Tag Archives: Economic Collapse

Orwellian Lockstep and a Loaded Syringe

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By Colin Todhunter

Source: Dissident Voice

Some years ago, the then vice-president of Monsanto Robert T Fraley asked, “Why do people doubt science”. He posed the question partly because he had difficulty in believing that some people had valid concerns about the use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in agriculture.

Critics were questioning the science behind GM technology and the impacts of GMOs because they could see how science is used, corrupted and manipulated by powerful corporations to serve their own ends. And it was also because they regard these conglomerates as largely unaccountable and unregulated.

We need look no further than the current coronavirus issue to understand how vested interests are set to profit by spinning the crisis a certain way and how questionable science is being used to pursue policies that are essentially illogical or ‘unscientific’. Politicians refer to ‘science’ and expect the public to defer to the authority of science without questioning the legitimacy of scientific modelling or data.

Although this legitimacy is being questioned on various levels, arguments challenging the official line are being sidelined. Governments, the police and the corporate media have become the arbiters of truth even if ‘the truth’ does not correspond with expert opinion or rational thought which challenges the mainstream narrative.

For instance, testing for coronavirus could be flawed (producing a majority of ‘false positives’) and the processes involved in determining death rates could be inflating the numbers: for example, dying ‘with’ coronavirus’ is different to dying ‘due to’ coronavirus: a serious distinction given that up to 98 per cent of people (according to official sources) who may be dying with it have at least one serious life-threatening condition. Moreover, the case-fatality ratio could be so low as to make the lockdown response appear wholly disproportionate. Yet we are asked to accept statistics at face value – and by implication, the policies based on them.

Indeed, documentary maker and author David Cayley addresses this last point by saying that modern society is hyper-scientific but radically unscientific as it has no standard against which it can measure or assess what it has done: that we must at all costs ‘save lives’ is not questioned, but this makes it very easy to start a stampede. Making an entire country go home and stay home has immense, incalculable costs in terms of well-being and livelihoods. Cayley argues that this itself has created a pervasive sense of panic and crisis and is largely a result of the measures taken against the pandemic and not of the pandemic itself.

He argues that the declaration by the World Health Organization that a pandemic (at the time based on a suspected 150 deaths globally) was now officially in progress did not change anyone’s health status, but it dramatically changed the public atmosphere. Moreover, the measures mandated have involved a remarkable curtailing of civil liberty.

One of the hallmarks of the current situation, he stresses, is that some think that ‘science’ knows more than it does and therefore they – especially politicians – know more than they do. Although certain epidemiologists may say frankly that there is very little sturdy evidence to base policies on, this has not prevented politicians from acting as if everything they say or do is based on solid science.

The current paradigm – with its rhetoric of physical distancing, flattening the curve and saving lives – could be difficult to escape from. Cayley says either we call it off soon and face the possibility that it was all misguided (referring to the policies adopted in Sweden to make his point), or we extend it and create harms that may be worse than the casualties we may have averted.

The lockdown may not be merited if we were to genuinely adopt a knowledge-based approach. For instance, if we look at early projections by Neil Ferguson of Imperial College in the UK, he had grossly overstated the number of possible deaths resulting from the coronavirus and has now backtracked substantially. Ferguson has a chequered track record, which led UK newspaper The Telegraph to run a piece entitled ‘How accurate was the science that led to lockdown?’ The article outlines Ferguson’s previous flawed predictions about infectious diseases and a number of experts raise serious questions about the modelling that led to lockdown in the UK.

It is worth noting that the lockdown policies we now see are remarkably similar to the disturbing Orwellian ‘Lock Step’ future scenario that was set out in 2010 by the Rockefeller Foundation report ‘Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development’. The report foresaw a future situation where freedoms are curtailed and draconian high-tech surveillance measures are rolled out under the ongoing pretexts of impending pandemics. Is this the type of technology use we can expect to see as hundreds of millions are marginalized and pushed into joblessness?

Instead of encouraging more diverse, informed and objective opinions in the mainstream, we too often see money and power forcing the issue, not least in the form of Bill Gates who tells the world ‘normality’ may not return for another 18 months – until he and his close associates in the pharmaceuticals industry find a vaccine and we are all vaccinated.

US attorney Robert F Kennedy Jr says that top Trump advisor Stephen Fauci has made the reckless choice to fast track vaccines, partially funded by Gates, without critical animal studies. Gates is so worried about the danger of adverse events that he says vaccines shouldn’t be distributed until governments agree to indemnity against lawsuits.

But this should come as little surprise. Kennedy notes that the Gates Foundation and its global vaccine agenda already has much to answer for. For example, Indian doctors blame the Gates Foundation for paralysing 490,000 children. And in 2009, the Gates Foundation funded tests of experimental vaccines, developed by Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) and Merck, on 23,000 girls. About 1,200 suffered severe side effects and seven died. Indian government investigations charged that Gates-funded researchers committed pervasive ethical violations.

Kennedy adds that in 2010 the Gates Foundation funded a trial of GSK’s experimental malaria vaccine, killing 151 African infants and causing serious adverse effects to 1,048 of the 5,949 children. In 2002, Gates’ operatives forcibly vaccinated thousands of African children against meningitis. Approximately 50 of the 500 children vaccinated developed paralysis.

Bill Gates committed $10 billion to the WHO in 2010. In 2014, Kenya’s Catholic Doctors Association accused the WHO of chemically sterilising millions of unwilling Kenyan women with a  ‘tetanus’ vaccine campaign. Independent labs found a sterility formula in every vaccine tested.

Instead of prioritising projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases and improve health — clean water, hygiene, nutrition and economic development — the Gates Foundation spends only about $650 million of its $5 billion budget on these areas.

Despite all of this, Gates appears on prime-time TV news shows in the US and the UK pushing his undemocratic and unaccountable pro-big pharma vaccination and surveillance agendas and is afforded deference by presenters who dare not mention any of what Kennedy outlines. Quite the opposite – he is treated like royalty.

In the meantime, an open Letter from Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, emeritus professor of medical microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, to Angela Merkel has called for an urgent reassessment of Germany’s lockdown. Dr Ioannidis, a professor of medicine and professor of epidemiology and population health at Stanford University, argues that we have made such decisions on the basis of unreliable data. In addition, numerous articles have recently appeared online which present the views of dozens of experts who question policies and the data being cited about the coronavirus.

While it is not the intention to dismiss the dangers of Covid-19, responses to those dangers must be proportionate to actual risks. And perspective is everything.

Millions die each year due to unnecessary conflicts, malnutrition and hunger, a range of preventative diseases (often far outweighing the apparent impact of Covid-19), environmental pollution and economic plunder which deprives poor countries of their natural wealth. Neoliberal reforms have pushed millions of farmers and poor people in India and elsewhere to the brink of joblessness and despair, while our food is being contaminated with toxic chemicals and the global ecosystem faces an apocalyptic breakdown.

Much of the above is being driven by an inherently predatory economic system and facilitated by those who now say they want to ‘save lives’ by implementing devastating lockdowns. Yet, for the media and the political class, the public’s attention should not be allowed to dwell on such things.

And that has easily been taken care of.

In the UK, the population is constantly subjected via their TV screens to clap for NHS workers, support the NHS and to stay home and save lives on the basis of questionable data and policies. It’s emotive stuff taking place under a ruling Conservative Party that has cut thousands of hospital beds, frozen staff pay and demonised junior doctors.

As people passively accept the stripping of their fundamental rights, Lionel Shriver, writing in The Spectator, says that the supine capitulation to a de facto police state has been one of the most depressing spectacles he has ever witnessed.

It’s a point of view that will resonate with many.

In the meantime, Bill Gates awaits as the saviour of humanity — with a loaded syringe.

What Are You Gonna Do About It?

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By Michael Krieger

Source: Liberty Blitzkrieg

Tucked into the recent recovery bill was a provision granting the Federal Reserve the right to set up a $450 billion bailout plan without following key provisions of the federal open meetings law, including announcing its meetings or keeping most records about them, according to a POLITICO review of the legislation.

The provision further calls into question the transparency and oversight for the biggest bailout law ever passed by Congress. President Donald Trump has indicated he does not plan to comply with another part of the new law intended to boost Congress’ oversight powers of the bailout funds. And earlier this week, Trump dismissed the government official chosen as the chief watchdog for the stimulus package.

The changes at the central bank – which appear to have been inserted into the 880-page bill by sympathetic senators during the scramble to get it approved — would address a complaint that the Fed faced during the 2008 financial crisis, when board members couldn’t easily hold group conversations to address the fast-moving economic turmoil.

The provision dispenses with a longstanding accountability rule that the board has to give at least one day’s notice before holding a meeting. Experts say the change could lead to key information about the $450 billion bailout fund, such as which firms might benefit from the program, remaining inaccessible long after the bailout is over.

The new law would absolve the board of the requirement to keep minutes to closed-door meetings as it deliberates on how to set up the $450 billion loan program. That would severely limit the amount of information potentially available to the public on what influenced the board’s decision-making. The board would only have to keep a record of its votes, though they wouldn’t have to be made public during the coronavirus crisis.

A Fed spokesperson did not comment on the changes in the law or whether the Fed would continue keeping records of its meetings.

– Politico: Recovery Law Allows Fed to Rope off Public as It Spends Billions

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted.

– Arthur Miller

Before going any further, I want to share a graphic that accurately summarizes my position on the current pandemic affecting the world.

Unfortunately, it’s quite common for many to latch on to one of these conclusions and singularly obsess about it to the detriment of the others, when we need to be thinking about all three simultaneously.

It’s absolutely critical we understand governments throughout the world are rapidly mobilizing to use the crisis as an excuse to extract more wealth from society and condition the public to relinquish more precious civil liberties. The response in my own imperial oligarchy masquerading as a country has been particularly grotesque. A government that told us masks don’t work and couldn’t roll out testing for weeks, is now responding with the worst of both post-9/11 and post-financial crisis responses. The idea of representative government or democracy in America is a complete myth. The interests and desires of the people are irrelevant, and our economic system can be best described as financial feudalism.

We’ve seen this movie before. The U.S. government and Federal Reserve used major crises to consolidate wealth and power twice before this century, and it’s happening again. They got away with it before — and they’re getting away with it now — because the public accepts it. I hate to write that, but it’s true. People will tell me the public has no way to fight back, but that’s not accurate. The public hasn’t even tried historical methods like mass strikes and boycotts, instead they’ve been successfully neutered by phony red/blue team mainstream politics, through bickering about marginal issues like pronouns and bathrooms, and by endless entertainment and debt-based consumption. This is why the oligarchy keeps winning. Americans aren’t a serious people yet.

Witnessing the massive theft and power consolidation during the financial crisis a decade ago shook me to my core. I learned so much about how the world really works I simply couldn’t go on in the same way, so I quit my finance job and moved out of NYC. I was convinced such in your face theft would lead to effective popular movements and that the people would discover their power and take direct action, but I was wrong. Rather than economic populism transcending other differences to become ascendant and potent, most Americans were successfully shoved back into convenient political boxes easily managed by oligarchy. The rest is history.

Is the above wishful thinking? It might be. I had similar thoughts a decade ago and nothing truly meaningful happened. That said, I’ve learned some valuable life lessons over the past decade and will share some of them today.

The title of today’s piece is “what are you gonna do about it?”, but let me start by telling you what I’m not going to do. I am not going to vote in the 2020 presidential election. In previous cycles, I went out and voted third party as a protest, but I won’t even do that this time. I refuse to give such a farcical system the satisfaction of even a protest vote. I’m over it. Done. 

Choosing to refrain from participation in a clearly rigged and sham presidential election process may feel like giving up, but it’s the exact opposite. It’s actually quite liberating to give up on the fantasy that voting for one of two sociopaths will materially improve your life or the direction of the country. Once you stop believing in the lazy fairytale version of politics you can get down to real action. If you accept that voting is largely a charade, you can either sit back and take it while playing video games, or you can get motivated. I see two avenues for action that can actually change things.

The first consists of mass organized movements that unite as many disparate factions as possible to focus on a single issue. This can take the form of a workers strike, a targeted boycott or something similar. The key thing that’s prevented this from happening is Americans have been so successfully divided and conquered. “Activist leaders” often demand those who constitute a movement see eye to eye on virtually everything, yet oligarchy knows to unite whenever their core interests are even slightly threatened. A hopelessly splintered public is one reason the people always lose.

Although I’m confident in the success of such a strategy if implemented by enough people, this doesn’t mean it will materialize. I was hopeful it could happen last decade, but it never did. Americans proved to be as divided, conquered and distracted as ever, and it’s possible things will continue along this path in the years ahead. As such, waiting for mass movements that may never occur to materialize is not a sufficient strategy. You need a primary strategy, and that strategy starts with you. 

The only thing you truly have control over is your mindset and your actions. Think about what angers you most about the system as it stands and turn that anger into something productive. What can you do as an individual to protest or reject that system? What can you do to become more resilient? Can you repurpose your skillset or profession in a way where you become more of a solution than part of the problem? Some of us can do more than others, but virtually everyone can take some action. If you can’t think of anything, think harder.

Reflecting on the past decade, every moment I spent taking control of my life and improving as an individual was worthwhile and rewarding, while every moment I spent hoping others around me would change was a gigantic disappointment.

This doesn’t mean we should give up on mass movements, it means you cannot rely on other people to get to the point you’re at as quickly as you’d like. Think about what’s actually in your control and go for it. And good luck.

The Psychology of the COVID-19 Coup: The Elite, their Victims and those who Resist

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By Robert J. Burrowes

As the elite coup against humanity continues to gather pace – see ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’ – it is invaluable to observe the way in which the dysfunctional and violent psychology of the global elite, including those of its members who have a significant public profile such as Bill Gates, is revealed more starkly.

At the same time, it is interesting to observe the vast number of fearfully submissive people who are willing to accept, or even ask for, greater constraints on our rights, freedom and economic security, ostensibly to ‘protect’ them from a virus. Sadly, too, the fear of these people plays a critical collaborative role in both advancing the elite coup and condemning millions of others to death as the economic consequences of the destruction of the global economy inflicts its devastating impacts on those least able to cope with it.

Clearly complicated by a number of factors, including the locust plagues that have been devastating several countries in Africa, the Middle East and South Asia during early 2020 – see ‘360 Billion Locusts And Growing – A Plague Of “Biblical Proportions” Is Destroying Crops Across The Middle East And Africa’ – but now particularly because of official responses to COVID-19, as World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director, David Beasley, has recently warned:

If we don’t prepare and act now to secure access, to avoid funding shortfalls and disruptions to trade, we could be facing multiple famines of biblical proportions within a short few months… our analysis shows that 300,000 people could starve to death every single day over a three-month period. See ‘WFP chief warns of “hunger pandemic” as Global Food Crises Report launched’.

That is 27,000,000 people, if arithmetic is not your strong point, that will die of starvation, not COVID-19. And this figure, of course, is quite separate from the phenomenal hardship that millions are already experiencing as a result of the economic dislocation which has created a staggering number of newly unemployed people around the world.

In this article I will do three things. I will briefly explain the dysfunctional psychology of the global elite, using Bill Gates as an example, which explains why they seek vastly greater control over our lives at staggering expense to our rights, freedom and economic security. I will briefly explain why so many people are fearfully submissive victims of this coup, unable to perceive the deeper strands of what is taking place. And I will briefly reiterate what those people in a third category, ranging from those skeptical of the fear-mongering in relation to COVID-19 to those already resisting the lockdowns, curfews, martial law and other serious impositions on our lives, can do to ensure that their resistance has strategic impact.

The Violently Dysfunctional Psychology of the Global Elite

While the world is in turmoil, partly in response to the fear-mongering by WHO, governments, the medical industry and the corporate media that has profoundly inflated people’s fear of COVID-19 but also because of the adverse cascading impacts of the long list of ill-advised decisions, particularly those that impact national economies made to supposedly deal with COVID-19, the primary concern of Bill Gates is that we all submit to vaccination and acquire a ‘digital certificate’ to prove that we have done so. For explanations of Gates’ unsavory motives in promoting and conducting extensive vaccination, see ‘Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination’ and ‘Bill Gates and the Depopulation Agenda. Robert F. Kennedy Junior Calls for an Investigation’.

While this has led to substantial resistance on social media, including that Gates be arrested for crimes against humanity – see ‘“Arrest Bill Gates” – Says every Instagrammer on Gates Account’ – it is, in fact, only the most public initiative by a member of the global elite even though it constitutes a key element of how the global elite intends to capture complete control of our lives to create what Whitney Webb describes as a ‘techno tyranny’.

Citing a range of evidence obtained from official but largely ignored organizations, decisions and documents in recent years, Webb thoughtfully describes a frightening view of the techno tyranny that is almost upon us and for which the latest moves are being rapidly implemented under the guise of combating COVID-19. Involving an unsavory alliance of the ‘intelligence’ community, the Pentagon and Silicon Valley, COVID-19 is being used as cover to remove economic and social ‘obstacles’ (including so-called ‘legacy systems’ with which we are all familiar) to implementing the so-called fourth industrial revolution – ‘a revolution characterized by discontinuous technological development in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data, fifth-generation telecommunications networking (5G), nanotechnology and biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing’ – to achieve everything from a cashless society and AI-driven technologies (particularly for mass surveillance and law enforcement) to driverless cars and ‘telemedicine’.

For a sample of the documentation, see ‘Competing With China on Technology and Innovation’, the US National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence, the ‘Chinese Tech Landscape Overview’, US Attorney General William Barr’s ‘Implementation of National Disruption and Early Engagement Programs to Counter the Threat of Mass Shootings’, the ‘American Artificial Intelligence Initiative: Year One Annual Report’ of the US Office of Science and Technology Policy, and the recent advice by the White House that ‘President Donald J. Trump Announces Great American Economic Revival Industry Groups’. Whitney Webb has written two recent articles – ‘Meet The Companies Poised To Build The Kushner-Backed “Coronavirus Surveillance System”’ and ‘Techno-Tyranny: How The US National Security State Is Using Coronavirus To Fulfill An Orwellian Vision’ – and been interviewed – see ‘Security State using coronavirus to implement Orwellian nightmare’ – that thoughtfully describe what is taking place.

In short, it will leave those of us who are still alive and who haven’t been replaced by robots as little more than digital entities, devoid of rights and freedoms, who are monitored and controlled to serve elite ends. You might still be able to choose what you buy, provided you do it online.

But while you can consider this evidence at your leisure, my own concern in this article is to explain why members of the global elite are so willing to inflict their violence on us, and to exploit us so mercilessly, without even caring. Why does their vision for the world and their effort to create it resemble the works of Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, rather than something that many more of us would consider desirable? Is profit really all that matters? What about people?

In short, the explanation for their behavior is that they are completely insane. But like some other versions of insanity that are also defined as ‘normal’ – essentially because they are so widespread (like over-consumption in industrialized countries) that few think to question whether or not the behavior is actually functional – it is fairly straightforward to explain both the origin and outcomes of their insanity.

At birth, every human child has enormous unique potential. However, to fully realize that potential, the child must be nurtured physically, emotionally, intellectually and in other ways so that their unique potential unfolds. This includes caring for them in their unique physical environment while allowing their natural inclination to learn, an evolutionary gift, to guide the manner and nature of their inquiry.

Unfortunately, however, adult humans do not appreciate and value the innate learning capacities of their children so we ‘teach’ them, in the ways of our choosing (particularly by funneling them all through the one-size-fits-all institution we call ‘school’), what we want them to know instead. Because the child naturally resists this, the child is subjected to an extraordinary range of ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ violence to force them to conform to societal norms.

Then, using what I have labeled ‘utterly invisible violence’, we ensure that the feelings of fear, sadness, anger and pain (among many others) that this causes are suppressed so that we do not have to deal with the emotional and behavioral consequences of the violence we inflict on the child. This leaves the child with an unconscious legacy of fear, self-hatred and powerlessness that will manifest, depending on the context, throughout the child’s life. For a thorough explanation of this, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

One outcome of being terrorized into submissive obedience throughout childhood is that the human ‘individual’ enters adulthood with no sense of their unique identity but fully comfortable with the socially constructed delusional identity they gradually took on during childhood. Having been terrorized into obedient submission to parents, teachers and religious figures, virtually all people readily take on the role of submissive worker/soldier and citizen fulfilling some fairly meaningless role in a society largely devoid of meaning. Understanding no other way and in a last resort to feel some sense of control over their life, they also then terrorize their own children into being submissively obedient.

And people like Bill Gates are not all that different except that the opportunities provided by their wealth and the privilege that goes with it, enable them to inflict their dysfunctional and violent behaviors on a vastly greater number of people in a fruitless endeavor to feel ‘in control’. And they can do so without attracting the sanctions, legal and otherwise, that might constrain the behaviors of the rest of us.

So, as documented in the articles about Bill Gates cited above, his vaccination programs have wreaked havoc on adults and children throughout the global south, killing or incapacitating substantial numbers of people. This is unsurprising given the historical role of vaccination in precipitating a great many disorders and deaths, by introducing into the body contaminants such as aluminium and glyphosate. 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 – see ‘Vaccination’ – or, if you wish to just read straightforward accounts of the history of vaccine damage and the ongoing dangers, see these articles by Gary G. Kohls MD: ‘A Comprehensive List of Vaccine-Associated Toxic Reactions’ and ‘Identifying the Vaccinology-Illiterate among Us’.

But does Bill Gates care about the staggering harm these vaccinations are causing? Does he care that future vaccinations are intended to be used to grotesquely infringe our rights and freedoms with the insertion of biometric data? See ‘COVID-19: Perfect Cover for Mandatory Biometric ID’. What of his love? Compassion? Empathy? Sympathy? Does he have a conscience to call him to account, even if no legal system does? Does he respect people? Does he believe everyone should be given an individual and informed choice about whether or not they are vaccinated?

Tragically, Bill Gates is so psychologically damaged that he is simply devoid of qualities such as these. They were never given the chance to develop by parents who showed him the same lack of love, sympathy, care, respect and consideration. Moreover, because of his fear of being out of control, as he was when endlessly suffering the incredible violence of his parents throughout childhood, he now endlessly seeks control in the highly dysfunctional ways that his unconscious fear projects. That is, by seeking to control us all.

If you want to read more about the psychological dysfunctionality of Bill Gates and other members of the global elite, as well as their agents, and how this always manifests to our detriment, you can do so in articles such as ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’, ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’ and ‘Understanding Self-Hatred in World Affairs’.

Sadly, however, it is not just members of the global elite who are psychologically dysfunctional. There is a substantial portion of the human population who have suffered a similar fate, even if it manifests very differently. However, while this dysfunctionality might manifest in an extraordinarily wide variety of ways, it almost invariably includes fearful submission to those considered to be ‘in authority’.

The Dysfunctional Psychology of Victims

Because each human being is unique, the individual is born with a powerful evolutionary gift: Self-will. This means that the individual has an incredible range of tools, including the capacity to apply sensory perception (sight, sound, touch…) to observe what is happening, the emotional capacity to feel what this means (is it satisfying, enjoyable, frightening, infuriating…), to think for themself about the significance of it, to compare and contrast it with relevant memories, to gauge it against one’s conscience and so on until an integrated sense of how to behave in response is formulated and then acted on.

If a person is doing this then we might describe them as ‘Self-aware’. And they are, truly, an individual.

However, because of the experience of childhood terrorization, briefly touched on above, most children are compelled to surrender the essence of these various capacities, and hence their Self-will, by a very young age. In these circumstances, the child becomes a fairly malleable instrument, easily transformed into a victim who is now devoid of the capacity to look deep within themselves to make sound judgments about what is taking place and to behave powerfully in response.

Instead, they simply obey the will of another: parent, teacher, religious figure, employer, political leader…. and act more out of habit than consideration. Given the endless violence (usually labeled ‘punishment’) that is inflicted to ensure that children are obedient to others, rather than allowed to follow their own self-will, it takes an extraordinary child to survive with even a semblance of the potential with which they were born. As a result, most human behavior lacks consideration, conviction, courage and strategy, and is simply driven compulsively by the predominant fear in each context.

For elaboration of this explanation, see ‘The Disintegrated Mind: The Greatest Threat to Human Survival on Earth’ and ‘The Psychology of Victimhood: Obama, Cameron, Netanyahu, Clinton, Kissinger’.

A primary outcome of this childhood terrorization experience in materialist cultures is that the child learns to suppress their awareness of how they feel by using food and material items to distract themself. By doing this, the child rapidly loses their emerging self-awareness and learns to consume as the substitute for this awareness. Clearly, this has catastrophic consequences for the child, their society and for nature (although it is immensely profitable for elites and their agents whose Self-awareness is non-existent). For a fuller explanation, see ‘Love Denied: The Psychology of Materialism, Violence and War’.

In essence, a victim is utterly terrified and powerless. These feelings are unconscious to the victim, which is why they are incapable of intelligently seeking out and personally assessing evidence (such as that in relation to COVID-19 and how it is being used) and they simply submit without protest once told to obey.

An equally important outcome for the victim, is that they have little, if any, capacity to see beyond themselves or their immediate concerns (which might include an activist preoccupation). They are incapable of perceiving and considering the wider ramifications of what is taking place – the ‘big picture’ – such as for those millions of starving people referred to by WFP Executive Director David Beasley above. Any sense of a ‘wider self’, of human solidarity beyond the most superficial kind, is incomprehensible to them.

Making sure our Resistance to this Coup has Strategic Impact

So this is why a third group in relation to this elite coup is so important: Those individuals who are already resisting the coup or those who will soon choose to do so. Clearly, these people have sufficient sense of Self, the intelligence and emotional capacity (including courage) to consider the evidence in relation to COVID-19 and what lies beneath it, and to draw conclusions at variance with those presented by the elite through its international organizations (such as the World Health Organization), governments and corporate media.

And it is to these people that this final section is particularly addressed.

I have previously explained a nonviolent strategy to resist this elite coup against humanity. See ‘The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully’.

This included identifying its political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’ – and setting out a basic list of 26 strategic goals for achieving this purpose. You can read the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic Aims’.

Remaining pages on the 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’ and how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

While many of the tactics identified are designed to make it very easy for individuals to be involved, an increasing number of people are already participating in nonviolent actions based on public gatherings to ‘End the Lockdown’ using social media messaging with that or similar labels. See, for example, ‘Protesting the Lockdowns is Getting Going – #endthelockdown’.

Therefore, as more people become aware of the coup and the energy to resist it continues to gather pace, it will be worthwhile to choose a locally significant date on which as many people who are willing to do so act to ‘End the Lockdown’ in your country. Using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist the coup that is taking place.

Because the actions taken can be dispersed with large numbers of people responding in a vast number of locations, it will be impossible for police and military forces to inflict violent repression against everyone, particularly if local organizers have implemented the points in ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

Equally importantly to any of the points above, particularly given the pressing threat of human extinction – see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ – but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. This project also explains how to take full advantage of non-monetary forms of community where goods and services are exchanged directly, without money as a medium of exchange. Money only has value in certain types of economy and these types of economy must be superseded if humans are to survive.

Moreover, given the enormous pressure on children at the moment, as their lives are upended, it would be useful to spend time listening to them. Of course, if you know an adult who is having trouble coping, it will help them enormously as well if you listen while giving them the opportunity to talk about, and focus on feeling, their own emotional reactions to what is taking place. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’. If you do not have anyone who can listen to you, try ‘Putting Feelings First’.

In addition, because the foundation of this entire elite-controlled world, and the coup it is now implementing, is the submissively obedient individual, the world can only be rebuilt as we might like it if we stop terrorizing children into being submissive. So I would start by parenting and educating children so that they become powerful. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

Finally, as touched on above, apart from the ongoing elite coup the Earth is under siege from our assaults on a vast range of fronts. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’. So if we are serious about tackling this crisis too, we must be willing to 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 explanation above)
  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 buy rainforest timber
  8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Given that any serious investigation of the circumstances underlying the so-called COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ reveals that the entire global episode has been contrived to further an unsavory elite end, at staggering cost to humans everywhere, it is imperative that those who are capable of perceiving this reality also take action to bring this ongoing coup to an early end.

The longer it takes to muster a full response to defeat this coup, the more damage – to our rights, freedoms, economic security, opportunities, democratic governance, the global economy and the environment – will have been inflicted, making the struggle to restore them vastly more difficult.

More importantly, if human solidarity means anything to you, the lives of millions of people (in the global south) are at stake and the economic security (through lost employment) of millions more.

And these lives, if lost or marginalized, while suiting some elite depopulation agenda, will be a stark but ugly reminder that COVID-19 was never about a virus but about our fear.

 

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.

 

Who Profits from the Pandemic?

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West Virginia National Guard members reporting to a Charleston nursing home to assist with Covid-19 testing. April 6, 2020. (U.S. Army National Guard, Edwin L. Wriston)

By Pepe Escobar

Source: Consortium News

You don’t need to read Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand that neoliberalism – in deep crisis since at least 2008 – is a control/governing technique in which surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded.

But now, with the world-system collapsing at breathtaking speed, neoliberalism is at a loss to deal with the next stage of dystopia, ever present in our hyper-connected angst: global mass unemployment.

Henry Kissinger, anointed oracle/gatekeeper of the ruling class, is predictably scared. He claims that, “sustaining the public trust is crucial to social solidarity.” He’s convinced the Hegemon should “safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.” Otherwise, “failure could set the world on fire.”

That’s so quaint. Public trust is dead across the spectrum. The liberal world “order” is now social Darwinist chaos. Just wait for the fire to rage.

The numbers are staggering. The Japan-based Asian Development Bank (ADB), in its annual economic report, may not have been exactly original. But it did note that the impact of the “worst pandemic in a century” will be as high as $4.1 trillion, or 4.8 percent of global GDP.

This an underestimation, as “supply disruptions, interrupted remittances, possible social and financial crises, and long-term effects on health care and education are excluded from the analysis.”

We cannot even start to imagine the cataclysmic social consequences of the crash. Entire sub-sectors of the global economy may not be recomposed at all.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) forecasts global unemployment at a conservative, additonal 24.7 million people – especially in aviation, tourism and hospitality.

The global aviation industry is a humongous $2.7 trillion business. That’s 3.6 percent of global GDP. It employs 2.7 million people. When you add air transport and tourism —everything from hotels and restaurants to theme parks and museums — it accounts for a minimum of 65.5 million jobs around the world.

According to the ILO, income losses for workers may range from $860 billion to an astonishing $3.4 trillion. “Working poverty” will be the new normal – especially across the Global South.

“Working poor,” in ILO terminology, means employed people living in households with a per capita income below the poverty line of $2 a day. As many as an additional 35 million people worldwide will become working poor in 2020.

Switching to feasible perspectives for global trade, it’s enlightening to examine that this report about how the economy may rebound is centered on the notorious hyperactive merchants and traders of Yiwu in eastern China – the world’s busiest small-commodity, business hub.

Their experience spells out a long and difficult recovery. As the rest of the world is in a coma, Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong stresses that China faces a 30 percent decline in external demand at least until next Fall.

Neoliberalism in Reverse?

In the next stage, the strategic competition between the U.S. and China will be no-holds-barred, as emerging narratives of China’s new, multifaceted global role – on trade, technology, cyberspace, climate change – will set in, even more far-reaching than the New Silk Roads. That will also be the case in global public health policies. Get ready for an accelerated Hybrid War between the “Chinese virus” narrative and the Health Silk Road.

The latest report by the China Institute of International Studies would be quite helpful for the West — hubris permitting — to understand how Beijing adopted key measures putting the health and safety of the general population first.

Now, as the Chinese economy slowly picks up, hordes of fund managers from across Asia are tracking everything from trips on the metro to noodle consumption to preview what kind of economy may emerge post-lockdown.

In contrast, across the West, the prevailing doom and gloom elicited a priceless editorial from The Financial Times. Like James Brown in the 1980s Blues Brothers pop epic, the City of London seems to have seen the light, or at least giving the impression it really means it. Neoliberalism in reverse. New social contract. “Secure” labor markets. Redistribution.

Cynics won’t be fooled. The cryogenic state of the global economy spells out a vicious Great Depression 2.0 and an unemployment tsunami. The plebs eventually reaching for the pitchforks and the AR-15s en masse is now a distinct possibility. Might as well start throwing a few breadcrumbs to the beggars’ banquet.

That may apply to European latitudes. But the American story is in a class by itself.

For decades, we were led to believe that the world-system put in place after WWII provided the U.S. with unrivalled structural power. Now, all that’s left is structural fragility, grotesque inequalities, unpayable Himalayas of debt, and a rolling crisis.

No one is fooled anymore by the Fed’s magic quantitative easing powers, or the acronym salad – TALF, ESF, SPV – built into the Fed/U.S. Treasury exclusive obsession with big banks, corporations and the Goddess of the Market, to the detriment of the average American.

It was only a few months ago that a serious discussion evolved around the $2.5 quadrillion derivatives market imploding and collapsing the global economy, based on the price of oil skyrocketing, in case the Strait of Hormuz – for whatever reason – was shut down.

Now it’s about Great Depression 2.0: the whole system crashing as a result of the shutdown of the global economy. The questions are absolutely legitimate: is the political and social cataclysm of the global economic crisis arguably a larger catastrophe than Covid-19 itself?  And will it provide an opportunity to end neoliberalism and usher in a more equitable system, or something even worse?

 ‘Transparent’ BlackRock

Wall Street, of course, lives in an alternative universe. In a nutshell, Wall Street turned the Fed into a hedge fund. The Fed is going to own at least two thirds of all U.S. Treasury bills in the market before the end of 2020.

The U.S. Treasury will be buying every security and loan in sight while the Fed will be the banker – financing the whole scheme.

So essentially this is a Fed/Treasury merger. A behemoth dispensing loads of helicopter money.

And the winner is BlackRock—the biggest money manager on the planet, with tentacles everywhere, managing the assets of over 170 pension funds, banks, foundations, insurance companies, in fact a great deal of the money in private equity and hedge funds. BlackRock — promising to be fully  “transparent” — will buy these securities and manage those dodgy SPVs on behalf of the Treasury.

BlackRock, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink, may not be as big as Vanguard, but it’s the top investor in Goldman Sachs, along with Vanguard and State Street, and with $6.5 trillion in assets, bigger than Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank combined.

Now, BlackRock is the new operating system (OS) of the Fed and the Treasury. The world’s biggest shadow bank – and no, it’s not Chinese.

Compared to this high-stakes game, mini-scandals such as the one around Georgia Senator Kelly Loffler are peanuts. Loffler allegedly profited from inside information on Covid-19 by the CDC to make a stock market killing. Loffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher – who happens to be the chairman of the NYSE, installed by Goldman Sachs.

While corporate media followed this story like headless chickens, post-Covid-19 plans, in Pentagon parlance, “move forward” by stealth.

The price? A meager $1,200 check per person for a month. Anyone knows that, based on median salary income, a typical American family would need $12,000 to survive for two months. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in an act of supreme effrontry, allows them a mere 10 percent of that. So American taxpayers will be left with a tsunami of debt while selected Wall Street players grab the whole loot, part of an unparalleled transfer of wealth upwards, complete with bankruptcies en masse of small and medium businesses.

Fink’s letter to his shareholders almost gives the game away: “I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

And right on cue, he forecasted that, “in the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant reallocation of capital.”

He was referring, then, to climate change. Now that refers to Covid-19.

Implant Our Nanochip, Or Else?

The game ahead for the elites, taking advantage of the crisis, might well contain these four elements: a social credit system, mandatory vaccination, a digital currency and a Universal Basic Income (UBI). This is what used to be called, according to the decades-old, time-tested CIA playbook, a “conspiracy theory.” Well, it might actually happen.

A social credit system is something that China set up already in 2014. Before the end of 2020, every Chinese citizen will be assigned his/her own credit score – a de facto “dynamic profile”, elaborated with extensive use of AI and the internet of things (IoT), including ubiquitous facial recognition technology. This implies, of course, 24/7 surveillance, complete with Blade Runner-style roving robotic birds.

The U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Russia and India may not be far behind. Germany, for instance, is tweaking its universal credit rating system, SCHUFA. France has an ID app very similar to the Chinese model, verified by facial recognition.

Mandatory vaccination is Bill Gates’s dream, working in conjunction with the WHO, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Big Pharma. He wants “billions of doses” to be enforced over the Global South. And it could be a cover to everyone getting a digital implant.

Here it is, in his own words. At 34:15: “Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person…Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.”

Then comes the last sentence which was erased from the official TED video. This was noted by Rosemary Frei, who has a master on molecular biology and is an independent investigative journalist in Canada. Gates says: “So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”

This “digital immunity proof” is crucial to keep in mind, something that could be misused by the state for nefarious purposes.

The three top candidates to produce a coronavirus vaccine are American biotech firm Moderna, as well as Germans CureVac and BioNTech.

Digital cash might then become an offspring of blockchain. Not only the U.S., but China and Russia are also interested in a national crypto-currency. A global currency – of course controlled by central bankers – may soon be adopted in the form of a basket of currencies, and would circulate virtually. Endless permutations of the toxic cocktail of IoT, blockchain technology and the social credit system could loom ahead.

Already Spain has announced that it is introducing UBI, and wants it to be permanent. It’s a form insurance for the elite against social uprisings, especially if millions of jobs never come back.

So the key working hypothesis is that Covid-19 could be used as cover for the usual suspects to bring in a new digital financial system and a mandatory vaccine with a “digital identity” nanochip with dissent not tolerated: what Slavoj Zizek calls the “erotic dream” of every totalitarian government.

Yet underneath it all, amid so much anxiety, a pent-up rage seems to be gathering strength, to eventually explode in unforeseeable ways. As much as the system may be changing at breakneck speed, there’s no guarantee even the 0.1 percent will be safe.

The Elite’s COVID-19 Coup Against a Terrified Humanity: Resisting Powerfully

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By Robert J. Burrowes

I have previously explained how the COVID-19 infection is being used to frighten us into submitting powerlessly to the global elite’s latest move to take much greater control of our lives and how those who can perceive this, and wish to resist it, can do so effectively. See ‘Observing Elites Manipulate Our Fear: COVID-19, Propaganda and Knowledge’ and ‘Defending Humanity Against the Elite Coup’.

In this article I want to document a sample of the rapidly increasing evidence of how this coup is taking shape and to reiterate a strategy for defeating it.

The coup was designed to take immediate measures to ensure that fundamental rights and freedoms, only ‘won’ (in name at least) after many centuries of struggle, were stripped away from us and to do it in such a way that people would fearfully accept it. This is why the idea of a virus ‘pandemic’ was quite clever. Because the fear of contracting the virus (and its possibly deadly consequences) could be grotesquely magnified by inflating the figures, constant harping on it by the World Health Organization, the medical industry (in league with the pharmaceutical industry) and governments, and then magnified by the corporate media – with one outlet laughably suggesting COVID-19 could be worse than the flu outbreak in 1918 (falsely attributed to Spain): see ‘COVID-19 has the potential to become as severe as the Spanish flu’ – it made virtually all people submissive to any measure taken, or order given, ostensibly to prevent the spread of the virus.

Fear manipulated by propaganda defeats knowledge and evidence every time, as history has endlessly demonstrated. Just ask Joseph Goebbels how they did it in Nazi Germany. Play on the fear, play on the fear….

But if you are not too scared to seek out the evidence, you get an utterly different picture of what is taking place.

So, for example, US physician Dr. Annie Bukacek observes that ‘The real number of COVID-19 deaths are not what most people are told and what they then think. How many people actually died from COVID-19 is anyone’s guess. … Based on inaccurate, incomplete data, people are being terrorized by fear-mongers into relinquishing freedoms.’ See ‘Montana physician Dr. Annie Bukacek discusses how COVID 19 death certificates are being manipulated’.

If you would like to read a wider sample of the literature and videos discussing how the infection and death rates from COVID-19 have been deliberately misinterpreted, inflated and presented in a way that induces fear, and hence willing submission to elite control, see the daily updates on ‘A Swiss Doctor on Covid-19’ and the articles/videos ‘Corona: creating the illusion of a pandemic through diagnostic tests’, ‘12 Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic’, ‘Can We Trust the WHO?’, ‘How deadly is the coronavirus? It’s still far from clear’, ‘Perspectives on the Pandemic II: A Conversation with Dr. Knut Wittkowski’, ‘Never Has So Little Done So Much Harm to So Many: The Latest Coronavirus Attack Is A Cover for Restricting Our Health Freedoms’, ‘Covid19 Death Figures “A Substantial Over-Estimate”’ and ‘Dr Scott Jensen Reveals “Ridiculous” Covid19 Guidance’.

As a result of this pandemic of fear, the human rights to privacy (Article 12), freedom of movement (Article 13.1) and freedom of assembly (Article 20.1), for example, which are enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed by the United Nations General Assembly in Paris on 10 December 1948 (but not necessarily legislated into law by individual countries and routinely violated by governments in any case) have now been publicly and completely eviscerated in one fell swoop with bans on gatherings, legal requirements for ‘social distancing’ and even greater surveillance of our private activities with barely a murmur of protest. For a comprehensive global summary, which monitors individual government responses to the pandemic that affect civic freedoms and human rights focusing on emergency laws, see the ‘COVID-19 Civic Freedom Tracker’.

Denied these fundamental rights, others – including those preventing arbitrary arrest or detention (Article 9), entitlement to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal in response to any criminal charge (Article 10), to make a living in the manner of our choosing (Article 23), to adequate healthcare irrespective of personal circumstances (Article 25.1) and to have some say in how we are governed (Article 21) – have, if they previously existed in practice, largely disappeared as many governments around the world have used a variety of illegal and sometimes unconstitutional measures – ranging from ‘lockdowns’ and curfews to martial law and suspensions of parliaments in favour of dictatorships – to usurp more complete control of national societies.

For just a brief taste of what is taking place in some countries, see ‘Denmark rushes through emergency coronavirus law’, ‘DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic’, ‘For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power’, ‘Suspending the Constitution: Police State Uses Crises to Expand Its Lockdown Powers’, ‘Hungary’s Leader Grabbed Powers to Fight the Virus. Some Fear Other Motives’, ‘Americans Beware: Trump Could Emulate Netanyahu’s Coronavirus Coup’ and ‘The Coronavirus State: New Zealand and Authoritarian Rumblings’.

In addition, 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’.

In this way, the elite has rapidly and vastly expanded the number of people who live a precarious economic existence, due to the exploitative functioning of the global economy – see ‘Who Profits From the Pandemic?’ – while also giving vast sums of money to wealthy corporations via government bailouts. See ‘Trump Signs Corporate Bailout Bill: A Measure That Will Live in Infamy’.

Moreover, adverse outcomes from the use of COVID-19 to wreak this economic destruction will multiply rapidly but the underlying corporate dysfunctionality will now escape the blame from most observers just as COVID-19 will help to obscure the elite’s true purpose in precipitating this crisis. See, for example, ‘Coronavirus pandemic will inevitably cause food crisis’, ‘10 Signs the U.S. Is Heading for a Depression’, ‘After the Lockdown: A Global Coronavirus Vaccination Program…’, ‘COVID-19. The Unspoken Truth. The Most Serious Global Crisis in Modern History’, ‘The worst economic collapse ever?’ and ‘Coronavirus – The Aftermath. A Coming Mega-Depression…’.

But apart from these more obvious encroachments on our rights, freedoms and economic well-being, there is a vast range of encroachments happening either outside or on the periphery of public view, given the phenomenal corporate media attention focused on COVID-19 to distract us.

Talking about US government surveillance in 2014, former Technical Director of the NSA, William ‘Bill’ Binney, explained that the NSA sought ‘total population control’. See ‘Whistleblower: NSA Goal Is “Total Population Control”’.

Six years later it is clear that the global elite is now making another push in its ongoing and longstanding effort to achieve total control. Will this be the final push?

As you consider this question, here is another small sample of those encroachments and devastating impacts that are happening while our attention is elsewhere:

  1. The public acceptance of surveillance technology to spy on us in the interests of our ‘health’ is facilitating elite efforts to rapidly expand its monitoring capacities in this regard. See, for example, ‘To Track Coronavirus, Israel Moves to Tap Secret Trove of Cellphone Data’ and ‘For Autocrats, and Others, Coronavirus Is a Chance to Grab Even More Power’.
  2. The deluge of propaganda is convincing us that compulsory vaccination will be necessary to ensure our ‘health and well-being’. However, apart from the conclusively and extensively documented harm from vaccinations – for one brief article just touching on this, see ‘Vaccines and the Liberal Mind’ – there is extensive evidence that any such vaccination program will be the trojan horse for implementing an electronic identification program that uses generalized vaccination as a platform for launching a scheme to give everyone ‘a portable and persistent biometrically-linked digital identity’. See ‘The Coronavirus COVID-19 Pandemic: The Real Danger is “Agenda ID2020”’, ‘After the Lockdown: A Global Coronavirus Vaccination Program…’, ‘Coronavirus: Biometric IDs could be “gamechanger” for tests, vaccines’ and ‘COVID-19: Perfect Cover for Mandatory Biometric ID’.

If you think this is fairyland stuff, check out the website of the elite agents advocating it: ‘The need for good digital ID is universal: The ability to prove who you are is a fundamental and universal human right. Because we live in a digital era, we need a trusted and reliable way to do that both in the physical world and online.’ See ‘The Need for Good Digital ID is Universal’.

Without thinking too hard, I can list a few ‘fundamental and universal human rights’ that I would nominate before I got too excited about my digital identity. I wonder if these people are concerned about whether I have enough to eat, whether I am clothed and housed…. Of course, I know they have no interest in my privacy given that digital ID and the surveillance that goes with it will make that non-existent.

  1. The deployment of the highly dangerous 5G which, under the guise of improving internet speed and capacity, will vastly expand everyone’s exposure to electromagnetic radiation with its long list of seriously adverse health impacts. For a taste of the extensive documentation on this point, see the ‘International Appeal to Stop 5G on Earth and in Space’.
  2. A dramatic increase in the violence inflicted within the family home, especially by men and women against children – see ‘Why Violence?’ – and by the more usually acknowledged men against women, during the lockdown. See ‘UN chief calls for domestic violence “ceasefire” amid “horrifying global surge”’.
  3. Intensified efforts to overthrow governments in Iran and Venezuela. See ‘COVID-19: Cover for Military Attack on Iran and Iraq? Trump ignores Iraqi demand US occupation forces leave the country’, ‘Not letting Covid-19 crisis go to waste? US ramps up war on drugs… focusing on Venezuela’s Maduro’, ‘Trump sends gun boats to Venezuela while the world partners to fight a deadly pandemic’ and ‘NATO in Arms to “Fight Coronavirus”’.

The background framework to what is happening regarding Venezuela has been exposed by its President Nicolás Maduro. See ‘Letter from President Nicolás Maduro to the People of the United States’.

  1. No end to the many ongoing wars involving the United States – see, for example, ‘U.S. Confirms Deployment Of Patriot Missiles In Iraq. Iran Prepares For Conflict In Straight Of Hormuz’ and ‘US Empire Exploits COVID-19 For More War’ – although a pause in some wars in which the US is not a party – for an overview, see ‘UN Ceasefire Defines War As a Non-Essential Activity’ – as a result of an appeal by the UN Secretary-General for warring nations to desist until the effort to contain COVID-19 is won. See ‘The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war’.

Unfortunately, this appeal, unlike the Secretary-General’s appeal for a ceasefire on domestic violence which attracted no significant public endorsement, quickly drew in many others equally devoid of any analysis of what is actually taking place and thus happy to help distract people from the core issue. See, for example, ‘COVID-19: Sign the Call for Global Ceasefire!’, ‘Global Ceasefire: Running List of Countries Committed’ and ‘Global Ceasefire Now!’

Obviously, I am heartily in favour of ending war. But this is only going to happen when we campaign strategically to do so and provided we have sufficient political freedom to do it. See ‘Strategic Aims’ (for ending war).

As an aside and displaying its usual projected fear of threats, when some US military personnel became infected with COVID-19 – see ‘Request for Assistance in Response to COVID-19 Pandemic’ – the Pentagon issued a suppression order on further reporting of COVID-19 in the US military. See ‘Pentagon orders all installations to stop reporting COVID-19 infections and deaths’.

  1. Ongoing economic sanctions by the United States directed against a variety of countries, notably including Iran and Venezuela, are complicating efforts to address COVID-19 effectively. In contrast, countries such as Cuba, China and Russia are leading the international effort to support other countries dealing with a higher level of infection. See ‘US Continues Sanctions Against Venezuela And Cuba During COVID-19 Pandemic – Analysis’ and ‘Expert: US sanctions on Iran, Venezuela during pandemic could be genocidal’.
  2. A variety of actions, including legal manoeuvres and false flag attacks, undertaken to inflict greater repression in some contexts, particularly against indigenous peoples and those engaged in national liberation struggles. See ‘Mashpee Wampanoag Tribe Threatened with Land Disestablishment, Tribal Leaders Step in to Address Ongoing Land Issues and Threats to Sovereignty’, ‘Media advisory notice on alleged shooting near Freeport mine in Timika’ and ‘During the Coronavirus crisis, Israel confiscates tents designated for clinic in the Northern West Bank’.
  3. Dramatic increases in absolute impoverishment among marginalized individuals and communities throughout the Global South who barely survive day-to-day under their usual, difficult economic circumstances. As one Asian NGO network, engaged in attempting to secure emergency relief to assist those most adversely impacted, has just reported: ‘We are receiving alarming reports that ADB and AIIB project-affected communities across Asia, especially South Asia and South East Asia are in an absolute state of crisis. Due to the enforced lockdown, they have no work or access to sanitizers and food supplies. Leaving them completely exposed and vulnerable to the COVID-19 pandemic. The state responses are slow and in some cases non-existent.’ See ‘COVID-19 Community Emergency Fund’.

And Arundhati Roy wrote an evocative account of how the Indian government’s lockdown exposed the ‘brutal, structural, social and economic inequality’ in that country and the government’s ‘callous indifference to suffering’ as the lockdown caused employers and landlords in cities and towns to drive out millions of impoverished, homeless and hungry workers to walk the hundreds of kilometres to their villages. Many have died along the way, but not of COVID-19. See ‘Social Devastation and Despair. How Coronavirus Threatens India’.

  1. No pause in the economic exploitation of countries in the Global South with, for example, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) quick to offer ‘emergency finance’ to some 80 of these countries that have requested it. See ‘IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva’s Statement Following a G20 Ministerial Call on the Coronavirus Emergency’.

What Ms. Georgieva didn’t mention is that these loans will no doubt be done on the usual highly conditional and exploitative basis for which the IMF has built its reputation for destroying the lives of ordinary local people by opening the door for corrupt or naive governments to accept corporate exploitation of their people and natural resources while building unsustainable levels of national debt trying to pay back the loans and interest to the IMF. For more detail on how this exploitation works, see the many Global Justice Now reports on the IMF and the book The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.

In contrast, World Bank President David Malpass was not so coy, clearly declaring that COVID-19 would be used to further exploit poorer countries by making any funding conditional on a willingness to make such exploitation easier in future: ‘Countries will need to implement structural reforms to help shorten the time to recovery and create confidence that the recovery can be strong. For those countries that have excessive regulations, subsidies, licensing regimes, trade protection or litigiousness as obstacles, we will work with them to foster markets, choice and faster growth prospects during the recovery.’ See ‘Remarks by World Bank Group President David Malpass on G20 Finance Ministers Conference Call on COVID-19’.

To reiterate: The World Bank will help existing heavily exploited countries with some funding for short-term health measures directed at containing COVID-19 provided the country removes laws that would make it difficult to exploit it indefinitely thereafter.

  1. No pause in environmentally destructive activities, ranging from the ongoing use of health-destroying poisons, such as glyphosate, used to contaminate our food – see ‘Locked Down and Locking in the New Global Order’ – which cause vastly more deaths than COVID-19 will cause, to the ongoing destruction of pristine rainforests to create, among other possibilities, more palm oil plantations. See ‘New player starts clearing rainforest in world’s biggest oil palm project’.

And while there has been a short-term reduced negative impact on the climate as a result of the slowdown in industrial activity and the use of fossil fuel-powered vehicles, the ongoing COVID-19 coup has been used to destroy whatever momentum has been achieved by the climate and environment movements in recent years.

  1. While COVID-19 is causing problems for the 100,000 skilled technicians responsible for controlling, maintaining and fuel loading/unloading of the 96 remaining nuclear power plants in the USA, given the confined space in which the technicians work which make ‘social distancing’ virtually impossible, ‘The industry is now using the Coronavirus Pandemic to rush through a wide range of deregulation demands. Among them is a move to allow radioactive waste to be dumped into municipal landfills.’ See ‘Terrified Atomic Workers Warn That the COVID-19 Pandemic May Threaten Nuclear Reactor Disaster’.
  2. Long intent on dominating Space both militarily and industrially – see the US Space Command’s ‘Vision for 2020’ – in violation of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which declared ‘The exploration and use of outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries… and shall be the province of all mankind’ – see ‘Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies’ – US president Trump has just signed an executive order to allow corporations and ‘citizens’ (that is, billionaires) to begin mining the moon. The elite also wants to use nuclear reactors to fuel spacecraft so they can mine Mars in the future. See ‘Trump Signs Executive Order to Mine the Moon’.

If you are a US citizen and wondering how the ‘largest industrial project in the history of the planet’ will be financed, look in your own purse or wallet and wonder how much more will be taken from you so that, as usual, you pay the upfront costs associated with the vast profits they plan to make. Of course, you will also pay with budget cuts to health, education and social security funding.

The 13-point list above is actually very short – and confined to readily observable ‘moves’ – but, hopefully, it gives you some idea of what is taking place behind the elite’s barrage of COVID-19 fear-mongering. Needless to say, it is the ‘moves’ that we do not know about that are, no doubt, even more troubling.

So what can we do in response to this fear-mongering and the coup it is being used to disguise?

Resisting the Elite Coup Powerfully

I have previously outlined this nonviolent strategy, identifying its political purpose – obviously ‘To defend humanity against a political/military coup conducted by the global elite’ – and I have set out a basic list of 26 strategic goals, of which eleven are as follows:

(1) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by wearing a global symbol of human solidarity, such as an image of several people of different genders/races/religions/abilities/classes holding hands.

(2) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting all corporate media outlets (television, radio, newspapers, Facebook, Twitter…) and by seeking news from progressive news outlets committed to telling the truth.

(3) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by withdrawing all funds from the corporate banks that are supporting the coup and to deposit their money in local community banks or credit unions.

(4) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting the medical and pharmaceutical industries – including by conscientiously refusing to submit to vaccination – and by seeking health advice and treatment from natural therapists. (If you are unfamiliar with the different philosophies underpinning these approaches, and hence why many natural therapies are so much more effective, there is a straightforward explanation here: ‘Pasteur vs. Bechamp: An Alternative View of Infectious Disease’.)

(5) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by boycotting corporate supermarkets and by supporting small and family businesses, and local markets.

(6) To cause people and groups all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in other locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For this item and many subsequent, see the list of possible nonviolent actions in the document ‘198 Tactics of Nonviolent Action’.

(7) To cause the workers [in trade unions or labor organizations T1, T2, T…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include withdrawing labor from an elite-controlled bank, media, pharmaceutical or other corporation operating in your country.

(8) To cause the small farmers and farmworkers [in organizations F1, F2, F…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include distributing farm produce through (existing or created) grassroots networks to small and family businesses as well as local markets rather than through corporate supply chains.

(9) To cause the indigenous peoples [in organizations IP1,IP2, IP…] all around the world to join the resistance strategy by participating in locally relevant nonviolent action(s)/campaign(s) and/or constructive program activities. For example, this might include utilizing indigenous knowledge to improve local self-reliance in food production and in other ways.

(10) To cause the soldiers and military police [in army units AU1, AU2, AU… and MP1, MP2, MP…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

(11) To cause the police [in police units P1, P2, P…], wherever stationed around the world, to refuse to obey orders from the global elite and its agents to arrest, assault, torture and shoot nonviolent activists and the other citizens of [your country].

Rather than detail all 26 strategic goals here, you can read the ‘Strategic goals for defeating a political/military coup conducted by the global elite against humanity’ by scrolling down the page at ‘Strategic Aims’.

Remaining pages on the website fully explain the twelve components of the strategy, as illustrated by the Nonviolent Strategy Wheel. These include the need to provide leadership and mutual aid at local levels, which are already happening in many places, as part of the overall effort.

The website also has articles and videos explaining all of the vital points of strategy and tactics, including articles to help you understand ‘Nonviolent Action: Why and How it Works’, the difference between ‘The Political Objective and Strategic Goal of Nonviolent Actions’ and how to prepare, frame and conduct any nonviolent action to minimize the risk of violent repression. See ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

It is worth emphasizing that, in some contexts, there is a place for large public nonviolent actions for those who are inclined to plan and conduct them. And the article just referenced will assist you to conduct them with minimal risk of violent repression. However, because the bans on public gatherings are being implemented widely, I have concentrated on providing tactical options in the examples above that do not depend on gathering in one place.

Nevertheless, as more people become aware of the coup and the energy to resist it gathers pace, it will be worthwhile to choose a locally significant date on which as many people who are willing to do so act to ‘End the Lockdown’ in that country. Using a locally relevant focus, or perhaps several, for which many people would traditionally be together – a cultural or sporting event, a community activity such as working to establish a community garden to increase local self-reliance, a birthday celebration and/or a return to work – we can mobilize people to collectively resist the coup that is taking place. Because the actions taken will be dispersed with large numbers of people responding in a vast number of locations, it will be impossible for police and military forces to inflict violent repression against everyone, particularly if local organizers have implemented the points in ‘Nonviolent Action: Minimizing the Risk of Violent Repression’.

Equally importantly to any of the points above, particularly given the pressing threat of human extinction – see ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’ – but also because becoming more self-reliant is vital to our ongoing capacity to resist elite encroachments on our rights, freedom and economic security, consider joining those participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’. This project also explains how to take full advantage of non-monetary forms of community where goods and services are exchanged directly, without money as a medium of exchange. Money only has value in certain types of economy and these types of economy must be superseded if humans are to survive.

And given the enormous pressure on children at the moment, as their lives are upended, it would be useful to spend time listening to them. Of course, if you know an adult who is having trouble coping, it will help them enormously as well if you listen while giving them the opportunity to talk about, and focus on feeling, their own emotional reactions to what is taking place. See ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep Listening’. If you do not have anyone who can listen to you, try ‘Putting Feelings First’.

Moreover, because the foundation of this entire elite-controlled world, and the coup it is now implementing, is the submissively obedient individual, the world can only be rebuilt as we might like it if we stop terrorizing children into being submissive. So I would start by parenting and educating children so that they become powerful. See ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Do We Want School or Education?’

In addition, if you would like to better understand the origin, identity and behaviour of the global elite and why it is insane, see the section headed ‘How the World Works’ in ‘Why Activists Fail’ and the articles ‘Exposing the Giants: The Global Power Elite’ and ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ and the many references cited in these documents. For a deeper understanding of why elite and other human violence is so pervasive, see ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

Finally, as touched on above, apart from the ongoing elite coup the Earth is under siege from our assaults on a vast range of fronts. See ‘Human Extinction Now Imminent and Inevitable? A Report on the State of Planet Earth’. So if we are serious about tackling this crisis too, we must be willing to 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 explanation above)
  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 buy rainforest timber
  8. I will not buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles, containers, cups and straws
  9. 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
  10. 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
  11. I will not get news from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television, radio, Google, Facebook, Twitter…)
  12. I will make the effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing, that makes me more self-reliant
  13. I will gently encourage my family and friends to consider signing this pledge.

Conclusion

Given that the statistics clearly show that the COVID-19 ‘pandemic’ is already fading in most places where it previously had serious impact, it is possible that the global elite will not complete its execution of this coup against humanity in the near future. It will be content with the demonstration of its phenomenal power to manipulate populations into passively submitting to its bidding and defer its final putsch for a short time.

If that is the case, the damage wrought by this socalled pandemic – on our rights, freedoms, economic security, opportunities, democratic governance, the global economy and the environment – will be irreparable and it would take many years to even restore a partial version of what we thought we had while knowing that they can be taken away, again, at any time just as they were on this occasion.

But, quite frankly, if I was a member of the global elite and had witnessed the remarkably submissive manner in which even activists were deceived by the COVID-19 coup, I would advocate for completing the coup now and lock us down, force-vaccinate us with our own unique digital ID and surveillance chip, and promptly implement all of the measures necessary to take final control of the prison planet previously known as Earth.

However, because I am not a member of the global elite, I will continue to draw attention to what is taking place and encourage people to resist in the strategic ways I have outlined above. And then do what I can to ensure that as many people as possible, who are powerful enough to do so, respond before it is too late.

I would rather act sooner, while we still have some room to move, rather than later, when we might have much less.

 

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.

Risings and Fallings

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By James Howard Kunstler

Source: Kunstler.com

In the corkscrewing anguish of the social sequester, with careers, savings, futures, and dreams whirling down the drain, voices rise above the din of conflicting statistics to ask: what is going on here? To some, it looks like a deliberate attempt to demolish what’s left of the economy for political advantage. Clouds of suspicion gather over the two medical superstars of the Daily Briefing show, Doctors Fauci and Birx, as they somewhat sheepishly revise their numbers for contagion and death downward and attempt to “balance” the formula of modeled projections versus mitigation efforts. Was the stay-at-home panic necessary, after all? Will it save the day or kill off modern life as we knew it?

Well, everyplace else in the world was shutting down, weren’t they? Did they all go off their rockers, too? At least a hundred doctors died in Italy heroically tending the stricken, so they say. South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore opted for flat-out medical Gestapo action. Britain, Spain, France, and Germany about the same, but minus testing at the grand scale and tracing of contacts. Honestly, how is it possible the whole planet punked itself?

I certainly don’t know the answer to all this, though readers are twanging on me to declare the whole Covid-19 story “a hoax,” which I’m not ready to do. I do know this: America has become utterly intolerant of uncertainty. And in the absence of certainty, that age-old human cognitive skill called pattern recognition, which has made us such a successful species, kicks into high gear scanning the field-of-view for answers. Any string-of-dots that affords even the slimmest plausibility goes on the table for review, including a lot of stories tagged as “conspiracy theories.”

I know this, too: the financial side of the gasping global economy was running off the rails well before Covid-19 flew out of its bat-cave into somebody’s soup bowl… or out of China’s Wuhan virus lab, if that’s how you like it… or before it seeped out of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s ark of world-saving secrets. In the USA and Europe, finance had come to mostly eclipse every other human endeavor of wealth production ­– with the catch that finance actually didn’t produce any real wealth, it only winkled and swindled wealth (or the mere ghosts of wealth) with its asset-stripping magic, from the places where wealth once did truly dwell. Or else it ginned up abstruse rackets that attempted to replace the utility of money with sheer math. Or, when all else failed, it just resorted to plain old accounting fraud… until, finally, there was so much there not actually there, that the whole holographic fantasy flickered out.

The pre-Easter bear market rally on Wall Street has been a wonder, don’t you think? As the numbers of able-bodied people out-of-work rocketed up past ten million during the same period, the stock indexes shot up three, five, six percent a day? Say, what? You’re telling me that’s based on the prospect of magnificent earnings in the third quarter? With every business on God’s green earth writhing in the dust like squashed bugs? And every supply line for basic goods and the gazillion spare parts for everything… all choked off?

And meanwhile, the American public sequesters and festers, waiting for those $1,200 checks that will fix… everything! Let’s face it: this is a twilight zone between stupor and fury. Nobody is paying anything to anyone. All obligations are suspended: rents, mortgages, bills, loans, bets, and vigs, all up in the air somewhere, but definitely not moving to their assigned destinations. The velocity of money is zero and all the various new term facilities and structured vehicles conjured by the Federal Reserve and Congress amount to a mere shadow of money moving ­– even though they are represented by trillions of brand-new alleged dollars. For every ten points that the Standard & Poor’s rose this week, somewhere down the line as many hedge funders will be dribbled like so many basketballs to the hoop of judgment.

The nation now has the long Easter weekend to stew and ruminate over its fate with spring achingly vivid and beckoning beyond the grim, streaked windows of sequestering. Those little cans of Easter Spam with pineapple rings won’t offer much consolation, combined with the abject discovery that even Netflix only has so many sequels to Frozen for children going catatonic with ennui. Kids are generally not so excited by stock and bond markets, but that’s probably where the genuine melodrama picks up on Monday. The weeks ahead there will give the phrase down-to-earth a whole new meaning.

A Debt Jubilee Is the Only Way to Avoid a Depression

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By Michael Hudson

Source: The Unz Review

Even before the coronavirus appeared, many American families were falling behind on student loans, auto loans, credit card balances and other payments. America’s debt overhead was pricing its labor and industry out of world markets. A debt crisis was inevitable eventually, but covid-19 has made it immediate.

Massive social distancing, with its accompanying job losses, stock dives, and huge bailouts to debt-strapped corporations, raises the threat of a depression. But it doesn’t have to be this way. History offers us another alternative in such situations: a debt jubilee. This slate-cleaning, balance-restoring step recognizes the fundamental truth that when debts grow too large to be paid without reducing debtors to poverty, the way to hold society together and restore balance is simply to cancel the bad debts.

The word Jubilee comes from the Hebrew word for trumpet — yobel. In Mosaic Law, it was blown every fifty years to signal the Year of the Lord, in which personal debts were to be cancelled. The alternative, the prophet Isaiah warned, was for smallholders to forfeit their lands to creditors: “Woe to you who add house to house and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land.” When Jesus delivered his first sermon, the Gospel of Luke describes him as unrolling the scroll of Isaiah and announcing that he had come to proclaim the Year of the Lord, the Jubilee Year.

Until recently, historians doubted that such a debt jubilee would have been possible in practice, or that such proclamations could have been enforced. But Assyriologists have found that from the beginning of recorded history in the Near East, it was normal for new rulers to proclaim a debt amnesty upon taking the throne. Instead of blowing a trumpet, the ruler “raised the sacred torch” to signal the amnesty.

It is now understood that these rulers were not being utopian or idealistic in forgiving debts. The alternative would have been for debtors to fall into bondage. Kingdoms would have lost their labor force, since so many would be working off debts to their creditors. Many debtors would have run away (much as Greeks emigrated en masse after their recent debt crisis) and communities would have been prone to attack from without.

The parallels to the current moment are notable. The U.S. economy has polarized sharply since the 2008 financial crisis. For far too many, the debts in place leave little income available for spending on goods and services or in the national interest. In a crashing economy, any demand that newly massive debts be paid to a financial class that has already absorbed most of the wealth gained since 2008 can only further split our society.

This has happened before in modern times — after World War I, the burden of war debts and reparations bankrupted Germany, contributing to the global financial collapse of 1929-31. Most of Germany was insolvent, and its politics polarized between the Nazis and Communists. We all know how that ended.

America’s 2008 bank crash offered a great opportunity to write down the often-fraudulent junk mortgages that burdened many lower-income families, especially minorities. But this was not done, and millions of American families were evicted.

The way to restore normalcy today is a debt writedown. The debts in deepest arrears, and most likely to default, are student debts, medical debts, general consumer debts and purely speculative debts. They block spending on goods and services, shrinking the “real” economy. A debt writedown would be pragmatic, not merely a moral sympathy with the less affluent.

In fact, it could create what the Germans called an “Economic Miracle” — their own modern debt jubilee in 1948, the currency reform administered by the Allied Powers. When the Deutsch Mark was introduced, replacing the Reichsmark, 90 percent of government and private debt was wiped out. Germany emerged as an almost debt-free economy, with low costs of production that jump-started its modern economy.

In the past, the politically powerful financial sector has blocked a writedown. Until now, the basic ethic of most people has been that debts must be repaid. But it is time to recognize that most debts now cannot be paid — through no real fault of the debtors in the face of today’s economic disaster.

The coronavirus outbreak is serving as a mind-expansion exercise, making hitherto unthinkable solutions thinkable. Debts that can’t be paid, won’t be. A debt jubilee may be the best way out.

 

Michael Hudson, author of “… and forgive them their debts” and “Killing the Host,” is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends and is Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.

From Quarantine To Tyranny To Rebellion: Where Is The Line In The Sand?

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.com

America is in a haze right now. It seems like half the country is in denial of the danger while the other half is awaking from apathy and frantically trying to prepare. This is creating a fog of confusion as one side screams “it’s nothing but the flu, stop buying up the grocery store…!”, and the other side just keeps stocking goods, though in an inexperienced way that prioritizes comfort over practicality.

The other day I went by the grocery store to grab a few peripheral items while they still exist on sale, and this was the first time since the Covid-19 situation began that people in my area actually seemed…different.   The usual carefree obliviousness was gone from their faces and they all had a deer-in-the-headlights look, their eyes wide as saucers as they nervously scrambled around the store.  None of them were absorbed into their cell phones.  All of them were alert as many people huddled over their cart, quickly snatching items from the shelves as if protecting themselves from potential thieves.  It seems that reality is finally hitting the masses square in the face like a sucker punch.

Suddenly, the prepper movement doesn’t look so “crazy” after all, and average people are now turning to prepper forums and websites to ask us for information on how to plan more effectively. Instead of stacking piles of toilet paper for psychological comfort, they are now buying food supplies.  The people who used to accuse us of being “chicken littles” and “doom mongers” are eerily silent. I almost miss them. At the very least, everyone is now concerned about the situation, if not for different reasons.

This is a far cry from the past two months, when governments around the world as well as the UN’s WHO continually downplayed the pandemic threat and offered the public nothing in terms of usable advice. The establishment consistently kept the public in the dark, not just on the virus and its capabilities but also on the vast weaknesses in the global economy. Abruptly in the past week they suggest that a threat is ahead and now millions of people are scrambling to prepare however they can.

As I have noted in previous articles, there is a reason why the establishment refused to inform the citizenry of the instabilities inherent in the pandemic scenario; the more unknowns there are for the public the more panic will set it, chaos ensues, and it is chaos that can be exploited to push forward numerous agendas. These agendas include global centralization as well as the erasure of constitutional liberties.

Now that a national collapse event is slowly being accepted by many as a legitimate possibility, there is a debate rising as to what measures the government should take, or should be allowed to take. Those of us in the prepper and liberty movements always knew this day was coming; a day when the public would start considering trading away an array of freedoms in exchange for promises of security.

Even now, government officials are still trying to tell people that this event will be “short lived”.

“Don’t worry”, they say, “It will only last a couple of weeks.” Oh, and “Don’t concern yourselves with food shortages, that’s not going to happen…” You can look at these lies in two different ways:

1) The government is trying to stave off a “panic” by slowly easing people into the reality that the system is breaking.

2) The government is trying to keep people passive to the danger so that when the system breaks completely they will be unprepared, desperate and easier to manipulate.

I believe the second option is the most likely given the evidence at hand, but in either case the government is crippling the public response time to the disaster. They did this for months and they are still trying to do it now.

So, my argument is, why should we suddenly take their advice or take orders from them when the manure hits the fan? They have FAILED in their responsibilities to inform and protect the citizenry, and they are about to violate their prime mandate, which is to protect the personal liberties that make our society worth living in. Without these freedoms, there is no point to keeping our system intact anyway.

The establishment and its defenders will claim that we all “have to make sacrifices” today in order to have freedoms tomorrow, but that’s not how the constitution was designed to work. Our rights are MORE important during times of distress and crisis, for it is in these times that we need to know what we are fighting for, and what we are struggling for. Survival is meaningless if we have to accept tyranny to achieve it.

Once governments see a chance to usurp freedoms from the people, they DO NOT tend to give those freedoms back later unless the people become a viable opponent that could bring the establishment down.

There are some who will say that a forced quarantine is necessary to protect the “greater good” of the greater number. It is true that the Covid-19 virus is a danger, and I think the people who claim it’s “no worse than the flu” are fighting a losing battle as the death rate is clearly much higher than the average flu virus. They will look extremely foolish a few months from now as the virus continues to cycle through the population and the dead continue to increase. That said, I think I understand why they cling to this crumbling argument.

They think that by arguing that the pandemic is “all hype” they can morally justify resistance to the inevitable totalitarian response from governments. They think it has to be one or the other:  Either the virus is hyped and resistance is acceptable, or the virus is real and resistance is unacceptable. I ask – Why can’t it be both? The virus is dangerous to many, but a totalitarian response is still unacceptable.

The virus is in fact more destructive than any flu in recent memory – It’s not a plague on the level of the Black Death, but if it continues to kill at a rate of 3% to 5% as it has been then this puts a large number of human beings at risk. It is not something to be taken lightly, and those people that are actively trying to discourage others from preparing for it are truly narcissistic in their ideology. If you don’t think it’s a threat, then don’t prepare, but don’t scream at others for taking precautions just because you desperately want to be right, and don’t come around demanding food and supplies from those same people when the ceiling comes crashing down on your head.

Also, understand that Covid-19 is only part of the problem. The bigger crisis is in the economy itself; a collapse has been built into the system for years now, and the virus has little to do with it.  Leftist kids are going around calling this pandemic the “boomer remover”, almost cheering the assumption that mostly older and conservative Americans will die from this.  I have to break it to them that during the economic collapse that is inevitably coming they will have to wipe the snot from their noses and put on their big-boy diapers otherwise they aren’t going to survive either; most of them have no discernible skills and no preparations to speak of.  They are essentially useless.

If Covid-19 is a “boomer remover”, then the economic crisis is a “snowflake bake”, and they are about to get roasted.

As I have noted time and time again over the past few years, the Everything Bubble only needed one major trigger event to fully implode, but the international banks and central banks created that precarious bubble in the first place, and they set up all the conditions which made it so dangerous. The virus is not the cause of the crash, it is just very good cover for the banks who are the real perpetrators.

Ignore the virus if you want, but the economic collapse is undeniable. Accept that the national and global emergency is real (even if it has been financially engineered), and let’s move on to a more meaningful debate: Should governments be allowed to implement martial law measures in response?

In my view there is no excuse for tyranny, even during a pandemic event. The majority of the public is more than capable of voluntary quarantine without government enforcement. Add government intervention into the mix and it will only make people want to do the opposite.  And beyond that, Covid-19 has such a long incubation period that ultimately most people will probably contract it anyway. Total containment is not achievable (as we have just seen in South Korea). Quarantines might slow the spread, which is good, but do not expect to avoid this virus indefinitely. Why sacrifice your freedoms for safety that is an illusion?

Then there is the argument of “herd immunity”, which is utter nonsense and always has been. Either a person or group is immune, or they are not, and people who are not immune do not put immune people at risk. Period. The claim that the virus might “mutate” within non-vaccinated or non-immune people and put vaccinated people at risk is a propaganda argument that ignores science. Generally, when a virus does mutate, it mutates into a less deadly or infectious strain, not a more deadly strain. Viruses are programmed to survive, too. If they evolved to kill ALL potential hosts then that would be counter to their survival imperative, which is why they usually evolve in the other direction.

In terms of Covid-19, there is no “herd immunity” by the establishment definition anyway, because it is a brand new virus. There is no vaccine and the vast majority of people have no antibodies. No one can make the argument that people need to be forcefully locked down in order to maintain a herd immunity that doesn’t exist.

Finally, there is a question of agenda and motive behind the rising call for martial law-like measures over the pandemic. For example, Champaign, Illinois mayor Deborah Frank Feinen has given herself executive powers in response to the coronavirus infection that are outright dictatorial and Soviet in their violations. Among other things, she demands the power to enforce curfews, ban public gatherings, ban alcohol, ban or confiscate firearms, as well as confiscate supplies from any citizen if those supplies are “needed for emergency response”.

Is this really about protecting the public? How does it protect the public to confiscate their only means of defense, or confiscate their food and supplies? This type of thing is usually done in communist countries, and it is done to protect government power, not protect the people.

Understand also that the Champaign mayor is not the only official calling for these types of actions. From New York to LA and beyond, those of us who are paying attention have noticed a swift and quiet implementation of orders that are whittling down American freedoms. Do not expect Donald Trump to operate differently, either. Expect him to initiate martial law measures (though he may not call it “martial law”) in the next few months. Expect him to activate Executive Order 13603, which was created by Barack Obama in 2012 and allows the federal government to appropriate everything from land to food to firearms in the event of a national emergency. This is going to happen. Count on it.

The pandemic is not an excuse for tyranny, and I for one will not comply. I and many I know will self quarantine for a time with the expectation that we will eventually contract the virus, and hopefully our immune systems are strong enough to fight it. In the meantime, I will not be allowing any government officials to confiscate my supplies or my firearms “for my own safety” or “for the greater good”.

I will not be cooperating with census takers asking questions about how much supplies I have stocked and whether or not I am ill.  I will not sit idle while checkpoints are set up in my county to enforce travel restrictions or demand people test for symptoms. I will not be signing up for government rations in exchange for my biometric data. I will not be visiting the local FEMA center for government aid. And, I will fight anyone that tries to assert martial law tactics in my area.

A message to the government: I know you won’t, but I suggest you leave people alone and let them self isolate in peace. Your brand of “help” is not the kind of help we need. You and the financial elites that reside over you created this mess, and we do not trust you to clean it up. At bottom, this disaster should result in your removal from power. You should be held accountable and replaced.

The system itself needs to be rebuilt from the ground up and principles of liberty need to return to the forefront of our society. Centralization and globalization have caused untold grief and terror to humanity; this collapse only reinforces the argument that we need to try something different. They will say that the world was “not centralized enough” and that a more global (totalitarian) framework is the solution. But, of course, who really benefits from that in the end? The common man, or the elites?

They can offer any rationalization they want in the name of public safety, but we know what the real play is here. If the line is crossed into martial law, I plan to fight. Not just for me, but for the next generation. Because if I do not, those children may grow up in the world never knowing what freedom truly is. There are fates worse than death, and a life of tyranny and slavery is one of them.