Tag Archives: Oligarchy

THE ELITES WHO ARE JUST SO OVER HUMANITY

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The depth of anti-humanist sentiment related by Douglas Rushkoff in his latest book, Survival of the Richest, is harrowing and illuminating.

By Chris Barsanti

Source: PopMatters

Some things can be horrifying even if unsurprising. One such moment is the opening anecdote in Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. In 2017, Rushkoff was paid an exorbitant fee to travel to a remote high-end resort where (he thought) he would do his usual thing: Talk about the future to investment bankers looking for a way to game the next trend.

What happened was far stranger. Rather than give a speech, Rushkoff sat at a conference room table with five fantastically rich guys from “the upper echelon of the tech investing and hedge fund world” and tried to answer their questions about how they could survive the impending apocalypse.

The scene is comical, in a Dr. Strangelove way. Assuming the world is racing toward an inevitable societal collapse they called “the Event”, the men thought it best to talk survival tactics with a self-described “Marxist media theorist” and professor at Queens/CUNY. Rather than acting like masters of the universe, they were nervous about being caught out when the Event came. They worried whether New Zealand or Alaska was the right location for their doomsday bunker; could their security guards keep the hungry mobs at bay; if an all-robot staff could be better. Rushkoff explains what seemed to lie behind these unnamed One Percenter preppers’ anxieties:

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonizing Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the aging process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic, and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.– Douglass Rushkoff

Rushkoff calls this thinking “the Mindset”. He defines it as an “atheistic and materialistic scientism” that launders a desire for control and conquest through quasi-religious adherence to digital code and the power of the market. Expanding on his original article from 2018 (Medium)—which ironically led to his being swamped by requests from disaster-related industries to get in touch with the anonymous five they thought needed their services—Rushkoff spends the rest of Survival of the Richest explaining where the Mindset came from, how dangerous it is, and what he thinks should replace it.

Nothing that Rushkoff writes in this clipped, angry book should surprise most readers. Nobody who has spent any time tracking the pronouncements and feuds of the more futurist-minded tech elites would think many had a high opinion of or interest in improving the daily lot of carbon-based life forms. Though predictable and at times a bit too broadly defined, the depth of anti-humanist sentiment related by Rushkoff is still harrowing and illuminating.

The phenomenon of powerful men thinking themselves separate from the great unwashed and unbound by common morality is as old as human history. Although this of-the-moment book contains little context dating back more than three decades, Rushkoff does not try to claim everything about the Mindset is new. He points instead to how illogical power fantasies have merged with an Ayn Randian cult of the solitary hero and been nurtured by the Web’s seductive capacity for self-aggrandizing mythmaking. Given how much he may have contributed to those seductions, he is the right messenger.

Among the first public intellectuals to grapple seriously with the digital revolution as it washed over society in the 1990s, Rushkoff remains a go-to expert for Internet prognostication. Unlike many tech evangelizers, though, he later had second thoughts. Some of the more revealing sections in Survival of the Richest come from when the author turns his focus on himself.

Readers of a mindset will likely feel a certain wistfulness as Rushkoff writes about the early punk years of cyberspace. Just as underground music was bursting into the mainstream and indie bands were making real money, outlaw hackers were suddenly at the forefront of a technological revolution. In 1994, Rushkoff published two books: The GenX Reader, a heady anthology of alt-cultural tropes (part of the Slacker screenplay, Dan Clowes and Peter Bagge comics) that could already see the commodification of generational rebellion to come; and Cyberia, a quasi-utopian paean about the psychedelia-inspired confluence of programmers, Deadheads, libertarians, Wiccans, and ravers who seemed to be leading the nascent Web towards a consciousness- and freedom-expanding future. The 1996 “Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace,” announced ironically enough at the first ever World Economic Forum in Davos, proclaimed a borderless world where governments had no sovereignty.

Rushkoff looks back now with clearer eyes:

Deregulation sounded good at the time. We were just ravers and cyberpunks, paranoid about the government arresting us for drugs … We didn’t realize that banishing the government from the internet would create a free zone for corporate colonization. We hadn’t yet discovered that government and business balance each other out—a bit like fungus and bacteria. Get rid of one, and the other runs rampant.

In Rushkoff’s cultural history, the experimental tribal ethos of the Web’s heady early days was co-opted by business interests who saw a new frontier to monetize; less Mondo 2000, more AOL CD-ROMs. Online libertarianism seemed to evolve from a confederacy of rule-breaking rebels and pioneers to anger-prone grumps so dissatisfied with their fellow man that they started planning unintentionally funny “seasteading” ocean communities, taking their toys and leaving. Wealthy futurists imagine uploading themselves onto a cloud server, revealing a depressingly simplistic view of human consciousness and a grand view of themselves as transcendent immortals. As technology and behavioral science became more finely tooled at predicting consumer behavior, it also exacerbates hate and loneliness, assisting the all-too-easy COVID-19 pandemic pivot to increasingly tech-mediated relationships.

For the Mindset’s “tech titans and billionaire inventors”, per Rushkoff, there is no problem that technology cannot solve. And the problems are often human in form. Suppose that were true, and the world was spiraling towards a collapse (which the online tools superpowered by elites could be accelerating). In that case, the believers might wonder, why not use technology to scarper off to their Bond villain bunkers?

Rushkoff’s critique expands from what he calls this amoral “sociopathic” attitude toward the state of capitalism. Combining the digital-communitarian ethos of Cory Doctorow with the acerbic skepticism of Naomi Klein, Rushkoff does not trust that a more enlightened kind of capitalism can save the world. His argument against eternal economic growth has merit. But Rushkoff is on firmer ground when defining technological-sociological phenomena like the Mindset. That is not to say there is no case for a more sustainable economy, but Rushkoff breezes too quickly past the challenges resulting from that massive transition. Being necessary does not make a thing easy.

As with many jeremiads of this kind, Survival of the Richest loses some of its impact when delivering suggestions for how to push back (don’t give in to the inevitability of doom, buy local, fight for anti-monopoly laws). That is partly because it is difficult for them to seem equal to the magnitude of the problem. But for Rushkoff, the smallness of the solutions is part of the point: “We can still be individuals; we just need to define our sense of self a bit differently than the algorithms do.”

Powerful New Evidence that U.S. Is A Dictatorship

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By Eric Zuesse

Source: The Duran

Because the U.S. Government flaunts itself as being a democracy instead of a dictatorship and it coups and invades and overthrows and replaces (“regime changes”) Governments that it declares to be dictatorships instead of democracies (the “New Cold War” isn’t about “capitalism versus communism,” but about “democracy versus dictatorship”), a crucial question now in all international political discussions is: Is the U.S. Government ACTUALLY a democracy, or does it instead only pretend to be one? In other words: Is the U.S. Government’s position in “the New Cold War” fraudulent?

The June 2022 issue of the peer-reviewed academic journal, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, contained an article that answers this question with empirical data which has definitively crushed all of the U.S. Government’s references to itself as being a “democracy.” It is therefore significant not only because it proves that the U.S. Government is a dictatorship, but also because it proves that the U.S. position in “the New Cold War is fraudulent. The article is therefore of significance not just to Americans, but globally.

The article, which was specifically about and addressed to America, closed by saying: “We think it is time that social scientists stop pushing the equivalent of the Ptolemaic solar system. They need to recognize what almost everyone else does: that we live in a money-driven political system. No one is going to make progress by adding epicycles to voting models.” In other words: political ‘scientists’ and ‘historians’ who continue to perpetuate the U.S. regime’s claim to being a democracy (one-person-one-vote instead of one-dollar-one-vote) are now archaic: they are equivalent to the physical philosophers who had preceded the first physical scientist or “physicist” Galileo’s empirical demonstrations and the resulting first scientific theory (and subsequently Darwin doing the same thing in the biological sciences), that the Bible is not a book of history but instead a book of mythology mixing lies with truths in order to perpetuate and expand a particular clergy. But, now, the issue isn’t about control of the State by the clergy, but instead it’s about control of the State by the aristocracy — the nation’s super-rich. That’s what’s at issue in today’s America. Science is finally now extending outward, from its existing base, first in physics, and then in biology, to demonstrate such powerful empirical political realities as this in society — encroaching now upon the U.S. regime’s fraudulent dogma that the U.S. Government is a “democracy” instead of a “dictatorship” (a dictatorship such as it invades abroad and tries to overthrow and replace, by a ‘democracy’, some foreign nation’s Government — to add a new vassal-nation to the American empire’s ‘allies’ or actual colonies). This Emperor has no clothes, is what this academic article displays. But this particular “Emperor” represents not the clergy (such as in the time of Galileo and of Darwin), but instead the aristocracy — the super-rich (the imperialists, in the “New Cold War”). 

The article’s title is: “How money drives US congressional elections: Linear models of money and outcomes”. Its “Abstract” or summary says that “the relations between money and votes cast for major parties in elections for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives from 1980 to 2018 are well approximated by straight lines.” In other words: Billionaires and other super-rich individuals can and do purchase electoral outcomes with their enormous political donations in America. It’s a “straight-line” relationship between money and winning: the candidate who is backed by the most money has the biggest (a huge) likelihood of winning; the candidate who is backed by the least money has the least (a minuscule) likelihood, and most of that money to the winning candidates comes from the few super-rich. The way to be politically successful in today’s America is, now clearly, to be more corrupt than your competitor — to be offering the Government for sale to the highest bidders (and to deliver on the promises that the politician makes to these individuals, so as to be able to remain in public office and continue to serve those masters). (And, then, after public office, come the biggest private benefits, to those former office-holders.) America is an aristocracy, not a democracy; it is one-dollar-one-vote, not one-person-one-vote. That’s what the article demonstrates.

Even more crushing is the same three authors’ (Thomas Ferguson, Paul Jorgenson, and Jie Chen) further analysis from these same data, their article “Big Money — Not Political Tribalism — Drives US Elections”, which exposes the fraudulence of the two American political Parties’ supposed ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ appeals, as being instead actually the aristocracy’s distractive political theater pumping those divides, as being, in reality, instead — at the structurally deeper level — between Republican versus Democratic Party billionaires, with Republican billionaires financing White-power appeals, and Democratic billionaires financing Black and other minority (and feminist) power appeals, all so that the nation’s population-at-large won’t be fighting instead against the aristocracy itself, which is the sole real beneficiary of this system of exploitation of the masses (exploitation of workers and consumers). Thus, the aristocracy’s victims — the public, the consumers and workers, the people who are NOT in the aristocracy — look elsewhere than at the aristocracy, to see their enemy. This latter paper isn’t behind a paywall, and it shows the same straight-line graphs relating money to power that the first-mentioned one here (which IS paywalled) did. So, one can readily see visually, here, how profoundly corrupt America’s Government actually is. (Those graphs are stunning, because the data are.)

I have previously posted articles summarizing, and linking to, a vast range of other empirical evidences, of many different types, all likewise pointing very strongly toward America’s being an aristocracy instead of a democracy, and these are some of them:

“How America’s dictatorship works”

“America Is One-Dollar-One-Vote, Not Really One-Person-One Vote.”

“Jimmy Carter Is Correct That the U.S. Is No Longer a Democracy”

“Politicians Don’t Actually Care What Voters Want”

“Is the U.S. actually a ‘police state’?”

“How the U.S. Government is controlled by its armaments firms”

“How the Billionaires Control American Elections”

“The Evilness of America’s Ruling Class”

All of those data should be compared to the opposite view, the U.S.-regime-imposed view, which is expressed by America’s political ‘scientists’ and ‘historians’, who continue to perpetuate the U.S. regime’s claim to being a democracy (one-person-one-vote, instead of one-dollar-one-vote — which is America’s reality). Not only politicians, but also scholars, are beneficiaries of billionaires’ donations — the donations funding professorial chairs, college endowments, and ‘non’-profit foundations and ‘charities’. Such private interests thus control the public interests, to produce a deeply corrupt (privatized) body-politic. 

On which side of this debate, about the aristocracy and the public, do you stand, and why? And what do you think should be done about it? Do you favor the aristocrats, or the public? This is not a political question, but a meta-political one. It transcends existing political Parties, and all existing political prejudices. It requires authentically scientific thinking about public policies. Above all, such questions concern the existing one-dollar-one-vote (aristocracy), versus the possibility of one-person-one-vote (democracy) emerging (or re-emerging). But can dictatorship ever transform into democracy? If so, how? Of course, history provides answers, and it shows that, at least for a while, the American Revolution did transform an aristocracy here into a democracy (albeit, a limited one): it conquered Britain’s aristocracy on its land. Unfortunately (or fortunately, if one prefers aristocracy to democracy), an American aristocracy has recently risen here. America now has its own aristocracy. In science, only history provides answers. There have also, in some other countries, been revolutions overthrowing the local nation’s own aristocracy. All evidences in science are historical facts — nothing else than that. And the articles which are linked-to here are scientific: they are analyses which are based only on the relevant historical facts, displaying what history (not myth) shows. One thing that all of human history shows is that every aristocracy is based on myths. America’s aristocracy is no different. Social science is now puncturing that myth — exposing that fraud. This is significant globally, not merely locally.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

The United States Does Not Have an Economy

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By Paul Craig Roberts

Source: PaulCraigRoberts.org

The US financial sector has long looted other countries.  A number of participants have described the process.  First a country is enticed with bribes to the leaders to take out loans that cannot be serviced or repaid.  Then in comes the IMF. Austerity is imposed on the population.  Public services and employment are cut to free resources for debt service, and public assets are sold to repay the loan.  Living standards fall, and US corporations take over the country’s economy.

As foreign governments, having experienced or witnessed the economic carnage and fearing accountability, are less willing to be bribed into indebting their countries, American finance is now applying this technique to Americans. Contrary to the narrative in the financial press, the Federal Reserve is not raising interest rates in order to fight inflation.  It is ludicrous to think that a three-quarters of one percent rise in a very low interest rate is going to have any impact on a 9.1% rate of consumer inflation or that speculation that the Federal Reserve has in mind another three-quarters of one percent possibly followed by one half of one percent comprise an anti-inflation policy.  If all these increases occur, it still leaves the interest rate below the inflation rate.

Moreover, as I have previously explained, the inflation is not monetary.  The higher prices are the result of supply disruptions caused by Washington’s Covid lockdowns and Russian sanctions.  Production was stopped and supply chains are broken.  

The Federal Reserve’s rise in interest rates is just a continuation of its policy of concentrating income and wealth in the hands of the One Percent.  Quantitative Easing was the cloak for the Federal Reserve to print $8.2 trillion in new money which was directed or found its way into the prices of stocks and bonds, thus enriching the small number who own most of these financial instruments.  Having maxed out this avenue of wealth concentration, the Federal Reserve is now raising interest rates in order to drive up mortgage costs to aspiring home owners.  The Federal Reserve is driving individuals out of the housing market in order to free up properties for “private equity” firms to purchase homes for their rental values.  That private equity firms see rental income from the existing stock of houses as the best investment opportunity tells us that the US economy has played out.  When investment goes into existing assets, not into producing new assets, the economy ceases to grow.

The Obama regimes policy of bailing out the financial fraudsters responsible for the 2008 crash while foreclosing on their victims, reduced American homeownership from 70% to 63 percent. The Urban Institute predicts further declines. Today homeowners’ equity has declined from 85% after World War II to one-third, leaving two-thirds of homeowner equity in the hands of creditors.  This makes it completely clear that a financialized economy indebts the people for the sake of rentier income to the One Percent.  Indeed, the financialized economy created by the Federal Reserve has reimposed a class system akin to the landed British aristocracy that was overthrown.  Indeed, we have an economically far worst class system.  The landed British aristocrats produced food that fed the nation.  The American class system produces interest and fees for the financial system.

As Michael Hudson has shown us, a no-growth economy is the end result of a financialized economy.  A financialized economy is one in which consumer income is diverted by debt expansion away from the purchase of new goods and services into debt service and fees–interest on mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, student loan debt.  With such a large share of household income spent on debt service, little is left for driving the economy forward.

If American economists were capable of escaping from their neoliberal junk economics, they would realize that “the world’s largest economy” they attribute to the United States is total fiction.  The fact is that the United States does not have an economy.  Corporations driven by Wall Street located American manufacturing in Asia so that the One Percent could benefit from higher profits from lower labor costs, while the deserted city and states had to sell their income streams, such as Chicago’s parking meter revenues for 75 years, to foreigners for one lump sum payment to solve one year’s budget crisis.  

The offshoring of American production, carried out under the cloak of “globalism,” destroyed the American economy and the tax bases of cities and states.  While the real economy declines, the Democrat Party, seeking permanent power, has imposed a policy of open borders for immigrant-invaders.  How are these millions of peoples to support themselves in an economy whose manufacturing has been moved abroad?  How can a population, deserted by American corporations, that is experiencing debt deflation absorb the costs of support and social infrastructure for tens of millions of third world immigrant-invaders?

You will never hear it from the whores in the financial press, but the United States is on the precipice of economic and social collapse.  And what are the fools in Washington doing?  The idiots are ginning up wars with Russia, China, and Iran.  

The Engineered Stagflationary Collapse Has Arrived – Here’s What Happens Next

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By Brandon Smith

Source: Alt-Market.us

In my 16 years as an alternative economist and political writer I have spent around half that time warning that the ultimate outcome of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus model would be a stagflationary collapse. Not a deflationary collapse, or an inflationary collapse, but a stagflationary collapse. The reasons for this were very specific – Mass debt creation was being countered with MORE debt creation while many central banks have been simultaneously devaluing their currencies through QE measures. On top of that, the US is in the unique position of relying on the world reserve status of the dollar and that status is diminishing.

It was only a matter of time before the to forces of deflation and inflation met in the middle to create stagflation. In my article ‘Infrastructure Bills Do Not Lead To Recovery, Only Increased Federal Control’, published in April of 2021, I stated that:

“Production of fiat money is not the same as real production within the economy… Trillions of dollars in public works programs might create more jobs, but it will also inflate prices as the dollar goes into decline. So, unless wages are adjusted constantly according to price increases, people will have jobs, but still won’t be able to afford a comfortable standard of living. This leads to stagflation, in which prices continue to rise while wages and consumption stagnate.

Another Catch-22 to consider is that if inflation becomes rampant, the Federal Reserve may be compelled (or claim they are compelled) to raise interest rates significantly in a short span of time. This means an immediate slowdown in the flow of overnight loans to major banks, an immediate slowdown in loans to large and small businesses, an immediate crash in credit options for consumers, and an overall crash in consumer spending. You might recognize this as the recipe that created the 1981-1982 recession, the third-worst in the 20th century.

In other words, the choice is stagflation, or deflationary depression.”

It’s clear today what the Fed has chosen. It’s important to remember that throughout 2020 and 2021 the mainstream media, the central bank and most government officials were telling the public that inflation was “transitory.” Suddenly in the past few months this has changed and now even Janet Yellen has admitted that she was “wrong” on inflation. This is a misdirection, however, because the Fed knows exactly what it is doing and always has. Yellen denied reality, but she knew she was denying reality. In other words, she was not mistaken about the economic crisis, she lied about it.

As I outlined last December in my article ‘The Fed’s Catch-22 Taper Is A Weapon, Not A Policy Error’:

‘First and foremost, no, the Fed is not motivated by profits, at least not primarily. The Fed is able to print wealth at will, they don’t care about profits – They care about power and centralization. Would they sacrifice “the golden goose” of US markets in order to gain more power and full bore globalism? Absolutely. Would central bankers sacrifice the dollar and blow up the Fed as an institution in order to force a global currency system on the masses? There is no doubt; they’ve put the US economy at risk in the past in order to get more centralization.’

The Fed has known for years that the current path would lead to inflation and then market destruction, and here’s the proof – Fed Chairman Jerome Powell actually warned about this exact outcome in October of 2012:

“I have concerns about more purchases. As others have pointed out, the dealer community is now assuming close to a $4 trillion balance sheet and purchases through the first quarter of 2014. I admit that is a much stronger reaction than I anticipated, and I am uncomfortable with it for a couple of reasons.First, the question, why stop at $4 trillion? The market in most cases will cheer us for doing more. It will never be enough for the market. Our models will always tell us that we are helping the economy, and I will probably always feel that those benefits are overestimated. And we will be able to tell ourselves that market function is not impaired and that inflation expectations are under control. What is to stop us, other than much faster economic growth, which it is probably not in our power to produce?

When it is time for us to sell, or even to stop buying, the response could be quite strong; there is every reason to expect a strong response. So there are a couple of ways to look at it. It is about $1.2 trillion in sales; you take 60 months, you get about $20 billion a month. That is a very doable thing, it sounds like, in a market where the norm by the middle of next year is $80 billion a month. Another way to look at it, though, is that it’s not so much the sale, the duration; it’s also unloading our short volatility position.”

As we all now know, the Fed waited until their balance sheet was far larger and until the economy was MUCH weaker than it was in 2012 to unleash tightening measures. They KNEW the whole time exactly what was going to happen.

It is no coincidence that the culmination of the Fed’s stimulus bonanza has arrived right after the incredible damage done to the economy and the global supply chain by the covid lockdowns. It is no coincidence that these two events work together to create the perfect stagflationary scenario. And, it’s no coincidence that the only people who benefit from these conditions are proponents of the “Great Reset” ideology at the World Economic Forum and other globalist institutions. This is an engineered collapse that has been in the works for many years.

The goal is to “reset” the world, to erase what’s left of free market systems, and to establish what they call the “Shared Economy” system. This system is one in which the people who survive the crash will be made utterly dependent on government through Universal Basic Income and one that will restrict all resource usage in the name of “carbon reduction.” According to the WEF, you will own nothing and you will like it.

The collapse is engineered to create crisis conditions so frightening that they expect the majority of the public to submit to a collectivist hive mind lifestyle with greatly reduced standards. This would be accomplished through UBI, digital currency models, carbon taxation, population reduction, rationing of all commodities and a social credit system. The goal, in other words, is complete control through technocratic authoritarianism.

All of this is dependent on the exploitation of crisis events to create fear in the population. Now that economic destabilization has arrived, what happens next? Here are my predictions…

The Fed Will Hike Interest Rates More Than Expected, But Not Enough To Stop Inflation

Today, we are witnessing the poisonous fruits of a decade-plus of massive fiat money creation and we are now at the stage where the Fed will reveal its true plan. Hiking interest rates fast, or hiking them slow. Fast hikes will mean an almost immediate crash in markets (beyond what we have already seen), slow hikes will mean a drawn out process of price inflation and general uncertainty.

I believe the Fed will hike more than expected, but not enough to actually slow inflation in necessities. There will be an overall decline in luxury items, recreation commerce and non-essentials, but most other goods will continue to climb in cost. It is to the advantage of globalists to keep the inflation train running for another year or longer.

In the end, though, the central bank WILL declare that the pace of interest rates is not enough to stop inflation and they will revert to a Volcker-like strategy, pushing rates up so high that the economy simply stops functioning altogether.

Markets Will Crash And Unemployment Will Abruptly Spike

Stock markets are utterly dependent on Fed stimulus and easy money through low interest rate loans – This is a fact. Without low rates and QE, corporations cannot engage in stock buybacks. Meaning, the tools for artificially inflating equities are disappearing. We are already seeing the effects of this now with markets dropping 20% or more.

The Fed will not capitulate. They will continue to hike regardless of the market reaction.

As far as jobs are concerned, Biden and many mainstream economists constantly applaud the low unemployment rate as proof that the American economy is “strong,” but this is an illusion. Covid stimulus measures temporarily created a dynamic in which businesses needed increased staff to deal with excess retail spending. Now, the covid checks have stopped and Americans have maxed out their credit cards. There is nothing left to keep the system afloat.

Businesses will start making large job cuts throughout the last half of 2022.

Price Controls

I have no doubt that Joe Biden and Democrats will seek to enforce price controls on many goods as inflation continues, and there will be a handful of Republicans that will support the tactic. Price controls actually lead to a reduction in supply because they remove all profits and thus all incentive for manufacturers to keep producing goods. What usually happens at that point is government steps in to nationalize manufacturing, but this will be substandard production and at a much lower yield.

In the end, supplies are reduced even further and prices go even higher on the black market because no one can get their hands on most goods anyway.

Rationing

Yes, rationing at the manufacturing and distribution level is going to happen, so be sure to buy what you need now before it does. Rationing occurs in the wake of price controls or supply chain disruptions, and usually this coincides with a government propaganda campaign against “hoarders.”

They will hold up a few exaggerated examples of people who buy truckloads of merchandise to scalp prices on the black market. Then, not long after, they will accuse preppers and anyone who bought goods BEFORE the crisis of “hoarding” simply because they planned ahead.

Rationing is not only about controlling the supply of necessities and thus controlling the population by proxy; it is also about creating an atmosphere of blame and suspicion within the public and getting them to snitch on or attack anyone that is prepared. Prepared people represent a threat to the establishment, so expect to be demonized in the media and organize with other prepared people to protect yourself.

Be Ready, It Only Gets Worse From Here On

It might sound like I am predicting success of the Great Reset program, but I actually believe the globalists will fail in the end. That’s not going to stop them from making the attempt. Also, the above scenarios are only predictions for the near term (within the next couple of years). There will be many other problems that stem from these situations.

Naturally, food riots and other mob actions will become more commonplace, perhaps not this year, but by the end of 2023 they will definitely be a problem. This will coincide with the return of political unrest in the US as leftist factions, encouraged by globalist foundations, demand more government intervention in poverty. At the same time, conservatives will demand less government interference and less tyranny.

At bottom, the people who are prepared might be called a lot of mean names, but as long as we organize and work together, we will survive. Many unprepared people will NOT survive. Understand that the economic conditions ahead of us are historically destructive; there is no way that serious consequences can be avoided for a large part of the population, if only because they refuse to listen and to take proper steps to protect themselves.

The denial is over. The crash is here. Time to take action if you have not done so already.

Wokeness is a Product of Neoliberalism

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Why don’t more people make this connection?

By Chad C. Mulligan

Source: The Hipcrime Vocab Substack

One thing I haven’t seen people point out anywhere else is how much the current atmosphere of “wokeness” is an outcome of neoliberalism.

Let me explain.

There was a lot of analysis written about neoliberalism back in the 1990s when it was still a relatively new phenomenon, having only been enshrined as the dominant economic paradigm in the 1980s. Now that neoliberalism has become simply the water in which we swim and the horizon upon which we gaze, we don’t even notice it anymore. The idea that there could be other ways to organize the economy and society has completely vanished from the discourse even on the nominal “Left”—so utterly complete has been its intellectual victory.

I can’t recall all the books and articles I read during that time, but a couple of standouts were One Market Under God by Thomas Frank and No Logo by Naomi Klein. Frank’s The Baffler magazine published a lot of good articles about neoliberalism back in those days, and Klein’s subsequent The Shock Doctrine is indispensable for understanding how neoliberalism took over the world.

One of the things that those analyses pointed out was the fact that neoliberalism derided governments as universally incompetent and inefficient and argued that only market competition could distribute goods and services effectively.

Furthermore, those markets had to be global in scope and free from “interference,” which was broadly defined as anything that hindered profit maximization including worker and environmental protections. This, in theory, would lead to ideal outcomes—or at least as close to ideal as they could be in a world of inherent scarcity.

As a corollary of this, neoliberals argued that democratic politics—the idea that citizens could express their wishes and desires via their elected representatives—was a hopelessly naive and outdated notion in the age of globalism. Rather, they argued that people’s preferences and desires would be more accurately reflected by how people spent their money in “free and open” markets. People’s spending patterns—aggregated and allocated by markets—would therefore be a better agent of social change than ineffective political action according to neoliberal theory1.

The One Big Market under neoliberalism, therefore, was seen not just a method for coordinating economic activities and allocating goods and services, but as the highest expression of people’s fundamental values. We were now expected to change the world thru shopping. As a result of this, you were expected to be an “ethical consumer.” You were exhorted to “spend your values.” Markets, neoliberals argued—and not popularly elected governments—were the true expression of the democratic will. As our choices at the voting booth began to narrow and seem more and more alike, we were told to vote with your dollar!

Here’s a concrete, real-world example. If you were concerned about dolphins being ensnared and killed in fishing nets used to dredge the ocean for tuna, the solution was not to ban the practice. No, the solution was to spend ethically on products labeled “dolphin safe.” Since consumers would express their preferences via buying dolphin safe tuna instead of the ones not so labeled, eventually the Invisible Hand of the Market would cause this practice to die out without a single government regulation. Similarly, if you wanted to support sustainable farming practices, you would spend preferentially on products labeled “organic” rather than the alternatives.

So in the neoliberal world view, the best way to bring about positive social change was by individuals spending their money in markets. That’s why in a modern shopping center you see all kinds of labels festooned on every conceivable product proclaiming how it is “responsibly sourced,” or how environmentally-friendly it is, or how the package is biodegradable, or how the farmers were fairly compensated, or whatever. You never saw that in the 1960s or 1970s—this change was ushered in by neoliberalism.

Now when you went to the grocery store it was no longer just to buy groceries—you had the obligation to save the world! (As if your life wasn’t stressful enough with the ever-longer working hours that were also the result of neoliberalism). A recurring theme of those analyses I read back in the day was the replacement of citizens with consumers.

(Of course, what’s to stop corporations from slapping any old claim onto their products? How can shoppers evaluate these claims? How can they possibly know what’s accurate and what’s not? Into this void stepped literally hundreds of different (private) certification agencies to try and make sure that these labels accurately reflected what they claimed. Thus, in the effort to avoid regulating markets, neoliberalism actually caused a proliferation of far more regulations and regulatory agencies than ever before. And often these privatized agencies have nonexistent oversight, poor standards and lax enforcement).

Another fundamental aspect of neoliberalism was the notion that competition would bring about ideal social outcomes. Therefore competition, neoliberals argued, had to be introduced into absolutely every aspect of human affairs. In this regard, neoliberalism a was really not just about economics, but was rather a radical totalitarian vision for remaking human society.

This extended even to social issues. For example, the philosophy behind “school choice” came from the notion that the problem with public schools was the lack of free market competition because schools were a state-owned monopoly. State-owned monopolies are the greatest possible evil under neoliberalism because they are not subject to market competition. By unleashing “choice,” schools would be forced to compete for students just like businesses compete for customers. This would make public education better, the thinking went, by eliminating bad schools and teachers and creating “lean and mean” educational institutions.

Even environmentalism has been colonized by neoliberalism. Instead of limiting the emission of fossil fuels, for example, new and exotic markets would be established so that polluters could trade opaque “carbon credits” in order to theoretically allocate pollution the same way we allocate any other resource under neoliberalism. This also demonstrates how neoliberalism is not anti-regulation or “small government” as is often portrayed, since creating these kinds of artificial markets takes massive amounts of government regulation and bureaucracy.

As this all-encompassing philosophy gradually took over the world, social protections were dismantled, regulations were abolished, and untrammeled, cutthroat competition was unleashed in every arena of life.

But it was Karl Polanyi who pointed out that such a vision of turning over society to anarchic markets with no protections and no refuge from its capricious dictates would lead to the “demolition of society.” No one could long withstand the never-ending whipsaws and bullwhips of “pure”relentless market competition—not consumers, not workers, and not even the businesses themselves! That’s why its has never existed, he said, and cannot exist.

So what actually happened in the real world due to unleashing this radical philosophy was an unprecedented wave of mergers, acquisitions, and consolidations in every sector of the economy, enabled by high finance (which was also “unleashed” thanks to neoliberalism).

You see, competition is expensive. It is also highly inefficient. It’s much more effective for parties to cooperate than to compete. That’s just game theory 101. It’s true of human affairs just as it is in nature. That’s why you see cooperation everywhere throughout the animal kingdom as Peter Kropotkin pointed out long ago. Any species where every single member was perennially locked in existential competition with every other member of the species would quickly die out, he said. Even where competition does exist in nature, it is in very limited in scope and in circumscribed contexts like mate choice.

Competition is also inherently unstable. You can’t just have an endless tournament going on forever and ever as free market theory depicts. Eventually there has to be a winner. Again, this is simply game theory 101. You can observe this everywhere you look.

So the current wave of consolidations and mergers in every sector of the economy can be seen as the logical outcome of neoliberal philosophy when applied to the real world as opposed to the world depicted in economic textbooks and think-tank policy papers. Want to know why the entire economy is dominated by a handful of mega-monopolies these days? That’s the reason why.

But getting back to our initial topic, here’s the point that’s absolutely critical: as a result of this neoliberal transformation, corporations had to portray themselves as agents of positive social change.

Read that again. And again and again and again until it sinks in.

This is what has lead to the rise of the modern “socially conscious” corporation and to so-called “woke capitalism.”

Think about it. Back in the pre-neoliberal 1960s, did any company bend over backwards to convey what it believed about absolutely anything? About any social issue whatsoever? No, because corporations weren’t expected to do that. Corporations were widely seen as anonymous entities devoid of values designed to make money by producing the goods and services consumers wanted. Back in the 1960’s—an era of rapid social change—no one cared about what IBM, Boeing, McDonalds, DuPont, General Electric, Coca Cola, General Motors, Prudential, Chevron, or any other big corporation thought about anything, much less the prevailing social issues of the day. That’s what politics was for! Businesses were expected to make money, full stop. Besides, how could a corporation really “think” anything? A corporation is a faceless bureaucratic enterprise composed of hundreds, or even thousands of individuals, each with their own personal set of values and beliefs. The very idea that a corporation could “believe” anything would have been seen as preposterous and absurd back then.

Spending money in “free” markets has subsequently become the only acceptable form of social protest or fomenting change under globalized neoliberalism—and not, for example, people banding together in popular movements to advocate for a better world. Government and politics have become passé and irrelevant—or so we’re told by those in charge. The sole option you have as a lone individual in the face of this relentless onslaught is to become an ethical consumer—in other words, to “spend your values.” Therefore, in order to meet this solemn obligation, you have to be sure that when you hand your money over to a corporation, that corporation reflects your values! That is a fundamental tenet of neoliberalism and its emphasis on markets—and not governments—as the highest arbiter of social values and preferences.

Yet very few commentators on the (fake) Left and the (pseudo) populist Right seem to grasp this. Instead they just shake their fists and rage.

So in order to get their hands on those precious “ethical” dollars, faceless bureaucratic corporations have to fashion themselves as “socially responsible.” As “ethical.” As being “positive change agents.” To that end they have launched wave after wave of PR campaigns designed to proclaim just how ethical and virtuous they are, from Amazon to Dove to Gillette, and every other big business has to follow suit.

Consider, for instance, those Dove advertisements that promised to let plus-size women believe they were beautiful—and publicly paraded them in their bras and panties in a commercial for cellulite-reducing cream. Or the Heineken “Worlds Apart” ad that showed people of disparate backgrounds and races coming together (eventually) over the beer. Or—to bring things back to the strategic positioning of carbonated sugar water as a proto-revolutionary product—the (thankfully short-lived) Kendall Jenner Pepsi spot that portrayed the soda as the means to bring Occupy-style protesters back into a grateful posture of consumer-abundance connoisseurship…

Believe in Something (The Baffler)

This also ties in with the “doing well by doing good” ethos of philanthropic capitalism as described by Anand Giridharadas in his book, Winners Take All. Once again, elected governments and politicians are portrayed as hopelessly inept and incompetent (sense a pattern?). In place of governments installed by the will of the people, therefore, “social entrepreneurs” will step into the void and solve the most pressing social problems of the day—and make a killing $$$ by doing so. This is portrayed as a “win-win” scenario in the media, which is owned and controlled by those same rich people (the fact that every single social problem seems to be getting exponentially worse has not deterred this policy approach in the slightest).

So if you wonder where all that cloying, patronizing Silicon Valley bullshit about “changing the world” and “making the world a better place” comes from—that’s where it comes from. It’s basically a form of neofeudalism in practice.

So the end result of all this is that under neoliberalism corporations are now obligated to portray themselves as ethical and moral in order to attract precious consumer dollars. Hence the rise of the modern “woke” corporation expressing it’s opinion on absolutely every hot-button issue of the day—from Black Lives Matter, to gay marriage, to the abortion debate, to transgender rights, to sexual harassment, to gun control, to multiculturalism, to whatever contentious wedge issue the political Right will dream up next.

And whether you like it or not, the people who tend to earn the most under globalized, technocratic monopoly capitalism really do strongly support cosmopolitan values like diversity, tolerance and inclusiveness. And since we are obligated to “spend our values” under neoliberalism, corporations have to cater to them—and to make sure that everyone knows about it. Thus they have to “officially” support things like Black Lives Matter. They have to speak out against discrimination against gay and transgender people. They have to be “antiracist.” They have to extol “empowering women and girls.” All because they need to attract the kinds of people who “spend their values,” and those values are more likely to be socially liberal for the kinds of people that corporations want to attract both as employees and consumers. That’s just the reality, and it’s not likely to change anytime soon.

And even though conservatives may not like it, socially regressive people and reactionaries tend to be poorer and less educated overall—and hence are less desirable as workers and consumers. That’s also just how it is. Therefore, corporations are “woke” based on a cynical, self-interested calculation of what will net them the most consumer dollars under neoliberal capitalism, and no amount of conservative grousing is going to change that. As a result, reactionaries and authoritarians are increasingly turning to politics to force their values upon people which they can’t enforce via the kinds of free market choices that they believe should dictate every other aspect of life.

When it became clear that the NFL supporters—largely white, male, and older—were outnumbered by the corporation’s brand loyalists—more diverse and younger—Nike went ahead and now even claims that it inaugurated the campaign because it believes that Kaepernick “is one of the most inspirational athletes of his generation.”

Believe in Something (The Baffler)

Of course, if we had a healthy and functioning political system none of this would be necessary. And it follows that if neoliberalism had not become the dominant social and economic paradigm of the twenty-first century there would be no such thing as “woke” capitalism in the first place.

So it’s truly amusing to watch the political Right rage to the heavens at the result of their own economic philosophy being applied in practice.

It’s also funny that, to my knowledge, no one appears to have made this connection. After all, why did corporations only relatively recently (i.e. after the 1990s) begin virtue signalling at every opportunity? It’s not just because everyone suddenly became “based” at approximately the same time. It’s the economic system, stupid!

Of course, it’s a win-win situation for political conservatives since they now have something to permanently complain about to rally people to their side, even though they are still just as pro-wealth and anti-worker as ever, and even though they still fervently believe in the most toxic tenets of neoliberalism (such as its contempt for democratically elected governments and its antipathy toward regulations and constraining the rich in any way). That’s the natural result of gutting civil society in favor of apotheosizing an all-powerful Market.

Of course, the bad news is that the end result of neoliberalism will probably be the rise of a twenty-first century form of fascist authoritarianism based on what I’m seeing in the media and across the political spectrum these days.

In conclusion, I find all of these “culture war” topics utterly inane and ridiculous (despite all the money you can make by endlessly bellyaching about them on Sub$tack). In a country where many citizens can’t even access basic health care, homelessness is endemic and rising, higher education is unaffordable, crime and suicide are rampant, people are mired in debt, wages have stagnated and mass shootings occur on a weekly basis2, I find it hard to get worked up over “wokeness” and “cancel culture.” And, as many besides me have pointed out, the idea that this cynical virtue signalling by mega-corporations means that they are in any way “left-of-center” by any reasonable definition of that term is absurd. After all, we’re talking about some of the most vile, sociopathic billionaires since the Gilded Age and some of the most brutal working conditions since the era of George Pullman. And the saddest thing is, we’ll never be able to unite to stop them since—thanks to neoliberalism—we will be kept perennially at each other’s throats while they continue to Tweet from their luxury yachts, penthouses, villas, and private jets about diversity and inclusiveness for ever and ever.

1 A good book about this is Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown. Here’s an interview with the author.

2 It’s worth noting that I wrote this post before the latest massacre in Texas.

The Worst Economic Gloom In 50 Years

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By Michael Snyder

Source: Activist Post

We haven’t seen anything like this in decades.  Energy prices are soaring to unprecedented heights.  Food shortages in some parts of the world are starting to become quite severe.  Rampant inflation is out of control all over the globe.  Meanwhile, economic activity is slowing down everywhere that you look.  Some are comparing this current crisis to the “stagflation” of the 1970s, but I believe that is a far too optimistic assessment.  Just about everyone can see that economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating, and there is a tremendous amount of alarm about what the months ahead will bring.

According to a brand new Wall Street Journal-NORC survey that was just released, the percentage of Americans that believe that the state of the U.S. economy is “poor or not so good” is 83 times larger than the percentage of Americans who believe that the state of the U.S. economy is “excellent”…

A severe pessimism grips the U.S. economy and Americans report the highest level of dissatisfaction with their financial situation in at least half a century, poll results released Monday show.

Eighty-three percent of Americans describe the state of the economy as poor or not so good, according to a Wall Street Journal-NORC Poll. Only one percent describe the economy as “excellent.”

I would like to talk to someone from the one percent of Americans who still believe that the U.S. economy is in “excellent shape”.

To me, it is always fascinating to find someone who can completely deny reality even when all of the evidence points in the other direction.

The same survey found that the percentage of Americans who are “not at all satisfied with their financial condition” is the highest in at least 50 years…

Thirty-five percent said they are not at all satisfied with their financial condition, the highest level of dissatisfaction since NORC began asking the question every few years starting in 1972.

Sixty-three percent of Americans say they are extremely or very concerned about the price of gas. Fifty-four percent say they are extremely or very concerned about the impact of high grocery prices on their household’s financial situation. Just 13 percent say they not very or not at all concerned about gas prices and 19 percent about grocery prices.

In other words, this is the gloomiest that Americans have been about their own personal finances in at least five decades.

Wow.

One of the big reasons why people feel this way is because the price of just about everything is going up.

In particular, the price of gasoline has been making national headlines just about every day.  On Tuesday, it set another brand new record…

The national average price of gas is now $4.955, reflecting an over three-cent jump overnight, 28-cent rise in the last week, and nearly 64-cent rise in the last month. Diesel also hit another record on Tuesday, reaching $5.719.

Currently, 16 states are experiencing an average price of gas of $5.00 or more. That includes Maine ($5.023), Massachusetts ($5.21), New Jersey ($5.032), Pennsylvania ($5.031), Michigan ($5.214), Ohio ($5.061), Indiana ($5.234), Illinois ($5.532), Idaho ($5.025), Alaska ($5.469), Hawaii ($5.493), Washington ($5.489), Oregon ($5.485), Nevada ($5.564), Arizona ($5.181), and California ($6.390). California’s Mono County appears to be reporting the highest gas price average in the Golden State — $7.213.

Unfortunately, there is a growing consensus among the experts that this is just the beginning.  Here is one example…

With the summer travel season just getting underway, demand for gasoline, coupled with the cut-off of Russian oil shipments due to the war in Ukraine, is sending oil prices higher on global markets.

The national average for gasoline could be close to $6 by later this summer according to Tom Kloza, global head of energy analysis for the OPIS, which tracks gas prices for AAA.

And here is another example…

GasBuddy head of petroleum analysis Patrick De Haan provided insight into record-high gas prices, warning on Wednesday that “we’re going to be swimming in these high prices for a while.”

Speaking on “Varney & Co.” on Wednesday, De Haan also revealed his forecasts for how high prices at the pump will climb, arguing that they could reach a national average of $6 a gallon in the coming months, but “what seems like more of a guarantee is that $5 mark.”

Others are even more pessimistic.  In fact, the head of commodity trading giant Trafigura just warned that the price of oil could actually make a “parabolic ” move in the months ahead.

Needless to say, energy prices have a domino effect throughout the entire economy.  When commentator Anthony B. Sanders contacted moving companies about his coming move out of state, he could hardly believe the quotes that he was given…

As I line up my move from Fairfax VA to Columbus OH, I am getting a variety of quotes from moving companies. And wow! The cost of moving using a national moving company for a 4 bedroom house is $15,000 to $20,500. That includes International, North American and Bekins.

One of the reasons for the high cost of moving is the massive increase in diesel fuel used for trucking. Diesel fuel under Biden has risen 117%. And since it was revealed that natural gas often is used for electric charging stations, and NATGAS is up 281% under Biden (but there aren’t many electric moving trucks yet).

Could you imagine paying $20,000 to move from Virginia to Ohio?

In the old days, you could purchase your own new vehicle for that much money.

In this crazy environment, some companies are attempting to hide inflation by shrinking their package sizes…

“Joining the parade of downsized products is cereal stalwart Honey Bunches of Oats, which has seen the weight of its standard box, previously 14.5 ounces, lessen to 12 ounces — a reduction of roughly 17 percent,” the U.K. paper said.

Angel Soft toilet paper has also reduced its size from 425 sheets per roll to 320, while Bounty paper towels have cut their rolls from 165 sheets per roll to 147 late last year. Gatorade also cut its bottle size from 32 ounces to 28 ounces.

Do they actually believe that we will not notice that the packages have changed?

And this isn’t just happening here in the United States.  At this point, this is taking place all over the globe…

In the U.S., a small box of Kleenex now has 60 tissues; a few months ago, it had 65. Chobani Flips yogurts have shrunk from 5.3 ounces to 4.5 ounces. In the U.K., Nestle slimmed down its Nescafe Azera Americano coffee tins from 100 grams to 90 grams. In India, a bar of Vim dish soap has shrunk from 155 grams to 135 grams.

Our standard of living is falling with each passing day, and that process is only going to accelerate during the second half of this year.

In a desperate attempt to keep living the way that they always have, many Americans are turning to their credit cards at an alarming rate.

Needless to say, that is only a short-term solution.

And at the same time, overall economic activity continues to slow down…

A closely followed measurement from the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank suggests the economy could be headed for a second-quarter decline in gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced in a country. The GDPNow tracker shows the economy grew at an annualized pace of just 0.9% in the spring, a steep decline from its previous estimate of 1.3% on June 1.

If U.S. GDP is actually negative for the second quarter, that will be two quarters in a row, and that will mean that we are officially in a recession right now.

But what we are heading into in 2023 and beyond is not going to be just a “recession”.

Ultimately, we are heading into the sort of “nightmare scenario” that I have warned about for years.

It took decades of very foolish decisions for us to reach this point, and our leaders in Washington continue to make very foolish decisions.

So the truth is that there are no long-term solutions in sight.

Only pain.

So if the American people are this upset about the economy now, how will they be feeling six months down the road?

The REAL agenda behind the created food crisis

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The created food crisis, whether real or a smoke-and-mirrors psy-op, is all about tearing down the global food system and “building back better” – a new dystopian food system built by corporate monoliths and rigidly controlled in the name of the greater good.

By Kit Knightly

Source: Off-Guardian

We’re in the early stages of a food crisis.

The press has been predicting this for years, but  up until now it always appeared to be nothing more than fearmongering, designed to worry or distract people, but the signs are there that this time, to quote Joe Biden, it “is going to be real”.

Nobody knows how bad it could get, except the people who are creating it.

Because the evidence is pretty clear, it is being deliberately & cold-bloodedly created. We’ve been documenting it for months.

We have Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine driving up the price of staple foods, wheat and sunflower oil, as well as fertiliser.

We have the sudden “bird flu outbreak” driving up the price of poultry and eggs.

The soaring price of oil is driving up the cost of food distribution.

The inflation caused by huge influxes of fiat currency means families are spending more money on less food.

And as all this is happening, the US and UK (and maybe others, we don’t know) are literally paying farmers not to farm.

It’s pretty clear this is The Great Reset: Food Edition. The lockdown melody with slightly different lyrics. A process of breaking down the structures already in place so we can “build back better” with a more controlled and more corporatised food system

Just as the Covid “pandemic” was said to highlight “weaknesses in the multilateral system”, so this food crisis will show that our “unstable food systems are in need of reform” and we need to ensure our “food security”…or a thousand variations on that theme.

That’s not supposition. They already started, over a year ago.

The Journal of Agriculture, Food Systems & Community Developments published a paper in February 2021 titled:

Dismantling and rebuilding the food system after COVID-19: Ten principles for redistribution and regeneration

In an interview from July last year, Ruth Richardson the Executive Director of the NGO Global Alliance for the Future of Food literally said:

Our Dominant Food System Needs to Be Dismantled and Rebuilt”

Later, in September 2021, the UN convened the first-ever “Food Systems Summit”, whose mission statement included the line:

Rebuilding the food systems of the world will also enable us to answer the UN Secretary-General’s call to “build back better” from COVID-19.

Writing in the Guardian two weeks ago, George Monbiot, weathervane for every deep state agenda, states with his trademark lack of subtlety:

The banks collapsed in 2008 – and our food system is about to do the same…The system has to change.

But what does “change” and “rebuilt” actually mean in this context?

Well, that’s no mystery, they’ve been talking it up for years.

Almost all of these are stories from just the past month or so, many of them talking points at the World Economic Forum’s Davos Conference.

As is almost always the case, the problem to which they’re currently “reacting” already has a series of pre-ordained solutions.

Just as we saw lockdowns break the economy to pieces whilst the billionaire class land record profits whilst corporate megaliths expanded their monopolies, so too will any proposed food security policies end up benefiting the already mega-rich or installing infrastructure for corporate control.

They just announced the building of the largest “cultured meat factory” in the world. Fake meat, of course, can’t be raised at home and is subject to patented processes of creation. Genetically edited or modified plants and animals are likewise subject to patents.

Supranational companies, with profits larger than the budget of some nations, are developing carbon footprint tracker apps which reward people for making the “right decisions”. That could easily be applied to food.

Bill Gates has quietly become the largest owner of agricultural land in the United States. Land on which he can grow new Frankencrops, or which the US government will pay him not to use.

The play is clear: Right now they’re getting ready to tear all our old food systems down, with the stated aim of building them back better.

But better for them, not us.

No Way Out but War

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Permanent war has cannibalized the country. It has created a social, political, and economic morass. Each new military debacle is another nail in the coffin of Pax Americana.

By Chris Hedges

Source: ScheerPost


The United States, as the near unanimous vote to provide nearly $40 billion in aid to Ukraine illustrates, is trapped in the death spiral of unchecked militarism. No high speed trains. No universal health care. No viable Covid relief program. No respite from 8.3 percent inflation. No infrastructure programs to repair decaying roads and bridges, which require $41.8 billion to fix the 43,586 structurally deficient bridges, on average 68 years old. No forgiveness of $1.7 trillion in student debt. No addressing income inequality. No program to feed the 17 million children who go to bed each night hungry. No rational gun control or curbing of the epidemic of nihilistic violence and mass shootings. No help for the 100,000 Americans who die each year of drug overdoses. No minimum wage of $15 an hour to counter 44 years of wage stagnation. No respite from gas prices that are projected to hit $6 a gallon.

The permanent war economy, implanted since the end of World War II, has destroyed the private economy, bankrupted the nation, and squandered trillions of dollars of taxpayer money. The monopolization of capital by the military has driven the US debt to $30 trillion, $ 6 trillion more than the US GDP of $ 24 trillion. Servicing this debt costs $300 billion a year. We spent more on the military, $ 813 billion for fiscal year 2023, than the next nine countries, including China and Russia, combined.

We are paying a heavy social, political, and economic cost for our militarism. Washington watches passively as the U.S. rots, morally, politically, economically, and physically, while China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, India, and other countries extract themselves from the tyranny of the U.S. dollar and the international Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), a messaging network banks and other financial institutions use to send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. Once the U.S. dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, once there is an alternative to SWIFT, it will precipitate an internal economic collapse. It will force the immediate contraction of the U.S. empire shuttering most of its nearly 800 overseas military installations. It will signal the death of Pax Americana.

Democrat or Republican. It does not matter. War is the raison d’état of the state. Extravagant military expenditures are justified in the name of “national security.” The nearly $40 billion allocated for Ukraine, most of it going into the hands of weapons manufacturers such as Raytheon Technologies, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing, is only the beginning. Military strategists, who say the war will be long and protracted, are talking about infusions of $4 or $5 billion in military aid a month to Ukraine. We face existential threats. But these do not count. The proposed budget for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in fiscal year 2023 is $10.675 billion. The proposed budget for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is $11.881 billion. Ukraine alone gets more than double that amount. Pandemics and the climate emergency are afterthoughts. War is all that matters. This is a recipe for collective suicide.

There were three restraints to the avarice and bloodlust of the permanent war economy that no longer exist. The first was the old liberal wing of the Democratic Party, led by politicians such as Senator George McGovern, Senator Eugene McCarthy, and Senator J. William Fulbright, who wrote The Pentagon Propaganda Machine. The self-identified progressives, a pitiful minority, in Congress today, from Barbara Lee, who was the single vote in the House and the Senate opposing a broad, open-ended authorization allowing the president to wage war in Afghanistan or anywhere else, to Ilhan Omar now dutifully line up to fund the latest proxy war. The second restraint was an independent media and academia, including journalists such as I.F Stone and Neil Sheehan along with scholars such as Seymour Melman, author of The Permanent War Economy and Pentagon Capitalism: The Political Economy of War. Third, and perhaps most important, was an organized anti-war movement, led by religious leaders such as Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King Jr. and Phil and Dan Berrigan as well as groups such as Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). They understood that unchecked militarism was a fatal disease.

None of these opposition forces, which did not reverse the permanent war economy but curbed its excesses, now exist. The two ruling parties have been bought by corporations, especially military contractors. The press is anemic and obsequious to the war industry. Propagandists for permanent war, largely from right-wing think tanks lavishly funded by the war industry, along with former military and intelligence officials, are exclusively quoted or interviewed as military experts. NBC’s “Meet the Press” aired a segment May 13 where officials from Center for a New American Security (CNAS) simulated what a war with China over Taiwan might look like. The co-founder of CNAS, Michèle Flournoy, who appeared in the “Meet the Press” war games segment and was considered by Biden to run the Pentagon, wrote in 2020 in Foreign Affairs that the U.S. needs to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.” 

The handful of anti-militarists and critics of empire from the left, such as Noam Chomsky, and the right, such as Ron Paul, have been declared persona non grata by a compliant media. The liberal class has retreated into boutique activism where issues of class, capitalism and militarism are jettisoned for “cancel culture,” multiculturalism and identity politics. Liberals are cheerleading the war in Ukraine. At least the inception of the war with Iraq saw them join significant street protests. Ukraine is embraced as the latest crusade for freedom and democracy against the new Hitler. There is little hope, I fear, of rolling back or restraining the disasters being orchestrated on a national and global level.  The neoconservatives and liberal interventionists chant in unison for war. Biden has appointed these war mongers, whose attitude to nuclear war is terrifyingly cavalier, to run the Pentagon, the National Security Council, and the State Department.

Since all we do is war, all proposed solutions are military. This military adventurism accelerates the decline, as the defeat in Vietnam and the squandering of $8 trillion in the futile wars in the Middle East illustrate. War and sanctions, it is believed, will cripple Russia, rich in gas and natural resources. War, or the threat of war, will curb the growing economic and military clout of China.

These are demented and dangerous fantasies, perpetrated by a ruling class that has severed itself from reality. No longer able to salvage their own society and economy, they seek to destroy those of their global competitors, especially Russia and China. Once the militarists cripple Russia, the plan goes, they will focus military aggression on the Indo-Pacific, dominating what Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, referring to the Pacific, called “the American Sea.” 

You cannot talk about war without talking about markets. The U.S., whose growth rate has fallen to below 2 percent, while China’s growth rate is 8.1 percent, has turned to military aggression to bolster its sagging economy. If the U.S. can sever Russian gas supplies to Europe, it will force Europeans to buy from the United States. U.S. firms, at the same time, would be happy to replace the Chinese Communist Party, even if they must do it through the threat of war, to open unfettered access to Chinese markets. War, if it did break out with China, would devastate the Chinese, American, and global economies, destroying free trade between countries as in World War I. But that doesn’t mean it won’t happen.

Washington is desperately trying to build military and economic alliances to ward off a rising China, whose economy is expected by 2028 to overtake that of the United States, according to the UK’s Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). The White House has said Biden’s current visit to Asia is about sending a “powerful message” to Beijing and others about what the world could look like if democracies “stand together to shape the rules of the road.” The Biden administration has invited South Korea and Japan to attend the NATO summit in Madrid.

But fewer and fewer nations, even among European allies, are willing to be dominated by the United States. Washington’s veneer of democracy and supposed respect for human rights and civil liberties is so badly tarnished as to be irrecoverable. Its economic decline, with China’s manufacturing 70 percent higher than that of the U.S., is irreversible. War is a desperate Hail Mary, one employed by dying empires throughout history with catastrophic consequences. “It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable,” Thucydides noted in the History of the Peloponnesian War. 

A key component to the sustenance of the permanent war state was the creation of the All-Volunteer Force. Without conscripts, the burden of fighting wars falls to the poor, the working class, and military families. This All-Volunteer Force allows the children of the middle class, who led the Vietnam anti-war movement, to avoid service. It protects the military from internal revolts, carried out by troops during the Vietnam War, which jeopardized the cohesion of the armed forces.

The All-Volunteer Force, by limiting the pool of available troops, also makes the global ambitions of the militarists impossible. Desperate to maintain or increase troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military instituted the stop-loss policy that arbitrarily extended active-duty contracts. Its slang term was the backdoor draft. The effort to bolster the number of troops by hiring private military contractors, as well, had a negligible effect. Increased troop levels would not have won the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but the tiny percentage of those willing to serve in the military (only 7 percent of the U.S. population are veterans) is an unacknowledged Achilles heel for the militarists.

“As a consequence, the problem of too much war and too few soldiers eludes serious scrutiny,” writes historian and retired Army Colonel Andrew Bacevich in After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed. “Expectations of technology bridging that gap provide an excuse to avoid asking the most fundamental questions: Does the United States possess the military wherewithal to oblige adversaries to endorse its claim of being history’s indispensable nation? And if the answer is no, as the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq suggest, wouldn’t it make sense for Washington to temper its ambitions accordingly?”

This question, as Bacevich points out, is “anathema.” The military strategists work from the supposition that the coming wars won’t look anything like past wars. They invest in imaginary theories of future wars that ignore the lessons of the past, ensuring more fiascos. 

The political class is as self-deluded as the generals. It refuses to accept the emergence of a multi-polar world and the palpable decline of American power. It speaks in the outdated language of American exceptionalism and triumphalism, believing it has the right to impose its will as the leader of the “free world.” In his 1992 Defense Planning Guidance memorandum, U.S. Under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz argued that the U.S. must ensure no rival superpower again arises. The U.S. should project its military strength to dominate a unipolar world in perpetuity. On February 19, 1998, on NBC’s “Today Show”, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright gave the Democratic version of this doctrine of unipolarity. “If we have to use force it is because we are Americans; we are the indispensable nation,” she said. “We stand tall, and we see further than other countries into the future.”

This demented vision of unrivaled U.S. global supremacy, not to mention unrivaled goodness and virtue, blinds the establishment Republicans and Democrats. The military strikes they casually used to assert the doctrine of unipolarity, especially in the Middle East, swiftly spawned jihadist terror and prolonged warfare. None of them saw it coming until the hijacked jets slammed into the World Trade Center twin towers. That they cling to this absurd hallucination is the triumph of hope over experience.

There is a deep loathing among the public for these elitist Ivy League architects of American imperialism. Imperialism was tolerated when it was able to project power abroad and produce rising living standards at home. It was tolerated when it restrained itself to covert interventions in countries such as Iran, Guatemala, and Indonesia. It went off the rails in Vietnam. The military defeats that followed accompanied a steady decline in living standards, wage stagnation, a crumbling infrastructure and eventually a series of economic policies and trade deals, orchestrated by the same ruling class, which deindustrialized and impoverished the country.

The establishment oligarchs, now united in the Democratic Party, distrust Donald Trump. He commits the heresy of questioning the sanctity of the American empire. Trump derided the invasion of Iraq as a “big, fat mistake.” He promised “to keep us out of endless war.” Trump was repeatedly questioned about his relationship with Vladimir Putin. Putin was “a killer,” one interviewer told him. “There are a lot of killers,” Trump retorted. “You think our country’s so innocent?” Trump dared to speak a truth that was to be forever unspoken, the militarists had sold out the American people.

Noam Chomsky took some heat for pointing out, correctly, that Trump is the “one statesman” who has laid out a “sensible” proposition to resolve the Russia-Ukraine crisis. The proposed solution included “facilitating negotiations instead of undermining them and moving toward establishing some kind of accommodation in Europe…in which there are no military alliances but just mutual accommodation.”

Trump is too unfocused and mercurial to offer serious policy solutions. He did set a timetable to withdraw from Afghanistan, but he also ratcheted up the economic war against Venezuela and reinstituted crushing sanctions against Cuba and Iran, which the Obama administration had ended. He increased the military budget. He apparently flirted with carrying out a missile strike on Mexico to “destroy the drug labs.” But he acknowledges a distaste for imperial mismanagement that resonates with the public, one that has every right to loath the smug mandarins that plunge us into one war after another. Trump lies like he breathes. But so do they.

The 57 Republicans who refused to support the $40 billion aid package to Ukraine, along with many of the 19 bills that included an earlier $13.6 billion in aid for Ukraine, come out of the kooky conspiratorial world of Trump. They, like Trump, repeat this heresy. They too are attacked and censored. But the longer Biden and the ruling class continue to pour resources into war at our expense, the more these proto fascists, already set to wipe out Democratic gains in the House and the Senate this fall, will be ascendant. Marjorie Taylor Greene, during the debate on the aid package to Ukraine, which most members were not given time to closely examine, said: “$40 billion dollars but there’s no baby formula for American mothers and babies.”

“An unknown amount of money to the CIA and Ukraine supplemental bill but there’s no formula for American babies,” she added. “Stop funding regime change and money laundering scams. A US politician covers up their crimes in countries like Ukraine.”

Democrat Jamie Raskin immediately attacked Greene for parroting the propaganda of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Greene, like Trump, spoke a truth that resonates with a beleaguered public. The opposition to permanent war should have come from the tiny progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which unfortunately sold out to the craven Democratic Party leadership to save their political careers. Greene is demented, but Raskin and the Democrats peddle their own brand of lunacy. We are going to pay a very steep price for this burlesque.