Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other so-called progressives exemplify the dangers of depending on the Democratic Party to enact any meaningful change.
Since the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Black Agenda Report has been the most consistent voice on the Left sounding the alarm about Democratic Party bankruptcy. The late founder and executive editor of the publication, Glen Ford, rightly called the Democratic Party the more effective evil serving the Lords of Capital in their reign of terror against the working class and oppressed masses. Late managing editor of BAR, Bruce Dixon, routinely pointed out that the Democratic Party made tepid promises to get elected but refused to enact a progressive policy agenda once in possession of majorities in Congress.
It was impossible to predict, however, that the reign of Barack Obama would precipitate a crisis of legitimacy in the two-party duopoly after his diligent service to the Lords of Capital had reduced much of the Left in the United States to a state of political stagnation. The economic discontent expressed in the Occupy Wall Street movement gave rise to Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in 2016. Thus began the ongoing split within the Democratic Party between an ever-consolidating establishment and a growing cohort of left-ish “democratic socialists.” The Democratic National Committee’s deliberate takedown of Bernie Sanders’ initial bid for the Democratic Party nomination gave rise to “the Squad,” a group of four women of color who adopted the Sanders agenda and successfully won Congressional seats in 2018.
One member of the Squad who has ripped whatever mask was left hanging on the Democratic Party is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC). AOC has done a masterful job bursting asunder whatever illusions existed that the Democratic Party can operate as anything other than an engine for war and austerity. AOC attended the $30,000 per ticket Met Gala event in mid-September wearing a dress draped with the message, “tax the rich.” This eye-grabbing moment prompted a good number of liberals to applaud AOC for bringing a progressive message on taxation into an elite space. However, others on the Left questioned why the self-described “democratic socialist” would tout a message already popular with majorities of the country instead of expressing solidarity with Black Lives Matter activists protesting outside of the Gala or, better yet, taking more meaningful action to pressure Medicare for All and the rest of the Squad’s so-called progressive agenda.
AOC followed up this act by changing her vote on $1 billion in additional U.S. funding for Israel’s Iron Dome from “nay” to “present.” The sudden decision appeared to be encouraged by House speaker Nancy Pelosi. Photos went viral of AOC visibly in tears following an encounter with Pelosi on the floor of the House. AOC has routinely coined herself a champion of human rights for the Palestinian people yet abdicated her responsibility to oppose additional funding to the settler colonial regime currently colonizing Palestine. To make matters worse, AOC painted herself as the victim in her response to the backlash by insinuating that a climate of “volatility” forced her to make a decision in haste. She did not, however, apologize to the Palestinian people and their allies for the vote.
While AOC has received her fair share of bad-faith criticism from the political right, she has yet to answer any of her good-faith critics from the left. It is thus quite easy to dismiss her most recent errors as worthy of criticism but not total condemnation. However, history is a stubborn thing. History says that AOC is not an innocent bystander in the establishment’s ongoing effort to sheep-dog the Left into the Democratic Party on the one hand and satisfy the interests of the rich on the other. In 2018, AOC called the deceased warmongering Republican John McCain an “unparalleled example of human decency” and expressed admiration for Nancy Pelosi’s activist credentials . She then collaborated with Republican Senator Ted Cruz in 2019 on a letter demanding that the National Basketball Association (NBA) pledge support for the U.S. color revolution in Hong Kong.
AOC has tacitly supported imperialism by regurgitating the State Department’s narrative of humanitarian imperialism on nearly every major instance of U.S. aggression. She has labeled Venezuela a “failed state” but has yet to demand an end to U.S. sanctions under Joe Biden. On Palestine, AOC has offered a variety of word salads when questioned on her opposition to Israeli colonialism . She has also professed her loyalty to the CIA-backed Dalai Lama . These instances of capitulation to imperialism have only aggravated frustrations held by progressives and leftists who rebuke her tendency to privilege spectacle over meaningful political action in the fight for a so-called “progressive” agenda.
AOC has recently been thrown praise by supporters for standing up to establishment Democrats seeking to tank Biden’s “Build Back Better” spending plan. Yet neither AOC, the Squad, nor the rest of the Progressive Caucus has been willing to take the political action necessary to meet the moment of crisis. AOC refused to force a vote on Medicare for All in exchange for Nancy Pelosi’s House Speaker vote and even suggested that Jimmy Dore and others who demanded that she do so were engaging in violence . AOC and the Squad’s so-called protest against the removal of the eviction moratorium did not include demands for universal housing, healthcare, or income during a deadly pandemic. Furthermore, AOC and the rest of the Democratic Party has been unwilling to take the streets to oppose the Biden administration’s mass deportation of undocumented immigrants , privatization of the Postal Service , and abandonment of police reform but has been more than willing to call Joe Biden a “good faith” partner in the Democratic Party.
AOC offers a particularly difficult but useful lesson on the need to dump the duopoly. In the final analysis, no member of the Democratic Party is equipped to lead the United States out of the abyss of its systemic decline. For successive administrations, progressives and leftists across the political spectrum have allowed the Democratic Party’s massive escalation of war and austerity to go unchallenged. While support for progressive policies has risen among the impoverished majority in tandem with a new wave of “left” sounding politicians, none of this has changed the overall character of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party remains the more effective evil of U.S. imperialism—a system which only independent, grassroots political organization can defeat.
Global corporations are colonising India’s retail space through e-commerce and destroying small-scale physical retail and millions of livelihoods.
Walmart entered into India in 2016 with a US$3.3 billion take-over of the online retail start-up Jet.com. This was followed in 2018 with a US$16 billion take-over of India’s largest online retail platform, Flipkart. Today, Walmart and Amazon control almost two thirds of India’s digital retail sector.
Amazon and Walmart have a record of using predatory pricing, deep discounts and other unfair business practices to attract customers to their online platforms. A couple of years ago, those two companies generated sales of over US$3 billion in just six days during Diwali. India’s small retailers reacted by calling for a boycott of online shopping.
If you want to know the eventual fate of India’s local markets and small retailers, look no further than what US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in 2019. He stated that Amazon had “destroyed the retail industry across the United States.”
AMAZON’S CORPORATE PRACTICES
In the US, an investigation by the House Judiciary Committee concluded that Amazon exerts monopoly power over many small- and medium-size businesses. It called for breaking up the company and regulating its online marketplace to ensure that sellers are treated fairly.
Amazon has spied on sellers and appropriated data about their sales, costs and suppliers. It has then used this information to create its own competing versions of their products, often giving its versions superior placement in the search results on its platform.
The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) published a revealing document on Amazon in June 2021 that discussed these issues. It also notes that Amazon has been caught using its venture capital fund to invest in start-ups only to steal their ideas and create rival products and services.
Moreover, Amazon’s dominance allows it to function as a gatekeeper: retailers and brands must sell on its site to reach much of the online market and changes to Amazon’s search algorithms or selling terms can cause their sales to evaporate overnight.
Amazon also makes it hard for sellers to reduce their dependence on its platform by making their brand identity almost invisible to shoppers and preventing them from building relationships with their customers. The company strictly limits contact between sellers and customers.
According to the ILSR, Amazon compels sellers to buy its warehousing and shipping services, even though many would get a better deal from other providers, and it blocks independent businesses from offering lower prices on other sites. The company also routinely suspends sellers’ accounts and seizes inventories and cash balances.
The Joint Action Committee against Foreign Retail and E-commerce (JACAFRE) was formed to resist the entry of foreign corporations like Walmart and Amazon into India’s e-commerce market. Its members represent more than 100 national groups, including major trade, workers’ and farmers’ organisations.
JACAFRE issued a statement in 2018 on Walmart’s acquisition of Flipkart, arguing that it undermines India’s economic and digital sovereignty and the livelihoods of millions in India. The committee said the deal would lead to Walmart and Amazon dominating India’s e-retail sector. It would also allow them to own India’s key consumer and other economic data, making them the country’s digital overlords, joining the ranks of Google and Facebook.
In January 2021, JACAFRE published an open letter saying that the three new farm laws, passed by parliament in September 2020, centre on enabling and facilitating the unregulated corporatisation of agriculture value chains. This will effectively make farmers and small traders of agricultural produce become subservient to the interests of a few agrifood and e-commerce giants or will eradicate them completely.
Although there was strong resistance to Walmart entering India with its physical stores, online and offline worlds are now merged: e-commerce companies not only control data about consumption but also control data on production and logistics. Through this control, e-commerce platforms can shape much of the physical economy.
What we are witnessing is the deliberate eradication of markets in favour of monopolistic platforms.
BEZOS NOT WELCOME
Amazon’s move into India encapsulates the unfair fight for space between local and global markets. There is a relative handful of multi-billionaires who own the corporations and platforms. And there are the interests of hundreds of millions of vendors and various small-scale enterprises who are regarded by these rich individuals as mere collateral damage to be displaced in their quest for ever-greater profit.
Thanks to the helping hand of various COVID-related lockdowns, which devastated small businesses, the wealth of the world’s billionaires increased by $3.9tn (trillion) between 18 March and 31 December 2020.
In September 2020, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, could have paid all 876,000 Amazon employees a $105,000 bonus and still be as wealthy as he was before COVID. Jeff Bezos – his fortune constructed on unprincipled methods that have been well documented in recent years – increased his net wealth by $78.2bn during this period.
Bezos’s plan is clear: the plunder of India and the eradication of millions of small traders and retailers and neighbourhood mom and pop shops.
This is a man with few scruples. After returning from a brief flight to space in July, in a rocket built by his private space company, Bezos said during a news conference:
I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.”
In response, US congresswoman Nydia Velazquez wrote on Twitter:
While Jeff Bezos is all over the news for paying to go to space, let’s not forget the reality he has created here on Earth.”
Little wonder that when Bezos visited India in January 2020, he was hardly welcomed with open arms.
Bezos praised India on Twitter by posting:
Dynamism. Energy. Democracy. #IndianCentury.”
The ruling party’s top man in the BJP foreign affairs department hit back with:
Please tell this to your employees in Washington DC. Otherwise, your charm offensive is likely to be waste of time and money.”
A fitting response, albeit perplexing given the current administration’s proposed sanctioning of the foreign takeover of the economy, not least by the unscrupulous interests that will benefit from the recent farm legislation.
Bezos landed in India on the back of the country’s antitrust regulator initiating a formal investigation of Amazon and with small store owners demonstrating in the streets. The Confederation of All India Traders (CAIT) announced that members of its affiliate bodies across the country would stage sit-ins and public rallies in 300 cities in protest.
In a letter to PM Modi, prior to the visit of Bezos, the secretary of the CAIT, General Praveen Khandelwal, claimed that Amazon, like Walmart-owned Flipkart, was an “economic terrorist” due to its predatory pricing that “compelled the closure of thousands of small traders.”
In 2020, Delhi Vyapar Mahasangh (DVM) filed a complaint against Amazon and Flipkart alleging that they favoured certain sellers over others on their platforms by offering them discounted fees and preferential listing. The DVM lobbies to promote the interests of small traders. It also raised concerns about Amazon and Flipkart entering into tie-ups with mobile phone manufacturers to sell phones exclusively on their platforms.
It was argued by DVM that this was anti-competitive behaviour as smaller traders could not purchase and sell these devices. Concerns were also raised over the flash sales and deep discounts offered by e-commerce companies, which could not be matched by small traders.
The CAIT estimates that in 2019 upwards of 50,000 mobile phone retailers were forced out of business by large e-commerce firms.
Amazon’s internal documents, as revealed by Reuters, indicated that Amazon had an indirect ownership stake in a handful of sellers who made up most of the sales on its Indian platform. This is an issue because in India Amazon and Flipkart are legally allowed to function only as neutral platforms that facilitate transactions between third-party sellers and buyers for a fee.
UNDER INVESTIGATION
The upshot is that India’s Supreme Court recently ruled that Amazon must face investigation by the Competition Commission of India (CCI) for alleged anti-competitive business practices. The CCI said it would probe the deep discounts, preferential listings and exclusionary tactics that Amazon and Flipkart are alleged to have used to destroy competition.
However, there are powerful forces that have been sitting on their hands as these companies have been running amok.
In August 2021, the CAIT attacked the NITI Aayog (the influential policy commission think tank of the Government of India) for interfering in e-commerce rules proposed by the Consumer Affairs Ministry.
The CAIT said that the think tank clearly seems to be under the pressure and influence of the foreign e-commerce giants.
The president of CAIT, BC Bhartia, stated that it is deeply shocking to see such a callous and indifferent attitude of the NITI Aayog whch have remained a silent spectator for so many years when:
…the foreign e-commerce giants have circumvented every rule of the FDI policy and blatantly violated and destroyed the retail and e-commerce landscape of the country but have suddenly decided to open their mouth at a time when the proposed e-commerce rules will potentially end the malpractices of the e-commerce companies.”
Of course, money talks and buys influence. In addition to tens of billions of US dollars invested in India by Walmart and Amazon, Facebook invested US$5.5 billion last year in Mukesh Ambani’s Jio Platforms (e-commerce retail). Google has also invested US$4.5 billion.
Since the early 1990s, when India opened up to neoliberal economics, the country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital which ride roughshod over democratic principles and the needs of hundreds of millions of ordinary people. ‘Foreign direct investment’ has thus become the holy grail of the Modi-led administration and the NITI Aayog.
The CAIT has urged the Consumer Affairs Ministry to implement the draft consumer protection e-commerce rules at the earliest as they are in the best interest of the consumers as well as the traders of the country.
Meanwhile, the CCI probably will complete its investigation within two months.
The communications system we live in is highly complex, mostly driven by greed and profit, in part semi-public, full of filth I know we’d be better off without, and increasingly openly censored and monitored by defenders of accepted good thinking.
Fascist nutcases are spreading dangerous nonsense, while billionaire monopolists are virtually disappearing critics and protesters. It’s easy to get confused about what ought to be done. It’s difficult to find any recommendation that isn’t confused. Different people want different outrages censored and censored by different entities; what they all have in common is a failure to think through the threats they are creating to the things they don’t want censored.
A 1975 Canadian government commission recommended censoring “libel, obscenity, breach of the Official Secrets Act, matters affecting the defense of Canada, treason, sedition, or promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence.” This is a typical muddle. Half of those things were almost certainly already banned, as suggested by their identification through legal terminology. A few of those things probably should be banned, such as incitement of violence (though not promulgating information that “leads” to incitement of any crime or violence). Of course I would include as incitement of violence a speech by the Prime Minister advocating the shipping of Canadian “Peace Keepers” to Africa, but the Prime Minister (who would have more say than I) would no doubt have just identified me as commenting on a matter affecting the defense of Canada — plus, if he or she were in the mood, I’ve probably just promulgated something that will lead to inciting some crime or other, even if it’s just the crime of more people speaking on matters affecting the “defense” of Canada. (And it shouldn’t matter that I’m not Canadian, since Julian Assange is not from the United States.)
Well, what’s the solution? A simplistic and surprisingly popular one is to blame philosophers. Those idiot postmodernists said there was no such thing as truth, which allowed that great student of philosophy Donald Trump to declare news about him “fake” — which he never could have thought of doing without a bunch of leftist academics inspiring him; and the endless blatant lies about wars and economies and environmental collapse and straight-faced reporting of campaign promises can’t have anything at all to do with the ease people have in distrusting news reporting. So, now we need to swing the pendulum back in the direction of tattooing the Ten Commandments on our foreheads before morality perishes at the hands of the monster relativism. We can’t do that without censoring the numbskulls, regrettably of course.
This line of thinking is dependent on failing to appreciate the point of postmodern criticism. That the greater level of consensus that exists on chemistry or physics as opposed to on what should be banned as “obscenity” is a matter of degree, not of essential or metaphysical substance, is an interesting point for philosophy students, and a correct one, but not a guide to life for politicians or school teachers. That there is no possible basis for declaring some law of physics permanent and incapable of being replaced by a better one is not a reason for treating a law of physics as a matter of opinion or susceptible to alteration via fairy dust. If Isaac Newton not being God, and God also not being God, disturbs you and you’re mad at philosophers for saying it, you should notice what follows from it: the need for everyone to support your right to try to persuade them of their error. And what does not follow from it: the elimination of chemistry or physics because some nitwit claims he can fly or kill a hurricane with his gun. If that idiot has 100,000 followers on social media, your concern is not with philosophy but with stupidity.
The tech-giant censors’ concern is — in part — also with stupidity, but it’s not clear they have the tools to address it. For one thing, they just cannot help themselves. They have other concerns too. They are concerned with their profits. They are concerned with any challenges to power — their power and the power of those who empower them. They are concerned, therefore, with the demands and national bigotry of national governments. They are concerned — whether they know it or not — with creative thinking. Every time they censor an idea they believe crazy, they risk censoring one of those ideas that proves superior to existing ones. Their combination of interests appears to be self-defeating. Rather than persuade people of the benefits of their censorship, they persuade more and more people of the rightness of what was censored and of the arbitrary power-interests of those doing the censoring.
Our problem is not too many voices on the internet. It is too much concentration of wealth and power in too few media outlets that are too narrowly restricted to too few voices, relegating other voices to marginal and ghettoized corners of the internet. Nobody gets to find out they’re mistaken through respectful discourse. Nobody gets to show someone else they’re right. We need to prioritize that sort of exchange, before a flood of misguided good intentions drowns us all.
The “promulgating information that leads to incitement of crime or violence” bit of that proposed law seems to have had a surprisingly good intention, namely benevolent parental concern with all the “action-filled” (violence-filled) children’s entertainment on television, the violence-normalizing enter/info-tainment programming for all ages that studies and commonsense suggest increase violence. But can we ban all that garbage, or do we have to empower people who actually give a damn to produce and select programming, and empower families to turn it all off, and schools to be more engaging than cartoons?
The difficulty of censoring such content should be clear from the fact that discussions of it tend to stray into numerous unrelated topics, including the supposed need to censor wars for the protection of, not children, but weapons dealers. Once you allow a corporation to censor damaging news — poof! — there go all negative reports on its products. Once you tell it to put warning labels over recommendations to drink bleach as medicine, it starts putting warning labels on anything related to climate collapse or originating outside the United States of Goddamn Righteousness. You can imagine whether that ends up helping or hurting the supposed target, stupidity.
Censoring news, and labeling news as “factual,” seems to me a cheap fix that doesn’t fix. It’s a bit like legalizing bribery and gerrymandering and limited ballot access and corporate airwaves domination and then declaring that you’ll institute term limits so that every rotten candidate has to be quickly replaced by an even more rotten one. It’s a lovely sounding solution until you try it. Look at the “fact-checker” sections of corporate media outlets. They’re as wrong and inconsistent as any other sections; they’re just labeled differently.
The solutions that will work are not easy, and I’m no expert on them, but they’re not new or mysterious either. We should democratize and legitimize government. We should use government to break up media monopolies. We should publicly and privately facilitate and support numerous independent media outlets. We should invest in publicly funded but independent media dedicated to allowing a wide range of people to discuss issues without the overarching control of the profit interest or the immediate interests of the government.
We should not be simplistic about banning or allowing censorship, but highly wary of opening up any new types of censorship and imagining they won’t be abused. We should stick to what is already illegal outside of communications (such as violence) and censor communications only when it is actually directly a part of those crimes (such as instigating particular violence). We should be open to some limits on the forces empowered by our choice through our public dollars to shape our communications; I’d be happy to ban militaries from having any role in producing movies and video games (if they’re going to bomb children in the name of “democracy,” well, then, that’s my vote for the use of my dollars).
At the same time, we need — through schools and outside of them — radically better education that includes education in the skills of media consumption, BS-spotting, propaganda deciphering, fact-verification, respect, civility, decency, and honesty. I hardly think it’s entirely the fault of youtube that kids get less of their education from their classrooms — part of the fault lies with the classrooms. But I hardly think the eternal project of learning, and of learning how to learn, can be restricted to classrooms.
But while the injectable will have devastating consequences on the human population and must be strenuously resisted, it is the hidden and complementary measures being introduced by the criminal global elite under the guise of the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ that will ensure the fundamental transformation of life for those humans and transhumans left alive.
In essence, the net outcome of the many measures that are being implemented, most of them ‘hidden’ behind the worldwide focus on the non-existent virus, will be a substantial human depopulation and enslavement of the rest. For more detail explaining what is already in train and how things will unfold, see the explanation, analysis and many references cited on ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’.
Options for Resistance
There are many options for resisting what is happening but most that are familiar are doomed to fail. Here, in brief, is why.
If you believe that mass protests will compel governments to respond to movement demands to cease implementing their heinous agenda, it would be useful for you to think a little more deeply about what is taking place. For a start, governments are not driving ‘The Great Reset’; it is an initiative of the global elite and governments are simply elite puppets. Moreover, movements that rely on mass protests only and which are focused too narrowly – such as on resisting lockdown measures, mandatory injection or ‘injection passports’ – cannot impact the elite program overall.
To do that, we need a combination of strategically-focused actions that undermine elite power to promote and implement its ‘Great Reset’ agenda which has very many components. And to achieve that outcome, protests are simply the wrong tactic (unless they are specifically used to raise awareness of strategic means of resisting ‘The Great Reset’ and its associated measures in relation to the fourth industrial revolution, eugenics and transhumanism).
And if you believe that challenges through the legal system will deliver us justice, be aware that these too were long ago captured by the global elite and are used to thwart fundamentally progressive initiatives, whatever occasional victories (invariably on issues that do not concern the global elite) in limited jurisdictions appear to suggest otherwise. In any case, there is no court in the world that has jurisdiction to require the global elite to appear before it to answer for its many outstanding crimes against peace, war crimes and crimes against humanity, nor those crimes it is inflicting now. As discussed by a diverse range of scholars and activists in the 18th , 19th and early 20th centuries, the rule of law is the rule of elite violence. See ‘The Rule of Law: Unjust and Violent’.
Finally, if you believe that violence, in any form, will get us out of this mess, you are giving inadequate consideration to the preeminent geopolitical reality of our time: the military forces at the command of the global elite, starting with the national military forces, including nuclear arsenals, committed to the NATO Alliance. Not to mention the police forces of each jurisdiction. And given the elite agenda includes substantial depopulation, from their viewpoint how this occurs, militarily or otherwise, is really immaterial. So a key strategic consideration is devising the appropriate ways to mobilize military and police forces in support of us.
Given that military and police personnel have far more in common with the communities in which they live than they have in common with the global elite, history offers many examples in which thoughtful nonviolent activists were able to achieve this very effectively. Moreover, while it might be counterintuitive, strategic nonviolent struggle is superior to military violence, as strategic theory explains and history has demonstrated. See the Strategy of Nonviolent Defense: A Gandhian Approach.
Conclusion
In essence then, effective resistance to this elite coup depends on mobilizing enough ‘ordinary’ people to take the strategically-focused nonviolent action – essentially acts of noncooperation to thwart key elite initiatives – that will shift power from the global elite to us. No other option is genuinely realistic or has the sheer power to be as effective.
Hence, as part of the ‘We Are Human, We Are Free’ strategy, earlier this year Anita McKone and I launched ‘The 7 Days Campaign to Resist the Great Reset’, carefully explaining why each of the actions nominated was important in undermining elite power. And recently, Henna Maria in Spain created the beautiful flyers, outlining essential elements of the campaign, displayed with this article.
If you wish to play a vital role in the defence of humanity and human freedom, you are invited to undertake the actions indicated on these flyers, and share them with those who you think might be interested. Provided enough people take these actions on an ongoing basis, the global elite’s capacity to kill or enslave each one of us can be defeated.
What you choose to do, one way or the other, will help shape the fate of humanity.
Biodata: Robert J. Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and ending human violence. He has done extensive research since 1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the author of ‘Why Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is here.
“A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
There is a vast and growing gulf between the world’s rich and poor. An obscene gulf. If we can read houses, they will confirm this. They offer a visible lesson in social class.
Houses stand before us like books on a shelf waiting to be read, and when the books are missing, as they are for a vast and growing multitude of the homeless exiled wandering ones and those imprisoned, their absence serves to indict the mansion-dwelling wealthy and to a lesser extent those whose homes serve to shield them from the truth of the ill-begotten gains of the wealthy elites who create the world’s suffering through their avarice, lies, and war making.
Many regular people want to say with Edmund in Eugene O’Neill’s play, Long Day’s Journey into Night:
The fog is where I wanted to be. Halfway down the path you can’t see this house. You’d never know it was here. Or any of the other places down the avenue. I couldn’t see but a few feet ahead. I didn’t meet a soul. Everything looked and sounded unreal. Nothing was what it is.That’s what I wanted – to be alone with myself in another world where truth is untrue and life can hide from itself….Who wants to see life as it is, if they can help it?
Yet the rich don’t hide or give a damn. They flaunt their houses. They know they are crooks and creators of illusions. Their nihilism is revealed in their conspicuous consumption and their predatory behavior; they want everyone else to see it too. So they rub it in their faces. Their wealth is built on the blood and suffering of millions around the world, but this is often hidden knowledge.
For many regular people prefer the fog to the harsh truth. It shields them from intense anger and the realization that the wealthy elites who run the world and control the media lie to them about everything and consider them beneath contempt. That would demand a response commensurate with the propaganda – rebellion. It would impose the moral demand to look squarely at the houses of death with their tiny cells in which the wealthy elites and their henchmen imprison and torture truth tellers like Julian Assange, an innocent man in a living hell; to make connections between wealth and power and the obscene flaunting of the rich elite’s sybaritic lifestyles in houses where every spacious room testifies to their moral depravity.
The recent news of Barack Obama’s vile selfie birthday celebration for his celebrity “friends” at his 29-acre estate and mansion (he has another eight-million-dollar mansion in Washington, D. C.) on Martha’s Vineyard is an egregious recent case in point. If he thinks this nauseating display is proof of his stability and strength – which obviously he does – then he is a deluded fool. But those who carry water for the military-intelligence-media complex are amply rewarded and want to tell the world that this is so. It’s essential for the Show. It must be conspicuous so the plebians learn their lesson.
Obama’s Vineyard mansion stands as an outward sign of his inner disgrace, his soullessness.
Trump’s golden towers and his never-ending self-promotion or the multiple million-dollar mansions of high-tech, sports, and Hollywood’s superstars send the same message.
Take Bill Gates’ sixty-three-million-dollar mansion, Xanadu, named after William Randolph Hearst’s estate in Citizen Kane, that took seven years to build.
Take the house up the hill from where I live in an erstwhile working-class town that sold for one million plus and now is being expanded to double its size with a massive swimming pool that leaves no grass uncovered. Every week, three black window-tinted SUVs arrive with New Jersey plates to join two white expensive sedans to oversee the progress in this small western Massachusetts town where McMansions rise throughout the hills faster than summer’s weeds.
Take the blue dolomite stone Searles Castle with its 60 acres, 40 rooms, and “dungeon” basement down the hill on Main St. that was recently bought by a NYC artist who also owns seven grand estates around the country that he showcases as examples of his fine artistic taste. “All these houses have endless things to do — it’s just mind-boggling,” he has said. The artist, Hunt Slonem, calls himself a “glamorizer,” and his “exotica” paintings, inspired by Andy Warhol’s repetition of soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, hang in galleries, museums, cruise ships, and the houses of film celebrities. Like his showcase houses, his exotica must have endless things to do.
What would Vincent van Gogh say? Perhaps what he wrote to his brother Theo: that the greatest people in painting and literature “have always worked against the grain” and in sympathy with the poor and oppressed. That might seem “mind-boggling” to Slonem.
Such ostentatious displays of wealth and power clearly reveal the delusions of the elites, as if there are no spiritual consequences for living so. Even if they read Tolstoy’s cautionary tale about greed, How Much Land Does A Man Need?, it is doubtful that its truth would register. Like Tolstoy’s protagonist Pahόm, they never have enough. But like Pahόm, the Devil has them in his grip, and like him, they will get their just rewards, a small room, a bit of land to imprison them forever.
His servant picked up the spade and dug a grave long enough for Pahóm to lie in, and buried him in it. Six feet from his head to his heels was all he needed.
Where does the money for all these estates, not just Slonem’s, come from? Who wants to ask?
Getting to the roots of wealth involves a little digging. Slonem’s castle was originally commissioned in the late 1800s by Mark Hopkins for his wife. Hopkins was one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad, which was built by Irish and Chinese immigrants. Labor history is quite illuminating on the ways immigrants have always been treated, in this case “the dregs of Asia” and the Irish dogs. Interestingly enough, the great black scholar and radical, W. E. B. Du Bois, a town native, worked at the castle’s construction site as a young man. No doubt it informed his future work against racism, capitalism, and economic exploitation.
Wealthy urbanites flooded this area after September 11, 2001, and now, in their terror of disease and death, they have bought every house they could find. Their cash-filled pockets overflow with blood-money and few ask why. To suggest that massive wealth is almost always ill-begotten is anathema. But innocence wears many masks, and the Show demands washed hands and no questions asked.
It is rare that one becomes super-wealthy in an honest and ethical way. The ways the rich get money almost without exception lead downward, to paraphrase Thoreau from his essay, “Life Without Principle.”
Since the corona crisis began, investment firms such as the Blackstone Group have been gobbling up vast numbers of houses across the United States as their prices have gone through the roof. The lockdowns – an appropriate prison term – have set millions of regular people back on their heels as the wealthiest have gotten exponentially wealthier. Poverty and starvation have increased around the world. This is not an accident. Despair and depression are widespread.
There is a taboo in life in general and in journalism: Do not ask where people’s money comes from. Thoreau was so advised long ago:
Do not ask how your bread is buttered; it will make you sick…
But the super-wealthy do not get sick. They are sick. For they revel in their depravity and push it in the faces of regular people, many who envy them and wish to become super-rich and powerful themselves. Of course there are the blue bloods whose method is understatement, but it takes many decades to enter their theater of deception. In many ways, these people are worse, for their personae have been crafted over decades of play-acting and public relations so their images are laundered to smell fresh and benevolent. They often wear the mask of philanthropy, while the history of their wealth lies shrouded in an amnestic fog.
Yet soul murder includes suicide, and while the old and new moneyed ones smoothly justify their oppression of the vast majority, many regular people kill the best in themselves by envying the rich.
Years ago, I discovered some documents that showed that one of this country’s most famous philosophers, known for his lofty moral pronouncements, owned a lot of stock in companies that were doing evil things – war making, poisoning and killings huge numbers with chemicals, etc. But his image was one of Mr. Clean, Mr. Good Guy. I suspect this is typical and that there are many such secrets in the basements and attics of the rich.
But let us also ask where the writers and presenters of the mainstream and alternative media get their money. Although “to follow the money” is a truism, few do. If we do, we will learn that money talks and those who take it toe the line, nor do they live in shacks by the side of the road or rent like so many others. They invest with Black Rock and their ilk and have money managers who can increase their wealth while shielding them from the ways that money is made on the backs of the poor and working people. And they lie about people like Assange, Daniel Hale, Reality Winner, Craig Murray, et al., all imprisoned for daring to reveal the depredations of the power elites, the violence at the heart of predatory capitalism.
Yes, houses speak. But few ever speak of where their money comes from. Those that are on the take – which has multiple meanings – always plead innocent. Yes, I can hear you say that I am being too harsh; that there are exceptions. That is obvious. So let’s skip the exceptions and focus on the general principle. There is a Buddhist principle that right livelihood is a core ethic in earning money. Jesus had another way of putting it but was of course in agreement, as were so many others whom people hold in highest esteem.
Thoreau wrote: “If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications.”
The truth is that for most people, work, if they can find it, is drudgery and hard, a matter of survival. The late great Studs Terkel called it hell and rightly said that most jobs are not big enough for people because they crush the soul, they lack meaning. And behind all ledgers of great wealth lie crushed souls. This reality is so obvious and goes by many names, including class warfare, that further commentary would be redundant.
A few years ago, I visited Mark Twain’s house in Hartford, Connecticut. It is advertised as “a house with a heart and a soul.” It is not a house but a mansion, and it was an ostentatious display in Twain’s time. Similar or worse than Obama’s mansion on Martha’s Vineyard today. It has no soul or heart. It was built with Twain’s wife’s family money. Her father was an oil and coal tycoon from upstate New York. Twain reveled in opulent respectability. He lived the life of a Gilded Age tycoon, an American magnate. It is not a pretty story, but the Twain myth says otherwise. Not that he catered to popular tastes to please the crowd and his domineering wife and that he lived in luxury, but that he was a radical critic of the establishment. This is false. For he withheld for the most part the publication of his withering take on American imperialism until after his death. He committed soul murder. But his mansion impressed his neighbors and his humor distracted from his luxurious lifestyle. His house still stands as a cautionary tale for those who will read it.
Baudelaire once said that in palaces “there is no place for intimacy.” This is no doubt why in people’s dreams small, simple houses with a light in the window loom large. Bachelard says, “When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut.” For here man and God meet in solitude; here human intimacy is possible. “The hut can receive none of the riches ‘of this world.’ It possesses the felicity of intense poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of poverty; as destitution increases, it gives access to absolute refuge.”
He is not espousing actual poverty, but the oneiric depths of true desire, the dreams of hope, reconciliation, and simple living that run counter to the amassing of wealth to prove one’s power and majesty. A humble house of truth, not a mansion of lies. This, to borrow the title of William Goyen’s novel, is “the house of breath” where the spirit can live and pseudo-stability gives way to faith, for insecurity is the essence of life.
There is such a hermit’s hut where the light shines. It is the tiny cell in Belmarsh Prison where Julian Assange hangs onto his life by a thread. His witness for truth sends an inspiring message to all those lost in the world’s woods to look to his fate and not turn away. To follow to their sources the money that greases the palms of all the so-called journalists and politicians who want him dead or imprisoned for life, who tell their endless lies, not just about him, but about everything.
The house of propaganda is built on unanimity. When one person says no, the foundation starts to crumble. The houses of the rich dead and crooked souls, erected to project the stability of their bloody illusions, start to crumble into sand when people dissent one by one.
Soon the fog lifts and there is no hiding any more. At the end of the path, you can see the vultures circling overhead as their prey go running out of their mansions in terror.
Vaccine purchasers must “indemnify, defend and hold harmless Pfizer … from and against any and all suits, claims, actions, demands, losses, damages, liabilities, settlements, penalties, fines, costs and expenses … arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the vaccine.”
A leaked document broken down by Twitter user Ehden reveals the shocking terms of Pfizer’s international COVID-19 vaccine agreements.
Countries that purchase Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot must acknowledge that “Pfizer’s efforts to develop and manufacture the product” are “subject to significant risks and uncertainties.”
In the event that a drug or other treatment comes out that can prevent, treat or cure COVID-19, the agreement stands, and the country must follow through with their vaccine order.
While COVID-19 vaccines are “free” to receive in the U.S., they’re being paid for by taxpayer dollars at a rate of $19.50 per dose — Albania, the leaked contract revealed, paid $12 per dose.
The purchaser of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine must also acknowledge two facts that have largely been brushed under the rug: both their efficacy and risks are unknown.
Purchasers must also “indemnify, defend and hold harmless Pfizer … from and against any and all suits, claims, actions, demands, losses, damages, liabilities, settlements, penalties, fines, costs and expenses … arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the Vaccine.”
The full extent of their COVID-19 vaccine indemnification agreements with countries, however, is a closely guarded secret, one that has remained highly confidential — until now. A leaked document broken down by Twitter user Ehden reveals the shocking terms of Pfizer’s international COVID-19 vaccine agreements.
PFIZERLEAK: EXPOSING THE PFIZER MANUFACTURING AND SUPPLY AGREEMENT.
(thread)
Background: Pfizer has been extremely aggressive in trying to protect the details of their international COVID19 vaccine agreements.
— Ehden (#PfizerLeak/#MonkeyBusiness/#COptiGate) 🌟 (@eh_den) July 26, 2021
“These agreements are confidential, but luckily one country did not protect the contract document well enough, so I managed to get a hold of a copy,” he wrote. “As you are about to see, there is a good reason why Pfizer was fighting to hide the details of these contracts.”
An ironclad agreement, all on Pfizer’s terms
The alleged indemnification agreement, reportedly between Pfizer and Albania, was originally posted in snippets on Twitter, but Twitter now has them marked as “unavailable.” Copies of the tweets are available on Treadreader, however.
The Albania agreement appears very similar to another contract, published online, between Pfizer and the Dominican Republic. It covers not only COVID-19 vaccines, but any product that enhances the use or effects of such vaccines.
Countries that purchase Pfizer’s COVID-19 shot must acknowledge that “Pfizer’s efforts to develop and manufacture the Product” are “subject to significant risks and uncertainties.”
And in the event that a drug or other treatment comes out that can prevent, treat or cure COVID-19, the agreement stands, and the country must follow through with their order. Ivermectin, for instance, is not only safe, inexpensive and widely available but has been found to reduce COVID-19 mortality by 81%. Yet, it continues to be ignored in favor of more expensive, and less effective, treatments and mass experimental vaccination.
“If you were wondering why #Ivermectin was suppressed,” Ehden wrote, “well, it is because the agreement that countries had with Pfizer does not allow them to escape their contract, which states that even if a drug will be found to treat COVID19 the contract cannot be voided.”
Even if Pfizer fails to deliver vaccine doses within their estimated delivery period, the purchaser may not cancel the order. Further, Pfizer can make adjustments to the number of contracted doses and their delivery schedule, “based on principles to be determined by Pfizer,” and the country buying the vaccines must “agree to any revision.”
It doesn’t matter if the vaccines are delivered severely late, even at a point when they’re no longer needed, as it’s made clear that “Under no circumstances will Pfizer be subject to or liable for any late delivery penalties.” As you might suspect, the contract also forbids returns “under any circumstances.”
The big secret: Pfizer charged U.S. More Than Other Countries
While COVID-19 vaccines are “free” to receive in the U.S., they’re being paid for by taxpayer dollars at a rate of $19.5011 per dose. Albania, the leaked contract revealed, paid $12 per dose, while the EU paid $14.70 per shot. While charging different prices to different purchases is common in the drug industry, it’s often frowned upon.
In the case of the price disparity between the U.S. and the EU, Pfizer is said to have given a price break to the EU because it financially supported the development of their COVID-19 vaccine. Still, Ehden noted, “U.S. taxpayers got screwed by Pfizer, probably also Israel.” Also, Pfizer makes a point to note that countries have no right to withhold payment to the company for any reason.
Apparently, this includes in the case of receiving damaged goods. Purchasers of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccines are not entitled to reject them “based on service complaints,” unless they do not conform to specifications or the FDA’s Current Good Manufacturing Practice regulations. And, Ehden adds, “This agreement is above any local law of the state.”
While the purchaser has virtually no way of canceling the contract, Pfizer can terminate the agreement in the event of a “material breach” of any term in their contract.
Safety and efficacy ‘not currently known’
The purchaser of Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine must also acknowledge two facts that have largely been brushed under the rug: Both their efficacy and risks are unknown. According to section 5.5 of the contract:
“Purchaser acknowledges that the Vaccine and materials related to the Vaccine, and their components and constituent materials are being rapidly developed due to the emergency circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to be studied after provision of the Vaccine to Purchaser under this Agreement.
“Purchaser further acknowledges that the long-term effects and efficacy of the Vaccine are not currently known and that there may be adverse effects of the Vaccine that are not currently known.”
Indemnification by the purchaser is also explicitly required by the contract, which states, under section 8.1:
“Purchaser hereby agrees to indemnify, defend and hold harmless Pfizer, BioNTech, each of their Affiliates, contractors, sub-contractors, licensors, licensees, sub-licensees, distributors, contract manufacturers, services providers, clinical trial researchers, third parties to whom Pfizer or BioNTech or any of their respective Affiliates may directly or indirectly owe an indemnity based on the research …
“from and against any and all suits, claims, actions, demands, losses, damages, liabilities, settlements, penalties, fines, costs and expenses (including, without limitation, reasonable attorneys’ fees and other expenses of an investigation or litigation … arising out of, relating to, or resulting from the Vaccine …”
Not only does Pfizer have total indemnification, but there’s also a section in the contract titled, “Assumption of Defense by Purchaser,” which states that in the event Pfizer suffers losses for which it is seeking indemnification, the purchaser “shall promptly assume conduct and control of the defense of such Indemnified Claims on behalf of the Indemnitee with counsel acceptable to Indemnitee(s), whether or not the Indemnified Claim is rightfully brought.” Ehden notes:
“Pfizer is making sure the country will pay for everything: ‘Costs and expenses, including … fees and disbursements of counsel, incurred by the Indemnitee(s) in connection with any Indemnified Claim shall be reimbursed on a quarterly basis by Purchaser.’”
Buried in the March 17, 2020, Federal Register — the daily journal of the U.S. government — in a document titled, “Declaration Under the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act for Medical Countermeasures Against COVID-19,” is language that establishes a new COVID-19 vaccine court — similar to the federal vaccine court that already exists.
In the U.S., vaccine makers already enjoy full indemnity against injuries occurring from this or any other pandemic vaccine under the PREP Act. If you’re injured by a COVID vaccine (or a select group of other vaccines designated under the act), you’d have to file a compensation claim with the Countermeasures Injury Compensation Program (CICP), which is funded by U.S. taxpayers via Congressional appropriation to the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).
While similar to the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program (NVICP), which applies to nonpandemic vaccines, the CICP is even less generous when it comes to compensation. As reported by Dr. Meryl Nass,25 the maximum payout you can receive — even in cases of permanent disability or death — is $250,000 per person; however, you’d have to exhaust your private insurance policy before the CICP gives you a dime.
The CICP also has a one-year statute of limitations, so you have to act quickly, which is also difficult since it’s unknown if long-term effects could occur more than a year later.
Pfizer accused of abuse of power
As is apparent in Pfizer’s confidential contract with Albania, the drug giant wants governments to guarantee the company will be compensated for any expenses resulting from injury lawsuits against it. Pfizer has also demanded that countries put up sovereign assets, including bank reserves, military bases and embassy buildings, as collateral for expected vaccine injury lawsuits resulting from its COVID-19 inoculation.
New Delhi-based World Is One News (WION) reported in February 2021 that Brazil rejected Pfizer’s demands, calling them “abusive.” The demands included that Brazil:
“Waives sovereignty of its assets abroad in favor of Pfizer.”
Not apply its domestic laws to the company.
Not penalize Pfizer for vaccine delivery delays.
Exempt Pfizer from all civil liability for side effects.
STAT News also referred to concerns by legal experts, who also suggested Pfizer’s demands were an abuse of power. Mark Eccleston-Turner, a lecturer in global health law at Keele University in England, told STAT:
“[Pfizer] is trying to eke out as much profit and minimize its risk at every juncture with this vaccine development then this vaccine rollout. Now, the vaccine development has been heavily subsidized already. So there’s very minimal risk for the manufacturer involved there.”
Signs of COVID vaccine failure, adverse effects rise
Pfizer continues to sign lucrative secret vaccine deals across the globe. In June 2021, they signed one of their biggest contracts to date — with the Philippine government for 40 million doses.
Meanwhile, COVID-19 “breakthrough cases,” which used to be called vaccine failures, are on the rise. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of July 19, 5,914 people who had been fully vaccinated for COVID-19 were hospitalized or died from COVID-19.
In the U.K., as of July 15, 87.5% of the adult population had received one dose of COVID-19 vaccine and 67.1% had received two. Yet, symptomatic cases among partially and fully vaccinatedare on the rise, with an average of 15,537 new infections a day being detected, a 40% increase from the week before.
In a July 19 report from the CDC, the agency also reported that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) had received 12,313 reports of death among people who received a COVID-19 vaccine — more than doubling from the 6,079 reports of death from the week before.
Soon after the report, however, they reverted the number to the 6,079 from the week before, indicating by default that no deaths from the vaccine had occurred that week,34 raising serious questions about transparency and vaccine safety.
The CDC revised downward its official number of deaths reported to VAERS following COVID vaccines, but an analysis of VAERS data shows the CDC arrived at the new, lower number, by excluding reports of deaths from outside the U.S.https://t.co/HA2n8lkuMw
— Robert F. Kennedy Jr (@RobertKennedyJr) July 22, 2021
Many other adverse events are also appearing, ranging from risks from the biologically active SARS-CoV-2 spike protein used in the vaccine to blood clots, reproductive toxicity and myocarditis(heart inflammation). As you can see in the confidential indemnification agreements, however, even if the vaccine turns out to be a dismal failure — and a risk to short- and long-term health — countries have no recourse, nor does anyone who received the experimental shots.
One question that we should all be asking is this: If the COVID-19 vaccines are, in fact, as safe and effective as the manufacturers claim, why do they require this level of indemnification?
The truth is America has lost its way if commoners pay a rate of 40% but its billionaires pay next to nothing.
As with everything else in polarized America, billionaires proclaiming space tourism is the next big thing for humanity neatly divides opinion into two camps: those who laud the initiative, hard work and innovations of the billionaires as examples of the American Can-Do Dream, and those who wished the billionaire space tourists had taken a one-way flight to a distant orbit of blissful silence.
Setting aside that bitter divide, let’s explore another divide: how our two-tier tax system enables billionaires to become billionaires while the rest of us get poorer. Whenever I discuss the taxes of the non-billionaire self-employed, armies of apologists leap to the defense of the status quo with various quibbles: the 0.9% Medicare surcharge only kicks in above $200,000, the cap on Social Security taxes is $142,800, and so on.
Setting aside the quibbles–and recall the tax code with regulatory notes is thousands of pages–let’s deal with the real issue, which is that billionaires and their corporations pay a thin slice of taxes as a percentage of total income/gains if they pay any at all, while self-employed and small business pay extraordinarily high tax rates.
To all the quibblers: please add the 15.3% Social Security/Medicare tax rate (self-employed / sole proprietors pay both the employee and employer share of this tax) to the federal tax rate of 24% for income above $85,520. It’s 39.3%.
Just how hard would it be to conclude that everyone earning more than $142,000 should pay at least the same rate the rest of us pay? Aren’t we demonstrating all those same laudable traits of the billionaires, just on a smaller scale? Why should we pay 40% and the billionaires pay essentially zero?
Gee, do you reckon paying no taxes might help folks become richer? Garsh, nobody ever asked that question before. And do you reckon paying 40% of your income might make you poorer over time? Golly gee, how come the talking heads worshiping the billionaires never ask these questions?
Since Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid are the bedrock of America’s social safety net, why shouldn’t billionaires pay to support these programs? Well, why not? Just how lame do the excuses have to be to be recognized as laughably self-serving?
Here’s the trick billionaires use to evade taxes. There are countless ways for the super-wealthy to evade taxes–funnel earnings through an Irish post office box, buy a tax break in Washington DC, slide the money into one of dozens of global tax havens, and so on.
But a simple one is to report no income and live large off borrowed money. As the billions of dollars in capital gains pile up as the billionaire’s stock holdings soar (thanks, Federal Reserve, for the free trillions; awful swell of you to give us all that free money), there’s no income generated until the billionaire sells some shares. No sale, no income. Just pay yourself $1 a year in salary, borrow against your billions at super-low rates of interest, and voila, you’re tax-free while you build your super-yacht, buy your private island, and so on.
Just as a thought experiment, suppose the first $50,000 in earnings for everyone were tax-free, and a 40% tax rate was collected on all income above $1 million, both earned and unearned (capital gains), not when the gains were realized in a sale but at the end of every tax year, whether the shares that rose in value were sold or not.
So Billionaire Space Tourist reaped $10 billion in capital gains from the appreciation of stocks held, then the Billionaire pays 40% of those gains: $4 billion. There is a way to not pay any taxes on capital gains–have your portfolio lose value. No gains, no taxes. And to close all the loopholes, the tax rate is on all assets and income connected in any way, shape or form with the U.S. First they pay the U.S. taxes, then if they want to pay other nations’ taxes as well, be my guest. But the 40% is due and payable regardless of any other conditions.
You don’t like it, then stop selling any products in the U.S. or holding any assets in the U.S. Why should billionaires get to set up immensely profitable monopolies, quasi-monopolies, cartels and corporations in the U.S. but pay near-zero in taxes? Why should billionaires be free to profit from America’s economy but pay nothing to support its citizenry?
What precisely is the logic of reducing taxes on the wealthiest few to near-zero? If there is no logic, then we’re left with corruption: America is a moral cesspool.
The truth is America has lost its way if commoners pay a rate of 40% but its billionaires pay next to nothing. Please note Karma and Divine Retribution are not controlled by the billionaire’s lackeys and apparatchiks in the Federal Reserve. The pendulum of exploitation has reached its extreme, and the reversal to the opposite extreme is underway.
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”– George Orwell 1984
“People will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people’s minds.” – Frank Zappa
Orwell and Zappa’s words of wisdom have never been truer than they are today. The level of untruth proliferated by the government, mainstream media, central bankers, military leaders, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Corp., and billionaire oligarchs has reached prolific heights. We are lost in a whirlwind of lies, destined to grow into a tornado of tragedy and ultimately result in a cascade of consequences.
Since the installation of the illegitimate dementia patient as president of this dying empire of debt by the Deep State (billionaire oligarchs, surveillance state agencies, military industrial complex, Silicon Valley censorship tyrants, corrupt bought off state politicians, Soros installed bureaucrats, and their propaganda arm – fake news media outlets), the country has further fractured into warring factions.
It has been driven by political party, moral vs. immoral, black vs. white, criminals vs. police, normal vs. abnormal, capitalists vs. communists, Federal Reserve vs. the people, vaxxer sheep vs. natural immunity realists, authoritarians vs. freedom fighters, critical thinkers vs. non-thinking believers, privileged elite vs. common men and women, citizens vs. traitors, powerful vs. powerless, and evil versus good.
As Zappa realized, people believe the narrative they have been conditioned to believe, and no quantity of facts, data or rational arguments will change their minds. Arguing on twitter or facebook is not going to change the mind of those you are arguing against. Our public education indoctrination centers have taught multiple generations to feel rather than think, believe rather than question, obey rather than challenge, and allow their minds to be molded by elitists to follow orders and do as they are told, no questions asked.
This organized effort by men constituting a true invisible government has been a conscious, decades long, manipulation of the minds of the masses, through media propaganda, government cultural indoctrination, and most recently through internet social media platforms.
Those in control have achieved astounding success in exploiting the psychological weaknesses of millions of Americans by inducing them to believe absurd falsities, consume on command, become dependent on government handouts, go into debt, work soul crushing jobs, become addicted to the very technology used to manipulate them and surveil them, and believe anything authority figures tell them to believe. The past seventeen months have proven this to be true.
They convinced an enormous portion of the world’s population a non-lethal virus, for anyone under 80 years old in decent health, was such a threat they agreed to be locked down and masked for a year, destroying the global economy, putting tens of millions out of work, bankrupting hundreds of thousands of small businesses, and benefiting authoritarian government tyrants, mega-corporations, and criminal cabal who stole the presidential election for a senile hair sniffing angry gaffe machine functioning as a Trojan donkey (ass) to implement the Build Back Better, new world order WEF plan.
The Davos elite and their henchmen have accomplished more than they probably thought possible, achieving almost universal compliance and obedience to rules and dictates which have proven to be pointless in controlling Covid, but remarkable in controlling the masses. The throngs have demonstrated their willful ignorance and sheeplike qualities by unquestioningly trusting anything their superiors told them and obeying orders like submissive slaves. Those controlling the narrative took the teachings of Edward Bernays to heart and realized repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
The number of provable untruths conveyed by those running this global psy-op have reached colossal heights of deceit. When trusted medical “experts”, politicians, Hollywood stars, sports heroes, government health apparatchiks, and corporate media all relentlessly repeat the same lies, it is difficult for a dumbed down populace to not believe the official narrative. Anyone who presented factual data to counter the untruths has been immediately censored and disappeared by the Silicon Valley social media tyrants Zuckerberg and Dorsey.
When doctors and journalists, with opinions and views contrary to Saint Fauci and his fawning media minions, are banned from Facebook and Twitter, while a media conspiracy to cover up Hunter Biden’s laptop and documented voting fraud in multiple states is beyond doubt, and an unarmed selfie taking joke of an insurrection where a bunch of boobs were ushered into the Capital by the police has been portrayed as the worse attack than Pearl Harbor or 9/11, you realize your government is controlled by men who are actively working against your best interests. They are acting to make sure you remain enslaved in debt, beholden to token government handouts of money they have already taken from you, and locked down physically, mentally, and socially.
The blatant disregard for truth displayed by our overlords during the last two years is either a sign of utter disdain for the intelligence of the common man or an act of desperation as this global Ponzi scheme of debt, deception and delusion is teetering on the brink of collapse. I do know the Big Lie strategy has been utilized at a level of zeal monumental in scope and shameful in application against the citizens of this nation and the world.
I will try to document some of the more egregious falsehoods being perpetuated by those attempting to control the narrative and accomplish their goal of world domination, complete control over our lives, and accumulation of massive wealth, while we will own nothing and be happy. The execution of their plan has been virtually flawless until now.
I’ll address the numerous lies related to the plandemic, where the weaponization of relatively non-lethal flu to anyone under 80 years old not tipping the scales at 275 pounds has been used to steal a presidential election; destroy hundreds of thousands of small businesses while shifting the profits to mega-corps like Amazon, Wal-Mart and Target; created division and suspicion among the population making them easier to manipulate and control; effectively implemented authoritarian measures and mandates, putting a final nail in the coffin of our Constitutional rights; unleashed the power of a corporate fascist social media censorship regime designed to silence the truth and punish those who do not comply with the approved narrative; and creating perpetual unfounded fear among the masses in order to make them obey all orders from their oligarch controllers.
One of the biggest lies from the outset has been about masks. All guidance from renowned health organizations prior to 2020, and backed up with scientific studies, unequivocally stated masks DO NOT protect you from viruses. Fauci, the Surgeon General and head of the CDC were not lying in March 2020 when they told the American public masks do not stop the spread of the virus. They have been lying ever since. The manufacturers of the masks even put a warning on the box that they do not work in preventing the spread of Covid-19.
The two charts below prove the point, and I could present fifty more charts from around the world showing the same results. Japan, the most masked country on earth, even when there isn’t a pandemic, was widely lauded early in the pandemic for stopping the spread with masks. Somehow, with 96% mask compliance, they experienced a massive surge in cases in January, another surge in May/June, and now a new surge, just like everywhere. Masks prevented nothing. They are useless against all viruses.
That brings us to the left-wing media whipping boy – Sweden. As the only developed country on earth to not lockdown, close schools, or require masks, they are truly the control group. The NYT, Washington Post and every other left wing fake news outlet wrote numerous fear mongering articles about the disaster in Sweden. They experienced the same exact pattern of cases as every other country in the world, with a surge in April/May 2020 and January 2021.
Their death rate per million people is the 21st highest in the world, with the UK, U.S., Spain, France, and Mexico recording far worse rates despite lockdowns and mask mandates. What becomes self-evident from the graph is they are not experiencing a surge from the Delta variant. Their vaccination rate is in the mid 30% range and virtually no one wears a mask. They have had ZERO deaths “with” covid in the last week. Previously infected people are not catching the Delta variant, while vaccinated people are. It sure looks like Sweden has achieved herd immunity with no lockdowns, masks, or mass vaccinations. But don’t expect the left wing media or Fauci to applaud their undeniable success.
The powers that be are now invoking mask mandates once again. Data and facts are meaningless to these totalitarian tyrants. The masks have never been about safety or stopping the spread. We’ve never been in this together. The point of the masks has been control. They wanted to sow distrust among the masses as nothing but disease spreading parasites. They want to dehumanize us.
They don’t want like-minded people getting together and realizing they are being screwed by their leaders. They want you holed up in your basement, frightened of a flu with a 99.7% survival rate. Smiles don’t exist when you are masked. Giving miserable lonely cat lady Karens a purpose in life is designed to sow discontent, anger, and division. We all become faceless sheep being corralled, shorn, and ultimately sacrificed at the altar of the Build Back Better New World Order.
Again, I could use fifty other charts proving lockdowns did not and do not work, but this chart of the permanently locked down continent of Australia will suffice. The dictatorial lockdowns across Australia didn’t work last July and August, as cases soared, and they have been entirely unnecessary since. A country with 26 million people has recorded less than 5 deaths with Covid since last October. Because the 7- day average of cases (not sick people) in Sydney has “skyrocketed” to 100 (with 1 death of an 80-year-old), the entire city has been locked down.
The propaganda media supports this ridiculous overreach with hyperbolic headlines about super spreader events. At least a portion of their population is fed up and their protests have begun to get violent, clashing with police thugs ordered to silence the discontent. Lockdowns are not for the purpose of keeping you safe. Their purpose is to keep the authoritarian politicians safe, while enriching their corporate and banking benefactors. These politicians and bureaucrats are being bought off to do the bidding of the true masters of the universe – the billionaire class.
This brings us to the big lie about vaccines. It seems both the left and right are in on the vaccine lie. The first lie is this gene altering concoction is actually a vaccine. A vaccine is supposed to trigger your immune system and provide immunity from a disease. This supposed vaccine does nothing of the sort. The polio vaccine didn’t lessen the polio symptoms, it eliminated polio as a disease. The smallpox vaccine didn’t lessen smallpox symptoms, it eradicated smallpox. These covid vaccines were sold to the public as the cure for covid. The CDC’s own website says the vaccine was supposed to keep you from getting the virus. Fact Check – FALSE!!!
Despite the misinformation being promulgated by Dementia Joe and his White House sycophants, vaccinated people are getting covid, being hospitalized, and dying with covid. The vaccine worshipers declared that no one said it was full proof, because its effectiveness was 95%. Of course, there would be a few breakthrough cases. It appears we have a more than a few. The data from Israel, the most vaxxed country on the planet, is proving these “vaccines” to be virtually worthless.
Over 80% of new cases are among the vaxxed and the effectiveness of the vaccines are clocking in at 39%, just a smidge lower than the 95% from the doctored trials. The cognitive dissonance of the vaxxed, rationalizing their stupidity by flailing about with new reasons for why the vaxx works as advertised is fascinating to observe. Just like Zappa said, you cannot change people’s minds, even when their decisions have proven to be asinine.
Now the story-line has changed to it reduces the symptoms and keeps you from being hospitalized or dying. Another Big Lie. The narrative is now 99% of the cases are among the unvaccinated. Untrue once again. They are purposely not testing the vaxxed, but still the data is rolling in day after day of the vaxxed catching covid, being hospitalized and dying. In addition, all the paid off medical “experts”, sports figures, Hollywood stars, and social media influencers appear in the never-ending vaccine marketing blitz commercials, subsidized with your tax dollars, telling you how safe and effective these jabs are. Another huge lie. The VAERS database, which is likely under-counting by a factor of at least three, has recorded 500,000 adverse reactions, 50,000 serious injuries, and over 11,000 deaths from the vaccines.
When the swine flu vaccine killed several people, it was immediately pulled by the FDA as too dangerous. Despite this experimental gene therapy killing and maiming thousands, while not providing the advertised immunity, the powers that be are ramping up the fear volume to 11 in order to sell this Big Pharma profit bonanza (with zero liability for the deaths and injuries caused by this toxic brew) to the public. They have even bought off Republican governors, senators, and the Fox news shills through threats of de-funding or promises of compensation (aka bribes).
They are laboriously ramming the jab as essential for teenagers down out throats, with the assistance of woke leftist university administrators demanding compliance to attend classes. Virtually no one under the age of 19 has died “with” covid in the last 17 months, as the CDC’s own statistics show. The proliferation of myocarditis in young men after getting the jab is being suppressed by the media vaccine complex.
This leads us to the lies required to allow these EUA “vaccines” to be used in the first place. The FDA is only supposed to allow emergency use of non-approved drugs if there are no other treatments deemed capable of providing the same level of success in treating the disease. It was known very early in this scamdemic both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine, safe, cheap, and effective drugs, both drastically reduced the symptoms of this flu. Scientific studies and papers were issued.
Many doctors began writing about their effectiveness and life-saving qualities. Even Trump was touting them. Suddenly, the Silicon Valley social media tyrants began censoring doctors, studies, or anyone daring to put forth facts about these cheap, plentiful, safe drugs. Trump stopped talking about them. Only the vaccines could save us. Doctors and hospitals were paid to shut up and deny writing prescriptions for these drugs. There was no money to be made prescribing these life-saving drugs.
How many lives could have been saved if these supposed “do no harm” physicians had not bowed down to Fauci and his Big Pharma co-conspirators. It’s always been about the Benjamins and Fauci has been the Liar-in-Chief during this plandemic, reaping the accolades from the vaccine rollout, keeping the fear flowing, and covering up his role in funding the creation of this virus in the Wuhan bioweapon lab. There are no coincidences when it comes to this engineered and weaponized pandemic. Was it a coincidence Gates, Fauci and Schwab conducted the Event 201 pandemic simulation in October 2019, three months before this bio-engineered virus was released into the world?
Why were Moderna patents for their vaccine obtained before the pandemic began? Why do Fauci and his NIH cronies have financial interests in Moderna? When will Fauci be brought to justice for funding the gain of function research at the Wuhan lab, as he continues to lie to Congress, despite documented proof of his guilt. This troll-like creature is a global mass murderer still lauded by the fake news media and treated like a holy figure by mindless liberal twits across the land. The sheep will bleatingly line up for their Pfizer booster shot, because three must be better than two. The only boost will be to Pfizer’s hundreds of billions of vaccine profits.
Now the latest Big Lie has been revealed, well after the damage has been done. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the invention of the PCR test, had this to say about its use and Fauci:
“The PCR, if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody. Those guys have got an agenda which is not what we would like them to have, being that we pay for them to take care of our health in some way. They have a personal kind of agenda. They make up their own rules as they go; they change them when they want to. And they (are smug)—like Tony Fauci does not mind going on television in front of the people who pay his salary and lie directly into the camera.”
His test was misused by Fauci and his financially motivated cohorts across the medical industrial complex to create a global casedemic, by measuring at greater than 35/40 cycles, creating the illusion of a pandemic by producing a huge number of false positives. As CNN and the rest of the propaganda spewing media outlets provided second by second case counts to frighten the masses into lockdown and mask compliance, only a tiny fraction of these cases were actual sicknesses.
There were critical thinking, rational medical professionals, journalists, and bloggers who argued the test was not accurately measuring the level of sickness in the world. The corporate media gave them no platform to speak, and the social media Big Brother entities censored and banned any discussion about the worthlessness of the PCR test and the level of false positives.
If the test had been conducted at 28 cycles, it would have ruined their agenda of removing Trump, destroying the economy, frightening the sheep into mass compliance, and furthering their Build Back Better New World Order. The moment Biden was installed as president, the guidance from the CDC on the PCR test was reduced from 35/40 to 28 cycles. They needed the case counts to drop to make it look like the vaccine was working. There was a narrative to peddle to the plebs.
Now, the vaccines are being revealed to be ineffective and dangerous. In a shocking development (not), late on a Friday night, the FDA put out a little alert that the PCR test is a complete failure and will be pulled from the market. It seems it accomplished its purpose of stoking mass global panic, and now that vaxxed people are testing positive in tremendous numbers, it has outlived its usefulness. And Fauci and his band of incompetent medical “professionals” won’t even blink or admit their devastatingly disastrous mistake of using a faulty test to shut down the entire planet.
Despite all these lies being revealed, the gullible, sheep-like masses breathlessly await the new proclamations and dictates from Fauci and the rest of the medical frauds dancing to the tune of Big Pharma, Gates, Soros, and Schwab. The narrative has devolved into renewed lockdowns, mask mandates, vaccine passports, and blaming the unvaxxed healthy people for the “surge” in cases (still 80% below January and 30% below April).
Despite over a year of factual data proving lockdowns and masks do not work, they demand compliance. Despite the fact vaxxed zombies’ contract and spread the virus, they insist on vaccine passports, which would be useless other than as a further control mechanism over the masses.
And lastly if the PCR test is entirely useless, according to the FDA, the surge in “cases” proclaimed by the politicians and compliant media mouthpieces, is a worthless data point and means nothing. What we do know is the entire U.S. is experiencing about 250 deaths per day “with” covid and the vast majority are over 80 with five co-morbidities. This is 93% below the January peak, 60% below the level in May, and 20% below the level in June. For some perspective, 400 people die each day from strokes and 1,650 die each day from cancer in the U.S. This fading faux pandemic is a nothing burger, with a side of fear mongering, and a dessert of permanent lockdowns.
They have pushed their agenda too far and too fast. The UK, France, Italy and Australia have tried to cross a bridge too far. Their totalitarian lockdowns, mandatory vaccine passport schemes, and generally treating their citizens like cattle has begun to backfire. Violent protests are taking place around the globe against the despotic tyranny of their elected leaders. The psychological manipulation and mass media propaganda worked for over a year. They took their foot off the gas by relaxing lockdowns and mask mandates but think their diabolical heavy-handed schemes will work again amid this faux delta variant charade.
The controllers’ hubris has led them to believe their Bernaysian propaganda mind manipulation techniques will work just as well the 2nd time around. As the mass protests attest, there are millions not buying what they are selling anymore. They want their freedom back. It wasn’t a majority that threw the British tea into the Boston Harbor. It was an irate tireless minority who set the brushfires of freedom in the minds of men. The smell of revolution is in the air.
Orwell’s fiction has become an instruction manual for our Big Brother overlords. He understood what power meant to these evil men. They are trying to remake the world by tearing everything apart and remaking it to their benefit.
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your choosing.” – George Orwell
The cascade of consequences created by those wielding power across the globe have only just begun. Their boldness in implementing a plan of global control where we will own nothing, eat bugs, be electronically surveilled 24/7, depend on government for an electronically delivered living stipend, be stripped of our rights to free speech, armed defense, and privacy, while living under constant fear of armed government thugs busting down our doors because we committed thoughtcrime, has rendered them recklessly arrogant.
Despite all their efforts to censor and suppress the truth, the internet is too vast and uncontrollable to shut down – unless this was the true purpose of Schwab’s recent Cyber Polygon simulation. As truth tellers across the world have begun to gain some traction, Huxley’s quote becomes more pertinent.
“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you mad.” – Aldous Huxley
People are getting mad. Those in power want us to direct our anger at each other. They want the vaxxed fighting the non-vaxxed, blacks fighting whites, citizens fighting immigrants, men fighting women, young fighting old, and the country fighting Russia and China. What the oligarchs do not want is our ire to be focused on them. But they have pushed the people too far. The top 1% of Americans own $42 trillion of wealth, 16 times as much as the bottom 50%, with most of that wealth concentrated among a few hundred families. This is not accidental. It’s part of their plan. This pillaging campaign is aided and abetted by their puppets at the Federal Reserve. And this is not reserved for just America. Europe is equally controlled by the few.
The consequence of their traitorous deeds is pointing towards civil chaos and global conflict – as anticipated in the later stages of a Fourth Turning. The protests arising across the globe are just the beginning. The way to chip away at their power is mass non-compliance to their mandates and individual acts of heroism, which will inspire more people to resist. Mocking and ridiculing the oligarchs and their minions will contribute to their decline in status. Boycotting corporations and entities supporting the narrative weakens their sway. Shunning those supporting the establishment, whether they be family, friends, or coworkers, will be essential in shifting the balance of power.
Most people have proven to be followers. We need to shift the narrative to the point where they begin following the truth tellers. The enemy have the wealth, power of the media, and politicians in their pockets. They think they have the police and military, but videos of the police joining the protestors in Italy, offer hope they may turn on the oligarchs. They have families at risk too. Our freedom and our future hang in the balance. Critical independent thought, courage, and fortitude in the face of tremendous adversity will be essential in defeating these global tyrants who think of you as a parasite to be crushed under their boot. Remember Carlin’s first rule. Don’t believe anything your government tells you. It’s all lies.
After the Crash 