Tag Archives: Corporate Crime

If the “Market” Never Goes Down, The System Is Doomed

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The reliance on “good news” narratives dooms our financial system and economy to a death spiral once reality breaks through the induced euphoria.

“Markets” that never go down aren’t markets, they’re signaling mechanisms of the Powers That Be. Markets are fundamentally clearing houses of information on price, demand, sentiment, expectations and so on–factual data on supply and demand, shipping costs, cost of credit, etc.–and reflections of trader and consumer emotions and psychology.

If markets are never allowed to go down, the information clearing house has been effectively shut down. Whatever information leaks out has been edited to fit the prevailing narrative, which in this moment is “central banks will never let markets go down ever again, so jump in and ride the guaranteed Bull to easy gains.”

The past 12 years offer ample evidence for this narrative: every dip draws a near-instantaneous monetary-policy response that reverse the dip and gooses markets higher.

That permanent monetary intervention distorts markets doesn’t matter to participants. Who cares if markets have become “markets,” simulacra of real markets that are now nothing but signaling mechanisms that all is well so buy, buy, buy? If gains are essentially guaranteed, who cares that markets are not longer information clearing houses?

Indeed. There’s no reason to care until the fatal spiral downward surprises us all. Here’s an analogy of what happens when real information gets edited to fit a convenient narrative.

Unfortunately, the patient has cancer which is starting to metastasize, i.e. spread to other organs in the body. But unbeknownst to the patient, this accurate information is considered “bad news,” so the test results and other information is carefully edited to show the cancer is actually shrinking–the exact opposite of what the actual facts reflect.

The patient is naturally delighted with this false data because it appears he’s on the mend and doesn’t need any surgery or other drastic treatments.

If participants don’t have information that reflects actual conditions, they cannot help but make disastrous decisions. Falsified or heavily edited information is misleading, and so all decisions made on the assumption this information is accurate will be fatally skewed.

Symptoms of the fatal spread of the disease are masked by stimulants that not only mask the spread but give the patient a sense of euphoric power and supreme confidence.

Imagine the patient’s terrible dismay when symptoms break through the euphoria and he learns his cancer is now terminal. Increasing the tragedy is his awareness that had the authorities in charge of his care given him the real-world data instead of the carefully edited “happy story” version, treatments could have been undertaken that might have extended his life. Now those options have been lost forever.

That’s the situation in our economy and financial system. The information cleared in markets has been suppressed, distorted and edited for 12 long years of permanent and ever-increasing monetary interventions, as the “doses” of intervention required to maintain the cocaine-like euphoria and supreme confidence in central bank manipulation of “markets” so they always signal the “good news” of guaranteed gains ratchets higher on every intrusion of reality.

The reliance on “good news” narratives dooms our financial system and economy to a death spiral once reality breaks through the induced euphoria. Our last chances to clear the financial cancers eating away at our economy are slipping away forever, masked by the “market’s” cocaine-like euphoria and supreme confidence in central-bank guaranteed gains.

If the stock market is never allowed to go down, this is the equivalent of telling the cancer-riddled patient that their cancer has disappeared, even as the disease is leading inexorably to the patient’s needless demise.

COVID-19 Does Not Exist: The Global Elite’s Campaign of Terror Against Humanity

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By Robert J. Burrowes

There is no COVID-19 virus. It does not exist. If you ask any doctor or scientist in the world to show you a scientifically-verified proof that it does exist, they will not be able to show you one.

Given that it has not been scientifically established that the COVID-19 virus exists, it is therefore clear that everything being done supposedly in the effort to tackle the ‘virus’ is being done for another purpose and COVID-19 is being used to conceal this fact.

However, with the elite-driven narrative being endlessly promoted by the World Health Organisation, governments, the medical and pharmaceutical industries, along with the corporate media, the truth is being obliterated.

And the reason for this is obvious: Any serious consideration of the underlying evidence, as I have documented previously, clearly indicates that the global elite is conducting a coup against humanity and using the fear it generates around COVID-19 to distract people from paying attention to what is happening in the background. For this reason, the coup continues to gain pace with only an insignificant number of people yet aware of the coup and its ongoing and increasingly devastating impacts.

‘How is the elite doing this?’ you might ask. Far too easily, unfortunately.

In essence, key individuals in the World Health Organisation (WHO), governments, the medical and pharmaceutical industries, as well as the corporate media are lying to you about this. They are lying to you, consciously or unconsciously, for essentially one of three reasons (essentially determined by where the individual fits in relation to the elite’s ongoing execution of its coup):

1. they are lying as an outcome of their complicity in the coup (given the perceived benefits to them personally, at least in the short term),

2. they are lying as an outcome of their ignorance (by not investigating and considering the evidence for themself and submissively accepting the elite narrative), or

3. they are lying as an outcome of their fear (of the adverse personal repercussions they would expect for resisting the elite narrative that there is indeed a virus).

And, so far, the elite is successfully executing its coup because the many voices contradicting its narrative – such as those individual doctors powerful enough to present the truth about the so-called ‘virus’ – are being denied a forum in any elite-controlled outlet such as the corporate media or they are being censored (including removed from accessible sites on the internet).

If what I have written above sounds incredible given the worldwide response supposedly to tackle the ‘virus’, the evidence presented below, together with the references to further documentation, will give you plenty to consider (provided your own fear will allow you to do so).

But before presenting this evidence, it is worth being aware of some of the existing adverse impacts of the coup:

1. The sudden destruction of the global economy has impoverished tens of millions of people in industrialized societies through unemployment, making them even more vulnerable to homelessness and other misery, as well as precipitating the death of millions of people projected to die of starvation in Africa, Asia and elsewhere because of the 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’.

2. There has been a dramatic increase in violence against children and women all over the world and particularly in some contexts with a recent United Nations Population Fund report highlighting that an ‘additional 5.6 million child marriages can be expected because of the coronavirus pandemic, which resulted in a short-term increase in poverty and the shutdown of schools’. In addition, the ‘current pandemic is also expected to have a massive impact on the projected growth of harmful practices on women’s bodies’ including female genital mutilation (FGM). See ‘Child Marriage, FGM and Harmful Practices on Women’s Bodies to Increase Because of COVID-19’.

3. The lockdowns have imprisoned people in their homes (with its seriously adverse psychological, social and physical repercussions) and laws have been introduced regarding ‘social distancing’ and other measures (including mask-wearing which I will discuss below) that have eviscerated rights and freedoms it took centuries to win. For the details, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’.

In response to growing concerns on a number of points, 600 doctors signed a letter to US President Donald Trump to end the ‘lockdown’ – see ‘“Mass casualty incident”: 600 doctors sign letter to Trump calling for end to lockdowns over health concerns’ – which has since been signed by thousands. See ‘Literally Thousands of Doctors and Scientists Have Come Out Against Fauci’s Lockdowns Including a Nobel Prize-Winning Biophysicist. The Media Just Doesn’t Want You to Know’.

4. Despite the ‘diagnostic’ tests for COVID-19 being ‘scientifically meaningless’ – see ‘COVID19 PCR Tests are Scientifically Meaningless’ – (how can they not be when there is no virus?) compulsory vaccination (again, against a non-existent virus) is being threatened – see ‘120 Covid-19 Vaccine Projects are Underway’ – in direct violation of Article 6 of the ‘Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights’ despite the extensively documented record of vaccines causing devastating harms including massive lethality. For a taste of the vast literature on this point, see ‘Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination’.

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. See ‘The Misconception Called “Virus”: Measles as an example’.

Moreover, this vaccination will be used to dramatically expand surveillance both via biometric ID and ‘immunity passes’. See ‘ID2020 and partners launch program to provide digital ID with vaccines’ and ‘Mass-Tracking COVI-PASS Immunity Passports Slated to Roll Out in 15 Countries’.

  1. Other measures to expand surveillance (apart from through vaccination) are being introduced. These include ‘contact tracing’ despite the fact that even ‘A WHO study on influenza pandemics in 2019 came to the conclusion that contact tracing is not useful from an epidemiological point of view and “is not recommended in any circumstances”.’ See ‘Facts about COVID-19’. But that is precisely the point: Contact tracing is not about epidemiological usefulness; it is about surveillance.
  2. Critically, several measures necessary to implement the so-called fourth industrial revolution, including the deployment of 5G, which will reduce human individuals to digitized identities without effective rights and freedoms, are being accelerated. See ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision’.
  3. While much human activity has been brought to a standstill, this has not included any of the violence which has not only continued unchecked but has expanded. Apart from the dramatic increase in violence against children and women all over the world noted above, wars, threats of war, sanctions, the military violence of occupations in places such as Palestine, Tibet and West Papua, the structural violence that systematically exploits (that is, loots) countries in Africa, Asia and Central/South America, the ecological violence that destroys lands, oceans and atmosphere have all proceeded as usual with the caveat that there has been a reduction in the emissions of some industrial and other waste products although this is hugely problematic in one critical sense. See ‘Will COVID-19 Trigger Extinction of All Life on Earth?’
  4. And four distinct paths to human extinction – nuclear war, the climate catastrophe, the deployment of 5G and biodiversity collapse – have been accelerated, inadvertently or otherwise, by the coup. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

COVID-19 Does Not Exist

Despite these and many other adverse impacts already happening in response to the COVID-19 crisis, as noted at the beginning, it has never been scientifically established that the COVID-19 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’.

To reiterate in the words of two other authors: ‘there is no original scientific evidence that definitively demonstrates that any virus is the cause of any disease’. See What Really Makes You Ill? Why everything you thought you knew about disease is wrong. But you can read more in ‘Dismantling the Virus Theory – The “measles virus” as an example’ and watch the video interview ‘The Real Science of Germs: Do Viruses Cause Disease?’

In addition, and specifically in relation to COVID-19, according to Dr Andrew Kaufman, ‘there is no evidence of anyone dying from any novel illness’. See ‘Unmasking the Lies Around COVID-19: Facts vs Fiction of the Coronavirus Pandemic’. So what has happened?

As Dr Kaufman explains: Early scientific papers on the subject suggested an association (not causation) between a novel coronavirus ‘with human to human transmission and severe human infection’ whereas a subsequent key ‘scientific’ paper that made a claim which helped drive the global response to COVID-19 ‘flat out lied’ about their results: ‘Following the first outbreaks of unexplained pneumonia in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, a new coronavirus was identified as the causative agent in January 2020.’ See ‘Identification of Coronavirus Isolated from a Patient in Korea with COVID-19’. In fact, Dr Kaufman points out: ‘they cannot reference any science to back that up whatsoever’.

Moreover, subsequently to this paper, another article – see ‘I study viruses: How our team isolated the new coronavirus to fight the global pandemic’ – declared ‘The emergence of a new coronavirus in a market in Wuhan, China, in December 2019 set in motion the pandemic we are now witnessing in 160 countries around the world’. But again, Dr Kaufman counters, ‘no evidence was provided at all’ to support this claim: ‘just flat out lies’. For the details and citation of all the scientific sources for this explanation of how the COVID-19 ‘rumour mill’ got started, see ‘The Rooster in the River of Rats’ or ‘Koch’s Postulates: Have They Been Proven for Viruses?’

Finally on this point, pathologist Dr Stoian Alexov, President of the Bulgarian Pathology Association, has stated that he and his colleagues across Europe:

have not found any evidence of any deaths from the novel coronavirus on that continent.

Dr. Stoian Alexov called the World Health Organization (WHO) a ‘criminal medical organization’ for creating worldwide fear and chaos without providing objectively verifiable proof of a pandemic.

See ‘“No one has died from the coronavirus”: Important revelations shared by Dr Stoian Alexov, President of the Bulgarian Pathology Association’.

Fortunately, as awareness of the fact that the COVID-19 virus does not exist gradually spreads, more people are challenging the official response to the engineered crisis on that basis. For example, one group of doctors has written to the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson challenging Public Health England to ‘show proof’ that a virus exists. See ‘Challenge to Public Health England that they must show Proof that a Virus Exists which Causes COVID-19 or Declare there is No Virus and end the Vax and Trax Programmes’.

But it is clear that the engineered crisis and the measures supposedly being taken to combat the non-existent ‘virus’ are being used to mask the truth, including the elite coup, and so actions aimed at elite agents, such as governments, must inevitably fail.

Unscientific Responses to the Non-existent Virus

The unscientific nature of the supposed threat posed by the ‘virus’ is, of course, matched by the unscientific response with countries imposing lockdowns suffering far worse outcomes – measured psychologically, socially, economically and otherwise – than countries, such as Japan, South Korea, Belarus and Sweden which did not follow this course. In any case, countries that did impose lockdowns could only use lies and statistical manipulation to make it appear that COVID-19 has been the cause of death among some of those who are recently deceased. For a taste of the extensive documentation, see ‘Facts about COVID-19: July 2020 Update’ and ‘COVID 19 Is A Statistical Nonsense’.

Given that the negative impacts of the lockdown are extensively documented, there have been many attempts (of many different kinds) occurring all over the world to end them already. See, for example, ‘“Mass casualty incident”: 600 doctors sign letter to Trump calling for end to lockdowns over health concerns’, ‘Vaccine Group Sues Trudeau Government for “Draconian and Unjustifiable” Response to COVID-19’ and ‘Popular Uprising against 2nd Covid Lockdown. Belgrade Liberated! The Govt Backs Down’.

But another way in which this unscientific response to the non-existent ‘virus’ is manifesting is immediately obvious if one examines the scientific evidence in relation to the effectiveness of masks in preventing cross infection. As it turns out, as explained in a long series of documented scientific studies, as distinct from the inaccurate claims promulgated by elite agents,

the research demonstrates that masks are at best ineffective, and at worst horribly counterproductive; that is, masks cannot achieve the purpose for which they are, supposedly, intended but they can achieve some very unhealthy outcomes.

But who among the general population is seeking out and considering this evidence (which the WHO, governments, the medical and pharmaceutical industries, the education systems and the corporate media are not going to present)?

For just a sample of the evidence about the ineffectiveness and dangers of wearing a mask, see the following:

‘Nevertheless, the question of the effectiveness of masks can be asked. In the case of influenza epidemics, the answer is already clear from a scientific point of view: masks in everyday life have no or very little effect. If used improperly, they can even increase the risk of infection.’ See ‘Facts about COVID-19: July 2020 Update’.

In a recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the five co-authors stated ‘We know that wearing a mask outside health care facilities offers little, if any, protection from infection.’ See ‘Universal Masking in Hospitals in the Covid-19 Era’.

In his recent article ‘Masks Don’t Work: A Review of Science Relevant to COVID-19 Social Policy’ documenting the results of his research, physics professor Dr Denis G. Rancourt concludes:

No RCT [randomized controlled trial] study with verified outcome shows a benefit for HCW [health care workers] or community members in households to wearing a mask or respirator. There is no such study. There are no exceptions.

Likewise, no study exists that shows a benefit from a broad policy to wear masks in public.

Furthermore, if there were any benefit to wearing a mask, because of the blocking power against droplets and aerosol particles, then there should be more benefit from wearing a respirator (N95) compared to a surgical mask, yet several large meta-analyses, and all the RCT, prove that there is no such relative benefit.

Masks and respirators do not work.

By making mask-wearing recommendations and policies for the general public, or by expressly condoning the practice, governments have both ignored the scientific evidence and done the opposite of following the precautionary principle.

After reviewing more than 50 articles on masks in the medical literature and documenting her case, Dr Sherri Tenpenny concludes as follows:

There are NO randomized, controlled trials (RCT) with verified outcomes that show a benefit to healthcare workers or community members for wearing a mask or a respirator. There is no such definitive study. Likewise, no study exists that shows a benefit from a broad policy to wear masks in public. See ‘Coronavirus Pt 4: Masks Don’t Protect’ and, for your convenience, Tenpenny has cited the relevant passage from 35 of the articles she researched in this document: ‘Conclusion Regarding Masks: They Do Not Work’.

But if you want to read more, you can access each of the 50 articles Tenpenny cited or check out these as well: ‘Coronavirus: Face masks could increase risk of infection, medical chief warns’ and ‘Coronavirus Fact-Check #6: Does wearing a mask do anything?’

Or watch this video presentation: ‘Why Face Masks Don’t Work, According to Science’.

So if there is no virus and face masks do not work to prevent infection anyway, why are we being told to wear them and, increasingly, being terrorized into wearing them under threat of punishment if we do not? For just two of many examples, see ‘Soon, You Will Need to Wear a Mask to Enter Virtually Every Major Retail Store in America’ and ‘Total Masking: Victoria’s Coronavirus Response’.

Because the face masks, like other elements of the supposed strategy to tackle COVID-19, are simply being used to terrorize us into not resisting the ongoing elite coup. See ‘The Mask as a Symbol of Subjugation’, ‘The New (Pathologized) Totalitarianism’ and ‘The Hidden Agendas of Masks, Distancing, and Tracing’.

And it is largely working with most people projecting their fear onto the non-existent ‘virus’ and then ignorantly endeavouring to ‘protect’ themselves from it by wearing a mask (or going along with other measures supposedly intended to ‘prevent infection’).

So if you are wondering why virtually everyone is being caught up in this, there are very good psychological reasons. One of them is that virtually all humans are terrorized into obedience as children. Consequently, resisting orders from those considered to be ‘in authority’ is virtually unthinkable. I have explained this submissive obedience in the article ‘Contemplating Human Extinction Terrifies Most People: A Strategy for Survival’.

But there is another, more subtle, reason too.

COVID-19 and the Psychology of Projection

For the vast bulk of the human population, considering the fundamental evidence of what is taking place – and acknowledging that the global elite is conducting a coup against us with all that this entails – is truly terrifying. Moreover, recognizing that if we are to resist this coup, we will need to make a courageous and strategically-focused stand to defend ourselves is frightening for most people as well.

And the global elite knows this. It is for this reason that they are terrorizing us in the first place. The elite does not want people resisting the coup and it certainly does not want them resisting the coup effectively.

Hence, the global elite is exploiting our fear – by projecting it onto COVID-19 – so that we submissively go along with its coup. How is the elite doing this? Let me explain the psychology of projection, very simply.

If, when you are a child, you are scared of something but that ‘something’ is truly terrifying and inescapable – that is, you are denied any safe opportunity to feel your terror and to take action in response to it so that you can make yourself safe – your mind will precipitate one response and, if necessary, a second response to defend you in the short term.

The first response will be to significantly dampen (and possibly completely suppress) your awareness of just how terrifying the ‘something’ that is scaring you actually is so that you are not overwhelmed to such an extent that you become incapacitated. This response is intended to enable you to act powerfully to get yourself out of the terrifying situation and into a context in which you feel safe.

Ideally, following any such incident when you again feel safe, you need time to recover emotionally. Fundamentally, this means that you need time to focus on feeling the terror and other feelings that were raised during the incident so that these feelings are fully felt and expressed, rather than suppressed more deeply into your unconscious.

If, however, there is no opportunity for this emotional recovery, your mind will have no choice but to more deeply suppress your awareness of these feelings so that you can resume functioning more or less as previously. I say ‘more or less’ because you won’t be functioning precisely as previously because the unconscious terror will now be playing a part in your emotional life and, therefore, playing a part in shaping your behaviour.

However, your unconscious mind – which is enormously powerful – has not given up on enabling you to heal from the terrifying incident and, therefore, its second response is to later trick you into believing that something else, that is far less frightening, is what is really scaring you so that you can safely access and feel your terror in relation to the original incident. Your mind does this so that the terror that was initially suppressed, in order to allow you to devise and implement a strategy for immediate survival, can now be released.

By using these two responses, your mind enables you to survive in a terrifying environment so that, hopefully at some point soon, you can devise and implement a strategy to escape that environment. But also by allowing you to subsequently believe that something that is actually quite safe by comparison is what was really scaring you in the first place, it gives you the opportunity to feel your fear and act it out without (or with profoundly reduced) fear of the consequences.

In the short term, this pair of responses by your mind can enable you to survive something truly terrifying: it minimizes the risk that you will be immobilized (frozen) in terror and thus unable to survive a dangerous situation. In essence, in evolutionary terms, these responses have tremendous survival value in the short term.

If, however, you are not able to escape the truly terrifying situation in the short term and you remain trapped in the situation indefinitely, your unconscious mind will continue to both suppress awareness of the terror and ‘trick’ you into subsequently believing that it is something else that is frightening you.

Unfortunately, beyond the very short term, this mental trick is highly dysfunctional. It leads the individual to eventually ‘forget’ (deeply suppress their awareness of) the original and true source of what is terrifying them and to believe that the safe ‘target’ they unconsciously chose subsequently is actually the genuine threat.

In the jargon of psychology, this is called ‘projection’ or ‘transference’ because the victim is now blaming something other than the true cause of their terror.

This has profound societal consequences too for the simple reason that an elite can effectively nominate the ‘something’ onto which our terror is projected. And it can do this very easily by simply parading a target or ‘legitimized victim’ as terrifying which, in effect, gives ‘permission’ for us to feel scared of the target it has nominated. But in directing our fear in a certain direction, they are also invariably intent on manipulating our behaviour in response.

Historically, this has been demonstrated rather endlessly with the manipulation of our fear crucial to the achievement of certain elite ends, politically and otherwise. For example, racism (fear of other far less frightening Africans) exploded to justify the slave trade, Nazism exploited fears to mobilize Germans against far less frightening Jews (among others), Israeli leaders project the fear of Israelis to exploit far less frightening Palestinians and the entire US ‘war on terror’ has been conducted on the basis of projecting people’s unconscious terror at far less frightening Muslims. As I mentioned, however, the list of possible examples is virtually endless.

In each and every case, however, the terror exploited had its origin in something much earlier in the life of these individuals than the current circumstance exploited by elites. It had its origin during early childhood.

And this origin can be traced directly back to the parenting and teaching models virtually universally used by human beings. As I have explained many times previously, but to briefly reiterate here: virtually all human beings are terrified for the same reason: the child-raising process that sociologists like to label ‘socialization’ should be more accurately labeled ‘terrorization’. This is because from the moment of a child’s birth, parents, teachers, religious leaders and adults generally regard themselves as responsible for terrorizing the child into obedience of the commands, rules, conventions and laws that define the nature of permissible behaviour in their society.

But because evolutionary pressures do not predispose any individual to obey the will of another – for the simple reason that obedience has no evolutionary functionality – it takes enormous terrorization during childhood to ensure that the child surrenders their Self-will at the alter of obedience. To achieve this outcome and largely unknowingly, parents, teachers, religious leaders and other adults in the child’s life use a large range of behaviours from the three categories of violence that I have labeled ‘visible’ violence, ‘invisible’ violence and ‘utterly invisible’ violence. See ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

At its most obvious, all children are routinely threatened with violence and actually punished with violence (usually in each of its three forms: ‘visible’, ‘invisible’ and ‘utterly invisible’) for ‘disobedience’ (that is, for following their own Self-will rather than obeying orders to submit). See ‘Punishment is Violent and Counterproductive’.

And, as preposterous as I know this sounds to those reading it for the first time: The fundamental outcome of this process is that all children end up utterly but unconsciously terrified of their parents, teachers, religious figures and other significant adults in their life.

But never given adequate safe opportunities to feel this terror, each child ends up projecting it onto something or a series of targets including those ‘legitimized victims’ approved by an elite, local or otherwise.

Hence, in the current world context, this results in the bulk of the human population submitting to direction by the global elite to project their fear onto COVID-19 and then behave as ordered, rather than pay attention to the elite coup and resist it. For summaries and documentation of the evidence in relation to each of these points, see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup: Fighting for Our Humanity, Our Liberty and Our Future’ and ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup to Destroy Humanity that is also Fast-Tracking Four Paths to Human Extinction’.

The elite does this by triggering our unconscious fear through endless reporting of the ‘threat’ posed by COVID-19, issuing warnings, announcing deaths supposedly caused by the ‘virus’ (and concealing that the death rates are not even comparable to deaths caused by a serious influenza), and placing increasingly onerous limits on our rights and freedoms (through such measures as lockdowns and mask-wearing). And because virtually everyone has so much suppressed terror and needs outlets onto which this can be projected, the coup is being conducted virtually without resistance.

As I have explained before, just because the global elite is able to do this does not mean that it is sane. In fact, it is completely insane and that is precisely why it is conducting this coup but unable to see its catastrophic outcome for the elite as well. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’.

So what can we do?

Well, if we are to effectively resist the elite coup and fight for human survival, it would be useful to start by giving yourself time to focus on feeling your emotional responses – fear, anger, sadness, pain, dread…. – to whatever is generating an emotional reaction: COVID-19, the elite coup, the imminent threats of extinction or anything else. See ‘Putting Feelings First’.

This is necessary so that you can engage meaningfully and strategically in the effort, whatever issue you choose to fight.

So once you have a clearer sense of your emotional reactions to this knowledge and have allowed yourself time to focus on feeling these feelings, you will be in a far more powerful position to consider your response to the situation. And, depending on your interests and circumstances, there is a range of possible responses that will each make an important difference.

Fundamentally, you might consider making ‘My Promise to Children’ which will include considering what an education for your children means to you, particularly if you want powerful individuals – not ones who are submissively obedient and project their terror – who can perceive reality and resist violence. See ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

You might consider supporting others to become more powerful. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’.

If you wish to strategically resist the elite coup against humanity, you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals for doing so, from here: Coup Strategic Aims.

Remaining pages on this website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel, as well as articles and videos explaining all of the vital points of strategy and tactics, such as those to help you understand ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’.

Given the complexity of the configuration of this conflict, however, which involves the need to fight simultaneously to retain our essential humanity, defeat the elite coup and avert near-term human extinction, it is important that our tactical choices are strategically-oriented (as are those listed at the Strategic Aims page nominated above). Hence, three further considerations assume importance.

First, choose/design tactics that have strategic impact, that is, they fundamentally and permanently alter, in our favor, the power relationship between the elite and us.

Second, when tactical choices are made, focus them on undermining the elite coup, not just features of it, such as ‘social distancing’ or the lockdowns. At its most basic, this can be achieved by using tactical choices that mobilize people to act initially, as is happening, but then inviting them to consider taking further, more focused, action as well (such as those nominated in the strategic goals referenced above). This is important because existing actions will have little impact on key underlying measures, such as those being taken by the elite to advance the fourth industrial revolution.

Third, choose/design tactics that also have strategic impact on the greatest threats to human survival, including the collapsing biodiversity on Earth, the threat of nuclear war, the climate catastrophe and the deployment of 5G. Given the incredibly short timeframe in which we are now working to avert human extinction, while people are mobilizing it is important to use this opportunity to give them the chance to perceive the ‘big picture’ of what is taking place – beyond lockdowns and other measures supposedly being used to tackle COVID-19 – and to act powerfully in response.

Fortunately, as more people become aware of the deeper strands of what is taking place, the energy to break the lockdowns, resist other limitations on our rights and freedoms (such as contact tracing, COVID-19 testing/temperature checks, mask-wearing and vaccinations) as well as resist the coup itself will gather pace. As I have previously outlined, using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural, religious or sporting event, a nonviolent action, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist.

If you wish to focus on powerfully resisting one of the primary threats to human existence – nuclear war, the deployment of 5G, the collapse of biodiversity and/or the climate catastrophe – you can read about nonviolent strategy, including strategic goals to focus your campaigns, from here: Campaign Strategic Aims.

You might also consider joining those who are powerful enough to recognize the critical importance of reduced consumption and greater self-reliance as essential elements of these strategies by participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. While you over-consume or are dependent on the elite for your survival, in any way, you are vulnerable.

In addition, you are welcome to consider signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Or, if you want something simpler, consider committing to:

The Earth Pledge

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

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

Conclusion

Under cover of a ‘virus’ that does not exist, the global elite is social engineering a massive restructuring of world society to suit their own ends. If they achieve their aim, your existence as any sort of individual with meaningful rights and freedoms will have been terminated.

Apart from these ongoing disastrous outcomes, the elite coup is also unwittingly accelerating four paths to human extinction: nuclear war, the climate catastrophe, the deployment of 5G and biodiversity collapse.

To have any chance of defeating the elite coup and fighting effectively to avert our own extinction, we must fight strategically.

Fundamentally, this means recognizing that lobbying (that is, begging) elite agents, such as governments, simply reinforces the power of the elite to control us. It is only when we take action ourselves to both build our own power (which includes that of our children and those with whom we work) while campaigning strategically to undermine the power of the global elite itself that we take crucial steps to liberate ourselves from its violence, in all of the forms that this violence takes.

Given that the elite coup is jeopardizing our individuality, our liberty and our future, it is time for us to decide whether we are human beings or a planet of sheep.

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.

Power Grab

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away

– Percy Shelley, Ozymandias

It didn’t take long for the most opportunistic, nefarious and corrupt actors in the U.S. to turn a pandemic crisis into another massive power grab attempt. We’ve seen it before; after 9/11 and also throughout the response to the financial crisis a decade ago. The irredeemable sociopaths who always make the big, important decisions used those crises to consolidate wealth and power. They’re going for it again.

There are many examples, but let me list a few:

– The EARN IT bill, by which senators are attempting to destroy widespread public use of encryption, i.e. private communications. (EFF)

– The White House and the CDC are asking Facebook, Google and other tech giants to give them greater access to Americans’ smartphone location data. (CNBC)

– The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies. (Politico)

– U.S. Senators are attempting to use the crisis as an opportunity to pull off a gigantic corporate coup. (Matt Stoller, BIG)

Then there’s the really big one, the Federal Reserve. An institution with more unaccountable power to shape and manipulate our world than any other, yet whose actions remain subject to virtually zero public debate.

While we’re at it…

I wrote about the scam that is the Federal Reserve last year in the post, Monetary Looting, and what they’re doing now makes those repo operations look like child’s play.

We often get distracted debating the implications of Fed actions, and in the process lose sight of the bigger picture. The real question we need to be asking is why do we allow a handful of unelected banker welfare agents the right to shape our entire world? It’s a crazy system, and until we start questioning the underlying premises of everything about our world, we’ll remain confused and subjugated.

That said, I remain more optimistic than ever that once we get through this crisis and a rough transition period, a far better era awaits on the other side. I say this because I believe this pandemic will shake enough people to such an extent they’ll emerge from it very different people with a more enlightened understanding of the world and their roles in it. An event like this can make people less conscious, or it can make them more conscious. I think humanity will expand its consciousness.

Of course, the future is not written in stone. Each and every one of us needs to grow up and step up if we’re going to build a better world. We each have our skillsets, so I ask everyone reading this to think about how they can repurpose their talents to the great work of ushering in a new era. I don’t do any of this to change the world. I can’t do that. I do this to inspire as many people as possible to change their own worlds. Then everything changes.

If I had to summarize where we’ve been and where I think we’re going, it would be with the following.

The world you lived in no longer exists, but the world to come has not yet been created. The worst people in society will attempt to create it in their image, but we can’t allow that. We must step up and create it ourselves. It’s entirely possible. Get to work.

Economic effect of coronavirus could be revolutionary

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: Intrepid Report

Coronavirus and globalism will teach us vital lessons. The question is whether we can learn vital lessons that do not serve the ruling interest groups and ideologies.

Coronavirus will teach us that a country without free national health care is severely handicapped. Millions of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. They cannot afford health care premiums, deductions, and copays. Millions have no insurance. This means millions of people infected with coronavirus who cannot get medical help. The morbidity from this is intolerable in any society.

Shutdowns associated with efforts to contain the spread of coronavirus will deny income to millions of Americans who live paycheck to paycheck. What do they do for food, shelter, transportation?  You don’t have to think very long along these lines to see a very frightening scenario.

Globalism has taken down the ladders of upward mobility by exporting American middle class jobs to Asia. A population once able to save now lives on debt, the service of which is interrupted by recession/depression and by debt service absorbing all net disposable income.

Globalism has also reduced the survivability of our society by making it dependent  on externally produced goods, the supply of which can be cut off by disruptions in other societies, by policy disagreements leading to sanctions, and by an inability to export enough to pay for imports, which is what the offshored production of US firms is.

The United States has an unprotected population and an economy in trouble. For years, corporate executives have run the companies for the benefit of their bonuses, which are largely dependent on rises in their company’s share price. Consequently, profits and borrowings have been invested in buying back the companies’ shares and not in new investment in the businesses. Corporate indebtedness is extreme and will threaten many corporations and many jobs in a downturn. Boeing is a case in point.

Economist Michael Hudson has for many decades studied the use of debt-forgiveness to restart economies killed by debt burdens. Debt forgiveness for corporations has a different implication than debt forgiveness for individuals. For corporations, forgiving debts lets those who financialized and indebted the economy and the population off the hook. To avoid rewarding them for the catastrophe they produced and to prevent widespread public outcry and distrust, nationalization is implied for insolvent companies and banks.

Nationalization would be limited to insolvent companies and financial institutions and doesn’t mean that there would be no private companies or businesses. Additional nationalization could be used to prevent strategic companies from substituting their interests for national interests, which they do when they move American jobs and factories offshore. Pharmaceuticals could be nationalized along with health care. Energy which often sacrifices the environment to its profits could be considered for nationalization. A successful society has to have more driving it than private profit.

For most Americans nationalization is a dirty word, but it has many benefits. For example, a national health care system reduces costs tremendously by taking profits out of the system. Additionally, nationalized pharmaceutical companies could be made more focused on research and cures than on profit avenues. Everyone knows how Big Pharma influences medical schools and medical practice in line with Big Pharma’s approach. A more open-minded approach to medicine would be beneficial.

Socialist is another American dirty word, one that is being used against Bernie Sanders.  I have not turned into a socialist overnight. I am simply thinking outloud. How can the economy recover when the population and corporations are smothered by debt?  Debt forgiveness is the only way out of this debt suffocation. Can debts be forgiven without nationalization? Not without a huge giveaway to financial mangers and Wall Street. It is the members of the “one percent” who have received 95% of the increase in us income and wealth since 2008. Do we want to reward them for smothering the economy with debt by bailing them out without nationalizing them?

The combination of an economy covered in debt and an unprotected population is clearly revolutionary. Do we have leadership capable of breaking out of interest group politics and ruling ideologies in order to save our society and put it on a more sustainable basis?

Or will the economic hardships be blamed on the virus, the catalyst that ignited the debt timebomb?

PG&E: Monopoly Power and Disasters by the Rich 1%

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By Peter Phillips and Tim Ogburn

Source: Project Censored

The Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has diverted over $100 million from safety and maintenance programs to executive compensation at the same time it has caused an average of more than one fire a day for the past six years killing over 100 people.

PG&E is the largest privately held public utility in the United States. A new research report shows that 91% of PG&E stocks are held by huge international investment management firms, including BlackRock and Vanguard Group. PG&E is an ideal investment for global capital management firms with monopoly control over five million households paying $16 billion for gas and electric in California. The California Public Utility Commission (PUC) has allowed an annual return up to 11%.

Between 2006 and the end of 2017, PG&E made $13.5 billion in net profits. Over those years, they paid nearly $10 billion in dividends to shareholders, but found little money to maintain safety on their electricity lines. Drought turned PG&E’s service area into a tinderbox at the same time money was diverted from maintenance to investor profits.

A 2013 Liberty Consulting report showed that 60% of PG&E’s power lines were at risk of failure due to obsolete equipment and 75% of the lines lacked in-line grounding. Between 2008 and 2015, the CPUC found PG&E late on thousands of repair violations. A 2012 report further revealed that PG&E illegally diverted $100 million from safety to executive compensation and bonuses over a 15-year period.

PG&E has caused over 1,500 fires in the past six years. PG&E electrical equipment has sparked more than a fire a day on average since 2014—more than 400 in 2018—including wildfires that killed more than 100 people.

In October 2017, multiple PG&E linked fires (Tubbs, Nuns, Adobe fires and more) in Northern California scorched more than 245,000 acres, destroyed or damaged more than 8,900 homes, displaced 100,000 people and killed at least 44.

In November, 2018, the PG&E caused Camp fire burned 153,336 acres, killing 86 people, and destroying 18,804 homes, business, and structures. The towns of Paradise and Concow were mostly obliterated. Overall damage was estimated at $16.5 billion.

PG&E has caused some $50 billion in damages from massive fires started by their failed power lines. They filed bankruptcy in January 2019 to try to shelter their assets. PG&E’s 529 million shares went from a high of $70 per share in in 2017 to a low of $3.55 in 2019. Shares are currently trading at $10.55 with zero returns.  At this point PG&E actually owes more in damages then the net worth of the company.

All but two members of the board of director resigned in early 2019, and the CEO was replaced. A new board of directors was elected by an annual stockholders meeting in June of 2019. PG&E now has a board of directors whose primary interest in 2020 is returning PG&E stock values to $50-70 range and returning to annual dividend payments in the 8-11% rate.

The new PG&E management took widespread aggressive action during the fire-season of 2019 shutting down electric power to over 2.5 million people statewide. Nonetheless, a high voltage power line malfunctioned in Sonoma county lead to the Kincade fire that burned 77,758 acres destroying 374 structures, and forced the evacuation 190,000 Sonoma county residents. Estimated damages from this fire are $10.6 billion.

The fourteen new PG&E directors were essentially hand-picked by PG&E’s major stockholder firms like Vanguard Holdings 2019 (47.5 million shares 9.1%) and BlackRock (44.2 million shares 8.5%). A new PG&E Director, Meridee Moore, SF area founder & CEO of $2 billion Watershed Asset Management, is also a board member of BlackRock.

Only three of the new fourteen directors live in PG&E’s service area (four if we count the newly appointed CEO from Tennessee). One board member lives the LA area. The remainder of the board live outside California, including three from Texas, two from the mid-west and the remaining four from New York or east coast states. Pending PG&E Bankruptcy court approval, new directors are slated to receive $400,000 each in annual compensation.

Ten of the new 2020 directors have direct current links with capital investment management firms. The remainder have shown proven loyalty experience on behalf of capital utility investors making the entire PG&E board a solid united group of capital investment protectors, whose primary objective is to return PG&E stock values to pre-2017 highs with a 11% return on investment. They claim that wide-spread blackouts will be needed for up to ten years.

All fourteen PG&E board members are in the upper levels of the 1% richest in the world. As millionaires with elite university educations, the PG&E board holds little empathy for the millions of Californians living paycheck to paycheck burdened with some of the highest utility bills in the country. PG&E shuts off gas and electric to over 250,000 families annually for late payments.

The PG&E 2020 board is in service to transnational investment capital. This creates a perfect storm for the continuing transfer of capital from the 99% to the richest 1% in the world, all with uncertain  blackouts, serious environmental damage, widespread fires, with multiple deaths and injuries.

We need to liquidate PG&E for the criminal damages it has afflicted on California. The “PG&E solution” is to manage PG&E democratically on the basis of human need, rather than private profit. It is time to take a stand for a publicly owned California Gas and Electric Company as the way to reverse the transfer of wealth to the global 1% and provide Californians with safe, low-cost and more renewable energy. All power to the people!

For the full report with all PG&E board names see:  www.projectcensored.org/pge

 

Peter Phillips, Political Sociologist at Sonoma State University; author Giants: The Global Power Elite, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2018); past director of Project Censored; co-author/editor of fourteen Censored yearbooks, 1997 to 2011; co-author of Impeach the President, (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007); and winner of the Dallas Smythe Award from the Union for Democratic Communications.

Tim Ogburn, 20-year manager for the California EPA; founder and co-chair of the Environmental Industry Coalition of the United States in Washington, D.C.; published in numerous technical and trade journals regarding public/private partnerships; International Environmental Technology consultant in India, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Egypt, and Israel; Consultant to USAID, US Department of Commerce, U.S. State Department; and has given Congressional Presentations on the environmental technology industry before Congress.

 

Related Podcast:

Project Censored – 02.04.20

As Northern California communities tally the toll of disastrous fires and repeated power shutoffs,Peter Phillips and Tim Ogburn say it’s time to replace the investor-owned Pacific Gas & Electric Co.with a public power authority. They say the recent installation of a new board of directors at PG&Ewon’t solve the problems, because the new directors, like their predecessors, represent the global one-percent,not the utility’s customers.

Snakes In Suits: Are Psychopaths Running The World?

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By Alanna Ketler

Source: Collective Evolution

Often when we think of the word psychopath, we think of deranged serial killers that are hopefully locked up in prison for life. While there are many psychopaths who kill for reasons that are unfathomable to most of us and who are indeed in prison, there is an even greater number roaming free in our society and often using their condition to their advantage in any way possible. In fact, it is very likely that you know some–they might even be your colleagues.

Most of us do not know or work with any serial killers, at least not that we are aware of. So, what exactly is a psychopath and how can we define them? The dictionary definition is as follows:

“A person suffering from a chronic mental disorder with abnormal or violent social behavior.”

As you can probably tell, a lot more than just serial killers will fit into this broad definition. In fact, according to Canadian psychologist Dr. Robert Hare, a world-renowned expert on psychopathy, an estimated 1% of the Earth’s population is psychopathic and around 25% of the population of male inmates at federal correctional facilities are psychopathic.

Psychopathic Traits

It is important to note that, in contrast with the popular image of the ‘deranged psycho,’ psychopaths tend to be very well composed, take good care of their appearance and are very charming (think of Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho). Because of this you may have a difficult time spotting them out, as they are masters of deception and are able to fake a lot of the qualities that define regular people. Some other psychopathic traits, according to Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist, are as follows:

  • Glib and superficial charm
  • Grandiose estimation of self
  • Need for stimulation
  • Manipulative and cunning
  • Complete lack of remorse or guilt
  • Pathological lying
  • Have a parasitic lifestyle, often latching onto and taking from others
  • Have a history of early behavioral problems
  • Overly impulsive
  • Are very irresponsible
  • Unable to accept responsibility for actions
  • Unable to commit to long-term relationships
  • History of juvenile delinquency
  • Display criminal versatility
  • Experienced a “revocation of conditional release”
  • Lacks realistic long term goals
  • History of promiscuous sexual behavior
  • Have poor behavioral controls
  • Are callous and lack empathy
  • Have a “shallow affect” (psychopaths show a lack of emotion when an emotional reaction is appropriate.)

You can actually rate yourself to find out if you are psychopath. On each criterion, the subject is ranked on a 3-point scale: (0 = item does not apply, 1 = item applies somewhat, 2 = item definitely applies). The scores are summed to create a rank of zero to 40. Anyone who scores 30 and above is most likely a psychopath. Hare has used this test and checklist to detect which inmates are psychopaths.

Snakes In Suits

What many of us may not realize is that psychopaths actually thrive in the corporate world. Hare has actually co-authored a book with Dr. Paul Babiak on this topic entitled, Snakes In Suits: Understanding and Surviving the Psychopaths in Your Office. Psychopaths manipulate others to accrue power, sometimes pitting them against each other in an attempt to divide and conquer. They are often attracted to bigger, dynamic corporations with very little structure or supervision. They generally don’t work well in teams because they don’t like to share information or skills and it brings them joy to watch others fail. They are addicted to power, status and money. Sound familiar?

The corporate world is set up to favor psychopathic traits such as fearlessness, dominant behavior and immunity to stress. Because of this, psychopaths often find themselves in these types of positions, and then have an easier time climbing the corporate ladder and obtaining positions of great power. This is where they can do real damage to society as we see it today.

Are Psychopaths Running The World?

Not only as corporate heads do psychopaths find success in our modern-day society, but also within our governments and political system — often as front-line politicians. This may come as a shock to you, but when you really look at some of the atrocities that are taking place on our planet, and if you’ve ever wondered how things that are so inhumane could actually be happening, well, therein lies part of your answer.

When you consider the war, genocide, senseless murder of civilians, treatment of the indigenous cultures of the world, chemicals in our food, air and water supply, acts of “terrorism”, war crimes and so many other unjust and cruel actions which are often instigated by our political leaders, it becomes easy to see how psychopaths actually fit the requirements for these types of roles quite well. As mentioned before they are masters of deception, pathological liars and often quite charming.

Many soldiers go to war and because they are conditioned to believe that they are fighting an enemy in the name of peace. They do as they are told and commit these heinous acts against other human beings. The reason why so many soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder is because it is not within human nature to murder other humans, and especially innocent civilians.

We already know how many politicians are crooked, but perhaps its time to start looking at them with the psychopath checklist in mind so that we can be better equipped to protect not only ourselves but our society from their malicious acts.

But Can’t We Help Them?

It is natural for anyone who is involved in spiritual work to have compassion for these individuals and feel compelled to help them overcome their psychopathic behavior. However, most research has pointed towards the understanding that psychopaths are born, not made and therefore cannot be cured. This is one of the main differences that separates sociopaths from psychopaths. Another is that sociopaths have a conscience, albeit a weak one, and will often justify something they know to be wrong. By contrast, psychopaths will believe that their actions are justified and feel no remorse for any harm done. Sociopaths are made, and have a higher likelihood of overcoming their current condition. However, many of those with sociopathic behavior will find themselves in similar corporate positions.

Hare’s research discovered that by attempting to heal or help a psychopath, you might actually be strengthening their cunning abilities, as they will find a way to manipulate you into believing that they are remorseful and understand how their actions were wrong.

The Corporate Debt Bubble Is A Train Wreck In Slow Motion

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

There are two subjects that the mainstream media seems specifically determined to avoid discussing these days when it comes to the economy – the first is the problem of falling global demand for goods and services; they absolutely refuse to acknowledge the fact that demand is going stagnant and will conjure all kinds of rationalizations to distract from the issue. The other subject is the debt bubble, the corporate debt bubble in particular.

These two factors alone guarantee a massive shock to the global economy and the US economy are built into the system, but I believe corporate debt is the key pillar of the false economy.  It has been utilized time and time again to keep the Everything Bubble from completely deflating, however, the fundamentals are starting to catch up to the fantasy.

For example, in terms of stock markets, which are now meaningless as an indicator of the health of the real economy, corporate stock buybacks have been the single most vital mechanism for inflation. Corporations buy their own stocks, often using cash borrowed from each other and from the Federal Reserve, in order to reduce the number of shares on the market and artificially boost the value of the remaining shares. This process is essentially legal manipulation of equities, and to be sure, it has been effective so far at keeping markets elevated.

The problem is that these same corporations are taking on more and more debt through interest payments in order to maintain the facade. Over the period of a decade, corporate debt has skyrocketed back to levels not seen since 2007, just before the credit crisis. The official corporate debt load now stands at over $10 trillion, and that’s not even counting derivatives exposure.  According to the Bank for International Settlements, the amount of derivatives still held by corporations stands at around $544 trillion in notional value (theoretical value), while the current market value is only around $10 trillion.  This is a massive discrepancy that can only lead to disaster.

In terms of debt-to-GDP, the credit cycle peak has spiked beyond any other peak in the past 40 years. This amount of borrowing always has consequences. Even if central banks were to intervene on a level similar to TARP, which saturated markets with $16 trillion in liquidity, the amount of cash needed is so immense and the economic returns so muted that such measures are ultimately a waste of time. The Federal Reserve fueled this bubble, and now there is no stopping it’s demise. Though, they’re behavior and minimal response to the problem suggests that they have no intention of stopping it anyway.

Currently, stock buybacks are set to decline this year, and I don’t think this is because corporations have decided they want to quit the tactic. They have to quit, because the amount of debt they are accumulating is is now outpacing their falling profits. Corporate profits peaked in the 3rd Quarter of 2018 and have been in decline ever since.  The Price-to-Earnings ratio as well as the Price-to-Sales ratio are now well above their historic peak during the dot-com bubble, meaning, stocks have never been more overvalued compared to the profits that corporations are actually bringing in.

As I warned back in 2018, Trump’s tax cuts were a gift to corporations, not average people, and that gift was designed to be squandered as there was no doubt that companies would pour all extra cash into stock buybacks instead of innovation and new jobs. This is exactly what happened.

While corporations, the Fed and Trump have been putting some effort into keeping stock markets from imploding, the real economy has been evaporating. Global import/exports are crashing, US manufacturing is in recession territory, US GDP is in decline (even according to rigged official numbers), US retail outlets are closing by the thousands, the poverty rate jumped in 30% of US counties in the past year, and high paying jobs are disappearing and being replaced with minimum wage service sector jobs.

To be sure, this process did not start under Trump, it’s been a slow motion train wreck for over a decade. But, it’s important to point out that Trump has done nothing to mitigate the crash and his obsession with the fraudulent stock market shows that he has no plans to try. The amount of time the tax cuts and debt increase bought was a couple of years. That’s it. With buybacks in decline, the question is what will keep the bubble afloat now? The Fed? That’s doubtful…

Global corporations with the most VISIBLE debt include:

AT&T with $180 billion

SoftBank with $154 billion

Apple with $136 billion

Verizon with $114 billion

Comcast with $112 billion

AbInbev with $110 billion

General Electric with $115 billion

Shell with $77 billion

Microsoft with $67 billion

Some companies, like Apple and Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway are holding extensive cash reserves, but most do not. Also, the level of cash reserves held by certain top corporations suggests they know something is on the horizon. Why hold piles of cash when the stock market is a “sure thing”? Unless, the debt bubble is about to collapse and cash will be needed to absorb the damage?

Stock buybacks, I believe, are the litmus test for how long the corporate world can hold out against the weight of the debt bubble. 2020 appears to be the year in which buybacks are set to crumble. Corporate profits degraded over 2019 and the slide is set to continue this year. This means profits are not going to come to the rescue and stave off the explosion of the debt structure (once again, the problems of demand and debt intertwine). All that is left is the Fed, as the “buyer of last resort” becomes the buyer of only import.

The list above, of course, does not include financial companies like JP Morgan and other banks that are suspected of harboring an extensive debt load and borrowing cash frantically through the Fed’s overnight repo markets.

These loans are now coming due, and the Fed has indicated it plans to tighten liquidity once again next month while returning to balance sheet cuts. Interest rates remain well above zero, which means the more companies borrow through repo markets, the more interest they will accrue. The Fed will have to institute a full QE program on the level of the TARP bailouts and cut interest rates to zero in order to end the constant repo liquidity threat and kick the can for a couple more years, and they’ve given no indication that they plan to do this in time to stop the current crash.

For now, Fed repo intervention has achieved little except keeping stocks at all-time highs. The rest of the economy is in disarray.

The real economy will start to drag down the establishment’s favorite distraction – The Dow, as this process continues. The big question is always one of timing. How long can the delusional euphoria keep the system levitated?

The situation is one of complacency and condition. If people are suddenly confronted with an enormous forest fire surrounding their city, they will ask “What can we do to save ourselves?” But what if people are surrounded by a forest fire for ten years and it hasn’t quite reached them yet? You warn them that the winds have finally changed and it is about to expand and take their homes and they will say “What forest fire?”

It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which there are no major shocks to the financial structure for the rest of the year. With the corporate system tapped out and no longer able to act as a support for the bubble, the fundamentals will start to take over again. Geopolitical events will also have a more visible effect. A whole year without escalation with Iran?  Without escalation with North Korea? Without a pandemic threat like the coronavirus going global? Without threats of a liquidity crisis as banks starve for more and more repo loans? I think not…

It’s important not to let complacency interfere with vigilance.  A slow motion train wreck is still ultimately a train wreck.  The damage can only be mitigated by removing one’s self from the train, and preparing for the fallout.  Do not think that simply because the system has been able to drag its nearly lifeless body along for ten years that this means all is well.  All bubbles collapse, and corporate debt has already sealed the fate of the Everything Bubble.

Corporate America Is an Anti-Social Black Plague: Negative Network Effects Run Amok

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The anti-social carnage unleashed by Corporate America’s “lock-in” / negative network effects has no real limits.

Here’s the U.S.economy in a nutshell: Corporate America is an anti-social Black Plague, gorging on cartel-monopoly profits reaped from negative network effects running amok, enriching the few at the expense of the many and concentrating political power in the hands of the most rapacious, anti-democratic corporate sociopaths.

Let’s start with network effects: the conventional definition is “When a network effect is present, the value of a product or service increases according to the number of others using it.”

So for example, when telephone service was only available to a few users, its value was limited. As more people obtained telephone service, the value of the network increased to both its owners and to users, who could reach more people and conduct commerce more easily as a result of having telephone service.

In the conventional analysis, negative network effects occur from “congestion,” i.e. the network is adding new users so quickly that “more users make a product less valuable.”

But this superficial analysis misses the fatally anti-social consequences of corporate negative network effects, a dynamic described by analyst Simons Chase in this essay. Here is an excerpt:

Even the most imaginative and far-reaching narratives about non-obvious economic fragility and off balance sheet risks are mere rants without constructive ideas about causes and solutions.

Consider network effects, the popular economic construct applied to market concentration and increasing returns for strategies pursued by some leading tech companies. This dynamic economic agent is also known as demand side economies of scale.

W. Brian Arthur, the economist credited with first developing the theory, described the condition of increasing returns as a game of strategic positioning and building up a user base to the point where ‘lock in’ of dominant players occurs. Companies able to tap network effects have been rewarded with huge valuations and highly defensible businesses.

But what about negative network effects? What if the same dynamic applies to the U.S.’s pay-to-play political industry where the government promotes or approves of something through a policy, subsidy or financial guarantee due to private sector influence.

Benefits accrue only to the purchaser of the network effects, and consumers, induced by the false signal of large network size, ultimately suffer from asymmetric risk and experience what I’m calling a loss of intangible net worth for each additional member after the ‘bandwagon’ wares off.

If this were the case, then you would see companies experience rapid revenue growth (out of line with traditional asset leverage models), executives accumulating huge fortunes and political campaign coffers swelling.

But the most striking feature would be the anti-social outcomes, the ones not available without the instant critical mass of government-supported network effects, the ones that, at scale, monetize a society’s intangible net worth.

Some products tied to these metrics include: prescriptions drugs, junk food targeting children, mortgages, diplomas, and social media. The list of industries that are likely to have gained through the purchasing of network effects in D.C. maps closely to the decay that is visible in U.S. society.

The loss of intangible capital and other manifestations of non-obvious economic fragility (to use Simons’ apt phrase) is the subject of my latest book, Will You Be Richer or Poorer? Profit, Power and A.I. in a Traumatized World, in which I catalog the anti-social consequences of negative network effects and other forces eroding our nation’s intangible capital.

Consider Facebook, a classic case of negative network effects running amok, creating immensely anti-social consequences while reaping billions in profits: Facebook isn’t free speech, it’s algorithmic amplification optimized for outrage (TechCrunch.com).

The full social cost of social media’s negative network effects are difficult to tally, but studies have found that loneliness and alienation are correlated to how many hours a day individuals spend on social media. (An Internet search brings up dozens of reports such as NPR’s Feeling Lonely? Too Much Time On Social Media May Be Why.)

Facebook is trying to leverage its social media “lock-in” to issue its own global currency and both Facebook and Google are trying to offer banking services without any of the pesky regulations imposed on legitimate banks. (Will $10 million in lobbying do the trick? How about $100 million? We’ve got billions to “invest” in corrupting and controlling public agencies and political power.)

Once Corporate America locks in cartel-monopoly power, i.e. you have to use our services and products, the corporate sociopaths use their billions in market cap and profits to buy the sociopaths in government. Pay-to-play is the real political machinery; “democracy” is the PR fig-leaf to mask the private sector “lock-in” (monopoly) and the public-sector “lock-in” (regulatory influence, anti-competitive barriers to entry, the legalization of corporate fraud, cooking the books, embezzlement, etc.)

Consider Boeing, an effective monopoly which used $12 billion in profits to buy back its own shares and “invested” millions in buying political influence so it could minimize public-sector oversight.

Rather than spend the $12 billion designing a new safe aircraft, Boeing cobbled together a fatally flawed design dependent on software, as described in The Case Against Boeing (The New Yorker) to maximize the profitability of its “lock-in”.

Google is running amok on so many levels, it’s difficult to keep track of its anti-social “let’s be evil, it’s so incredibly profitable” agenda: Google’s Secret ‘Project Nightingale’ Gathers Personal Health Data on Millions of Americans (Wall Street Journal). The goal, of course, is to reap more billions in profits for insiders and corporate sociopaths.

The anti-social carnage unleashed by Corporate America’s “lock-in” / negative network effects has no real limits. Consider the essentially limitless private and social damage caused by Big Tech: Child Abusers Run Rampant as Tech Companies Look the Other Way (New York Times).

Then there’s the opioid epidemic, whose casualties run into the hundreds of thousands, an epidemic that was entirely a creature of Corporate America seeking to maximize “lock-in” profits by buying regulatory approval and pushing false claims that the corporate products were safe and non-addictive.

Note the media sources of these reports: these are the top tier of American journalism, not some easily dismissed alt-media source.

What does this tell us? It tells us the anti-social consequences are now so extreme and so apparent that the corporate media cannot ignore them. Once Corporate America locks-in market, financial and political power, it acts as a virulent Black Plague on the social order, legitimate democracy, and an entire spectrum of intangible social capital including the rule of law.

As Simons put it: “The ethical dimension underpinning the whole system is this: what’s moral is what’s legal and what’s legal is for sale.” Where does this Black Plague pathology take us? To a collapse of the status quo which enabled it, cheered it, and so richly rewarded it.