Category Archives: Capitalism in Decay

WATCH: Whitney Webb Dissects the Wellcome Leap into Transhumanism

Whitney Webb of UnlimitedHangout.com joins James to discuss her latest article, “A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction.”

Even if you’re familiar with the transhumanist agenda, what the ex-DARPA, ex-Silicon Valley old hands at the newly created Welcome Leap are planning to do in their quest to transform the human species in the coming decade will blow your mind.

Just in case you needed a reminder of the state of the internet these days – this video was uploaded to YouTube and then removed only a few hours later. If you make video content, or know anyone who does, remind them to have a back-up channel on an independent platform.

Links, sources – plus download options and an audio-only version – are available here.

Joe Biden’s Green Energy Mirage

Authored by Craig Rucker via RealClearEnergy.com,

President Biden recently announced ambitious plans to install huge offshore industrial wind facilities along America’s Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico and Pacific coasts. His goal is to churn out 30 gigawatts (30,000 megawatts) of wind capacity by 2030, ensuring the U.S. “leads by example” in fighting the “climate crisis.”

Granted “30 by 2030” is clever PR. But what are the realities?

The only existing U.S. offshore wind operation features five 6-MW turbines off Rhode Island. Their combined capacity (what they could generate if they worked full-bore, round the clock 24/7) is 30 MW. Mr. Biden is planning 1,000 times more offshore electricity, perhaps split three ways: 10,000 MW for each coast.

While that might sound impressive, it isn’t. It means total wind capacity for the entire Atlantic coast, under Biden’s plan, would only meet three-fourths of the peak summertime electricity needed to power New York City. Again, this assumes the blades are fully spinning 24/7. In reality, such turbines would be lucky to be operating a top capacity half the time. Even less as storms and salt spray corrode the turbines, year after year.

The reason why is there is often minimal or no wind in the Atlantic – especially on the hottest days. Ditto for the Gulf of Mexico. No wind means no electricity – right when you need it most.

Of course, too little wind isn’t the only issue. Other times, there’s too much wind – as when a hurricane roars up the coast. That’s more likely in the Gulf of Mexico. But the Great Atlantic Hurricane of 1944 had Category 4 winds in Virginia, Category 3 intensity off Cape Hatteras (NC), Long Island and Rhode Island, and Category 2 when it reached Maine. It sank four U.S. Navy and Coast Guard ships.

When storms or hurricanes hit, turbines can be destroyed. Repairing or replacing hundreds of offshore turbines could take years.

If the White House is planning to generate all that power using common 6-MW turbines, our coastlines would need a hefty 5,000 of the 600-foot tall monsters dotting them. The Washington Monument is 655 feet tall.

Going instead with 12-MW turbines, like the 850-foot-tall GE Haliade-X turbines Virginia is planning to install off its coast, America would still need 2,500 of the behemoths – just to complete Phase One of Biden’s plan. 30,000 megawatts by 2030. Even if these were all plopped in the Atlantic, it still would not be enough to meet New York State’s current electricity needs.

And what about the environment?

How many millions of tons of steel, copper, lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, concrete, petroleum-based composites (for turbine blades) and other raw materials would be required to manufacture and install the turbines and undersea electrical cables, especially where deep-water turbines are involved?

How many billions of tons of ore would have to be mined, crushed, processed and refined – considering that it takes 125,000 tons of average ore for every 1,000 tons of pure copper metal?

Not only would nearly all of this mining and manufacturing require fossil fuels, but much of it would be done in China, or in other countries by Chinese-owned companies. Haliade-X turbines are also manufactured in China. And much of the mining and processing is done under horrid workplace safety and environmental conditions, often with near-slave and child labor.

More turbines will also kill countless birds and bats. Turbine infrasound and other noise have been implicated in disorienting and stranding whales and dolphins. The numbers, height and low-frequency turbine noise also interferes with surface ships, submarines, aircraft and radar.

Nuclear power or billions of batteries (or retained fossil fuel power plants) will have to back up every megawatt of intermittent, unreliable wind power, so that society can function every time the wind fails. That means more raw materials, transmission lines and costs.

Even with massive taxpayer subsidies, electricity generated by offshore turbines will cost many times what we are paying today, even in New York and California. That will have especially heavy impacts on energy-intensive industries, hospitals, and poor, middle-class, minority and fixed-income families.

Economic, environmental and climate justice reviews must fully, carefully and honestly assess every one of these factors. No “expedited” or “climate emergency” shortcuts should be permitted.

President Biden likes to say offshore wind energy is clean, green, renewable and sustainable. Wind itself certainly is. But harnessing the wind (or sun), to meet the needs of modern civilization is not – especially in ocean environments.

Claiming otherwise is a mirage – a scam. Maybe that’s why the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management already canceled two wind projects off Long Island. The costs and impacts are enormous, and local opposition was high. Do climate activists in and out of the Biden Administration expect otherwise anywhere else?

The U.S. Will Print $7 TRILLION in the Next 24 Months

Phoenix Capital Research's PhotoBY PHOENIX CAPITAL RESEARCH

And the horrifying inflationary data points keep coming!

Over the last few weeks, we’ve outlined the following:

1. If you add up all of the money the U.S. has ever printed… over 40% of it was printed in 2020 alone.

2. In three months in 2020, the U.S. increased its deficit by more than it had during the past five recessions combined (’73, ’75, ’82, early ‘90s and Great Financial Crisis).

3. Under Jerome Powell, the Fed bought more Treasuries in SIX WEEKS than it did in 10 years under Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen.

4. Agricultural commodities prices are up nearly 40% since August.

5. The Commodity Research Bureau’s Index is up 75% since April.

These items alone are horrifying… and unfortunately for the world, there are a slew of new ones to add to the list.

  • Copper traded over $8,900 per tonne last week, hitting a 10-year high.
  • That same week, Nickel traded a $18,534 per tonne, a six-year high.
  • Lumber cleared $1,000 per 1,000 board feet, for the first time in history.

Best of all… the Fed claims that there are no signs of inflation!

Last week NY Fed President John Williams told CNBC that rising prices are due to “optimism” about the growing economy. He also claimed that inflation expectations are rising but that he sees no evidence that asset prices are “out of control.”

So the financial system is SCREAMING that inflation is already running hot, and the Fed is asleep at the wheel.

It’s only going to get worse.

As I keep stating, once inflation appears in the financial system, the only thing that can stop it is if the Fed begins to tighten monetary conditions much as Paul Volcker did in the late ’70s early ’80s.

Well, the Fed continues to print $120+ billion every single month… and has announced it won’t raise rates for another TWO YEARS!

Two years… as in 2022 to 2023.

Put another way, the Fed is going to be printing another $2.8 trillion ($1.4 trillion per year for two years) going forward. Between this and the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion stimulus program, $2 trillion infrastructure program, and $1.7 trillion climate change program, we’re talking about ~$7 TRILLION being printed in the next two years’ time.

$7 trillion… an amount equal to 33% of US GDP.

The coming inflation is going to ANNIHILATE most investors’ portfolios.

Those who are properly prepared. however, will make literal fortunes.

The coming inflation is going to ANNIHILATE most investors’ portfolios.

On that note, we just published a Special Investment Report concerning FIVE secret investments you can use to make inflation pay you as it rips through the financial system in the months ahead.

The report is titled Survive the Inflationary Storm. And it explains in very simply terms how to make inflation PAY YOU.

Today is the last day this report will be available to the public. We extended the deadline based on the weekend run in commodities, but this is it… no more extensions.

To pick up yours, swing by:

https://phoenixcapitalmarketing.com/inflationstorm.html

Best Regards

Graham Summers

Chief Market Strategist

Phoenix Capital Research

At What Point Do We Realize Bill Gates Is Dangerously Insane?

MacAoidh Source: The Hayride

This isn’t an overreaction to Gates’ latest foray into the news cycle. It’s an observation based on a long pattern of statements and behavior by the founder of Microsoft and one of the richest men who has ever lived which, were any of us normal people guilty of them, would result in our being institutionalized.

Bill Gates is crazy. And he’s dangerous, because he’s willing to put untold sums of money toward making the insane things he believes a reality – and all of those insane things hurt people.

The most recent idiocy? Impossible Burgers for all the white people.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates recently stated that he believes “rich countries,” such as the United States and western Europe, should switch to eating 100 percent synthetic beef.

In a recent interview with the MIT Technology Review, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates discussed his environmental impact efforts and various green initiatives aimed at reducing global carbon emissions. One suggestion Gates proposed was for wealthy and developed nations to move entirely to synthetic beef in efforts to reduce the carbon emissions from livestock.

Explaining the suggestion, Gates told the MIT Tech Review:

For Africa and other poor countries, we’ll have to use animal genetics to dramatically raise the amount of beef per emissions for them. Weirdly, the US livestock, because they’re so productive, the emissions per pound of beef are dramatically less than emissions per pound in Africa. And as part of the [Bill and Melinda Gates] Foundation’s work, we’re taking the benefit of the African livestock, which means they can survive in heat, and crossing in the monstrous productivity both on the meat side and the milk side of the elite US beef lines.

So no, I don’t think the poorest 80 countries will be eating synthetic meat. I do think all rich countries should move to 100% synthetic beef. You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time. Eventually, that green premium is modest enough that you can sort of change the [behavior of] people or use regulation to totally shift the demand.

So for meat in the middle-income-and-above countries, I do think it’s possible. But it’s one of those ones where, wow, you have to track it every year and see, and the politics [are challenging]. There are all these bills that say it’s got to be called, basically, lab garbage to be sold. They don’t want us to use the beef label.

This isn’t even the scariest idea-biscuit Gates has floated. Remember this?

It sounds like a wacky idea out of science-fiction – but it’s funded in part by billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates and backed by top scientists at Harvard University.

The researchers believe that a fleet of specially-designed aircraft could spray sulfate particles into the lower stratosphere to cool down our planet and offset the effects of climate change.

A test of the technology has been proposed for this year, the Daily Mail reports, with the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx) seeing a bag of carbonate dust released into the atmosphere 12 miles up.

If that experiment proves successful, the researchers will move on to releasing the dust from planes.

The researchers suggest that jets flying 12 miles up would complete over 60,000 missions in 15 years, starting with a fleet of eight and moving up to 100 planes.

As bad as denying people in First World countries access to beef might be (and putting a massive industry employing more than half a million people out of business), creating an artificial Nuclear Winter is even worse.

More people freeze to death in extreme cold weather than die of heat-related causes when it’s hot, you know.

And then there’s the population control piece, which the Left – many if not most of whom operate on a Malthusian principle and don’t actually disagree with Gates – denies he’s for.

How you deny this is a question…

We’re not going to get into the vaccine stuff, much of which is the product of Alex Jones-style conspiracy theories every bit as crazy as Gates is. There’s a lot out there, though, and not all of it is good. Gates’ influence with public health bureaucrats like Anthony Fauci, who he has clearly bought off, is something of a concern. He’s an unelected software developer with no medical training; nothing about him suggests he’s qualified to make public policy on healthcare for an entire planet, no matter how heavily he wants to buy his way in.

What this comes down to, though, is that Bill Gates has been so rich for so long that he’s spent the bulk of his adult life without anyone telling him he’s wrong. That has the same corrosive effect on character and sanity that you see in the case of kings and dictators. People want some of Bill Gates’ money, so they constantly suck up to him and tell him his ideas are great even when they’re atrocious, and the guardrails normal people live between don’t exist in his case.

So he throws money around at insane things. That he isn’t outwardly off his rocker like Howard Hughes was is small comfort; Hughes mostly kept to himself in that hotel suite in Las Vegas as he descended into madness. Gates is everywhere.

Gates said that he modeled his charitable foundation after the one the Rockefeller family founded. But the Rockefellers took decades to become obsessed with globalist-utopian causes; Gates fell out of the philanthropic womb that way.

It’s a problem. There needs to be some limiting principle governing this man’s excesses. But where that will come from is a good question. When he’s openly discussing destroying an industry that directly employs a half-million Americans for the purposes of “climate change” (formerly known as global warming, until it couldn’t be denied that there was no statistically significant warming going on) when we’re in the middle of the worst cold snap much of the country has seen in decades, finding ways to check this increasingly nutty bull in a china shop begins to become an urgent necessity.

Perhaps it’s time to start taxing charitable foundations which engage in public policy-related activities. That could easily devolve into a mess, but the alternative could be that we increasingly have to live under the cracked worldview of out-of-touch billionaires like Bill Gates.

Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill

Steve Watson

"Gates has a Napoleonic concept of himself."

See full article here: Bill Gates and Neo-Feudalism: A Closer Look at Farmer Bill

Lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., son of Robert F. Kennedy and the nephew of former U.S. president John F. Kennedy, has penned a comprehensive account of Bill Gates’ attempt to monopolize and dominate global food production, labelling it “a dark form of philanthro-capitalism based on biopiracy and corporate biopiracy.”

Kennedy warns that “To cloak his dystopian plans for humanity in benign intentions, Gates has expropriated the rhetoric of “sustainability,” “biodiversity,” “good stewardship” and “climate.””

Kennedy continues, “These causes are all grim realities that pose existential threats to our children and require urgent attention. However, Gates’ record exposes his benevolent intentions as masquerades for his agenda to maximize personal profit and control.”

Writing for his Children’s Health Defense group, Kennedy notes that “It’s baffling to me how so many of my friends in the environmental movement have swallowed Gates’ chicanery.”

The article contains a raft of links documenting Gates’ “long-term strategy of mastery over agriculture and food production globally”.

Throughout the essay, Kennedy notes how Gates has:

Kennedy notes that just as with Gates’ vaccination programs in Africa, “there was neither internal evaluation nor public accountability.”

Kennedy also notes that Gates’ power grab doesn’t end with food production. He has sought to dominate in the areas of public health, privatizing prisons, online education and global communications while promoting digital currencies, high tech surveillance, data harvesting systems and artificial  intelligence. The piece is an extraordinary takedown of Gates, who Kennedy charges has “learned to fatten himself on global crises, whether it’s pandemics, climate, famine or mass extinction.”

In partnering with companies like Monsanto and pushing GMOs, Kennedy charges that Gates is engaging in “Chemical warfare on human health.”

The piece also notes how Gates has pushed ‘faux’ global governmental agencies that he himself created “to push his diabolical chemical, medical and food concoctions,” including insect protein.

“Following Gates’ lead, GAVI is optimistic that bugs will soon be an important food supplement for impoverished and undernourished children,” Kennedy writes.

Kennedy also covers the elite push for a ‘great reset’ “to impose authoritarian controls, pervasive surveillance, oppressive new economic models and one-world government on a beleaguered, terrified and compliant humanity.”

The article is a must read to understand how deeply embedded Bill Gates’ tentacles are in the control structures of the globe, and how every policy and program he is pushing is fundamentally anti-human.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been exposing this anti-human, anti-Earth agenda for some time, which is why he is relentlessly attacked and smeared by elite ‘think tanks’ and globalist organizations.

Calls for Kennedy to be cancelled and erased are sure to increase after this latest important salvo against Gates and his minions.

State and State-Connected Funding of Google and Facebook – Excerpt

Authored by Michael Rectenwald via The Mises Institute

First, both Google and Facebook received start-up capital—both directly and indirectly—from US intelligence agencies. In the case of Facebook, the start-up capital came through Palantir, Accel Partners, and Greylock Partners. These funding sources either received their funding from, or were heavily involved in, In-Q-Tel.

In 1999, CIA created In-Q-Tel, its own private sector venture capital investment firm, to fund promising start-ups that might create technologies useful for intelligence agencies. As St. Paul Research analyst Jody Chudley notes, “In-Q-Tel funded Thiel’s startup firm Palantir somewhere around 2004. In 2004, Accel partner James Breyer sat on the board of directors of military defense contractor BBN with In-Q-Tel’s CEO Gilman Louie. Howard Cox, the head of Greylock, served directly on In-Q-Tel’s board of directors.”

In the case of Google, as independent journalist and former VICE reporter Nafeez Ahmed has detailed at great length, Google’s connections with the intelligence community and military run deep. Ahmed details that relationships with DARPA officials yielded start-up funding, and direct funding from the intelligence community (IC) followed. The IC saw in the internet unprecedent potential for data collection and the upstart search engine venture represented a key to gathering it.

In 2003, Google began customizing its search engine under special contract with CIA for its Intelink Management Office, “overseeing top-secret, secret and sensitive but unclassified intranets for CIA and other IC agencies,” according to Homeland Security Today. In 2004, Google purchased Keyhole, which was initially funded by In-Q-Tel. Using Keyhole, Google began developing Google Earth.

Intelligence agency backers also included In-Q-Tel itself. In-Q-Tel’s investment in Google came to light in 2005, when In-Q-Tel sold its $2.2 million in Google stocks. A no-bid contract with the NSA sister agency, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), followed in 2010. Google’s connections with the IC and military communities also involved personnel exchanges, including the acquisition of the former head of DARPA and Highland’s Forum cochair, Regina Dugan, who left the agency in 2012 to become a senior Google executive overseeing the company’s new Advanced Technology and Projects Group.

“From its inception, in other words,” Ahmed writes,

Google was incubated, nurtured and financed by interests that were directly affiliated or closely aligned with the US military intelligence community, many of whom were embedded in the Pentagon Highlands Forum.

Second, and lest I be accused of the genetic fallacy, it should be noted that Google technologies were developed largely in connection with the IC and military and thus bear the earmarks of IC and military interests. And Google’s contracts with the IC have continued. Moreover, these platforms and social media outfits fully cooperate with the IC and military, handing over data to the NSA upon demand and granting them backdoor access to user data. Google was a deep-state asset from its inception and remains one to this day.

Furthermore, it is possible that tools developed by the IC and military have been acquired by private contractors and are being used by these platforms and social media giants to influence the behavior of users of their services. In particular, former IC contractor Patrick Bercy alleges that social media psychological warfare tools that he developed for the Defense Department were acquired, possibly illegally, by General James Jones, formerly the National Security Adviser under then president Obama. In partnership with the Atlantic Council, where Jones is now the executive chairman emeritus, Facebook, Bercy alleges, is using social media psychological warfare tools, supposedly for the purposes of “restoring election integrity worldwide,” and “to combat election-related propaganda and misinformation from proliferating on its service.” It just may be that what is deemed “fake news” by Google and social media platforms represents the truth about the fake news that the platforms themselves are proliferating.

In short, Google, Facebook and others are not strictly private sector entities; they are governmentalities in the sense that I have given to the term. They are extensions and apparatuses of the state. Furthermore, these platforms are governmentalities with a particular interest in the growth and extension of governmentality itself. This includes championing every kind of “subordinated” and newly created identity class that they can find or create, because such “endangered” categories require state acknowledgement and protection. Thus, the state’s circumference continues to expand. Big Digital is partial to the interests and growth of the state. It not only does business with statists but also shares their values. This helps makes sense of its leftist bent and their preference for the deep state Democrats. Leftism is statism.

If Biden wins, Russiagate will magically morph into Chinagate

© Global Look Press/Bao Dandan/Xinhua

By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

Just like Democrats and the liberal media peddled Russiagate against Donald Trump, Biden is now the target of a budding Chinagate – the conservatives and Trumpists eager to adopt their foes’ shrillness and disregard for facts.

Ohhh god. It’s happening again.

The same exact low rumble, slowly rising toward the same fever-pitch crescendo. First you get a few unexpected comments showing up in your notifications, then a few more, then a lot more, then a whole lot more. It’s one news story, then it’s 10, then it’s 100, then it’s completely dominating half of US political discourse.

The increasingly shrill shrieking from rightists about China having leverage over Joe Biden is alarmingly similar to what I experienced from liberals at this exact point in time in 2016 about Russia having leverage over Donald Trump. When I point out these similarities, I always get a bunch of Trumpists telling me that their CIA-friendly conspiracy theory about a US-targeted Asiatic nation having leverage over a presidential candidate in the form of blackmail and financial ties is completely different from the liberal CIA-friendly conspiracy theory about a US-targeted Asiatic nation having leverage over a presidential candidate in the form of blackmail and financial ties, but it’s the same. It’s exactly the same.

And it’s being directed in remarkably similar ways.

It started to pick up steam a week-and-a-half ago when the New York Post published a follow-up to its notorious Burisma emails publication purporting to show corrupt and nepotistic dealings between Hunter Biden and China’s largest private energy company which also involved Joe Biden at some level. Then last week a business associate of the younger Biden named Tony Bobulinski told the press that he had discussed deals with Chinese business entities with both Bidens.

These dealings would be inappropriate if true, and in a government that isn’t unfathomably corrupt like Washington they might even be remarkable. What they absolutely are not is evidence that Joe Biden is controlled in some way by the Chinese government.

Yet the notion that Biden may be owned by Beijing is being amplified and promoted by rightists like Nigel Farage and CIA applicant Tucker Carlson. It’s no more indicative of covert loyalties to a foreign government than the Gish gallop of weak arguments presented for the theories of Trump’s loyalty to Moscow, which after years of investigation and sweeping subpoena powers failed to see a single American indicted for conspiracy with the Russian government. Yet right-wing pundits are pushing this baseless claim with the same fervor we saw liberals beginning to push Russia conspiracy theories at this point in 2016, and their followers are showing up in my mentions telling me I’m a CCP agent for expressing skepticism.

We have been here before.

If Biden is elected we can expect to see these claims get louder and more shrill, surpassing the force with which Republicans pushed Benghazi many times over. It will dominate political discourse in the same way Russiagate has, and anyone expressing skepticism on social media that a virulent China hawk is actually a Chinese asset will be labeled a CCP propagandist by Trumpists.

We can expect this to create political pressure on the Biden administration to escalate Cold War aggression against Beijing, which Biden will happily do since, again, he is a virulent China hawk. We can expect Republicans to ignore those escalations and keep claiming Biden is suspiciously soft on China, while Democrats don’t object to them because he’s their president and they want him to show that he’s not a Chinese asset.

How do I know that last bit will happen? Because it’s exactly what happened with Russiagate.

And of course neither Democrats nor liberal media platforms will have a moral leg to stand on to protest against these fact-free conspiracy theories, since they just spent four years doing the exact same thing. They chose to enter into a battle of conspiracy theories and McCarthyism with the Republican Party, which is a bit like challenging Tyson Fury to a boxing match. Russiagate will magically morph into Chinagate, and hysterical McCarthyite Sinophobe Tucker Carlson will become the new Rachel Maddow.

And of course the only winners of this nonsense will be the spies and Cold Warriors who are driving it all from behind the scenes. It started out with the contents of a laptop getting to the New York Post under very suspicious circumstances which nobody really believes the official story of, and it’s going to end up advancing the neoconservative goal of unipolar global hegemony. They got their new cold war against one half of the Russia-China tandem, and now they’re getting it against the other half.

To quote author and analyst Michael Parenti:

“The PNAC plan envisions a strategic confrontation with China, and a still greater permanent military presence in every corner of the world. The objective is not just power for its own sake but power to control the world’s natural resources and markets, power to privatize and deregulate the economies of every nation in the world, and power to hoist upon the backs of peoples everywhere-including North America-the blessings of an untrammeled global ‘free market.’ The end goal is to ensure not merely the supremacy of global capitalism as such, but the supremacy of American global capitalism by preventing the emergence of any other potentially competing superpower.”

PNAC is of course the Project for the New American Century, the highly influential neoconservative think tank whose insane ideology of preserving US-centralized planetary dominance at all cost rose to real power with the paradigm-shifting George W. Bush administration. Their ideology never went away, it just gradually became the mainstream orthodoxy and is now seldom seriously questioned in mainstream circles.

The goal of stopping the rise of China has been in the works for many years, and Joe Biden was part of the administration whose “pivot” laid a major part of the groundwork for that agenda. Yet fact and narrative are so loosely related that no amount of evidence will dissuade the allegation that he is secretly a puppet of Xi Jinping, no matter how many economic sanctions and nuclear escalations he rolls out as president.

I was so looking forward to Russiagate being over and done with if Trump gets out, but it looks like I’m going to wind up accused of shilling for Biden and of being a secret CCP agent just like I’ve been accused of shilling for Trump and being a Kremlin agent for the last four years as I yell over and over again that the Cold Warriors are recycling the exact same goddamn script.

Oh well. Russian agent to Chinese agent. I guess it’s good to change things up with a new career move now and then.

What ‘The Great Reset’ Architects Don’t Want You To Understand About Economics

Authored by Matthew Ehret,

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the Vice President of the World Bank Carmen Reinhardt recently warned on October 15 that a new financial disaster looms ominously over the horizon with a vast sovereign default and a corporate debt default. Just in the past 6 months of bailouts unleashed by the blowout of the system induced by the Coronavirus lockdown, Reinhardt noted that the U.S. Federal Reserve created $3.4 Trillion out of thin air while it took 40 years to create $14 Trillion. Meanwhile panicking economists are screaming in tandem that banks across Trans Atlantic must unleash ever more hyperinflationary quantitative easing which threatens to turn our money into toilet paper while at the same time acquiescing to infinite lockdowns in response to a disease which has the fatality levels of a common flu.

The fact of the oncoming collapse itself should not be a surprise- especially when one is reminded of the $1.5 quadrillion of derivatives which has taken over a world economy which generates a mere $80 trillion/year in measurable goods and trade. These nebulous bets on insurance on bets on collateralized debts known as derivatives didn’t even exist a few decades ago, and the fact is that no matter what the Federal Reserve and European Central Bank have attempted to do to stop a new rupture of this overextended casino bubble of an economy in recent months, nothing has worked. Zero to negative percent interest rates haven’t worked, opening overnight repo loans of $100 billion/night to failing banks hasn’t worked- nor has $4.5 trillion of bailout unleashed since March 2020. No matter what these financial wizards try to do, things just keep getting worse. Rather than acknowledge what is actually happening, scapegoats have been selected to shift the blame away from reality to the point that the current crisis is actually being blamed on the Coronavirus!

This Goes Far Beyond COVID-19

Let me just state outright: That while the coronavirus may in fact be the catalyzer for the oncoming financial blowout, it is the height of stupidity to believe that it is the cause, as the seeds of the crisis goes deeper and originated much earlier than most people are prepared to admit.

To start getting at a more truthful diagnostic, it is useful to think of an economy in real (vs purely financial) terms – That is: Simply think of the economy as total system in which the body of humanity (all cultures, nations and families of the world) exist.

This co-existence is predicated on certain necessary powers of production of food, clothing, capital goods (hard and soft infrastructure), transportation and energy production. After raw materials are transformed into finished goods, these physical goods and services move from points A to B and are consumed. This is very much akin to the metabolism that maintains a living body.

Now since populations tend to grow geometrically, while resources deplete arithmetically, constant demands on new creative discoveries and technological application are also needed to meet and improve upon the needs of a growing humanity. This last factor is actually the most important because it touches on the principled element that distinguishes humanity from all other forms of life in the ecosystem which Lincoln identified wonderfully in his 1859 Discoveries and Inventions Speech:

“All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner. The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various “leads” from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny… Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions.”

In a 2016 speech by President Xi Jinping, the principles of Lincoln’s understanding were laid out by the Chinese statesman who said:

“We must consider innovation as the primary driving force of growth and the core in this whole undertaking, and human resources as the primary source to support development. We should promote innovation in theory, systems, science and technology, and culture, and make innovation the dominant theme in the work of the Party, and government, and everyday activity in society… In the 16th century, human society entered an unprecedented period of active innovation. Achievements in scientific innovation over the past five centuries have exceeded the sum total of several previous millennia. . . . Each and every scientific and industrial revolution has profoundly changed the outlook and pattern of world development… Since the second Industrial Revolution, the U.S. has maintained global hegemony because it has always been the leader and the largest beneficiary of scientific and industrial progress.”

What Lincoln and Xi laid 150 years apart are not mere hypotheses, but elementary facts of life which even the most ardent money-worshipper cannot get around.

Of course money is a perfectly useful tool to facilitate trade and get around the awkward problem of lugging bartered goods around on your back all day, but it really is just that: a supporting element to a physical process of maintenance and improvement of trans-generational existence. When fools allow themselves to loose sight of that fact and elevate money to the status of a cause of all value (simply because everyone wants it), then we find ourselves far outside the sphere of reality and in the Alice in Wonderland world of Alan Greenspan’s fantasy world where up is down, good is evil, and humans are little more than vicious monkeys.

So with that in mind, let’s take this concept and look back upon today’s crisis.

London’s ‘Big Bang’

The great “liberalization” of world commerce began with a series of waves through the 1970s, and moved into high gear with the interest rate hikes of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in 1980-82, the effects of which both annihilated much of the small and medium sized entrepreneurs, opened the speculative gates into the “Savings and Loan” debacle and also helped cartelize mineral, food, and financial institutions into ever greater behemoths. Volcker himself described this process as the “controlled disintegration of the US economy” upon becoming Fed Chairman in 1978. The raising of interest rates to 20-21% not only shut down the life blood of much of the US economic base, but also threw the third world into greater debt slavery, as nations now had to pay usurious interest on US loans.

In 1986, the City of London announced the beginning of a new era of economic irrationalism with Margaret Thatcher’s “Big Bang” deregulation. This wave of liberalization took the world by storm as it swept aside the separation of commercial, deposit and investment banking which had been the post-world war cornerstone in ensuring that the will of private finance would never again hold more sway than the power of sovereign nation-states. For those who are confused about London’s guiding hand in this process, I encourage you to read Cynthia Chung’s impeccable essay “Sugar and Spice, and Everything Vice: The Empire’s Sin City of London”.

Greenspan and the Controlled Disintegration of the Economy

When Alan Greenspan confronted the financial crisis of October1987, markets had collapsed by 28.5% and the American economy was already suffering from a decay begun 16 years earlier when the dollar was removed from the fixed exchange rate and was “floated” into a world of speculation. This departure from the 1938-1971 Industrial growth model ushered in a new paradigm of “post-industrialism” (aka: nation stripping) under the new logic of “globalization”. This foolish decision was celebrated as the consumer-driven, “white collar society” which would no longer worry about “intangible things” like “the future”, infrastructure maintenance, or “growth”. Under this new paradigm, if something couldn’t generate a monetary profit within 3 years, it wasn’t worth doing.

Paul Volcker (Greenspan’s predecessor at the Federal Reserve) exemplified this detachment from reality when he called for the “controlled disintegration of society” in 1977, and acted accordingly by keeping interest rates above 20% for two years which destroyed small and medium agro-industrial enterprises across America (and the world). Greenspan confronted the 1987 crisis with all the gusto of a black magician, and rather than re-connect the economy to physical reality and rebuild the decaying industrial base, he chose instead to normalize “creative financial instruments” in the form of derivatives (aka: “creative financial instruments”), which quickly grew from several billion in 1988 to $2 trillion in 1992 to $70 trillion in 1999.

“Creative financial instruments” was the Orwellian name given to the new financial asset popularized by Greenspan, but otherwise known as “derivatives”. New supercomputing technologies were increasingly used in this new venture, not as the support for higher nation building practices, and space exploration programs as their NASA origins intended, but would rather become perverted to accommodate the creation of new complex formulas which could associate values to price differentials on securities and insured debts that could then be “hedged” on those very spot and futures markets made possible via the destruction of the Bretton Woods system in 1971. So while an exponentially self-generating monster was created that could end nowhere but in a meltdown, “market confidence” rallied back in force with the new flux of easy money. The physical potential to sustain human life continued to plummet.

NAFTA, the Euro and the End of History

It is no coincidence that within this period, another deadly treaty was passed called the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). With this Agreement made law, protective programs that had kept North American factories in the U.S and Canada were struck down, allowing for the export of the lifeblood of highly skilled industrial workforce to Mexico where skills were low, technologies lower, and salaries lower still. With a stripping of its productive assets, North America became increasingly reliant on exporting cheap resources and services for its means of existence. Again, the physically productive powers of society would collapse, yet monetary profits in the ephemeral “now” would skyrocket. This was replicated in Europe with the creation of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 establishing the Euro by 1994 while the “liberalization” process of Perestroika replicated this agenda in the former Soviet Union. While some personalities gave this agenda the name “End of History” and others “the New World Order”, the effect was the same.

Universal Banking, NAFTA, Euro integration and the creation of the derivative economy in a space of just several years would induce a cartelization of finance through newly legalized mergers and acquisitions at a rate never before seen. The multitude of financial institutions that had existed in the early 1980s were absorbed into each other at great speed through the 1990s in true “survival of the fittest” fashion. No matter what level of regulation were attempted under this new structure, the degree of conflict of interest, and private political power was uncontrollable, as evidenced in the United States, by the shutdown of any attempt by Securities and Exchange Commission head Brooksley Born to fight the derivative cancer at its early stages.

When Bill Clinton repealed Glass-Steagall bank separation of commercial and investment banks as his last act in office in 1999, speculators had un-bounded access to savings and pensions which they used with relish and went to town gambling with other people’s money. This new bubble continued for a few more years until the $700 trillion derivatives time bomb found a new trigger and the subprime mortgage market nearly burned the system down. Just like in 1987, and the collapse of the Y2K bubble in 2001, the Mammon worshipping wizards in the ECB and Fed solved this crisis by creating a new system of “bailout” which continued for another decade.

The 2000-2008 Frenzy

With Glass-Steagall now removed, legitimate capital such as pension funds could be used to start a hedge to end all hedges. Billions were now poured into mortgage-backed securities (MBS), a market which had been artificially plunged to record-breaking interest rate lows of 1-2% for over a year by the US Federal Reserve making borrowing easy, and the returns on the investments into the MBSs obscene. The obscenity swelled as the values of the houses skyrocketed far beyond the real values to the tune of one hundred thousand dollar homes selling for 5-6 times that price within the span of several years. As long as no one assumed this growth was ab-normal, and the un-payable nature of the capital underlying the leveraged assets locked up in the now infamous “sub-primes” and other illegitimate debt obligations was ignored, then profits were supposed to just continue infinitely. Anyone who questioned this logic was considered a heretic by the latter-day priesthood.

The stunning “success” of securitizing housing debts immediately induced a wave of sovereign wealth funds to come into prominence applying the same model that had been used in the case of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and collateralized debt obligations (CDO) to the debts of entire nations. The securitizing of bundled packages of sovereign debts that could then be infinitely leveraged on the de-regulated world markets would no longer be considered an act of national treason, but the key to easy money.

The Ugly Truth of Today’s Crisis

New “sub-prime” bubbles have been created in the Corporate Debt sector which has risen to over $13.8 trillion (up 16% from the year earlier). A quarter of which is considered junk, and another half graded at BB by Moodies (a step above junk).

Household debt, student and auto debt has skyrocketed and since wages have not kept up with inflation causing even more unpayable debts have been incurred in desperation. Industrial jobs have collapsed consistently since 1971, and low paying service jobs have taken over like a plague.

The last report from the American Society of Civil Engineers concluded that America desperately needs to spend $4.5 trillion just to bring its decayed infrastructure up to safety levels. Roads, bridges, rail, dams, airports, schools all received near failing grades with the average age of Dams clocking in at 56 years, and many water pipes over 100 years old, and transmission/distribution lines are well over 60 years. The factories which once supplied those infrastructure needs are long outsourced, and much of the productive workforce that had that living knowledge to build a nation are retired or dead leaving a deadly generation knowledge gap in its place filled with millennials who never knew what a productive economy looked like.

American farmers have probably been the most devastated in all this with dramatic population losses across the entire farm belt of America and the average age of farmers now 60 years. It was recently reported that 82% of U.S. Agricultural family income comes from off farms, as mega cartels have taken over all aspects of farming (from equipment/supplies, packaging and the even the actual farming in between).

Combined with the controlled destruction of global food supplies internationally, COVID has ensured that strategic food chain supplies are being ripped to shreds with the UN reporting the worst food crisis in over 50 years (and that is not accounting for the oncoming blowout of the bubble economy).

Why was this permitted to happen? Well besides the obvious intention to induce “a controlled disintegration of the economy” as Volcker so coldly stated, the idea was always to create the conditions described by the late Maurice Strong (sociopath and Rothschild cut-out extraordinaire) in 1992 when he rhetorically asked:

“What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

How do we get back to health?

Like any addict who wakes up one morning at rock bottom with the sudden terror that his death is nigh, the first step is admitting we have a problem. This means simply: acknowledging the true nature of the current economic calamity instead of trying to blame “coronavirus” or China, or some other scapegoat.

The next step is begin to act on reality instead of continuing to take heroine (a fine metaphor for the addiction to derivatives speculation).

An obvious first step to this recovery involves restoring Glass-Steagall in order to 1) break up the Too Big to Fail banks and 2) impose a standard of judging “false” value from “legitimate” value which is currently absent from the modern psycho that lost all sense of needs vs wants. This would allow nations to re-create a purge of the unpayable fictitious debt and other claims from the system while preserving whatever is tied to the real economy (whatever is directly connected to life). This process is sort of akin to cutting a cancer.

This act would look very similar to what Franklin Roosevelt did in 1933 which I outlined in my recent paper Hyperinflation, Fascism and War: How the New World Order May be Defeated Once More.

At this point nation states will have re-asserted their true authority over the pirates of private finance controlling the Trans-Atlantic financial system like would-be gods of Olympus (unbounded perverted vices and all).

It should be obvious to all that the United States must get its head out of its proverbial ass before it is too late by imposing these reforms onto the murderous sociopaths on Wall Street and London who would rather promote a “Great Reset” onto the world economy under the fog of COVD in order to control the terms of the blowout and also the rules of the new post-nation state operating system which they wish to see brought online as a (final) “solution”.

When corporate power is your real government, corporate media is state media

By Caitlin Johnstone, an independent journalist based in Melbourne, Australia. Her website is here and you can follow her on Twitter @caitoz

In the American corporatist system, where wealthy elites control the elected government through lobbyists, corporate media is state media, promoting narratives that help maintain the corporate-approved status quo.

The New York Times published an astonishingly horrible article the other day titled “Latin America Is Facing a ‘Decline of Democracy’ Under the Pandemic” accusing governments like Venezuela and Nicaragua of exploiting Covid-19 to quash opposition and oppress democracy.

The article sources its jarringly propagandistic claims in multiple US government-funded narrative management operations like the Wilson Center and the National Endowment for Democracy-sponsored Freedom House, the extensively plutocrat-funded Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the United States Naval Academy.

The crown jewel of this piece of State Department stenography reads as follows:

“Adding to these challenges, democracy in Latin America has also lost a champion in the United States, which had played an important role in promoting democracy after the end of the Cold War by financing good governance programs and calling out authoritarian abuses.”

Whoa, nelly.

The fact that America’s most widely regarded newspaper feels perfectly comfortable making such a spectacularly in-your-face lie on behalf of the US government tells you everything you need to know about what the mass media in America really are and what they do.

The United States has never at any time been a champion of democracy in Latin America, before or since the Cold War. It has intervened hundreds of times in the continent’s affairs throughout history, with everything from murderous corporate colonialism to deadly CIA regime-change operations to overt military invasions. It is currently trying to orchestrate acoup in Venezuela after failing to stage one during the Bush administration, it’s pushing regime change in Nicaragua, and The New York Times itself admitted this year that it was wrong to promote the false US government narrative of electoral shenanigans in Bolivia’s presidential race last year, a narrative which facilitated a bloody fascist coup.

This is propaganda. There is no other word for it. And yet the only time Western politicians and news reporters use that word is to talk about nations like Russia and China.

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Caitlin Johnstone: In post-Iraq invasion world, it’s absolutely insane to blindly believe the US narrative on ChinaCaitlin Johnstone: In post-Iraq invasion world, it’s absolutely insane to blindly believe the US narrative on China

Why is propaganda used in an ostensibly free democracy with an ostensibly free media? Why are its news media outlets so consistently in alignment with every foreign policy objective of US government agencies, no matter how destructive and inexcusable? If the media and the government are two separate institutions, why do they so consistently function as though they are not separate?

Well, that’s easy. It’s because they aren’t separate. The only thing keeping this from being seen is the fact that America’s real government isn’t located where people think it is.

In a corporatist system of government, where no hard lines are drawn between corporate/financial power and state power, corporate media is state media. Since bribery is legal in the US political system in the form of corporate lobbying and campaign donations, America’s elected government is controlled by wealthy elites who have money to burn and who benefit from maintaining a specific status quo arrangement.

The fact that this same plutocratic class also owns America’s media, which is now so consolidated that it’s almost entirely run by just six corporations, means that the people who run the government also run the media. This allows America’s true rulers to set up a system which promotes narratives that are favorable to their desired status quo.

Which means that the US has state propaganda. They just don’t call it that themselves.

Strip away the phony two-handed sock puppet show of US electoral politics and look at how power actually moves in that country, and you just see one more tyrannical regime which propagandizes its citizens, brutally cracks down on protesters, deliberately keeps its populace impoverished so they don’t get powerful enough to change things, and attacks any nation which dares to disobey its dictates.

Beneath the thin layer of narrative overlay about freedom and democracy, the US is just one more despotic, bloodthirsty empire. It’s no better than any of the other despotic, bloodthirsty empires throughout history. It just has good PR.

Plutocrats not only exert control over America’s media and politics, they also form alliances with the secretive government agencies whose operators remain amid the comings and goings of the official elected government. We see examples of this in the way new-money tech plutocrats like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel and Pierre Omidyar have direct relationships with the CIA and its proxies.

We also see it in the sexual blackmail operation which was facilitated by the late Jeffrey Epstein in connection with billionaire Leslie Wexner and Israeli intelligence, along with potentially the FBI and/or other US intelligence agencies. Today the internet is abuzz as newly unsealed court documents relating to Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell reveal witness testimony regarding underage sex trafficking, with such high-profile names appearing in the documents as Alan Dershowitz, Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew.

The Overton window of acceptable political discourse has been shrunk into such a narrow spectrum of debate that talking about even well-known and extensively documented facts involving the real nature of America’s government and media will get you laughingly dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, which is itself a symptom of tight narrative control by a ruling class which much prefers Americans thinking they live in a free democracy whose government they control with their votes.

In the old days you used to be able to tell who your rulers were because they’d sit on thrones and wear golden crowns and make you bow before them. Human consciousness eventually evolved beyond the acceptability of such brazen indignities, so it became necessary for rulers to take on more of a background role while the citizenry clap and cheer for the illusory puppet show of electoral politics.

But the kings are still among us, just as cruel and tyrannical as ever. They’ve just figured out how to mask their tyranny behind the facade of freedom.

But 2020 has been a year of revelations, a trend which seems likely to continue accelerating. Truth cannot stay hidden forever.