Imagine a town of 1,000 adults and their dependents in which one person holds the vast majority of wealth and political influence. Would that qualify as a democracy? Now imagine that 100 of the 1,000 adults own 90% of all the wealth, collect 97% of all the income from capital and have virtually all the political power. How can a society in which 90% of the populace is decapitalized, disenfranchised and demoralized by political powerlessness be a democracy?
This is America: a kleptocratic autocracy that serves the few at the expense of the many, stripmining the bottom 90% under the guise of a fraudulent “democracy” in which only the few wield real power. Recall Smith’s Neofeudalism Principle #1: If the citizenry cannot replace a kleptocratic government and/or limit the power of the financial Aristocracy at the ballot box, the nation is a democracy in name only.
It’s also a fact that the top 10% get virtually all the gains from the nation’s capital, and this wealth is concentrated in the top 0.1%:Monopoly Versus Democracy: How to End a Gilded Age Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.
Exactly how can a system of governance that is nothing but an invitation-only auction of political favors in which the top 0.1% own more than the bottom 80% be a functional democracy? The answer is it cannot. Politics and government have been reduced to protecting and enriching a neofeudal autocracy while claiming to serve the stripmined public.
This extreme concentration of wealth and power is not accidental; the government’s policies have generated this concentration of wealth which has hollowed out democracy. The super-wealthy didn’t siphon $50 trillion from those earning their living from labor on their own; government policies aided and abetted this vast transfer of wealth.
Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018: $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.
The catastrophic consequences of this systemic concentration of wealth and power are also well documented. For example, Human and nature dynamics (HANDY): Modeling inequality and use of resources in the collapse or sustainability of societies. Extreme inequality brings down societies, and America is now a society dominated by extreme inequality.
America is nothing but a vast moral cesspool that the public is told is a pristine pond of “democracy”. Self-enrichment is cloaked as “doing God’s work,” profiteering is sold as “value,” fraud is packaged as “finance” and rapacious monopolies are marketed as “enterprise.”
Institutions have become little more than rackets enriching insiders and the wealthiest few; they have lost moral legitimacy which is the fundamental foundation of democracy and a market-based economy.
It wasn’t just bad luck that financialization and globalization hollowed out America’s economy and democracy and turned the bottom 90% into debt-serfs and tax donkeys; it was government policies implemented by elected officials and the appointed handmaidens of the super-wealthy. Virtually every major policy implemented by either party served the interests of the super-wealthy and corporations: tax cuts had trivial impacts on the bottom 90% while vastly increasing the wealth of the super-wealthy; the Supreme Court’s rulings in favor of corporate “personhood” and “free speech” (a.k.a. the best government we can buy), and the evisceration of the rule of law for corporate fraud, collusion and embezzlement (“too big to fail, too big to jail”).
The Federal Reserve’s free money for financiers distributes gains on the order of 20-to-1 in favor of the super-wealthy: $2 trillion in gains for the bottom 90%, $40 trillion for the top tier.
The list is long and painful proof that the elected government of the United States serves the interests of the top few–a reality masked by expert PR and partisanship.
Partisanship reflects a core structural dynamic: America is now a two-tier society and economy. If you’re an executive at a big Wall Street investment bank, you can rig markets and embezzle billions and you’ll never face any personal legal consequences such as being indicted, convicted and imprisoned. (Bernie Madoff’s conviction was a classic Soviet-style show trial to mask the fact that thousands of other white-collar criminals kept their ill-gotten gains and faced no consequences.)
But try being an employee at a local credit union and embezzle $5,000–a prison sentence is very predictable.
If a spoiled-rotten rich kid gets caught with drugs, Mommy and Daddy’s lawyer kicks into gear and gets a suspended sentence plea bargain. The kid from the bottom 90% gets a tenner in the Drug War Gulag. And so on.
America is also a regional two-tier economy/society. When a society kneels down and worships financialization and globalization, it gives all the political and financial power to the already-super-wealthy and corporations who get 97% of the gains from financialization and globalization.
Since the majority of already-super-wealthy and corporate managers reside in coastal metropolitan areas, the tide of new wealth flooding into the hands of the few boosts the economies of these select regions. The Brookings chart below may look like a chart of political polarization, and superficially that’s obvious: the 500 counties Biden won hold 70% of the nation’s GDP while the 2,500 counties Trump won hold 30% of the nation’s GDP.
The real polarization is economic-financial: there are two economies in America and there’s very little commonality in the two economies. One benefited greatly from financialization and globalization, and the other was hollowed out and brought to its knees by financialization and globalization.
Since income and political power flow to capital, the disparity / inequality far exceed the 70/30 split depicted in this chart. The chart showing the soaring wealth of billionaires is a more accurate reflection of inequality in America.
What’s missing from the 70/30 map is the staggering percentage of residents in the wealthiest 500 counties who are precariats living paycheck to paycheck, the ALICE Americans: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.
Is there any wonder that stripmined Americans who sense their powerlessness are attracted to virulent partisanship? The more extreme the pendulum swing of wealth-power inequality, the more extreme the political blowback.
America’s political class has no plan to reverse this destructive tide. Our leadership’s “plan” is something they know well first-hand: bribery and complicity: just send a monthly stipend of bread and circuses to all the disempowered, decapitalized households, urban and rural, so they can stay out of trouble and not bother the elites’ profitable pillaging of America and the planet.
The insurrection and coup happened long ago, when financialization and globalization hollowed out the real economy and disempowered the bottom 90%. When the whole rotten palace of corruption collapses in a putrid heap, look no further for the cause than the extremes of wealth-power inequality that rendered “democracy” a convenient facade for the stripmining of the bottom 90%.
Try to find a developing-world kleptocracy in which the top few collect more than 97% of the income from capital. There aren’t any that top the USA, the world’s most extreme kleptocracy. We’re Number 1.
A global network of stakeholder capitalist partners are collaborating to usher in what they claim to be a new model of enhanced democratic accountability that includes “civil society”. However, beneath their deceptive use of the term civil society lies an ideology which offers this network an unprecedented degree of political control that threatens to extinguish representative democracy entirely.
Representative democracy is quietly being phased out to be replaced with a “new normal.” This “new normal” is a nascent form of governance being referred to as “civil society.” It is founded upon the principles of communitarianism and it is being offered to us as an illusory replacement for representative democracy.
The Global Public-Private Partnership (G3P), who set the worldwide policy agenda, have long-seen the manipulation of the concept of civil society as a means to achieve their ambitions. This is at odds with how many emergent “civil society” groups understand their allocated roll.
Set against the background of a corporate, global state, in this article, we will explore the exploitation of communitarian civil society and consider the evidence that, despite possibly good intentions, civil society is very far from the system of increased democratic accountability that communitarians had hoped for. In the hands of the G3P, what they refer to as “civil society” is a tyranny.
Shaping the Global Public-Private Partnership
Speaking at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual Davos meeting in 1998, then United Nations (UN) Secretary General Kofi Annan, described the transformation of the United Nations. He signalled the transition to the G3P model of global governance:
“The United Nations has been transformed since we last met here in Davos. The Organization has undergone a complete overhaul that I have described as a ‘quiet revolution’ […] A fundamental shift has occurred. The United Nations once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments, international organizations, the business community and civil society […] The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world.”
The WEF describes itself as the “International Organization for Public-Private Cooperation.” It represents the interests of more than 1000 global corporations and, in June 2019, it signed a Strategic Partnership Framework agreement with the United Nations. The WEF and the UN agreed to work together to “accelerate implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”
Agenda 2030 establishes the initial waypoints along the path to completion of the plan for the 21st century, also known as Agenda 21. The policies required to achieve these goals will be developed by the multi-stakeholder partnership. The UN explain how this is envisaged to operate:
“Cross sectorial and innovative multi-stakeholder partnerships will play a crucial role for getting us to where we need by the year 2030. Partnerships for sustainable development are multi-stakeholder initiatives voluntarily undertaken by Governments, intergovernmental organizations, major groups and others stakeholders, which efforts are contributing to the implementation of inter-governmentally agreed development goals and commitments, as included in Agenda 21.”
For its part, the UN describes itself as the “place where the world’s nations can gather together, discuss common problems and find shared solutions.” Currently 193 sovereign states are signed up to the UN Charter.
National governments commit to abide by the principles of the Charter and the ruling arbitration of the International Court of Justice. While UN General Assembly recommendations are non-binding on member states, the UN provides a mechanism by which governments can take collective action.
With the Strategic Partnership in place, the WEF and the corporations they represent are now engaged in “effective collaboration” with the 193 national governments represented at the UN. They are directly partnering with government in the development of global policy agendas.
The partnership will guide the formation of policies and regulations related to international finance and the global financial system; the transition to a new, low carbon global economy; international public health policy, disaster preparedness and global health security; the technological development deemed necessary to bring about the Fourth Industrial Revolution; policies on diversity, inclusion and equality; oversight of the global education systems and more.
In an attempt to add a veneer of democratic accountability to this Strategic Partnership Framework, as the world uniformly moves towards Agenda 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the UN strongly advocates collaboration with “civil society.” Indeed, SDG 17 specifically refers to this arrangement: “Goal 17 further seek to encourage and promote effective public, public-private and civil society partnerships”
Civil society will be engaged by utilising the WEF concept of the “multistakeholder platform.” This is a core element of the WEF’s definition of stakeholder capitalism.
The communitarian model of civil society is based upon a triumvirate power sharing structure between state (public sector), market (private sector) and community (social or third sector.) However, the WEF’s interpretation of stakeholder capitalism assumes that the public-private partnership stakeholders (state-market) select the civil society communities (social or third sector) they wish to engage with.
Selection bias is a concern, as it obviously excludes the communities the public-private partnership does not wish to engage with. In part, this contradicts the communitarian view of civil society.
The WEF’s multistakeholder platform appears to exploit, rather than embrace, communitarian civil society. Understandably, the WEF’s partnership with the UN drew strong criticism from many civil society groups. The Transnational Institute (TNI) encapsulated their concerns as follows:
“This public-private partnership will permanently associate the UN with transnational corporations […] This is a form of corporate capture […] The provisions of the strategic partnership effectively provide that corporate leaders will become ‘whisper advisors’ to the heads of UN system departments, using their private access to advocate market-based profit-making ‘solutions’ to global problems while undermining real solutions […] The UN’s acceptance of this partnership agreement moves the world toward WEF’s aspirations for multistakeholderism becoming the effective replacement of multilateralism […] The goal was to weaken the role of states in global decision-making and to elevate the role of a new set of ‘stakeholders’, turning our multilateral system into a multistakeholder system, in which companies are part of the governing mechanisms. This would bring transnational corporations, selected civil society representatives, states and other non-state actors together to make global decisions, discarding or ignoring critical concerns around conflicts of interest, accountability and democracy.”
Less than six months after the Strategic Partnership Framework was signed the pseudopandemic allegedly began in Wuhan, China. Resulting world events have somewhat obscured the corporate capture of global governance from public attention, but it remains in place.
The Civil Society Tradition
Representative democracies have a long tradition of civil society. Between 1835 and 1840 the French aristocrat, Alexis de Tocqueville, wrote and published two volumes of “Democracy in America.” He noted that, for the representative democracy of the “new world,” the voluntary institutions of civil society promoted active engagement in decision making and acted as a bulwark against the excesses of centralised, governmental authority:
“Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds -religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books […] and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools […] they form a society.”
While he found that American civil society empowered the citizenry, de Tocqueville also identified some of the apparent risks:
“When several members of an aristocracy agree to combine, they easily succeed in doing so; as each of them brings great strength to the partnership, the number of its members may be very limited; and when the members of an association are limited in number, they may easily become mutually acquainted, understand each other, and establish fixed regulations. The same opportunities do not occur amongst democratic nations, where the associated members must always be very numerous for their association to have any power.”
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with concept of civil society, but even in the 19th century the potential for it to be exploited by powerful interest groups was apparent.
Today, civil society is sold to us as a way to fix what many people see as the “democratic deficit”. First coined in the late 70’s by the Congress of Young European Federalists (JEF), the “deficit” was conceived to explain the observed failings in representative democracy.
The JEF held that the ponderous, centralised bureaucracy of national government was unable to adapt to rapidly changing economic and social conditions. Further, that the interdependent, international nature of modern, technologically advanced industrial societies created conditions that no single nation could address in isolation.
This left the electorate unable to affect the policy changes they needed, as government became unresponsive to social and economic realities. Civil society was suggested as a way to bridge the gap between governance, government and community. Unfortunately, the inherent credulity of the communitarian theory driving it rendered civil society vulnerable to manipulation by more Machiavellian global forces.
Communitarian Civil Society Model
In 1848, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the first edition of the Communist Manifesto. In it they criticised their intellectual forebears, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and others, for their utopian naivety. In particular they decried the “utopian socialist” rejection of the class struggle, pointing out that, in their opinion, the proletariat needed an independent political movement in order to overturn the rule of the bourgeoisie.
In 1841, John Goodwyn Barmby coined the term “communitarian.” He was among those who Marx would subsequently label as utopian socialists. Communitarianism elucidated their theory that individual identity was a product of familial, social and community interactions. Communitarianism wasn’t widely referenced until, in 1996, the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor highlighted that a new form of political communitarianism was building in the US:
“The term has been taken up by a group under the leadership of Amitai Etzioni in the US. This group has a political agenda. One might say that they are concerned social democrats who are worried about the way that various forms of individualism are undermining the welfare state. They see the need for solidarity, and hence for ‘community’ on a number of levels, from the family to the state.”
Amitai Etzioni, an Israeli-American dual citizen, is the director of the Center for Communitarian Policy Studies at George Washington University. A former advisor to the Carter administration, he formed an association of like minded sociologists and other scholars called the Communitarian Network.
In 1991, the Network produced its manifesto in the form of the Responsive Communitarian Platform. Etzioni et al. defined civil society as the moral and political space between community and state. They suggested that global problems could only be tackled with the participation of civil society:
“A communitarian perspective must be brought to bear on the great moral, legal and social issues of our time […] Moral voices achieve their effect mainly through education and persuasion, rather than through coercion […] they exhort, admonish, and appeal to what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature […] this important moral realm, which is neither one of random individual choice nor of government control, has been much neglected […] we see an urgent need for a communitarian social movement to accord these voices their essential place […] civil society is a constant, ongoing enterprise.”
Communitarianism is opposed to authoritarian control. It specifies “community” as representative of the people. Accordingly, in order for government to be genuinely responsive to the changing needs of the electorate, it must engage with communities:
“We seek to find ways to accord citizens more information, and more say, more often. We seek to curb the role of private money, special interests, and corruption in government. Similarly, we ask how ‘private governments,’ whether corporations, labor unions, or voluntary associations, can become more responsive to their members and to the needs of the community.”
Etzioni and other communitarians, like the utopian socialists before them, believe that the community represents the individual. Therefore, the community can speak for the individual. Further, they believe that governments and “private governments” can engage with the people via consultation with the communities. In combination, these communities form civil society.
Communitarian Assumptions
In his 2000 commissioned treatise for the UK-based, privately funded think tank DEMOS, titled The Third Way To A Good Society, Etzioni argued that civil society could remedy public disillusionment in democratic institutions. He noted the dwindling public trust in government and increasing sense of disenfranchisement. The remedy he proposed for this democratic deficit has since proven disastrous:
“We aspire to a society that is not merely civil but is good […] When we bond with family, friends or community members we live up to the basic principle of the good society […] The good society is one that balances three often partially incompatible elements: the state, the market and the community. […] Communities, in my understanding, are based on two foundations […] First, communities provide bonds of affection that turn groups of people into social entities resembling extended families. Second, they transmit a shared moral culture (a set of shared social meanings and values that characterise what the community considers virtuous verses unacceptable behaviour) […] These traits differentiate communities from other social groups […] Contemporary communities evolve among members of one profession working for the same institution […] members of an ethnic or racial group even if dispersed among others; people who share a sexual orientation; or intellectuals of the same political or cultural feather […]Groups that merely share specific interests – to prevent the Internet from being taxed or to reduce the costs of postage – are solely an interest group or lobby. They lack the affective bonds and shared culture that make communities.”
For communitarians shared morality defines the “good society” which manifests in the exercise of power sharing between “the state, the market and the community.” Communities, as defined, stand apart from mere “interest groups” because they have “affective bonds” whereas interest groups don’t, in the communitarian’s view.
Community is, according to the communitarians, held together because people have affection for each other. They suggest that interest groups lack cohesion by comparison.
Community is “good” and therefore the power-sharing triangle is “good” for society. Certainly the vast majority of us want to live in a peaceful society, where families of every shape and size can thrive, where children have the opportunity to reach their full potential and conflict is resolved without resorting to violence. Nonetheless, communitarianism poses some questions.
Absent a shared “specific interest,” it is not easy to define community. Which “communities” will be chosen to form civil society, how is this decision made and who makes it? Who represents the local community? Is it the church, if so which church? Is it a local charity or an environmentalist group? Does the local cyclist community represent the interests of the local road hauliers community? What “good” values do these selected communities promote, who among us agree with them and how many of us share their aims and objectives?
Who is selected from each alleged community to represent the opinions of all of its constituent members? Do the community members share the views of their representatives? Are they happy for these community leaders to speak for them?
In the multistakeholder platform-based model of civil society it appears that these judgments fall to the public-private partnership. How confident can the rest of us be in their rationale? Even the notion of the local community is a nebulous concept. Where are the boundaries of local? Is it our street, our town, city or nation state? Does everyone who lives in whatever is prescribed as the local community agree? Do we all share the same opinions, do we even want to be part of a community?
Communitarians offer few, if any, answers to these questions. It is an implicit assumption of communitarianism that this thing they call community is capable of acting as a voice for the individual. This is not evident.
Communitarian “New Normal” Intolerance
An oft quoted sound-bite during the 2020 iteration of the pseudopandemic was the phrase the “new normal.” Many of us probably believed that the prospect of a new normal referred to little more than the introduction of stringent public health measures following an unprecedented global pandemic. However, this is not what “new normal” means.
While he was far from the first to use it, the “new normal” was a phrase offered by Amitai Etzioni in his 2011 book of the same name. He accompanied his book with an essay, titled The New Normal, also written in 2011. In both the book and the essay, Etzioni explored the communitarian view on the new, post global economic collapse world. The “new normal” was the name Etzioni gave to a society of “diminished economic condition.”
He suggested that people must accept that continual growth was unlikely and should, in any case, eschew consumerism as a measure of success. He welcomed this envisaged change to a society that valued relationships as well as emotional, intellectual and spiritual growth beyond material acquisition. He claimed that a reduction in consumption was required to save the planet. We all needed to reduce our carbon footprints, he asserted.
As people have come to question the often dispiriting pursuit of modern materialism, Etzioni’s perspective was welcome perhaps. However, it is in Etzioni’s exploration of the balance between individual rights and the “common good” where doubts arise. Etzioni, alongside most communitarians, considers that balance to be fluid. Neither individual rights nor the common good take precedent in a sociological concept Etzioni called “libertarian communitarianism.”
As new situations arise and technologies emerge, what is good for the community today may not be good for the community tomorrow. Therefore, the point at which the common good does override individual rights—as it must—is constantly shifting, according to libertarian communitarianism.
However, one value which communitarianism does not espouse is diversity of opinion. In the communitarian model, the power to define the common good is absolute. The traditional democratic values of freedom of speech and expression are distinctly unwelcome in communitarian philosophy. This is not admitted, but it is implicit to their theory. For communitarians, dissent from the community or disagreement with the stated “common good” is not tolerated.
“We should not hesitate to speak up and express our moral concerns to others when it comes to issues we care about deeply […] Those who neglect these duties, should be explicitly considered poor members of the community […] A good citizen is involved in a community or communities. We know that enduring responsive communities cannot be created through fiat or coercion, but only through genuine public conviction […] Although it may seem utopian, we believe that in the multiplication of strongly democratic communities around the world lies our best hope for the emergence of a global community that can deal concertedly with matters of general concern to our species as a whole.”
Communitarians are ambitious. They see their civil society as a global project where everyone involved has a “genuine public conviction” to communitarian principles. This ambition is shared by the G3P, but for very different reasons.
What if we are not convinced? What if we believe individual sovereignty is sacrosanct and that freedom of speech and expression, of organic public protest and freedom of choice are more important than a commitment to any prescribed community or the community’s authorised version of the common good?
According to communitarians, like Etzioni, this makes us poor members of the community. We are not “good citizens” and they suggest how we should be dealt with:
“Responsibilities are anchored in community […] communities define what is expected of people; they educate their members to accept these values; and they praise them when they do and frown upon them when they do not […] Whenever individuals or members of a group are harassed, many non-legal measures are appropriate to express disapproval of hateful expressions and to promote tolerance among the members of the polity.”
This is community as a control mechanism, not as an extension of any egalitarian meritocracy where individuals can flourish. The community will define our responsibilities and spell out what is expected of us. The community will instill its values and we must agree with them. If we don’t, we will be “educated” to accept them.
If we strongly express disagreement with community values this could constitute “hate” and “harassment” of community members. Those of us outside of the community, for any reason, will be receive its disapproval and efforts will be made to make us more tolerant of the community’s beliefs. Whatever they may be.
Therefore, uniformity of opinion within these communities is enforced. Debate will be welcome as long as it doesn’t challenge the community’s precepts. These are off limits. Members will probably have to leave independent thought at the door before entering the community and certainly before being accepted by it.
There is a significant risk that groupthink will develop. The roots of communitarianism are in the utopian socialist view that identity is formed by the community. In turn, this also suggests that community identity becomes individual identity.
An individual suffering from groupthink possesses unquestioned certainty, intolerance for any opposing views and an inability to engage in logical discourse. Their critical thinking skills are impaired, because to question the community is to question their own identity.
Those who do not share the ordained group ethos, or those who question the evidence base underpinning the group’s certainty, are not part of the community. They are “other.”
Etzioni describes anyone who doesn’t embrace vaccine passports as Individual Rights Luddites. Having thought about vaccine passports, he concluded:
“These passports could enable scores of millions of people to leave their depressing quarantines, to go to work, to attend school, and to be socially active again, all of which would help revive the economy and reduce social tensions.”
He accepts that lockdowns and the closure of the global economy was an unavoidable response to a global pandemic and not a policy choice. He believes that school closures make sense and that the economy will be revived once the vaccine passport system is established. He believes that the mRNA and viral vector injections are vaccines and that they work as described by the manufacturers.
In other words Etzioni accepts a whole raft of assumptions. Based upon them, he insists that denying access to society to those who don’t want to be injected is not “discrimination” but rather “differentiation.” Applying his communitarian principles he wrote:
“Differentiation will exert some pressure on those who refuse to be vaccinated, as they will be unable to reap the benefits of the passports unless they reconsider their position.”
Etzioni has defined the common good. Or rather, he accepts the common good as defined for him. Freedom of choice or principles such as bodily autonomy are overridden by the “common good.”
Etzioni disagrees with the philosopher Giorgio Agamben who pointed out the horrific ramifications of a biosecurity state. This is fine, disagreement and debate are welcome in any free society.
Unfortunately, unlike Agamben, Etzioni doesn’t advocate a free society. He suggests a communitarian civil society based upon the consensus view of what does or does not constitute the common good. As did Hitler’s National Socialists in 1930s Germany, a society from which Etzioni fled as a child to what is now the state of Israel.
Communitarians oppose the abuse of power and it is unfair to describe them as fascists. Nonetheless, it is entirely reasonable to point out the parallels. Both political ideologies accept authoritarian diktat. That is what enforcement of the “common good” is.
However, this is not the most worrying aspect of the communitarianism. It is communitarians’ naive grasp of the global realpolitik, which renders communitarian civil society the perfect policy vehicle for the G3P. This is what should concern us most. Unlike communitarians, the G3P definitely wants to enforce dictatorial control.
The Political Class Embraces Communitarian Civil Society
In one sense, the global political class’ apparent enthusiasm for communitarian civil society seems surprising. It is unusual for them to seek ways to increase public scrutiny of state and corporate power or public involvement in their policy development.
While public consultation is nothing new, policy is typically designed via internal party political processes, set at party conferences and so-forth. The parties then produce manifestos that the people are invited to select in elections, once every 4 or 5 years.
Civil society, as envisioned by communitarians, suggests a permanent power sharing structure that affords individual voters “more say, more often” in an effort to “curb the role of private money, special interests, and corruption in government.” It is rare that governments, and the political parties that form them, willingly diminish their own power and authority.
That this seeming diminution of party political power should be embraced both simultaneously and globally is unprecedented. Yet, that is what we have seen, as Western representative democracies have advocated, what appears to be, increasing political power for civil society groups.
The recent COP26 summit, which established the basis for action for the new global economy, invited representatives from “governments, businesses, NGOs, and civil society groups.” The US State Department brought together “leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector” for their Summit For Democracy to deliberate on US foreign policy.
The German government has appointed a National Civil Society Body to monitor the site selection for potential nuclear waste storage facilities. The UK government has created the Office for Civil Society within the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. On the surface, it seems democracy is exploding everywhere.
Communitarian Civil Society Is A G3P Project
The Communitarian Network’s ideas certainly enthralled the western political class. During the 1990s, US president Clinton and then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, with German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder leading the mainland European charge, embraced what they called “the Third Way.”
“Elements of both stakeholding and communitarianism can be found in the Third Way […] communitarian ideas have undoubtedly influenced New Labour [..] Outputs and not ideology are driving the new agenda of governance under New Labour. This is seen to have its roots in the new ways of working the party has embraced in local governance, where public–private partnerships have become the norm and a new ethos of public service has emerged.”
This transformation in governance was not solely a political shift of the “progressive left.” Following the demise of the UK Labour government, the Conservative-led coalition, under David Cameron, advocated the “Big Society.” Today, under another Conservative government, virtually no UK policy initiative or announcement is complete unless it speaks of engagement with “civil society.”
“Public-private partnerships” became prevalent in UK local government decision-making during the 1980s & 90s. This was an aspect of the forerunner of the Third Way, named by the UK Labour party as the “stakeholder society.”
The idea of the stakeholder society owed much to the reforms introduced by former UK Conservative Prime Minster, Margaret Thatcher. Under her leadership in the 1980s the pursuit of “Reagonomics” led the introduction of compulsory competitive tendering (CCT) for all local authority contracts.
Hitherto, standard local government practice had been to allocate infrastructure projects to private contractors while the regional government provided many local services. With CCT, all contracts were opened up to the private sector. This meant that multinational corporations had access to new taxpayer-funded markets.
“The key idea behind one nation socialism is the stakeholder society, a society in which all individuals and interests have a stake through democratic representation, and through the adoption by political parties like the Labour Party of a conception of the public interest.”
However, the stakeholder society redefined who would determine the public interest? Traditionally, this had primarily been an undertaking for elected governments. They could be kicked out of office if the public disagreed with their policies. However, the stakeholder society gave a formal policymaking role to both the third (social) and the private sector. No one voted for them, nor could they be removed through any electoral process.
Nor was the Third Way simply a European project. In the US, the Third Way policy think tank was formed in Washington in 2005. Supposedly a think tank of the “progressive left”, the Third Way was heavily backed by global corporations and lobbied Congress intensively to adopt multinational trade deals, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).
Initially, it seems difficult to understand why global corporations and governments would be eager to promote an idea like the Third Way or civil society. For global corporations, the ability to focus their lobbying efforts on a handful of elected officials would appear preferable, and easier, than trying to influence the communities forming civil society. Centralised authority benefits them, so why would they seek to to dilute it?
The “key idea” of the stakeholder society did not originate in centre-left think tanks like the Resolution Foundation or the Third Way. It sprang from the heart of the global capitalist network forming the Global Public Private Partnership (G3P).
Stakeholder capitalism is supposedly a new model of so-called responsible capitalism which the founder and current executive chairman of the World Economic Forum (WEF), Klaus Schwab, pioneered in the 1970s. The G3P he represents claims the right to act as trustees of society. In December 2019, Schwab wrote “What Kind of Capitalism Do We Want”, where he outlined the stakeholder capitalism concept:
“Stakeholder capitalism, a model I first proposed a half-century ago, positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges.”
“The person appointed, or required by law, to execute a trust; one in whom an estate, interest, or power is vested, under an express or implied agreement to administer or exercise it for the benefit or to the use of another.”
The referenced “other” is us, the population. We all apparently agree that private corporations should be invested with the power to administer the global estate. Or at least that is the assumption at the heart of stakeholder capitalism.
Communitarianism and stakeholder capitalism merge to form what is now being referred to as “civil society.” This then is the proposed model of representative democracy that will ostensibly enable us to have a say in the policy formation process. If we examine this claim, however, it is resoundingly hollow.
In the hands of the global stakeholder capitalists, with the connivance of a power hungry “progressive” left, Etzioni’s dream of a communitarian civil society has metastasised into a global control mechanism for the G3P. Civil society, as the term is now being used, is a threat to every democratic principle we value.
The Tyranny of the New Normal Communitarian Civil Society
Etzioni, Michael Sandel, Charles Taylor and other proponents of communitarianism, who advocate local and national governance via civil society, offer a model ripe for exploitation. Governments across the world have enthusiastically seized the opportunity presented by this rendering of civil society, typically in the form of people’s or citizen’s assemblies.
Many assemblies have formed their consultative community through the drawing of lots. So-called sortition is a governance model that invites members of the local community to deliberate on important policy issues. For example, the UK Government commissioned the Climate Assembly to look at policy enabling the UK to achieve “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050.
Selected delegates were able to debate what the net zero policy priorities should be. They considered how fast net zero policies should be implemented and looked at how net zero policies could impact their communities, considering what mitigation measures may be required. What they could not do is question net zero policy nor the underlying assumptions it is based upon.
“Civil society actors from a wide range of fields come together to collaborate with government and business leaders on finding and advocating solutions to global challenges. They also focus on how to best leverage the transformation brought by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and partner with industry, philanthropy, government and academia to take action and engage in the development, deployment, use and governance of technology. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs), labour and religious leaders, faith-based organizations and other civil society stakeholders are key members of the World Economic Forum’s multistakeholder platform.”
There is no questioning of either government or business. No opportunity is provided for the people, the subjects of the policy agenda under debate, to explore alternatives.
The necessity for the WEF model of the Fourth Industrial Revolution is assumed, as is the partnership with industry to achieve it. The problems are predetermined and the “solutions” have already been decided before civil society has the opportunity to “collaborate with government and business.”
The civil society stakeholders are chosen. Representatives from NGOs, religious communities, unions and philanthropic foundations are the selected stakeholders whose only role is to agree with the policies placed on the table by the public-private partnership. Their consent is deemed to be public consent.
As previously stated, the communitarian civil society creates a power sharing structure between state (public sector), market (private sector) and community (social or third sector.) It assumes that all three sectors are independent of each other and therefore governance, the setting of policy agendas, is achieved through equal compromise of all three parties.
This fatal naivety effectively extinguishes, rather than enhances, democratic accountability. In truth, the public and private sector are not independent of each other. They are working as equals in partnership.
Between them, they have all the money, all the legal authority, all the resources. Via the public sector (government), they also possess a monopoly on the use of force to compel communities to comply.
On the other side of the civil society equation sits some abstract form of “community” that is invited by the public-private partnership to collaborate. The public-private partnership selects the community or communities they want to rubber stamp their policies. The community has neither power, nor access to resources. Unlike their civil society “partners”, the community can’t force anyone to do anything.
The parameters of the alleged debate are set before the community joins and it will only be allowed to select from whatever “solutions” are put in front of it. All of this fulfills the immediate objectives of the G3P.
At the same time, this allows the G3P to address an issue that has plagued it for years: the democratic deficit or the public’s loss of trust in the institutions of government.
Within the G3P, governments don’t necessarily devise policy. Instead, their primary role is to market the policy and then enforce it.
Governments also provide the enabling environment for G3P policy agendas. They provide this environment both in terms of investment, via the taxpayer, and perhaps more importantly because the population is more likely to accept the rule of an allegedly democratic government rather than a dictatorship composed of a network of global corporations, NGOs and philanthropic foundations.
Consequently, a democratic deficit that erodes that trust is a problem. If you want to convert your policy agenda into legislation and regulation that impacts people’s lives, then you need to make them believe they still have some way of holding decision makers to account. Otherwise, they might resist your undemocratic rule.
The communitarian model of civil society is a gift for the G3P. Not only can they use it to continue maintaining the illusion of democracy, they can exploit claimed engagement with the community and build trust. Building trust is a current, major goal fo the G3P. For example, a “Crucial Year to Rebuild Trust” was the central theme of the 2021 Davos summit, hosted largely virtually by the WEF, and their planned theme for 2022 is “Working Together, Restoring Trust.”
Our continued “trust” in their institutions is vital for the G3P and the stability of their rule. The constant reference to civil society is intended to convince us that we too are stakeholders in the G3P’s multistakeholder platform. In reality, we aren’t. This is a deceit.
Instead, we are the subjects of the predetermined policy agendas that civil society will be invited to approve on our behalf. If we question the selected representative civil society groups, their communitarian beliefs or their assumed right to speak for us, we will be castigated as “bad citizens.”
Being in a community of like-minded souls, with whom we feel a bond, is nice but such a community has no chance against against a committed “interest group.” Such groups have a shared goal and often the will and the resources to attain it. Throughout history, communities have been ruthlessly oppressed by such “interest groups.”
Interest groups’ big advantage is that their members don’t have to feel any affection for each other or even agree on anything other than their objective. Its constituent members simply need to settle their purpose and they do so because each recognises how it benefits them. They are committed to the cause, not to each other.
In the case of the G3P, their cause is the creation and control of new markets and, in doing so, the establishment of a new global economic model. Civil society has helped to set this process in motion.
One of the G3P objectives is the global roll-out of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). This offers the G3P the ability to individually monitor and control every financial transaction on Earth. We have every reason to fiercely oppose its introduction. It represents nothing less than absolute economic enslavement.
Yet, the civil society deception is being used to convince us that we are somehow stakeholders in its development. This will undoubtedly be exploited to persuade us to accept its imminent introduction.
The Bank of England (BoE), who claim they have yet to make a decisions on CBDC, has committed its CBDC Taskforce to “engage widely with stakeholders on the benefits, risks and practicalities.”
To this end, they have set up the CBDC Engagement Forum (EF). The BoE states that the EF will:
“Provide a forum to engage senior stakeholders and gather strategic input on all non-technology aspects of CBDC from a diverse cross-section of expertise and perspectives […] The EF will inform the Bank’s further exploration of the challenges and opportunities of potentially implementing CBDC […] Participation in the EF is at the invitation of the Bank and HMT (Her Majesty’s Treasury.) Members will be drawn from the relevant range of CBDC stakeholders: from financial institutions, to civil society groups, to merchants, business users and consumers.”
Given that the introduction of CBDC will radically transform all our lives, it would be good to know who the civil society groups are that will supposedly be representing the public interest. The BoE explains that representatives will be invited to join, following their application, from any of the following organisations:
“Organisation active in retail or the digital economy, a university, a trade or consumer representative body, a think-tank, a registered charity or non-government organisation.”
It is not clear how any of these hand-picked delegates will actually advocate in the public’s interest. However, the BoE assures us that they will:
“On an individual level, the EF will be representative of the gender and ethnic diversity of the UK population, and seek to incorporate members of different backgrounds to support diversity of thought.”
This is what the BoE call engaging widely with stakeholders. In many respects, it is the epitome of communitarian ideology.
The community (in this case, the British public) will be represented because the EF will reflect the right gender and ethnic balance. This is appropriate, but it is missing one vital aspect of diversity: Class.
Just like the utopian socialists who inspired Etzioni and other communitarian thinkers, the BoE does not think that economic power matters when it comes to defining civil society. As long as they tick the right diversity boxes, class is not an issue. However, when they decide to introduce CBDC, it is the working and middle class who will suffer most as a result.
This may not be the model of civil society that the communitarians intended, but it is the model that the rest of us are going to get. A powerful interest group, the G3P, has seized upon the opportunity of communitarianism to construct a form of fake democratic accountability that consolidates their power and authority.
In one sense, it does fix the democratic deficit. By cutting out the electorate, the “new normal” communitarian civil society effectively ends representative democracy.
When did parts of the left get so contemptuous of the principle of “bodily autonomy”? Answer: Just about the time they started fetishising vaccines as the only route out of the current pandemic.
Only two years ago most people understood “bodily autonomy” to be a fundamental, unquestionable human right. Now it is being treated as some kind of perverse libertarian luxury, as proof that the “deplorables” have been watching too much Tucker Carlson or that they have come to idealise the worst excesses of neoliberalism’s emphasis on the rights of the individual over the social good.
This is dangerous nonsense, as should be obvious if we step back and imagine what our world might look like had the principle of “bodily autonomy” not been established through centuries of struggle, just as were the right to vote and the right to health care.
Because without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be dragging virgins up high staircases so that they could be sacrificed to placate the sun gods. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still be treating black people like animals – chattel to be used and exploited so that a white landowning class could grow rich from their enforced labours. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have doctors experimenting on those who are “inferior” – Jews, Romanies, Communists, gays – so that “superior races” could benefit from the “research”. Without the principle of bodily autonomy, we might still have the right of men to rape their wives as one of the unwritten marital vows.
Many of these battles and others were won far more recently than most of us care to remember. I am old enough to recall listening in the car on the way to school to “serious” debates on BBC Radio 4 about whether it was justifiable for the courts to presume a husband’s right to rape his wife.
Arguments about whose bodily autonomy has primacy – a woman’s or the foetus she is carrying – are at the heart of ongoing and inflammatory abortion debates in the United States. And protection of bodily autonomy was the main reason why anyone with an ounce of moral fibre opposed the US torture regime that became normalised in the war on brown people known as the “war on terror”.
Bad faith
There is good reason why, in western societies, vaccination uptake is lowest among ethnic minorities. The clues are embedded in the three preceding paragraphs. Powerful nation-states, run by white elites for the benefit of white elites, have been trampling on the bodily autonomy of black and brown people for centuries – sometimes because those elites were indifferent to the harm they were causing, and sometimes because they professed to be helping these “inferior” peoples, such as in the “war on terror’s” promotion of neoliberal “democracy” as the grounds for invading countries whose oil we coveted.
The pretexts change but the bad faith is the same.
Based on their long histories of suffering at the hands of western, colonial states, black and brown communities have every reason to continue assuming bad faith. It is not solidarity, or protecting them, to ignore or trivialise their concerns and their alienation from state institutions. It is ugly arrogance. Contempt for their concerns will not make those concerns evaporate. It will reinforce them.
But, of course, there is also something arrogant about treating the concerns of ethnic minorities as exceptional, patronising them by according them some kind of special dispensation, as though they need indulging on the principle of bodily autonomy when the rest of us are mature enough to discard it.
The fact is each generation comes to understand that the priorities of its ancestors were misplaced. Each generation has a powerful elite, or a majority whose consent has been manufactured, that luxuriate in the false certainty that bodily autonomy can be safely sacrificed for a higher principle. Half a century ago the proponents of marital rape argued for protecting tradition and patriarchal values because they were supposedly the glue holding society together. With 50 years’ hindsight, we may see the current debates about vaccine mandates – and the completely unscientific corollary that the unvaccinated are unclean and plague carriers – in much the same light.
The swelling political consensus on vaccine mandates intentionally ignores the enormous spread of the virus after two years of pandemic and the consequent natural immunity of large sections of the population, irrespective of vaccination status. This same consensus obfuscates the fact that natural immunity is most likely to prove longer-lasting and more effective against any variants of Covid that continue to emerge. And the consensus distracts from the inconvenient fact that the short-lived efficacy of the current vaccines means everyone is potentially “unclean” and a plague carrier, as the new variant Omicron is underscoring only too clearly.
No solidarity
The truth is that where each of us stands on the political divide over bodily autonomy says less about how much we prioritise human rights, or the social good, or solidarity with the weak and powerless, and much more about other, far less objectively rational matters, such as:
how fearful we are personally about the effects of Covid on ourselves or our loved ones;
whether we think the plutocrats that run our societies have prioritised the social good over the desire for quick, profit-making technological fixes, and the appearance of strong leadership and decisive action;
how sure we are that science is taking precedence over the interests of pharmaceutical corporations whose profits are booming as our societies grow older and sicker, and whether we think these corporations have captured our regulatory authorities, including the World Health Organisation;
whether we think it helpful or dangerous to scapegoat an unvaccinated minority, blaming it for straining health services or for the failure to eradicate a virus that is, in reality, never going away;
and, especially in the left’s case, how reassured we are that non-western, official “enemy” governments, such as Cuba, China, Russia and Iran, have thrown most of their eggs into the vaccine basket too – and usually as enthusiastically as western societies.
It is possible, however, that the way our technological, materialist world has evolved, ruled by competitive elites in nation states vying for power, means there was always likely to be a single, global conception of how to end the pandemic: through a quick-fix, magic bullet of either a vaccine or a drug. The fact that nation states – the “good” and “bad” alike – are unlikely to think outside this particular box does not mean it is the only box available, or that this box must be the one all citizens are coerced into.
Basic human rights do not apply only in the good times. They can’t just be set aside in difficult times like a pandemic because those rights are a nuisance, or because some people refuse to do what we think is best for them. Those rights are fundamental to what it means to live in a free and open society. If we get rid of bodily autonomy while we deal with this virus, that principle will have to be fought for all over again – and in the context of hi-tech, surveillance states that are undoubtedly more powerful than any we have known before.
Coerced vaccination
It is wrong, however, to focus exclusively on bodily autonomy. The undermining of the right to bodily autonomy is slipping into an equally alarming undermining of the right to cognitive autonomy. In fact, these two kinds of autonomy cannot be readily disentangled. Because anyone who believes that people must be required to take a vaccine will soon be arguing that no one should be allowed to hear information that might make them more resistant to vaccination.
There is an essential problem about maintaining an open and honest debate during a time of pandemic, which anyone who is thinking critically about Covid and our responses to it must grapple with every time they put finger to keyboard. The discourse playing-field is far from level.
Those who demand vaccine mandates, and wish to jettison the principle of bodily autonomy as a “medical” inconvenience, can give full-throated voice to their arguments in the secure knowledge that only a few, isolated contrarians may occasionally dare to challenge them.
But when those who value the principle of bodily autonomy or who blanch at the idea of coerced vaccination wish to make their case, they must hold back. They must argue with one arm tied behind their backs – and not just because they are likely to be mobbed, particularly by the left, for trying to widen the range of arguments under consideration in what are essentially political and ethical debates masquerading as scientific ones.
Tonight I will oppose both compulsory vaccines for NHS staff, and the introduction of vaccine passports. Both measures are counterproductive and will create division when we need cooperation and unity.
Those questioning the manufactured consensus – a consensus that intentionally scapegoats the unvaccinated as disease carriers, a consensus that has once again upended social solidarity among the 99 per cent, a consensus that has been weaponised to shield the elites from proper scrutiny for their profiteering from the pandemic – must measure every word they say against the effect it may have on those listening.
Personal calculations
I place a high value on autonomy, of both the cognitive and physical varieties. I am against the state deciding for me what I and you are allowed to think and say, and I am against the state deciding what goes into my and your body without our consent (though I also recognise that I have little choice but to breathe polluted air, drink polluted water, and eat chemically altered food, all of which have damaged my and your immune systems and made us more susceptible to viruses like Covid).
But at the same time, unlike the vaccine mandate mob, I never forget that I am responsible for my words and that they have consequences, and potentially dangerous ones. There are a significant proportion of people who almost certainly need to be vaccinated, and probably regularly, to avoid being seriously harmed by exposure to the virus. Any responsible writer needs to weigh the effect of their words. I do not wish to be responsible for making one person who would benefit from a vaccine more hesitant to take it. I am particularly wary of playing God during a pandemic.
However, my reluctance to pontificate on a subject on which I have no expertise – vaccine safety – does not confer a licence on others to command the debate on other subjects about which they appear to know very little, such as medical and political ethics.
The fact is, however much some people would be best advised to take the vaccine, there is a recognised risk involved, even if we are not supposed to mention it. The long-term safety of the vaccines is unknown and cannot be known for several more years – and possibly for much longer, given the refusal of the drug regulators to release vaccine data for many more decades.
The vaccine technology is novel and its effects on the complex physiology of the human body and the individual vagaries of each of our immune systems will not be fully apparent for a long time. The decision to take a new type of vaccine in these circumstances is a calculation that each individual must weigh carefully for themselves, based on a body they know better than anyone else.
Pretending that there is no calculation – that everyone is the same, that the vaccines will react in the same manner on every person – is belied by the fact that the vaccines have had to be given emergency approval, and that there have been harsh disagreements even among experts about whether the calculation in favour of vaccination makes sense for everyone, especially for children. That calculation is further complicated by the fact that a significant section of the population now have a natural immunity to the whole virus and not just vaccine-induced immunity to the spike protein.
But stuffing everyone into a one-size-fits-all solution is exactly what bureaucratic, technocratic states are there to do. It is what they know best. To the state, you are I and just a figure on a pandemic spread-sheet. To think otherwise is childish delusion. Those who refuse to think of themselves as simply a spread-sheet digit – those who insist on their right to bodily and cognitive autonomy – should not be treated as narcissists for doing so or as a threat to public health, especially when the immunity provided by the vaccines is so short-lived, the vaccines themselves are highly leaky, and there is little understanding yet of the differences, or even potential conflicts, between natural and vaccine-induced immunity.
Perpetual emergency
Nonetheless, parts of the left are acting as if none of this is true, or even debatable. Instead they are proudly joining the mob, leading the self-righteous clamour to assert control not only over the bodies of others but over their minds too. This left angrily rejects all debate as a threat to the official “medical” consensus. They insist on conformity of opinion and then claim it as science, in denial of the fact that science is by its nature disputatious and evolves constantly. They cheer on censorship – by profit-driven social media corporations – even when it is recognised experts who are being silenced.
Their subtext is that any contrary opinion is a threat to the social order, and will fuel vaccine hesitancy. The demand is that we all become worshippers at the altars of Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, at the risk otherwise of being denounced as heretics, as “anti-vaxxers”. No middle ground can be allowed in this era of perpetual emergency.
This is not just disturbing ethically. It is disastrous politically. The state is already massively powerful against each of us as individuals. We have collective power only in so far as we show solidarity with each other. If the left conspires with the state against those who are weak, against black and brown communities whose main experiences of state institutions have been abusive, against the “deplorables”, we divide ourselves and make the weakest parts of our society even weaker.
Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn understood this when he was one of the few on the left to publicly resist the recent move by the UK government to legislate vaccine mandates. He rightly argued that the correct path is persuasion, not coercion.
But this kind of mix of reason and compassion is being drowned out on parts of the left. They justify violations of bodily and cognitive autonomy on the grounds that we are living in exceptional times, during a pandemic. They complacently argue that such violations will be temporary, required only until the virus is eradicated – even though the virus is now endemic and with us for good. They silently assent to the corporate media being given even greater censorship powers as the price we must pay to deal with vaccine hesitancy, on the assumption that we can reclaim the right to dissent later.
But these losses, in circumstances in which our rights and freedoms are already under unprecedented assault, will not be easily restored. Once social media can erase you or me from the public square for stating real-world facts that are politically and commercially inconvenient – such as Twitter’s ban on anyone pointing out that the vaccinated can spread the virus too – there will be no going back.
Political instincts
There is a further reason, however, why the left is being deeply foolish in turning on the unvaccinated and treating the principles of bodily and cognitive autonomy with such contempt. Because this approach sends a message to black and brown communities, and to the “deplorables”, that the left is elitist, that its talk of solidarity is hollow, and that it is only the right, not the left, that is willing to fight to protect the most intimate freedoms we enjoy – over our bodies and minds.
Every time the left shouts down those who are hesitant about taking a Covid vaccine; every time it echoes the authoritarianism of those who demand mandates, chiefly for low-paid workers; every time it refuses to engage with – or even allow – counter-arguments, it abandons the political battlefield to the right.
Through its behaviour, the shrill left confirms the right’s claims that the political instincts of the left are Stalinist, that the left will always back the might of an all-powerful state against the concerns of ordinary people, that the left sees only the faceless masses, who need to be herded towards bureaucratically convenient solutions, rather than individuals who need to be listened to as they grapple with their own particular dilemmas and beliefs.
The fact is that you can favour vaccines, you can be vaccinated yourself, you can even desire that everyone regularly takes a Covid vaccine, and still think that bodily and cognitive autonomy are vitally important principles – principles to be valued even more than vaccines. You can be a cheerleader for vaccination and still march against vaccine mandates.
Some on the left behave as if these are entirely incompatible positions, or as if they are proof of hypocrisy and bad faith. But what this kind of left is really exposing is their own inability to think in politically complex ways, their own difficulty remembering that principles are more important than quick-fixes, however frightening the circumstances, and that the debates about how we organise our societies are inherently political, much more so than technocratic or “medical”.
The right understands that there is a political calculus in handling the pandemic that cannot be discarded except at a grave political cost. Part of the left has a much weaker grasp of this point. Its censoriousness, its arrogance, its hectoring tone – all given cover by claims to be following a “science” that keeps changing – are predictably alienating those the left claims to represent.
The left needs to start insisting again on the critical importance of bodily and cognitive autonomy – and to stop shooting itself in the foot.
In a stunning 46-page legal filing to the International Criminal Court on December 6, an intrepid attorney and seven applicants accused Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Melinda Gates, William Gates III, and twelve others of numerous violations of the Nuremberg Code. These included various crimes against humanity and war crimes as defined by the Rome Statutes, Articles 6, 7, 8, 15, 21, and 53.
Besides the four kingpins, twelve others were named, including the CEOs of the leading vaccine corporations and the health leaders held accountable for the United Kingdom.
Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer
Stephane Bancel, CEO of AstraZeneca
Pascal Soriot, CEO of Moderna
Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson and Johnson
Tedros Adhanhom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the WHO
Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister
Christopher Whitty, UK Chief Medical Adviser
Matthew Hancock, former UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
Sajid Javid, current UK Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
June Raine, UK Chief Executive of Medicines and Healthcare products
Dr. Ravid Shah, President of the Rockefeller Foundation
Klaus Schwab, President of the World Economic Forum
Dr. Ravid Shah, having worked for the Gates Foundation since 2001, was named a World Economic Forum “Young Global Leader” in 2007. He now presides over the Rockefeller Foundation, a group funding ID2020 along with the Gates Foundation.
Klaus Schwab, a wickedly intelligent, perhaps diabolical German with double doctorate degrees in Economics and Engineering, is the founder of the World Economic Forum, a club for the wealthiest percentile of the world’s corporate and political elite. He is a power broker who has groomed many presidents, prime ministers, and tech CEOs who now view him with reverence and unswerving loyalty.
Schwab, an economist, and technocrat has befriended many nations, most significantly China’s Xi Jinping, who delivered a key speech at Davos. He praised his vision of a New World Order. On January 25, 2021, Klaus Schwab vowed his support for Xi Jinping with these words, “Mr. President (Xi Jinping) I believe this is the best time to reset our policies and to work, jointly, for a peaceful and prosperous world. We all welcome now, his excellency, Xi Jinping, President of the People’s Republic of China.” See mark 2:26.
Many consider Schwab the mastermind behind the current movement towards cryptocurrency, universal identification, and a one-world (fascist) government to be run jointly, in totalitarian fashion, with China.
Attorney Hannah Rose and seven applicants brought the Nuremberg action on behalf of the victims, the entire population of the United Kingdom. She filed the legal proceeding with the International Criminal Court located at The Hague. The Hague is notable for its long history in helping victims seek redress for war crimes and defining appropriate ethical guidelines for conduct during war.
Following the Nazi atrocities committed during World War II, the war crime trials were held in Nuremberg, Germany. Following these, a set of principles was developed, which ultimately led to the development of the Nuremberg Code.
These principles essentially meant that anyone, no matter how wealthy or powerful, even a head of state, was not above the law. The fact that the law of their home nation would permit their action would not relieve the person from justice under international law.
In particular, the medical experiments conducted by the Nazi doctors led to strict rules and ethical principles regarding future human scientific trials, including the doctrine of necessary informed consent and freedom from coercion or threat in submitting to experimental drugs.
As we all know, before receiving a surgical procedure, there is a legal and ethical requirement that the patient be apprised of any significant potential risks, including infection, bleeding, nerve damage, or even death. The patient usually signs the consent form following this explanation. And as we all know, whenever we receive prescription medication, we are notified of the potential risks on a package insert and usually a discussion with the Pharmacist.
The vaccines should be no different, yet they are. A person about to receive the jab is rarely told that there are risks of blood clots, bleeding, cerebral thrombosis, myocarditis, and death, yet those risks exist. See mark 12:58 to 17:40.
Attorney Hannah Rose notes in Point 40 of her brief that the ethical standards of the Nuremberg Code amount to an obligation on physicians and pharmaceutical manufacturers to abide by its principles. Accordingly, any physician or research scientist found to have breached any of the ten principles of the Nuremberg Code would face criminal liability.
She notes in Point 42, “The first principle of the Nuremberg Code is a willingness and informed consent by the person to receive treatment and participate in an experiment. The person is supposed to activate freedom of choice without the intervention, either through force, deceit, fraud, threat, solicitation, or any other type of binding or coercion.”
In Point 43 she argues, “When the heads of the Ministry of Health as well as the Prime Minister presented the vaccine in the United Kingdom and began the vaccination of United Kingdom residents, the vaccinated were not advised, that in practice, they would be taking part in a medical experiment and that their consent is required under the Nuremberg Code. This as a matter of fact is a genetic medical experiment on human beings performed without informed consent under a severe and blatant offense of the Nuremberg Code.”
In addition, Rose argues under Point 44 that there is an obligation for alternative treatments to be discussed, including the risks and benefits of such alternatives. She notes that these were never discussed despite the fact alternative treatments have been proven to be safe and effective “with up to a 100% success rate.”
A key principle of the Nuremberg Code requires that a scientist must be prepared to terminate the experiment at any stage, if he has probable cause to believe, in the exercise of the good faith, superior skill, and careful judgment required of him that a continuation of the experiment is likely to result in injury, disability, or death to the experimental subject.
In Point 46, she argues, “It is known that the mRNA ‘vaccination’ treatments have caused the death of many as well as injury and severe damage (including disablement and paralysis) after the ‘vaccine’ was administered. Despite this fact, the government did not instruct the initiation of an investigation into the matter. It is also questionable that given the experimental nature of these vaccinations, that there are not any full reports available of the numbers of dead or injured, as may be expected in such a medical process for the benefit of the public participating in the experiment.”
The reader is reminded that Nazi physicians conducted experiments on human beings in concentration camps without informed consent, leading to horrific suffering and death.
To dramatically underscore the relevance of Nuremberg to the horrific deaths we now see related to the experimental mRNA ‘vaccination’ program, Rose, in Point 34a, included a statement from a group of Holocaust survivors, those who experienced first-hand both the Nazi experiments and today the vaccine experiment. This is an excerpt from their unique perspective:
We, the survivors of the atrocities committed against humanity during the Second World War, feel bound to follow our conscience…Another holocaust of greater magnitude is taking place before our eyes. We call upon you to stop this ungodly medical experiment on humankind immediately. It is a medical experiment to which the Nuremberg Code must be applied.
Holocaust survivor Vera Sharav issued a statement in Points 34b and 34c:
The stark lesson of the Holocaust is that whenever doctors join forces with government and deviate from their personal, professional, clinical commitment to do no harm to the individual, medicine can then be perverted from a healing, humanitarian profession to a murderous apparatus…What sets the Holocaust apart from all other mass genocides is the pivotal role played by the medical establishment, the entire medical establishment. Every step of the murderous process was endorsed by the academic, professional medical establishment.
As a direct result of the Nuremberg World War II experience, the United Nations asked the International Law Commission to develop the Nuremberg Principles, the key standards to avoid the Nazi doctors’ atrocities. Unfortunately, as Hannah Rose pointed out, many of these ten principles of the Nuremberg Code were systematically violated by the United Kingdom and many other countries during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In addition, a permanent international criminal court was established for investigation and enforcement – known as The International Criminal Court. The ICC began full-time operations in 2002 and currently has 123 member nations that have explicitly agreed to be bound by the Rome Statutes.
The United Kingdom is a member while the United States is not. However, under article 12(3) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, even a state that is NOT a member may exercise jurisdiction “by declaration lodged with the Registrar,” meaning that any nation may be subject to the ICC depending upon the circumstances, member nation or not. Keep in mind that Nazi Germany had not consented to jurisdiction.
The ICC bills itself as a “court of last resort” meaning that claims should be decided in the perpetrator’s home nation whenever possible. However, the core principle of impunity drives the ICC, the belief that no one who commits war crimes should enjoy freedom from criminal responsibility. Therefore, the ICC operates as an impartial and omnipotent arbiter of world human rights and will aggressively step in when it sees flagrant Nuremberg-type atrocities without consequence.
That is precisely what Hannah Rose has identified in her legal brief in Point 2,
“We have tried to raise this case through the English police and the English Court system without success, we have been unable even to get the case registered either with the police or with the court after several attempts…This is such a case which is why we are addressing the ICC directly.”
Attorney Rose relied partly upon the expertise of Dr. Michael Yeadon, a research-based PhD in respiratory pharmacology and former Vice President and Chief Scientist at Pfizer.
In the background section of the brief, she writes in Point 5:
“The Covid-19 ‘vaccines’ do not meet the requirement to be categorized as vaccines and are in fact gene therapy (Appendix 8)…Dr. Mike Yeadon, a joint applicant on this request, asserts that claims calling the Covid-19 injections a ‘vaccine’ is public manipulation and misrepresentation of clinical treatment.
It’s not a vaccination. It’s not prohibiting infection. It’s not a prohibiting transmission device. It’s a means by which your body is conscripted to make the toxin that then allegedly your body somehow gets used to dealing with it, but unlike a vaccine, which is to trigger the immune response, this is to trigger the creation of the toxin.’
MRNA uses the cell’s machinery to synthesize proteins that are supposed to resemble the SPIKE protein of the virus, which is what it uses to enter cells via the ACE2 receptor. These proteins are then identified by the immune system, which builds antibodies against them. The real concern is that these proteins could accumulate in the body, especially in regions of high concentration of ACE2 receptors, such as the gonads. If the immune system then attacks the location where they accumulate, then you could be dealing with an auto-immune condition.”
Dr. Yeadon mentions, in an interview, that our governments have grossly exaggerated the entire threat of COVID-19. He notes that COVID-19 represents a slightly greater risk than influenza if you are older than age 70 but a much lower risk than the seasonal flu if you are younger. See mark 31:00.
“So it’s just absurd that you should be happy or willing to let your economy and civil society be smashed for something which represents for almost everyone working a lower risk than influenza – but that’s true.
Given this virus represents at worst a slightly bigger risk to the old and ill than does influenza, and a less risk than for almost everyone else who’s younger and fit, it was NEVER NECESSARY for us to have done anything.
We didn’t need to do anything, lockdowns, masks, mass testing, vaccines – there are multiple therapeutic drugs that are at least as effective as vaccines are…an off-patent drug called Ivermectin, one of the most widely used drugs in the world, is also able to reduce symptoms at any stage of the disease including lethality by about 90%.
So you don’t need vaccines and you don’t need any of the measures that have been introduced at all.” See mark 31:15.
For any reader still under the illusion that these mRNA covid vaccines have helped, please read the following article comparing the countries without vaccination to those with it. The most vaccinated nations have deaths per million up to 100 x greater than the least. Always question what the government tells you.
Yeadon goes on to explain that people need not worry about variants. He explains that our immune system is easily able to deal with ALL mutations of SARS-CoV-2 and explains that 18 years after the first SARS, those people are still protected by their immunity – and this immunity even extends to immunity against SARS-CoV-2, a virus 80% similar but 20% different than the original SARS.
Yeadon’s major point is that if survivors of SARS some 18 years later have immunity against the new virus, which is 20% different, why would we believe that a current viral mutant only 0.3% different would be a threat? See mark 35:40.
“So when your government scientists say that a variant that’s 0.3% different from SARS could masquerade as a new virus and be a threat to your health, you should know, and I’m telling you, THEY ARE LYING. If they’re lying and they are, why is the pharmaceutical industry making top-up vaccines? They are making them.” See mark 35:55
“You should be terrified at this point. I am, because there is absolutely no possible justification for their manufacture. But they’re being made, and the world’s medicine regulators have said…we won’t be asking them to do any clinical safety studies. Let me just say again, the variants are not different enough to represent a threat to you so you do not need top-up vaccines…
The regulators have waved them through. I’m very frightened of that – there’s no possible benign interpretation of this. I believe they are going to be used to damage your health and possibly kill you. Seriously. I can see no sensible interpretation other than a serious attempt at mass depopulation.
This will provide the tools to do it and plausible deniability – because they will create another story about some sort of biological threat, you’ll line up and get your top-up vaccines, and a few months or a year or so later, you’ll die of some peculiar, inexplicable syndrome, and they won’t be able to associate it with the top-up vaccines.” See mark 36:05 to 37:15.
Yeadon follows this up with his conclusion, “This system (mandatory vaccine passports) is being put in place using lies, and it’s being put in place for some purpose, and I believe that purpose is complete totalitarian control, and I think the purpose of that is going to be mass depopulation.” See mark 45:40.
“Do not allow it to be an interoperable global fixed-format database because that will be the end of human freedom, and I see no way of recovering from that once the system’s up and running.” See mark 46:30
Yeadon explained that few people will hear his words and that this fraud was perpetrated on the world’s population through censorship, fear and propaganda. Dr. Yeadon, an insightful man, notes that the perpetrators have exhaustively planned this all, and they have considered how people might respond. Yeadon notes that if we all respond as expected, we will lose.
“Collectively, we need to do something unexpected.” See mark 48:43.
However, it is likely they didn’t plan on the International Criminal Court coming after them. They also didn’t plan on Dr. Reiner Fuellmich, an experienced trial lawyer licensed in Germany and California who founded the Berlin Corona Committee, which heads a group of attorneys with global reach dedicated to dragging this deadly conspiracy into the open and suing it into oblivion.
Fuellmich does an excellent job in this interview of exposing the actions of Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum, WEF, also known as Davos. The WEF has as its goal the establishment of a New World Order, with the globe to be run by self-selected technocrats like Bill Gates, himself, and other members of Davos.
In 1971 Schwab founded what was to become the WEF in 1987. It has 1,000 members. In general, qualification requires a business to have more than 5 billion dollars per year in revenue. The theme of WEF and Klaus Schwab has recently been “The Great Reset,” which essentially means a new world order. In the following video, Klaus Schwab can be heard discussing this with Henry Kissinger. We hear Dr. Kissinger praising China’s Xi Jinping’s speech and the formation of a new international order. See mark 2:50 to 4:00.
Schwab himself sums up the 2017 Davos Meeting with the following statement, “What a wonderful opportunity to conclude our week here with such concrete proposals and ideas of how we can really create a New World Order.” See mark 26:40.
Professor Andreas Oehler aptly describes the agenda of Schwab and the WEF, “The World Economic Forum seems to be the driver behind and organizer of the global population control operations, be it pandemics, biometric IDs, Great Reset, or public-private partnerships in name of the “common good” (fascist corporatism).” See the following article, “The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse identified, along with the Apocalypse itself.”
Professor Oehler of the University of Bamberg is widely published in credit, banking, finance, and investor protection. He believes that Klaus Schwab and his WEF members, including Bill Gates, planned the COVID-19 pandemic by sponsoring Event 201, a coronavirus pandemic simulation exercise held in New York City on October 18, 2019. WEF has been a proponent of digital biometric identity systems to make societies “more efficient and productive” (and easier to control).
Oehler wrote, “WEF collaborates with the ID2020 alliance, funded by the Gates and Rockefeller foundations to run a program to ‘provide digital ID with vaccines.’ In particular, ID2020 sees the vaccination of children as ‘an entry point for digital identity.’ In reality, this means that anything a person does or is allowed to do (employment, travel, commerce, health care…) will be linked to the person’s digital ID. This will remove any privacy and take total control over each and every activity of any individual on earth.”
For readers who may doubt this, read Klaus Schwab’s book, The Great Reset. One of his chief goals is to have perfect monitoring ability of every human being and to be able to regulate all behavior, even to the point of complete totalitarian control.
The WEF sees times of great turmoil or catastrophes as ideal opportunities to implement this reset, such as during the financial crisis of 2008, and now the COVID-19 pandemic, which Dr. Reiner Fuellmich feels created a perfect opportunity for the WEF to execute its plan. Fuellmich, a world-renowned trial attorney, refers to Schwab and his henchmen collectively as “Mr. Global.”
“Klaus Schwab spells this out in his book, The Great Reset, and demands… a World Government under the UN, which has been brought under control by the WEF. This is to be achieved by creating as much worldwide chaos as possible in the form of pandemics, wars including civil wars and natural disasters so that the world population becomes convinced that the national governments are overwhelmed, and only a world government can help.
At the same time, Schwab calls for the shifting of all wealth to Mr. Global so that in 2030, no one, except Mr. Global, will still own anything, and we will supposedly be happy with that. Cash is to be abolished and replaced by a digital currency. This will be allocated to or taken away from every person in the world who can then also be found anywhere and at any time by various tracking systems. This is to be done by a single central world bank.” See mark 32:45 to 33:56.
Fuellmich and Oehler both describe a series of puppets that the WEF has trained to help carry out these missions under the WEF “Young Global Leader” program, which started in 1993. Such people have gone on to become Presidents, Prime Ministers, and CEOs. These include some of the key players in this pandemic and vaccination effort:
Microsoft founder Bill Gates (1993)
California Governor Gavin Newsom (selected in 2005)
Pete Buttigieg (selected in 2019, candidate for US President in 2020, US secretary of transportation since 2021)
Stéphane Bancel (Moderna CEO; selected in 2009)
Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (2009)
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg (2007)
Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page (2002/2005)
Covid Twitter personality Eric Feigl-Ding (a ‘WEF Global Shaper‘ since 2013)
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern (since 2017, selected in 2014)
Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt (selected in 2003; former WEF strategy director)
Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland (selected in 2001; former managing director of Reuters)
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a WEF participant but is not a confirmed Young Global Leader
German Chancellor Angela Merkel (selected in 1993, 12 years before becoming Chancellor)
Current German Health Minister Jens Spahn and former Health Ministers Philipp Roesler and Daniel Bahr
EU Commission Presidents Jose Manuel Barroso (2004-2014, selected in 1993) and Jean-Claude Juncker (2014-2019, selected in 1995)
French President Emanuel Macron (since 2017, selected in 2016),
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012, selected in 1993),
Austrian Chancellor Sebastian Kurz
Former Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi (2014-2016, selected in 2012),
Former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar (1996-2004, selected in 1993)
Dr. Ravid Shah, President of the Rockefeller Foundation
When we notice the harsh authoritarian and mandatory lockdowns of Australia, Austria, and Canada, perhaps it begins to make better sense when we factor in the names of those in the WEF Young Global Leadership program. See mark 34:25 to 34:58.
Now, against our seemingly hopeless situation, Reiner Fuellmich gives us all every reason to be optimistic:
“Against this background, which increasingly more people are recognizing, very large legal disputes have been set in motion in India, South Africa, the US, Canada, and France. Their goal is to hold those responsible accountable under both civil and criminal law. This also includes that the assets that have been taken away by Mr. Global from the world’s population…are returned…In particular, Anglo-American Law with its powerful tools of class action, pre-trial discovery, punitive damages…provides the tools for very effective justice.” See mark 35:00.
Reiner mentions that he has developed very good evidence that the PCR test was fraudulently used to grossly exaggerate the number of true COVID cases and the courts in Portugal, Austria and Germany, have set excellent precedents in their rulings to that effect.
Fuellmich concludes, “The Berlin Corona Committee already now has extremely incriminating evidence proving that this Corona ‘plandemic’ NEVER had anything to do with health; rather Mr. Global’s actions are aimed solely at these goals:
#1. Destruction of regional economies to make the population dependent on Mr. Global’s global supply chains.
#2. Shifting the wealth of the world’s populations from the bottom to the top – to the super-rich – to Mr. Global.
#3. Population reduction – you can call it genocide.
#4. The installation of a World Government under the UN which is now under the control of the WEF.” See mark 36:13 to 36:56.
He reminds us that we are dealing with megalomaniacs and sociopaths, those who lack a conscience. Fuellmich reminds us that while the mainstream media may censor, hundreds of thousands of people hear the message anyway; they are taking to the streets in protest in England, Germany, Australia, Brazil, etc. Civil servants, medical doctors, lawyers, politicians, nurses, and police officers are refusing the jab.
Key elements include those of compassion and spirituality, as this has indeed become an epic struggle between right versus wrong. Reiner tells the story of a doctor who walked into a bank and was accosted by a person afraid because he was not wearing a mask. He hugged the individual who began to weep because they had not been held in more than a year. Fuellmich reminds us that we can all laugh, cry, and feel while they (the sociopaths) cannot.
Attorney Rose, now a heroic icon, asked the ICC to take immediate action by way of legal injunction in Points 128 and 153:
It is of the utmost urgency, that ICC take immediate action, taking all of this into account, to stop the rollout of covid vaccinations, introduction of unlawful vaccination passports and all other types of illegal warfare mentioned herein currently being waged against the people of the United Kingdom by way of a court injunction.
In closing, Reiner Fuellmich asked us to remember spirituality. We must celebrate our humanity. Like those in the Nazi concentration camps, who remembered to sing and praise God in the face of the most extreme adversity, we too must cling to our roots in religion and love for one another.
Fuellmich is confident that we will prevail. See mark 38:40.
That’s what this is all about, humanity versus inhumanity. We are human. We can laugh, cry, sing, dance and hug. The other side, Mr. Global and his puppets can’t do that. They can only fake feelings and have no empathy at all. This is because the other side has no access to the spiritual side. The US Constitution starts with the words, ‘We the People.’ And when the wall came down between East and West Berlin, 33 years ago, it was the East German people chanting – We the people – that brought it down. Mr. Global’s house of cards will come crashing down the very same way. Without a doubt in my mind, Mr. Global and his puppets will lose this war of good against evil – they will lose their insane war against life and creation itself. There is no other way.
After hearing him speak, I am confident as well. Dr. Pierre Kory once told me, “This situation seems backward. The doctors were the corrupt people who caused this mess, but the lawyers are those with ethics who will save us.”
Pierre Kory, as usual, is correct. Someday, today’s youth will become senior citizens. They will remind their society of today’s Nuremberg II trials, and how they helped stop the largest con job ever perpetrated on the world. It is time to end the lockdowns, the vaccination mandates, the censorship, and the propaganda.
The media will resume reporting real news and cease fear-mongering. Then, journalists will return to what they do best – proper investigative reporting. And the International Criminal Court will most assuredly continue what it does best – bringing cold-blooded mass murderers to justice.
Dr. Justus R. Hope, writer’s pseudonym, graduated summa cum laude from Wabash College where he was named a Lilly Scholar. He attended Baylor College of Medicine where he was awarded the M.D. degree. He completed a residency in Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation at The University of California Irvine Medical Center. He is board-certified and has taught at The University of California Davis Medical Center in the departments of Family Practice and Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. He has practiced medicine for over 35 years and maintains a private practice in Northern California.
Long cycles operate at such a glacial pace they’re easily dismissed as either figments of fevered imagination or this time it’s different.
But since Nature and human nature remain stubbornly grounded by the same old dynamics, cycles eventually turn and the world changes dramatically. Nobody thinks the cyclical turn is possible until it’s already well underway.
Multiple long cycles are turning in unison:
1. The cycle of interest rates: down for 40+ years (last turn, 1981), now up for an unknown but consequential period of time.
2. The cycle of inflation / deflation: the 40-year period of low real-world inflation and rip-roaring speculative debt-asset inflation has ended and now an era of scarcity, real-world inflation and speculative debt-asset deflation begins.
3. The cycle of capital-labor balance: capital has dominated labor for 40+ years, siphoning $50 trillion from labor. This cycle has now turned and the rebalancing is underway: it’s capital’s turn to surrender gains and power.
4. The cycle of social order-disorder: as documented by historian Peter Turchin and others, social order (in Turchin’s phrase, the integrative phase) holds sway for about 50 years and then it gives way to an era of social disorder (the disintegrative phase). This phase doesn’t end with mild reforms nobody even notices, it ends with a rebalancing of social, political and economic power.
5. The cycle of wealth/power inequality: wealth–and the political power it buys–becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. This feeds economic and political dysfunction and exploitation that must be remedied by reducing extremes of wealth-power inequality.
6. The cycle of speculative excess: those in power protect their wealth and the wealth of their cronies by instituting moral hazard, the disconnect of risk and consequence: the central state and central bank backstop and bail out the most egregious big speculators, who keep all their gains and transfer their losses to the public.
The public concludes the only way to get ahead in such a rigged financial system is to belly up to the gaming tables and gamble that the next bubble will never pop because those in power won’t ever let it pop.
But alas, humans do not possess god-like powers, they only possess hubris, and so all bubbles pop: the more extreme the bubble, the more devastating the pop. The faint cries that fade to silence are: but this time it’s different! and the Fed will save us! That’s not how cycles work: all the god-like powers are revealed as hubris, which arouses the fatal ire of Nemesis.
“This is really a technology designed to poison people, there’s really no two-ways about it.” Dr. Michael Palmer on mRNA vaccines
***
Question– Does the Covid-19 vaccine cause heart attacks?
Answer– It does, and researchers are closer to understanding the mechanism that triggers those events.
Question– How can I be sure you’re telling the truth?
Answer– Well, for starters, there’s a research paper that appeared recently in the prestigious Circulation magazine that draws the same conclusion. Here’s an excerpt from the paper:
It’s actually quite rare for researchers to be so blunt in their analysis, but there it is in black and white. As you can see, they didn’t pull their punches. Here’s how Alex Berenson summed it up on his blogsite at Substack:
“A new study of 566 patients who received either the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines shows that signs of cardiovascular damage soared following the shots. The risk of heart attacks or other severe coronary problems more than doubled months after the vaccines were administered, based on changes in markers of inflammation and other cell damage. Patients had a 1 in 4 risk for severe problems after the vaccines, compared to 1 in 9 before. (“If you like heart problems, you’ll love the Pfizer and Moderna Covid vaccines”, Alex Berenson, Substack)
“Doubled”? “The risk of heart attacks.. more than doubled” after vaccination?
Apparently, so. No wonder cardiologist Dr. Aseem Malhotra is so flabbergasted. Here’s what he said in a recent interview:
“Extraordinary, disturbing and upsetting. We now have evidence of a plausible biological mechanism of how mRNA vaccine may be contributing to increased cardiac events. The abstract is published in the highest impact cardiology journal so we must take these findings very seriously.”
Indeed, we must, but our public health experts continue to pretend that nothing has changed, even though more and more professionals continue to speak out. Here’s Malhotra again:
“I have alot of interaction with the cardiology community across the UK, and anecdotally, I have been told by colleagues that they are seeing younger and younger people coming in with heart attacks…. Now since July, there’s been at least 10,000 non-covid deaths, and most of those have been driven by circulatory disease, in other words, heart attack and stroke. And there’s been a 30% increase in deaths at home, often because of cardiac arrest…. (So) The signal is quite strong… This needs to be investigated… And I think it is high-time that policymakers around the world put an end to the mandates, because –if this signal is correct– then history will not be on their side and the public will not forgive them for it.”
Shocking, right? And what’s more shocking is the media’s response which is aimed at concealing the fact that these toxic injections pose a clear threat to the lives of millions. Is that overstating the case?
No, not at all.
So, what conclusions can we draw from this new research? What is the science telling us?
It’s telling us that the vaccine can reduce the flow of blood to the heart, damage heart tissue, and greatly increase the risk of a heart attack. The authors are telling readers point-blank that the vaccine can either kill or severely injure them. Can you see that?
Question– I can’t say. I haven’t read the report.
Answer– No, you haven’t, and you probably won’t either since the big news organizations and social media giants are going to make sure it never sees the light of day. But just read that one paragraph over again and try to grasp what the authors are saying. They’re saying that many people who choose to get vaccinated will either die or have years shaved off their lives. And–remember–this isn’t an opinion piece. It’s science. It’s also a straightforward repudiation of a mass vaccination campaign that is demonstrably killing people.
Question– You always exaggerate. This is just one report from one group of researchers. I could easily provide you with research that refutes your theory.
Answer– I’m sure you could, in fact there’s a small army of industry-employed propagandists (aka– “fact checkers”) who spend all their waking hours cobbling together fake news stories that do just that; discredit the science that veers even slightly from the official narrative. The truth is, the pro-vaxx disinformation campaign has been vastly more effective than the vaccine itself. I don’t think even you’d disagree with that.
Question– I do disagree with that, and I resent your characterization of the widespread support for these essential procedures as “pro-vaxx disinformation”. That is an extremely biased and ignorant statement.
Answer– Is it? In the last few weeks, we’ve produced hard evidence that a great many people who died after vaccination, died from the vaccination. We showed, for example, that two German pathology professors, Arne Burkhardt and Walter Lang, found that in five of the ten autopsies, “the two physicians rate the connection between death and vaccination as very probable, in two cases as probable.” These same doctors found that “lymphocytic myocarditis, the most common diagnosis.…(along with) autoimmune phenomena, reduction in immune capacity, acceleration of cancer growth, vascular damage “endothelitis”, vasculitis, perivasculitis and erythrocyte “clumping”.. In other words, the whole ‘dog’s breakfast’ of maladies that have been linked to the “poison-death shot”. (See full report here; “Lymphocyte riot’: Pathologists investigate deaths after Corona vaccination”, Free West Media)
These same pathologists found evidence of a “lymphocyte riot”, potentially in all tissues and organs. (Note– Lymphocytes are white blood cells in the immune system that swing into action to fight invaders or pathogen-infected cells. A “lymphocyte riot” suggests the immune system has gone crazy trying to counter the effects of billions of spike proteins located in cells in the bloodstream. As the lymphocytes are depleted, the body grows more susceptible to other infections which may explain why a large number of people are now contracting respiratory viruses in late summer.)
The autopsies provide hard evidence that the vaccines do, in fact, cause significant tissue damage. So, my question to you is this: How do you brush aside the rock-solid proof that the vaccines inflict significant injury on people who get injected? Do you need to examine the maligned corpses yourself before you change your mind and admit you’re wrong?
Question– Nothing can be deduced from just 10 autopsies. More than a billion people have been vaccinated so far, and the deaths are still within an acceptable range given the severity of the disease.
Answer– “The severity of the disease”? You mean a virus that is survived by over 99.98% of the people who catch it? You mean an infection that –according to the latest figures from Johns Hopkins– killed 351,000 in the US in 2020 which is roughly half the number of people who die from heart disease every year? And when you say: “Nothing can be deduced from just 10 autopsies”, you are very much mistaken. You can detect a pattern of vaccine-generated disease that is produced by the injection of a toxic substance (spike protein) that causes bleeding, clotting and autoimmunity even in the people who survive. “Survival” does not mean undamaged. Oh, no. And anyone who has seen the many videos of healthy athletes dropping dead on the field of play months after being jabbed, should understand that “There go I but for the grace of God.” Bottom line: If you get injected, you’re never going to know whether you’ll be struck-down without warning by a similar cardio-type event. (See: “At least 69 athletes collapse in one month, many dead”, freewestmedia.com)Lethal Injection; Frontline E.R. Doctor Gives Chilling Account of Unusual Vaccine-Induced Illness
Do you think that if these athletes knew they could die from the vaccine, they would have made the choice they did?
Question– You’re being overly dramatic. Naturally, not everyone is going to react the same to an emergency-use drug, but– on balance– the vaccines have mitigated the impact of a deadly pandemic the likes of which we haven’t seen for more than a century.
Answer– You really believe that, don’t you? Just like you really believe that Covid-19 is a totally unique and “novel” virus. If you just researched it a bit, you’d know that that theory has been thoroughly debunked. The Coronavirus isn’t new; it is an iteration of numerous other infections that have spread through the population for a least 2 decades. Take a look at this except from a research paper by the Doctors for Covid Ethics and you’ll see what I’m talking about:
“Several studies have demonstrated that circulating SARS-CoV-2-specific IgG and IgA antibodies became detectable within 1-2 weeks after application of mRNA vaccines... Rapid production of IgG and IgA always indicates a secondary, memory-type response that is elicited through re-stimulation of pre-existing immune cells…. Importantly, however, IgG rose faster than IgM, which confirms that the early IgG response was indeed of the memory type. This memory response indicates pre-existing, cross-reactive immunity due to previous infectionwith ordinary respiratory human coronavirus strains….
Memory-type responses have also been documented with respect to T-cell-mediated immunity. Overall, these findings indicate that our immune system efficiently recognizes SARS-CoV-2 as “known” even on first contact. Severe cases of the disease thus cannot be ascribed to lacking immunity. Instead, severe cases might very well be caused or aggravated by pre-existing immunity through antibody-dependent enhancement.
This study confirms the above assertion that the immune response to initial contact with SARS-CoV-2 is of the memory type. In addition, it shows that this reaction occurs with almost all individuals, and particularly also with those who experience no manifest clinical symptoms.
Repeat: If the vast majority of people already have robust, pre-existing immunity, “then the benefits of vaccination are highly doubtful.”
Is that a reasonable “evidence-based” conclusion? And, if it is, then shouldn’t there have been a debate on this matter before over a billion people were inoculated with an experimental substance that causes, bleeding, clotting, autoimmunity, strokes, and heart attacks? And how could it not be true, after all, if there was no pre-existing immunity in a US population of 330 million people, then the number of fatalities would be exponentially higher. Instead, after a full two years of exposure– the percentage of deaths in the US is still less than one-third of one percent, a veritable drop in the bucket. Would that be possible with a truly super-contagious “novel” virus?
No, it would not be possible, which means that Fauci and Co lied. And the reason they lied was to convince people that they’re more vulnerable than they really are. It’s just one of many fearmongering scams they used to promote the vaccine: “Get vaccinated or die”, that was the message.
Doesn’t that bother you? Doesn’t it bother you to know the government and public health authorities twisted the truth in order to dupe you into an invasive and potentially-lethal medical procedure?
Question– I think our public health officials did the best they could given the circumstances.
Answer– I think you are wrong about that. I think they have lied repeatedly in order to advance a predominantly-political agenda. But, let’s assume you’re right for a minute. Then why do they continue to ignore groundbreaking research that conflicts with their political objectives? Have you thought about that? I already mentioned the shocking report above that indicates the vaccine reduces the flow of blood to the heart and increases the risk of a heart attack. Have you heard a peep out of Fauci or Walensky about that report?
No, not a thing.
Why do you think that is? You’d assume that if Fauci had our best interests in mind, he’d use his sway with the media to spread-the-word far and wide. But, no. He’s made no effort to confirm what the research indicates; that there’s a clear link between the production of the spike protein and cardiovascular damage. He hasn’t lifted a finger in that regard, and it shows. The surge in fatalities and the sharp uptick in excess deaths in the vast number of countries that launched mass vaccination campaigns earlier in the year, are mainly circulatory deaths, that is, heart attacks, strokes and the like. The latest example of this phenom is the Netherlands which has seen a 20% spike in deaths over the previous year. Check it out:
“Last week the number of deaths was more than 20 percent higher than usual for this time of year. The Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) reported 3 750 deaths, nearly 850 more than expected. According to the statistical office, the higher mortality can be seen in all age groups.
In the Netherlands, 85 percent of people over the age of 18 are fully vaccinated, and many had their jabs only recently. … Dutch officials have started injecting those 80 with boosters on Thursday, weeks earlier than planned…
Based on weekly data from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) in the UK, vaccinated people under 60 are twice as likely to die as unvaccinated people. And overall deaths in Britain are far above normal.
As in Germany, Swedes also appear to die at rates 20 percent or more above normal for weeks after receiving their second Covid jab, according to data from a Swedish study.” (“Dutch deaths more than 20% higher than previous year”, Free West Media)
And this isn’t just happening in the Netherlands and Germany either. It’s happening everywhere that mass vaccination campaigns were launched earlier in the year. Now, all of those countries are seeing a sharp uptick in cardiac arrests, strokes, vascular damage and blood clots. Why? What did we do differently in 2021 than we did in the years before?
Question– Where are you going with this? I feel like you’re setting me up for something?
Answer– I am. I want you to admit that the data now supports the case for terminating the vaccination campaign immediately. That’s my main objective, to convince people that we’re on the wrong track and need to stop this madness before more people die.
Did you know that the vaccines also damage the immune system?
It’s true, the injections are immuno-suppressant which means the body is less capable of fighting off infections, viruses and diseases. Think about that for a minute. The vaccine was supposed to protect its recipients from sickness and death, instead it does the exact opposite. It prevents cells from producing the antibodies that are needed to stave-off infection. Check out this short blurb from Dr. David Bauer of Francis Crick Institute who explains what’s going on:
“So, the key message from our finding is that, we found that recipients of the Pfizer vaccine– those who have two doses– have five to six-fold lower of neutralizing antibodies. These are the “gold standard” private-security antibodies of your immune system, which block the virus from getting into your cells in the first place. So, we found that that’s less for people with two doses. We also found that for people with just one dose of the Pfizer jab, that they are less likely to have high levels of these antibodies in their blood. And perhaps most importantly, we see that the older you are, the lower your levels are likely to be, and the time since you’ve had your second jab, the longer that time goes on, the lower your levels are likely to be. So, that’s telling us that we’re probably going to need to prioritize boosters for older and more vulnerable people, coming up soon, especially if this new variant spreads.”
6-times less neutralizing antibodies?
Yep. Like we said, the vaccine suppresses the immune system which opens a pathway to infection. Here’s how Alex Berenson summed it up in an article he posted recently on Substack:
“What the British are saying is they are now finding the vaccine interferes with your body’s innate ability after infection to produce antibodies against not just the spike protein but other pieces of the virus….
This means vaccinated people will be far more vulnerable to mutations in the spike protein EVEN AFTER THEY HAVE BEEN INFECTED AND RECOVERED ONCE...
But how can that be? How can the government, the public health establishment and the drug companies push a vaccine that actually makes people more vulnerable to disease? It makes no sense, right; unless, of course, the object is to make people sicker and more likely to die? Is that what’s going on?
Indeed, it is. Here’s more from a Pfizer whistleblower:
“A former Pfizer employee, now working as a pharmaceutical marketing expert and biotech analyst, has provided evidence in a public meeting in September suggesting that Pfizer is aware that these shots can cause those vaccinated to be more prone to contracting COVID-19 and infections.
Why isn’t this front-page news? Why is the science being suppressed? Why are the claims of credible professionals being swept under the rug, censored on social media, and brushed aside by our public health officials?
The only reasonable explanation, is that the authors of the mass vaccination campaign want to conceal the dangers of the vaccine from the public, because what they really care about is universal vaccination, making sure that all 7 billion people on Planet Earth are vaccinated come hell-or-high-water. As you can see, the science hasn’t deterred them at all. They are just as determined to implement their plan as they were on Day 1, maybe more so.
Take a look at this clip from an explosive paper that shows how the spike protein enters the nucleus of our cells causing incalculable damage to the immune system. This cutting-edge research has caused a furor in the scientific community.
“Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS–CoV–2) has led to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID–19) pandemic, severely affecting public health and the global economy. Adaptive immunity plays a crucial role in fighting against SARS–CoV–2 infection and directly influences the clinical outcomes of patients. Clinical studies have indicated that patients with severe COVID–19 exhibit delayed and weak adaptive immune responses; however, the mechanism by which SARS–CoV–2 impedes adaptive immunity remains unclear. Here, by using an in vitro cell line, we report that the SARS–CoV–2 spike protein significantly inhibits DNA damage repair, which is required for effective V(D)J recombination in adaptive immunity.
It means that the spike protein enters the nucleus of our cells and damages our DNA. That was not supposed to happen. The vaccine was not supposed to penetrate the inner sanctum where our genetic material is stored. Once it makes its way to the nucleus, the spike protein prevents the repair of broken DNA which, in turn, impacts the proliferation of B-cells and T-cells that are essential in the fight against infection. (Note– The spike also effects specific genes that are highly “predispositional for cancer development… so, this is clearly news of great significance that should not be taken lightly.” (See– “Spike protein inside nucleus enhancing DNA damage? – COVID-19 mRNA vaccines update 1″, youtube, 12 minutes)
Here’s how Dr. Mobeen Syed explains the effects of the spike protein on the immune system: (I transcribed this myself and apologize for any errors.)
“The spike protein enters the nucleus, and not just the spike but also the non-structural proteins end up in the nucleus as well. They do not just contaminate the DNA, but also interfere with the machinery and repair of the DNA… When our cells are dividing, there are strict mechanisms to make sure the DNA is correctly repaired, and correctly copied, otherwise the cell will become a cancer cell. We have an elaborate mechanism to repair DNA…. There are multiple mechanisms for DNA repair, because there are multiple kinds of repair… These two mechanisms are important, because these two mechanisms of repair are impaired by the spike proteins presence.… When any infection occurs, the B cells and T cells proliferate. Increasing in number, means making copies of the DNA… Proliferation itself is an important immune response. The creation of the antibodies requires functioning DNA...
What I am explaining here is that DNA break-and-repair can also be done in immune cells intentionally for the normal function of the immune system. Every B and T cell needs a variable binding sight to attach to the antigen, and to create that variation we need the DNA to randomly restructure which needs DNA break-and-repair … Imagine there are repair enzymes in our body that go to the broken DNA and fix it. Now imagine that these repair enzymes no longer go to the site of the broken DNA or even are produced? Researchers found that when the nonstructural proteins are drawn into the nucleus, then reduced proliferation of the (B and T) cells occurs… and our ability to respond to infections will not be good.” (“Spike Protein Goes to Nucleus and Impairs DNA Repair”Spike Protein Goes to Nucleus and Impairs DNA Repair”, you tube)
Imagine if someone or some group of powerful elites wanted to reduce the global population by many billions of people. And they figured the best way to achieve that objective would be to inject people with a mysterious pathogen that had been secretly developed in foreign labs for over a decade. Imagine if that lethal antigen not only triggered heart attacks, strokes and catastrophic vascular injury, but also disabled the body’s critical defense (immune) system, thus, increasing one’s susceptibility to infections, viruses and diseases by many orders of magnitude. Imagine if we saw signs that this plan was unfolding before our very eyes, from the mountain of corpses that were riddled with killer lymphocytes, to the sharp rise in excess deaths and all-cause mortality, to the unexplained surge in cardiac arrests, strokes, autoimmunity, bleeding, clotting, headaches, bruising, inflammation, heart-valve problems, brain bleeds, vascular, neurological and respiratory diseases all suspiciously linked to the initiation of a mass vaccination campaign.
Could such a thing could happen in this day and age? Could anyone be bold enough to launch a war against humanity? Is anyone capable of such evil?
Translated by Vrouwen voor Vrijeid (Women for Freedom)
This Dutch documentary attempts to pinpoint the main corporations and individuals responsible for the Covid plandemic.
It begins by examining the key institutional investors that own the vast majority of the global share market. Going company by company, filmmakers reveal that approximately 8-10 institutional investors own 80% of the stock of nearly all global corporations. Some of the smaller institutional investors include mutual and pension funds. However the top three of every corporation they examine include BlackRock* and the Vanguard Group.**
The film looks at the institutional shareholdings of company after company, including Google, Twitter, Apple, Microsoft, Sony, Phillips, Boeing, Airbus, Coca Cola, Pepsi, all the mining companies, all the oil companies, Cargill, ADM, Bayer (the largest seed producer in the world since their acquisition of Monsanto), all the textile and fashion brands, Amazon, Ebay, Master Card, Visa, Paypal, and all the banks, tobacco companies, defense contractors, insurance companies, processed food companies, cosmetic brands and publishers and media outlets.***
In every case, both Vanguard Group and BlackRock are both within the top three institutional investors.
They also own stock in each other’s companies. In fact, Vanguard is the biggest shareholder in BlackRock, which Bloomberg refers to as the “fourth branch of government” because it both advises central banks and lends them money.
We don’t know exactly who owns shares in Vanguard as it’s not a publicly traded company. However we do know that it’s a safe place for many of the most powerful families in the world to hide their wealth (eg the Rockefellers, Rothschilds and British royal family).
The film also explores how wealthy families use nonprofit foundations to shape global politics in their own interest without attracting public attention. The big three featured in the film are George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, the Clinton Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
All these rich and powerful elites meet at the World Economic Forum in Davos Switzerland every January and mingle with world leaders and significant non-profit groups, such as Greenpeace and UNESCO.
Chairman and founder of the WEF is Klaus Schwab, a Swiss professor and businessman. In his book, The Great Reset, he states that the coronavirus is a great “opportunity” to reset our societies. According, to Schwab, our old society must switch to a new one because the consumption society the elite has forced on us is no longer sustainable. Under the new society he proposes, people will own nothing and rely primarily on the state to get their needs met.
*BlackRock, Inc. is an American multinational investment management corporation based in New York City. Founded in 1988, initially as a risk management and fixed income institutional asset manager, BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $8.67 trillion in assets under management as of January 2021.
**The Vanguard Group, Inc. is an American registered investment advisor based in Malvern, Pennsylvania with about $7 trillion in global assets under management, as of January 13, 2021. It is the largest provider of mutual funds and the second-largest provider of exchange-traded funds in the world after BlackRock’s iShares.
***What this means, In essence, is that a handful of individuals control all public information.
One might anticipate that the bottom 50%’s meager share of the nation’s exploding wealth would have increased as smartly as the wealth of the billionaires, but alas, no.
America’s economy has changed in ways few of the winners seem to notice, as they’re too busy cheerleading their own brilliance and success. In the view of the winners, who just so happen to occupy all the seats at the media-punditry-Federal Reserve, etc. table–the rising tide of stock, bond and real estate bubbles are raising all boats. What’s left unsaid is except for the 50% of boats with gaping holes below the waterline, i.e. stagnant wages and a fast-rising cost of living.
The truth the self-satisfied winners don’t include in their self-congratulatory rah-rah is there’s no place for the bottom 50% of American households to go but down. All the winnings flow to those who already owned assets back when they were affordable– the already-wealthy–whose wealth has soared as assets have shot to the moon while the the burdens of inflation and debt service hit the bottom 50% the hardest.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is whining that inflation isn’t high enough yet for their refined tastes. Boo-hoo, how sad for the Fed–inflation isn’t yet high enough. Oh wait–didn’t they each mint millions by front-running their own policies? No wonder they’re not worried about inflation.
The reality few acknowledge is that globalization and financialization have stripped the American economy of low-skilled jobs that don’t demand much of the employee. The reality is that a great many people don’t have what it takes to learn high-level skills and work at a demanding pace under constant pressure–the description of the average job in America.
There were once millions of low-skill, low-pay jobs for people who for whatever mix of reasons were unable to muster the wherewithal to fulfill the fantasy of working extra hard, going to night school, soaking up high-level skills, moving quickly up the ladder to higher pay, buying the starter home and then moving up the food chain to middle class security from there.
The cost of living was low enough that those working these low-skill, low-pay jobs could still have an independent life. There were still low-cost rentals, often derided by the wealthy, in nooks and crannies of even the costliest cities. (I once lived in a room stuffed with old tax records in a poolside shack in an upscale neighborhood. The room had been cleared for a single bed and a path to the decrepit bathroom. Its most important attribute was that I could afford it on my low earnings.)
Affordable housing has vanished, eliminated by the financialization of America’s economy. Once landlords pay double the price for the property, rents have to double to pay their higher expenses. The apartment didn’t double in size or amenities–the rent doubled without any increase in utility to the renter. You get nothing more for double the price–nice.
Yes, people could make better choices, and some do. The point here is the game is rigged against those in the lower tier of the economy who can no longer afford a house or other stake in the only winning game in town–speculative asset bubbles. Go ahead and work a second job and go to night school–you’ll still be left behind the already-rich.
Globalization opened every job in America to global competition via offshoring or the influx of undocumented workers so desperate to support their families back home that no pay was too low and no working condition too wretched to refuse.
Many overindulged pundits who never worked an honest day in their lives sneer about burger flippers without realizing how hard those burger flippers have to work. I doubt the well-dressed pundits, snobbish about their university degrees and general brilliance, could manage to work a single day in a demanding fast-food job.
As the price of housing and other assets have soared, enriching the already rich, they’re out of reach for the bottom 50% who struggle to pay their bills as wages have stagnated and the costs of essentials have skyrocketed.
The rising cost of parking tickets, junk fees, user fees, utilities and food don’t impact the well-paid top 5% technocrat class, whose stake in the Everything Bubble keeps expanding by tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. But for the bottom 50%, those incremental increases are, when added to higher rents, absolutely crushing.
As for getting high-quality healthcare that includes mental health support–those are reserved for the rich. But no worries, self-medication is always a “choice.”
Getting a boost in pay from $12 an hour to $15 an hour is welcome, but that doesn’t put the worker any closer to affording a house or equivalent stake in the Everything Bubble.
The new feudalism is masked by the glossy SillyCon Valley PR of a gig economy where (per the PR fantasy) bright, shiny and totally independent workers freely choose to serve the winners in the rigged sweepstakes for low pay and zero benefits.
In the SillyCon Valley PR, serfs freely choose to serve their noble masters for nothing but survival because they love the “freedom” and “choice” of kissing the nobility’s plump derrieres. (After all, there were “choices” even back in the good old days of feudalism–one could join the brigands in the forest, or enlist in a poorly paid mercenary army where the odds of dying were high–you know, “choices” of “gigs.”)
One might anticipate that the bottom 50%’s meager share of the nation’s exploding wealth would have increased as smartly as the wealth of the billionaires, but alas, no–the bottom 50%’s share of stocks (equities) actually plummeted in the the glorious decades of Federal Reserve free money for financiers, stock buy-backs and asset bubbles.
All this suits the billionaires and those collecting the crumbs of the Everything Bubble just fine. So what if the bottom 50% have nowhere to go but down? There’s plenty of room in the homeless encampment for another broken down station wagon or an old camper. There’s lots of “choices.”
And no consequences for the winners, of course, because The Fed has our backs.
After the Crash 