In 1943, the writer and literature professor C.S. Lewis delivered a series of three evening lectures at King’s College, Newcastle. In the third and final part of his lecture series titled “The Abolition of Man,” he spoke of how science can be misused. A literary giant who is known for his pro-Christian texts linked the progress of science to man’s aspiration to dominate nature. Lewis stated, “Man’s conquest of nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men.”
Over half a century later, we are seeing “science”, in the hands of the few, being used to reshape the world.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the disintegration of the global economy which began unraveling in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In mid 2020, as the economy had yet to recover, the World Economic Forum (WEF) announced its plan for a “Great Reset” to re-engineer the global economy as the world emerged from the pandemic.
Participants in the initiative include international governmental organizations such as the United Nations and its specialized agency the World Health Organization (WHO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as well as leading global corporations.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of WEF, called the initiative of the Great Reset “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” that opens up a new chapter for human development. Using science and advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and genetic engineering, its stated goal is said to create a “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity.”
Merging humans with the machine
Steps toward the merging of digital technologies and biological systems are already taking place with the idea of the immunity passport – a form of documentation that could prove a person has received the required number of shots of an approved Covid-19 vaccine. On August 27, 2021, the WHO released a guiding document for a digital certificate for COVID-19 vaccination status. Funded by organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, it is intended that this digital information system be used to implement a vaccine passport in every country.
A COVID vaccination certificate system has been already rolled out in Israel, some European countries, and in US cities such as New York and San Francisco. Current uses for the vaccine passport include denying those who are unvaccinated access to restaurants, bars, gyms and trains. This program separates people based on health status and creates a system of medical and socio-economic apartheid.
Government issued QR-code health passes could be used to launch a China style authoritarian government program. With the use of big data, face recognition technology and machine learning, China’s social credit system monitors and regulates people’s behavior. It ranks them based on their ‘social credit’, rewarding ‘good’ citizens, while punishing ‘bad’ citizens.
Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of WEF, called the initiative of the Great Reset “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” that opens up a new chapter for human development. Using science and advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics and genetic engineering, its stated goal is said to create a “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity.”
Merging humans with the machine
Steps toward the merging of digital technologies and biological systems are already taking place with the idea of the immunity passport – a form of documentation that could prove a person has received the required number of shots of an approved Covid-19 vaccine. On August 27, 2021, the WHO released a guiding document for a digital certificate for COVID-19 vaccination status. Funded by organizations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, it is intended that this digital information system be used to implement a vaccine passport in every country.
A COVID vaccination certificate system has been already rolled out in Israel, some European countries, and in US cities such as New York and San Francisco. Current uses for the vaccine passport include denying those who are unvaccinated access to restaurants, bars, gyms and trains. This program separates people based on health status and creates a system of medical and socio-economic apartheid.
Government issued QR-code health passes could be used to launch a China style authoritarian government program. With the use of big data, face recognition technology and machine learning, China’s social credit system monitors and regulates people’s behavior. It ranks them based on their ‘social credit’, rewarding ‘good’ citizens, while punishing ‘bad’ citizens.
Now, it looks like China’s social scoring technocracy is coming to the West. Under algorithmic governance that enforces obedience and conformity, human beings will become automatons, not being able to make independent decisions about their own actions.
Internet of bodies
The enslavement of humanity in cyberspace is not the end goal. The convergence of biological and digital identity will bring about a radical transformation of human beings. Lewis recognized man’s aspiration to control nature would lead to the abolition of our humanity, and that the timing of this change was not far off:
“The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by prenatal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won.”
In the digital age, the advancement of technology is opening up many possibilities for human beings to transform themselves. By experimenting with a range of high-tech innovations, teams behind the Great Reset are now seeking to exploit this uncharted territory.
In July 2020, WEF published the white paper titled, “Shaping the Future of the Internet of Bodies: New Challenges of Technology Governance.” A 28-page document introduced the concept of the internet of bodies (IoB) as “the network of human bodies and data through connected sensors”. It explained how these sensors can be attached to human bodies through consumer wearable devices or “implanted within or ingested into human bodies to monitor, analyse and even modify human bodies and behavior.”
Those who are working to bring related products to market claim that the application of IoB could change human beings as a natural concept. Seizing the power of this technology, this can be viewed as an attempt to claim ownership of human bodies, to gain access to the thoughts, emotions and biorhythmic data of individuals. Their vision seeks to create a post-human society by transforming “the human body into a new technology platform.”
Politicization of public health
Capitalising on the ongoing pandemic, while people are kept in fear and uncertainty, the end game is being played out for man’s final conquest of nature. Those who aspire to eradicate the human race in its natural state steer the societal narrative in order to ensnare the population in their web of control.
Since it declared a global pandemic on March 11, 2020, the WHO has quickly positioned itself as the preeminent global health authority. With its own process of gathering data, research and evaluation, the organization has spearheaded global public health efforts, advising countries on how to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. They have published guidance as to how to minimize the risk of spreading, or catching the virus, together with its own website ‘myth-buster’, which purports to debunk what they deem to be unsubstantiated information or “medical misinformation” online.
In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a branch of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), working in partnership with the WHO, began to set guidelines and give recommendations. As new rules and restrictions have been put into place, the concept of ‘public health’ has become politicized.
From face mask policies to “lockdown” measures, corporate media framed the issues in a false dichotomy of liberal and conservative talking points. First, major media networks have dismissed anyone questioning the official pandemic narrative as “conspiracy theorists” and accused them of spreading harmful misinformation to the public. Then they indiscriminately labeled them as “Covid deniers,” and branded them as “far right,” or “Trumpers,” and “anti-science.”
Insane disinformation propagated by Dr. Leana Wen on national TV. Her and other agencies actions are leading to increasing deaths – she and they are literally citing a FRAUDULENT paper to support their lies as proven in this review https://t.co/PUCPGqTIk2pic.twitter.com/oKMA37X7e9
Concerted efforts of the legacy media have been used to suppress information on early treatment that could be beneficial to the public, paving the way for the perception that a vaccine is the only way to end the pandemic. With a message of “we are all in this together,” we were told we need to accept the government’s mandate “for the public good.”
Discourse that is not founded on medical facts and is wrapped up with the concept of public duty seems to have affected prominent liberal intellectuals like Noam Chomsky, and institutions such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) which recently issued a puzzling statement saying that the vaccine mandates further civil liberty.
Their virtue-signalling has influenced public opinion on the political left. Organized networks of self-righteous social justice activists have been quickly formed online to engage in the shaming and guilt-tripping of fellow citizens who dare to question or comment negatively on official policies, or who refuse to take the vaccine.
For instance, comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore faced backlash on social media when he shared his own experience of adverse side effects after receiving his second dose of the Moderna Covid vaccine. In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, he said that people started to call him an ‘anti-vaxxer,’ and that he was pressured not to share any more information about his reactions.
Demonization of unvaccinated
The moral battle that has been engineered maintains its structure through marginalizing a certain population and assigning them negative attributes. From black, indigenous, and people of color, and other immigrants, governments have often used minority groups as a means of social control and source of blame for a country’s domestic problems. In the wake of 9/11, American Muslims were scapegoated for the terrifying reality of terrorism on U.S. soil. Now, in this Covid crisis, the unvaccinated have become a target for demonization. By using the phrase “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” President Joe Biden has portrayed unvaccinated people as those who pose a threat to public health, stopping society from moving forward.
Placing blame on the unvaccinated has helped spread a new type of discrimination. In some hospitals, doctors have begun to refuse to treat the unvaccinated, making those who are vaccinated a priority when resources are scarce. Vilification of those who have not gotten a shot has increased, such as when The Atlanticpublished an article from former Obama Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem calling for unvaccinated people to be put on the No Fly List.
This type of discrimination can escalate quickly. Arne Duncan, who served as former President Obama’s Education Secretary for seven years, compared unvaccinated Americans to suicide bombers at the Kabul airport. In his tweet, he noted that anti-mask and anti-vax people “blow themselves up, inflict harm on those around them, and are convinced they are fighting for freedom.”
These wild imaginations have been acted out in other Western countries. In France, a woman who tried to enter a shopping mall without proof of vaccine passport was violently beaten by the security forces.
On the streets of Paris, police are using teargas during their confrontation with the protesters opposing the vaccine passport. Similar scenes can be seen in other countries.
New domestic terrorism
Now, with the rise of the allegedly highly contagious Delta variant, governments are intensifying their fight against the coronavirus. Accompanied by media fear mongering, the drumbeat for ‘the war on Covid-19’ is getting louder.
Earlier this month, on September 9, President Biden announced his intention to expand the executive branch’s power to require all federal workers to get vaccinated, while this mandate does not extend to members of Congress. He also stated his intention to force all private businesses with over 100 employees to get COVID vaccinations or be tested for coronavirus at least once a week.
During his announcement the President heaped even more disdain on the unvaccinated, saying they are “keeping us from turning the corner” and “making people sick, causing unvaccinated people to die.” He then said that the fight against the virus requires defeating those who are reluctant to get a shot, and that he intended to make them roll up their sleeves.
Biden’s forceful Covid-19 vaccine speech came at a time when his administration introduced the government’s new strategy to confront domestic terrorism. Journalist Whitney Webb reported that despite its stated aim of tackling “right-wing white supremacists”, the policy targets anyone who criticizes the government’s authority.
But who are the unvaccinated, now being treated like a dangerous virus that needs to be dispatched? In reality, they are not confined to some fringe element of society. They represent a broad range of professionals including police officers, military members, firefighters, teachers and students. They are physicians, nurses and other ‘essential’ workers who put their lives on the frontline during the pandemic – and are now told to take a jab or lose a job.
Silenced majority
The politicians and media pundits call those who are refusing to take doses “anti-vaxxers.” But many of them are not strictly anti-vaccine. Rather, they are anti government (or corporate) mandating of the vaccine. Most have had other vaccines previously, and vaccinated their children. Many have even taken the Covid vaccine. They are also those who came to a decision that a Covid-19 vaccine is not right for them, whether it is for medical, personal health or religious reasons. They believe in medical freedom and choose natural remedies; to eat wholesome food and work with the body’s innate capacity for healing. They are individuals who are standing up for bodily autonomy with the conviction that the government has no right to inject things that they don’t want into their body.
‼️This is — without a doubt — the best articulation as to the ethical problem posed by mandatory vaccines or vaccine passports.
Dr. Julie Ponesse explains the dilemma in a persuasive manner.
Mass media depict them as right-wing extremists, but they do not belong to either the left or the right. They are a silenced majority, being betrayed and abandoned by elected leaders and now being pushed into political exile.
Despite health officials calling them anti-science, many of them believe in science and hold a view that science requires rigorous studies and open debate. They are those who have acquired natural immunity because they already had the virus. They are people who were injured after the first dose and the doctor advised not to take a second dose. They are people whose immune systems are compromised and who cannot take a shot, even if they want to. They are parents who are concerned that their little children are categorized as disease reservoirs and do not want to accept medical treatment from manufacturers and healthcare providers that are shielded from legal liability.
While the vaccinated represent a largely privileged class in a society, among the majority of unvaccinated are poor and people of color from marginalized communities. Black people have been showing hesitancy because they distrust the government based on historic injustices like the Tuskegee experiment and other past experience of abuse at the hands of the government.
Awakening human heart
The war on Covid is a war on humanity. In this pandemic crisis, we have been made to be afraid of an invisible virus. The fear has frozen our hearts, making us afraid of our own neighbors. With the practice of social distancing, we have been conditioned to see each other as a threat from which we need to protect ourselves. Now, career politicians who have never once cared about public health are telling us that we have to sacrifice our freedom to bring society back to normal. They are now further dividing us into a new class of ‘vaxxed’ or ‘non-vaxxed’ to make us fight against one another.
With the vaccine mandate and digital ID, the movers of the Great Reset aim to open a new chapter for a society without humanity. Under the slogan “Build Back Better,” political leaders and activists around the world engage in a campaign, promising to create a fairer and greener future. Yet, the system that is built on exclusion of some brothers and sisters, separation and hatred can’t create a truly sustainable world that acknowledges the sacredness of all living beings.
In his book, Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis talked about the concept of progress, saying, “If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road.”
Hence, we can best evolve as a species through each of us returning to a path of nature and choosing to abide by the laws of human nature.
The future of civil society requires human beings who freely lay claim to their responsibility as stewards of this planet. Our willingness to confront our fears with courage can awaken our sense of shared humanity. This is the heart of our democracy that accepts diverse opinions and remains open to our radical differences. Through ordinary people, heart to heart in solidarity, a new network is being created that can bring a triumph of the human spirit.
Defenders of vaccination insist that indisputable, objective medical facts have determined the approach to the pandemic. Their dogmatic arguments are based on the false assumption that COVID is an enemy to be eradicated, and the vaccine is the singular weapon of choice.
Curing illness and preventing death have been the focus of most medical systems throughout recorded history. Symptoms, and their underlying causes, have dominated debates and research about disease.
For hundreds of years in western medical science, the central paradigm for developing therapies has rested on the supposition that each malady is the result of a single dangerous invasive element. Fundamental treatment usually involves dispelling a contaminant from the patient.
Poor health is presumed to have a foundational cause — the body is violated by something with destructive intent and force.
There are many advances in technological medicine that have saved lives. Medical science has made incredible progress in the repair and replacement of organs and limbs.
The evolution of micro-surgery represents the cutting edge of engineering. New therapies have made previously deadly cancers treatable.
Yet despite insightful developments in biology and genetics, the incredibly complex natural processes of the human body remain far from fully understood.
A static view is usually applied to disease — it is deemed something that must be eradicated. The remedies of choice are poisonous concoctions used to suppress symptoms or overwhelm pathogens.
Although new treatments and drugs have been developed, essentially the approach to health has not changed. That’s because the basic underlying philosophy and perspective of medical research and practice have not evolved along with technology.
New techniques, old habits
Without deeper knowledge of what sustains good health, evaluations of maladies are dominated by tests and statistics, and extremis of illness is assessed by need for hospitalization or risk of death.
In place of a sophisticated, philosophical approach, current medical practice maintains a false veil of modernity.
Failures in treatment reveal how most diseases continue to be framed as a corporal encroachment.
Bloodletting was a common practice for millennia through the late 19th century, applied for many maladies. The belief that the human body required purging from detrimental substances was the central guiding principle.
The need to expel deleterious parts or pathogens from the body continues to drive most therapies today.
Medical science hasn’t begun to understand the power of natural disease immunity. The ability of the endocrine and nervous systems to seamlessly integrate in maximizing vitality, even in the face of increasing challenges, is phenomenal.
The precarious belief that we have reached an apex of understanding the human body has engendered other false assumptions, including that medicine can improve biology with powerful disruptive drugs, including vaccines.
Epidemics arise where the benefits of a vaccine might outweigh its risks. Until more enlightened solutions are developed, their application should be openly debated, and then used with great caution.
Until generational studies can be done, including the effects on fertility, no one can make any claim about long-term safety.
The supposedly cutting-edge mRNA vaccine, developed from a growing understanding of the human genome, is designed and described as something that teaches cells how to fight off the virus.
The application conforms with the archaic arsenal of medical science — it is a weapon used against an opponent that must be conquered.
Vaccination therapy assumes the human body needs training to best defend itself. Following the logic of this highly questionable notion, in this current conflict the enemy appears to have found ways to camouflage and evolve.
If the pandemic is seen as a war, the use of vaccines could lead to many casualties and disastrous collateral damage.
The battle with disease
Within decades, experts will likely view the use of vaccines — promoted to defy viral infection — as misguided, similar to how we now regard bloodletting.
When general health is maximized, no vaccine comes close to offering the protection provided by the sophisticated and complex human immune system. With balanced vitality, our bodies instinctively eliminate microorganisms that don’t belong.
Pathogens are rarely the primary cause of ailments. As within the rest of nature, microorganisms most often thrive when the process of deterioration has already begun.
Most that live on or in humans are beneficial. Some bacteria are key components of digestion — we would die without them.
In the 20th century, the development of penicillin brought a profound impact to life-threatening infections and traumatic injuries with sepsis.
However, there are growing concerns that overuse of antibiotics, both in humans and animals, has engendered more powerful and more dangerous bacteria.
Medical science relentlessly continues to attack disease and pathogens without recognizing that suppression is a tactic with great risks.
There is growing awareness that this approach frequently engenders more virulent mutations and manifestations of underlying causes.
The ongoing notion that we must battle illness at all costs is an insidious problem. Attempting to destroy pathogens, or relying solely on a vaccine to defend against a toxic force, exacerbates the faulty logic that has driven treatment of disease since the Middle Ages.
Our well-being is founded on establishing harmony with our environment, and is exemplified by our innate immunity to microbes that might harm us.
The statistics about increased life expectancy for industrialized countries are less telling when compared to regions of the world where stress is minimal, air, water and soil are clean, and a nutritious diet is the cultural norm.
In some of those places, people have lived for more than 100 years without medical intervention.
The central thrust of modern medicine is based on a fearful, feudal model that eclipses the importance of life-style. Although they are key factors in avoiding illness, diet and environment are rarely mentioned by the medical establishment.
The irrational dread of a viral pandemic exemplifies how the medical world has projected its obsolete mania on to humanity.
People want to avoid pain and sickness, but they know that their quality of life is more precious than anything else.
Good health, even in the midst of a pandemic, can’t be measured by defiance of death or how well a medical system dispenses products.
Fear and loathing in the plague
As the philosophy of medical science staunchly remains in the Dark Ages, those who seek an alternative approach to maintaining health are marginalized.
In recent decades, there has been movement towards an enlightened approach in response to this ongoing challenge.
Compounding the current situation, the militant response to the pandemic has stalled necessary changes and further entrenched the vested medical mindset. The crisis has revealed, and furthered, detrimental attitudes towards illness and disease.
We are repeatedly told malicious forces are assaulting us in the form of a microorganism, and that this loathsome virus is intent on destabilizing humanity and every tier of society.
The vehemence of the counter-attack against the virus is telling — the pathogen and its mutations are enemies that we will need to fight perpetually. Those who defy the prescribed approach in any way are deemed heretics.
Similar views dominated during previous pandemics.
Although the greatest plague in modern history caused much more misery and mortality, the response to the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the mid-14th century has disturbing parallels to our current experience.
The bubonic plague engendered horrific suffering and often caused death within days of infection. Those who survived were deeply shocked and scarred, finding themselves in an unrecognizable world.
The pandemic is estimated to have killed half the population of Europe. Many factors contributed to its transmission. Treatments were mostly limited to exorcisms, bloodletting and poisonous concoctions that often killed the patient before the disease.
Widespread terror heightened divisiveness. Overt blame was laid at the feet of those who deviated from the dominant culture of the era. As the horizon darkened, hostility increased, with innocent people jailed, tortured or killed as punishment for their alleged responsibility for bringing the pestilence.
Infidels were burned at the stake because they held minority beliefs. They were identified as the source of the evil scourge that had spread through most villages, cities and provinces.
Although the Black Death pushed ignorance and hostility to new heights, the Renaissance emerged out of the darkness. An enlightened era fueled creativity in the general sciences, arts and philosophy, eventually leading to the rise of more democratic societies.
Yet medical science remained obsessed with morbidity and mortality.
The science of death
Physicians from Europe arrived for the first time in China in the late 16th century. The traditional doctors who met them found their approach to the human body peculiar. They seemed to know very little about the source of wellness or methods to prevent illness.
They were told about the reliance on dissecting cadavers to understand the human body. These doctors, whose training was in ancient and sophisticated folk medicine, concluded that the observation of the static anatomy of the dead overshadowed the physiology of the living.
The Chinese philosopher-physicians regarded western medicine as the science of death.
Over the following centuries, an ever-narrowing focus was applied to understanding disease, ultimately symbolized by a microscope in search of deadly pathogens.
Virtually ignoring a wider view and analysis of creative process, medicine became focused on finding nearly invisible beasts which were still believed to be the core source of affliction.
A long time coming
Many people believe the recent vaccine rollout is enlightened by achievements of the highest order, including how quickly a specific remedy for COVID-19 was released.
Those who are not convinced that a wonder drug has been developed are intimidated by the hostility of a vociferous majority.
The defenders of vaccination insist that indisputable, objective medical facts have determined the approach to the pandemic. Their dogmatic arguments all are based on the false assumption that the virus is an enemy to be eradicated, and the vaccine is the singular weapon of choice.
Alternative views are rejected with absolutism. By dismissing debate and mirroring the intolerance of the Dark Ages, harsh critics of the unvaccinated confirm their reactionary and hypocritical position.
Those who deny that the philosophical approach to disease is mired in the past, angrily assert that the advances of modern medicine are unassailable. Challenging the medical establishment’s majority position is now forbidden.
At the heart of the polarized debate is the definition of disease — everyone has a right to participate in implementing a model for good health.
Insistence on one point of view and supporting mandates to enforce it, reflects how an antiquated system has infected the populace and politics with medieval perspective and policies.
A mortal threat can cause an atheist to speak with god, convert a pacifist into a warrior, or transform a humanitarian into a fascist. Fear of the unknown, particularly when potential illness and death are looming, evokes the worst of human instincts.
Even the president of the United States feels he is empowered to further intensify the divide, blaming the unvaccinated for failures in the war on the virus.
Figuratively, dissenters are now burned at the stake, and from a psychological perspective, this condemnation is no different from 14th century nobles and priests denouncing innocent people for causing the plague.
This insanity prevails because the proponents of inoculation have been assured by the infallible gods of medicine and their devoted ministry that the unvaccinated are responsible for the continuing pandemic.
They have no doubt that those who question this edict exhibit the height of irresponsibility in the war against a destructive virus. Everyone must give unwavering support to the government’s plan to defeat the dark elements causing the plague.
Leaders and supporters have transformed into a hostile mob, grandly claiming that any scientist, doctor or journalist who questions the strategy of the battle is a dangerous liar and apostate. They insist the existential public health threat to every nation must be faced with a unified front.
This irate and intractable position is a thinly veiled charade.
Unrelenting vehemence and angry tirades are directly proportional to fears and doubts. A dogmatic stance is never an enlightened position — it reflects a need to suppress any dissent that reveals insecurity.
When anger fails, enforced dictates follow. However, the implementation of medical mandates with draconian tactics are ultimately detrimental to public health.
Echoing the irrational fears of medical science, and absurdly invoking the power of a threatening microbe, most governments will soon lose credibility in the handling of the pandemic.
The enemy is not the virus nor the unvaccinated. The only true threats are fear and intolerance.
To face this disease, we need an enlightened approach, particularly in developing innovative prevention for those at greatest risk and effective treatments for those who are ill.
A cabal with questionable morals and motives should not determine our future. Modern medicine will remain capricious and deeply flawed until a new open-minded, creative philosophy is applied to limiting disease.
The appropriate response to any genuine public health crisis needs to be debated, discussed and implemented with calm demeanor by the broadest range of informed individuals.
Establishing wellness begins with rational and ethical discussion about what is truly effective, including a renewed emphasis on the importance of good nutrition.
There is room for optimism. If we recognize that supporting natural immunity engenders the greatest vitality, a renaissance in healthcare can emerge from this current plague of ignorance.
There’s a quote from an ancient Buddhist text called the Dhammapada that’s often translated as, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.”
In other words our mental habits shape our personality and determine how that personality will behave, and that behavior contributes to the shaping of the world.
We see a similar line in the Upanishads of Hinduism: “As is your desire, so is your intention. As is your intention, so is your will. As is your will, so is your deed. As is your deed, so is your destiny.”
These are two different ways of expressing the same timeless observation we see pop up in various forms throughout philosophical traditions around the world: that our actions arise from our thoughts and our thoughts arise from our conditioned mental habits, so we need to be very careful about what those mental habits are since it will ultimately determine our destiny.
But the people who pour the most energy and attention into this timeless observation as a group are not the Buddhists, nor the Hindus, nor any religious or philosophical tradition at all. Those who are the most interested in studying and acting upon this insight are the powerful people who rule this world.
The powerful understand that because people’s actions follow from their thoughts and the destiny of the world follows from people’s actions, if you can control the thoughts people think at mass scale you can control the destiny of the world.
Control the way people collectively think about things and you can control the way they act, you can control the way they organize, and you can control the way they vote. This is important because people have become more literate and better at sharing information over the years, and therefore more aware of the value of freedom and equality, so it’s gotten harder and harder to deny them freedom and equality without sparking violent revolutions and winding up with your head in a basket.
Power structures of more “enlightened” societies have addressed this dilemma by giving people the illusion of freedom snd equality while still keeping them enslaved to the agendas of their rulers via mass-scale psychological manipulation. Media institutions, online platforms and think tanks are dominated by plutocrats in coordination with secretive government agencies to ensure that the information the majority of people consume serves the social, political, military and geostrategic interests of the ruling power structure.
This is why when you watch the news on TV it always kind of feels like they are deceiving you; that’s exactly what’s happening. Information that is inconvenient for the powerful is omitted, while information that serves the powerful is amplified and twisted in the most convenient light possible.
This happens not because the media-controlling class is personally leaning over the shoulder of every news reporter and instructing them to lie, but because if you control who runs a media outlet then you control who they will hire and who they will elevate, naturally giving rise to a system wherein reporters understand that the only way for them to advance their careers is to promote narratives which serve the ruling power establishment and marginalize narratives which don’t.
Many journalists – either for self-serving reasons or due to genuine befuddlement – are completely misinterpreting Bernie's media critique. The person who explained it most clearly was Noam Chomsky in this 90-second answer to an equally confused BBC host. This will clear it up: pic.twitter.com/AgznEp3LB1
The best way to manipulate people without their knowing it is to appeal to their strongest and most unconscious impulses. In practice this means tugging at the psychological hooks of the ego, which at their base level are fear and identity. If you’ve made a strong identity out of something like belonging to a certain political party or a certain ideological or ethnic group, then it will carry a lot of egoic weight for you. If you’re in a fear state then there will be a lot of egoic contraction and you’ll consequentially take your thoughts very seriously.
If you can appeal to people’s base impulses of fear and identification it becomes very easy to insert ideas into their minds and give them new mental habits, and that’s exactly what propagandists do. You need to fear the terrorists, the Russians and the Chinese, because they’re going to harm you. You need to support the Democratic Party and everything its pundits tell you, because that’s your tribe. Those anti-vaxxers over there are your real enemy, not the nuclear-armed globe-spanning power structure that is driving our world to its doom in myriad ways. And on and on and on.
They give us the illusion of freedom, but as long as they chain our minds with propaganda we are not free. It wouldn’t matter if they gave us every personal liberty imaginable if a critical mass of us were still thinking in ways which benefit the powerful, because those thoughts would cause us to act, organize and vote in a way that benefits our rulers and not us.
If we want to free our minds from the chains of power, it’s not enough to do research and memorize a bunch of facts about what’s really going on in our nation and our world. The most important step to freeing our minds from their shackles is to remove from ourselves the psychological hooks of fear and identity to which those shackles are attached. This means freeing ourselves from the delusions of egoic consciousness, which, funny enough, brings us right back around to the central tenets of Buddhism and Hinduism again.
As long as humanity is enslaved to the ego it will remain enslaved to abusive power structures, because manipulators will always be able to use our egoic hooks to propagandize us into supporting their interests at mass scale. Until then it won’t ultimately matter how many civil liberties we gain or lose, because we’ll still be unable to move beyond the bonds of our psychological chains.
Not until humanity collectively breaks free from the gravitational pull of egoic consciousness will we truly blast off into the real potentiality of our species.
In October 2019, in a speech at an International Monetary Fund conference, former Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences for what he called the “democratic market system”.
According to King, the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression. He concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.
In the repurchase agreement (repo) market, interest rates soared on 16 September. The Federal Reserve stepped in by intervening to the tune of $75 billion per day over four days, a sum not seen since the 2008 crisis.
At that time, according to Fabio Vighi, professor of critical theory at Cardiff University, the Fed began an emergency monetary programme that saw hundreds of billions of dollars per week pumped into Wall Street.
Over the last 18 months or so, under the guise of a ‘pandemic’, we have seen economies closed down, small businesses being crushed, workers being made unemployed and people’s rights being destroyed. Lockdowns and restrictions have facilitated this process. The purpose of these so-called ‘public health measures’ has little to do with public health and much to do with managing a crisis of capitalism and ultimately the restructuring of the economy.
Neoliberalism has squeezed workers income and benefits, offshored key sectors of economies and has used every tool at its disposal to maintain demand and create financial Ponzi schemes in which the rich can still invest in and profit from. The bailouts to the banking sector following the 2008 crash provided only temporary respite. The crash returned with a much bigger bang pre-Covid along with multi-billion-dollar bailouts.
The dystopian ‘great reset’ that we are currently witnessing is a response to this crisis. This reset envisages a transformation of capitalism.
Fabio Vighi sheds light on the role of the ‘pandemic’ in all of this:
“… some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s).”
Vighi describes how, in pre-Covid times, the world economy was on the verge of another colossal meltdown and chronicles how the Swiss Bank of International Settlements, BlackRock (the world’s most powerful investment fund), G7 central bankers and others worked to avert a massive impending financial meltdown.
The world economy was suffocating under an unsustainable mountain of debt. Many companies could not generate enough profit to cover interest payments on their own debts and were staying afloat only by taking on new loans. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were rising everywhere.
Lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets (under the guise of COVID) with freshly printed money while shutting down the real economy to avoid hyperinflation.
Vighi says:
“… the stock market did not collapse (in March 2020) because lockdowns had to be imposed; rather, lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing. With lockdowns came the suspension of business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion. In other words, restructuring the financial architecture through extraordinary monetary policy was contingent on the economy’s engine being turned off.”
It all amounted to a multi-trillion bailout for Wall Street under the guise of COVID ‘relief’ followed by an ongoing plan to fundamentally restructure capitalism that involves smaller enterprises being driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies and global chains, thereby ensuring continued viable profits for these predatory corporations, and the eradication of millions of jobs resulting from lockdowns and accelerated automation.
“It retains all the cruelties of the free market for those who live and work in the real world, but turns the paper economy into a state protectorate, surrounded by a kind of Trumpian Money Wall that is designed to keep the investor class safe from fear of loss. This financial economy is a fantasy casino, where the winnings are real but free chips cover the losses. For a rarefied segment of society, failure is being written out of the capitalist bargain.”
The World Economic Forum says that by 2030 the public will ‘rent’ everything they require. This means undermining the right of ownership (or possibly seizing personal assets) and restricting consumer choice underpinned by the rhetoric of reducing public debt or ‘sustainable consumption’, which will be used to legitimise impending austerity as a result of the economic meltdown. Ordinary people will foot the bill for the ‘COVID relief’ packages.
If the financial bailouts do not go according to plan, we could see further lockdowns imposed, perhaps justified under the pretext of ‘the virus’ but also ‘climate emergency’.
It is not only Big Finance that has been saved. A previously ailing pharmaceuticals industry has also received a massive bailout (public funds to develop and purchase the vaccines) and lifeline thanks to the money-making COVID jabs.
The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants as well and have cemented their dominance. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID government measures.
Capitalism and labour
Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms. A significant part of the working class has long been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. Since then, this section of the population has had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services or, if ‘lucky’, insecure low-paid service sector jobs.
What we saw following the 2008 crash was ordinary people being pushed further to the edge. After a decade of ‘austerity’ in the UK – a neoliberal assault on the living conditions of ordinary people carried out under the guise of reining in public debt following the bank bail outs – a leading UN poverty expert compared Conservative welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses and warned that, unless austerity is ended, the UK’s poorest people face lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.
Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused ministers of being in a state of denial about the impact of policies. He accused them of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.
In another 2019 report, the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank laid the blame for more than 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 at the door of government policies. It claimed that these deaths could have been prevented if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts.
Over the past 10 years in the UK, according to the Trussell Group, there has been rising food poverty and increasing reliance on food banks.
And in a damning report on poverty in the UK by Professor David Gordon of the University of Bristol, it was found that almost 18 million cannot afford adequate housing conditions, 12 million are too poor to engage in common social activities, one in three cannot afford to heat their homes adequately in winter and four million children and adults are not properly fed (Britain’s population is estimated at around 66 million).
Moreover, a 2015 report by the New Policy Institute noted that the total number of people in poverty in the UK had increased by 800,000, from 13.2 to 14.0 million in just two to three years.
Meanwhile, The Equality Trust in 2018 reported that the ‘austerity’ years were anything but austere for the richest 1,000 people in the UK. They had increased their wealth by £66 billion in one year alone (2017-2018), by £274 billion in five years (2013-2018) and had increased their total wealth to £724 billion – significantly more than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion).
Just some of the cruelties of the ‘free market’ for those who live and work in the real world. And all of this hardship prior to lockdowns that have subsequently devastated lives, livelihoods and health, with cancer diagnoses and treatments and other conditions having been neglected due to the shutdown of health services.
During the current economic crisis, what we are seeing is many millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision on the immediate horizon, a mass labour force will no longer be required.
It raises fundamental questions about the need for and the future of mass education, welfare and healthcare provision and systems that have traditionally served to reproduce and maintain labour that capitalist economic activity has required.
As the economic is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed. If work is a condition of the existence of the labouring classes, then, in the eyes of capitalists, why maintain a pool of (surplus) labour that is no longer needed?
A concentration of wealth power and ownership is taking place as a result of COVID-related policies: according to research by Oxfam, the world’s billionaires gained $3.9 trillion while working people lost $3.7 trillion in 2020. At the same time, as large sections of the population head into a state of permanent unemployment, the rulers are weary of mass dissent and resistance. We are witnessing an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.
In 2020, World Bank Group President David Malpass stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns but such ‘help’ would be on condition that neoliberal reforms become further embedded. In other words, the de facto privatisation of states (affecting all nations, rich and poor alike), the (complete) erosion of national sovereignty and dollar-denominated debt leading to a further strengthening of US leverage and power.
In a system of top-down surveillance capitalism with an increasing section of the population deemed ‘unproductive’ and ‘useless eaters’, notions of individualism, liberal democracy and the ideology of free choice and consumerism are regarded by the elite as ‘unnecessary luxuries’ along with political and civil rights and freedoms.
We need only look at the ongoing tyranny in Australia to see where other countries could be heading. How quickly Australia was transformed from a ‘liberal democracy’ to a brutal totalitarian police state of endless lockdowns where gathering and protests are not to be tolerated.
Being beaten and thrown to the ground and fired at with rubber bullets in the name of protecting health makes as much sense as devastating entire societies through socially and economically destructive lockdowns to ‘save lives’.
It makes as much sense as mask-wearing and social-distancing mandates unsupported by science, misused and flawed PCR tests, perfectly healthy people being labelled as ‘cases’, deliberately inflated COVID death figures, pushing dangerous experimental vaccines in the name of health, ramping up fear, relying on Neil Ferguson’s bogus modelling, censoring debate about any of this and the WHO declaring a worldwide ‘pandemic’ based on a very low number of global ‘cases’ back in early 2020 (44,279 ‘cases’ and 1,440 supposed COVID deaths outside China out of a population of 6.4 billion).
There is little if any logic to this. But of course, If we view what is happening in terms of a crisis of capitalism, it might begin to make a lot more sense.
The austerity measures that followed the 2008 crash were bad enough for ordinary people who were still reeling from the impacts when the first lockdown was imposed.
The authorities are aware that deeper, harsher impacts as well as much more wide-ranging changes will be experienced this time around and seem adamant that the masses must become more tightly controlled and conditioned to their coming servitude.
Of all the mass delusions running rampant in the culture, none is more spectacularly delusional than the conviction that we can all get fabulously rich from speculation while producing nothing. The key characteristic of speculation is that it produces nothing: it doesn’t generate any new goods or services, boost productivity or increase the functionality of real-world essentials.
Like all mass delusions, the greater the disconnect from reality, the greater the appeal. Mass delusions gain their escape velocity by leaving any ties to real-world limitations behind, and by igniting the most powerful booster to human euphoric confidence known, greed.
Lost in the mania of easy wealth from speculative trading is the absence of any value creation in the rotation-churn of moving bets from one table to the latest hot game: in flipping houses sight unseen, no functionality was added to the house. In transferring bets on one cryptocurrency to another or from one meme stock to another, no value to the economy or society was created.
In the mass delusion that near-infinite wealth can be generated without producing anything, creating value has no value: the delusion is that I can get rich producing nothing but speculative gains, and then I can buy all the stuff somebody else is making.
The fantasy powering the speculative frenzy is once I get rich, I’ll stop working and live off my wealth. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how everyone can get rich via unproductive speculation, quit their jobs and then live off the productive work of somebody else who failed to get rich off speculation.
Maybe that’s why all the container ships are lined up at Long Beach, waiting to unload the goodies made in China for American speculators to buy. This is what happens when the incentive structure of the economy decays so that being productive has little upside (i.e., working is for chumps) while speculating is all upside (get rich quickly and easily).
Everyone knows great empires became great by transferring their critical supply chains to competing nations, living it up on borrowed/printed money, exploiting the highest bidder wins regulatory/governance system and incentivizing speculation while pushing wage earners into debt-and-tax servitude. Bone up on your history, Bucko; all great nations got there by quitting boring, tiresome productive work to speculate on illusions of value with borrowed money.
This is the result of monopolies and cartels becoming the financial and political power centers of the nation. Maximizing private gains is all that matters in this incentive structure, and so treating employees as chattel to lower costs, offshoring critical supply chains to squeeze out a few more dollars of profits, engineering products to break down (planned obsolescence), buying regulatory barriers and “free passes” and tax breaks galore with all the billions showered on financiers and other fraudsters by the Federal Reserve: in a word, a system that optimizes corruption.
This is how you hollow out a nation and guarantee collapse. The most rewarding “skillsets” are a sociopathological obsession with maximizing profits by any means available and speculating with Fed free money for financiers. The millions of “retail” speculators are simply picking up the cues being given by the billionaires who gained their wealth by issuing debt to fund stock buy-backs and other financial manipulations.
Working for monopolies and cartels is for chumps because monopolies and cartels have zero incentive to share profits with mere employees. Their profits are made not by taking care of their workforce but by regulatory capture, artificial scarcities and financialized destruction of competition: first, borrow billions thanks to the Fed and Wall Street, destroy the competition (for example, the taxi industry), then once the competition has been wiped out, jack up prices because now consumers have no choice other than another member of the cartel.
Speculative “wealth” is phantom wealth, a flickering illusion of prosperity. All speculative bubbles pop, and all speculative bubbles inflated by borrowed money and central bank manipulation pop even more ferociously than bubbles funded by actual savings.
By incentivizing speculation and corruption, reducing the rewards for productive work and sucking wages dry with inflation, America has greased the skids to collapse. As with all mass delusions, the incentives to continue believing are immense and the incentives to reconnect with reality few.
So in conclusion: the speculative gains to be made in the collapse of the mass delusion will be spectacular. There’s nothing like the collapse of a hollowed out, completely corrupt economy to generate outsized profits for nimble speculators. Just keep your speculative winnings on number 22 on the roulette wheel. (A Casablanca movie reference….)
Behold the photo (above) showing President “Joe Biden” getting his booster shot of the Covid-19 “vaccine,” with the news media clustered to the left of what is apparently a stage-set built in a larger chamber. Do you possibly ask yourself: why bother to build a set for this event in or under the White House somewhere — including even fake daylit windows — when there are any number of actual rooms in the White House perfectly suited to holding this grand event in real daylight? What is going on here?
And, by the way, how do we know that “JB” is getting an actual mRNA booster? Or is it just 10 CCs of saline solution? Is not the syringe, after all, just another prop in the show? The video of this event was broadcast on cable TV channels and corporate media websites everywhere. None of them commented on the strange artificiality of the staging. And so, the mystery abides….
It only reinforces the creeping suspicion that absolutely everything about the “Joe Biden” regime is fake. And malevolently so. How else could it be that so many bad things are happening at the same time in this country if there was not some faction seeking to destroy it?
For instance, the vaccine mandates for medical personnel. In upstate New York, WNYT-TV reported yesterday that 200 employees of Albany Med, a large, regional teaching hospital, are placed on seven day’s unpaid leave prior to getting fired for refusing the vaccine. Andrew Cuomo’s replacement, new Governor Kathy Hochul, has blocked unemployment benefits for fired nurses and technicians if they persist in evading the vax. Doctors are included in the mix, too.
Of course, large numbers of health care workers getting kicked out of their jobs will only make it more difficult to care for patients — with Covid or any other health problem — so how does this policy help anyone? (Unless you consider that, with fewer staff on-duty, fewer Covid in-patients will be subjected to the medical malpractice of being placed on ventilators and treated with the killer drug Remdesivir.) Not only has effective early treatment with other drugs been banned from the official medical standards-of-practice across the USA, but mere talk about it has been banned, notably by Google’s YouTube app.
This coercion of health care workers is going on all over the country, of course, not just in New York state. These nurses and techs have been working around Covid patients for going on two years, and many of them have gotten the disease, with symptoms or without, conferring natural immunity. So, what is the point of forcing the vaxes on them? It is also a fact that vaccinated people are susceptible to catching the disease, and that, in any case, the vaccinated carry heavier viral loads than the un-vaxed, making them more efficient spreaders. It is also a fact that mass vaccination in the midst of a pandemic promotes the mutation of new variant viruses that increasingly are not affected by the vaccines.
Thursday night, CNN ran a segment with its house doctor, Sanjay Gupta, hectoring one Andrea Babinski, a La Crosse, Wisconsin, nurse who is quitting her job at Gundersen Hospital there rather than take the vax shot. Dr. Gupta, acting all perplexed, asked her why. Ms. Babinski said she was concerned about blood-clotting. Dr. Gupta dismissed her concern, saying, “If you’ve got a clotting disorder, you should get the vaccine.” Really…?
After the segment, Dr. Gupta and Anderson Cooper shook their heads in amused puzzlement over the nurse’s obdurate foolishness. They are apparently uninformed that the spike protein produced by the vaccine is known to bind onto the endothelial lining of blood vessels and promote blood clots, leading to a range of lethal events such as myocardial infarction and cerebral hemorrhage — heart attack and stroke — plus a broad array of organ damage and neurological disorders.
The Medicare Tracking System states that 48,465 people have died within 14 days of receiving a vax shot. Many had co-morbidities, of course, so not all the deaths can be directly attributed to the vaccines, but the public health authorities are averse to autopsies that might establish the truth of the matter. Anyway, the CDC has ruled recently that they will only count people more than 14 days out from a shot as being considered officially vaccinated — so none of those aforementioned deaths would have counted as vaccinated persons under the rule. Do you see how they are gaming the statistics to keep Americans as misinformed as possible?
Despite all the efforts to bamboozle the public, the “Joe Biden” regime has about run out the string on Covid paranoia, and wrung all of the political usefulness out of it. Going forward, it will only backfire on them. Do they think that wrecking hospital services while depriving thousands of health care workers of their incomes is a winning strategy? These are existential threats to US citizens.
Everything else under “Joe Biden’s” watch looks like a pyromaniac seeking to burn down the country. Over 10,000 Haitian interlopers have been surreptitiously dispersed from Del Rio, Texas, to nether regions of the USA. The government made no effort to vaccinate them — what does that tell you? Over 100,000 more invading opportunists from all over the world are reportedly heading to the southern border. A month after the fall of Afghanistan, and after this week’s hearings in both the House and the Senate, still nobody knows who gave the insane order to surrender Bagram Air Force Base outside Kabul. The Democrats’ dishonest “infrastructure” bill is wilting in Congress. Food and energy prices are rising fast, with shortages on the horizon. The capital markets are wobbling. And Special Counsel John Durham is back on the scene with more actions against Hillary Clinton’s favorite law firm, Perkins Coie, facilitators of the seditious RussiaGate campaign. Put it all together and you have a mechanism that looks like a “Joe Biden” toaster.
Off in a far corner of the News-O-Sphere, someone affecting to be John McAfee dwells on a Telegram channel labeled “OfficialMcAfee.” John McAfee, for those who don’t know, was the wealthy inventor of antivirus computer software who found himself at odds with the US government, went rogue, and supposedly committed suicide in Spain last June. Now, he has apparently turned up on this social media app in a series of videos and cryptic info drops. Whether he is actually still alive, or perhaps recorded these videos before taking his life, is not known. But he had threatened to release terabytes of digital evidence against his antagonists, including video of sexual misconduct among well-known political figures connected to the late Jeffrey Epstein, as well as incriminating documents from the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign files from 2016. Those info dumps have commenced and the figure who appears to be John McAfee in the Telegram videos says that the dumps will contain incrementally more shocking material for weeks to come.
All of this activity is obviously weird to an extreme never before seen in national affairs prior to the deep fake era — to the degree that reality is almost impossible to establish for now. We are a people lost in a dark wood. When you are lost, the first thing you must do is stop your useless, self-defeating locomotion, hunker down in place, and carefully assess what’s around you. Even if everything else is murky and perplexing, one thing is known: there is a way out of these dark woods. Remain calm and alert and it will reveal itself.
Fully understanding significant world events as they happened yesterday and unfold today invariably requires an understanding of the long arc of history; that is, knowledge about how the human world really works. Moreover, without that understanding, it is impossible to devise and implement an effective response. This is certainly the case in the world of 2021.
Increasingly, people around the world are realizing that there is a great deal more going on under cover of the ‘official’ narrative that we are the victims of a ‘virus’ that has, so far, required 18 months of onerous restrictions and a series of government-ordered mandates that tell us all that we must submit to several experimental, gene-altering injections and other measures that will deny our rights and freedoms ongoingly into the future.
What most people do not yet realize is that this deeper agenda is monumentally huge: the world as we knew it has ended. Moreover, if we are to recover the vaguest semblance of what we once had and, hopefully, an even better version of it, we have an equally monumental struggle ahead of us.
Undoubtedly, despite extensive effort by elite agents – including international organizations (such as the UN and WHO), governments, the medical and pharmaceutical industries, and the corporate media – to conceal what is happening, the massive death toll and other costs that have resulted from the near-total dislocation of the global economy, coupled with the rapidly increasing death and damage toll from the injectables program, are key factors in this ‘awakening’. See, for example, ‘Local Detroit TV Asks for Stories of Unvaxxed Dying from COVID – Gets over 180K Responses of Vaccine Injured and Dead Instead’.
Tragically, however, virtually all who become aware that ‘something is wrong’ do not understand the ‘long arc of history’ and are therefore trapped in a powerless mode of complaint and begging elite agents, such as governments and legal systems, to fix things for them. But this will not happen. See ‘Are We Human? Are We Free? Defeating the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” before it Destroys Us’. Consequently humanity rushes headlong to the fate planned for us by the elite long ago.
So while the global elite’s long-planned coup d’état – marketed by the World Economic Forum as ‘The Great Reset’ – is certainly intended to utterly transform the human individual and human society, the driving motivation of its agenda remains ‘hidden’.
And yet this driving motivation is hidden in plain sight. The Global Elite intends to kill off a substantial portion of the human population while enslaving virtually all of those left alive. Why? So that the elite can control access to, and utilization of, the Earth’s remaining but now depleted resources.
Let me briefly explain something of the origin of this motivation, elaborate the key ways that it has manifested over the past 500 years and identify precisely how it is manifesting now. Most importantly, let me explain what we must do to resist this agenda effectively.
The Origin and Brief History of Eugenics While the notion of ‘selective breeding’ to secure offspring with ‘desirable’ traits dates at least since the publication of Plato’s Republic in about 378 bce and has reappeared periodically since that time in one guise or another, the term ‘eugenics’ was coined in 1883 by British explorer and natural scientist Francis Galton. During the early 20th century, eugenics was given the appearance of being serious scientific study because of its pursuit by both biologists and social scientists. Their interest was understanding the extent to which human characteristics considered socially important were inherited. Of particular interest were the predictability of intelligence and certain deviant behaviours. But interest was not confined to scientific laboratories and academic institutions: it soon gained attention in cultural thought in various parts of the world. See ‘Eugenics’.
Notably, it attracted the attention of wealthy oligarchs who wanted a justification for elite rule of society ‘that discarded outdated appeals to supernatural order and seemed to rest on a bedrock of science. An idea that could explain how nouveau riche upstarts like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds had risen to positions of prominence in society alongside the old royal dynasties of Europe. Eugenics fit the bill perfectly. The answer was in their genes.’ See ‘How Big Oil Conquered The World’.
Of course, eugenics has always been pseudoscience. But it appealed to ‘the vanity of the researchers, usually hailing from successful and wealthy families themselves. And it gave an excuse for social engineering on a scale never before dreamed of.’ The idea spread precisely because it provided an ‘explanation’ of elite ‘superiority’ and so, as soon as the idea crossed the Atlantic, it was picked up by Charles Davenport, a Harvard-trained zoologist who had grown up in a strict, puritanical family.
Davenport concocted an ambitious idea for furthering the eugenic cause: the creation of a Eugenics Record Office to register the genetic background of every single individual in the USA so that each person could be categorized by their family line and assigned a genetic rating. ‘Once completed, those with the lowest eugenic value could be eliminated from the gene pool.’ Not surprisingly, Rockefeller individuals and institutions, as well as others, invested millions of dollars to fund ‘research’ and other activities in support of these efforts to identify and control the ‘eugenically unfit’.
Consequently, fueled by the support of America’s rich and powerful and with the blessing of many high-profile public figures, ‘the field of eugenics transformed from the quaint hobbyhorse of a few mad scientists into the social cause of an entire generation. Economists, politicians, authors, activists – by the 1920s, everyone who was anyone was extolling the need to eradicate the “germ-plasm” of the lower stock.’ Popularized by the corporate media, taught at universities, written about in best-selling books, it became a mass movement. So while the state of Indiana had passed the first eugenic sterilization law in the United States in 1907, by 1927 the US Supreme Court had endorsed it and the practice had become commonplace. See ‘How Big Oil Conquered The World’ and ‘Buck v. Bell: Inside the SCOTUS Case That Led to Forced Sterilization of 70,000 & Inspired the Nazis’.
And, by this time, the Nazis in Germany were being inspired, encouraged, guided and funded by eugenicists, particularly the Rockefellers, in the United States. The Third Reich’s ‘Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny’ was passed on 14 July 1933, less than six months after Hitler was appointed interim chancellor. It mandated sterilization of ‘defectives’ in eight different categories and, at its peak in the 1940s, resulted in the forced sterilization of 400,000 Germans. In this period too, the program was expanded to include ‘euthanasia’ resulting in over 70,000 German children, senior citizens, and psychiatric patients being murdered by the Nazi regime. See ‘How Big Oil Conquered The World’.
Of course, Germans were not the only victims of Nazi eugenics programs during World War II.
Nevertheless, whatever damage was done to the eugenics movement by the radical interpretation of it that manifested in Nazi practices prior to and during World War II, ranging from sterilization to killing of people with a mental illness, physical disability, a history of poverty or criminal behaviour, or in relation to those people not conforming to their notion of ‘racial hygiene’, the movement has never gone away and has had some prominent exponents. In fact, it is now making a profound resurgence although its proponents know better than to label themselves ‘eugenicists’.
And the United States remains the true home of eugenicists with forced sterilization practiced up until the 1970s and still the law of the land in 2021. ‘It doesn’t happen now’, you might say. See ‘The U.S. Is Still Forcibly Sterilizing Prisoners’.
Nevertheless, it is true that the Nazi experience had tarnished the reputation of eugenics which forced ongoing work in the field to be disguised by repackaging. And this means that the ideas and many of its practices survive to this day but in different form and certainly under different labels.
But it should also be noted that while the above might be considered a heavily-abridged history of the formal eugenics movement, which scholars like Anton Chaitkin have elaborated – listen to ‘Anton Chaitkin on the Eugenics/Euthanasia Agenda’ – and upon which others like Dr David Martin have cast a very different slant by highlighting the role of life insurance companies in driving it – watch ‘The Illusion of Knowledge’ – it is also true that one version or another of the practice, by various names in different contexts, has been around for a very long time. This is the case notwithstanding, for example, considerable academic discussion regarding the precise relationship or otherwise between eugenics and genocide. As one detailed study concluded: ‘eugenics is in fact deeply implicated in the history of genocide once it is placed in a wider context’. See ‘Eugenics and Genocide’. Without delving deeper than 500 years into human history, consider the following, for example.
Since European imperialism began in the 15th century, adversely impacting indigenous peoples in many regions around the world who were subjected to the genocidal practices of their imperial conquerors, a steady sequence of geopolitical ‘developments’ has taken place with each of these having a seriously adverse impact on local human populations: the enclosure of the commons and other measures that started being introduced during the industrial revolution in Europe in the 17th century and which denied local people the land on which their ancestors had lived for generations, the establishment of the system of nation-states with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, as well as the widespread introduction of capitalism. Each of these transformations, involving military, political, economic and social measures, exacted a significant ongoing death toll readily attributed to the violence built into the state, industrial society, capitalism and colonialism.
But one way of understanding the ideas that justified and drove this violence, which took both direct and structural forms, is to consider them through the prism of eugenics. This is because the national elites who implemented these measures – that have resulted in the massive displacement and death of local peoples the world over since the 15th century – have always actively promoted this outcome against those they considered of ‘lower stock’ (however this has been described in any given context), and as evidenced by their ongoing resistance to efforts to transform the global system into anything that offers recognition and an appropriate response to their imperial genocide of indigenous peoples or offers more equalized access to opportunities for ‘ordinary’ people everywhere even now.
In essence, elite intention has never really wavered: Whatever ideology supposedly guided any elite in a particular context, the elite has usually wanted a substantial proportion of any local human population killed off and the bulk of those left alive reduced to slavery, in one form or another, while endlessly commandeering planetary resources for elite use.
And it has used a variety of means to achieve this. Notably, genocide (particularly against indigenous peoples in Africa; Asia; North, Central and South America; and Australia), war (with about 20 million people killed in World War I and 70-85 million people killed in World War II alone), and starvation through control of the global economy (which was already killing 100,000 people each day before the current crisis was generated to play its part).
Anyway, my point is simple: What is the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ all about? It is simply the latest (and intended final) step in the Global Elite’s long-standing eugenics agenda. In this instance, it is being further and primarily implemented through destruction of the global economy and the forced injectables program being carried out worldwide, with deployment of 5G and geoengineering playing roles as well, while the enslavement of those left alive is being achieved by measures to implement the technocratic/transhumanist agenda. See ‘Beware the Transhumanists: How “Being Human” is being Re-engineered by the Elite’s Covid-19 Coup’.
If you think that this program is not being forced upon us, I hope that you will continue to monitor the destruction of your human rights, including your right to freedom of expression which includes the simple right to question and gain access to conflicting analyses of what is happening, so that the many (dis)guises under which this agenda is being implemented become clearer.
But your observation will also soon reveal that some other very basic human rights, such as those to food, medical choice and privacy are all but gone. And winning them back is going to take a monumental struggle and require millions of people acting strategically.
Killing off Humanity: Starvation There are many ways to kill off a human population with, as touched on above, wars and genocide both obvious examples, and the death toll from wars and genocides over recent centuries is testament to their effectiveness in achieving substantial depopulation.
But if you want to kill off substantial human populations in a way that is less obvious to those not paying attention, two highly effective methods are starvation in those countries outside the ‘West’, where tens of millions die annually under the ‘usual’ circumstances – that is, as an inevitable outcome of the inequities built into capitalism which is designed to concentrate wealth – without serious effort being made to address the problem, and by producing a toxic substance and compelling the bulk of the human population, one way or another, to submit to accepting it, through the air, their food and water, or even ‘medically’.
So while control of food, for example, is an ancient practice that can be dated to at least 4,000 years ago, today the world food supply is controlled by a small number of giant corporations interested only in profit, not sharing food equitably. Hence, while there is ample food, distribution reflects profitability not response to need. As a result: ‘Each year tens of millions die from the most elementary lack of their daily bread’. For a comprehensive account of corporate control of food, see ‘The BA Cartel, Part 2’ and ‘The BA Cartel, Part 3’.
But it is not just elite-driven corporate practice that is responsible for this starvation. Governments are actively involved in implementing elite policy in this regard too, as was made clear in the neo-Malthusian policy which Henry Kissinger promulgated in 1974 as U.S. Secretary of State, in his National Security Study Memorandum 200. See ‘Implications of Worldwide Population Growth For U.S. Security and Overseas Interests’. NSSM-200 outlined a policy of genocide and depopulation against the Third World, and ultimately, against the industrialized sector.
Just one factor in this elite control of food and the massive deaths by starvation it is generating is the model of industrial agriculture – including large-scale corporate ownership of land (at the expense of millions of small-holders), the use of genetically mutilated organisms and extensive use of synthetic fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides – that has been systematically imposed worldwide. For one account of this that elaborates the interrelated set of problems in some detail, see ‘Industrial Ag Is Poisoning the World – and Causing a Global Hunger Pandemic’.
But since formal destruction of the global economy began in March 2020 (thus achieving the concealment of its fragility and likely collapse in any case), even the perverse distribution system in place as part of this corporate grip on the world food supply has been further distorted leading to what one author called ‘lockdown starvation’. By closing down the global economy supposedly in response to the ‘pandemic’, the global elite was able to conceal a significant component of its depopulation agenda by largely confining it to places where such deaths are already routine and readily ignored: countries in Africa, Asia and Central/South America. As a result, substantially greater numbers are dying of starvation now. See, for example, ‘“The Cure is Worse Than The Disease” – What’s Really Going On in India’.
So while the sudden destruction of the global economy impoverished tens of millions of people in industrialized societies through unemployment, making them even more vulnerable to homelessness and destitution, in April 2020 the chief of the World Food Program, David Beasley, warned that: ‘the world faces “multiple famines of biblical proportions” that could result in 300,000 deaths per day’ because of the starvation resulting from disruption of global food production and supply. See ‘WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’ and ‘COVID-19 could kill more people through hunger than the disease itself, warns Oxfam’.
More than a year later, in June 2021, Oxfam reported that ‘20 million more people have been pushed to extreme levels of food insecurity, reaching a total of 155 million people in 55 countries.’ Government measures to destroy economies since the alleged ‘pandemic’ began, have seen the number of people living in famine-like conditions increase sixfold to more than 520,000.
In any case, one would be naive to believe that governments or international organizations now, any more than at any time in the past, are going to ‘urgently tackle food insecurity and its root causes head on’. Such words are simply the most straightforward way of pretending concern until the reader’s attention moves on to the next subject without asking ‘was anything done?’ Of course not, and it will not be.
In addition, as touched on above, by deliberately crashing national economies it was easy to conceal the fact that they were on the brink of crashing anyway. In the words of Scott C. Tips: ‘As the American and other economies falter from major structural problems, out-of-control debt, reckless spending, and government stupidity in shuttering businesses, the blame for markets crashing and economies tanking is borne by the conveniently available COVID-19 disease.’ See ‘Never Has So Little Done So Much Harm to So Many: The Latest Coronavirus Attack Is A Cover for Restricting Our Health Freedoms’.
As the elite coup (the ‘Great Reset’) proceeds and key measures to tighten its control and consolidate the transfer of wealth from poor to rich are implemented, populations in industrialized countries will also be confined to the economic margins and starved to death.
Killing off Humanity: Injectables Parallel with economic measures to kill off a substantial proportion of humanity, the global elite has long used ‘medical’ measures to achieve a similar outcome.
Dating from the time when the Louis Pasteur model of disease – based on ‘germ theory’: microorganisms attack the body and must be fought off individually – gained ascendancy over the Antoine Béchamp model – based on ‘terrain theory’: the health of the body and its environment determine health outcomes – in the late 19th century, the focus of allopathic medicine has been ‘treating’ disease with synthetic drugs, chemotherapy, radiation, surgical removal of body parts and vaccines. See Bechamp or Pasteur? A lost chapter in the history of biology and ‘Germ Theory Versus Terrain: The Wrong Side Won the Day’.
However, despite the focus of the dominant medical system on ‘germ theory’, it has never been scientifically established that the SARS-CoV-2 virus actually exists. More fundamentally, according to Dr Stefan Lanka: ‘Contrary to what most people believe, there are no pathogenic viruses.… All claims about viruses as pathogens are wrong and are based on easily recognisable, understandable and verifiable misinterpretations…. A real and complete virus does not exist anywhere in the entire “scientific” literature.’ See ‘The Misconception Called “Virus”: Measles as an example’.
And so the entire foundation of health practice underwent a profound transformation during the late 19th century. The shift from highly effective natural health modalities to pharmaceutical ‘medicine’ was keenly facilitated by the Rockefeller family whose oil products needed outlets given that the automotive industry was just starting (and was generating only limited demand) and the drugs being promoted were made from oil byproducts. Consequently, the Rockefeller family and its allies made strenuous efforts to obliterate the natural health modalities popular and effective prior to the turn of the 20th century and invested hundreds of millions of dollars to ensure the emergence of pharmaceutical ‘medicine’ based on the petrochemicals its oil industry made possible. See ‘Rockefeller Foundation Moments in Time: 1921-1929’ and ‘How Big Oil Conquered The World’.
In brief, and notwithstanding the many fine doctors who have done what they could to genuinely restore health, this model has meant that large segments of the human population have been condemned to one or more of the medically-induced forms of chronic ill-health while many others have been the victims of iatrogenic (‘medical error’) deaths, the leading cause of death in many countries, including the United States: ‘the American medical system is the leading cause of death and injury in the US.’ See Death by Medicine. Of course, the second and third leading causes of death – cancer and heart disease – could also be attributed to a medical system that promotes a grossly unhealthy diet of poisoned (by synthetic herbicides and pesticides), processed and unhealthily prepared foods (as well as fluoridated water) while suppressing awareness of a nutritionally/environmentally sound and ethical diet (biodynamically/organically grown, whole – and preferably vegan/vegetarian – food) as well as effective treatments, such as Gerson Therapy for cancer.
But a vital component of the injuries and deaths inflicted medically occur by vaccination, for which there is zero science of any benefit. As Dr Stefan Lanka has explained about vaccines generally:
Only ignorant people who blindly trust in the state authorities who are ‘testing’ and approving the vaccines can regard vaccination as a ‘small harmless prick’. The verifiable facts demonstrate the danger and negligence of these scientists and politicians, who claim that vaccines are safe, have little or no side-effects and would protect from a disease. None of these claims is true and scientific; on the contrary, upon precise scientific analysis, one finds that vaccines are useless and the respective literature admits to the lack of any evidence in their favour. See ‘The Misconception Called “Virus”: Measles as an example’.
Far from being useless, however, vaccines have an exceptional record of achievement in two realms. They are extraordinarily profitable – with even multi-billion dollar fines imposed on pharmaceutical corporations absorbed as a cost of doing business: see ‘Big Pharma Conglomerate with a Criminal Record: Pfizer “Takes Over” the EU Vaccine Market. 1.8 Billion Doses’ – and they injure and kill with ruthless efficiency. And for those paying attention this has been well known for a long time with a great many scientists documenting the myriad problems with vaccines – for just one example, see ‘New Quality-Control Investigations on Vaccines: Micro- and Nanocontamination’ – and others documenting the extensive injuries and deaths. See Sayer Ji’s 326 page bibliography with a vast number of references to the literature explaining the exceptional range of shocking dangers from vaccination: ‘Vaccination’.
In fact, based on his own experience of promoting vaccines among unaware populations in Africa and Asia and given his well-known sympathies for eugenics, Bill Gates has candidly stated that ‘if we are doing a real good job vaccinating, we may reduce the world population by 10% to 15%’. See ‘Innovating to Zero!’ Moreover, he might have added, if we use a gene-altering ‘injectable’ we can do it far more efficiently.
So how effective at killing are these injectables? Here is just a sample of what some prominent doctors and scientists have described, usually as part of a warning:
According to Professor Cahill, great harm will result from these mRNA vaccines in the years to come: ‘I have been saying all along [that] anyone who’s over 70 who gets one of these mRNA vaccines will probably sadly die within about two to three years.’ And anyone who gets the mRNA injection, no matter what their age, can be expected to die within five to ten years.
According to Dr Judy Mikovits, ‘Fifty million people will die in America from the vaccine.’ Dr Tenpenny agrees, subject to the proviso that ‘if they don’t die, they are going to be seriously injured’.
In his video ‘A Final Warning to Humanity’, Dr. Mike Yeadon asks ‘Why is the pharmaceutical industry making “top up” vaccines?… You should be terrified at this point, as I am, because there is absolutely no possible justification for their manufacture…. I am very frightened of that. There is no possible benign interpretation of this. I believe that they are going to be used to damage your health and possibly kill you. Seriously. I can see no sensible interpretation other than a serious attempt at mass depopulation. This will provide the tools to do it and plausible deniability.’
Official sources, namely EudraVigilance (EU, EEA, Switzerland), MHRA (UK) and VAERS (USA), have now recorded many more deaths and injuries from the COVID-!9 “vaccine” roll-out than from all previous vaccines combined since records began…. TOTAL for EU/UK/USA – 40,666 Covid-19 injection related deaths and 6,626,502 injuries reported as at 15 September 2021.
It is important to be aware that the official figures above (reported to the health authorities) are but a small percentage (1 to 10%) of the actual figures…. This catastrophic number of injection related deaths has NOT been reported by the mainstream media, despite the official figures above being publicly available….
The signal of harm is now indisputably overwhelming, and, in line with universally accepted ethical standards for clinical trials, Doctors for Covid Ethics demands that the COVID-19 “vaccination” programme be halted immediately worldwide.
Continuation of the programme, in the full knowledge of ongoing serious harm and death to both adults and children, constitutes Crimes Against Humanity/Genocide….
Governments worldwide are lying to you the people, to the populations they purportedly serve.
Having cited these examples, however, it should be pointed out that they constitute a tiny fraction of the rather endless sequence of highly qualified doctors, scientists, geopolitical analysts and others who have perceived the nature of what has been planned and is now being implemented, and been warning humanity of its fate unless vigorous resistance is offered. For just two of these other warnings, consider the following.
In this evocative open letter from twelve holocaust survivors of World War II, they warn:
We, the survivors of the atrocities committed against humanity during the Second World War, feel bound to follow our conscience and write this letter.
It is obvious to us that another holocaust of greater magnitude is taking place before our eyes. The majority of the world’s populace do not yet realize what is happening, for magnitude of an organized crime such as this is beyond their scope of experience.
We, however, know. We remember the name Josef Mengele. Some of us have personal memories. We experience a déjà vu that is so horrifying that we rise to shield our poor fellow humans. The threatened innocents now include children, and even infants. In just four months, the COVID-19 vaccines have killed more people than all available vaccines combined from mid-1997 until the end of 2013—a period of 15.5 years. And people affected worst are between 18 and 64 years old – the group which was not in the Covid statistics.
We call upon you to stop this ungodly medical experiment on humankind immediately. What you call “vaccination” against SARS-Cov-2 is in truth a blasphemic encroachment into nature. Never before has immunization of the entire planet been accomplished by delivering a synthetic mRNA into the human body. It is a medical experiment to which the Nuremberg Code must be applied. The 10 ethical principles in this document represents a foundational code of medical ethics that was formulated during the Nuremberg Doctors Trial to ensure that human beings will never again be subjected to involuntary medical experimentation & procedures…. See ‘Stop the Covid Holocaust! Open Letter. We call upon you to stop this ungodly medical experiment on humankind immediately’.
In a recent article, Professor Michel Chossudovsky noted:
The vaccine is being applied and imposed Worldwide. The target population is 7.9 billion. Several doses are contemplated. It is the largest vaccination program in World history.
“Never before has immunization of the entire planet been accomplished by delivering a synthetic mRNA into the human body”…
The mRNA vaccine is not a project of a UN intergovernmental body (WHO) on behalf (of) the member states of the UN: This is a private initiative. The billionaire elites which fund and enforce the Vaccine Project Worldwide are Eugenists committed to Depopulation. See ‘The COVID-19 “Vaccine” and the Nuremberg Code. Crimes Against Humanity, Genocide’.
Beyond these warnings, however, if we consider the official injury and death figures from the injectables cited above, we know that millions have been injured and many tens of thousands killed (in the European Union, the UK and the USA only) by the ‘death needle’ already.
Of course, the problem with official figures is that they always profoundly understate the deaths and injuries as an extensive CDC-funded Harvard research study explained a decade ago. In reality, for a variety of clearly identified reasons, ‘fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events are reported.’ See ‘Electronic Support for Public Health – Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System’.
But remember the warnings from Professor Cahill, Dr. Mikovits, Dr. Yeadon, Dr. Bhakdi and others. The timeframe on deaths is over the next few years so, in short, despite the horrifying reality already, the tragedy has only just begun.
Of course, the truth about the ‘vaccine’ death and injury toll is being heavily suppressed by international organizations (including the United Nations and World Health Organization), governments and the medical, pharmaceutical and media industries because this knowledge would only undermine support for the elite-driven eugenics program.
Hence, the tragedy will continue to accelerate with resistance confined to that which can be mobilized outside mainstream channels.
So How Can We Resist? Fortunately, there is considerable resistance already. However, we need to expand this and also get it onto a more strategic footing so that it functionally undermines the power of the Global Elite to conduct this coup. And don’t assume that the Global Elite will back off. It is criminally insane. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.
So, as I have explained before, our defense strategy must thwart those key measures of their coup that would give them the control they want. This will not be easy because we must mobilize millions to act strategically. Random acts of resistance, such as the mass mobilizations without strategic focus that have been conducted so far, can have no impact.
For an integrated strategy to defeat the elite coup, see the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign, which has 29 strategic goals for defeating the coup including meaningful engagement with police and military forces to assist them to understand and resist, rather than support, the elite agenda.
One-page flyers in several languages, outlining essential nonviolent actions that we must undertake, are published with this article.
Conclusion Given the enormous sophistication and complexity of the elite agenda being implemented under cover of the so-called SARS-CoV-2 virus, our resistance must match the sophistication of the coup if it is to succeed. And, in this case, it will require far more action in the home than on the street. This is because street protests do not constitute resistance in themselves and can only be used as a means of mobilizing strategic resistance, most of which will need to occur as a result of people modifying certain elements of their daily behaviours as they go about their usual routines.
If we cannot mobilize sufficient noncooperation with particular elite agents and specific measures being taken by the elite through these agents, then the Global Elite will succeed in killing off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslaving the balance.
So our choice is simple. Resist, strategically, as outlined above or watch Earth being depopulated to a planet of cyborg slaves.
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.
Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods.
Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.
Amazon and Walmart have a record of using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to attract customers to their online platforms. A couple of years ago, those two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during Diwali. India’s small retailers reacted by calling for a boycott of online shopping.
If you want to know the eventual fate of India’s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019. He stated that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”
AMAZON’S CORPORATE PRACTICES
In the US, an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee concluded that Amazon exerts monopoly power over many small- and medium-size businesses. It called for breaking up the company and regulating its online marketplace to ensure that sellers are treated fairly.
Amazon has spied on sellers and appropriated data about their sales, costs and suppliers. It has then used this information to create its own competing versions of their products, often giving its versions superior placement in the search results on its platform.
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) published a revealing document on Amazon in June 2021 that discussed these issues. It also notes that Amazon has been caught using its venture capital fund to invest in start-ups only to steal their ideas and create rival products and services.
Moreover, Amazon’s dominance allows it to function as a gatekeeper: retailers and brands must sell on its site to reach much of the online market and changes to Amazon’s search algorithms or selling terms can cause their sales to evaporate overnight.
Amazon also makes it hard for sellers to reduce their dependence on its platform by making their brand identity almost invisible to shoppers and preventing them from building relationships with their customers. The company strictly limits contact between sellers and customers.
According to the ILSR, Amazon compels sellers to buy its warehousing and shipping services, even though many would get a better deal from other providers, and it blocks independent businesses from offering lower prices on other sites. The company also routinely suspends sellers’ accounts and seizes inventories and cash balances.
The Joint Action Committee against Foreign Retail and E-commerce (JACAFRE) was formed to resist the entry of foreign corporations like Walmart and Amazon into India’s e-commerce market. Its members represent more than 100 national groups, including major trade, workers’ and farmers’ organisations.
JACAFRE issued a statement in 2018 on Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart, arguing that it undermines India’s economic and digital sovereignty and the livelihoods of millions in India. The committee said the deal would lead to Walmart and Amazon dominating India’s e-retail sector. It would also allow them to own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords, joining the ranks of Google and Facebook.
In January 2021, JACAFRE published an open letter saying that the three new farm laws, passed by parliament in September 2020, centre on enabling and facilitating the unregulated corporatisation of agriculture value chains. This will effectively make farmers and small traders of agricultural produce become subservient to the interests of a few agrifood and e-commerce giants or will eradicate them completely.
Although there was strong resistance to Walmart entering India with its physical stores, online and offline worlds are now merged: e-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production and logistics. Through this control, e-commerce platforms can shape much of the physical economy.
What we are witnessing is the deliberate eradication of markets in favour of monopolistic platforms.
BEZOS NOT WELCOME
Amazon’s move into India encapsulates the unfair fight for space between local and global markets. There is a relative handful of multi-billionaires who own the corporations and platforms. And there are the interests of hundreds of millions of vendors and various small-scale enterprises who are regarded by these rich individuals as mere collateral damage to be displaced in their quest for ever-greater profit.
Thanks to the helping hand of various COVID-related lockdowns, which devastated small businesses, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020.
In September 2020, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID. Jeff Bezos – his fortune constructed on unprincipled methods that have been well documented in recent years – increased his net wealth by $78.2bn during this period.
Bezos’s plan is clear: the plunder of India and the eradication of millions of small traders and retailers and neighbourhood mom and pop shops.
This is a man with few scruples. After returning from a brief flight to space in July, in a rocket built by his private space company, Bezos said during a news conference:
I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.”
In response, US congresswoman Nydia Velazquez wrote on Twitter:
While Jeff Bezos is all over the news for paying to go to space, let’s not forget the reality he has created here on Earth.”
Little wonder that when Bezos visited India in January 2020, he was hardly welcomed with open arms.
Bezos praised India on Twitter by posting:
Dynamism. Energy. Democracy. #IndianCentury.”
The ruling party’s top man in the BJP foreign affairs department hit back with:
Please tell this to your employees in Washington DC. Otherwise, your charm offensive is likely to be waste of time and money.”
A fitting response, albeit perplexing given the current administration’s proposed sanctioning of the foreign takeover of the economy, not least by the unscrupulous interests that will benefit from the recent farm legislation.
Bezos landed in India on the back of the country’s antitrust regulator initiating a formal investigation of Amazon and with small store owners demonstrating in the streets. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) announced that members of its affiliate bodies across the country would stage sit-ins and public rallies in 300 cities in protest.
In a letter to PM Modi, prior to the visit of Bezos, the secretary of the CAIT, General Praveen Khandelwal, claimed that Amazon, like Walmart-owned Flipkart, was an “economic terrorist” due to its predatory pricing that “compelled the closure of thousands of small traders.”
In 2020, Delhi Vyapar Mahasangh (DVM) filed a complaint against Amazon and Flipkart alleging that they favoured certain sellers over others on their platforms by offering them discounted fees and preferential listing. The DVM lobbies to promote the interests of small traders. It also raised concerns about Amazon and Flipkart entering into tie-ups with mobile phone manufacturers to sell phones exclusively on their platforms.
It was argued by DVM that this was anti-competitive behaviour as smaller traders could not purchase and sell these devices. Concerns were also raised over the flash sales and deep discounts offered by e-commerce companies, which could not be matched by small traders.
The CAIT estimates that in 2019 upwards of 50,000 mobile phone retailers were forced out of business by large e-commerce firms.
Amazon’s internal documents, as revealed by Reuters, indicated that Amazon had an indirect ownership stake in a handful of sellers who made up most of the sales on its Indian platform. This is an issue because in India Amazon and Flipkart are legally allowed to function only as neutral platforms that facilitate transactions between third-party sellers and buyers for a fee.
UNDER INVESTIGATION
The upshot is that India’s Supreme Court recently ruled that Amazon must face investigation by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for alleged anti-competitive business practices. The CCI said it would probe the deep discounts, preferential listings and exclusionary tactics that Amazon and Flipkart are alleged to have used to destroy competition.
However, there are powerful forces that have been sitting on their hands as these companies have been running amok.
In August 2021, the CAIT attacked the NITI Aayog (the influential policy commission think tank of the Government of India) for interfering in e-commerce rules proposed by the Consumer Affairs Ministry.
The CAIT said that the think tank clearly seems to be under the pressure and influence of the foreign e-commerce giants.
The president of CAIT, BC Bhartia, stated that it is deeply shocking to see such a callous and indifferent attitude of the NITI Aayog whch have remained a silent spectator for so many years when:
…the foreign e-commerce giants have circumvented every rule of the FDI policy and blatantly violated and destroyed the retail and e-commerce landscape of the country but have suddenly decided to open their mouth at a time when the proposed e-commerce rules will potentially end the malpractices of the e-commerce companies.”
Of course, money talks and buys influence. In addition to tens of billions of US dollars invested in India by Walmart and Amazon, Facebook invested US$5.5 billion last year in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms (e-commerce retail). Google has also invested US$4.5 billion.
Since the early 1990s, when India opened up to neoliberal economics, the country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital which ride roughshod over democratic principles and the needs of hundreds of millions of ordinary people. ‘Foreign direct investment’ has thus become the holy grail of the Modi-led administration and the NITI Aayog.
The CAIT has urged the Consumer Affairs Ministry to implement the draft consumer protection e-commerce rules at the earliest as they are in the best interest of the consumers as well as the traders of the country.
Meanwhile, the CCI probably will complete its investigation within two months.