Tag Archives: financial crisis

Another Housing Crisis in America Is Coming

Posted on by
2

By Tim Kirby

Source: Covert Geopolitics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on by
1

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America Is Now a Kleptocrapocracy

Posted on by
1

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

I’ve coined a new portmanteau word to describe America’s descent: kleptocrapocracy, a union of kleptocracy (a nation ruled by kleptocrats) and crapocracy, a nation drowning in a moral sewer of rampant self-interest in which the focus is cloaking all the skims, scams, rackets and bezzles in some virtuous-sounding garb, a nation choking on low-quality junk ceaselessly hawked by robocalls, spam, phishing and Big Tech manipulation.

It’s little wonder trust has collapsed in America: the only thing we can trust is whatever’s being pitched is deceptively packaged to mask the self-interest and profiteering of the perps.

The stench from the decomposing carcasses of once-trusted institutions is everywhere. Insiders and the marketers they pay to cloak their grifting are banking bennies at the expense of hapless debt-serfs who fell for the scam. You need these three costly medications, and then when the side-effects kick in, you need six more to counteract the first three, and so on. But trust us; your “health” (heh) is our only concern. Uh, sure.

Why do state universities need to market themselves like a roto-rooter service? Maybe because they’re both working the sewers: state universities are exploiting the student loan sewers, desperate to recruit another batch of debt-serfs who fell for the 3-card monte game in which a lifetime of debt is exchanged for a credential of dubious value.

The competition for the remaining pool of debt-serfs is heating up, so like everything else in America, the game is now all about marketing, virtue-signaling, exploiting Big Tech manipulation, and so on.

Doing something useful is now for chumps. The opportunities in America are all about getting rich by doing, well, nothing: skimming 20% “guaranteed” returns in DeFi, mining cryptos, trading stablecoins, selling volatility, etc.–getting rich and then living large on the sweat of the chumps who are still working (poor deluded fools!).

The obvious goal here is for everyone to get in on trading stablecoins, buying rentals with DeFi, churning meme stocks, etc. Why should anyone lower themselves to doing something useful anymore? Why bother?

Labor has been degraded for decades in speculative-frenzy America. Why work when the Fed has our backs and all those newly issued trillions are up for grabs? Doing something useful is for chumps.

Nobody seems to ask what happens when we’re all minting fortunes off speculative churn and there’s nobody filling potholes, stocking shelves or carrying bags of QuikCrete to customers’ trucks.

And while we’re on the subject of sewage: if America’s security services and Big Tech oligarchies track everything and everyone, why are we drowning in robocalls, spam, SMS-spam (smishing), etc.? Couldn’t the NSA/CIA track the spammers and robo-callers down and rendition them (warrantlessly, of course) to a hellhole camp in an unnamed country?

Of course they could. But the ruination of everyday life is of no concern to the kleptocrats (fly with me to the stars!) or our dysfunctional government, which has become nothing more than an invitation-only auction of favors that elevates the relentless pursuit of self-interest and profiteering to new kleptocratic heights.

Please don’t make the mistake of expecting anything to work properly in America. The components are garbage, the parts are on back-order, the people who knew how to make the kludgy mess function just quit in disgust, and we’ll have to get back to you about your request, as our service staff just left to launch an OnlyFans site.

I don’t want to work, I’m minting money speculating, but gol-darn it, I want everyone else to wait on me and meet my needs for low, low quality goods and services at not-so-low prices, and if I’m not treated well enough by everyone earning chump-change, then I’ll freak out, and if that doesn’t pan out, I’ll blame it all on my meds. Accountability is like work–only for chumps.

Trust me, everything’s going great and we’re all going to get wealthier and wealthier until we won’t be able to take it any more, it will be so great. I hope everyone here is hungry because the banquet of consequences is being served.

Planet of the Living Dead (Halloween 2021)

Posted on by
1

By Mickey Z.

Source: Dissident Voice

The only thing we have to fear…

(the dude who signed Executive Order 9066)

Halloween is an odd holiday. The ostensible concept — as it has evolved to become — is to shock, startle, frighten, petrify, horrify, and/or terrify… all while consuming enough high fructose corn syrup to keep the American Dental Association content for another century or two. Every year, as October 31 nears, loyal consumers squander a small fortune to adorn their soon-to-be-foreclosed-upon abodes with Made-in-China images of tombstones, skulls, ghouls, goblins, monsters, zombies, and even the occasional bloody severed limb or two. But let’s face it, none of these cardboard depictions remotely compare to the real-life horrors we passively accept as normal.

Who needs Dracula when we’ve got ruling class vampires sucking us dry — stealing not only our blood but also our jobs, homes, health, autonomy, sovereignty, and future? Why bother with Michael Myers when legions of Y chromosome ghouls unleash far worse cruelty — every minute of every day — via male pattern violence? Never forget:

  • No zombie is more frightening than those stumbling around in masks and chanting “trust the science.” 
  • Never mind Jason and his hockey mask when you’ve got “Brandon” playing left wing. 
  • Bats, pumpkins, and skeletons vs. pornographers, pimps, and pedophiles? No contest. 
  • Elm Street’s Freddie ain’t got nothing on corporations transformed into “persons” — set free to pillage the ecosystem and co-opt our minds. 
  • And I’ll take Godzilla’s side over pesticide, genocide, and ecocide. 

Here’s one more 24/7 real-life nightmare far more dreadful than anything the Halloween-Industrial Complex can conjure up: When all those kids come knocking on your door, expecting brightly colored toxins called “candy,” you might wish to remind yourself that across the globe, an estimated 10,000 extra children are dying each month thanks to unnecessary lockdowns and restrictions. 

Cue the ominous music: 10,000 dead. Every single month. From preventable causes. Because most of the world bought into the Covid lies. The next time you’re at a sporting event or a concert (for the vaccinated-only, of course), take a good, slow look around you and get a feel for what 10,000 looks like. It’s a whole lot more terrifying than the whir of a chainsaw echoing down a desolate Texas highway. Remember: “We’re all in this together.”

You Don’t Have To Wait For Halloween To See Monsters, Because They Are Already All Around Us

Posted on by
5

By Michael Snyder

Source: End of the American Dream

A lot of Americans will dress up like monsters this Halloween, but there is no way that they could ever be as frightening as the actual monsters that walk our halls of power on a daily basis.  Some of the things that I am going to share with you in this article are deeply disturbing, but they need to be revealed because the people that have been doing these things need to be held accountable.  Real life horror movies play out in secret facilities all across America day after day, and much of the time the incredibly sick things that are being done to animals are being funded by our tax dollars.  But because the corporate media keeps very quiet about these “experiments”, most Americans never hear about what is really going on behind closed doors.

The good news is that some brave investigators are starting to pull back the veil and reveal the truth about the horrific animal abuse that is taking place.

Here is one example of what I am talking about…

“Our investigators show that Fauci’s NIH division shipped part of a $375,800 grant to a lab in Tunisia to drug beagles and lock their heads in mesh cages filled with hungry sand flies so that the insects could eat them alive,” White Coat Waste told Changing America. “They also locked beagles alone in cages in the desert overnight for nine consecutive nights to use them as bait to attract infectious sand flies.”

How sick do you have to be to do something like that to innocent little puppies?

Dr. Anthony Fauci and the others that were involved in funding this research are monsters.

And it turns out that this wasn’t the first time that they funded this sort of “experimentation”.

Back in 2016, they spent more than 18 million dollars to torture beagles “for 22 months” before finally killing and dissecting them…

Fauci’s team had previously, in 2016, strapped the infectious sand flies to beagles at the NIAID lab in Bethesda, Maryland, allowing them to feed on the dogs for 22 months.

The White Coat Waste Project alleges that the dogs developed infectious legions before researchers killed and dissected them.

This procedure cost $18,430,917.

Fauci and everyone else involved in such “experiments” aren’t just criminals.

They are monsters in the worst sense of the word.

If you are sickened by what you have read already, you may want to stop, because there is more.

What Fauci and his minions did to 44 beagle puppies at a facility in Menlo Park, California has no place in a civilized society…

Another procedure – which the NIH funded to the tune of $1.8m – saw 44 beagle puppies undergo a ‘cordectomy,’ which saw their vocal cords cut to stop them barking.

That experiment, which took place in Menlo Park, California, saw the dogs then pumped full of drugs, before being killed and dissected.

What would “justice” look like for crimes of this magnitude?

The next time someone in the corporate media tries to call Fauci a “hero”, it should make you want to vomit.

Of course Fauci and his minions have moved on from just experimenting on animals.

Today, innocent people all over the globe are the guinea pigs.

And it turns out that Fauci’s NIH is now publicly admitting to funding incredibly twisted research on “a bat coronavirus” at the Wuhan Insitute of Virology just before the pandemic hit…

White House coronavirus adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci and National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins have declared under oath that they did not fund the dangerous gain-of-function virus research in China that now is believed be the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But now the NIH has admitted in a letter to the leading Republican on the House Oversight Committee that the U.S. funded an experiment at the Wuhan Insitute of Virology in which a bat coronavirus was modified, creating a virus that made mice “sicker” than the original virus.

We all know the rest of the story.

But after everything that has transpired, Fauci and his minions are still treated like heroes, and that is because we have a national love affair with evil.

If you doubt this, just consider the “holiday” that is coming up.  It is a festival of evil, darkness and death, and yet Americans will spend more than 1o billion dollars celebrating it this year…

The 2021 Halloween season is breaking the bank this year.

According to the National Retail Federation’s annual survey, Americans are expected to spend $10.14 billion this year on Halloween-related items. The price tag grew by $2 billion in comparison to last year’s numbers.

Unless you are already sold out to evil, why in the world would anyone want to celebrate such a “holiday”?

By now, pretty much everyone understands that our modern “Halloween” comes directly from a very wicked ancient pagan festival known as “Samhain”.

Over the years, many have told me that they just celebrate Halloween for some “innocent fun” and that the holiday doesn’t mean anything evil to them.

But what if you celebrated a Satanic black mass and put a bunch of “positive” labels on all of the various elements of that ritual?

Would that make it okay?

Of course not.

Giving evil an “alternative” name does not transform it into something good.

So stop pretending.

Fauci and his minions call the evil they are committing “scientific research”, and millions upon millions of Americans are willing to go along with their torture of animals “for the greater good”.

Of course “the greater good” is now being used to justify all sorts of nightmarish crimes against humanity.

We live at a time when the level of evil on this planet is reaching a great crescendo, and it is truly sickening to watch.

But when things are at their darkest, that is when light is needed the most, and so let us all endeavor to be the greatest lights to this world that we possibly can.

Without admitting it, we are already converted to transhumanism

Posted on by
2
On October 18, 2019, i.e. before the alert was issued against Covid-19, a few personalities participated in a role-playing game simulating this epidemic. This event was funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

By Thierry Meyssan

Source: Voltairenet.org

The world is changing very fast. During the Covid epidemic, money has been concentrated in a few hands. The new oligarchs are transhumanists. Without realising it, we have already accepted their ideology and are beginning to put it into practice. Western doctors have given up trying to cure this disease and it seems obvious to us to bet everything on messenger RNA. It does not matter that this strategy is fatal. Henceforth, this is how we think.

The containment, due to the political reaction to Covid-19, favoured a global redistribution of wealth in favour of a few Internet players (Microsoft, Alphabet…). At the same time, investment funds (Vanguard, Blackrock, etc.), which were already managing astronomical sums and could impose their interests on states, became the property of a few families. There are now stratospheric wealth gaps between a few super-billionaires and the people.

The middle classes, which had been slowly eroding since the fall of the USSR and the beginning of economic globalisation, are gradually disappearing. In practice, democratic systems cannot withstand these sudden and gigantic wealth gaps.

As always in periods of change in political systems, the social class that aspires to power imposes its point of view. In this case, transhumanism. The idea that scientific progress will enable a transformation of human biology to the point of overcoming death. Almost all of the world’s fifty largest fortunes seem to subscribe to this fantasy. For them, technology will replace many people in the same way that science has replaced superstition.

In order to impose their new Doxa, these very large fortunes are starting to control what we think and to force us to act according to this new ideology. The most recent phenomenon is precisely our reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic. Historically, in all previous epidemics without exception, doctors sought to cure the sick. That was the old world. In the new transhumanist world, no one is to be cured, all are to be protected with a new technology, messenger RNA. Most developed states forbid their doctors to treat their patients and their pharmacists to sell drugs that might help them (hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, etc.). A leading medical journal, The Lancet, even published an article claiming that an old drug used by millions of people was killing Covid patients who took it. The Internet giants censor accounts that promote it. Everything must be done to make messenger RNA the one and only option.

I am not a doctor. I don’t know what these products are worth. I’m just a man who observes the way in which a debate is closed before it has begun. I am not interfering in the scientific debate, but I am observing the closure of the debate.

The messenger RNA case against doctors is not over, however. President Joe Biden held a virtual global summit on September 22, 2021 to distribute 500 million packets of messenger RNA ’vaccine’. To everyone’s surprise, the states that were to be the recipients of this gift boycotted the summit. They do not believe that messenger RNA is a solution for them [1].

To understand them, all you need is a calculator: the states that went all in on messenger RNA had 20 to 25 times more deaths per million population than those that allowed care by doctors.

Transhumanism already fascinates us because we don’t ask about the ban on Covid care. It does not have the same influence outside the West.

In the past, vaccination consisted of inoculating a small portion of a disease so that the body learns to defend itself against it. Since Covid-19, messenger RNA has been equated with vaccination, yet it is not a vaccine in the classical sense.

PROPAGANDA

History has shown us that in order to impose a new regime, you must first get people to act in accordance with a new ideology. Once the subjects have started to comply, it becomes very difficult for them to back down. The game is up. This is called propaganda. Propaganda is not about controlling discourse, but about using it to change behaviour [2].

As we have all given up on experimenting with Covid care, we have all signed up to messenger RNA and now the health pass. We are ripe to enter this new regime. It is absurd to call it a “dictatorship”; an old world concept. We do not yet know what this new regime will be, yet we are already building it.

States are threatened by the very large fortunes mentioned above, which are generally much more powerful than they are. States have mainly fixed costs and very little room for manoeuvre. On the contrary, the new very large fortunes can withdraw their investments here at any time and take them there. Very few Sovereign Wealth Funds can compete with them and thus still be independent of them.

The corporate media refuse to question the ban on care for Covid-19. They devote all their energy to promoting messenger RNA.

THE CORPORATE MEDIA

The corporate media have been very active in this project. For a long time, but especially since the end of the Cold War, journalism has defined itself as a search for ’objectivity’, even though it is known to be impossible.

In court, witnesses are not asked to be ’objective’. But they are required to “tell the Truth, the whole Truth and nothing but the Truth”. It is known that each person has only perceived a part of the Truth according to his or her own condition. Thus, in an accident involving a pedestrian and a car, most of the pedestrian witnesses agree with the pedestrian, while most of the motorist witnesses say that the car was in the right. It is only the sum of the evidence that tells us what happened.

The corporate media reacted to the influx of new actors into their profession (blogs and social networks) first by trying to disqualify them: these people are touching, but they are not trained enough to compare themselves to us. Professional journalists have made a distinction between freedom of expression (for all) and freedom of the press (for them alone). One thing leading to another, they have set themselves up as schoolmasters, the only ones capable of giving good and bad marks to those who try to imitate them. To do this, they imagined that they would check their assertions (fact check) as if their work were comparable to a television game show.

Worried that politicians would side with their constituents rather than the very rich, the corporate media have extended fact checking to their political guests. There are countless programmes where a leader is subjected to editorial fact-checking. Political discourse, which should be an analysis of society’s problems and how to solve them, is reduced to a series of figures that can be checked against statistical yearbooks.

The corporate media have asserted themselves first as a ’Fourth Estate’ and then, after absorbing the others, as the main Estate. This notion comes from the 18th century British politician and philosopher, Edmund Burke. The ’Fourth Estate’ was constituted alongside the Spiritual, the Temporal and the Commons (the simple people). Burke, in the name of his liberal conservatism, did not dispute its legitimacy. Today everyone can see that it is not based on a value, but on the money of its owners.

The choice of subjects covered by the corporate media is constantly shrinking. It is slowly moving away from analysis and concentrating on verifiable data only.

Twenty years ago, for example, newspapers that challenged my work would present it summarily and then immediately disqualify it as ’conspiratorial’. Today, they no longer dare to summarise my theses, because they have no way of ’fact-checking’ them. So they just classify me as ’unreliable’. Faced with younger, non-professional journalists, the corporate media limit themselves to insults. As a result, there is a growing gap between them.

This phenomenon is particularly evident with the ’yellow vests’, ordinary citizens who were protesting against this sociological evolution of the world even before containment allowed it to triumph. I remember a debate on a 24-hour news channel where a member of parliament asked a yellow vest what allowance would satisfy the protesters, while the yellow vest replied, “We don’t need allowances, we want a fairer system.” The corporate media quickly removed individuals who, like this lady, were thinking about the problems of society and replaced them with others who were making concrete and immediate demands. They did everything to censor their thinking.

In the past, the Church published a list of books that were forbidden to the faithful. Today, on the contrary, they try to publish a list of reliable sources, even to determine a priori the Truth.

GOOD AND BAD GRADES

Another solution envisaged by the new ruling elite is to re-establish the Index librorum prohibitorum. In the past, the Church – which was not only a community of believers but also a political power – published a list of books that were censored for all but its clerics. It wanted to protect the People from the errors and lies of the protesters. This only lasted for a while. In the backlash, the believers deprived the Church of its political power.

Former Nato and Bush Administration officials set up a New York-based company, NewsGuard, to compile a list of unreliable websites (including ours) [3]. Or NATO, the European Union, Bill Gates and a few others have created CrossCheck, which finances, among other things, Les Décodeurs du Monde [4]. It seems that the exponential multiplication of information sources has ruined this project.

A more recent method consists in defining a priori, not who is reliable, but what the Truth is.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, has just set up a “Mission against disinformation and conspiracy”, its president, the sociologist Gérald Bronner, considers that the State should set up a body to establish the Truth on the basis of “scientific consensus”. He considers it unacceptable that the word of “a university professor is equivalent to that of a yellow vest” [5].

This method is not new. In the 17th century, Galileo claimed that the Earth revolved around the Sun and not the other way round. Gérald Bronner’s predecessors opposed him with various passages from the Holy Scriptures, which were then considered a revealed source of knowledge. Then the ’scientific consensus’ led to his condemnation by the Church.

The history of science is full of examples of this type: almost all the great discoverers were opposed by the ’scientific consensus’ of their time. Most of the time their ideas were not able to triumph with demonstrations, but with the death of their opponents: the leaders of the “scientific consensus”.

Translation:
Roger Lagassé

The Fear Pandemic and the Crisis of Capitalism. Sleepwalking Towards A Global Economic Crisis?

Posted on by
2

By Colin Todhunter

Source: Global Research

In October 2019, in a speech at an International Monetary Fund conference, former Bank of England governor Mervyn King warned that the world was sleepwalking towards a fresh economic and financial crisis that would have devastating consequences for what he called the “democratic market system”.

According to King, the global economy was stuck in a low growth trap and recovery from the crisis of 2008 was weaker than that after the Great Depression. He concluded that it was time for the Federal Reserve and other central banks to begin talks behind closed doors with politicians.

In the repurchase agreement (repo) market, interest rates soared on 16 September. The Federal Reserve stepped in by intervening to the tune of $75 billion per day over four days, a sum not seen since the 2008 crisis.

At that time, according to Fabio Vighi, professor of critical theory at Cardiff University, the Fed began an emergency monetary programme that saw hundreds of billions of dollars per week pumped into Wall Street.

Over the last 18 months or so, under the guise of a ‘pandemic’, we have seen economies closed down, small businesses being crushed, workers being made unemployed and people’s rights being destroyed. Lockdowns and restrictions have facilitated this process. The purpose of these so-called ‘public health measures’ has little to do with public health and much to do with managing a crisis of capitalism and ultimately the restructuring of the economy.

Neoliberalism has squeezed workers income and benefits, offshored key sectors of economies and has used every tool at its disposal to maintain demand and create financial Ponzi schemes in which the rich can still invest in and profit from. The bailouts to the banking sector following the 2008 crash provided only temporary respite. The crash returned with a much bigger bang pre-Covid along with multi-billion-dollar bailouts.

The dystopian ‘great reset’ that we are currently witnessing is a response to this crisis. This reset envisages a transformation of capitalism.

Fabio Vighi sheds light on the role of the ‘pandemic’ in all of this:

“… some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s).”

Vighi describes how, in pre-Covid times, the world economy was on the verge of another colossal meltdown and chronicles how the Swiss Bank of International Settlements, BlackRock (the world’s most powerful investment fund), G7 central bankers and others worked to avert a massive impending financial meltdown.

The world economy was suffocating under an unsustainable mountain of debt. Many companies could not generate enough profit to cover interest payments on their own debts and were staying afloat only by taking on new loans. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflows and highly leveraged balance sheets were rising everywhere.

Lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets (under the guise of COVID) with freshly printed money while shutting down the real economy to avoid hyperinflation.

Vighi says:

“… the stock market did not collapse (in March 2020) because lockdowns had to be imposed; rather, lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing. With lockdowns came the suspension of business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion. In other words, restructuring the financial architecture through extraordinary monetary policy was contingent on the economy’s engine being turned off.”

It all amounted to a multi-trillion bailout for Wall Street under the guise of COVID ‘relief’ followed by an ongoing plan to fundamentally restructure capitalism that involves smaller enterprises being driven to bankruptcy or bought up by monopolies and global chains, thereby ensuring continued viable profits for these predatory corporations, and the eradication of millions of jobs resulting from lockdowns and accelerated automation.

Author and journalist Matt Taibbi noted in 2020:

“It retains all the cruelties of the free market for those who live and work in the real world, but turns the paper economy into a state protectorate, surrounded by a kind of Trumpian Money Wall that is designed to keep the investor class safe from fear of loss. This financial economy is a fantasy casino, where the winnings are real but free chips cover the losses. For a rarefied segment of society, failure is being written out of the capitalist bargain.”

The World Economic Forum says that by 2030 the public will ‘rent’ everything they require. This means undermining the right of ownership (or possibly seizing personal assets) and restricting consumer choice underpinned by the rhetoric of reducing public debt or ‘sustainable consumption’, which will be used to legitimise impending austerity as a result of the economic meltdown. Ordinary people will foot the bill for the ‘COVID relief’ packages.

If the financial bailouts do not go according to plan, we could see further lockdowns imposed, perhaps justified under the pretext of  ‘the virus’ but also ‘climate emergency’.

It is not only Big Finance that has been saved. A previously ailing pharmaceuticals industry has also received a massive bailout (public funds to develop and purchase the vaccines) and lifeline thanks to the money-making COVID jabs.

The lockdowns and restrictions we have seen since March 2020 have helped boost the bottom line of global chains and the e-commerce giants as well and have cemented their dominance. At the same time, fundamental rights have been eradicated under COVID government measures.

Capitalism and labour

Essential to this ‘new normal’ is the compulsion to remove individual liberties and personal freedoms. A significant part of the working class has long been deemed ‘surplus to requirements’ – such people were sacrificed on the altar of neo-liberalism. They lost their jobs due to automation and offshoring. Since then, this section of the population has had to rely on meagre state welfare and run-down public services or, if ‘lucky’, insecure low-paid service sector jobs.

What we saw following the 2008 crash was ordinary people being pushed further to the edge. After a decade of ‘austerity’ in the UK – a neoliberal assault on the living conditions of ordinary people carried out under the guise of reining in public debt following the bank bail outs – a leading UN poverty expert compared Conservative welfare policies to the creation of 19th-century workhouses and warned that, unless austerity is ended, the UK’s poorest people face lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

Philip Alston, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty, accused ministers of being in a state of denial about the impact of policies. He accused them of the “systematic immiseration of a significant part of the British population”.

In another 2019 report, the Institute for Public Policy Research think tank laid the blame for more than 130,000 deaths in the UK since 2012 at the door of government policies. It claimed that these deaths could have been prevented if improvements in public health policy had not stalled as a direct result of austerity cuts.

Over the past 10 years in the UK, according to the Trussell Group, there has been rising food poverty and increasing reliance on food banks.

And in a damning report on poverty in the UK by Professor David Gordon of the University of Bristol, it was found that almost 18 million cannot afford adequate housing conditions, 12 million are too poor to engage in common social activities, one in three cannot afford to heat their homes adequately in winter and four million children and adults are not properly fed (Britain’s population is estimated at around 66 million).

Moreover, a 2015 report by the New Policy Institute noted that the total number of people in poverty in the UK had increased by 800,000, from 13.2 to 14.0 million in just two to three years.

Meanwhile, The Equality Trust in 2018 reported that the ‘austerity’ years were anything but austere for the richest 1,000 people in the UK. They had increased their wealth by £66 billion in one year alone (2017-2018), by £274 billion in five years (2013-2018) and had increased their total wealth to £724 billion – significantly more than the poorest 40% of households combined (£567 billion).

Just some of the cruelties of the ‘free market’ for those who live and work in the real world. And all of this hardship prior to lockdowns that have subsequently devastated lives, livelihoods and health, with cancer diagnoses and treatments and other conditions having been neglected due to the shutdown of health services.

During the current economic crisis, what we are seeing is many millions around the world being robbed of their livelihoods. With AI and advanced automation of production, distribution and service provision on the immediate horizon, a mass labour force will no longer be required.

It raises fundamental questions about the need for and the future of mass education, welfare and healthcare provision and systems that have traditionally served to reproduce and maintain labour that capitalist economic activity has required.

As the economic is restructured, labour’s relationship to capital is being transformed. If work is a condition of the existence of the labouring classes, then, in the eyes of capitalists, why maintain a pool of (surplus) labour that is no longer needed?

A concentration of wealth power and ownership is taking place as a result of COVID-related policies: according to research by Oxfam, the world’s billionaires gained $3.9 trillion while working people lost $3.7 trillion in 2020. At the same time, as large sections of the population head into a state of permanent unemployment, the rulers are weary of mass dissent and resistance. We are witnessing an emerging biosecurity surveillance state designed to curtail liberties ranging from freedom of movement and assembly to political protest and free speech.

The global implications are immense too. Barely a month into the COVID agenda, the IMF and World Bank were already facing a deluge of aid requests from developing countries that were asking for bailouts and loans. Ideal cover for rebooting the global economy via a massive debt crisis and the subsequent privatisation of national assets.

In 2020, World Bank Group President David Malpass stated that poorer countries will be ‘helped’ to get back on their feet after the various lockdowns but such ‘help’ would be on condition that neoliberal reforms become further embedded. In other words, the de facto privatisation of states (affecting all nations, rich and poor alike), the (complete) erosion of national sovereignty and dollar-denominated debt leading to a further strengthening of US leverage and power.

In a system of top-down surveillance capitalism with an increasing section of the population deemed ‘unproductive’ and ‘useless eaters’, notions of individualism, liberal democracy and the ideology of free choice and consumerism are regarded by the elite as ‘unnecessary luxuries’ along with political and civil rights and freedoms.

We need only look at the ongoing tyranny in Australia to see where other countries could be heading. How quickly Australia was transformed from a ‘liberal democracy’ to a brutal totalitarian police state of endless lockdowns where gathering and protests are not to be tolerated.

Being beaten and thrown to the ground and fired at with rubber bullets in the name of protecting health makes as much sense as devastating entire societies through socially and economically destructive lockdowns to ‘save lives’.

It makes as much sense as mask-wearing and social-distancing mandates unsupported by science, misused and flawed PCR tests, perfectly healthy people being labelled as ‘cases’, deliberately inflated COVID death figures, pushing dangerous experimental vaccines in the name of health, ramping up fear, relying on Neil Ferguson’s bogus modelling, censoring debate about any of this and the WHO declaring a worldwide ‘pandemic’ based on a very low number of global ‘cases’ back in early 2020 (44,279 ‘cases’ and 1,440 supposed COVID deaths outside China out of a population of 6.4 billion).

There is little if any logic to this. But of course, If we view what is happening in terms of a crisis of capitalism, it might begin to make a lot more sense.

The austerity measures that followed the 2008 crash were bad enough for ordinary people who were still reeling from the impacts when the first lockdown was imposed.

The authorities are aware that deeper, harsher impacts as well as much more wide-ranging changes will be experienced this time around and seem adamant that the masses must become more tightly controlled and conditioned to their coming servitude.

The Illusion of Getting Rich While Producing Nothing

Posted on by
1

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

Of all the mass delusions running rampant in the culture, none is more spectacularly delusional than the conviction that we can all get fabulously rich from speculation while producing nothing. The key characteristic of speculation is that it produces nothing: it doesn’t generate any new goods or services, boost productivity or increase the functionality of real-world essentials.

Like all mass delusions, the greater the disconnect from reality, the greater the appeal. Mass delusions gain their escape velocity by leaving any ties to real-world limitations behind, and by igniting the most powerful booster to human euphoric confidence known, greed.

Lost in the mania of easy wealth from speculative trading is the absence of any value creation in the rotation-churn of moving bets from one table to the latest hot game: in flipping houses sight unseen, no functionality was added to the house. In transferring bets on one cryptocurrency to another or from one meme stock to another, no value to the economy or society was created.

In the mass delusion that near-infinite wealth can be generated without producing anything, creating value has no value: the delusion is that I can get rich producing nothing but speculative gains, and then I can buy all the stuff somebody else is making.

The fantasy powering the speculative frenzy is once I get rich, I’ll stop working and live off my wealth. It’s interesting, isn’t it, how everyone can get rich via unproductive speculation, quit their jobs and then live off the productive work of somebody else who failed to get rich off speculation.

Maybe that’s why all the container ships are lined up at Long Beach, waiting to unload the goodies made in China for American speculators to buy. This is what happens when the incentive structure of the economy decays so that being productive has little upside (i.e., working is for chumps) while speculating is all upside (get rich quickly and easily).

Everyone knows great empires became great by transferring their critical supply chains to competing nations, living it up on borrowed/printed money, exploiting the highest bidder wins regulatory/governance system and incentivizing speculation while pushing wage earners into debt-and-tax servitude. Bone up on your history, Bucko; all great nations got there by quitting boring, tiresome productive work to speculate on illusions of value with borrowed money.

This is the result of monopolies and cartels becoming the financial and political power centers of the nation. Maximizing private gains is all that matters in this incentive structure, and so treating employees as chattel to lower costs, offshoring critical supply chains to squeeze out a few more dollars of profits, engineering products to break down (planned obsolescence), buying regulatory barriers and “free passes” and tax breaks galore with all the billions showered on financiers and other fraudsters by the Federal Reserve: in a word, a system that optimizes corruption.

This is how you hollow out a nation and guarantee collapse. The most rewarding “skillsets” are a sociopathological obsession with maximizing profits by any means available and speculating with Fed free money for financiers. The millions of “retail” speculators are simply picking up the cues being given by the billionaires who gained their wealth by issuing debt to fund stock buy-backs and other financial manipulations.

Working for monopolies and cartels is for chumps because monopolies and cartels have zero incentive to share profits with mere employees. Their profits are made not by taking care of their workforce but by regulatory capture, artificial scarcities and financialized destruction of competition: first, borrow billions thanks to the Fed and Wall Street, destroy the competition (for example, the taxi industry), then once the competition has been wiped out, jack up prices because now consumers have no choice other than another member of the cartel.

Speculative “wealth” is phantom wealth, a flickering illusion of prosperity. All speculative bubbles pop, and all speculative bubbles inflated by borrowed money and central bank manipulation pop even more ferociously than bubbles funded by actual savings.

By incentivizing speculation and corruption, reducing the rewards for productive work and sucking wages dry with inflation, America has greased the skids to collapse. As with all mass delusions, the incentives to continue believing are immense and the incentives to reconnect with reality few.

So in conclusion: the speculative gains to be made in the collapse of the mass delusion will be spectacular. There’s nothing like the collapse of a hollowed out, completely corrupt economy to generate outsized profits for nimble speculators. Just keep your speculative winnings on number 22 on the roulette wheel. (A Casablanca movie reference….)