Category Archives: Economics

Corporate Power: Who Owns the World?

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By Dr. Joseph Mercola

Source: The Herland Report

Who Owns the World? A handful of mega corporations — private investment companies — dominate every aspect of our lives; everything we eat, drink, wear or use in one way or another.

These investment firms are so enormous, they control the money flow worldwide.

While there appear to be hundreds of competing brands on the market, like Russian nesting dolls, larger parent companies own multiple smaller brands. In reality, all packaged food brands, for example, are owned by a dozen or so larger parent companies. (Feature photo: A rare photo of The Federal Reserve Board of Governors)

These parent companies, in turn, are owned by shareholders, and the largest shareholders are the same in all of them: Vanguard and Blackrock, writes Dr. Joseph Mercola, osteopathic physician, best-selling author and recipient of multiple awards in the field of natural health.

No matter what industry you look at, the top shareholders, and therefore decision makers, are the same: Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street and/or Berkshire Hathaway. In virtually every major company, you find these names among the top 10 institutional investors.

These major investment firms are in turn owned by their own set of shareholders. One of the most amazing things about this scheme is that the institutional investors also own each other.

They’re all shareholders in each other’s companies. At the very top are Vanguard and Blackrock. Blackrock’s largest shareholder is Vanguard, which does not disclose the identity of its shareholders due to its unique structure.

To understand what’s really going on, watch Tim Gielen’s hour-long documentary, “MONOPOLY: Who Owns the World?”

Who Owns the World? Until recently, it appeared economic competition had been driving the rise and fall of small and large companies across the U.S. Supposedly, PepsiCo is Coca Cola’s competitor, Apple and Android vie for your loyalty and drug companies battle for your health care dollars. However, all of that turns out to be an illusion.

Since the mid-1970s, two corporations — Vanguard and Blackrock — have gobbled up most companies in the world, effectively destroying the competitive market on which America’s strength has rested, leaving only false appearances behind.

Indeed, the global economy may be the greatest illusionary trick ever pulled over the eyes of people around the world. To understand what’s really going on, watch Tim Gielen’s hour-long documentary, “MONOPOLY: Who Owns the World?” above.

Corporate Domination

Who Owns the World? As noted by Gielen, who narrates the film, a handful of mega corporations — private investment companies — dominate every aspect of our lives; everything we eat, drink, wear or use in one way or another. These investment firms are so enormous, they control the money flow worldwide. So, how does this scheme work?

While there appear to be hundreds of competing brands on the market, like Russian nesting dolls, larger parent companies own multiple smaller brands. In reality, all packaged food brands, for example, are owned by a dozen or so larger parent companies.

Pepsi Co. owns a long list of food, beverage and snack brands, as does Coca-Cola, Nestle, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars, Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Danone and Associated British Foods. Together, these parent companies monopolize the packaged food industry, as virtually every food brand available belongs to one of them.

These companies are publicly traded and are run by boards, where the largest shareholders have power over the decision making. This is where it gets interesting, because when you look up who the largest shareholders are, you find yet another monopoly.

While the topmost shareholders can change from time to time, based on shares bought and sold, two companies are consistently listed among the top institutional holders of these parent companies: The Vanguard Group Inc. and Blackrock Inc.

Pepsi and Coca-Cola — An Example

Who Owns the World? For example, while there are more than 3,000 shareholders in Pepsi Co., Vanguard and Blackrock’s holdings account for nearly one-third of all shares. Of the top 10 shareholders in Pepsi Co., the top three, Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation, own more shares than the remaining seven.

Now, let’s look at Coca-Cola Co., Pepsi’s top competitor. Who owns Coke? As with Pepsi, the majority of the company shares are held by institutional investors, which number 3,155 (as of the making of the documentary).

As shown in the film, three of the top four institutional shareholders of Coca-Cola are identical with that of Pepsi: Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation. The No. 1 shareholder of Coca-Cola is Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

These four — Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street and Berkshire Hathaway — are the four largest investment firms on the planet. “So, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are anything but competitors,” Gielen says. And the same goes for the other packaged food companies. All are owned by the same small group of institutional shareholders.

Big Tech Monopoly

Who Owns the World? The monopoly of these investment firms isn’t relegated to the packaged food industry. You find them dominating virtually all other industries as well. Take Big Tech, for example. Among the top 10 largest tech companies we find Apple, Samsung, Alphabet (parent company of Google), Microsoft, Huawei, Dell, IBM and Sony.

Here, we find the same Russian nesting doll setup. For example, Facebook owns Whatsapp and Instagram. Alphabet owns Google and all Google-related businesses, including YouTube and Gmail.

It’s also the biggest developer of Android, the main competitor to Apple. Microsoft owns Windows and Xbox. In all, four parent companies produce the software used by virtually all computers, tablets and smartphones in the world. Who, then, owns them? Here’s a sampling:

  • Facebook — More than 80% of Facebook shares are held by institutional investors, and the top institutional holders are the same as those found in the food industry: Vanguard and Blackrock being the top two, as of the end of March 2021. State Street Corporation is the fifth biggest shareholder
  • Apple — The top four institutional investors are Vanguard, Blackrock, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street Corporation
  • Microsoft — The top three institutional shareholders are Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation

You can continue going through the list of tech brands — companies that build computers, smart phones, electronics and household appliances — and you’ll repeatedly find Vanguard, Blackrock, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street Corporation among the top shareholders.

Who Owns the World? A famous David Rockefeller quote, the dream of a global political and economic structure – one world.

Same Small Group Owns Everything Else Too

Who Owns the World? The same ownership trend exists in all other industries. Gielen offers yet another example to prove this statement is not an exaggeration:

“Let’s say we want to plan a vacation. On our computer or smart phone, we look for a cheap flight to the sun through websites like Skyscanner and Expedia, both of which are owned by the same group of institutional investors [Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation].

We fly with one of the many airlines [American Airlines, Air France, KLM, United Airlines, Delta and Transavia] of which the majority of the shares are often owned by the same investors …

The airline we fly [on] is in most cases a Boeing or an Airbus. Again, we see the same [institutional shareholders]. We look for a hotel or an apartment through Bookings.com or AirBnB.com. Once we arrive at our destination, we go out to dinner and we write a review on Trip Advisor. The same investors are at the basis of every aspect of our journey.

And their power goes even much further, because even the kerosene that fuels the plane comes from one of their many oil companies and refineries. Just like the steel that the plane is made of comes from one of their many mining companies.

This small club of investment companies, banks and mutual funds, are also the largest shareholders in the primary industries, where our raw materials come from.”

The same goes for the agricultural industry that the global food industry depends on, and any other major industry. These institutional investors own Bayer, the world’s largest seed producer; they own the largest textile manufacturers and many of the largest clothing companies.

They own the oil refineries, the largest solar panel producers and the automobile, aircraft and arms industries. They own all the major tobacco companies, and all the major drug companies and scientific institutes too. They also own the big department stores and the online marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and AliExpress.

They even own the payment methods we use, from credit card companies to digital payment platforms, as well as insurance companies, banks, construction companies, telephone companies, restaurant chains, personal care brands and cosmetic brands.

No matter what industry you look at, the top shareholders, and therefore decision makers, are the same: Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street and/or Berkshire Hathaway. In virtually every major company, you find these names among the top 10 institutional investors.

Who Owns the Investment Firms of the World?

Who Owns the World? Diving deeper, we find that these major investment firms are in turn owned by their own set of shareholders. One of the most amazing things about this scheme is that the institutional investors — and there are many more than the primary four we’ve focused on here — also own each other. They’re all shareholders in each other’s companies.At the top of the pyramid — the largest Russian doll of all — we find Vanguard and Blackrock.

“Together, they form an immense network that we can compare to a pyramid,” Gielen says. Smaller institutional investors, such as Citibank, ING and T. Rowe Price, are owned by larger investment firms such as Northern Trust, Capital Group, 3G Capital and KKR.

Those investors in turn are owned by even larger investment firms, like Goldman Sachs and Wellington Market, which are owned by larger firms yet, such as Berkshire Hathaway and State Street. At the top of the pyramid — the largest Russian doll of all — we find Vanguard and Blackrock.

“The power of these two companies is something we can barely imagine,” Gielen says. “Not only are they the largest institutional investors of every major company on earth, they also own the other institutional investors of those companies, giving them a complete monopoly.”

Gielen cites data from Bloomberg, showing that by 2028, Vanguard and BlackRock are expected to collectively manage $20 trillion-worth of investments. In the process, they will own almost everything on planet Earth.

BlackRock — The Fourth Branch of Government

Who Owns the World? Bloomberg has also referred to BlackRock as the “fourth branch of government,” due to its close relationship with the central banks. BlackRock actually lends money to the central bank, the federal reserve, and is their principal adviser.

Dozens of BlackRock employees have held senior positions in the White House under the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations. BlackRock also developed the computer system that the central banks use.

While Larry Fink is the figurehead of BlackRock, being its founder, chairman and chief executive officer, he’s not the sole decision maker, as BlackRock too is owned by shareholders. Here we find yet another curiosity, as the largest shareholder of BlackRock is Vanguard.

Who Owns the World? “This is where it gets dark,” Gielen says. Vanguard has a unique structure that blocks us from seeing who the actual shareholders are. “The elite who own Vanguard don’t want anyone to know they are the owners of the most powerful company on earth.” Still, if you dig deep enough, you can find clues as to who these owners are.

The owners of the wealthiest, most powerful company on Earth can be expected to be among the wealthiest individuals on earth. In 2016, Oxfam reported that the combined wealth of the richest 1% in the world was equal to the wealth of the remaining 99%. In 2018, it was reported that the world’s richest people get 82% of all the money earned around the world in 2017.

In reality, we can assume that the owners of Vanguard are among the 0.001% richest people on the planet. According to Forbes, there were 2,075 billionaires in the world as of March 2020. Gielen cites Oxfam data showing that two-thirds of billionaires obtained their fortunes via inheritance, monopoly and/or cronyism.

“This means that Vanguard is in the hands of the richest families on earth,” Gielen says. Among them we find the Rothschilds, the DuPont family, the Rockefellers, the Bush family and the Morgan family, just to name a few.

Many belong to royal bloodlines and are the founders of our central banking system, the United Nations and just about every industry on the planet.

Gielen goes even further in his documentary, so I highly recommend watching it in its entirety. I’ve only summarized a small piece of the whole film here.

A Financial Coup D’etat

Speaking of the central bankers, I recently interviewed finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts, and she believes it’s the central bankers that are at the heart of the global takeover we’re currently seeing. She also believes they are the ones pressuring private companies to implement the clearly illegal COVID jab mandates. Their control is so great, few companies have the ability to take a stand against them.

“I think [the central bankers] are really depending on the smart grid and creepy technology to help them go to the last steps of financial control, which is what I think they’re pushing for,” she said.

“What we’ve seen is a tremendous effort to bankrupt the population and the governments so that it’s much easier for the central bankers to take control. That’s what I’ve been writing about since 1998, that this is a financial coup d’etat.

Now the financial coup d’etat is being consolidated, where the central bankers just serve jurisdiction over the treasury and the tax money. And if they can get the [vaccine] passports in with the CBDC [central bank digital currency], then it will be able to take taxes out of our accounts and take our assets. So, this is a real coup d’etat.”

When Everything Is Artifice and PR, Collapse Beckons

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The notion that consequence can be as easily managed as PR is the ultimate artifice and the ultimate delusion.

The consequences of the drip-drip-drip of moral decay is difficult to discern in day-to-day life. It’s easy to dismiss the ubiquity of artifice, PR, spin, corruption, racketeering, fraud, collusion and narrative manipulation (a.k.a. propaganda) as nothing more than human nature, but this dismissal of moral decay is nothing more than rationalizing the rot to protect insiders from the sobering reality that the entire system is unraveling and heading for its final reckoning: collapse.

We’ve become so accustomed to the excesses of marketing that we’ve lost the ability to recognize the difference between “science” that’s been carefully designed to reach a pre-planned conclusion and science that accepts the outcome, even if it harms well-funded interests.

The vast expanses of ignorance greatly aid this artifice. Even though high school physics, chemistry and biology are sufficient to tease apart the vast majority of rigged experiments, trials and studies, few Americans have the interest or fortitude to read Phase III trial results, etc. critically, and so the corporate media can trumpet bogus results without fear of exposure: all the statistical tricks and gimmicks are passed off as “science” to the distracted and gullible.

And if someone dares to examine the results critically, then those benefiting from the ignorance make the results “secret” until the year 2929. And that’s the entire game in a nutshell: maximizing private gain from artifice, PR, spin, corruption, racketeering, fraud, collusion and narrative manipulation, all masked by an putrid spew of virtue-signaling and PR.

Every institution that was once trustworthy has been debauched to maximize private gain: higher education, science, medicine, national defense–the list includes virtually every sector and industry in America. Nothing can be trusted because somebody behind the scenes is spinning the story and data to mask their self-interest, their immense gains and the carefully contrived structure of diverting investigation and eliminating transparency, competition and accountability.

Our technocratic obsession denies the existence of the moral universe, reducing the world to techno-gimmicks (electric air taxis for everyone!), techno-fantasies (fusion reactors on every corner!) and techno-distractions (which billionaire will be the first on Mars?), as if a nation and society hurtling toward moral, social, civic and economic collapse can be saved by some “innovation” that beneath the surface is nothing more than another profiteering monopoly or cartel.

Many people fear collapse, but quality, service and reliability have already collapsed. The washing machine that two generations ago was designed and built to last 25 years now breaks down after a few years–so sorry, the motherboard failed. That will cost you almost as much as new washer, and so the manufacturer, bank and retailer win because the weary, clueless consumer will do the easy thing and buy a new, expensive appliance on credit. The “old” appliance (brand-new by previous standards) is hauled off to the landfill, the ultimate destination of everything in our Landfill Economy of poorly made junk.

Service would be hauled to the landfill as well if it was tangible. Alas, it is simply maddening, as nothing works and Kafkaesque bureaucracies have so much power that they are immune to transparency, competition and accountability. their websites don’t work, they botch the most basic transactions and they perpetuate incorrect information, but too bad–there is no recourse.

Big Tech is equally impervious to transparency, competition and accountability. Your “crime” is never explained, and there is no recourse, for the Machine has no judiciary or human contact: you query the Machine knowing full well that you will never extract anything remotely fair or just from its algorithmic monstrosity.

Technology doesn’t extinguish moral decay or eliminate the stench of self-serving artifice, PR, spin, corruption, racketeering, fraud, collusion and narrative manipulation. Technology only enhances the potential for profiteering under the tissue-thin guise of “innovation,” “technological advance” and the threadbare delusions of a populace that has watched too many contrived narratives in which technology saves the day.

The moral buffers have already thinned; there is nothing left to tap. There is nothing left in what actually matters: social cohesion, moral legitimacy, civic virtue–all stripped, depleted, gone.

Drones and robots won’t save us from collapse. Neither will fusion reactors, electric air taxis, billionaires in space, missions to Mars, algae-based meat or any of the other thousand “innovations” those profiting from moral rot promote in the hopes that the banquet of consequences being served can be swept away by more gimmicks, more artifice, more delusions, more fantasies, more PR, more spin and more narrative control.

Collapse can’t be gimmicked away. The notion that consequence can be as easily managed as PR is the ultimate artifice and the ultimate delusion.

Saving Capitalism or Saving the Planet? 

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Dissident Voice

The UK government’s Behavioural Insights Team helped to push the public towards accepting the COVID narrative, restrictions and lockdowns. It is now working on ‘nudging’ people towards further possible restrictions or at least big changes in their behaviour in the name of ‘climate emergency’. From frequent news stories and advertisements to soap opera storylines and government announcements, the message about impending climate catastrophe is almost relentless.

Part of the messaging includes blaming the public’s consumption habits for a perceived ‘climate emergency’. At the same time, young people are being told that we only have a decade or so (depending on who is saying it) to ‘save the planet’.

Setting the agenda are powerful corporations that helped degrade much of the environment in the first place. But ordinary people, not the multi-billionaires pushing this agenda, will pay the price for this as living more frugally seems to be part of the programme (‘own nothing and be happy’). Could we at some future point see ‘climate emergency’ lockdowns, not to ‘save the NHS’ but to ‘save the planet’?

A tendency to focus on individual behaviour and not ‘the system’ exists.

But let us not forget this is a system that deliberately sought to eradicate a culture of self-reliance that prevailed among the working class in the 19th century (self-education, recycling products, a culture of thrift, etc) via advertising and a formal school education that ensured conformity and set in motion a lifetime of wage labour and dependency on the products manufactured by an environmentally destructive capitalism.

A system that has its roots in inflicting massive violence across the globe to exert control over land and resources elsewhere.

In his 2018 book The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequalities and its solutions, Jason Hickel describes the processes involved in Europe’s wealth accumulation over a 150-year period of colonialism that resulted in tens of millions of deaths.

By using other countries’ land, Britain effectively doubled the size of arable land in its control. This made it more practical to then reassign the rural population at home (by stripping people of their means of production) to industrial labour. This too was underpinned by massive violence (burning villages, destroying houses, razing crops).

Hickel argues that none of this was inevitable but was rooted in the fear of being left behind by other countries because of Europe’s relative lack of land resources to produce commodities.

This is worth bearing in mind as we currently witness a fundamental shift in our relationship to the state resulting from authoritarian COVID-related policies and the rapidly emerging corporate-led green agenda. We should never underestimate the ruthlessness involved in the quest for preserving wealth and power and the propensity for wrecking lives and nature to achieve this.

Commodification of nature

Current green agenda ‘solutions’ are based on a notion of ‘stakeholder’ capitalism or private-public partnerships whereby vested interests are accorded greater weight, with governments and public money merely facilitating the priorities of private capital.

A key component of this strategy involves the ‘financialisation of nature’ and the production of new ‘green’ markets to deal with capitalism’s crisis of over accumulation and weak consumer demand caused by decades of neoliberal policies and the declining purchasing power of working people. The banking sector is especially set to make a killing via ‘green profiling’ and ‘green bonds’.

According to Friends of the Earth (FoE), corporations and states will use the financialisation of nature discourse to weaken laws and regulations designed to protect the environment with the aim of facilitating the goals of extractive industries, while allowing mega-infrastructure projects in protected areas and other contested places.

Global corporations will be able to ‘offset’ (greenwash) their activities by, for example, protecting or planting a forest elsewhere (on indigenous people’s land) or perhaps even investing in (imposing) industrial agriculture which grows herbicide-resistant GMO commodity crop monocultures that are misleadingly portrayed as ‘climate friendly’.

FoE states:

Offsetting schemes allow companies to exceed legally defined limits of destruction at a particular location, or destroy protected habitat, on the promise of compensation elsewhere; and allow banks to finance such destruction on the same premise.

This agenda could result in the weakening of current environmental protection legislation or its eradication in some regions under the pretext of compensating for the effects elsewhere. How ecoservice ‘assets’ (for example, a forest that performs a service to the ecosystem by acting as a carbon sink) are to be evaluated in a monetary sense is very likely to be done on terms that are highly favourable to the corporations involved, meaning that environmental protection will play second fiddle to corporate and finance sector return-on-investment interests.

As FoE argues, business wants this system to be implemented on its terms, which means the bottom line will be more important than stringent rules that prohibit environmental destruction.

Saving capitalism

The envisaged commodification of nature will ensure massive profit-seeking opportunities through the opening up of new markets and the creation of fresh investment instruments.

Capitalism needs to keep expanding into or creating new markets to ensure the accumulation of capital to offset the tendency for the general rate of profit to fall (according to writer Ted Reese, it has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s). The system suffers from a rising overaccumulation (surplus) of capital.Reese notes that, although wages and corporate taxes have been slashed, the exploitability of labour continued to become increasingly insufficient to meet the demands of capital accumulation. By late 2019, the world economy was suffocating under a mountain of debt. Many companies could not generate enough profit and falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent. In effect, economic growth was already grinding to a halt prior to the massive stock market crash in February 2020.

In the form of COVID ‘relief’, there has been a multi-trillion bailout for capitalism as well as the driving of smaller enterprises to bankruptcy. Or they have being swallowed up by global interests. Either way, the likes of Amazon and other predatory global corporations have been the winners.

New ‘green’ Ponzi trading schemes to offset carbon emissions and commodify ‘ecoservices’ along with electric vehicles and an ‘energy transition’ represent a further restructuring of the capitalist economy, resulting in a shift away from a consumer oriented demand-led system.

It essentially leaves those responsible for environmental degradation at the wheel, imposing their will and their narrative on the rest of us.

Global agribusiness

Between 2000 and 2009, Indonesia supplied more than half of the global palm oil market at an annual expense of some 340,000 hectares of Indonesian countryside. Consider too that Brazil and Indonesia have spent over 100 times more in subsidies to industries that cause deforestation than they received in international conservation aid from the UN to prevent it.

These two countries gave over $40bn in subsidies to the palm oil, timber, soy, beef and biofuels sectors between 2009 and 2012, some 126 times more than the $346m they received to preserve their rain forests.

India is the world’s leading importer of palm oil, accounting for around 15% of the global supply. It imports over two-­thirds of its palm oil from Indonesia.

Until the mid-1990s, India was virtually self-sufficient in edible oils. Under pressure from the World Trade Organization (WTO), import tariffs were reduced, leading to an influx of cheap (subsidised) edible oil imports that domestic farmers could not compete with. This was a deliberate policy that effectively devastated the home-grown edible oils sector and served the interests of palm oil growers and US grain and agriculture commodity company Cargill, which helped write international trade rules to secure access to the Indian market on its terms.

Indonesia leads the world in global palm oil production, but palm oil plantations have too often replaced tropical forests, leading to the killing of endangered species and the uprooting of local communities as well as contributing to the release of potential environment-damaging gases. Indonesia emits more of these gases than any country besides China and the US, largely due to the production of palm oil.

The issue of palm oil is one example from the many that could be provided to highlight how the drive to facilitate corporate need and profit trumps any notion of environmental protection or addressing any ‘climate emergency’. Whether it is in Indonesia, Latin America or elsewhere, transnational agribusiness – and the system of globalised industrial commodity crop agriculture it promotes – fuels much of the destruction we see today.

Even if the mass production of lab-created food, under the guise of ‘saving the planet’ and ‘sustainability’, becomes logistically possible (which despite all the hype is not at this stage), it may still need biomass and huge amounts of energy. Whose land will be used to grow these biomass commodities and which food crops will they replace? And will it involve that now-famous Gates’ euphemism ‘land mobility’ (farmers losing their land)?

Microsoft is already mapping Indian farmers’ lands and capturing agriculture datasets such as crop yields, weather data, farmers’ personal details, profile of land held (cadastral maps, farm size, land titles, local climatic and geographical conditions), production details (crops grown, production history, input history, quality of output, machinery in possession) and financial details (input costs, average return, credit history).

Is this an example of stakeholder-partnership capitalism, whereby a government facilitates the gathering of such information by a private player which can then use the data for developing a land market (courtesy of land law changes that the government enacts) for institutional investors at the expense of smallholder farmers who find themselves ‘land mobile’? This is a major concern among farmers and civil society in India.

Back in 2017, agribusiness giant Monsanto was judged to have engaged in practices that impinged on the basic human right to a healthy environment, the right to food and the right to health. Judges at the ‘Monsanto Tribunal’, held in The Hague, concluded that if ecocide were to be formally recognised as a crime in international criminal law, Monsanto could be found guilty.

The tribunal called for the need to assert the primacy of international human and environmental rights law. However, it was also careful to note that an existing set of legal rules serves to protect investors’ rights in the framework of the WTO and in bilateral investment treaties and in clauses in free trade agreements. These investor trade rights provisions undermine the capacity of nations to maintain policies, laws and practices protecting human rights and the environment and represent a disturbing shift in power.

The tribunal denounced the severe disparity between the rights of multinational corporations and their obligations.

While the Monsanto Tribunal judged that company to be guilty of human rights violations, including crimes against the environment, in a sense we also witnessed global capitalism on trial.

Global conglomerates can only operate as they do because of a framework designed to allow them to capture or co-opt governments and regulatory bodies and to use the WTO and bilateral trade deals to lever influence. As Jason Hickel notes in his book (previously referred to), old-style colonialism may have gone but governments in the Global North and its corporations have found new ways to assert dominance via leveraging aid, market access and ‘philanthropic’ interventions to force lower income countries to do what they want.

The World Bank’s ‘Enabling the Business of Agriculture’ and its ongoing commitment to an unjust model of globalisation is an example of this and a recipe for further plunder and the concentration of power and wealth in the hands of the few.

Brazil and Indonesia have subsidised private corporations to effectively destroy the environment through their practices. Canada and the UK are working with the GMO biotech sector to facilitate its needs. And India is facilitating the destruction of its agrarian base according to World Bank directives for the benefit of the likes of Corteva and Cargill.

The TRIPS Agreement, written by Monsanto, and the WTO Agreement on Agriculture, written by Cargill, was key to a new era of corporate imperialism. It came as little surprise that in 2013 India’s then Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar accused US companies of derailing the nation’s oil seeds production programme.

Powerful corporations continue to regard themselves as the owners of people, the planet and the environment and as having the right – enshrined in laws and agreements they wrote – to exploit and devastate for commercial gain.

Partnership or co-option?

It was noticeable during a debate on food and agriculture at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow that there was much talk about transforming the food system through partnerships and agreements. Fine-sounding stuff, especially when the role of agroecology and regenerative farming was mentioned.

However, if, for instance, the interests you hope to form partnerships with are coercing countries to eradicate their essential buffer food stocks then bid for such food on the global market with US dollars (as in India) or are lobbying for the enclosure of seeds through patents (as in Africa and elsewhere), then surely this deliberate deepening of dependency should be challenged; otherwise ‘partnership’ really means co-option.

Similarly, the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) that took place during September in New York was little more than an enabler of corporate needs. The UNFSS was founded on a partnership between the UN and the World Economic Forum and was disproportionately influenced by corporate actors.

Those granted a pivotal role at the UNFSS support industrial food systems that promote ultra-processed foods, deforestation, industrial livestock production, intensive pesticide use and commodity crop monocultures, all of which cause soil deterioration, water contamination and irreversible impacts on biodiversity and human health. And this will continue as long as the environmental effects can be ‘offset’ or these practices can be twisted on the basis of them somehow being ‘climate-friendly’.

Critics of the UNFSS offer genuine alternatives to the prevailing food system. In doing so, they also provide genuine solutions to climate-related issues and food injustice based on notions of food sovereignty, localisation and a system of food cultivation deriving from agroecological principles and practices. Something which people who organised the climate summit in Glasgow would do well to bear in mind.

Current greenwashed policies are being sold by tugging at the emotional heartstrings of the public. This green agenda, with its lexicon of ‘sustainability’, ‘carbon neutrality’, ‘net-zero’ and doom-laden forecasts, is part of a programme that seeks to restructure capitalism, to create new investment markets and instruments and to return the system to viable levels of profitability.

Another Housing Crisis in America Is Coming

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By Tim Kirby

Source: Covert Geopolitics

There is now an unprecedented spike in housing costs while COVID-19 has driven down the wealth of the average American.

Let’s begin our discussion of the next Housing Crisis with a relevant personal anecdote, that is a microcosm of what is happening all over the United States right now.

Some of my relatives made the wise decision to live within their means and build a smaller (by American standards) house in the early 2000s. They live in the Midwest which means there is generally plenty of space for a big house even within city limits. Mortgages and loans were super easy to get for even fantastically large sums of money at that time. So my kin were definitely in the minority in terms of choosing something smaller and affordable rather than a giant debt pit with a huge kitchen. In a region of America known for having a shockingly low average income of $20,000-$30,000 per year in the 2020s, the banks two decades ago were just throwing $300,000 worth of credit for McMansions to all-comers with seemingly little discretion.

When the 2008 Financial Crisis hit it was the McMansions that got seized first and foremost, whereas my relatives got through it relatively unscathed. It looks like across America some 10,000,000 homes were lost (or perhaps it would be better to say “transferred” to the banks) due to this crisis. Again, because of choosing to have low square footage my family members did just fine with their more reasonable payments, however something recently happened that should sound some alarm bells that a second crisis is nigh.

Image: It costs over a quarter of a million dollars to live in a relatively small stick-frame house in the absolutely most dangerous neighborhood in a city with no significant employment opportunities. Something is not right here.

My relatives were given an offer from a neighbor to buy their home at its value (the last time it was appraised before the Covid Pandemic) plus more than $100,000 on top of that. The explanation was that the offering party wanted to have their son or daughter move closer to them and they were willing to pay big bucks for any house on that particular street. My family members thought they had won the lottery. They ecstatically looked for smaller homes to buy, so they could sell theirs, pay off their current mortgage early and keep a hefty percentage of this seemingly massive overpayment living the rest of their lives debt free.

But to their surprise, besides double-wide trailers they couldn’t find anything to buy. Now even the price of a home, smaller than their already modest home, in the impoverished Rust Belt, now sells for the prices that the McMansions demanded before the 2008 Crisis. To be clear, a house at Pre-Covid value + $100,000 in that region, now cannot even buy a sanitary home that is one half its size.

Again, for foreign readers, the house in question is not a piece of real estate in Silicon Valley or Manhattan where insane sounding prices could be justified by elite salaries and the presence of successful entrepreneurs. No, this is in the part of America where making $15 an hour to sling pizzas is considered a “good” job, but this price hike is not isolated to my state of birth, this madness is happening across all of America, just take a look at the graph below.

It does not take an elite degree in economics to see that there is now an unprecedented spike in housing costs while at the same time, paradoxically, COVID-19 has driven down the wealth of the average American. It is true that building materials have become artificially expensive and that would reflect on housing prices, but in a nation that has so many homes, including abandoned ones, it is hard to believe that America is in a desperate shortage of housing, furiously building to catch up like the Soviets after WWII, who had all their villages bombed into the dirt by the Germans.

Panic is driving housing prices up in a few different ways. Americans are flipping out because of the supposed…

  • Lack of building materials, which means there must be a housing “shortage” because construction is mostly off the table, so they must buy now or be left outdoors.
  • Prices, that are just going to keep going up so they must buy now before the affordability train leaves the station forever.
  • “Historically low mortgage rates”, which are probably the most dangerous aspect of this situation that will turn it into the next economic fiasco.

One of the key reasons that the 2008 Financial Crisis happened was because of the low interest rates on mortgages and inflated values of homes in connection with a lack of regulation over the financial world as a whole – and these exact same things are happening again right now in front of our faces. Just look at these interest rates.

It is not hyperbolic to say that they are “historically low”, because they are. The only difference is that in the past people were suckered into a McMansion while making $20,000 a year, now they will be suckered into a tiny house, trailer or grungy hellhole for the same price, that they will probably end up losing anyways when the crisis hits. Ranch-style homes in Texas far from major cities are starting to reach the $600,000-$700,000 mark which is simply unsustainable unless there are vastly more cattle and oil tycoons down there than we are aware of.

It simply does not require a genius financial mind or the word “Harvard” on your resume to see where this is going. We are again heading towards a housing crisis, only this time the bar is lower as the average American is getting less house and is paying more for it. Of course, the banks will “win” because whenever homes are lost they do not vanish out of existence, but get transferred to them the real lords of the realm so this won’t be bad for everyone, just almost everyone. The normies are doomed.

In a political context this repeating madness seems only to underline my belief that the arguments for small government are correct, but the problem is when government is both small and weak. This situation would not happen if those we elect were completely in charge of how America works systemically as a reflection of the will of the masses. The power that banks have may at times be overexaggerated by the conspiratorial types, but as we can see the nation is again being pushed down the wrong path and no one can stop it, meaning the benefactors of the coming crisis, the bankers, must have vastly more influence and power over Washington than anyone else, who would not benefit from this housing catastrophe.

Malfeasance Behind the FDA Vax OK for Children

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By F. William Engdahl

Source: New Eastern Outlook

On October 27 the US Food and Drug Administration Advisory Panel on Vaccines recommended the agency allow Pfizer to amend its Emergency Use Authorization for its COVID vaccine to include children 5 through 11 years old. Two days later the FDA officially approved the rollout. Major media are treating this as a positive development to protect young children. On closer inspection it is anything but that. The FDA is today shockingly corrupt under the Acting Director and is little more than a rubber stamp for Big Pharma, and especially Pfizer, where the former FDA head sits on the board.

The FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted 17 to 0, with one abstention, to give a green light allowing Emergency Use Authorization for the Pfizer-BioNTech experimental mRNA to children between 5 and 12 years. The expert who abstained later explained he did so because of limited safety and efficacy data provided. Previously the FDA had approved the vaccine for 12 and older. Adding to the stench of corruption around the latest vote, the Biden Administration a week earlier announced it had already purchased enough Pfizer vaccine to inoculate all 28 million 5- to 11-year-olds in the US. Did they know the fix was in?

‘…Just the Way it Goes’

The record of the FDA, the major drug oversight agency in the US Government, regarding safety and risks of the experimental gene-altered mRNA vaccines of Pfizer, is one of criminal malfeasance, defined as willful violation of a public trust or obligation that causes harm or death. Their latest ruling is even more egregious for blatant conflicts of interest and scientific fraud. Both Pfizer, who conducted the tests on the efficacy of their own vaccine on the 5-11 year age group, and the FDA experts, admitted that they had no idea if the vaccine was safe for such a young population.

Dr. Eric Rubin, professor of immunology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health voted to approve the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, noting, “The data show that the vaccine works and is pretty safe … and yet we’re worried about a side effect that we can’t measure yet, but it’s probably real.” That is hardly confidence-building. He then stated, “we’re never going to learn about how safe this vaccine is unless we start giving it. That’s just the way it goes.”

This cold-blooded nonchalance is even more astonishing in light of the fact that the incidence of serious side effects in the 5-11 age group who allegedly have tested positive for the corona virus is essentially zero. According to data of the US Government Centers for Disease Control, the Infection Fatality Rate for children from 0-17 years is 0.0002 per 100,000 and far lower for the 5-11 years. A research study by Johns Hopkins University found that risk of severe illness or death from covid19 in a study of 48,000 children is essentially zero if no other morbidity risk such as leukemia, diabetes or asthma is present. Moreover, risk of infecting other children is also very low.

In their submission to FDA for approval, Pfizer stated the vaccination was needed for the 5-11 age group to prevent covid disease transmission. Yet in their FDA hearing on questioning, Dr. William Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, said they did not even assess whether the vaccine prevents transmission. We might ask why is this at all needed then if the risk to children is zero and there is no evidence of children transmission?

Even more shocking is the statement by Pfizer about its tests. First there were no animal tests on rats or such first. They admitted that the tested human group was so small that they could not test for myocarditis or pericarditis. Yet those are among the most reported negative effects for all others that have had the Pfizer jab. In its FDA application Pfizer noted that the number of participants in the current clinical development program was “too small to detect any potential risks of myocarditis associated with vaccination,” and that “to evaluate long-term sequelae of post-vaccination myocarditis/pericarditis” in participants 5 to <12 years of age will not be studied until after the vaccine is authorized for children.”

Flawed Pfizer Tests

The tests Pfizer made were also fatally flawed. According to Dr. Josh Guetzkow, of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the Pfizer study was not double-blind. Further, Pfizer cherry-picked subjects to evidently better their results. Three thousand children age 5-11 received Pfizer’s COVID vaccine, but only 750 of those children were selectively included in the company’s safety analysis. And Pfizer dismissed cases with adverse vaccine effects in their FDA filing: “Few serious Adverse Events, none of which were related to vaccine, and no AEs leading to withdrawal were reported.” They give no explanation how that was determined. Just trust Pfizer.

And post-vaccination follow up was less than 2 months for one test cohort and only 2.4 weeks for a second. The Pfizer report to FDA read, “Supplemental safety expansion group data were analyzed from approximately 1500 vaccine recipients with a median follow-up time of 2.4 weeks after Dose 2. These supplemental data demonstrate an acceptable safety profile…” It can take months or longer for side effects to manifest. Vaccine experts recommend at least 18-24 month post-vaccine follow up, not 3 months or 2.4 weeks. This is not serious science.

As well, it seems the FDA and or Pfizer wrongly name the vaccine in the title as “BNT162B2 [COMIRNATY (COVID-19 VACCINE, MRNA)] .“Yet the actual FDA text calls it “Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine (BNT162b2).”

The separate company, BioNTech of Mainz, Germany, has a similar but “legally different” vaccine, trade-named Comirnaty, that is not available in the USA. The distinction is essential as it was the basis in August for the corrupt FDA to give Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine an extension of Emergency Use Authorization but to misleadingly declare its full approval for Comirnaty vaccine of BioNTech. This is deliberate fraud and allowed the Biden Administration to mandate vaccination of US government workers (curiously except for White House and Congress), military, and any company with more than 100 employees.

Conflicts of Interest?

The corruption of the FDA extends to the members of the Vaccine Advisory Committee. Many of the members of the current 18 person committee have direct ties to Pfizer or to the pro-Pfizer Gates Foundation.

Prof. Holly Janes of the Fred Hutch Cancer Research Center in Seattle designed the flawed Pfizer tests. Her institute is funded by Gates Foundation money. FDA committee member Dr. Steven Pergam is also with the Gates-funded Fred Hutch center. Acting committee chair, Arnold S. Monto was a paid consultant to Pfizer. Committee member Archana Chatterjee worked on a Pfizer research project related to vaccines for infants between 2018-2020. Geeta K. Swamy is chair of the “Independent Data Monitoring Committee for the Pfizer Group B Streptococcus Vaccine Program,” a committee sponsored by Pfizer. Duke University states that “Dr. Swamy serves as a co-investigator for the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine trial.” FDA Committee member Gregg Sylvester was a vice president for Pfizer Vaccines. Ofer Levy, professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School is on record vigorously supporting Pfizer covid vaccines for children 12 and older. And FDA committee member Paul Offit professor of pediatrics at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia called openly last June for covid vaccine permission for children.

When we compare the actions of corrupt FDA Acting Director Janet Woodcock during the August FDA extension of emergency use authorization for Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, she refused then to even allow the vaccine committee to meet to debate the issue. Several months before in June 2021 three members of the FDA Vaccine Committee resigned in protest over Woodcock’s refusal to heed the near unanimous vote of the advisory committee to approve an Alzheimer’s drug called Aduhelm against the wishes of nearly every member on the panel.

Clearly Woodcock has been busy in the meantime stacking the advisory committee with pro-Pfizer members. Not to be forgotten is the fact that after he left as head of the FDA under Trump, Scott Gottlieb immediately joined the board of directors of…Pfizer Inc. Woodcock served under him at FDA.

Woodcock has been at FDA since 1986, almost as long as Fauci at NIAID. Woodcock was Biden’s choice to head FDA, but a massive opposition from 28 groups including state attorneys general and citizen groups forced him to name her “acting,” which does not need Congressional scrutiny. Woodcock was directly responsible for the original FDA approval of deadly opioids over the objections of her own scientists and other advisors.

Already California has moved to make public school admission contingent on covid vaccination, anticipating Pfizer approval. This spread of the deadly Pfizer vaccine to children who have near zero risk of serious disease makes no public health sense. It is simply prima facie evidence of medical malfeasance at the highest levels of the US Government including FDA, with plausible criminal intent. The FDA decision will now be used to argue for similar inclusion of essentially no risk children for the vaccine jab.

Wall Street’s Latest Scheme Is Monetizing Nature Itself

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Just in time for the UN’s policy push for “30 x 30” – 30% of the earth to be “conserved” by 2030 – a new Wall Street asset class puts up for sale the processes underpinning all life.

By Ellen Brown

Source: ScheerPost.com

A month before the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (known as COP26) kicked off in Scotland, a new asset class was launched by the New York Stock Exchange that will “open up a new feeding ground for predatory Wall Street banks and financial institutions that will allow them to dominate not just the human economy, but the entire natural world.” So writes Whitney Webb in an article titled “Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class”:

Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.” These NACs will then maintain, manage and grow the natural assets they commodify, with the end goal of maximizing the aspects of that natural asset that are deemed by the company to be profitable.

The vehicle is allegedly designed to preserve and restore Nature’s assets; but when Wall Street gets involved, profit and exploitation are not far behind. Webb writes:

[E]ven the creators of NACs admit that the ultimate goal is to extract near-infinite profits from the natural processes they seek to quantify and then monetize….

Framed with the lofty talk of “sustainability” and “conservation”, media reports on the move in outlets like Fortune couldn’t avoid noting that NACs open the doors to “a new form of sustainable investment” which “has enthralled the likes of BlackRock CEO Larry Fink over the past several years even though there remain big, unanswered questions about it.” 

BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with nearly $9.5 trillion under management. That is more than the gross domestic product of every country in the world except the U.S. and China. BlackRock also runs a massive technology platform that oversees at least $21.6 trillion in assets. It and two other megalithic asset managers, State Street and Vanguard (BlackRock’s largest shareholder), already effectively own much of the world. Adding “natural asset companies” to their portfolios could make them owners of the foundations of all life. 

A $4 Quadrillion Asset — The Earth Itself

Partnering with the New York Stock Exchange team launching the NAC is the Intrinsic Exchange Group (IEG), major investors in which are the Rockefeller Foundation and the Inter-American Development Bank, notorious for imposing neo-colonialist agendas through debt entrapment. According to IEG’s website:

We are pioneering a new asset class based on natural assets and the mechanism to convert them to financial capital. These assets are essential, making life on Earth possible and enjoyable. They include biological systems that provide clean air, water, foods, medicines, a stable climate, human health and societal potential.

The potential of this asset class is immense. Nature’s economy is larger than our current industrial economy ….

The immense potential of “Nature’s Economy” is estimated by IEG at $4,000 trillion ($4 quadrillion). 

Webb cites researcher and journalist Cory Morningstar, who maintains that one of the aims of creating “Nature’s Economy” and packaging it via NACs is to drastically advance massive land grab efforts made by Wall Street and the oligarch class in recent years, including those made by Wall Street firms and billionaires like Bill Gates during the COVID crisis. The land grabs facilitated through the development of NACs, however, will largely target indigenous communities in the developing world. Morningstar observes:

The public launch of NACs strategically preceded the fifteenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the biggest biodiversity conference in a decade. Under the pretext of turning 30% of the globe into “protected areas”, the largest global land grab in history is underway. Built on a foundation of white supremacy, this proposal will displace hundreds of millions, furthering the ongoing genocide of Indigenous peoples.

The UN’s “30 x 30”

The land grab of which Morningstar speaks is embodied in a draft agreement called the “Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework,” currently being negotiated among the 186 governments that are signatories to the Convention for Biological Diversity. Part I of its 15th meeting (COP15) closed on October 15, just ahead of COP26 (the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties) hosted in Glasgow from October 31 through November 12. COP26 focuses on climate change, while COP 15 focuses on preserving diversity. Part II of COP15 will be held in 2022. The draft text for the COP 15 nature pact includes a core pledge to protect at least 30% of the planet’s land and oceans by 2030.

In September 2020, 128 environmental and human rights NGOs and experts warned that the 30 x 30 plan could result in severe human rights violations and irreversible social harm for some of the world’s poorest people. Based on figures from a paper published in the academic journal Nature, they argued that the new target could displace or dispossess as many as 300 million people. Stephen Corry of Survival International contended: 

The call to make 30% of the globe into “Protected Areas” is really a colossal land grab as big as Europe’s colonial era, and it’ll bring as much suffering and death. Let’s not be fooled by the hype from the conservation NGOs and their UN and government funders. This has nothing to do with climate change, protecting biodiversity or avoiding pandemics – in fact it’s more likely to make all of them worse. It’s really all about money, land and resource control, and an all out assault on human diversity. This planned dispossession of hundreds of millions of people risks eradicating human diversity and self-sufficiency – the real keys to our being able to slow climate change and protect biodiversity.

30 x 30 in the United States

The 30 x 30 target was incorporated in President Biden’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad dated January 27, 2021, which includes at Sec. 219 “the goal of conserving at least 30 percent of our lands and waters by 2030.” 

How that is to be done is not clearly specified, but proponents insist it is not a “land grab.” Critics, however, contend there is no other way to pull it off. Only about 12% of land and water in the U.S. is now considered to be “in conservation,” including wilderness lands, national parks, national wildlife refuges, state parks, national monuments, and private lands with permanent conservation easements (contracts to surrender a portion of property rights to a land trust or the federal government). According to environmental expert Dr. Bonner Cohen, raising that figure to 30%, adding 600 million acres to the total, “means putting this land and water (mostly land) off limits to any productive use in perpetuity. To accomplish this goal, the federal government will have to buy up – through eminent domain or other pressures on landowners making them ‘willing sellers’ of their property – millions of acres of private land.”

In July 2021, 15 governors wrote to the Administration opposing the plan, led by Gov. Pete Ricketts of Nebraska. Ricketts said in a press release: 

This requires restricting a land area the size of the State of Nebraska every year, each year, for the next nine years, or in other words a landmass twice the size of Texas by 2030.

This goal is especially radical given that the President has no constitutional authority to take action to conserve 30% of the land and water. 

The Real Threat to Mother Nature

The federal government may have no constitutional authority to take the land, but a megalithic private firm such as BlackRock could do it simply by making farmers and local residents an offer they can’t refuse. This ploy has already been demonstrated in the housing market. 

According to a survey reported in The Guardian on October 12, 2021, nearly 40% of U.S. households are facing serious financial problems, including struggling to afford medical care and food; and 30% of lower income households (those earning under $50,000 per year) said they had lost all their savings during the coronavirus pandemic. In the first quarter of 2021, 15% of U.S. home sales went to large corporate investors including BlackRock, which beat out families in search of homes just by offering substantially more than the asking price. Sometimes whole neighborhoods were bought up at once for conversion into rental properties. 

BlackRock’s chairman Larry Fink is on the board of the World Economic Forum, which until recently featured a controversial promotional video declaring “You will own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

We all want a clean environment, and we want to preserve species biodiversity. But that includes human biodiversity – acknowledging the rights of rural landowners and Indigenous peoples, the land’s natural stewards. The greatest threat to the land is not the people living on it but those well-heeled investors who swoop in to buy up the rights to it, financializing the earth for profit. 

Not just private property but those public lands and infrastructure once known as “the commons” are now under threat. We face an existential moment in our economic history, in which accumulated private wealth is acquiring carte blanche control of the essentials of life. Whether that juggernaut can be stopped remains to be seen, but the first step in any defensive action is to be aware of the threat at our doorsteps.

‘It’s absolutely appalling’: Unvaccinated Canadians become social outcasts and the new persecuted minority

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By Eva K Bartlett

Source: In Gaza

In Canada, the supposedly benevolent country that prides itself on inclusivity, Covid totalitarianism has become unavoidably apparent, with its decision that soon only the fully vaccinated can travel.

Vaccine mandates have also been imposed on healthcare workers, municipal employees and federal public servants. Basically, as part of what PM Justin Trudeau called one of the world’s strictest vaccine-mandate policies, unjabbed Canadians are being increasingly restricted/excluded not only from work, but from social life as well. Supposedly, this is done for their well-being and health. I argue, though, that it’s nothing but “medical fascism.” 

Some months ago, much ado was made in media around the world when the government of Canada shed crocodile tears for the country’s imprisonment, torture, starvation and murder of indigenous children in the horrific ‘residential school’ system. The government, we were meant to believe, suddenly cared for the people it had sought to erase.

But, aside from many examples of that being mere lip service, it has become clear, over the past year and a half plus, that the government doesn’t care for Canadians, period.

Under some of the world’s longest lockdowns, Canadians had their businesses shuttered, were deprived of contact with their elderly, were prevented from worshipping and holding holiday gatherings (while Canadian leadership steadfastly ignored the rules) and, more seriously, were deprived of critical medical care—all in the name of public health.

Already, Canadians with natural immunity say they have been told that’s not enough to enter the country.

Starting from October 30, only the Covid-jabbed can travel by plane or train in Canada. While huge numbers of Canadians have got the shots, many others have legitimate concerns about the safety of vaccines, with good reason.

When Dr. Byram Bridle, associate professor of viral immunology—a well-recognized expert in vaccinology—refused vaccination due to his natural immunity, he was derided by media and banned from his University of Guelph campus. He made clear that he is, “a vaccine lover and an innovator in this field,” but has concerns about the, “possible link between this heart inflammation that is occurring and these COVID-19 vaccines.” 

And although I already realized it is unlikely that I’ll see my family in Canada in person again, the newest ‘no jab, no travel’ dictates seal the deal for me.

But, for people within Canada, it is more than just the matter of being able to see loved ones again. For some, these new dictates might mean a matter of life or death: whether they can get vital medical care and whether they can earn a living.

One such person is an Italian researcher living in Canada since 2001, who was in that year diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. I recently spoke with Valentina Capurri about how the vaccine mandates will affect her.

She explained that, following her MS diagnosis, she was offered to participate in a trial program for a new medication. Although a risky decision, she accepted for different reasons, including the health care and medication it would ensure her as a then-lone international student.

She described the importance of the trial, which lasted twelve years.

“Lots of people who had severe effects of MS would have benefitted from the medication. And yet they were not able to access the medication for a reason: because you cannot give a medication whose effect–if everything goes wrong–can be worse than the cure.”

Trials like this, she emphasized, are something every new medication, or vaccine, endure.

“And none of this has been done in this particular case. So that’s what made me a little suspicious about the Covid vaccines.”

Over the past year and a half, she says, she has not been allowed to see her neurologist, all medical appointments at her Toronto hospital were suspended and replaced with  phone consultations. No physical visits, no MRIs, just phone calls.

“In 2003, when we had SARS, I used to go once a month to the hospital. Despite the fact that SARS in 2003 had a much higher mortality rate than Covid, we still were allowed to enter the hospital on a regular basis. None of our visits were cancelled back then as they are now.”

Since neither she nor her Canadian husband will take the jab, they will lose their jobs, and thus won’t be able to pay for her expensive MS medication.

“You are forcing me to lose my job, to lose my ability to support myself, just because I am exerting my right not to have an experimental medical procedure done on me. This is worse than fascism, this is absolutely appalling.”

On top of this, now, those needing organ transplants face being denied care if they do not consent to mandatory jabs.

Among other Canadians suspended without pay for their refusal to be jabbed are hundreds of hospital workers, including nurses. The sort of people who might know a thing or two about health…

And, in August, emergency room and family practice physician, Dr. Rochagné Kilian resigned over the unethical and coercive pressuring of Canadians to be jabbed.

While medical workers and average Canadians are being forced out of work, denied medical care, ostracized from society, the government has made clear the rules for thee but not for me adage still applies.

PM Trudeau said all federal workers would be compelled to get fully vaccinated but, as it turns out, that’s not the case. According to an article in the Toronto Sun, roughly 70% of the federal workforce will be exempt from getting vaccines, including: federal judges, meat inspectors, park wardens, postal workers, tax auditors, Commons and Senate staff, soldiers, sailors and air force personnel, and Canada Post employees, among others.

Canada doesn’t even pretend to follow logic any longer. Just full-on medical fascism for the majority of Canadians.

With the introduction of vaccine mandates, it is only a matter of time before Canada reaches Lithuanian-level totalitarianism where the non-jabbed are almost fully excluded from all aspects of society.

Please ask yourselves if you really believe this is about public health.

America’s Bottom 50% Have Nowhere To Go But Down

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

One might anticipate that the bottom 50%’s meager share of the nation’s exploding wealth would have increased as smartly as the wealth of the billionaires, but alas, no.

America’s economy has changed in ways few of the winners seem to notice, as they’re too busy cheerleading their own brilliance and success. In the view of the winners, who just so happen to occupy all the seats at the media-punditry-Federal Reserve, etc. table–the rising tide of stock, bond and real estate bubbles are raising all boats. What’s left unsaid is except for the 50% of boats with gaping holes below the waterline, i.e. stagnant wages and a fast-rising cost of living.

The truth the self-satisfied winners don’t include in their self-congratulatory rah-rah is there’s no place for the bottom 50% of American households to go but down. All the winnings flow to those who already owned assets back when they were affordable– the already-wealthy–whose wealth has soared as assets have shot to the moon while the the burdens of inflation and debt service hit the bottom 50% the hardest.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is whining that inflation isn’t high enough yet for their refined tastes. Boo-hoo, how sad for the Fed–inflation isn’t yet high enough. Oh wait–didn’t they each mint millions by front-running their own policies? No wonder they’re not worried about inflation.

The reality few acknowledge is that globalization and financialization have stripped the American economy of low-skilled jobs that don’t demand much of the employee. The reality is that a great many people don’t have what it takes to learn high-level skills and work at a demanding pace under constant pressure–the description of the average job in America.

There were once millions of low-skill, low-pay jobs for people who for whatever mix of reasons were unable to muster the wherewithal to fulfill the fantasy of working extra hard, going to night school, soaking up high-level skills, moving quickly up the ladder to higher pay, buying the starter home and then moving up the food chain to middle class security from there.

The cost of living was low enough that those working these low-skill, low-pay jobs could still have an independent life. There were still low-cost rentals, often derided by the wealthy, in nooks and crannies of even the costliest cities. (I once lived in a room stuffed with old tax records in a poolside shack in an upscale neighborhood. The room had been cleared for a single bed and a path to the decrepit bathroom. Its most important attribute was that I could afford it on my low earnings.)

Affordable housing has vanished, eliminated by the financialization of America’s economy. Once landlords pay double the price for the property, rents have to double to pay their higher expenses. The apartment didn’t double in size or amenities–the rent doubled without any increase in utility to the renter. You get nothing more for double the price–nice.

Yes, people could make better choices, and some do. The point here is the game is rigged against those in the lower tier of the economy who can no longer afford a house or other stake in the only winning game in town–speculative asset bubbles. Go ahead and work a second job and go to night school–you’ll still be left behind the already-rich.

Globalization opened every job in America to global competition via offshoring or the influx of undocumented workers so desperate to support their families back home that no pay was too low and no working condition too wretched to refuse.

Many overindulged pundits who never worked an honest day in their lives sneer about burger flippers without realizing how hard those burger flippers have to work. I doubt the well-dressed pundits, snobbish about their university degrees and general brilliance, could manage to work a single day in a demanding fast-food job.

As the price of housing and other assets have soared, enriching the already rich, they’re out of reach for the bottom 50% who struggle to pay their bills as wages have stagnated and the costs of essentials have skyrocketed.

The rising cost of parking tickets, junk fees, user fees, utilities and food don’t impact the well-paid top 5% technocrat class, whose stake in the Everything Bubble keeps expanding by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for the bottom 50%, those incremental increases are, when added to higher rents, absolutely crushing.

As for getting high-quality healthcare that includes mental health support–those are reserved for the rich. But no worries, self-medication is always a “choice.”

Getting a boost in pay from $12 an hour to $15 an hour is welcome, but that doesn’t put the worker any closer to affording a house or equivalent stake in the Everything Bubble.

The new feudalism is masked by the glossy SillyCon Valley PR of a gig economy where (per the PR fantasy) bright, shiny and totally independent workers freely choose to serve the winners in the rigged sweepstakes for low pay and zero benefits.

In the SillyCon Valley PR, serfs freely choose to serve their noble masters for nothing but survival because they love the “freedom” and “choice” of kissing the nobility’s plump derrieres. (After all, there were “choices” even back in the good old days of feudalism–one could join the brigands in the forest, or enlist in a poorly paid mercenary army where the odds of dying were high–you know, “choices” of “gigs.”)

One might anticipate that the bottom 50%’s meager share of the nation’s exploding wealth would have increased as smartly as the wealth of the billionaires, but alas, no–the bottom 50%’s share of stocks (equities) actually plummeted in the the glorious decades of Federal Reserve free money for financiers, stock buy-backs and asset bubbles.

All this suits the billionaires and those collecting the crumbs of the Everything Bubble just fine. So what if the bottom 50% have nowhere to go but down? There’s plenty of room in the homeless encampment for another broken down station wagon or an old camper. There’s lots of “choices.”

And no consequences for the winners, of course, because The Fed has our backs.