia Run Amok: Pandemics, Lockdowns & Martial Law

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By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead

Source: The Rutherford Institute

“Totalitarian paranoia runs deep in American society, and it now inhabits the highest levels of government.”—Professor Henry Giroux

Once upon a time, there was a government so paranoid about its hold on power that it treated everyone and everything as a threat and a reason to expand its powers. Unfortunately, the citizens of this nation believed everything they were told by their government, and they suffered for it.

When terrorists attacked the country, and the government passed massive laws aimed at paving the way for a surveillance state, the people believed it was done merely to keep them safe. The few who disagreed were labeled traitors.

When the government waged costly preemptive wars on foreign countries, insisting it was necessary to protect the nation, the citizens believed it. And when the government brought the weapons and tactics of war home to use against the populace, claiming it was just a way to recycle old equipment, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled unpatriotic.

When the government spied on its own citizens, claiming they were looking for terrorists hiding among them, the people believed it. And when the government began tracking the citizenry’s movements, monitoring their spending, snooping on their social media, and surveying them about their habits—supposedly in an effort to make their lives more efficient—the people believed that, too. The few who disagreed were labeled paranoid.

When the government allowed private companies to take over the prison industry and agreed to keep the jails full, justifying it as a cost-saving measure, the people believed them. And when the government started arresting and jailing people for minor infractions, claiming the only way to keep communities safe was to be tough on crime, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were labeled soft on crime.

When the government hired crisis actors to take part in disaster drills, never alerting the public to which “disasters” were staged, the people genuinely believed they were under attack. And when the government insisted it needed greater powers to prevent such attacks from happening again, the people believed that too. The few who disagreed were told to shut up or leave the country.

When the government started carrying out covert military drills around the country, insisting it was necessary to train the troops for foreign combat, most of the people believed them. The few who disagreed, fearing that perhaps all was not what it seemed, were shouted down as conspiracy theorists and quacks.

When government leaders locked down the nation, claiming it was the only way to prevent an unknown virus from sickening the populace, the people believed them and complied with the mandates and quarantines. The few who resisted or voiced skepticism about the government’s edicts were denounced as selfish and dangerous and silenced on social media.

When the government expanded its war on terrorism to include domestic terrorists, the people believed that only violent extremists would be targeted. Little did they know that anyone who criticizes the government can be considered an extremist.

By the time the government began using nationalized police and the military to routinely lockdown the nation, the citizenry had become so acclimated to such states of emergency that they barely even noticed the prison walls that had grown up around them.

Now every fable has a moral, and the moral of this story is to beware of anyone who urges you to ignore your better instincts and blindly trust that the government has your best interests at heart.

In other words, if it looks like trouble and it smells like trouble, you can bet there’s trouble afoot.

Unfortunately, the government has fully succeeded in recalibrating our general distaste for anything that smacks too overtly of tyranny.

After all, like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

It’s happening already.

The sight of police clad in body armor and gas masks, wielding semiautomatic rifles and escorting an armored vehicle through a crowded street, a scene likened to “a military patrol through a hostile city,” no longer causes alarm among the general populace.

We’ve allowed ourselves to be acclimated to the occasional lockdown of government buildings, military drills in small towns so that special operations forces can get “realistic military training” in “hostile” territory, and  Live Active Shooter Drill training exercises, carried out at schools, in shopping malls, and on public transit, which can and do fool law enforcement officials, students, teachers and bystanders into thinking it’s a real crisis.

Still, you can’t say we weren’t warned.

Back in 2008, an Army War College report revealed that “widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security.” The 44-page report went on to warn that potential causes for such civil unrest could include another terrorist attack, “unforeseen economic collapse, loss of functioning political and legal order, purposeful domestic resistance or insurgency, pervasive public health emergencies, and catastrophic natural and human disasters.”

In 2009, reports by the Department of Homeland Security surfaced that called on the government to subject right-wing and left-wing activists and military veterans to full-fledged, pre-crime surveillance.

Meanwhile, the government has been amassing an arsenal of military weapons, including hollow point bullets, for use domestically and equipping and training their “troops” for war. Even government agencies with largely administrative functions such as the Food and Drug Administration, Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Smithsonian have been acquiring body armor, riot helmets and shields, cannon launchers and police firearms and ammunition. In fact, there are now at least 120,000 armed federal agents carrying such weapons who possess the power to arrest.

Rounding out this profit-driven campaign to turn American citizens into enemy combatants (and America into a battlefield) is a technology sector that has been colluding with the government to create a Big Brother that is all-knowing, all-seeing and inescapable. It’s not just the drones, fusion centers, license plate readers, stingray devices and the NSA that you have to worry about. You’re also being tracked by the black boxes in your cars, your cell phone, smart devices in your home, grocery loyalty cards, social media accounts, credit cards, streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, and e-book reader accounts.

And then there are the military drills that have been taking place on American soil in recent years.

In the latest “unconventional warfare exercise,” dubbed “Robin Sage,” special forces soldiers will battle seasoned “freedom fighters” in a “realistic” guerrilla war across two dozen North Carolina counties.

Robin Sage follows on the heels of other such military drills, including Jade Helm, which involved U.S. Army Special Operations Command, the Navy Seals, Air Force Special Operations, Marine Special Operations Command, Marine Expeditionary Units, the 82nd Airborne Division, and other interagency partners.

According to the government, these planned military exercises are supposed to test and practice unconventional warfare including, but not limited to, guerrilla warfare, subversion, sabotage, intelligence activities, and unconventional assisted recovery.

The training, known as Realistic Military Training (RMT) because it will be conducted outside of federal property, are carried out on both public and private land, with locations marked as “hostile territory,” permissive, uncertain (leaning friendly), or uncertain (leaning hostile).

This is psychological warfare at its most sophisticated.

Add these military exercises onto the list of other troubling developments that have taken place over the past 30 years or more, and suddenly, the overall picture seems that much more sinister: the expansion of the military industrial complex and its influence in Washington DC, the rampant surveillance, the corporate-funded elections and revolving door between lobbyists and elected officials, the militarized police, the loss of our freedoms, the injustice of the courts, the privatized prisons, the school lockdowns, the roadside strip searches, the military drills on domestic soil, the fusion centers and the simultaneous fusing of every branch of law enforcement (federal, state and local), the stockpiling of ammunition by various government agencies, the active shooter drills that are indistinguishable from actual crises, the economy flirting with near collapse, the growing social unrest, the socio-psychological experiments being carried out by government agencies, etc.

And then you have the government’s Machiavellian schemes for unleashing all manner of dangers on an unsuspecting populace, then demanding additional powers in order to protect “we the people” from the threats. Almost every national security threat that the government has claimed greater powers in order to fight—all the while undermining the liberties of the American citizenry—has been manufactured in one way or another by the government.

What we’ve seen play out before us is more than mere totalitarian paranoia run amok.

What has unfolded over the past few years has been a test to see how well “we the people” have assimilated the government’s lessons in compliance, fear and police state tactics; a test to see how quickly “we the people” will march in lockstep with the government’s dictates, no questions asked; and a test to see how little resistance “we the people” will offer up to the government’s power grabs when made in the name of national security.

Most critically of all, this has been a test to see whether the Constitution—and our commitment to the principles enshrined in the Bill of Rights—could survive a national crisis and true state of emergency.

We have failed the test abysmally.

We have also made it way too easy for a government that has been working hard to destabilize to lockdown the nation.

Mark my words, there’s trouble brewing.

Better yet, take a look at “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” a Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command.

The training video is only five minutes long, but it says a lot about the government’s mindset, the way its views the citizenry, and the so-called “problems” that the government must be prepared to address in the near future through the use of martial law.

Even more troubling, however, is what this military video doesn’t say about the Constitution, about the rights of the citizenry, and about the dangers of locking down the nation and using the military to address political and social problems.

The training video anticipates that all hell will break loose by 2030—that’s barely eight short years away—but we’re already witnessing a breakdown of society on virtually every front.

The danger signs are screaming out a message

The government is anticipating trouble (read: civil unrest), which is code for anything that challenges the government’s authority, wealth and power.

According to the Pentagon training video created by the Army for U.S. Special Operations Command, the U.S. government is grooming its armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems.

What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security.

The chilling five-minute training video, obtained by The Intercept through a FOIA request and made available online, paints an ominous picture of the future—a future the military is preparing for—bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots.

And then comes the kicker. Three-and-a-half minutes into the Pentagon’s dystopian vision of “a world of Robert Kaplan-esque urban hellscapes—brutal and anarchic supercities filled with gangs of youth-gone-wild, a restive underclass, criminal syndicates, and bands of malicious hackers,” the ominous voice of the narrator speaks of a need to “drain the swamps.”

The government wants to use the military to drain the swamps of futuristic urban American cities of “noncombatants and engage the remaining adversaries in high intensity conflict within.” And who are these noncombatants, a military term that refers to civilians who are not engaged in fighting? They are, according to the Pentagon, “adversaries.” They are “threats.”

They are the “enemy.”

They are people who don’t support the government, people who live in fast-growing urban communities, people who may be less well-off economically than the government and corporate elite, people who engage in protests, people who are unemployed, people who engage in crime (in keeping with the government’s fast-growing, overly broad definition of what constitutes a crime).

In other words, in the eyes of the U.S. military, noncombatants are American citizens a.k.a. domestic extremists a.k.a. enemy combatants who must be identified, targeted, detained, contained and, if necessary, eliminated.

In the future imagined by the Pentagon, any walls and prisons that are built will be used to protect the societal elite—the haves—from the have-nots.

If you haven’t figured it out already, we the people are the have-nots.

Suddenly, the events of recent years begin to make sense: the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers.

The government is systematically locking down the nation and shifting us into martial law.

This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

As Nazi Field Marshal Hermann Goering remarked during the Nuremberg trials:

It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

It does indeed work the same in every country.

It’s time to wake up and stop being deceived by government propaganda.

Mind you, by “government,” I’m not referring to the highly partisan, two-party bureaucracy of the Republicans and Democrats.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, I’m referring to “government” with a capital “G,” the entrenched Deep State that is unaffected by elections, unaltered by populist movements, and has set itself beyond the reach of the law. I’m referring to the corporatized, militarized, entrenched bureaucracy that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country and calling the shots in Washington DC, no matter who sits in the White House.

Be warned: in the future envisioned by the government, we will not be viewed as Republicans or Democrats. Rather, “we the people” will all be enemies of the state.