Ransacking the World Economy until ‘You’ll Own Nothing’ (Part 2)

The Coup de Grâce–>The Great Reset

By Robert J. Burrowes

Building on millennia of learning how to structure and manage an economy to accumulate and consolidate control and wealth in particular hands, as explained in Part 1 of this investigation, the Global Elite launched its final coup in January 2020 under cover of the fake Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. Using the health threat supposedly implied by the existence of a pathogenic ‘virus’, the bulk of the world population was terrorized into submitting to an onerous series of violations of their human rights which was tantamount to a declaration of martial law. See ‘The Final Battle For Humanity: It Is “Now or Never” In The Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.

Under a barrage of propaganda delivered by Elite agents – including organizations such as the World Economic Forum, the United Nations, the World Health Organisation, governments, the pharmaceutical industry and corporate media as well as individuals such as Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harari and Bill Gates – people were compelled to wear masks, use QR codes, stay locked down in their homes and, later, submit to a series of experimental but involuntary gene-altering bioweapons to acquire a ‘vaccine passport’, among other measures.

Particularly importantly, these restrictions effectively shut down the mainstream economy with vast sectors of industry either closed outright or unable to function in the absence of locked-down or, later, bioweapon-injured or bioweapon-killed staff. For just one discussion of the vast evidence available of Covid-19 ‘vaccine’ injuries and deaths, watch ‘3.5 BILLION could be injured or killed by the jab. Are YOU ready?’ which is briefly discussed here: ‘Dr. David Martin blasts health authorities for turning roughly 4 billion people into “bioweapons factories”’.

This inevitably adversely impacted the entire supply chain: That is, the process that connects the production of raw materials, such as food grown on farms and minerals mined from the Earth, to factories that produce everything from canned food to computers, and then to outlets that sell these products to the public. All components of this chain were either shut down completely at one or more times, as part of the imposed restrictions or other policy measures – watch, for example, ‘Biden pays farms to STOPEU out of FeedMeat taxes & Chicken permitsUp to you to GROW FOOD!’ – or just substantially curtailed by the unavailability of essential inputs, ranging from replacement parts to competent labour.

To exacerbate matters, the transport industry (trucking, railroads, shipping, airlines) was also effectively shut down, containers became unavailable (because they were in the wrong places) and logistics corporations (that organize the movement of trade goods) were disabled, including by cyber attacks. The airline and tourist industries were just two industries that were profoundly disrupted. But so was much of small business, with many businesses destroyed. As a result, hundreds of millions of people lost employment, many permanently, throughout the industrial economies and millions more were starved to death in Africa, Asia and Central/South America because the day-to-day economy, by which many survive, was shuttered and any ameliorative measures by governments and international organizations were, deliberately, woefully inadequate (or were siphoned into elite wallets). See ‘The Global Elite’s “Kill and Control” Agenda: Destroying Our Food Security’.

But ‘behind the (obvious) scenes’ outlined above, there has been a great deal more going on that has been deliberately concealed from public view, and this has been considered and discussed by some fine analysts.

According to Catherine Austin Fitts, using ‘national security’ as the justification, the U.S. National Security Act 1947 and the CIA Act 1949 were the basis of a series of Acts and Executive Orders that ‘created a secrecy machinery’ which essentially meant that ‘the most powerful financial interests in the world can keep a whole bunch of money secret’, thus creating a secret black budget. And, starting in 1998, according to US federal government documentation, huge sums of money were not accounted for while private equity firms began exploding and, despite having no capacity to raise such amounts, were suddenly investing huge sums of money in emerging markets. According to Fitts ‘we are now missing over $US21 trillion’, which she calls a ‘financial coup d’etat’ that is clearly in ‘massive violation’ of the US constitution. The financial value of what has transpired under the Covid-19 narrative is that the ‘magic virus’ can be used to explain, for example, why there is no money for healthcare or pension funds cannot pay on retirement those who paid into them throughout their lives. Watch ‘We Need to Talk about Mr Global – Part Two’ with a simple summary here: ‘The Real Game of Missing Money’.

But if $US21 trillion missing already sounds like a lot, it doesn’t end there, as Fitt’s recent discussion with Professor Mark Skidmore makes perfectly clear in ‘The Financial Coup: More Missing Money & FASAB Standard 56’. Fitts observes:

‘We are now over $US100 trillion of undocumentable adjustments if we use their most recent figures and so I would say we are describing a financial system which is completely and utterly out of control…. If any of the allegations about financial fraud in the 2020 [US Presidential] election are true, and I believe that many of them are, we’ve now delinked both the election system and the finances [from] the constitution and the law so we are are now operating both in terms of who governs and how they spend the money completely outside of the law and completely outside of any democratic process. So this is a coup.’

To which Professor Skidmore responds:

‘The reason that I really struggled… watching what was going on during the last financial crisis, [was that] I thought ‘Wow we don’t have the rule of law’. It was so obvious that we didn’t ten years ago and it’s like it’s devolving even more and so I am not sure how much further we can go before we are just completely devoid of the rule of law at least for a subset of the very powerful.’

As an aside, while genuinely appreciative of the research of Fitts and Skidmore, as outlined earlier in this article and previously demonstrated, democracy has always been a sham and the Elite has always operated beyond the rule of law, routinely corrupting national political processes in pursuit of Elite ends. See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’ All we are seeing in the current context is Elite corruption being flaunted in a way that reflects the sure knowledge that it can act corruptly, on a global scale, with impunity.

But to return to the subject at hand: In 2019, the central bankers of the G7 countries met for their regular conference at Jackson Hole, Wyoming and agreed to the ‘Going Direct Reset’, a plan devised (and later orchestrated) by BlackRock – see ‘Dealing with the next downturn’ – and, as explained by John Titus, the fundamental purpose of this ‘Reset’ was to orchestrate the largest asset transfer in history under cover of the forthcoming Covid-19 ‘pandemic’. Watch ‘Larry & Carstens’ Excellent Pandemic’ with a summary here: ‘Summary – Going Direct Reset’.

In the words of Titus: ‘In a nutshell, the arrival of the 2020 pandemic was about as accidental as an assassination. The pandemic narrative is nothing but a cover story to conceal from the public what in reality is the biggest asset transfer ever.’ See Summary – Going Direct Reset.

While you can learn the mechanics of how this was conducted in the excellent documents and videos immediately above, as Fitts points out in relation to the central banks: ‘Controlling and having access to data on fiscal and monetary policy is the basis of huge fortunes.’ And, combined with the secrecy that has protected their manipulations from public view – ‘if you look at all the technology and assets that have been transferred, by questionable means, into private and corporate hands, the liability is over the top’ – it has engendered the view that their only way forward is ‘complete, total central control’.

Central Bank Digital Currencies

How will this ‘total control’ be achieved? One key element will be the introduction of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs). According to Fitts: The fundamental value of digitized systems, from the elite perspective, is that they enable centralized control. So, by creating CBDCs the financial transaction control grid becomes the means by which you enable centralized control; that is, slavery. Watch ‘We Need to Talk about Mr Global – Part Two’.

How does this work? CBDCs allow the Central Bank to determine exactly what products and services your digital currency can be spent on, when it can spent and where it can be spent. It also allows the issuing authority to freeze, reduce or empty your bank account, and to alter its functionality with the latest ‘update’, based on your ‘social credit score’, political allegiance or if you do not comply with certain directives. But it goes beyond this.

According to the Bank for International Settlements:

‘The G20 has made enhancing cross-border payments a global priority and has identified CBDC as a potential way forward to improving such payments. A “holy grail” solution for cross-border payments is one which allows such payments to be immediate, cheap, universally accessible and settled in a secure settlement medium. For wholesale payments, central bank money is the preferred medium for financial

market infrastructures. A multi-CBDC platform upon which multiple central banks can issue and exchange their respective CBDCs is a particularly promising solution for achieving this vision, and mBridge is a wholesale multi-CBDC project that aims to advance towards this goal. It builds on previous work…. Project mBridge tests the hypothesis that an efficient, low-cost, real-time and scalable cross-border multi-CBDC arrangement can provide a network of direct central bank and commercial participant connectivity and greatly increase the potential for international trade flows and cross-border business at large…. All the while safeguarding currency sovereignty and monetary and financial stability by appropriately integrating policy, regulatory and legal compliance, and privacy considerations.’ See ‘Project mBridge: Connecting economies through CBDC’.

Apart from the fact that the G20 governments are distinctly unrepresentative of the world’s people, these words are typical of the type usually chosen when the Elite is intent on sugarcoating their lies to conceal their true agenda.

Fortunately, Agustin Carstens of the Bank for International Settlements has been more forthcoming: ‘We don’t know, for example, who’s using a $100 bill today, we don’t know who is using a 1,000 peso bill today. The key difference with the CBDC is the central bank will have absolute control on the rules and regulations that will determine the use of that expression of central bank liability, and also we will have the technology to enforce that.’ Watch ‘Cross-Border Payments: A Vision for the Future’. And here is the Bank of England advising government ministers in the UK on the issue of programming CBDCs: ‘Bank of England tells ministers to intervene on digital currency “programming”’. For a more detailed explanation, see ‘What Is Programmable Money?’ And for an update on progress in your country, see ‘CBDC: A Country-by-Country Guide’.

Before proceeding, however, it is worthwhile noting the conflict that is going on between the central banks and the commercial banks (the traditional actors in the retail banking sector, that is, the part of banking where people interact directly with a bank), as well as that between the commercial banks and the big tech companies, such as PayPal, Alipay, Facebook and Amazon that have developed or are developing their own digital currencies and/or payments systems outside the traditional financial system. While non-bank financial institutions long-ago overtook commercial banks in lending, bank influence generally continues to decline and is accelerating in the face of the competition from the technology giants. Why the conflict? Because a CBDC risks collapsing the commercial banking sector completely by eliminating retail banking and thus destabilizing the long-standing financial system. For some discussion of this, watch Alice Fulwood’s presentation ‘Could digital currencies put banks out of business?’ There is no doubt, of course, that this conflict will be resolved and that it will not be in our favour.

In any case, CBDCs are just one feature of their planned technocracy which includes digitizing your identity, issuing you a social credit score, geofencing you in one of the Elite’s ‘smart cities’ and feeding you insects and processed trash, among many other elements. See ‘Digitizing Your Identity is the Fast-Track to Slavery: How Can You Defend Your Freedom?’ and ‘Digital Currency: The Fed Moves toward Monetary Totalitarianism’.

And to elaborate the significance of imprisoning you in a ‘smart’ city, Patrick Wood points out the evidence both in the literature and in practice: The intention is to force us off the land, as is already happening in China, and at gunpoint if necessary, so that ‘vacated farm land’ can be combined ‘into giant factory farms to be operated by advanced technology such as agricultural robots and automated tractors’. Once relocated into the ‘smart’ city of the government’s choice, everyone will be subject to 24 hour surveillance using a plethora of ‘smart’ technologies such as biometric facial scanning, geospatial tracking and CBDCs, forced onto public transport which will not include the option of leaving the city, and confined to those work and other activities approved by the relevant technocrats. See ‘Day 9: Technocracy And Smart Cities’.

The bottom line, in simple language however, is the same as it has always been: Endlessly acting to consolidate their control over the rest of us, our money is being stolen by the Elite for their own ends and they are not required to report it and they cannot be held accountable, legally or otherwise. The only difference to what has happened historically is that now even the pretense of some form of equity, the rule of law and even the notion of democracy are being abandoned in the final rush to techno-totalitarianism and wealth concentration.

Beyond this, however, other components of the elite program are designed to play a part in destroying human society and the global economy. For a summary of these, see ‘Killing Off Humanity: How The Global Elite Is Using Eugenics And Transhumanism To Shape Our Future’.

Collapsing the Global Economy

Not content with these measures, however, the war in central Asia was precipitated by the Elite to advance key elements of their program. Superficially portrayed by most politicians and corporate media as a war between Russia and Ukraine, many thoughtful analysts perceive some of the deeper strands of what has occurred: Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and NATO commitments made at the end of the Cold War, NATO has consistently violated those commitments and there has been routine Ukrainian attacks on Donetsk and Luhansk over the past eight years. These and other events have ensured a long but steady ‘lead time’ in the final build up to the war, precipitating the military response of Russia, as intended. For just four thoughtful analyses, see ‘Understanding The Great Game in Ukraine’, ‘Ukraine, Russia, and the New World Order’, ‘Some of Us Don’t Think the Russian Invasion Was “Aggression.” Here’s Why.’ and ‘The U.S. Is Leading the World Into the Abyss’.

Obscured by the war, however, the leaderships of both Russia and Ukraine are heavily involved in the World Economic Forum and both have been heavily committed to imposing the elite agenda on their populations. In short, the Russia-Ukraine war serves elite purposes well with consequences including even greater disruption of food and fuel supply chains than the ‘Great Reset’ was able to achieve alone. See ‘The War in Ukraine: Understanding and Resisting the Global Elite’s Deeper Agenda’.

Similarly, the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 & 2 gas pipelines – see ‘Ukraine War: New Developments’  – might be seen through various lenses but, again, it serves elite purposes well. As Tom Luongo noted: ‘The important thing I keep trying to point out [is] that thinking in terms of “country” is ultimately the wrong lens to view these people’s actions. Factions are the better lens. Factions cross political borders.’ See ‘The Curious Whodunit of Nordstreams 1 and 2’. Given that the sabotage of these two pipelines is seriously exacerbating the energy crisis in Europe, while displacing people’s anger onto one or other parties in the war, as always the elite forces driving destruction of the world economy escape scrutiny.

Beyond this, on 7 October 2022 the Biden Administration dealt a ‘nuclear’ strike to the hi-tech industry by imposing onerous new export rules that cut off supply of essential technology (advanced semiconductors, chip-making equipment and supercomputer components) to China, immediately and adversely impacting Chinese production. See ‘Implementation of Additional Export Controls: Certain Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items’. But whatever pain this will inflict on the Chinese, it will inflict far more pain on ordinary people who will be required to deal with the outcomes of this latest supply-chain disruption: higher prices, more battered household budgets and fewer families able to scrape by on shrinking wages. See ‘Biden’s Tech-War Goes Nuclear’ and ‘US Economic War on China Threatens Global Microchip Industry’.

In any case, the ongoing destruction of the global economy will continue even while, apparently, considerable effort is being made to restructure key elements of it, such as those in relation to trade relations, trade routes, currencies and international banking being undertaken in various international fora. For one discussion of these ongoing efforts, see ‘Russia, India, China, Iran: the Quad that really matters’.

But, again, how serious are these efforts when all governments are collaborating closely on the fundamental Elite program? At one of these meetings, recently concluded, the G20 Summit in Bali – see ‘G20 Bali Leaders’ Declaration’ – Moscow, Beijing, Washington and all other governments present, agreed to ‘the creation of a global health-preserving Pandemic Fund sponsored by the WHO, the World Bank, Bill Gates, and the Rockefeller Foundation. The fund will ensure there is plenty of money for experimental genetic vaccines in the weeks, months, and decades ahead.’ Beyond this, however, the Declaration contains ‘purple prose’ about ‘digital transformation’, ‘interoperability of Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) for cross-border payments’, and other elements of the Elite’s technocratic program. As Riley Waggaman observed: ‘It’s truly heart-warming that even amidst ceaseless geopolitical squabbling, Moscow and the Collective West can sit down at the negotiating table, break bread, and agree to cattle-tag the entire world.’ See ‘World leaders agree to cattle-tag the planet’.

And while a recent World Economic Forum report, based on the views of 50 chief economists from around the world, sanitized economic prospects by simply referring to a likely forthcoming ‘recession’ either in 2022 or 2023, spokesperson Saadia Zahidi couldn’t avoid mentioning the heavy consensus that real wages will decline, poverty will increase and ‘social unrest is expected to continue to rise’ in response to rises in the cost of living, particularly due to production and supply chain disruptions in fuel and food supplies. See ‘Special Agenda Dialogue on the Future of the Global Economy’.

Taking a similarly ‘moderate’ stance, in its recent ‘World Economic Outlook’, the International Monetary Fund warned that ‘More than a third of the global economy will contract this year or next, while the three largest economies – the United States, the European Union, and China – will continue to stall. In short, the worst is yet to come, and for many people 2023 will feel like a recession.’ See ‘World Economic Outlook – Countering the Cost-of-Living Crisis’. At the media briefing to launch the report, the Director of the IMF’s Research Department, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, noted that ‘the global economy is headed for stormy waters’ and ‘Too many low-income countries are close to or are already in debt distress. Progress toward orderly debt restructuring… is urgently needed to avert a wave of sovereign debt crises. Time may soon run out.’ See ‘WEO Press Briefing Annual Meetings 2022’.

But other reports suggest something far worse.

Summarizing his own extensive research on the subject over the past three years, in a recent interview Professor Michel Chossudovsky simply explains what triggered the economic collapse, referring to the origin of the crisis with decisions made in early 2020: ‘This is really Economics 101:… the announcement of the lockdown… implies the confinement of the labor force on the one hand and the freezing of the workplace on the other…. What happens? The answer is obvious: Collapse! Economic and social collapse on an unprecedented basis because it was implemented simultaneously in 190 countries.’ Watch ‘The Worldwide Corona Crisis, Global Coup d’Etat Against Humanity’.

Noting the complete failure of authorities to hold even one corporate executive to account for the financial collapse they caused in 2008 – when banking institutions intentionally sold securities they knew were bad to defraud customers and increase their own profits, as carefully reported in a ‘Frontline’ documentary in 2013 – Dr Joseph Mercola argues that the ‘same criminal bankers are now intentionally destroying the global financial system in order to replace it with something even worse – social credit scores, digital identity and Central Banking Digital Currencies (CBDCs), which will give them the ability to control not only your individual finances but also everything else in your life’. Apparently unaware of the extensive lead time on what is happening, he goes on to observe that ‘We’re now at the point where banksters have self-selected themselves to rule the whole world, tossing notions of democracy, freedom and human dignity in the waste bin along the way.’ See ‘Who Is Behind the Economic Collapse?’

As explained above, these ‘banksters’ operate beyond the rule of law too.

According to the Irish economist Philip Pilkington: ‘The Western world today faces a serious risk of slipping into another Great Depression. This risk has arisen… due to global economic relations deteriorating to the point of all out warfare.’ Noting the critical importance of the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines, leaving Europe with ‘insufficient access to energy, the price of energy in Europe will remain extremely high for years to come. European industry, for which energy is a key input, will become uncompetitive.’ See ‘The next Great Depression? Economic warfare has severe implications’.

According to former BlackRock manager, Edward Dowd, the outcome of what has been happening, which is being accelerated by the corruption that has plagued Wall Street since the 1990s, is that the forthcoming financial collapse is a ‘mathematical certainty’ and will occur within the next six to 24 months. Watch ‘Ex-BlackRock Manager: Global Financial Collapse a “Mathematical Certainty”’.

Or, in the words of strategic risk consultant William Engdahl: What is coming in the months ahead, barring a dramatic policy reversal, ‘is the worst economic depression in history to date’. See ‘Global Planned Financial Tsunami Has Just Begun’.

After listing a sequence of industry shutdowns and other measures in Europe because of energy shortages, Michael Snyder simply observes that ‘This is what an economic collapse looks like’, notes the prospect (also predicted by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and, as we saw above, the World Economic Forum) of ‘civil unrest’ and warns that ‘Europe is going to descend into “the new Dark Ages” this winter, and the entire world will experience extreme pain as a result.’ See ‘This Winter, Europe Plunges Into “The New Dark Ages”’.

According to Irina Slav, countries of the European Union have suffered a consistent decline in gas and electricity consumption this year amid record-breaking prices. Businesses are shutting down factories, downsizing or relocating, while production of such basic products as steel, zinc, aluminium, chemicals, plastics and ceramics has been cut substantially, if not slashed dramatically. Observing that the European Union is heading for a recession that is ‘quite clear to anyone watching the indicators’ she goes on to state that ‘Europe may well be on the way to deindustrialization’. See ‘Europe May See Forced De-Industrialization As Result Of Energy Crisis’.

Dr. Seshadri Kumar agrees. He has offered an intensively detailed critique of the economic fallout from the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war and events such as the sanctions against Russia and the sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 & 2 gas pipelines. Following his careful analysis, he notes a series of conclusions including that ‘The scarcity of oil and gas, combined with the scarcity of commodities, will lead to the De-Industrialization of Europe in short order.’

‘Europe needs what Russia has (and what China has). It cannot do without those things. But Russia (and China) can do without what Europe has. They are self-sufficient. The financial impact of European sanctions on Russia is minimal. Therefore, economic sanctions against Russia (or China) will never work. But, because of the overwhelming dependence of Europe on Russian (and Chinese) goods, sanctions on Russia (or China) will utterly destroy Europe. The only hope for Europe to prevent a total economic catastrophe is to achieve an agreement with Russia that ends the current destructive sanctions as soon as possible, and at whatever political cost, including the abandonment of Ukraine and cession of Ukrainian territory to Russia. The longer this is postponed, the more extensive the permanent economic damage to Europe will be….

‘A New World Order is taking birth before our eyes….

‘The sanctions on Russia will be seen in hindsight as Europe’s Stalingrad as well as its Waterloo.’ See ‘The Coming European Economic Apocalypse’.

Commenting on the banking system, precious metals businessman Stefan Gleason warns that ‘The global fractional-reserve banking system is teetering on the brink of failure. Financial strains are exposing major banks as under-capitalized and ill prepared to weather additional strains from high inflation, rising interest rates, and a weakening economy. Banks operating outside the United States are presently most vulnerable. A spike in interest rates concomitant with a spike in the exchange rate of the Federal Reserve note “dollar” is wreaking havoc in global debt markets and driving capital flight. Many analysts fear bank runs are coming. They are already hitting developing countries.’ See ‘Banks on the Brink: Is Your Money Safe?’

Noting that imposition of technologies associated with the fourth industrial revolution and the war in Ukraine are impacting the labor force, among a wide variety of other impacts on society as a whole, ‘Winter Oak’ observes that while anticipating future employment trends is not easy, ‘the combined threat of pandemics and wars means the labour force is on the brink of an unprecedented reshuffle with technology reshaping logistics, potentially threatening hundreds of millions of blue and white collar jobs, resulting in the greatest and fastest displacement of jobs in history and foreshadowing a labour market shift which was previously inconceivable.’

Furthermore: the nation state model is being upended ‘by a global technocracy, consisting of an unelected consortium of leaders of industry, central banking oligarchs and private financial institutions, most of which are predominantly non-state corporate actors attempting to restructure global governance and enlist themselves in the global decision-making process.’ See ‘The Great Reset Phase 2: War’.

James Corbett simply observes that ‘the financial order we have known our whole lives is slated for destruction’. The demolition of the economy provides cover to conceal implementation of other key elements of the elite plan in which all fit neatly together: ‘vaccine passports introduce the digital ID. The digital ID provides the infrastructure for the CBDCs. The CBDCs provide a mechanism for enforcement of a social credit system.’ As Corbett notes: ‘To see these events as separate events unfolding haphazardly and coincidentally is to miss the entire point.’ See ‘The Controlled Demolition of the Economy’.

And, according to a source cited by Anviksha Patel, executives at the giant hedge-fund firm Elliott Management Corp. recently sent a letter to investors advising that the world is ‘on the path to hyperinflation’ which could lead to ‘global societal collapse and civil or international strife’. See ‘Hedge-fund giant Elliott warns looming hyperinflation could lead to “global societal collapse”’.

Among many other commentaries offering insight into one or more aspects of what is happening, Oxfam documents the fact that ‘billionaires in the food and energy sectors are increasing their fortunes by $1 billion dollars every two days’ and that a new billionaire is being created every 30 hours while nearly a million people are being pushed into extreme poverty at nearly the same rate. See ‘Pandemic creates new billionaire every 30 hours – now a million people could fall into extreme poverty at same rate in 2022’.

But perhaps the most evocative account of what is transpiring is offered by Egon von Greyerz, founder and managing partner of Matterhorn Asset Management in Switzerland, a company that has ‘always held a deep respect for analysing and managing risk’: By the end of the 1990s, it was clear ‘that global [financial] risk was growing increasingly apparent as debts and derivative levels rapidly rose’. See Matterhorn Asset Management: History.

Noting that laws governing the functioning of modern economies ensure that ‘No banker, no company management or business owner ever has to take the loss personally if he makes a mistake. Losses are socialised and profits are capitalised. Heads I win, Tails I don’t lose!’ Greyerz goes on to note that ‘there are honourable exceptions.’ Some Swiss banks still operate in accordance with the principle of unlimited personal liability for the partners/owners which clearly encourages a responsible, ethical approach to the conduct of business.

He observes: ‘If the global financial system and governments applied that principle, imagine how different the world would look not just financially but also ethically.’ If we had such a system, he contends, then human values would come before adoration of ‘the golden calf’. And evaluation of an investment proposal or a loan would be based on a judgment about its soundness economically and ethically, as well as a judgment that the risk of loss was minimal, rather than just the size of the personal profit it might return.

Instead, since 1971 (when President Nixon unilaterally terminated convertibility of the US dollar into gold, effectively ending the 1944 Bretton Woods system) ‘governments and central banks have contributed to the creation of almost $300 trillion of new money plus quasi money in the form of unfunded liabilities and derivatives [‘the most dangerous and aggressive financial instrument of destruction’] of $2.2 quadrillion making $2.5 [quadrillion] in total. As debt explodes, the world could easily face a debt burden of $3 quadrillion by 2025-2030.’ At the same time, ‘Central banks around the world hold $2 trillion [in gold reserves].’

The outcome is inevitable: ‘with over $2 quadrillion (2 and 15 zeros) of debt and liabilities resting on a foundation of $2 trillion of government-owned gold that makes a gold coverage of 0.1% or a leverage of 1000X!… an inverse pyramid with a very weak foundation.’ Noting that a sound financial system ‘needs a very solid foundation of real money’ it is simply the case that quadrillions of debt and liabilities ‘can not survive resting on this feeble amount of gold. So the $2 quadrillion financial weapon of mass destruction is now on the way to totally destroy the system. This is a global house of cards that will collapse at some point in the not too distant future…. No government and no central bank can solve the problem that they have created. More of the same just won’t work.’ See ‘$2 Quadrillion Debt Precariously Resting on $2 Trillion Gold’.

The most likely outcome, according to Greyerz: ‘The dollar will go to ZERO and the US will default. The same will happen to most countries.’ See ‘In the End the $ Goes to Zero and the US Defaults’.

The fundamental summary then, according to Greyerz, is this: ‘This system will start to implode.’… ‘The whole banking system is rotten. With the problems in Europe now it is actually a critical situation…. We have a two tier economy:… the rich are still rich but the poor are really poor. And you see that in every country in the world now… People haven’t got enough money to live…. This is going to be a human disaster of major proportions: it’s so sad and governments will not have any chance of doing anything about it.’ In the US outside the metropolitan areas, ‘the poverty is incredibly high and people live in boxes… poverty is everywhere and sadly, we are only seeing the beginning and there is no solution…. From a human point of view, we are looking at a major disaster.’ Watch ‘$2.5 Quadrillion Disaster Waiting to Happen’.

Will action be taken to halt the collapse? According to alternative economist Brandon Smith, it won’t. Consider this: ‘What if the goal of the Fed is the destruction of the middle class?… What if they are luring investors into markets with rumors of a pivot, tricking those investors into pumping money back into markets and then triggering losses yet again with more rate hikes and hawkish language? What if this is a wealth destruction steam valve? What if it’s a trap? I present this idea because we have seen this before in the US, from 1929 through the 1930s during the Great Depression. The Fed used very similar tactics to systematically destroy middle class wealth and consolidate power for the international banking elites.’

Smith’s conclusion? ‘This is an engineered crash, not an accidental crash.’ See ‘Markets Are Expecting The Federal Reserve To Save Them – It’s Not Going To Happen’.

And that, of course, is the point: the crash has been engineered. Why?

In summarizing the ongoing collapse of European infrastructure and industry, and energy shortages in the USA, Mike Adams notes that the ‘globalists are decimating the pillars of civilization in order to cause collapse and depopulation…. The overarching goal is to exterminate the vast majority of the human population, then enslave the survivors.’ See ‘Dark Times: Industry and infrastructure collapsing by the day across Europe and the USA’.

But this is no surprise. All that any thoughtful observer needs to do is consider history, listen to what the Global Elite is telling us they are doing, observe them doing it, and then simply inform people what is at hand: The destruction of the global economy, as part of the fundamental reshaping of world order.

After all, the Elite has been crystal clear. It’s fundamental aim is to kill off a substantial proportion of the human population and reduce those humans and transhumans left alive to slavery while confined in their technocratic prison; even wealth concentration is anciliary to that, although a product of it. See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’ And if you crash the global economy denying people regular food, energy to stay warm and the capacity to communicate effectively, most of those left alive will be inclined to submit to whatever conditions they are offered in order to survive. How bad does your technocratic prison sound now? Even if you are eating insects?

So, to reiterate a vital point, the Elite agenda in relation to the economy is intimately related to its wider agenda in relation to eugenics and technocracy.

In an interview about her recently published book – see One Nation Under Blackmail: The sordid union between Intelligence and Organized Crime that gave rise to Jeffrey Epstein – Whitney Webb simply observes that ‘we are being herded into a technofeudalism, slavery… there’s a lot of different names for it going around but it’s not good and it’s organized crime running the show’…. Elaborating, Webb explained that ‘They’re looking at feudalism and how do you create a class of slaves that cannot even cognitively rebel ever again.’ Watch ‘How Elites Will Create a New Class of Slaves’.

How will this happen? While it will obviously require several of the range of measures being introduced, particularly including the deployment of 5G, the digitization of your identity and the utilization of a range of other technologies such as artificial intelligence and geofencing, here is what Clive Thompson, retired Managing Director of Union Bancaire Privée in Switzerland, believes might happen:

‘I think its quite likely that the CBDC will arrive and it will also be the subject of the currency reset at the same time. At some point the world is going to go into a crisis or a country is going to go into a crisis…. When that happens I think they will close the banks, you will wake up on a Sunday morning and hear the news that they’ve shut the banks, they’re not going to open on Monday. Then by Monday evening or Tuesday you’ll get the announcement that we’re having a new currency – the CBDC – and don’t worry it will be one-to-one against the old currency but there will be some restrictions on your ability to convert your old money into the new money.

‘So if you’re poor and you have a small bank account it will be converted one-to-one straight away, and you’ll probably even find that you get a free gift from the government to kickstart the system, maybe three or five thousand pounds will be given to every citizen gratuitiously to kickstart the new system to the new CBDC. But if you have a hundred thousand or a million in the bank you’re going to be told ‘Yes, it’s one-to-one but you’re going to have to wait to convert it to the new currency.’ Now “wait” means “never”, we all know that. But they won’t tell you that. They’ll say it’s a temporary suspension because we’re in the middle of a crisis, the people are rioting in the street, we need to calm the system so ‘Here’s some free money everybody, go and enjoy yourselves.’…

‘So I think the CBDC will arrive as a consequence of a crisis and when that happens there will be a limitation on how much of your old currency you can convert, at one-to-one, with the new one…. But the advantage of this, from the government’s point of view, is it’s to all intents and purposes wiping the slate clean because all their liabilities will be denominated in a currency that nobody can use, nobody can spend.’ Watch ‘The Currency Reset Will Wipe Out Creditors and Usher in CBDCs. Part 1’.

In preparing to cope with the disruption this must inevitably cause, among other assets that would be critically useful while retaining value, such as open-pollinated (non-hybrid) seeds, Thompson suggests gold and silver (including gold and silver coins), land, property, equities, collectibles (such as art and rarer coins), machine and other tools, electricity generators, useful items, animals, firewood, washing powder, canned food and house extensions. See ‘The Currency Reset Will Wipe Out Creditors and Usher in CBDCs. Part 2.’

Of course, Thompson might be wrong in his prediction of precisely how the technocratic state will ultimately be imposed. But imposed it will be, one way or another, unless we are effectively resisting the foundational components of the Elite program.

Is cryptocurrency part of the answer?

Many people are suggesting cryptocurrencies as one way around some of the problems we face. However, the very basis of sound economy for any world that is unfolding is self-reliance, particularly in relation to essential needs around food, water, clothing, shelter and energy, within a local, sustainable community that is as self-sufficient as possible, and able to nonviolently defend itself.

Complemented by use of local markets and trading schemes – whether using local currencies or goods and services directly – this will maximise economic survival prospects for those participating (and no doubt some others besides).

Anything that is internet-based will become increasingly vulnerable, and there are definitely plans to shut down some/all of it, depending on the scenario. Cyber Polygon makes that crystal clear. See ‘Taking Control by Destroying Cash: Beware Cyber Polygon as Part of the Elite Coup’.

And unless a currency is backed by something with genuine value – as currencies were backed by gold or other metals in earlier eras – or there is widespread confidence in a currency for another reason (as currencies around the world have been backed by their governments until now), it can become valueless very quickly.

Moreover, the big banks are heavily invested in cryptocurrencies: Another reason to be wary. See ‘3 Banks That Have Big Plans for Blockchain and Cryptocurrency’.

But for an extremely succinct warning against crypto, check out this brief statement from Catherine Austin Fitts: ‘If you move to crypto, and I just want to really underscore this, crypto is not a currency, it is a control system.’ See ‘The Dangers Of Cryptocurrencies’.

And, perhaps, the recent bankruptcy of the FTX Group is worth considering. See ‘“This Is Unprecedented”: Enron Liquidator Overseeing FTX Bankruptcy Speechless: “I Have Never Seen Anything Like This”’.

For another of the many critiques of crypto, see retired corporate accountant Lawrence A. Stellato’s ‘The Dangers of Cryptocurrencies’.

Crypto has a high environmental cost too, given the technology it uses and the energy it needs to run.

In essence: Just not part of the future we must work together to build.

The Rothschilds and Transhumanism

Before concluding this investigation, it is worth returning to consideration of the Rothschild family in relation to one final issue: Transhumanism.

Why is this important?

Throughout this investigation, I have endeavoured to document a few basic facts: The Global Elite is intent on reshaping world order by killing off a substantial proportion of the human population and enslaving those left alive as transhuman slaves imprisoned in ‘smart’ cities. As part of achieving this outcome, the global economy is being ransacked and destroyed: This is intended to deprive people of the sustenance necessary to resist the entire Elite program that, among other outcomes, will concentrate virtually all remaining wealth in Elite hands.

This program has been planned in detail by elite agents in organizations like the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organization and is being implemented by relevant international organizations and multinational corporations (particularly those in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, and the corporate media), as well as national governments and medical organizations.

But, as I have pointed out, every organization, corporation and government is composed of individual human beings who make decisions (consciously or unconsciously) about what they do in any given circumstance. And while structural power is not something that can be ignored, individuals do have agency.

To illustrate this point, I have used the House of Rothschild as one example of a family of individuals who make decisions about how to act in the world and how the decisions of this family exercise enormous influence over world events. Consider another brief example of the decisions made by Rothschild family members and what has transpired as a result.

The Rothschild influence over world banking and the global economy, and thus political systems, is heavily documented and illustrated above. So, given the current Elite push to substantially reduce the human population and introduce a technocratic state populated by transhuman slaves, one question that inevitably suggests itself as worthy of further investigation concerns the possible involvement of the Rothschilds in the research and development of the technologies and biotechnologies that make this all possible.

An investigation soon reveals that Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, the 3rd Baron Rothschild, was born in 1910 and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read physiology, later gaining a PhD. After working for MI5 during World War II, ‘he joined the zoology department at Cambridge University from 1950 to 1970. He served as chairman of the Agricultural Research Council from 1948 to 1958 and as worldwide head of research at Royal Dutch/Shell [as noted above, a family business] from 1963 to 1970.’ See ‘Victor Rothschild, 3rd Baron Rothschild’.

Beyond this, however, articles in ‘The Financial Times’ in 1982-1983 reveal that N.M. Rothschild, of which the biologist Lord Rothschild was head, had established a venture capital fund called Biotechnology Investments in 1981 to attract £25m investments for biotechnology research. However, the fund, registered in the tax haven of Guernsey, had such exacting scientific and financial standards that it was having trouble identifying companies that could meet those standards despite the rapidly growing field. According to one news report in 1982: ‘City [of London] estimates put the number of new technology companies established in the last five years at about 150, mostly in North America. At least 70 are practising genetic engineering.’ See ‘Newsclippings re. Biotechnology Investments Limited (BIL) owned by N.M. Rothschild Asset Management’.

But lest you are concerned that the Rothschilds failed to establish a firm foothold in this fledgling industry, you might be reassured, but no wiser, to read the entry on the CHSL Archives Repository (that focuses on ‘Preserving and promoting the history of molecular biology’) titled ‘Rothschild Asset Management – Rothschild, Lord Victor’.

You will be no wiser because the archive is marked ‘Closed until Jan 2045 – Suppress all images for 60 years’.

As it turns out, however, the Rothschilds, whose business acumen is never questioned, are still raising funds and investing heavily in biotechnology. See ‘Edmond de Rothschild private equity unit to invest in biotech’. It’s just that, as usual, while you are hearing from elite agents (such as Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harari and Elon Musk) who publicly promote transhumanist endeavours, you are hearing very little from those, like the Rothschilds, who prefer control and profit to publicity.

Consequently, the Rothschilds are playing a key role both in the ongoing ransacking of the global economy and in profiting from the control they are helping to make possible through introduction of transhumanist technologies. It goes without saying that the family has heavy investments in many other technologies too, including those that will be critical to the success of the imminent technocratic world order, such as the Internet of Things. See, for example, Rothschild Technology Limited.

Of course, the Rothschilds and other Elite families with whom they are interconnected in various ways are also heavily involved through investments in major asset management corporations such as Vanguard and BlackRock. But again, it is not just about wealth concentration; it is about control and depopulation too. So, for example, the Rockefellers, another family closely connected to the Rothschilds, are also well-known for their longstanding involvement in social engineering and eugenics. See ‘Where Did this “New World Order” Coup Come From? The Rockefeller’s “Social Engineering Project”’ and ‘Killing Off Humanity: How the Global Elite is using Eugenics and Transhumanism to Shape Our Future’.

So What Can We Do about This?

Because it controls the political, economic, financial, technological, medical, educational, media and other important levers of society, the Elite profits hugely from daily human activity. But it can also precipitate an ‘extreme event’ (or the delusion of one) – a war, financial crisis (including depression), revolution, ‘natural disaster’, ‘pandemic’ (if you think that the Covid-19 scam was the last of its kind, see ‘Who’s Driving the Pandemic Express?’ and watch the plan for the next one, already available: ‘Catastrophic Contagion’) – and use its control of the political, economic, technological and other levers mentioned to manage how events unfold while simultaneously managing the narrative about what is taking place so that the truth is concealed.

This means that the Elite’s killing and exploitation of the human population at large is hidden behind whatever ‘enemy’ (human or otherwise) that Elite agents in government and the media direct the attention of the public towards at any given time.

It doesn’t matter whether we all end up blaming Hitler, Saddam or ‘the Russians’, ‘the capitalists’ or ‘Wall Street’, ‘the government’, ‘the climate’ or ‘the virus’, we never blame the Elite. So we never take action that is focused on stopping those individuals and their corporations and institutions that are fundamentally responsible for inflicting unending harm on us all, as well as the Earth and all of its other creatures too.

Fortunately, while the Elite is adept at devising an ever-expanding range of tools that can be used to manipulate events while simultaneously concealing this behind a barrage of propaganda, there is still just enough time to finally recognize what is happening and to end it. Otherwise, just as in the board game ‘Monopoly’, where one player finally owns everything and the other players have been forced out of the game, the Elite will win the ‘final battle’ against humanity, capture all wealth and reduce those humans and transhumans left alive to the status of slaves. See ‘The Final Battle for Humanity: It is “Now or Never” in the Long War Against Homo Sapiens’.

Does this sound insane to you? Of course it is. Do you think the Elite is insane? Of course it is. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ with further detail in ‘Why Violence?’ and ‘Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice’.

But just because someone is insane and their plan is insane, it doesn’t mean they cannot succeed. Remember Adolf Hitler? Idi Amin in Uganda? Pol Pot in Cambodia? Insane violence of unspeakable magnitude can succeed if too many people either cannot perceive the insanity, are afraid of it or simply believe it is too preposterous – ‘It can’t be true.’ – and do nothing about it. Or, in the cases just mentioned, not until it was too late to prevent vast killing.

So here is the summary: Humanity faces the gravest threat in our history. But because our opponent – the Global Elite – is insane, we cannot rely on reason or thoughtfulness alone to get us out of this mess: You cannot reason with insanity. And because the Global Elite controls international and national political processes, the global economy and legal systems, efforts to seek redress through those channels must fail. See ‘The Elite Coup to Kill or Enslave Us: Why Can’t Governments, Legal Actions and Protests Stop Them?’

Hence, if we are going to defeat this long-planned, complex and multifaceted threat, we must defeat its foundational components, not delude ourselves that we can defeat it one threat at a time or even by choosing those threats we think are the worst and addressing those first.

This is because the elite program, whatever its flaws and inconsistencies, as well as its potential for technological failure at times, is deeply integrated so we must direct our efforts at preventing or halting those foundational components of it that make everything else possible. This is why random acts of resistance will achieve nothing. Effective resistance requires the focused exercise of our power. In simple terms, we must be ‘strategic’.

If you are interested in being strategic in your resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ and its related agendas, you are welcome to participate in the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ campaign which identifies a list of 30 strategic goals for doing so.

In addition and more simply, you can download the one-page flyer that identifies a short series of crucial nonviolent actions that anyone can take. This flyer, recently updated and now available in 23 languages (Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Malay, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Slovak and Turkish) with several more languages in the pipeline, can be downloaded from here: ‘One-page Flyer’.

If this strategic resistance to the ‘Great Reset’ (and related agendas) appeals to you, consider joining the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ Telegram group (with a link accessible from the website).

And if you want to organize a mass mobilization, such as a rally, at least make sure that one or more of any team of organizers and/or speakers is responsible for inviting people to participate in this campaign and that some people at the event are designated to hand out the one-page flyer about the campaign.

If you like, you can also watch, share and/or organize to show, a short video about the campaign here: ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ video.

In parallel with our resistance, we must create the political, economic and social structures that serve our needs, not those of the Elite. That is why long-standing efforts to encourage and support people to grow their own food, participate in local trading schemes (involving the exchange of knowledge, skills, services and products with or without a local medium of exchange) and develop structures for cooperation, governance, nonviolent defence and networking with other communities are so important. Of course, indigenous peoples still have many of these capacities – lost to vast numbers of humans as civilization has expanded over the past five millennia – but many people are now engaged in renewed efforts to create local communities, such as ecovillages, and local trading schemes, such as Community Exchange Systems. Obviously, we must initiate/expand these forms of individual and community engagement in city neighbourhoods too.

Moreover, as Catherine Austin Fitts reminds us, if we choose that option, there is nothing to stop us having our own decentralised money system, starting with our own local community central bank and our own local community currency. Watch ‘We Need to Talk about Mr Global – Part Two’.

Finally, as noted by Professor Carroll Quigley in the very last words of his nearly-1,000 page epic Tragedy & Hope:

‘Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults.’ See Tragedy & Hope: A History of the World in Our Time, p. 947.

Fortunately, the passage of time since Quigley wrote these words has revealed an answer to this challenge. So, if you want to raise children who are powerfully able to investigate, analyze and act, you are welcome to make ‘My Promise to Children’.

Conclusion

Since the dawn of human civilization 5,000 years ago, in one context after another, some people who are more terrified than others in their immediate vicinity have sought what they perceived to be increased personal ‘security’ by gaining and exercising greater control over the people and resources around them.

Progressively, over time, this serious psychological dysfunctionality has been compounding until, today, the degree of ‘security’ and control that some people require includes all of us and all of the world’s resources. For want of a better term, we might call them the ‘Global Elite’ but it is important to understand that they are insane, criminal and ruthlessly violent.

This takeover of all of us and everything on Planet Earth is currently being attempted by this Elite through the ‘Great Reset’ and its related fourth industrial revolution, eugenicist and transhumanist agendas.

In essence, the intention is to kill off a substantial proportion of us, as is now happening, enclose the commons forever (and force those who live in regional areas off the land) while imprisoning those left alive as transhuman slaves in their technocratic ‘smart cities’ where we will ‘own nothing’ but provide the compliant workforce necessary to serve Elite ends.

Whether wars or financial crises (including depressions), ‘natural disasters’, revolutions or ‘pandemics’, great events are contrived by the Elite to distract attention from and facilitate profound changes in world order and obscure vast transfers of wealth from ordinary people to this Elite.

And this is done with the active complicity of Elite agents – including international organizations such as the United Nations, national governments and legal systems – which is why redress cannot be found through mainstream political or legal channels.

However, distracted by an endless stream of irrelevant ‘news’, superficial debates such as capitalism vs. socialism, monarchy vs. democracy, this political party vs. that political party, or even which football team is better, virtually all people are oblivious to how the world really works and who is orchestrating how history will be written by elite agents.

Is there conflict between individuals, families and groups within the Elite? Of course! But unlike the conflicts they endlessly throw in our faces to distract and manipulate us, the unifying agenda to which they all subscribe is to perpetually restructure world order to expand Elite control and extract more wealth for Elites. 5,000 years of human history categorically demonstrates that point.

Hence, if humanity is to defeat this Elite program, we must do it ourselves.

And if you want your resistance to this carefully-planned Elite technocratic takeover to be effective, then it must be strategic. Otherwise, your death or technocratic enslavement is now imminent.

I thank Anita McKone for thoughtful suggestions to improve the original draft of this investigation.

Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here. He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

Goodbye G20, hello BRICS+

The increasingly irrelevant G20 Summit concluded with sure signs that BRICS+ will be the way forward for Global South cooperation.

By Pepe Escobar

Source: The Cradle

The redeeming quality of a tense G20 held in Bali – otherwise managed by laudable Indonesian graciousness – was to sharply define which way the geopolitical winds are blowing.

That was encapsulated in the Summit’s two highlights: the much anticipated China-US presidential meeting – representing the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century – and the final G20 statement.

The 3-hour, 30-minute-long face-to-face meeting between Chinese President Xi Jinping and his US counterpart Joe Biden – requested by the White House – took place at the Chinese delegation’s residence in Bali, and not at the G20 venue at the luxury Apurva Kempinski in Nusa Dua.

The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs concisely outlined what really mattered. Specifically, Xi told Biden that Taiwan independence is simply out of the question. Xi also expressed hope that NATO, the EU, and the US will engage in “comprehensive dialogue” with Russia. Instead of confrontation, the Chinese president chose to highlight the layers of common interest and cooperation.

Biden, according to the Chinese, made several points. The US does not seek a New Cold War; does not support “Taiwan independence;” does not support “two Chinas” or “one China, one Taiwan”; does not seek “decoupling” from China; and does not want to contain Beijing.

However, the recent record shows Xi has few reasons to take Biden at face value.

The final G20 statement was an even fuzzier matter: the result of arduous compromise.

As much as the G20 is self-described as “the premier forum for global economic cooperation,” engaged to “address the world’s major economic challenges,” the G7 inside the G20 in Bali had the summit de facto hijacked by war. “War” gets almost double the number of mentions in the statement compared to “food” after all.

The collective west, including the Japanese vassal state, was bent on including the war in Ukraine and its “economic impacts” – especially the food and energy crisis – in the statement. Yet without offering even a shade of context, related to NATO expansion. What mattered was to blame Russia – for everything.

The Global South effect

It was up to this year’s G20 host Indonesia – and the next host, India – to exercise trademark Asian politeness and consensus building. Jakarta and New Delhi worked extremely hard to find wording that would be acceptable to both Moscow and Beijing. Call it the Global South effect.

Still, China wanted changes in the wording. This was opposed by western states, while Russia did not review the last-minute wording because Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov had already departed.

On point 3 out of 52, the statement “expresses its deepest regret over the aggression of the Russian Federation against Ukraine and demands the complete and unconditional withdrawal of armed forces from the territory of Ukraine.”

“Russian aggression” is the standard NATO mantra – not shared by virtually the whole Global South.

The statement draws a direct correlation between the war and a non-contextualized “aggravation of pressing problems in the global economy – slowing economic growth, rising inflation, disruption of supply chains, worsening energy, and food security, increased risks to financial stability.”

As for this passage, it could not be more self-evident: “The use or threat of use of nuclear weapons is inadmissible. The peaceful resolution of conflicts, efforts to address crises, as well as diplomacy and dialogue, are vital. Today’s era must not be of war.”

This is ironic given that NATO and its public relations department, the EU, “represented” by the unelected eurocrats of the European Commission, don’t do “diplomacy and dialogue.”

Fixated with war

Instead the US, which controls NATO, has been weaponizing Ukraine, since March, by a whopping $91.3 billion, including the latest presidential request, this month, of $37.7 billion. That happens to be 33 percent more than Russia’s total (italics mine) military spending for 2022.

Extra evidence of the Bali Summit being hijacked by “war” was provided by the emergency meeting, called by the US, to debate what ended up being a Ukrainian S-300 missile falling on a Polish farm, and not the start of WWIII like some tabloids hysterically suggested.

Tellingly, there was absolutely no one from the Global South in the meeting – the sole Asian nation being the Japanese vassal, part of the G7.

Compounding the picture, we had the sinister Davos master Klaus Schwab once again impersonating a Bond villain at the B20 business forum, selling his Great Reset agenda of “rebuilding the world” through pandemics, famines, climate change, cyber attacks, and – of course – wars.

As if this was not ominous enough, Davos and its World Economic Forum are now ordering Africa – completely excluded from the G20 – to pay $2.8 trillion to “meet its obligations” under the Paris Agreement to minimize greenhouse gas emissions.

The demise of the G20 as we know it

The serious fracture between Global North and Global South, so evident in Bali, had already been suggested in Phnom Penh, as Cambodia hosted the East Asia Summit this past weekend.

The 10 members of ASEAN had made it very clear they remain unwilling to follow the US and the G7 in their collective demonization of Russia and in many aspects China.

The Southeast Asians are also not exactly excited by the US-concocted IPEF (Indo-Pacific Economic Framework), which will be irrelevant in terms of slowing down China’s extensive trade and connectivity across Southeast Asia.

And it gets worse. The self-described “leader of the free world” is shunning the extremely important APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) summit in Bangkok at the end of this week.

For very sensitive and sophisticated Asian cultures, this is seen as an affront. APEC, established way back in 1990s to promote trade across the Pacific Rim, is about serious Asia-Pacific business, not Americanized “Indo-Pacific” militarization.

The snub follows Biden’s latest blunder when he erroneously addressed Cambodia’s Hun Sen as “prime minister of Colombia” at the summit in Phnom Penh.

Lining up to join BRICS

It is safe to say that the G20 may have plunged into an irretrievable path toward irrelevancy. Even before the current Southeast Asian summit wave – in Phnom Penh, Bali and Bangkok – Lavrov had already signaled what comes next when he noted that “over a dozen countries” have applied to join BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa).

Iran, Argentina, and Algeria have formally applied: Iran, alongside Russia, India, and China, is already part of the Eurasian Quad that really matters.

Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Afghanistan are extremely interested in becoming members. Indonesia just applied, in Bali. And then there’s the next wave: Kazakhstan, UAE, Thailand (possibly applying this weekend in Bangkok), Nigeria, Senegal, and Nicaragua.

It’s crucial to note that all of the above sent their Finance Ministers to a BRICS Expansion dialogue in May. A short but serious appraisal of the candidates reveals an astonishing unity in diversity.

Lavrov himself noted that it will take time for the current five BRICS to analyze the immense geopolitical and geoeconomic implications of expanding to the point of virtually reaching the size of the G20 – and without the collective west.

What unites the candidates above all is the possession of massive natural resources: oil and gas, precious metals, rare earths, rare minerals, coal, solar power, timber, agricultural land, fisheries, and fresh water. That’s the imperative when it comes to designing a new resource-based reserve currency to bypass the US dollar.

Let’s assume that it may take up to 2025 to have this new BRICS+ configuration up and running. That would represent roughly 45 percent of confirmed global oil reserves and over 60 percent of confirmed global gas reserves (and that will balloon if gas republic Turkmenistan later joins the group).

The combined GDP – in today’s figures – would be roughly $29.35 trillion; much larger than the US ($23 trillion) and at least double the EU ($14.5 trillion, and falling).

As it stands, BRICS account for 40 percent of the global population and 25 percent of GDP. BRICS+ would congregate 4.257 billion people: over 50 percent of the total global population as it stands.

BRI embraces BRICS+

BRICS+ will be striving towards interconnection with a maze of institutions: the most important are the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), itself featuring a list of players itching to become full members; strategic OPEC+, de facto led by Russia and Saudi Arabia; and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China’s overarching trade and foreign policy framework for the 21st century. It is worth pointing out that early all crucial Asian players have joined the BRI.

Then there are the close links of BRICS with a plethora of regional trade blocs: ASEAN, Mercosur, GCC (Gulf Cooperation Council), Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), Arab Trade Zone, African Continental Free Trade Area, ALBA, SAARC, and last but not least the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), the largest trade deal on the planet, which includes a majority of BRI partners.

BRICS+ and BRI is a match everywhere you look at it – from West Asia and Central Asia to the Southeast Asians (especially Indonesia and Thailand). The multiplier effect will be key – as BRI members will be inevitably attracting more candidates for BRICS+.

This will inevitably lead to a second wave of BRICS+ hopefuls including, most certainly, Azerbaijan, Mongolia, three more Central Asians (Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and gas republic Turkmenistan), Pakistan, Vietnam, and Sri Lanka, and in Latin America, a hefty contingent featuring Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia, and Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the role of the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB) as well as the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) will be enhanced – coordinating infrastructure loans across the spectrum, as BRICS+ will be increasingly shunning dictates imposed by the US-dominated IMF and the World Bank.

All of the above barely sketches the width and depth of the geopolitical and geoeconomic realignments further on down the road – affecting every nook and cranny of global trade and supply chain networks. The G7’s obsession in isolating and/or containing the top Eurasian players is turning on itself in the framework of the G20. In the end, it’s the G7 that may be isolated by the BRICS+ irresistible force.

A war Russia set to win

The Europeans have been nicely played by the Americans

Breached: With the attack on the Crimean Bridge, Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has crossed a red line that Moscow had warned him against. Reuters

By MK Bhadrakumar

Source: The Tribune of India

Two massive terrorist strikes misfired spectacularly and a terrible beauty is born in the Ukraine war. These two carefully planned attacks in quick succession — on Nord Stream gas pipelines and Crimean Bridge — were intended as a knockout blow to Russia. According to President Vladimir Putin, people ‘who want to finally sever ties between Russia and the EU, weaken Europe’ are behind the Nord Stream blasts. He named the US, Ukraine and Poland as ‘beneficiaries’.

Last Wednesday, Russia’s domestic intelligence service FSB identified Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, Kyrylo Budanov, as the mastermind behind the Crimean attack. The New York Times and Washington Post also pointed fingers at Kiev, quoting ‘sources’. While Nord Stream-1 has been crippled, one of the strings of Nord Stream-2 remains intact. Putin said last week that the pipeline could be restored and Russia could deliver about 27 billion cubic metres of gas. ‘The ball is on the side of the European Union, if they want — let’s turn on the tap,’ he said.

But mum’s the word from Brussels. It is a profoundly embarrassing moment for the EU. The triumphalism has vanished as Europe is threatened by years of recession caused by the blowback from sanctions against Russia, where the US insisted on the cut off of energy ties with Moscow. The EU has now become a captive market for Big Oil and is left to buy LNG from the US at the asking price, which is six to seven times higher than the domestic price in the US. (Contracted price for long-term Russian supply for Germany used to be about $280 per 1,000 cubic metres as against the current market price hovering around $2,000.)

Plainly put, the Europeans have been nicely played by the Americans. India should take note of the US’ sense of entitlement. Basically, the Biden administration created a contrived energy crisis whose real aim is war profiteering.

The Crimean Bridge attack of October 8 is much more serious. Zelenskyy has crossed a red line that Moscow had repeatedly warned him against. Putin has disclosed that there have also been three terrorist attacks against the Kursk NPP. Russians will settle for nothing less than the ouster of the Zelenskyy regime.

Russia’s retaliation against Ukraine’s ‘critical infrastructure’, something Moscow refrained from so far, has serious implications. Since October 9, Russia has begun systematically targeting Ukraine’s power system and railways. Noted Russian military expert Vladislav Shurygin told Izvestia that if this tempo was kept up for a week or so, it ‘will disrupt the entire logistics of the Ukrainian military — system for transporting personnel, military equipment, ammunition, related cargo, as well as the functioning of military and repair plants.’

The Americans are cocooned in a surreal world of their self-serving narrative that Russia ‘lost’ the war. In the real world, though, Ivan Tertel, KGB chief in Belarus, who has an insider view of Moscow, said last Tuesday that with Russia boosting its troop strength in the war zone — 3 lakh troops who have been mobilised plus 70,000 volunteers — and the deployment of advanced weaponry, ‘the military operation will enter a key phase. According to our estimates, a turning point will come in the period from November of this year to February of next year.’

Policy-makers and strategists in Delhi should make a careful note of the timeline. The bottom line is, Russia is looking for an all-out victory and will not settle for anything less than a friendly government in Kiev. Western politicians, including Biden, understand that there is nothing stopping the Russians now. The US’ weapon kitty is running dry as Kiev keeps asking for more.

When asked whether he’d meet Biden at the G20 in Bali, Putin derisively remarked on Friday, ‘He (Biden) should be asked whether he is ready to hold such negotiations with me or not. To be honest, I don’t see any need, by and large. There is no platform for any negotiations for the time being.’

However, Washington has not yet thrown in the towel and the Biden administration remains obsessed with exhausting the Russian military — even at the cost of Ukraine’s destruction. And, for the Russians too, there is still much to be worked out on the battlefield: the oppressed Russian populations in Odessa (which suffered unspeakable atrocities from the neo-Nazis), Mykolaiv, Zaporizhya, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov are expecting ‘liberation’. It’s a highly emotive issue for Russia. Again, the overarching agenda of ‘demilitarisation’ and ‘denazification’ of Ukraine must be taken to its logical conclusion.

When all that is over, Putin knows Biden will not even want to meet him. Hungarian PM Viktor Orban said last week, ‘Anyone who seriously believes that the war can be ended through Russian-Ukrainian negotiations lives in another world. Reality looks different. In reality, such issues can only be discussed between Washington and Moscow. Today, Ukraine is able to fight only because it receives military assistance from the United States…

‘At the same time, I do not see President Biden as the person who would really be suitable for such serious negotiations. President Biden has gone too far. Suffice it to recall his statements to Russian President Putin.’

India should expect the defeat of the US and NATO, which completes the transition to a multipolar world order. Sadly, Indian elites are yet to purge their ‘unipolar predicament’. Europe, including Britain, is devastated and there is palpable discontent over the US’s ‘transatlantic leadership’. Indo-Pacific strategy is hopelessly adrift. New power centres are emerging in India’s extended neighbourhood, as the OPEC’s rebuff to Washington shows. A profound adjustment is needed in the Indian strategic calculus.

Exposing the Giants: The Global Power Elite

Diego Rivera, Man at the Crossroads/Man, Controller of the Universe, 1933

By Robert J. Burrowes

Developing the tradition charted by C. Wright Mills in his 1956 classic The Power Elite, in his latest book, Professor Peter Phillips starts by reviewing the transition from the nation state power elites described by authors such as Mills to a transnational power elite centralized on the control of global capital.

Thus, in his just-released study Giants: The Global Power Elite, Phillips, a professor of political sociology at Sonoma State University in the USA, identifies the world’s top seventeen asset management firms, such as BlackRock and J.P Morgan Chase, each with more than one trillion dollars of investment capital under management, as the ‘Giants’ of world capitalism. The seventeen firms collectively manage more than $US41.1 trillion in a self-invested network of interlocking capital that spans the globe.

This $41 trillion represents the wealth invested for profit by thousands of millionaires, billionaires and corporations. The seventeen Giants operate in nearly every country in the world and are ‘the central institutions of the financial capital that powers the global economic system’. They invest in anything considered profitable, ranging from ‘agricultural lands on which indigenous farmers are replaced by power elite investors’ to public assets (such as energy and water utilities) to war.

In addition, Phillips identifies the most important networks of the Global Power Elite and the individuals therein. He names 389 individuals (a small number of whom are women and a token number of whom are from countries other than the United States and the wealthier countries of Western Europe) at the core of the policy planning nongovernmental networks that manage, facilitate and defend the continued concentration of global capital. The Global Power Elite perform two key uniting functions, he argues: they provide ideological justifications for their shared interests (promulgated through their corporate media), and define the parameters of action for transnational governmental organizations and capitalist nation-states.

More precisely, Phillips identifies the 199 directors of the seventeen global financial Giants and offers short biographies and public information on their individual net wealth. These individuals are closely interconnected through numerous networks of association including the World Economic Forum, the International Monetary Conference, university affiliations, various policy councils, social clubs, and cultural enterprises. For a taste of one of these clubs, see this account of The Links in New York. As Phillips observes: ‘It is certainly safe to conclude they all know each other personally or know of each other in the shared context of their positions of power.’

The Giants, Phillips documents, invest in each other but also in many hundreds of investment management firms, many of which are near-Giants. This results in tens of trillions of dollars coordinated in a single vast network of global capital controlled by a very small number of people. ‘Their constant objective is to find enough safe investment opportunities for a return on capital that allows for continued growth. Inadequate capital-placement opportunities lead to dangerous speculative investments, buying up of public assets, and permanent war spending.’

Because the directors of these seventeen asset management firms represent the central core of international capital, ‘Individuals can retire or pass away, and other similar people will move into their place, making the overall structure a self-perpetuating network of global capital control. As such, these 199 people share a common goal of maximum return on investments for themselves and their clients, and they may seek to achieve returns by any means necessary – legal or not…. the institutional and structural arrangements within the money management systems of global capital relentlessly seek ways to achieve maximum return on investment, and … the conditions for manipulations – legal or not – are always present.’

Like some researchers before him, Phillips identifies the importance of those transnational institutions that serve a unifying function. The World Bank, International Monetary Fund, G20, G7, World Trade Organization (WTO), World Economic Forum (WEF), Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Bank for International Settlements, Group of 30 (G30), the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Monetary Conference serve as institutional mechanisms for consensus building within the transnational capitalist class, and power elite policy formulation and implementation. ‘These international institutions serve the interests of the global financial Giants by supporting policies and regulations that seek to protect the free, unrestricted flow of capital and debt collection worldwide.’

But within this network of transnational institutions, Phillips identifies two very important global elite policy-planning organizations: the Group of Thirty (which has 32 members) and the extended executive committee of the Trilateral Commission (which has 55 members). These nonprofit corporations, which each have a research and support staff, formulate elite policy and issue instructions for their implementation by the transnational governmental institutions like the G7, G20, IMF, WTO, and World Bank. Elite policies are also implemented following instruction of the relevant agent, including governments, in the context. These agents then do as they are instructed. Thus, these 85 members (because two overlap) of the Group of Thirty and the Trilateral Commission comprise a central group of facilitators of global capitalism, ensuring that ‘global capital remains safe, secure, and growing’.

So, while many of the major international institutions are controlled by nation-state representatives and central bankers (with proportional power exercised by dominant financial supporters such as the United States and European Union countries), Phillips is more concerned with the transnational policy groups that are nongovernmental because these organizations ‘help to unite TCC power elites as a class’ and the individuals involved in these organizations facilitate world capitalism. ‘They serve as policy elites who seek the continued growth of capital in the world.’

Developing this list of 199 directors of the largest money management firms in the world, Phillips argues, is an important step toward understanding how capitalism works globally today. These global power elite directors make the decisions regarding the investment of trillions of dollars. Supposedly in competition, the concentrated wealth they share requires them to cooperate for their greater good by identifying investment opportunities and shared risk agreements, and working collectively for political arrangements that create advantages for their profit-generating system as a whole.

Their fundamental priority is to secure an average return on investment of 3 to 10 percent, or even more. The nature of any investment is less important than what it yields: continuous returns that support growth in the overall market. Hence, capital investment in tobacco products, weapons of war, toxic chemicals, pollution, and other socially destructive goods and services are judged purely by their profitability. Concern for the social and environmental costs of the investment are non-existent. In other words, inflicting death and destruction are fine because they are profitable.

So what is the global elite’s purpose? In a few sentences Phillips characterizes it thus: The elite is largely united in support of the US/NATO military empire that prosecutes a repressive war against resisting groups – typically labeled ‘terrorists’ – around the world. The real purpose of ‘the war on terror’ is defense of transnational globalization, the unimpeded flow of financial capital around the world, dollar hegemony and access to oil; it has nothing to do with repressing terrorism which it generates, perpetuates and finances to provide cover for its real agenda. This is why the United States has a long history of CIA and military interventions around the world ostensibly in defense of ‘national interests’.

 

Wealth and Power

An interesting point that emerges for me from reading Phillips thoughtful analysis is that there is a clear distinction between those individuals and families who have wealth and those individuals who have (sometimes significantly) less wealth (which, nevertheless, is still considerable) but, through their positions and connections, wield a great deal of power. As Phillips explains this distinction, ‘the sociology of elites is more important than particular elite individuals and their families’. Just 199 individuals decide how more than $40 trillion will be invested. And this is his central point. Let me briefly elaborate.

There are some really wealthy families in the world, notably including the families Rothschild (France and the United Kingdom), Rockefeller (USA), Goldman-Sachs (USA), Warburgs (Germany), Lehmann (USA), Lazards (France), Kuhn Loebs (USA), Israel Moses Seifs (Italy), Al-Saud (Saudi Arabia), Walton (USA), Koch (USA), Mars (USA), Cargill-MacMillan (USA) and Cox (USA). However, not all of these families overtly seek power to shape the world as they wish.

Similarly, the world’s extremely wealthy individuals such as Jeff Bezos (USA), Bill Gates (USA), Warren Buffett (USA), Bernard Arnault (France), Carlos Slim Helu (Mexico) and Francoise Bettencourt Meyers (France) are not necessarily connected in such a way that they exercise enormous power. In fact, they may have little interest in power as such, despite their obvious interest in wealth.

In essence, some individuals and families are content to simply take advantage of how capitalism and its ancilliary governmental and transnational instruments function while others are more politically engaged in seeking to manipulate major institutions to achieve outcomes that not only maximize their own profit and hence wealth but also shape the world itself.

So if you look at the list of 199 individuals that Phillips identifies at the centre of global capital, it does not include names such as Bezos, Gates, Buffett, Koch, Walton or even Rothschild, Rockefeller or Windsor (the Queen of England) despite their well-known and extraordinary wealth. As an aside, many of these names are also missing from the lists compiled by groups such as Forbes and Bloomberg, but their absence from these lists is for a very different reason given the penchant for many really wealthy individuals and families to avoid certain types of publicity and their power to ensure that they do.

In contrast to the names just listed, in Phillips’ analysis names like Laurence (Larry) Fink (Chairman and CEO of BlackRock), James (Jamie) Dimon (Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase) and John McFarlane (Chairman of Barclays Bank), while not as wealthy as those listed immediately above, wield far more power because of their positions and connections within the global elite network of 199 individuals.

Predictably then, Phillips observes, these three individuals have similar lifestyles and ideological orientations. They believe capitalism is beneficial for the world and while inequality and poverty are important issues, they believe that capital growth will eventually solve these problems. They are relatively non-expressive about environmental issues, but recognize that investment opportunities may change in response to climate ‘modifications’. As millionaires they own multiple homes. They attended elite universities and rose quickly in international finance to reach their current status as giants of the global power elite. ‘The institutions they manage have been shown to engage in illegal collusions with others, but the regulatory fines by governments are essentially seen as just part of doing business.’

In short, as I would characterize this description: They are devoid of a legal or moral framework to guide their actions, whether in relation to business, fellow human beings, war or the environment and climate. They are obviously typical of the elite.

Any apparent concern for people, such as that expressed by Fink and Dimon in response to the racist violence in Charlottesville, USA in August 2017, is simply designed to promote ‘stability’ or more precisely, a stable (that is, profitable) investment and consumer climate.

The lack of concern for people and issues that might concern many of us is also evident from a consideration of the agenda at elite gatherings. Consider the International Monetary Conference. Founded in 1956, it is a private yearly meeting of the top few hundred bankers in the world. The American Bankers Association (ABA) serves as the secretariat for the conference. But, as Phillips notes: ‘Nothing on the agenda seems to address the socioeconomic consequences of investments to determine the impacts on people and the environment.’ A casual perusal of the agenda at any elite gathering reveals that this comment applies equally to any elite forum. See, for example, the agenda of the recent WEF meeting in Davos. Any talk of ‘concern’ is misleading rhetoric.

Hence, in the words of Phillips: The 199 directors of the global Giants are ‘a very select set of people. They all know each other personally or know of each other. At least 69 have attended the annual World Economic Forum, where they often serve on panels or give public presentations. They mostly attended the same elite universities, and interact in upperclass social setting[s] in the major cities of the world. They all are wealthy and have significant stock holdings in one or more of the financial Giants. They are all deeply invested in the importance of maintaining capital growth in the world. Some are sensitive to environmental and social justice issues, but they seem to be unable to link these issues to global capital concentration.’

Of course, the global elite cannot manage the world system alone: the elite requires agents to perform many of the functions necessary to control national societies and the individuals within them. ‘The interests of the Global Power Elite and the TCC are fully recognized by major institutions in society. Governments, intelligence services, policymakers, universities, police forces, military, and corporate media all work in support of their vital interests.’

In other words, to elaborate Phillips’ point and extend it a little, through their economic power, the Giants control all of the instruments through which their policies are implemented. Whether it be governments, national military forces, ‘military contractors’ or mercenaries (with at least $200 billion spent on private security globally, the industry currently employs some fifteen million people worldwide) used both in ‘foreign’ wars but also likely deployed in future for domestic control, key ‘intelligence’ agencies, legal systems and police forces, major nongovernment organizations, or the academic, educational, ‘public relations propaganda’, corporate media, medical, psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries, all instruments are fully responsive to elite control and are designed to misinform, deceive, disempower, intimidate, repress, imprison (in a jail or psychiatric ward), exploit and/or kill (depending on the constituency) the rest of us, as is readily evident.

 

Defending Elite Power

Phillips observes that the power elite continually worries about rebellion by the ‘unruly exploited masses’ against their structure of concentrated wealth. This is why the US military empire has long played the role of defender of global capitalism. As a result, the United States has more than 800 military bases (with some scholars suggesting 1,000) in 70 countries and territories. In comparison, the United Kingdom, France, and Russia have about 30 foreign bases. In addition, US military forces are now deployed in 70 percent of the world’s nations with US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) having troops in 147 countries, an increase of 80 percent since 2010. These forces conduct counterterrorism strikes regularly, including drone assassinations and kill/capture raids.

‘The US military empire stands on hundreds of years of colonial exploitation and continues to support repressive, exploitative governments that cooperate with global capital’s imperial agenda. Governments that accept external capital investment, whereby a small segment of a country’s elite benefits, do so knowing that capital inevitably requires a return on investment that entails using up resources and people for economic gain. The whole system continues wealth concentration for elites and expanded wretched inequality for the masses….

‘Understanding permanent war as an economic relief valve for surplus capital is a vital part of comprehending capitalism in the world today. War provides investment opportunity for the Giants and TCC elites and a guaranteed return on capital. War also serves a repressive function of keeping the suffering masses of humanity afraid and compliant.’

As Phillips elaborates: This is why defense of global capital is the prime reason that NATO countries now account for 85 percent of the world’s military spending; the United States spends more on the military than the rest of the world combined.

In essence, ‘the Global Power Elite uses NATO and the US military empire for its worldwide security. This is part of an expanding strategy of US military domination around the world, whereby the US/ NATO military empire, advised by the power elite’s Atlantic Council, operates in service to the Transnational Corporate Class for the protection of international capital everywhere in the world’.

This entails ‘further pauperization of the bottom half of the world’s population and an unrelenting downward spiral of wages for 80 percent of the world. The world is facing economic crisis, and the neoliberal solution is to spend less on human needs and more on security. It is a world of financial institutions run amok, where the answer to economic collapse is to print more money through quantitative easing, flooding the population with trillions of new inflation-producing dollars. It is a world of permanent war, whereby spending for destruction requires further spending to rebuild, a cycle that profits the Giants and global networks of economic power. It is a world of drone killings, extrajudicial assassinations, death, and destruction, at home and abroad.’

 

Where is this all heading?

So what are the implications of this state of affairs? Phillips responds unequivocally: ‘This concentration of protected wealth leads to a crisis of humanity, whereby poverty, war, starvation, mass alienation, media propaganda, and environmental devastation are reaching a species-level threat. We realize that humankind is in danger of possible extinction’.

He goes on to state that the Global Power Elite is probably the only entity ‘capable of correcting this condition without major civil unrest, war, and chaos’ and elaborates an important aim of his book: to raise awareness of the importance of systemic change and the redistribution of wealth among both the book’s general readers but also the elite, ‘in the hope that they can begin the process of saving humanity.’ The book’s postscript is a ‘A Letter to the Global Power Elite’, co-signed by Phillips and 90 others, beseeching the elite to act accordingly.

‘It is no longer acceptable for you to believe that you can manage capitalism to grow its way out of the gross inequalities we all now face. The environment cannot accept more pollution and waste, and civil unrest is everywhere inevitable at some point. Humanity needs you to step up and insure that trickle-down becomes a river of resources that reaches every child, every family, and all human beings. We urge you to use your power and make the needed changes for humanity’s survival.’

But he also emphasizes that nonviolent social movements, using the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a moral code, can accelerate the process of redistributing wealth by pressuring the elite into action.

 

Conclusion

Peter Phillips has written an important book. For those of us interested in understanding elite control of the world, this book is a vital addition to the bookshelf. And like any good book, as you will see from my comments both above and below, it raised more questions for me even while it answered many.

As I read Phillips’ insightful and candid account of elite behavior in this regard, I am reminded, yet again, that the global power elite is extraordinarily violent and utterly insane: content to kill people in vast numbers (whether through starvation or military violence) and destroy the biosphere for profit, with zero sense of humanity’s now limited future. See ‘The Global Elite is Insane Revisited’ and ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ with more detailed explanations for the violence and insanity here: Why Violence? and Fearless Psychology and Fearful Psychology: Principles and Practice.

For this reason I do not share his faith in moral appeals to the elite, as articulated in the letter in his postscript. It is fine to make the appeal but history offers no evidence to suggest that there will be any significant response. The death and destruction inflicted by elites is highly profitable, centuries-old and ongoing. It will take powerful, strategically-focused nonviolent campaigns (or societal collapse) to compel the necessary changes in elite behavior. Hence, I fully endorse his call for nonviolent social movements to compel elite action where we cannot make the necessary changes without their involvement. See ‘A Nonviolent Strategy to End Violence and Avert Human Extinction’ and Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

I would also encourage independent action, in one or more of several ways, by those individuals and communities powerful enough to do so. This includes nurturing more powerful individuals by making ‘My Promise to Children’, participating in ‘The Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’ and signing the online pledge of ‘The People’s Charter to Create a Nonviolent World’.

Fundamentally, Giants: The Global Power Elite is a call to action. Professor Peter Phillips is highly aware of our predicament – politically, socially, economically, environmentally and climatically – and the critical role played by the global power elite in generating that predicament.

If we cannot persuade the global power elite to respond sensibly to that predicament, or nonviolently compel it to do so, humanity’s time on Earth is indeed limited.

 

Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ http://tinyurl.com/whyviolence His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here. http://robertjburrowes.wordpress.com

Robert J. Burrowes
P.O. Box 68
Daylesford, Victoria 3460
Australia

Email: flametree@riseup.net

Websites:
Nonviolence Charter
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth
‘Why Violence?’
Feelings First
Nonviolent Campaign Strategy
Nonviolent Defense/Liberation Strategy
Anita: Songs of Nonviolence
Robert Burrowes
Global Nonviolence Network

Putin, Xi Message To Trump: US Unipolar World Is Over

By Finian Cunningham

Source: Information Clearing House

The US’ strategy has been to isolate Russia internationally. Evidently, it is Washington that is becoming more isolated on the global stage. This week in the run-up to the G20 summit in Germany, the reverse in fortunes could not be more glaring.

While North Korea was openly defying Washington with a breakthrough ballistic missile test, and US President Donald Trump was embroiled in his usual juvenile tweeting antics, Russia and China’s leaders were proudly consolidating their strategic alliance for a new multipolar global order.

Western media won’t acknowledge as much, but the meeting this week in Moscow between Putin and Xi Jinping was of historical importance. We are witnessing a global transition in power. And for the common good.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping bond through an apparent deep sense of mutual respect and wisdom about the political challenges facing today’s world. The two leaders have met on more than 20 occasions over the past four years. President Xi referred to Russia as China’s foremost ally and said that in a topsy-turvy world the friendship between the two was a source of countervailing stability.

On the breaking news of North Korea’s successful test launch of its first Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM), both Putin and Xi called for calm restraint. By contrast, US President Trump took to Twitter to taunt Kim Jong-Un. “Does this guy not have anything better to do with his life?” said Trump in words that could apply more pertinently to the American president.

Then the US and its South Korea ally also launched their ballistic missiles in a military drill aimed as a show of strength to Pyongyang. Kim Jung-Un responded that the ICBM was a “gift for the American bastards” on their Fourth of July Independence Day holiday and that there would more such gifts on the way.

Rather than escalating tensions, Putin and Xi put forward the eminently reasonable proposal that North Korea should freeze its missile tests and the US should likewise halt its military exercises on the Korean peninsula. All sides must convene in negotiations with a commitment to non-violence and without preconditions to strive for a comprehensive settlement to the decades-old dispute.

The contrast in Putin and Xi’s dignified, intelligent response with that of Trump’s petulance is clear proof of Russia and China showing real global leadership, whereas the Americans are just part of the problem.

But the Korean drama was only one illustration this week of how American ambitions of unipolar dominance have become redundant.

The G20 summit prelude of Putin hosting Xi in Moscow was followed by the Chinese president making a state visit to Germany on Wednesday two days before the gathering in Hamburg. Xi and German Chancellor Angela Merkel reportedly signed new trade deals between the world’s two leading export economies.

“Relations between China and Germany are at their historic best,”said Michael Clauss, Germany’s ambassador to Beijing. “The economic and political dynamic from a German perspective is moving toward the east.”

Of significance too was news this week the European Union is preparing to finalize a major trade pact with Japan.

It is also significant that Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on China and Russia to help mediate the Korean crisis immediately following Pyongyang’s ICMB test launch.

Evidently, Japan, despite being an ally of Washington, is reaching out to a multilateral solution as proposed by Moscow and Beijing.

In so many ways, therefore, whether on matters of security or trade and economy, the world appears to be moving inexorably toward a multipolar format as the most appropriate response to challenges.

Not so from the American point of view, especially under Donald Trump’s leadership. All nations seem to be nothing more than a footstool for the “exceptional” Americans who feel entitled to hector and browbeat everyone else to get what they want.

America’s isolation in the world was glimpsed at the G7 summit earlier this year in May when the other nations awkwardly diverged from Trump on his decision to withdraw the US from the global climate accord. Two months on, the isolation of Washington is even more vivid on the world stage as G20 leaders gather in Hamburg this weekend.

A Bloomberg News headline put it succinctly: ‘Trump risks uniting Cold War allies and foes against him’.

Trump’s quest for “America First” through trade protectionism and his narrow-minded unilateralism toward issues of global security have put America out on a limb as far as the rest of the world is concerned.

Where is the American “team player”, the supposed “leader of the free world”? All the self-proclaimed virtues are being seen for what they always were: overblown, pretentious and vainglorious bombast.

America is seen as nothing more than a selfish, hulking giant. Its trade imbalances with the rest of the world are not because of “rotten deals”, as Trump would have it, but rather because the American economy has ruined itself over many decades. The off-shoring of jobs by American corporations and gutting of American workers with poverty wages are part of it.

When America now talks about upholding international law and security, the rest of the world just laughs with bitter irony. The wars across the Middle East and the sponsoring of terrorism are largely US products of criminal regime-change intrigues. Who is this deluded head-case in Washington?

The same deluded head-case that has “beautiful chocolate cake” with China’s president in a Florida beach resort, and then proceeds to slap sanctions on China and make provocative military incursions on its territory. It’s not just Trump. It’s the whole American political leadership. The American ruling class has become so blinded by hubris that it can’t even see how the world it claims to dominate is collectively shutting the door on it and walking away.

Washington has no answers for today’s world challenges. Because simply put, Washington is the source of many of today’s problems. It has not even the modesty to acknowledge its responsibility. The only thing the US seems capable of is to make current problems fiendishly worse. The Korean crisis is an object lesson.

Presidents Putin and Xi are not scheming to usurp world domination, as Washington would have us believe. Only in Washington would a vision for a multipolar, more democratic global order be construed as something threatening and sinister. That’s because American ambitions of unipolar “full spectrum dominance” are actually threatening and sinister.

The world can be thankful it has genuine leaders in Putin and Xi who are forging ahead to create a multipolar global order. Fortunately, the strategic alliance between Russia and China is underpinned by a formidable military capability. Joint naval exercises this month carried out in the Baltic Sea are a vital insurance policy to back up what Moscow and Beijing are increasingly bold enough to say to the Americans.

That message, as Putin and Xi effectively gave to Trump this week, is that American ambitions of world domination are no longer acceptable and no longer tenable. Washington’s days of bullying the world with its moralizing hypocrisy and military aggression are over.