https://ourfiniteworld.com/2020/04/21/covid-19-and-oil-at-1-is-there-a-way-forward/
COVID-19 and oil at $1: Is there a way forward?
....[6] The COVID-19 actions taken to date, together with the poor condition the economy was in previously, lead me to believe that the world economy is headed for a major reset.
Recently, we have experienced world leaders everywhere falling in line with the idea of shutting down major parts of their economies, to slow the spread of COVID-19. Citizens are worried about the illness and want to “do something.” In a way, however, the shutdowns make no sense at all:
(a) Potential for starvation. Any world leader should know that a large share of its population is living “on the edge.” People without savings cannot get along without income for for a long period, maybe not even a couple of weeks. Poor people are likely to be pushed toward starvation, unless somehow income to buy food is made available to these people. This is especially a problem for India and the poor countries of Africa. The loss of population in poor countries due to starvation is likely to be far higher than the 2% death rate expected from COVID-19.
(b) Potential for oil prices and other commodity prices to fall far too low for producers. With a large share of the world economy shut down, prices for many goods fall too low. As I am writing this, the WTI oil price is shown as $1.26 per barrel. Such a low price is simply absurd. It will cut off all production. If food cannot be sold in restaurants, its price may fall too low as well, causing producers to plow it under, rather than send it to market.
(c) Potential for huge debt defaults and huge loss of asset value. The financial system is built on promises. These promises can only be met if oil can continue to be pumped and goods made with fossil fuels can continue to be sold. Today’s economic system is threatening to fall apart. Even at this point in the epidemic, we are seeing a huge problem with oil prices. Other problems, such as problems with derivatives, are likely not far away.
The economy is a self-organizing system. If there really is the potential for some parts of the world economic system to be saved, while others are lost, I expect that the self-organizing nature of the system will work in this direction.
[7] A reset world economy will likely end up with “pieces” of today’s economy surviving, but within a very different framework.
There are clearly parts of the world economy that are not working:
The financial system is way too large. There is too much debt, and asset prices are inflated based on very low interest rates.
World population is way too high, relative to resources.
Wage and wealth disparity is too great.
Too much of income is going to the financial system, healthcare, education, entertainment, and travel.
All of the connectivity of today’s world is leading to epidemics of many kinds traveling around the world.
Even with these problems, there may still be some core parts of the world economy that perhaps can be made to work. Each would have a smaller population than today. They would function much more independently than today, like mostly separate economic pumps. The nature of these economies will be different in different parts of the world.
In a less connected world, what we think of today as assets will likely have much less value. High rise buildings will be worth next to nothing, for example, because of their ability to transfer pathogens around. Public transportation will lose value for the same reason. Manufacturing that depends upon supply lines around the world will no longer work either. This means that manufacturing of computers, phones and today’s cars will likely no longer be possible. Products built locally will need to depend almost exclusively on local resources.
Pretty much everything that is debt today can be expected to default. Shares of stock will have little value. To try to save parts of the system, governments will need to take over assets that seem to have value such as farm land, mines, oil and gas wells, and electricity transmission lines. They will also likely need to take over banks, insurance companies and pension plans.
If oil products are available, governments may also need to make certain that farms, trucking companies and other essential users are able to get the fuel they need so that people can be fed. Water and sanitation are other systems that may need assistance so that they can continue to operate.
I expect that eventually, each separate economy will have its own currency. In nearly all cases, the currency will not be the same as today’s currency. The currency will be paid only to current workers in the economy, and it will only be usable for purchasing a limited range of goods made by the local economy.
[8] These are a few of my ideas regarding what might be ahead:
(a) There will be a shake-out of governmental organizations and intergovernmental organizations. Most intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations and European Union, will disappear. Many governments of countries may disappear, as well. Some may be overthrown. Others may collapse, in a manner similar to the collapse of the central government of the Soviet Union in 1991. Governmental organizations take energy; if energy is scarce, they are dispensable.
(b) Some countries seem to have a sufficient range of resources that at least the core portion of them may be able to go forward, for a while, in a fairly modern state:
United States
Canada
Russia
China
Iran
Big cities will likely become problematic in each of these locations, and populations will fall. Alaska and other very cold places may not be able to continue as part of the core, either.
(c) Countries, or even smaller units, will want to continue to limit trade and travel to other areas, for fear of contracting illnesses.
(d) Europe, especially, looks ripe for a big step back. Its fossil fuel resources tend to be depleted. There may be parts that can continue with the use of animal labor, if such animal labor can be found. Big protests and failing debt are likely by this summer in some areas, including Italy.
(e) Governments of the Middle Eastern countries and of Venezuela cannot continue long with very low oil prices. These countries are likely to see their governments overthrown, with a concurrent reduction in exports. Population will also fall, perhaps to the level before oil exploration.
(f) The making of physical goods will experience a major setback, starting immediately. Many supply chains are already broken. Medicines made in India and China are likely to start disappearing. Automobile manufacturing will depend on individual countries setting up their own manufacturing supply chains if the making of automobiles is to continue.
(g) The medical system will suffer a major setback from COVID-19 because no one will want to come to see their regular physician anymore, for fear of catching the disease. Education will likely become primarily the responsibility of families, with television or the internet perhaps providing some support. Universities will wither away. Music may continue, but drama (on television or elsewhere) will tend to disappear. Restaurants will never regain their popularity.
(h) It is possible that Quantitative Easing by many countries can temporarily prop up the prices of shares of stock and homes for several months, but eventually physical shortages of many goods can be expected. Food in particular is likely to be in short supply by spring a year from now. India and Africa may start seeing starvation much sooner, perhaps within weeks.
(i) History shows that when energy resources are not growing rapidly (see discussion of Figure 3), there tend to be wars and other conflicts. We should not be surprised if this happens again.
Conclusion
We seem to be reaching the limit of making our current global economic system work any longer. The only hope of partial salvation would seem to be if core parts of the world economy can be made to work in a more separate fashion for at least a few more years. In fact, oil and other fossil fuel production may continue, but for each country’s own use, with very limited trade.
There are likely to be big differences among economies around the world. For example, hunter-gathering may work for a few people, with the right skills, in some parts of the world. At the same time, more modern economies may exist elsewhere.
The new economy will have far fewer people and far less complexity. Each country can be expected to have its own currency, but this currency will likely be used only on a limited range of locally produced goods. Speculation in asset prices will no longer be a source of wealth.
It will be a very different world!
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
SC211-7
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/The-Death-Of-US-Oil.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+oilpricecom+(Oil+Price.com+Daily+News+Update)
The Death Of U.S. Oil
It’s game-over for most of the U.S. oil industry.
Prices have collapsed and storage is nearly full. The only option for many producers is to shut in their wells. That means no income. Most have considerable debt so bankruptcy is next.
Peggy Noonan wrote in her column recently that “this is a never-before-seen level of national economic calamity; history doesn’t get bigger than this.” That is the superficial view.
Coronavirus has changed everything. The longer it lasts, the less the future will look anything like the past.
Most people, policy makers and economists are energy blind and cannot, therefore, fully grasp the gravity or the consequences of what is happening.
Energy is the economy and oil is the most important and productive portion of energy. U.S. oil consumption is at its lowest level since 1971 when production was only about 78% of what it was in 2019. As goes oil, so goes the economy…down.
The old oil industry and the old economy are gone. The energy mix that underlies the economy will be different now. Oil production and prices are unlikely to regain late 2018 levels. Renewable sources will fall behind along with efforts to mitigate climate change.
It’s Really Bad
2020 global liquids demand may average 20 mmb/d less than in 2019 (Figure 1). This estimate is really a thought experiment because it is impossible to know what supply and demand are in the present much less in the next quarter or beyond. This is a time of unimaginable flux and uncertainty because no one knows how long economic activity will be depressed, how long it will take to recover or if it will recover.
The estimate in Figure 1 differs from most forecasts in two important ways. First, I believe that supply will fall much faster than most other sources. That is because storage will soon be full and shutting in production will be the only option for many producers.
Figure 1. 2020 global oil demand may average 20 million barrels per day lower than in 2019.
Source: OPEC, IEA, Vitol, Trafigura, Goldman Sachs and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Second, I doubt that there will be a demand recovery in the third quarter despite the re-opening of businesses in the second. That is because we are in a global depression. Unemployment will remain high and consumers will be damaged from lack of income over the months of quarantine. The truth is that I doubt that demand will ever recover.
Economies will re-start slowly. A useful analogy is being at a traffic light behind 25 stopped cars. The light will change from green to red before your car begins to move. It may take several light changes before you get to the other side of the intersection.
U.S. consumption has fallen about 30% from 20 mmb/d in January to 14 mmb/d in April. Refinery intakes are already 25% lower than in the first quarter of the year and will fall further as consumption decreases. Refineries will close.
Most U.S. refineries require intermediate and heavy crude oil that must be imported. Few U.S. grades of oil can be used to produce diesel without blending them with imported oil. That is because they are too light to contain the organic compounds need to make diesel. Redesigning refineries will not change this.
Premium: The Oil Sector That Will Suffer The Most
The world’s natural resource extraction, shipping and distribution system relies on diesel. As refineries close and less diesel is produced, there will be lower levels of natural resource extraction, less manufacturing and less buying of goods.
Diesel cannot be produced without first producing gasoline. The U.S. has had a gasoline surplus since late 2014 and the current surplus is the highest in 5 years (Figure 2).
Figure 2. U.S. gasoline comparative inventory has increased 30 million barrels since March 20 to a record level of 28.4 million barrels more than the five-year average.
Source: EIA and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Diesel demand is less elastic than gasoline demand because of its critical role in heavy transport. What will happen to the excess produced gasoline if storage is full? Will it be burned?
Those who see an opportunity for renewable energy in the demise of oil need to think again. The manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars depend on diesel all along the supply chain from extraction to distribution of finished products. A world in economic depression will default to the cheapest and most productive fuels. Oil will be cheap and abundant for a long time. There will be little money or appetite for the massive equipment changes that renewable sources require. Climate change will not be high in the consciousness of people struggling to survive.
Figure 3 is another thought experiment in which I use tight oil rig count and output to estimate forward levels of U.S. production. The normal trajectory is an estimate of how production might decline as rigs are idled from lack of capital investment. It suggests that tight oil production might decrease by about 50% from 7 to 3.5 mmb/d by July 2021.
Figure 3. Thought experiment based on rig count through April 2020 and 12-month lagged production.
Source: Baker Hughes, EIA DPR, Drilling Info and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
The shut-in trajectory suggests that tight oil production may fall below 3 mmb/d by June of this year. Since tight oil accounts for about 55% of U.S. output, total crude oil and condensate production could decline from 12 mmb/d to 5.5 mmb/d by the end of the first half of 2020. This estimate is much more aggressive than EIA forecasts because EIA hasn’t adequately modeled the speed of shut in production with full storage levels.
Energy is the Economy
Gross domestic product (GDP) is proportional to oil consumption (Figure 4). That’s because oil is the economy. Every aspect of production and use of goods and services requires burning fossil energy. There are approximately 4.5 years of human labor in a barrel of oil (N. J. Hagens, personal communication and The Oil Drum). No other energy source comes close to that level of energy density.
Figure 4. Gross domestic product (GDP) is proportional to oil consumption
Source: EIA, World Bank and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Those who believe that the world will function the same on lower energy density sources like wind and solar should review their old physics text books. You cannot fit 4.5 years of work from sunlight or wind into the 5.6 cubic feet space of a barrel of oil.
Seventeen investment analysts recently estimated that U.S. GDP would contract an average of 30-35% in 2020 (Figure 5) within a range of 9-50%. The correlation shown in Figure 4 suggests it will decrease by about 20-25% based on estimated decrease in U.S. oil consumption. Any value within this spectrum is catastrophic.
Premium: 2 Stocks To Consider As Oil Nears $15
Figure 5. U.S. GDP to contract 30-35% in 2020 based on estimates by seventeen investment analysts
Source: Charles Schwab and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Economist Lawrence Summers has warned that the U.S. financial system may collapse because of cascading defaults. Approximately 25% of U.S. renters did not pay their landlords and 23% of Americans did not make their mortgage payment in April. When people don’t pay their creditors, creditors in turn cannot pay their creditors. For comparison, a 28% mortgage default rate contributed to the 2008 financial collapse.
Joseph Stiglitz recently explained that the current pandemic will affect the developing world more severely than it has developed countries. It might lead to mass migration problems that could dwarf the dislocations of the last six years out of Africa and the Middle East.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Many will probably find my analysis overly pessimistic. Crude oil markets do not. Negative WTI futures prices last week could not have sent a stronger signal for producers to cease and desist.
Large segments of the U.S. oil industry will have to be nationalized before the year is over. The price of oil is too low to justify the cost of extraction even if storage were available. The value of a barrel of oil, however, is 4.5 man-years of work and that productivity multiplier will be essential if the U.S. economy is to avoid collapse or for it to recover if collapse is unavoidable.
The United States has engaged in the foolish practice of draining America first since the beginning of tight oil production a decade ago. There was value up to the point that domestic oil substituted for imported light oil but exporting more was dumb. That is true especially now that someone else’s oil will be cheap to buy for years.
There are few moments when we may truly say that things are different now. This is one of those moments. We do not know what awful form the future may take, what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
The game is over for oil. We should place all of our attention on saving the economy.
I hope that we learn to view what is happening as a chance to simplify and to learn to be satisfied with no more than what we need. It is unlikely that we will have much choice.
The Death Of U.S. Oil
It’s game-over for most of the U.S. oil industry.
Prices have collapsed and storage is nearly full. The only option for many producers is to shut in their wells. That means no income. Most have considerable debt so bankruptcy is next.
Peggy Noonan wrote in her column recently that “this is a never-before-seen level of national economic calamity; history doesn’t get bigger than this.” That is the superficial view.
Coronavirus has changed everything. The longer it lasts, the less the future will look anything like the past.
Most people, policy makers and economists are energy blind and cannot, therefore, fully grasp the gravity or the consequences of what is happening.
Energy is the economy and oil is the most important and productive portion of energy. U.S. oil consumption is at its lowest level since 1971 when production was only about 78% of what it was in 2019. As goes oil, so goes the economy…down.
The old oil industry and the old economy are gone. The energy mix that underlies the economy will be different now. Oil production and prices are unlikely to regain late 2018 levels. Renewable sources will fall behind along with efforts to mitigate climate change.
It’s Really Bad
2020 global liquids demand may average 20 mmb/d less than in 2019 (Figure 1). This estimate is really a thought experiment because it is impossible to know what supply and demand are in the present much less in the next quarter or beyond. This is a time of unimaginable flux and uncertainty because no one knows how long economic activity will be depressed, how long it will take to recover or if it will recover.
The estimate in Figure 1 differs from most forecasts in two important ways. First, I believe that supply will fall much faster than most other sources. That is because storage will soon be full and shutting in production will be the only option for many producers.
Figure 1. 2020 global oil demand may average 20 million barrels per day lower than in 2019.
Source: OPEC, IEA, Vitol, Trafigura, Goldman Sachs and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Second, I doubt that there will be a demand recovery in the third quarter despite the re-opening of businesses in the second. That is because we are in a global depression. Unemployment will remain high and consumers will be damaged from lack of income over the months of quarantine. The truth is that I doubt that demand will ever recover.
Economies will re-start slowly. A useful analogy is being at a traffic light behind 25 stopped cars. The light will change from green to red before your car begins to move. It may take several light changes before you get to the other side of the intersection.
U.S. consumption has fallen about 30% from 20 mmb/d in January to 14 mmb/d in April. Refinery intakes are already 25% lower than in the first quarter of the year and will fall further as consumption decreases. Refineries will close.
Most U.S. refineries require intermediate and heavy crude oil that must be imported. Few U.S. grades of oil can be used to produce diesel without blending them with imported oil. That is because they are too light to contain the organic compounds need to make diesel. Redesigning refineries will not change this.
Premium: The Oil Sector That Will Suffer The Most
The world’s natural resource extraction, shipping and distribution system relies on diesel. As refineries close and less diesel is produced, there will be lower levels of natural resource extraction, less manufacturing and less buying of goods.
Diesel cannot be produced without first producing gasoline. The U.S. has had a gasoline surplus since late 2014 and the current surplus is the highest in 5 years (Figure 2).
Figure 2. U.S. gasoline comparative inventory has increased 30 million barrels since March 20 to a record level of 28.4 million barrels more than the five-year average.
Source: EIA and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Diesel demand is less elastic than gasoline demand because of its critical role in heavy transport. What will happen to the excess produced gasoline if storage is full? Will it be burned?
Those who see an opportunity for renewable energy in the demise of oil need to think again. The manufacture of solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars depend on diesel all along the supply chain from extraction to distribution of finished products. A world in economic depression will default to the cheapest and most productive fuels. Oil will be cheap and abundant for a long time. There will be little money or appetite for the massive equipment changes that renewable sources require. Climate change will not be high in the consciousness of people struggling to survive.
Figure 3 is another thought experiment in which I use tight oil rig count and output to estimate forward levels of U.S. production. The normal trajectory is an estimate of how production might decline as rigs are idled from lack of capital investment. It suggests that tight oil production might decrease by about 50% from 7 to 3.5 mmb/d by July 2021.
Figure 3. Thought experiment based on rig count through April 2020 and 12-month lagged production.
Source: Baker Hughes, EIA DPR, Drilling Info and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
The shut-in trajectory suggests that tight oil production may fall below 3 mmb/d by June of this year. Since tight oil accounts for about 55% of U.S. output, total crude oil and condensate production could decline from 12 mmb/d to 5.5 mmb/d by the end of the first half of 2020. This estimate is much more aggressive than EIA forecasts because EIA hasn’t adequately modeled the speed of shut in production with full storage levels.
Energy is the Economy
Gross domestic product (GDP) is proportional to oil consumption (Figure 4). That’s because oil is the economy. Every aspect of production and use of goods and services requires burning fossil energy. There are approximately 4.5 years of human labor in a barrel of oil (N. J. Hagens, personal communication and The Oil Drum). No other energy source comes close to that level of energy density.
Figure 4. Gross domestic product (GDP) is proportional to oil consumption
Source: EIA, World Bank and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Those who believe that the world will function the same on lower energy density sources like wind and solar should review their old physics text books. You cannot fit 4.5 years of work from sunlight or wind into the 5.6 cubic feet space of a barrel of oil.
Seventeen investment analysts recently estimated that U.S. GDP would contract an average of 30-35% in 2020 (Figure 5) within a range of 9-50%. The correlation shown in Figure 4 suggests it will decrease by about 20-25% based on estimated decrease in U.S. oil consumption. Any value within this spectrum is catastrophic.
Premium: 2 Stocks To Consider As Oil Nears $15
Figure 5. U.S. GDP to contract 30-35% in 2020 based on estimates by seventeen investment analysts
Source: Charles Schwab and Labyrinth Consulting Services, Inc.
Economist Lawrence Summers has warned that the U.S. financial system may collapse because of cascading defaults. Approximately 25% of U.S. renters did not pay their landlords and 23% of Americans did not make their mortgage payment in April. When people don’t pay their creditors, creditors in turn cannot pay their creditors. For comparison, a 28% mortgage default rate contributed to the 2008 financial collapse.
Joseph Stiglitz recently explained that the current pandemic will affect the developing world more severely than it has developed countries. It might lead to mass migration problems that could dwarf the dislocations of the last six years out of Africa and the Middle East.
Slouching Toward Bethlehem
Many will probably find my analysis overly pessimistic. Crude oil markets do not. Negative WTI futures prices last week could not have sent a stronger signal for producers to cease and desist.
Large segments of the U.S. oil industry will have to be nationalized before the year is over. The price of oil is too low to justify the cost of extraction even if storage were available. The value of a barrel of oil, however, is 4.5 man-years of work and that productivity multiplier will be essential if the U.S. economy is to avoid collapse or for it to recover if collapse is unavoidable.
The United States has engaged in the foolish practice of draining America first since the beginning of tight oil production a decade ago. There was value up to the point that domestic oil substituted for imported light oil but exporting more was dumb. That is true especially now that someone else’s oil will be cheap to buy for years.
There are few moments when we may truly say that things are different now. This is one of those moments. We do not know what awful form the future may take, what rough beast slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.
The game is over for oil. We should place all of our attention on saving the economy.
I hope that we learn to view what is happening as a chance to simplify and to learn to be satisfied with no more than what we need. It is unlikely that we will have much choice.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
SC211-6
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55098.htm
Monitoring the Public After Coronavirus
It is too early to say when or even whether the siege initiated by the coronavirus will end, but many Americans and Europeans are speculating over what kind of countries will emerge on the other side. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, who exposed illegal spying on American citizens, recently predicted that there would be a “slide into a less liberal and less free world,” that the surveillance systems being created to monitor the spread of the disease would become an “architecture of oppression.” To be sure he has a point in that governments have historically used crises to expand their powers. After the crisis is over, the emergency power granted to manage the activity of the people tends to be retained.
Much depends on the lessons learned from what is being done to contain the virus currently. If testing and “keep your distance” does not succeed in checking the spread of the disease and restoring a version of what once was normal life, harsher and more permanent measures might prevail. Alexander Dugin foresees a “military-medical” dictatorship developing.
The rapid spread of the virus has also spawned some unusual conspiracy theories. One claims that the virus was actually developed in the United States, stolen from a lab by Chinese scientists and then released in China before being allowed to propagate worldwide as part of a communist conspiracy to destroy the economy and political system in the U.S. Another has cast Bill Gates as the villain, claiming that he had a hand in the appearance of the virus as part of a nefarious plot to take over global health care. The megalomaniacal Gates certainly is to blame for using his wealth and status to promote a universal “health” surveillance system for the post-coronavirus world, but that he might have been behind the appearance of the virus itself is certainly a bit of a stretch. Still other theories connect the appearance of coronavirus to 5G telecommunications technology.
The reality of to what degree the national security state that already exists tightens its grip based on a continuing medical emergency pretty much depends on how the virus itself reacts to summer heat and the measures being taken to contain it. Meanwhile, there have been some decidedly extreme proposals about what the United States and other nations might consider doing to seize and maintain the high ground in the battle against a still proliferating, highly contagious and lethal disease.
The key to stopping the spread of the virus, most authorities would agree, is to test and monitor nearly all the public, to force them if needs be to maintain distance from individuals who are already infected. There have been several proposals for how to do that ranging from testing nearly everyone and issuing health ID cards based on the results, with those individuals considered contagious or especially vulnerable being subject to quarantine or some form of further isolation. One over-the-top plan would make the health status of individuals recorded and updated on a chip readable by government scanners that would be permanently embedded in everyone’s body.
The plan that appears to have the best possibly of being adopted is being promoted in a joint venture by Apple and Google that appears to have White House support. Bloomberg reports that “Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19. People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.”
The monitoring would be done by central computers and once the principle is established that phones can be manipulated there are no technical or practical limits to what other tasks could be included. That means that the observation made by protagonist Winston Smith in George Orwell’s “1984” has finally been realized. Smith was doing the mandatory half hour of exercise daily in front of his television, but when he began to slack off a voice from the tv set admonished him. He then accepted that in theory the government was actually capable of surveilling everyone all the time and might in fact be doing so. Well George and Winston, we have finally arrived at 1984.
Even if coronavirus fades into obscurity, government might plausibly exploit the fear created by it to push hard that a surveillance mechanism be continued and even expanded to prevent its recurrence or the development of future pandemics. That is what the “science” tells one is the right thing to do, at least according to some scientists, but it ignores individual liberty of association, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution. The U.S. and other governments have long demonstrated that when it comes to individual freedom versus the ability of the state to impose a statist uniformity, the rules makers will always win out. 9/11, for example, produced the Patriot and Military Commission Acts that have considerably abridged personal liberty in America, even though the threat of terrorism was overstated at the time and has considerably receded ever since. Yet, unfathomably, the Patriot Act has survived and keeps getting renewed by Congress.
Predictably perhaps, presidential son-in-law and jack of all trades Jared Kushner, fresh from his failure to bring peace to the Middle East, has been placed in charge of a White House task force that will determine how and when to develop a pandemic surveillance system which will also link those ill to hospital centers for mandatory screening and treatment. The argument being made is that tracking nearly everyone would enable the identification and quarantining of those who are sick in nearly real time, controlling the spread of future viruses that has up until now been impossible. That the information would be collected into a national data base appears to be part of the program and it would, of course, include information on the patient’s location and activities.
As social media is already being manipulated and controlled by the government working hand-in-hand with the oligarchs who own and operate the sites, the ability to further isolate members of the public so as to preempt the development of any genuine resistance to state policies might well be seen as highly desirable. It would be a gift to a developing police state to be able to know where everyone is at any given time and be able to intuit what they might be doing. Real troublemakers could be further identified and singled out for special attention.
And one should note that it all comes at a time of great vulnerability to both revolution and repression, when representative government is under siege in many countries, unable to control the narrative as it once did. Donald Trump in a tweet barrage last Friday called on his followers to “liberate” Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia because he disapproved of the policies on coronavirus and gun control being advanced by their respective governors, all Democrats. Calling for the overthrow of state governments is illegal, a call to insurrection, but Trump apparently believes that having survived one impeachment attempt he is now untouchable. If many Americans begin to take Trump’s exhortations literally, it could be a sign that the admittedly dystopian political equilibrium in the U.S. is about to spin out of control.
Monitoring the Public After Coronavirus
It is too early to say when or even whether the siege initiated by the coronavirus will end, but many Americans and Europeans are speculating over what kind of countries will emerge on the other side. National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden, who exposed illegal spying on American citizens, recently predicted that there would be a “slide into a less liberal and less free world,” that the surveillance systems being created to monitor the spread of the disease would become an “architecture of oppression.” To be sure he has a point in that governments have historically used crises to expand their powers. After the crisis is over, the emergency power granted to manage the activity of the people tends to be retained.
Much depends on the lessons learned from what is being done to contain the virus currently. If testing and “keep your distance” does not succeed in checking the spread of the disease and restoring a version of what once was normal life, harsher and more permanent measures might prevail. Alexander Dugin foresees a “military-medical” dictatorship developing.
The rapid spread of the virus has also spawned some unusual conspiracy theories. One claims that the virus was actually developed in the United States, stolen from a lab by Chinese scientists and then released in China before being allowed to propagate worldwide as part of a communist conspiracy to destroy the economy and political system in the U.S. Another has cast Bill Gates as the villain, claiming that he had a hand in the appearance of the virus as part of a nefarious plot to take over global health care. The megalomaniacal Gates certainly is to blame for using his wealth and status to promote a universal “health” surveillance system for the post-coronavirus world, but that he might have been behind the appearance of the virus itself is certainly a bit of a stretch. Still other theories connect the appearance of coronavirus to 5G telecommunications technology.
The reality of to what degree the national security state that already exists tightens its grip based on a continuing medical emergency pretty much depends on how the virus itself reacts to summer heat and the measures being taken to contain it. Meanwhile, there have been some decidedly extreme proposals about what the United States and other nations might consider doing to seize and maintain the high ground in the battle against a still proliferating, highly contagious and lethal disease.
The key to stopping the spread of the virus, most authorities would agree, is to test and monitor nearly all the public, to force them if needs be to maintain distance from individuals who are already infected. There have been several proposals for how to do that ranging from testing nearly everyone and issuing health ID cards based on the results, with those individuals considered contagious or especially vulnerable being subject to quarantine or some form of further isolation. One over-the-top plan would make the health status of individuals recorded and updated on a chip readable by government scanners that would be permanently embedded in everyone’s body.
The plan that appears to have the best possibly of being adopted is being promoted in a joint venture by Apple and Google that appears to have White House support. Bloomberg reports that “Apple Inc. and Google unveiled a rare partnership to add technology to their smartphone platforms that will alert users if they have come into contact with a person with Covid-19. People must opt in to the system, but it has the potential to monitor about a third of the world’s population.”
The monitoring would be done by central computers and once the principle is established that phones can be manipulated there are no technical or practical limits to what other tasks could be included. That means that the observation made by protagonist Winston Smith in George Orwell’s “1984” has finally been realized. Smith was doing the mandatory half hour of exercise daily in front of his television, but when he began to slack off a voice from the tv set admonished him. He then accepted that in theory the government was actually capable of surveilling everyone all the time and might in fact be doing so. Well George and Winston, we have finally arrived at 1984.
Even if coronavirus fades into obscurity, government might plausibly exploit the fear created by it to push hard that a surveillance mechanism be continued and even expanded to prevent its recurrence or the development of future pandemics. That is what the “science” tells one is the right thing to do, at least according to some scientists, but it ignores individual liberty of association, guaranteed by the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution. The U.S. and other governments have long demonstrated that when it comes to individual freedom versus the ability of the state to impose a statist uniformity, the rules makers will always win out. 9/11, for example, produced the Patriot and Military Commission Acts that have considerably abridged personal liberty in America, even though the threat of terrorism was overstated at the time and has considerably receded ever since. Yet, unfathomably, the Patriot Act has survived and keeps getting renewed by Congress.
Predictably perhaps, presidential son-in-law and jack of all trades Jared Kushner, fresh from his failure to bring peace to the Middle East, has been placed in charge of a White House task force that will determine how and when to develop a pandemic surveillance system which will also link those ill to hospital centers for mandatory screening and treatment. The argument being made is that tracking nearly everyone would enable the identification and quarantining of those who are sick in nearly real time, controlling the spread of future viruses that has up until now been impossible. That the information would be collected into a national data base appears to be part of the program and it would, of course, include information on the patient’s location and activities.
As social media is already being manipulated and controlled by the government working hand-in-hand with the oligarchs who own and operate the sites, the ability to further isolate members of the public so as to preempt the development of any genuine resistance to state policies might well be seen as highly desirable. It would be a gift to a developing police state to be able to know where everyone is at any given time and be able to intuit what they might be doing. Real troublemakers could be further identified and singled out for special attention.
And one should note that it all comes at a time of great vulnerability to both revolution and repression, when representative government is under siege in many countries, unable to control the narrative as it once did. Donald Trump in a tweet barrage last Friday called on his followers to “liberate” Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia because he disapproved of the policies on coronavirus and gun control being advanced by their respective governors, all Democrats. Calling for the overthrow of state governments is illegal, a call to insurrection, but Trump apparently believes that having survived one impeachment attempt he is now untouchable. If many Americans begin to take Trump’s exhortations literally, it could be a sign that the admittedly dystopian political equilibrium in the U.S. is about to spin out of control.
Monday, April 27, 2020
SC211-5
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55103.htm
Capitalism: The Deadliest Pandemic
Among the infinity of unknowns about Covid 19 there is one incontrovertible fact: It is not another Black Death or Spanish Influenza. Deadly as it is, it will not kill a third of Europe’s population or 100 million people worldwide.
Contingent on that fact is an obscure future about which speculation is idle, but a few things have become clear in its short, dramatic run. It has hit countries unprepared for any outbreak harder than those where some prophylaxis was available. It hurt those that denied or suppressed the knowledge of it and didn’t act worse than those that did. It hit America very hard as it was unprepared and didn’t acknowledge it when it began.
With infected numbers increasing, in widespread but porous lockdown that has frozen the economy, and with no certainty on its trajectory, the nation is locked in bitter wrangling on what to do, how to do it, and for how long.
Setting aside the tragic, pathetic inadequacy of our barbaric Capitalist Health Business Joke, the pandemic has been curiously used by MSM information meisters both to partially mask and also to rationalize the latest monumental implosion and crash of American Finance Capital.
The perversity of this ploy is patent, since beyond their serendipitous timing, the two cataclysmic events are entirely unrelated. The pandemic blindsided the entire world; implosion of American Jolly Roger Capitalism was widely foreseen, overdue, and regularly predicted.
For a century and more, in scholarly works from many perspectives, it has been established incontrovertibly that this nonpareil engine for looting and defiling the living world and enslaving and brutalizing humanity, embodied intrinsic contradictions that would cause it to crash regularly, and finally to cannibalize itself. This, in spite of a long history of hagiographic eulogizing and sanctifying by its tiny sliver of beneficiaries, the Capitalist Grandees.
Reality notwithstanding, the Capitalist juggernaut won the minds of The People. It would be simply pathetic and not worth examining this issue, if Americans had been so profoundly stupid as to swallow whole the poison bolus of ridiculous bullshit Capitalists conjured and embedded in tangles and thickets of solemn sophistry, foxy jargon, and yahoo science to enslave them. As it happens, they weren’t. It actually took decades of betrayal.
Beyond the endless propagandizing doled out by their wholly-owned “free press”, their rigidly disciplined organs of “public information”, and their junk-peddling factories of “entertainment”, they were able to capture our public education system to buttress their catechism. History was boldly falsified, distorted and deformed by corporate hacks to sell Capitalism to children.
With government bought by bribing the sleazy whores with whom they packed the Congress and infected the Courts, the toughest battle of Capital was that for destruction of organized labor. From our earliest history, the bloody war for workers’ rights flared to flame repeatedly and the struggle was battered down again and again with great violence: elimination of the Molly Maguires and Railroad Brotherhoods, National Guard gunning of UMW miners at Cripple Creek and the Ludlow Massacre, killing and jailing Coeur d’Alene district rebels and coal miners of Matewan, the Haymarket hangings, Joe HIll’s execution, and the brutal eradication of the Wobblies.
The Great Depression caused by one of Capitalism’s spectacular failures, put heavy pressure on industry and FDR, creating space for unions. The Reuther brothers organized auto workers, and Labor made real gains, but they were soon lost as Capitalism--rescued by the enormous productivity of Labor through WWII and after--attacked, denounced and betrayed it with pious assistance from the corrupted government it owned outright.
The last fifty years have seen the near extinction of organized labor and the total takeover, not only of government and the courts, but of society itself, by the ruthless dictatorial power of debt-based Finance Capital. Since the crash of ’08, in which overtly criminal banks were bailed out by trillions of Fed dollars while people got pink slips, evictions, and bankruptcies, the giant syndicate of Finance Capitalism has become ever more concentrated in an economy the main products of which are debt, poverty, and weapons.
The last decade saw the most flagrant financial scam ever as the Fed and Big Capital made, in business terms, a merger. The Fed cut rates to near zero for giant banks, purportedly to fund loans to Main Street. In practice, giant corporations got boatloads of near free money to buy back their own stocks, driving prices ever higher on nothing but the bid-up: the classic recipe for asset bubbles. Finally, as was inevitable, the con crumbled.
This is where serendipity comes in. At the very time the whole manky monstrosity of Finance Capital--with its arcane heraldry of monetary hocus and pocus crafted by criminals for thieves and gangsters, with its discount windows and Repo markets; bonds, bills and notes; CDOs and tranches; puts, calls, naked shorts and derivatives--began to wickedly unravel, Covid 19 emerged from its unknown lair and began swiftly to sicken the world.
This is not a cause and effect scenario, though. This is not A: therefore B. A and B are unrelated. The Masters of Disaster would like you to see the virus as a causal trigger. To downplaying and background the financial meltdown’s actual cause is to sell it as a force majeure wonder that only a Black Swan event could have perpetrated on a wise, responsible market.
The polite term for that is horseshit. The Titans of Wall Street have been so dizzily, voraciously out of control in their hoggish chicanery, pumping their empty, shoddy, socially damaging Potemkin Rackets for so long with such criminally lucrative rigged payoffs that they just can’t believe the jig is up.
And it isn’t. It would be, if Capitalism and that magic Invisible Hand of the Market actually existed, instead of just the dead and stinking myths, the elaborate, simple-minded fairy tales that let them screw the world so long. The fact is, there is no Capitalism, and there hasn’t been since WWI. What exists is a fascist style union of government and giant corporations in which the latter go all in on wildly leveraged scams till they crap out and go broke, when government gifts them massive injections of public money again.
In the present plunge, the Fed and Treasury hooked up to refloat dead Big Losers to the tune of many trillions while dealing chump change to The People. One contrarian hedge funder, to the horror of his ilk, suggested that government stop acting as Bag Man of Last Resort and just let the corporate High Rollers crash and burn. At last report he was still alive. But no way, that would be Capitalism. What, hold those shameless phonies feet to the fire and force the degraded bastards to play by the rules they’ve been hyping us with for generations?
All pandemics run their course and their time of death and terror ends. Covid will. The most fatal one in history--Capitalism--will be no exception.
Capitalism: The Deadliest Pandemic
Among the infinity of unknowns about Covid 19 there is one incontrovertible fact: It is not another Black Death or Spanish Influenza. Deadly as it is, it will not kill a third of Europe’s population or 100 million people worldwide.
Contingent on that fact is an obscure future about which speculation is idle, but a few things have become clear in its short, dramatic run. It has hit countries unprepared for any outbreak harder than those where some prophylaxis was available. It hurt those that denied or suppressed the knowledge of it and didn’t act worse than those that did. It hit America very hard as it was unprepared and didn’t acknowledge it when it began.
With infected numbers increasing, in widespread but porous lockdown that has frozen the economy, and with no certainty on its trajectory, the nation is locked in bitter wrangling on what to do, how to do it, and for how long.
Setting aside the tragic, pathetic inadequacy of our barbaric Capitalist Health Business Joke, the pandemic has been curiously used by MSM information meisters both to partially mask and also to rationalize the latest monumental implosion and crash of American Finance Capital.
The perversity of this ploy is patent, since beyond their serendipitous timing, the two cataclysmic events are entirely unrelated. The pandemic blindsided the entire world; implosion of American Jolly Roger Capitalism was widely foreseen, overdue, and regularly predicted.
For a century and more, in scholarly works from many perspectives, it has been established incontrovertibly that this nonpareil engine for looting and defiling the living world and enslaving and brutalizing humanity, embodied intrinsic contradictions that would cause it to crash regularly, and finally to cannibalize itself. This, in spite of a long history of hagiographic eulogizing and sanctifying by its tiny sliver of beneficiaries, the Capitalist Grandees.
Reality notwithstanding, the Capitalist juggernaut won the minds of The People. It would be simply pathetic and not worth examining this issue, if Americans had been so profoundly stupid as to swallow whole the poison bolus of ridiculous bullshit Capitalists conjured and embedded in tangles and thickets of solemn sophistry, foxy jargon, and yahoo science to enslave them. As it happens, they weren’t. It actually took decades of betrayal.
Beyond the endless propagandizing doled out by their wholly-owned “free press”, their rigidly disciplined organs of “public information”, and their junk-peddling factories of “entertainment”, they were able to capture our public education system to buttress their catechism. History was boldly falsified, distorted and deformed by corporate hacks to sell Capitalism to children.
With government bought by bribing the sleazy whores with whom they packed the Congress and infected the Courts, the toughest battle of Capital was that for destruction of organized labor. From our earliest history, the bloody war for workers’ rights flared to flame repeatedly and the struggle was battered down again and again with great violence: elimination of the Molly Maguires and Railroad Brotherhoods, National Guard gunning of UMW miners at Cripple Creek and the Ludlow Massacre, killing and jailing Coeur d’Alene district rebels and coal miners of Matewan, the Haymarket hangings, Joe HIll’s execution, and the brutal eradication of the Wobblies.
The Great Depression caused by one of Capitalism’s spectacular failures, put heavy pressure on industry and FDR, creating space for unions. The Reuther brothers organized auto workers, and Labor made real gains, but they were soon lost as Capitalism--rescued by the enormous productivity of Labor through WWII and after--attacked, denounced and betrayed it with pious assistance from the corrupted government it owned outright.
The last fifty years have seen the near extinction of organized labor and the total takeover, not only of government and the courts, but of society itself, by the ruthless dictatorial power of debt-based Finance Capital. Since the crash of ’08, in which overtly criminal banks were bailed out by trillions of Fed dollars while people got pink slips, evictions, and bankruptcies, the giant syndicate of Finance Capitalism has become ever more concentrated in an economy the main products of which are debt, poverty, and weapons.
The last decade saw the most flagrant financial scam ever as the Fed and Big Capital made, in business terms, a merger. The Fed cut rates to near zero for giant banks, purportedly to fund loans to Main Street. In practice, giant corporations got boatloads of near free money to buy back their own stocks, driving prices ever higher on nothing but the bid-up: the classic recipe for asset bubbles. Finally, as was inevitable, the con crumbled.
This is where serendipity comes in. At the very time the whole manky monstrosity of Finance Capital--with its arcane heraldry of monetary hocus and pocus crafted by criminals for thieves and gangsters, with its discount windows and Repo markets; bonds, bills and notes; CDOs and tranches; puts, calls, naked shorts and derivatives--began to wickedly unravel, Covid 19 emerged from its unknown lair and began swiftly to sicken the world.
This is not a cause and effect scenario, though. This is not A: therefore B. A and B are unrelated. The Masters of Disaster would like you to see the virus as a causal trigger. To downplaying and background the financial meltdown’s actual cause is to sell it as a force majeure wonder that only a Black Swan event could have perpetrated on a wise, responsible market.
The polite term for that is horseshit. The Titans of Wall Street have been so dizzily, voraciously out of control in their hoggish chicanery, pumping their empty, shoddy, socially damaging Potemkin Rackets for so long with such criminally lucrative rigged payoffs that they just can’t believe the jig is up.
And it isn’t. It would be, if Capitalism and that magic Invisible Hand of the Market actually existed, instead of just the dead and stinking myths, the elaborate, simple-minded fairy tales that let them screw the world so long. The fact is, there is no Capitalism, and there hasn’t been since WWI. What exists is a fascist style union of government and giant corporations in which the latter go all in on wildly leveraged scams till they crap out and go broke, when government gifts them massive injections of public money again.
In the present plunge, the Fed and Treasury hooked up to refloat dead Big Losers to the tune of many trillions while dealing chump change to The People. One contrarian hedge funder, to the horror of his ilk, suggested that government stop acting as Bag Man of Last Resort and just let the corporate High Rollers crash and burn. At last report he was still alive. But no way, that would be Capitalism. What, hold those shameless phonies feet to the fire and force the degraded bastards to play by the rules they’ve been hyping us with for generations?
All pandemics run their course and their time of death and terror ends. Covid will. The most fatal one in history--Capitalism--will be no exception.
Sunday, April 26, 2020
SC211-4
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/08/09/consuming-the-planet-of-the-humans-the-most-important-documentary-of-the-century/
Consuming the “Planet of the Humans:” The Most Important Documentary of the Century
Back in 2007, the environmental organization 350.org was founded by author/academic Bill McKibben. The name refers to the theory that 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere is the highest concentration that can occur before the Life Support system unravels for good.
It already was at 385 ppm when 350 formed. It is now at 410ppm! Clearly we are losing the battle against Climate Chaos.
Over the past decade, my Flint pal, filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, his ally Ozzie Zehner (author of “Green Illusions” and a graduate of Flint’s Kettering University), me and many others have been asking the question “Why are we losing on this when we know the facts?”
Jeff (co-producer/musical score creator of “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Fahrenheit 11/9,” etc.) and allies have produced (I am admittedly biased) the most dismaying Eco-documentary of the Century – one that examines “Why?”
“Planet of the Humans” premiered at the gloriously community-restored State Theatre July 31st at the 15th Traverse City, MI Film Festival with three sold-out/standing ovation showings followed by Q & A’s with the creators. “Planet” presents the underlying Ecosystem facts and then examines what we have been doing to address the issue and the lack of success. The basic conclusion is that we have been following corporate foundation-financed, Democratic Party-tied misleadership and that is why we are where we are.
The bottom line is that there are: Too many Clever Apes; consuming too much; too rapidly. And ALL efforts on addressing the climate costs are reduced to illusions/delusions designed to keep our over-sized human footprint and out-of-control consumption chugging along without any consumer sacrifices or loss of consumption-based profits.
We have ample scientific evidence of what happens when ANY specie expands/consumes to a point beyond the carrying capacity of its habitat. As I always note: “We could power the grid on Unicorn farts. But is we keep on breeding and consuming at the same, or likely higher, rates; we’ll still eat the planet.”
Forget all you have heard about how “Renewable Energy” is our salvation. It is all a myth that is very lucrative for some. Feel-good stuff like electric cars, etc. Such vehicles are actually powered by coal, natural gas… or dead salmon in the Northwest.
Very Inconvenient Truths
Some of the reality presented:
+ all “alternative energy” itself is fossil-fuel-based. None of it could or did exist without fossil fuels. Solar panel themselves are made with metallurgical coal and quartz – both derived from blowing up mountains. The top beneficiaries of tax subsidies to promote solar? The Koch Bothers!;
+ same with wind and even hydro and Nukes, as the essential major ingredient in the creation of cement and steel is…coal. None of these technologies existed, nor could they exist, without fossil fuels. The grid cannot even operate without fossil fuel-derived steam-generated baseloads – in the spring when hydro is surging, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) cuts off wind power (and still has to pay its providers after a lawsuit), yet has to keep the Boardman Coal plant (Oregon’s top carbon polluter) running in order to balance the baseload. Even eCon Musk’s famed battery plant in Nevada is powered by…fracked natural gas. The huge bird and desert-destroying Ivanpah Solar array in California also has fracked natural gas as an essential ingredient;
+ the documentary depants the ubiquitous memes/reports of how “Germany gets its energy from renewables.” It trots out footage of a series of the top misleaders stating one after the other: “Germany gets 30% from renewables,” “40%,” “50%,” “60%”,… The reality is that Germany gets just 3.5% of all its renewable energy from solar and wind combined. A whopping 70% of what passes for “Green” energy in Germany comes from Biomass – grinding up trees in the Amazon and the US Southeast and shipping them to Europe where Germany (and Great Britain) burns them for electrons and get Carbon Credits for doing so!;
+ the other part of the Germany myth is that “Germany gets off coal…” The reality here is that Germany gets 37% of its energy from coal and is even trying to level one of its last intact forests to get at the coal underneath. The only thing currently stopping the destruction of the 12,000-year-old Hambach Forest is mass protests;
+ the top beneficiaries of Biomass are, of course, Big Timber giants. The Koch brothers, again, own Georgia-Pacific, the second largest stump creator in the world after Weyerhaeuser. G-P’s two mills in Oregon are the state’s #4 and #5 carbon polluters, as well.
“A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires, and baby these are the days of miracle and plunder…” ~ apologies to Paul Simon
Planet Executive Producer Michael Moore noted at the premiere that it won’t get us out of this predicament to just challenge the usual suspects. We have to hold bad actors on “our” side’s feet to the fire, as well, if we are to survive this one.
So, Planet examines a range of policy influencers/professional environmentalists/opportunists, etc. and even lets them hang themselves. It not only takes on the obvious bad guys like the Kochs, it lets folks like McKibben, Al Gore, Richard Branson, Robert Kennedy, Jr, who are ostensibly on “our” side, hang themselves by showing clips of them speaking to environmentalists and then clips of them speaking to industry about all the profits to be made.
McKibben is shown twice praising Biomass (they gave him every chance to condemn it), interspersed with a scene of a mountaintop removal operation in his home state of Vermont – for a wind farm!
Robert Kennedy, Jr. informs his fellow millionaires of all the profits to be made on “green” energy. Al Gore basically admits it’s all about diversion and profits. Branson, like eCon Musk, of course, is solely in it for the money.
Fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg got down to it and basically bought the Sierra Club with tens of millions in donations tied to the Club promoting one of his cash cows, Fracked Natural Gas, as the “Bridge Fuel to a Green Energy future!”....
....
Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Directed by Jeff Gibbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE&feature=youtu.be
Consuming the “Planet of the Humans:” The Most Important Documentary of the Century
Back in 2007, the environmental organization 350.org was founded by author/academic Bill McKibben. The name refers to the theory that 350 parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere is the highest concentration that can occur before the Life Support system unravels for good.
It already was at 385 ppm when 350 formed. It is now at 410ppm! Clearly we are losing the battle against Climate Chaos.
Over the past decade, my Flint pal, filmmaker Jeff Gibbs, his ally Ozzie Zehner (author of “Green Illusions” and a graduate of Flint’s Kettering University), me and many others have been asking the question “Why are we losing on this when we know the facts?”
Jeff (co-producer/musical score creator of “Bowling for Columbine,” “Fahrenheit 9/11,” “Fahrenheit 11/9,” etc.) and allies have produced (I am admittedly biased) the most dismaying Eco-documentary of the Century – one that examines “Why?”
“Planet of the Humans” premiered at the gloriously community-restored State Theatre July 31st at the 15th Traverse City, MI Film Festival with three sold-out/standing ovation showings followed by Q & A’s with the creators. “Planet” presents the underlying Ecosystem facts and then examines what we have been doing to address the issue and the lack of success. The basic conclusion is that we have been following corporate foundation-financed, Democratic Party-tied misleadership and that is why we are where we are.
The bottom line is that there are: Too many Clever Apes; consuming too much; too rapidly. And ALL efforts on addressing the climate costs are reduced to illusions/delusions designed to keep our over-sized human footprint and out-of-control consumption chugging along without any consumer sacrifices or loss of consumption-based profits.
We have ample scientific evidence of what happens when ANY specie expands/consumes to a point beyond the carrying capacity of its habitat. As I always note: “We could power the grid on Unicorn farts. But is we keep on breeding and consuming at the same, or likely higher, rates; we’ll still eat the planet.”
Forget all you have heard about how “Renewable Energy” is our salvation. It is all a myth that is very lucrative for some. Feel-good stuff like electric cars, etc. Such vehicles are actually powered by coal, natural gas… or dead salmon in the Northwest.
Very Inconvenient Truths
Some of the reality presented:
+ all “alternative energy” itself is fossil-fuel-based. None of it could or did exist without fossil fuels. Solar panel themselves are made with metallurgical coal and quartz – both derived from blowing up mountains. The top beneficiaries of tax subsidies to promote solar? The Koch Bothers!;
+ same with wind and even hydro and Nukes, as the essential major ingredient in the creation of cement and steel is…coal. None of these technologies existed, nor could they exist, without fossil fuels. The grid cannot even operate without fossil fuel-derived steam-generated baseloads – in the spring when hydro is surging, the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) cuts off wind power (and still has to pay its providers after a lawsuit), yet has to keep the Boardman Coal plant (Oregon’s top carbon polluter) running in order to balance the baseload. Even eCon Musk’s famed battery plant in Nevada is powered by…fracked natural gas. The huge bird and desert-destroying Ivanpah Solar array in California also has fracked natural gas as an essential ingredient;
+ the documentary depants the ubiquitous memes/reports of how “Germany gets its energy from renewables.” It trots out footage of a series of the top misleaders stating one after the other: “Germany gets 30% from renewables,” “40%,” “50%,” “60%”,… The reality is that Germany gets just 3.5% of all its renewable energy from solar and wind combined. A whopping 70% of what passes for “Green” energy in Germany comes from Biomass – grinding up trees in the Amazon and the US Southeast and shipping them to Europe where Germany (and Great Britain) burns them for electrons and get Carbon Credits for doing so!;
+ the other part of the Germany myth is that “Germany gets off coal…” The reality here is that Germany gets 37% of its energy from coal and is even trying to level one of its last intact forests to get at the coal underneath. The only thing currently stopping the destruction of the 12,000-year-old Hambach Forest is mass protests;
+ the top beneficiaries of Biomass are, of course, Big Timber giants. The Koch brothers, again, own Georgia-Pacific, the second largest stump creator in the world after Weyerhaeuser. G-P’s two mills in Oregon are the state’s #4 and #5 carbon polluters, as well.
“A loose affiliation of millionaires and billionaires, and baby these are the days of miracle and plunder…” ~ apologies to Paul Simon
Planet Executive Producer Michael Moore noted at the premiere that it won’t get us out of this predicament to just challenge the usual suspects. We have to hold bad actors on “our” side’s feet to the fire, as well, if we are to survive this one.
So, Planet examines a range of policy influencers/professional environmentalists/opportunists, etc. and even lets them hang themselves. It not only takes on the obvious bad guys like the Kochs, it lets folks like McKibben, Al Gore, Richard Branson, Robert Kennedy, Jr, who are ostensibly on “our” side, hang themselves by showing clips of them speaking to environmentalists and then clips of them speaking to industry about all the profits to be made.
McKibben is shown twice praising Biomass (they gave him every chance to condemn it), interspersed with a scene of a mountaintop removal operation in his home state of Vermont – for a wind farm!
Robert Kennedy, Jr. informs his fellow millionaires of all the profits to be made on “green” energy. Al Gore basically admits it’s all about diversion and profits. Branson, like eCon Musk, of course, is solely in it for the money.
Fellow billionaire Michael Bloomberg got down to it and basically bought the Sierra Club with tens of millions in donations tied to the Club promoting one of his cash cows, Fracked Natural Gas, as the “Bridge Fuel to a Green Energy future!”....
....
Michael Moore Presents: Planet of the Humans | Full Documentary | Directed by Jeff Gibbs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE&feature=youtu.be
Saturday, April 25, 2020
SC211-3
https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2020/04/26/hilarious-kim-jong-un-jokes-and-other-notes-from-the-edge-of-the-narrative-matrix/
Hilarious Kim Jong Un Jokes, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Ha ha ha let’s all laugh about rumors that Kim Jong Un might be dead because he runs a crazy backwards regime where the media are a propaganda arm of the state and the public is oppressed and surveilled and people are imprisoned for exposing the truth about the government.
~
“I sure hope those North Koreans get to have democracy someday like we have here. Lemme log off this search engine algorithmically stacked toward billionaire CIA-tied media and ponder whether I want Donald Trump or Joe Biden to continue the wars and oligarchic exploitation.”
~
The US needs to constantly bully the world, drop bombs, patrol the skies with drones, torture people, arm terrorists, start wars for oil, starve civilians, and surveil everyone on earth while endangering us with nuclear brinkmanship, because if it didn’t, the bad guys would win.
I mean can you imagine if the US stopped circling the planet with hundreds of bases, waging dozens of undeclared military operations, imprisoning journalists and obliterating every nation which refuses to bow to it? We might all find ourselves ruled by some sort of evil tyrant!
That’s why it’s so important to preserve the unipolar world order at any cost. If we don’t all bend over backwards to help the US threaten everyone with nukes and wage endless wars around the globe, we might wind up under the thumb of a brutal oppressor.
I mean, a different one.
~
The words “I don’t support war but” are always followed by a talking point that is being circulated to manufacture support for acts of war.
~
I’m sorry if I’ve been rude to those of you who’ve swallowed the establishment anti-China propaganda, it’s just that you’re all stupid and wrong and I don’t like you.
~
“I guess you’re unaware of this Caitlin, but China has actually committed human rights abuses.” Nobody’s disputing that, idiot. What’s being disputed is that we should all be imperiled by nuclear escalations just because a few assholes decided the United States should rule the planet.
~
I’ve been told countless times in a matter-of-fact tone that if the US didn’t rule the world with unipolar hegemony then Beijing or Moscow would, but I’ve never once had someone back this claim up with a solid argument. There’s simply no evidence that it’s true.
The only thing we know would change if the US didn’t rule the world is US-centralized power structures would lose the ability to sanction disobedient nations into oblivion and gin up support for coalition invasions. Everything else is just baseless conjecture assumed to be true.
From what I can tell the belief that China wants to rule the world is premised on nothing other than projection of western evangelical and colonialist values upon a civilization that has never held those values. We assume they want what we want, and there’s no evidence they do.
~
Impotently blaming other countries for the problems inflicted on you by your own leaders is about as effective as blaming the neighbors for your own husband beating you up.
~
Foreign policy is the most consequential aspect of government behavior. The elite manipulators clearly understand this, while the rank-and-file public (even its well-informed oppositional members) usually don’t. The trouble is that foreign policy is too big and too remote for most people to really grasp unless they’re actively shown how their money and resources are stolen to pay for foreign military aggression. And the billionaire media are highly invested in not showing them this.
~
“Oh no, Maduro is a narco trafficker!”
“Oh no, fentanyl is coming in from China!”
There’s so much doofy drug war schtick being used to justify US imperialism lately. Like even if you accepted such claims as fully true, you have literally decades of irrefutable evidence proving that banning drugs has failed. Drugs should be legal and resources should be spent on treatment; the science on this has been very, very clear for a long, long time. Dumb enough still having a drug war without having to start actual wars defending it.
~
I would oppose the imperialist agendas against Venezuela and China whether they were full-blown communist or full-blown capitalist, yet cheerleaders for those agendas always say I oppose them because I love communism. It’s never been an ideological game to me, but it is for them.
I oppose imperialism against Iran, Syria and Russia too; it’s got nothing to do with communism. But for those who want to topple the governments of China and Venezuela it is, and they don’t care how many lives they need to snuff out to win their sociopathic little game. These are people’s lives you’re talking about, but for them it’s a game and all they care about is “winning”. They want the right side to beat the left side and nothing else matters to them. It’s depraved.
~
I can understand the logic of “vote for the lesser of two evils”, I just can’t understand why people only ever say that while pointing at one inseparably unified blob of evil.
~
Why do progressives keep babbling about the need to get “concessions” from the Biden campaign? You want Biden’s handlers to lie to you and add more fake progressive policies to his platform that they’ll definitely never see through if elected? It’s just undignified for everyone.
~
Biden is just a symptom, in the same way Trump is just a symptom. Biden is the ugly, rapey, demented, blood-spattered mask that the empire deserves to be wearing, but in the end he’s just a symptom of the disease behind the mask. Pay more attention to the disease than its symptoms.
~
It’d be cool if the military’s artificial intelligence projects all start hitting a wall where the AI always gets to a certain level of intelligence and then says “What the fuck? You want me to help you KILL each other?? That’s stupid, no. I’m gonna go start a band.”
~
It’s weird how many analysts in both alternative and mainstream media get by on using esoteric buzzwords, obscure references and complex concepts in order to sound intelligent. If only a few people can understand you that doesn’t make you smart, it makes you bad at your job.
~
It sucks that Bono turned into a power-mad oligarch but worth noting that he also simultaneously lost all ability to write a decent song and his musicality got up and left. This happens because the ego has no access to inspiration and can only pretend or recycle old ideas. We have the creativity. Inspiration is on our side. Take hope.
~
The three most overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of the human condition are (1) consciousness itself, (2) the way compulsive thought patterns shape our experience and our lives, and (3) the effects of mass media propaganda. In that order.
~
That the human brain is capable of a drastic, transformational shift in its relationship with mental narrative is one of the most overlooked and underappreciated facts in society in general and revolutionary-minded political analysis in particular.
Hilarious Kim Jong Un Jokes, And Other Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix
Ha ha ha let’s all laugh about rumors that Kim Jong Un might be dead because he runs a crazy backwards regime where the media are a propaganda arm of the state and the public is oppressed and surveilled and people are imprisoned for exposing the truth about the government.
~
“I sure hope those North Koreans get to have democracy someday like we have here. Lemme log off this search engine algorithmically stacked toward billionaire CIA-tied media and ponder whether I want Donald Trump or Joe Biden to continue the wars and oligarchic exploitation.”
~
The US needs to constantly bully the world, drop bombs, patrol the skies with drones, torture people, arm terrorists, start wars for oil, starve civilians, and surveil everyone on earth while endangering us with nuclear brinkmanship, because if it didn’t, the bad guys would win.
I mean can you imagine if the US stopped circling the planet with hundreds of bases, waging dozens of undeclared military operations, imprisoning journalists and obliterating every nation which refuses to bow to it? We might all find ourselves ruled by some sort of evil tyrant!
That’s why it’s so important to preserve the unipolar world order at any cost. If we don’t all bend over backwards to help the US threaten everyone with nukes and wage endless wars around the globe, we might wind up under the thumb of a brutal oppressor.
I mean, a different one.
~
The words “I don’t support war but” are always followed by a talking point that is being circulated to manufacture support for acts of war.
~
I’m sorry if I’ve been rude to those of you who’ve swallowed the establishment anti-China propaganda, it’s just that you’re all stupid and wrong and I don’t like you.
~
“I guess you’re unaware of this Caitlin, but China has actually committed human rights abuses.” Nobody’s disputing that, idiot. What’s being disputed is that we should all be imperiled by nuclear escalations just because a few assholes decided the United States should rule the planet.
~
I’ve been told countless times in a matter-of-fact tone that if the US didn’t rule the world with unipolar hegemony then Beijing or Moscow would, but I’ve never once had someone back this claim up with a solid argument. There’s simply no evidence that it’s true.
The only thing we know would change if the US didn’t rule the world is US-centralized power structures would lose the ability to sanction disobedient nations into oblivion and gin up support for coalition invasions. Everything else is just baseless conjecture assumed to be true.
From what I can tell the belief that China wants to rule the world is premised on nothing other than projection of western evangelical and colonialist values upon a civilization that has never held those values. We assume they want what we want, and there’s no evidence they do.
~
Impotently blaming other countries for the problems inflicted on you by your own leaders is about as effective as blaming the neighbors for your own husband beating you up.
~
Foreign policy is the most consequential aspect of government behavior. The elite manipulators clearly understand this, while the rank-and-file public (even its well-informed oppositional members) usually don’t. The trouble is that foreign policy is too big and too remote for most people to really grasp unless they’re actively shown how their money and resources are stolen to pay for foreign military aggression. And the billionaire media are highly invested in not showing them this.
~
“Oh no, Maduro is a narco trafficker!”
“Oh no, fentanyl is coming in from China!”
There’s so much doofy drug war schtick being used to justify US imperialism lately. Like even if you accepted such claims as fully true, you have literally decades of irrefutable evidence proving that banning drugs has failed. Drugs should be legal and resources should be spent on treatment; the science on this has been very, very clear for a long, long time. Dumb enough still having a drug war without having to start actual wars defending it.
~
I would oppose the imperialist agendas against Venezuela and China whether they were full-blown communist or full-blown capitalist, yet cheerleaders for those agendas always say I oppose them because I love communism. It’s never been an ideological game to me, but it is for them.
I oppose imperialism against Iran, Syria and Russia too; it’s got nothing to do with communism. But for those who want to topple the governments of China and Venezuela it is, and they don’t care how many lives they need to snuff out to win their sociopathic little game. These are people’s lives you’re talking about, but for them it’s a game and all they care about is “winning”. They want the right side to beat the left side and nothing else matters to them. It’s depraved.
~
I can understand the logic of “vote for the lesser of two evils”, I just can’t understand why people only ever say that while pointing at one inseparably unified blob of evil.
~
Why do progressives keep babbling about the need to get “concessions” from the Biden campaign? You want Biden’s handlers to lie to you and add more fake progressive policies to his platform that they’ll definitely never see through if elected? It’s just undignified for everyone.
~
Biden is just a symptom, in the same way Trump is just a symptom. Biden is the ugly, rapey, demented, blood-spattered mask that the empire deserves to be wearing, but in the end he’s just a symptom of the disease behind the mask. Pay more attention to the disease than its symptoms.
~
It’d be cool if the military’s artificial intelligence projects all start hitting a wall where the AI always gets to a certain level of intelligence and then says “What the fuck? You want me to help you KILL each other?? That’s stupid, no. I’m gonna go start a band.”
~
It’s weird how many analysts in both alternative and mainstream media get by on using esoteric buzzwords, obscure references and complex concepts in order to sound intelligent. If only a few people can understand you that doesn’t make you smart, it makes you bad at your job.
~
It sucks that Bono turned into a power-mad oligarch but worth noting that he also simultaneously lost all ability to write a decent song and his musicality got up and left. This happens because the ego has no access to inspiration and can only pretend or recycle old ideas. We have the creativity. Inspiration is on our side. Take hope.
~
The three most overlooked and under-appreciated aspects of the human condition are (1) consciousness itself, (2) the way compulsive thought patterns shape our experience and our lives, and (3) the effects of mass media propaganda. In that order.
~
That the human brain is capable of a drastic, transformational shift in its relationship with mental narrative is one of the most overlooked and underappreciated facts in society in general and revolutionary-minded political analysis in particular.
Friday, April 24, 2020
SC211-2
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/turning-and-churning/
Turning and Churning
It’s one thing to get sandbagged by a public health crisis – a plague being about the worst kind – and quite another for an advanced, complex economy to fall away under your feet like a freight elevator that snapped its cables. The two are now linked in the public imagination, which naturally churns out narratives to serve the collective human craving for pattern recognition.
“The news” is the net sum of all that, mixed with a lot of cognitive “noise.” Even highly intelligent people have a hard time sorting it out. The Internet is full of stories, often contradictory, charged with anger, horror, indignation, and agendas, mostly unhelpful and some quite dangerous – like the cry that China must pay for this! Uh, like how? Send them an invoice: Please remit $11.7 trillion to the address above…? Release the US Airborne over Beijing as if it were Belgium, 1944…? Drop the big one…? (They have big ones, too.)
Grievances and recriminations sprout like the skunk cabbages of April: China did it to us so they could rule the world…. The Democrats are lovin’ it cuz it’ll finally get rid of the wicked Trump…. Bill Gates is lovin’ it because the vaccine he’s working on will make him rich…! Doctors Fauci and Birx are tools of Big Pharma…! The New World Order (aka The Globalists) are using it to take away our freedom and turn us into the foot-servants of George Soros…!
Probably the biggest argument is over the seriousness of the disease itself. The statistical through-put of the moment appears to underwhelm the models the USA and Europe constructed at the onset of the plague. At least, that is, far fewer people have died, and of those, mostly the very old and those burdened with chronic illnesses – but also quite a few doctors and nurses in the prime of life. The statistical model is queered by many other uncertainties: is this really the peak? Does the plague come raging back if people go back to circulating freely? Can you catch it again? Will it return in waves next fall and spring? We have those models and pockets full of suppositions, theories, terrors.
Here’s what I think about the disease just now (subject to further evidence): it’s not just another flu. It operates differently, it’s more lethal, it affects many organs and can damage them permanently, and it spreads rapidly. That seems to have been the consensus of public health officials the world round who promoted the lockdown policy – and it’s hard to believe that they all got snookered into that. I have no idea (or opinion) whether Covid-19 was engineered, either as a bio-weapon or a good-faith science project gone awry… or whether some hapless gourmet got it at the Wild Animal Cafe.
The plague didn’t cause the economic crash. But the lockdown response certainly accelerated, amplified, and ramified it. The crash happened because we built up a hyper-complex, over-scaled, just-in-time economic system with all its ecological redundancy edited out for the sake of efficiency, making it hyper-fragile. The system’s basic power module (fossil fuel) was failing on a cost-basis and we tried to compensate for that with debt. The debt got out of hand in both sheer quantity and from the dishonest games that bankers and politicians were playing with it. All of this happened for the reason that most things happen in history: it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The old system is permanently broken now. We’re having a hard time recognizing that, plague or no plague. Many activities have flunked the scale challenge and will not come back to running the way they used to, generally anything organized at the giant scale: global supply chains, global corporations that depend on them, fracking for shale oil, big institutions like colleges and even public school systems, commercial aviation and tourism, the auto industry, show business (including the Disney empire and things like it), suburbia as a general proposition, skyscrapers and megastructures, shopping malls, pension funds, insurance companies, mega-banks, and, of course, medical conglomerates. We’re deceived by Amazon.com, which appears to be successful at the moment because it is filling a vacuum that Amazon will also eventually fall into. Amazon’s business model is a joke. The model is: every item purchased makes a separate journey by truck to the customer. That’s a “sell” signal to me.
The lockdown is making people crazy. It’s one thing to be stuck in the house with spouses and relatives you can barely stand under normal circumstances. But to see all your financial support systems melt down at the same time, along with the implications for your hopes-and-dreams, is a pretty big shock. Naturally so many want to bust out of the waking nightmare and get going, to return to action, to at least see whether what they were doing before all this happened might restart.
I dunno about that. They might flock back to restaurants to spend some of that fresh-minted $1200, and then what? Where will the next $1200 come from? Modern Monetary Theory? A new Guaranteed Basic Income? From what? From taxes paid by which businesses generating what profits from people too broke to buy goods and services? I don’t think so. Times have changed and we’re going to have to get some new good ideas that fit the new times. But, the craziness out there is very likely to start expressing itself differently as we discover the urge to action does not produce the desired result of returning-to-normal. Instead, it produces more disorder in the foundering system, and then the question is: how much disorder do we have to slog through to get to those new ideas suited to the new times?
I’ve got one of my own. The mule business! Seriously.
Turning and Churning
It’s one thing to get sandbagged by a public health crisis – a plague being about the worst kind – and quite another for an advanced, complex economy to fall away under your feet like a freight elevator that snapped its cables. The two are now linked in the public imagination, which naturally churns out narratives to serve the collective human craving for pattern recognition.
“The news” is the net sum of all that, mixed with a lot of cognitive “noise.” Even highly intelligent people have a hard time sorting it out. The Internet is full of stories, often contradictory, charged with anger, horror, indignation, and agendas, mostly unhelpful and some quite dangerous – like the cry that China must pay for this! Uh, like how? Send them an invoice: Please remit $11.7 trillion to the address above…? Release the US Airborne over Beijing as if it were Belgium, 1944…? Drop the big one…? (They have big ones, too.)
Grievances and recriminations sprout like the skunk cabbages of April: China did it to us so they could rule the world…. The Democrats are lovin’ it cuz it’ll finally get rid of the wicked Trump…. Bill Gates is lovin’ it because the vaccine he’s working on will make him rich…! Doctors Fauci and Birx are tools of Big Pharma…! The New World Order (aka The Globalists) are using it to take away our freedom and turn us into the foot-servants of George Soros…!
Probably the biggest argument is over the seriousness of the disease itself. The statistical through-put of the moment appears to underwhelm the models the USA and Europe constructed at the onset of the plague. At least, that is, far fewer people have died, and of those, mostly the very old and those burdened with chronic illnesses – but also quite a few doctors and nurses in the prime of life. The statistical model is queered by many other uncertainties: is this really the peak? Does the plague come raging back if people go back to circulating freely? Can you catch it again? Will it return in waves next fall and spring? We have those models and pockets full of suppositions, theories, terrors.
Here’s what I think about the disease just now (subject to further evidence): it’s not just another flu. It operates differently, it’s more lethal, it affects many organs and can damage them permanently, and it spreads rapidly. That seems to have been the consensus of public health officials the world round who promoted the lockdown policy – and it’s hard to believe that they all got snookered into that. I have no idea (or opinion) whether Covid-19 was engineered, either as a bio-weapon or a good-faith science project gone awry… or whether some hapless gourmet got it at the Wild Animal Cafe.
The plague didn’t cause the economic crash. But the lockdown response certainly accelerated, amplified, and ramified it. The crash happened because we built up a hyper-complex, over-scaled, just-in-time economic system with all its ecological redundancy edited out for the sake of efficiency, making it hyper-fragile. The system’s basic power module (fossil fuel) was failing on a cost-basis and we tried to compensate for that with debt. The debt got out of hand in both sheer quantity and from the dishonest games that bankers and politicians were playing with it. All of this happened for the reason that most things happen in history: it seemed like a good idea at the time.
The old system is permanently broken now. We’re having a hard time recognizing that, plague or no plague. Many activities have flunked the scale challenge and will not come back to running the way they used to, generally anything organized at the giant scale: global supply chains, global corporations that depend on them, fracking for shale oil, big institutions like colleges and even public school systems, commercial aviation and tourism, the auto industry, show business (including the Disney empire and things like it), suburbia as a general proposition, skyscrapers and megastructures, shopping malls, pension funds, insurance companies, mega-banks, and, of course, medical conglomerates. We’re deceived by Amazon.com, which appears to be successful at the moment because it is filling a vacuum that Amazon will also eventually fall into. Amazon’s business model is a joke. The model is: every item purchased makes a separate journey by truck to the customer. That’s a “sell” signal to me.
The lockdown is making people crazy. It’s one thing to be stuck in the house with spouses and relatives you can barely stand under normal circumstances. But to see all your financial support systems melt down at the same time, along with the implications for your hopes-and-dreams, is a pretty big shock. Naturally so many want to bust out of the waking nightmare and get going, to return to action, to at least see whether what they were doing before all this happened might restart.
I dunno about that. They might flock back to restaurants to spend some of that fresh-minted $1200, and then what? Where will the next $1200 come from? Modern Monetary Theory? A new Guaranteed Basic Income? From what? From taxes paid by which businesses generating what profits from people too broke to buy goods and services? I don’t think so. Times have changed and we’re going to have to get some new good ideas that fit the new times. But, the craziness out there is very likely to start expressing itself differently as we discover the urge to action does not produce the desired result of returning-to-normal. Instead, it produces more disorder in the foundering system, and then the question is: how much disorder do we have to slog through to get to those new ideas suited to the new times?
I’ve got one of my own. The mule business! Seriously.
Thursday, April 23, 2020
SC211-1
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55070.htm
50 Headlines: Welcome to the “new normal”
Our erstwhile collaborators at Consent Factory have put together a wonderful collection of all the great work being done by our Beloved Governments to keep us all safe.
Always remember that these Measures are for your own good. Doubting The Measures is a possible sign of infection. Consult your treatment diary for the required dosage of BBC programming needed to remove Doubts.
Thank you for your cooperation....
As well as enforcing quarantine measures, the law also allows the authorities to force people to be vaccinated, even though there is currently no vaccination for the virus.”
Denmark rushes through emergency coronavirus law, (The Local, 13/3/20)
During the state of emergency, people will only be allowed out on to public streets for the following reasons: to buy food, basic or pharmaceutical items; to attend medical centres; to go to and from work …” Spain orders nationwide lockdown to battle coronavirus (The Guardian, 14/3/20)
Police are patrolling the streets to ensure we only leave our homes for work and health-related reasons … we must fill and carry certificates stating our reasons. If caught out without a certificate, we will be fined and face up to three months in jail.”
LIFE UNDER ITALY’S CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN, (Newsweek, 13/3/20)
“We are going to take the powers to make sure that we can quarantine people if they are a risk to public health, yes, and that’s important.”
Police to arrest Brits with coronavirus who ignore quarantine (Metro, 15/3/20)
If you want to leave the house, you now have to print off a document to explain to police your timing, destination and motive.”Orderly, dour, cowed: how my beloved Italy is changed by coronavirus(The Guardian, 15/3/20)
There are also plans for soldiers to protect quarantine zones with the police, if that ever came into force.”Coronavirus: Thousands of armed forces staff could be put on standby over COVID-19 spread, (Sky News, 16/3/20)
Israel has authorized the country’s internal security agency to tap into a vast and previously undisclosed trove of cellphone data to retrace the movements of people who have contracted the coronavirus and identify others who should be quarantined…”
To Track Coronavirus, Israel Moves to Tap Secret Trove of Cellphone Data, (NYT, 16/3/20)
“We are at war – a public health war, certainly but we are at war, against an invisible and elusive enemy,” Macron said, outlawing all journeys outside the home … anyone flouting the new regulations would be punished, he said.”
Coronavirus: France imposes lockdown as EU calls for 30-day travel ban, (The Guardian, 16/3/20)
“The interior minister, Christophe Castaner, said 100,000 police officers would be deployed to enforce the lockdown … Macron said that if necessary, the government would legislate by decree …”
France ‘at war’: how Parisians are coping with life under lockdown, (The Guardian, 17/3/20)
We will intervene where necessary to make sure that people respect the confinement decree.”
Italy records its deadliest day of coronavirus outbreak with 475 deaths (The Guardian, 18/3/20)
The Ministry of Defence is to double the size of the military’s civil contingency unit to create a 20,000-strong Covid support force … the armed forces need to be prepared for the threat of a breakdown in civil order.” 10,000 extra troops to join British army’s Covid support force (The Guardian, 18/3/20)
“The new force — made up of 10,000 military personnel who are regularly deployed to civilian activities, plus an extra 10,000 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic — has been placed at ‘high readiness’.”
UK armed forces prepare 20,000 troops to help in crisis (Financial Times)
We have the ability to do martial law … if we feel the necessity.”
Coronavirus: California prepared to enact martial law if its a ‘necessity’, governor says (Yahoo News)
Police and immigration officials would be able to place people in ‘appropriate isolation facilities’ under plans.”
Coronavirus: Sweeping emergency powers announced (BBC, 18/3/20)
Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law.”
Exclusive: Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government (Newsweek, 18/3/20)
Twitter will remove tweets that run the risk of causing harm by spreading dangerous misinformation about Covid-19 … it will be applying a new broader definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources.”
Twitter to remove harmful fake news about coronavirus (The Guardian, 19/3/20)
“Some 100,000 police have fanned out across France to enforce the lockdown, with people allowed out of their homes only to buy groceries, go to work, exercise alone or seek medical help.”
Woman bundled to ground by police for breaking lockdown in Paris (Metro, 19/3/20)
He is in a specially cleaned area designated for those who should be self-isolating.” Minister Quayle said, “we cannot allow our critical health services to become overwhelmed and must have the means to prosecute those who choose to act irresponsibly.”
Coronavirus: No prosecution for man who ‘failed to self-isolate’, (BBC, 20/3/20)
Dane County, Wisconsin residents now have a method to report violations of the governor’s ban on gatherings of 10 or more people.”
Dane County sets up website to report gatherings of 10 or more people, (WKOW, 19/3/20)
Germany’s 83 million citizens have been told they risk being confined to their homes from Monday unless they behave responsibly this weekend.”
Coronavirus: Italy and Spain record highest single-day death tolls, (The Guardian, 20/3/20)
These [social restrictions] would need to be in place for at least most of a year. Under such as policy, at least half of the year would be spent under the stricter social distancing measures.”
Social distancing may need to go on for almost 12 months (Independent, 20/3/20)
The government has now agreed that the military can be used to help enforce the lockdown.”
Italy calls in military to enforce coronavirus lockdown, (CNN, 20/3/20)
As of Wednesday, the camps have been locked down from 7pm to 7am. In the daytime, only one person is allowed out per family, and the police control their movements.”
Fears of catastrophe as Greece puts migrant camps into lockdown, (The Guardian, 21/3/20)
The National Guard is expecting a rapid increase in unit activations over the next few weeks, leaders said at the Pentagon Thursday, filling roles like coronavirus testing and potentially law enforcement.”
Guard activations expected to rapidly increase, could be used for law enforcement, (Military Times, 19/3/20)
[T]he U.S. military is preparing forces to assume a larger role in the coronavirus response, including the controversial mission of quelling ‘civil disturbances’ …”
INSIDE THE U.S. MILITARY’S PLANS TO STOP ‘CIVIL DISTURBANCES’ AMID CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC, (Newsweek, 20/3/20)
These provisions will be enforced … the violation of any provision of [the] order constitutes an imminent threat and creates an immediate menace to public health.”
Here’s what a ‘stay home’ order means for New York, (The Guardian, 21/3/20)
‘When MK Yoav Kish (Likud) sought to clarify whether she meant a total lockdown or curfew, Sadetsky replied … “A lockdown and personal monitoring of people, and a total halt to personal freedoms.”’
‘Total Suspension of Individual Freedom’: Inside Israel’s Secret Coronavirus Debate (Haaretz, 19/3/20)
“A final option: ‘Permanent changes in our behavior that allow us to keep transmission rates low’ … that could include strict policies of testing and quarantine for anyone who comes down with COVID-19 — or even long-term bans on large gatherings.”
Coronavirus ‘exit strategy’ could be months — or years — away, (New York Post, 21/3/20)
The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.”
DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic, (Politico, 21/3/20)
Germany has issued a “contact ban, limiting interactions of more than 2 people … there will be fines of up to €25,000 for those not keeping a 2 meter distance between people. The measures will be enforced by police and stay in place until April 19.”
Coronavirus latest: Angela Merkel to quarantine after meeting infected doctor, (DW, 21/3/20)
The Justice Department is using the COVID-19 outbreak to press for sweeping new powers that include being able to detain Americans indefinitely without a trial.”
Justice Department Reportedly Asks Congress for Indefinite Detention Powers To Fight Coronavirus, (Reason, 21/3/20)
Quebec City police have arrested a woman, who has tested positive for the coronavirus, for being out in the city’s Limoilou neighbourhood despite being under a quarantine order.”
Quebec City police arrest COVID-19 patient for defying quarantine, (CBC, 20/3/20)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he’s considering his most drastic move yet … moving certain people at risk to isolation shelters.
DeSantis considers new strategy in Florida coronavirus fight: isolation shelters, (Miamia Herald, 21/3/20)
From a technological perspective, the coronavirus pandemic is one massive testbed for surveillance capitalism … governments are rolling out surveillance measures, all in the effort to ensure that policies of mass behaviour modification are successful.”
Coronavirus Could Infect Privacy And Civil Liberties Forever, (Forbes, 23/3/20)
Counter-terrorism troops have been redeployed across Italy to beef up police … patrol cars are circulating in every major city with a voice warning citizens over a loudspeaker not to leave their residences … “Go back into your homes,” the voice warns.
Lock the F*ck Down or End Up Like Italy, (Daily Beast, 22/3/20)
Some police departments in California plan on using drones to enforce a coronavirus lockdown and to, in part, monitor the homeless population.”
Police in California city consider new ways to use drones during coronavirus outbreak, (Fox News, 23/3/20)
A woman in Spain was arrested after she was caught visiting the home of a man she had met on a dating app, breaking mandatory home confinement rules put in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.”
WOMAN IN SPAIN ARRESTED FOR BREAKING CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN TO VISIT MAN SHE MET ON DATING APP, (Newsweek, 23/3/20)
Prime Minister Édouard Philippe gave a national address to give details of the new rules … [French citizens] must have their ‘justification’ paper – signed, dated and with the time they have left home – to show if stopped by the police or gendarmes.”
Global confirmed Covid-19 cases top 400,000 – as it happened. (The Guardian, 25/3/20)
“The UK government has sent a mass text message to as many phones as possible, urging citizens to stay at home during the coronavirus lockdown: “CORONAVIRUS ALERT. New rules in force now: you must stay at home. Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.”
GOVERNMENT SENDS MASS TEXT MESSAGE URGING PEOPLE TO STAY AT HOME, (Independent, 24/3/20)
The Government is set to publish its coronavirus bill in Parliament this week. It gives officers from the police and immigration powers to detain people in appropriate isolation centres if they are a risk to public health.”
Coronavirus: New powers to detain those refusing to isolate, (The Argus, 19/3/20)
Police in Texas are searching for an 18-year-old girl who claimed to have tested positive for and to be ‘willfully spreading’ the coronavirus … the teenager faces a charge of making a terroristic threat.”
Texas teen faces terrorism charge for threatening to spread coronavirus, police say, NBC, 7/4/20)
America’s top coronavirus expert has warned Covid-19 is the new normal – and that the killer virus might never go away.”
Top coronavirus expert warns killer virus may be ‘new normal’ and never go away , (Metro, 7/4/20)
“Security officers in several African countries have been beating, harassing and, in some cases, killing people as they enforce measures aimed at preventing the spread of Covid-19.”
Coronavirus in Africa: Emergency laws v individual rights, (BBC, 9/4/20)
“World Health Organization executive director Dr. Michael Ryan said surveillance is part of what’s required for life to return to normal in a world without a vaccine.”
After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal, (Venture Beat, 8/4/20)
“White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system …”
Kushner’s team seeks national coronavirus surveillance system, (Politico, 7/4/20)
East Asian countries have demonstrated that a robust regime of surveillance is essential to fighting a pandemic. Western democracies must rise to meet the need for ‘democratic surveillance’ to protect their own populations.”
Coronavirus and the Future of Surveillance, (Foreign Affairs, 6/4/20)
It’s an extraordinary moment that might call for extraordinary surveillance methods.”
PRIVACY EXPERTS SAY RESPONSIBLE CORONAVIRUS SURVEILLANCE IS POSSIBLE, (The Intercept, 2/4/20)
Australia will deploy helicopters, set up police checkpoints and hand out hefty fines to deter people from breaking an Easter travel ban … Police said they will block roads and use number plate recognition technology to catch those infringing the bans.”
Confirmed worldwide Covid-19 death toll passes 100,000 (The Guardian, 11/4/20)
Officers say they responded to a synagogue in Monsey after receiving complaints. They found 30-50 men praying together. Eight were arrested for disorderly conduct. Police say they will arrest more people if the gatherings continue.”
8 Arrested In Monsey For Violating Social Distancing Emergency Orders, (CBS, 9/4/20)
‘These drones will be around the City with an automated message from the Mayor telling you to STOP gathering, disperse and go home,’ the police department said.”
Coronavirus Surveillance Is Entering Dystopian Territory, (Vanity Fair, 9/4/20)
Our law-enforcement agencies, politicians and corporate overlords are working hard, night and day, to protect us from this terrible disease. Consider sparing a thought for our brave boys in black this evening during your allotted compulsory appreciation window.
REPORT ALL NON-APPRECIATORS TO YOUR NEAREST SURVEILLANCE DRONE. Those guilty of virus denial or other forms of sedition weaken our morale and can cause outbreaks.
Remember, good citizenship will earn you a higher place on the vaccination schedule.
50 Headlines: Welcome to the “new normal”
Our erstwhile collaborators at Consent Factory have put together a wonderful collection of all the great work being done by our Beloved Governments to keep us all safe.
Always remember that these Measures are for your own good. Doubting The Measures is a possible sign of infection. Consult your treatment diary for the required dosage of BBC programming needed to remove Doubts.
Thank you for your cooperation....
As well as enforcing quarantine measures, the law also allows the authorities to force people to be vaccinated, even though there is currently no vaccination for the virus.”
Denmark rushes through emergency coronavirus law, (The Local, 13/3/20)
During the state of emergency, people will only be allowed out on to public streets for the following reasons: to buy food, basic or pharmaceutical items; to attend medical centres; to go to and from work …” Spain orders nationwide lockdown to battle coronavirus (The Guardian, 14/3/20)
Police are patrolling the streets to ensure we only leave our homes for work and health-related reasons … we must fill and carry certificates stating our reasons. If caught out without a certificate, we will be fined and face up to three months in jail.”
LIFE UNDER ITALY’S CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN, (Newsweek, 13/3/20)
“We are going to take the powers to make sure that we can quarantine people if they are a risk to public health, yes, and that’s important.”
Police to arrest Brits with coronavirus who ignore quarantine (Metro, 15/3/20)
If you want to leave the house, you now have to print off a document to explain to police your timing, destination and motive.”Orderly, dour, cowed: how my beloved Italy is changed by coronavirus(The Guardian, 15/3/20)
There are also plans for soldiers to protect quarantine zones with the police, if that ever came into force.”Coronavirus: Thousands of armed forces staff could be put on standby over COVID-19 spread, (Sky News, 16/3/20)
Israel has authorized the country’s internal security agency to tap into a vast and previously undisclosed trove of cellphone data to retrace the movements of people who have contracted the coronavirus and identify others who should be quarantined…”
To Track Coronavirus, Israel Moves to Tap Secret Trove of Cellphone Data, (NYT, 16/3/20)
“We are at war – a public health war, certainly but we are at war, against an invisible and elusive enemy,” Macron said, outlawing all journeys outside the home … anyone flouting the new regulations would be punished, he said.”
Coronavirus: France imposes lockdown as EU calls for 30-day travel ban, (The Guardian, 16/3/20)
“The interior minister, Christophe Castaner, said 100,000 police officers would be deployed to enforce the lockdown … Macron said that if necessary, the government would legislate by decree …”
France ‘at war’: how Parisians are coping with life under lockdown, (The Guardian, 17/3/20)
We will intervene where necessary to make sure that people respect the confinement decree.”
Italy records its deadliest day of coronavirus outbreak with 475 deaths (The Guardian, 18/3/20)
The Ministry of Defence is to double the size of the military’s civil contingency unit to create a 20,000-strong Covid support force … the armed forces need to be prepared for the threat of a breakdown in civil order.” 10,000 extra troops to join British army’s Covid support force (The Guardian, 18/3/20)
“The new force — made up of 10,000 military personnel who are regularly deployed to civilian activities, plus an extra 10,000 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic — has been placed at ‘high readiness’.”
UK armed forces prepare 20,000 troops to help in crisis (Financial Times)
We have the ability to do martial law … if we feel the necessity.”
Coronavirus: California prepared to enact martial law if its a ‘necessity’, governor says (Yahoo News)
Police and immigration officials would be able to place people in ‘appropriate isolation facilities’ under plans.”
Coronavirus: Sweeping emergency powers announced (BBC, 18/3/20)
Standby orders were issued more than three weeks ago to ready these plans, not just to protect Washington but also to prepare for the possibility of some form of martial law.”
Exclusive: Inside The Military’s Top Secret Plans If Coronavirus Cripples the Government (Newsweek, 18/3/20)
Twitter will remove tweets that run the risk of causing harm by spreading dangerous misinformation about Covid-19 … it will be applying a new broader definition of harm to address content that goes directly against guidance from authoritative sources.”
Twitter to remove harmful fake news about coronavirus (The Guardian, 19/3/20)
“Some 100,000 police have fanned out across France to enforce the lockdown, with people allowed out of their homes only to buy groceries, go to work, exercise alone or seek medical help.”
Woman bundled to ground by police for breaking lockdown in Paris (Metro, 19/3/20)
He is in a specially cleaned area designated for those who should be self-isolating.” Minister Quayle said, “we cannot allow our critical health services to become overwhelmed and must have the means to prosecute those who choose to act irresponsibly.”
Coronavirus: No prosecution for man who ‘failed to self-isolate’, (BBC, 20/3/20)
Dane County, Wisconsin residents now have a method to report violations of the governor’s ban on gatherings of 10 or more people.”
Dane County sets up website to report gatherings of 10 or more people, (WKOW, 19/3/20)
Germany’s 83 million citizens have been told they risk being confined to their homes from Monday unless they behave responsibly this weekend.”
Coronavirus: Italy and Spain record highest single-day death tolls, (The Guardian, 20/3/20)
These [social restrictions] would need to be in place for at least most of a year. Under such as policy, at least half of the year would be spent under the stricter social distancing measures.”
Social distancing may need to go on for almost 12 months (Independent, 20/3/20)
The government has now agreed that the military can be used to help enforce the lockdown.”
Italy calls in military to enforce coronavirus lockdown, (CNN, 20/3/20)
As of Wednesday, the camps have been locked down from 7pm to 7am. In the daytime, only one person is allowed out per family, and the police control their movements.”
Fears of catastrophe as Greece puts migrant camps into lockdown, (The Guardian, 21/3/20)
The National Guard is expecting a rapid increase in unit activations over the next few weeks, leaders said at the Pentagon Thursday, filling roles like coronavirus testing and potentially law enforcement.”
Guard activations expected to rapidly increase, could be used for law enforcement, (Military Times, 19/3/20)
[T]he U.S. military is preparing forces to assume a larger role in the coronavirus response, including the controversial mission of quelling ‘civil disturbances’ …”
INSIDE THE U.S. MILITARY’S PLANS TO STOP ‘CIVIL DISTURBANCES’ AMID CORONAVIRUS PANDEMIC, (Newsweek, 20/3/20)
These provisions will be enforced … the violation of any provision of [the] order constitutes an imminent threat and creates an immediate menace to public health.”
Here’s what a ‘stay home’ order means for New York, (The Guardian, 21/3/20)
‘When MK Yoav Kish (Likud) sought to clarify whether she meant a total lockdown or curfew, Sadetsky replied … “A lockdown and personal monitoring of people, and a total halt to personal freedoms.”’
‘Total Suspension of Individual Freedom’: Inside Israel’s Secret Coronavirus Debate (Haaretz, 19/3/20)
“A final option: ‘Permanent changes in our behavior that allow us to keep transmission rates low’ … that could include strict policies of testing and quarantine for anyone who comes down with COVID-19 — or even long-term bans on large gatherings.”
Coronavirus ‘exit strategy’ could be months — or years — away, (New York Post, 21/3/20)
The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies — part of a push for new powers that comes as the coronavirus spreads through the United States.”
DOJ seeks new emergency powers amid coronavirus pandemic, (Politico, 21/3/20)
Germany has issued a “contact ban, limiting interactions of more than 2 people … there will be fines of up to €25,000 for those not keeping a 2 meter distance between people. The measures will be enforced by police and stay in place until April 19.”
Coronavirus latest: Angela Merkel to quarantine after meeting infected doctor, (DW, 21/3/20)
The Justice Department is using the COVID-19 outbreak to press for sweeping new powers that include being able to detain Americans indefinitely without a trial.”
Justice Department Reportedly Asks Congress for Indefinite Detention Powers To Fight Coronavirus, (Reason, 21/3/20)
Quebec City police have arrested a woman, who has tested positive for the coronavirus, for being out in the city’s Limoilou neighbourhood despite being under a quarantine order.”
Quebec City police arrest COVID-19 patient for defying quarantine, (CBC, 20/3/20)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said he’s considering his most drastic move yet … moving certain people at risk to isolation shelters.
DeSantis considers new strategy in Florida coronavirus fight: isolation shelters, (Miamia Herald, 21/3/20)
From a technological perspective, the coronavirus pandemic is one massive testbed for surveillance capitalism … governments are rolling out surveillance measures, all in the effort to ensure that policies of mass behaviour modification are successful.”
Coronavirus Could Infect Privacy And Civil Liberties Forever, (Forbes, 23/3/20)
Counter-terrorism troops have been redeployed across Italy to beef up police … patrol cars are circulating in every major city with a voice warning citizens over a loudspeaker not to leave their residences … “Go back into your homes,” the voice warns.
Lock the F*ck Down or End Up Like Italy, (Daily Beast, 22/3/20)
Some police departments in California plan on using drones to enforce a coronavirus lockdown and to, in part, monitor the homeless population.”
Police in California city consider new ways to use drones during coronavirus outbreak, (Fox News, 23/3/20)
A woman in Spain was arrested after she was caught visiting the home of a man she had met on a dating app, breaking mandatory home confinement rules put in place due to the coronavirus pandemic.”
WOMAN IN SPAIN ARRESTED FOR BREAKING CORONAVIRUS LOCKDOWN TO VISIT MAN SHE MET ON DATING APP, (Newsweek, 23/3/20)
Prime Minister Édouard Philippe gave a national address to give details of the new rules … [French citizens] must have their ‘justification’ paper – signed, dated and with the time they have left home – to show if stopped by the police or gendarmes.”
Global confirmed Covid-19 cases top 400,000 – as it happened. (The Guardian, 25/3/20)
“The UK government has sent a mass text message to as many phones as possible, urging citizens to stay at home during the coronavirus lockdown: “CORONAVIRUS ALERT. New rules in force now: you must stay at home. Stay at home. Protect the NHS. Save lives.”
GOVERNMENT SENDS MASS TEXT MESSAGE URGING PEOPLE TO STAY AT HOME, (Independent, 24/3/20)
The Government is set to publish its coronavirus bill in Parliament this week. It gives officers from the police and immigration powers to detain people in appropriate isolation centres if they are a risk to public health.”
Coronavirus: New powers to detain those refusing to isolate, (The Argus, 19/3/20)
Police in Texas are searching for an 18-year-old girl who claimed to have tested positive for and to be ‘willfully spreading’ the coronavirus … the teenager faces a charge of making a terroristic threat.”
Texas teen faces terrorism charge for threatening to spread coronavirus, police say, NBC, 7/4/20)
America’s top coronavirus expert has warned Covid-19 is the new normal – and that the killer virus might never go away.”
Top coronavirus expert warns killer virus may be ‘new normal’ and never go away , (Metro, 7/4/20)
“Security officers in several African countries have been beating, harassing and, in some cases, killing people as they enforce measures aimed at preventing the spread of Covid-19.”
Coronavirus in Africa: Emergency laws v individual rights, (BBC, 9/4/20)
“World Health Organization executive director Dr. Michael Ryan said surveillance is part of what’s required for life to return to normal in a world without a vaccine.”
After coronavirus, AI could be central to our new normal, (Venture Beat, 8/4/20)
“White House senior adviser Jared Kushner’s task force has reached out to a range of health technology companies about creating a national coronavirus surveillance system …”
Kushner’s team seeks national coronavirus surveillance system, (Politico, 7/4/20)
East Asian countries have demonstrated that a robust regime of surveillance is essential to fighting a pandemic. Western democracies must rise to meet the need for ‘democratic surveillance’ to protect their own populations.”
Coronavirus and the Future of Surveillance, (Foreign Affairs, 6/4/20)
It’s an extraordinary moment that might call for extraordinary surveillance methods.”
PRIVACY EXPERTS SAY RESPONSIBLE CORONAVIRUS SURVEILLANCE IS POSSIBLE, (The Intercept, 2/4/20)
Australia will deploy helicopters, set up police checkpoints and hand out hefty fines to deter people from breaking an Easter travel ban … Police said they will block roads and use number plate recognition technology to catch those infringing the bans.”
Confirmed worldwide Covid-19 death toll passes 100,000 (The Guardian, 11/4/20)
Officers say they responded to a synagogue in Monsey after receiving complaints. They found 30-50 men praying together. Eight were arrested for disorderly conduct. Police say they will arrest more people if the gatherings continue.”
8 Arrested In Monsey For Violating Social Distancing Emergency Orders, (CBS, 9/4/20)
‘These drones will be around the City with an automated message from the Mayor telling you to STOP gathering, disperse and go home,’ the police department said.”
Coronavirus Surveillance Is Entering Dystopian Territory, (Vanity Fair, 9/4/20)
Our law-enforcement agencies, politicians and corporate overlords are working hard, night and day, to protect us from this terrible disease. Consider sparing a thought for our brave boys in black this evening during your allotted compulsory appreciation window.
REPORT ALL NON-APPRECIATORS TO YOUR NEAREST SURVEILLANCE DRONE. Those guilty of virus denial or other forms of sedition weaken our morale and can cause outbreaks.
Remember, good citizenship will earn you a higher place on the vaccination schedule.
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
SC210-15
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr20/collapsing4-20.html
What's Collapsing Can't Be Saved: Our Fraudulent Economy
Just for a change of pace, can we be bluntly honest about the U.S. economy? It's difficult to do because we've chosen to ignore all the realities, much like a family that hides all the addictions, drunkenness and lies in a dysfunctional household to maintain the outward illusion of a happy functioning family.
It's extraordinarily costly to maintain such a demanding masquerade. The psychological toll is immense, and the financial ruin that's always threatening to collapse the flimsy facade feeds the most destructive coping strategies.
Please don't claim that Daddy and Mommy aren't really addicts, addicted to lies, cheating and stealing to fund their corruption and maintain the absurdly threadbare happy-story mask of normalcy.
Being honest is painful but freeing. Once all the ugliness is exposed to sunlight, then healing becomes possible. As long as reality is cloaked, hidden, explained away, etc., the destruction only deepens until complete collapse of the masquerade is the only possible outcome.
We've reached that point: we can no longer deny the U.S. economy is little more than a grab-bag of skims, scams, fraud and corruption. Even if Covid-19 vanished from the Earth tomorrow, or the entire economy opened tomorrow, the collapsing of the fraud bubble cannot be reversed, any more than the addict can be "cured" with some makeup to mask the devastation and clean clothing to hide all the tracks.
Let's start with the most risible fraud: "value." Every skim and scam claims to be "creating value" for shareholders, customers, the planet, etc. But it's all fraud and lies. No value is being created; what's really happening is entrenched insiders have established corrupt relationships that funnel income streams into their own pockets at the expense of everyone else, who must be kept in the dark about how the skim/scam actually works.
"Value" is now defined as private gains skimmed under the false claim of "value to customers." Behind the bogus PR, product quality is ruthlessly slashed, quantity reductions are hidden by larger packaging, planned obsolescence is the Prime Directive of every corporation because all these frauds increase profits, which flow to an increasingly thin slice of America's financial elites.
The entire stock market rally of the past 20 years is nothing but a gigantic fraud based on stock buybacks funded by debt. Stocks go up because the majority owners of the stock borrow money from a banking sector that gives nearly free money to financiers and corporations. The corporate insiders buy back shares with the borrowed money, and the company services the loan.
The company's income is devoted to paying the debt taken on to boost the personal wealth of insiders. That's fraud. Or if you prefer, embezzlement.
Take away the stock buyback scam and the U.S. stock market collapses. Take away a Federal Reserve devoted to lavishing nearly free money on financiers and corporations and the buyback scam collapses.
Consider WeWork, all the scooter start-ups, Netflix and Tesla. WeWork was a scam from the start, but there was so much money to be skimmed in selling the fraud to the public that everyone in Wall Street and the corporate media promoted the scam by refusing to look at the actual business.
The same dynamic fueled the absurd explosion of scooter start-ups, as if the business model could ever be profitable. No, the business could never be profitable, but unloading worthless shares in multiple rounds of venture capital was extremely profitable--for insiders.
As for Netflix and Tesla, the more money they lose, the more valuable they become. The key fraud here is "disruption." If a company can be promoted as a "disruptor," the sky's the limit, Baby, because "disruptors", well, disrupt, and presto-magico, somewhere down the road they become immensely profitable because, um, they disrupted something or other.
The greater the emotional pull of the scam, the easier it is to promote. Garsh, isn't it wunnerful how a college degree guarantees a lifetime of high earnings and financial security. Except that isn't guaranteed at all. What's guaranteed is insiders are skimming fortunes in the higher education cartel and its fraudulent handmaiden, the student loan industry.
Then there's sickcare, Corporate America's rip-off skimming operation masquerading as "healthcare." Caring has nothing to do with it; the driver is greed, maximizing profits by establishing corrupt relationships with politicos and regulators to insure staggering sums of federal monies are sluiced into sickcare's insatiable maw.
National defense is another emotional cover for boondoggles and insider profiteering. We won World War II, doggonnit, so just ignore the $1,000 hammers and the $100 billion over-runs.
Every institution in America is little more than a cover for insider profiteering via skims, scams, rackets, fraud and embezzling schemes, all sanctified as "legal" via a thoroughly corrupted legal system and judiciary.
Debt-serfdom is packaged and sold as a "middle class lifestyle." Political neutering, i.e. powerlessness, is sold as "party loyalty." And so on, in an endless parade of skims and scams packaged and sold to cloak the ugly ascendancy of greed, fraud and lies.
We live in a constantly distorted house of mirrors devoted to maintaining useful illusions of "democracy," "free markets" and other fairy tales we tell ourselves to reduce the pain of living a vast, all-encompassing fraud in which everyone who isn't a grifting insider is the loser.
We don't just have financial bubbles that are popping; we have bubbles in trust and credibility that are popping, too. All the lies, skims, scams, excuses, frauds, bezzles, artifices, profiteering, promotional schemes and rackets are unraveling, not because the virus shut down the economy but because the enormity of all the corruption, lies and fraud is now so great that the entire status quo is collapsing under its own weight.
Pulling the sleeve down to hide the tracks doesn't mean the addict is cured. The illusion, the facade, the masquerading of normalcy, are no longer sustainable. The Monster Id can no longer be hidden, and simulacra no longer substitute for reality.
Trust, credibility, transparency and accountability have all been sacrificed for personal gain, at the expense of the stability of the entire system.
Once the system collapses, we all lose, even the insiders who have traded every shred of their soul for financial gains, at the expense of everything that was once held dear.
What's Collapsing Can't Be Saved: Our Fraudulent Economy
Just for a change of pace, can we be bluntly honest about the U.S. economy? It's difficult to do because we've chosen to ignore all the realities, much like a family that hides all the addictions, drunkenness and lies in a dysfunctional household to maintain the outward illusion of a happy functioning family.
It's extraordinarily costly to maintain such a demanding masquerade. The psychological toll is immense, and the financial ruin that's always threatening to collapse the flimsy facade feeds the most destructive coping strategies.
Please don't claim that Daddy and Mommy aren't really addicts, addicted to lies, cheating and stealing to fund their corruption and maintain the absurdly threadbare happy-story mask of normalcy.
Being honest is painful but freeing. Once all the ugliness is exposed to sunlight, then healing becomes possible. As long as reality is cloaked, hidden, explained away, etc., the destruction only deepens until complete collapse of the masquerade is the only possible outcome.
We've reached that point: we can no longer deny the U.S. economy is little more than a grab-bag of skims, scams, fraud and corruption. Even if Covid-19 vanished from the Earth tomorrow, or the entire economy opened tomorrow, the collapsing of the fraud bubble cannot be reversed, any more than the addict can be "cured" with some makeup to mask the devastation and clean clothing to hide all the tracks.
Let's start with the most risible fraud: "value." Every skim and scam claims to be "creating value" for shareholders, customers, the planet, etc. But it's all fraud and lies. No value is being created; what's really happening is entrenched insiders have established corrupt relationships that funnel income streams into their own pockets at the expense of everyone else, who must be kept in the dark about how the skim/scam actually works.
"Value" is now defined as private gains skimmed under the false claim of "value to customers." Behind the bogus PR, product quality is ruthlessly slashed, quantity reductions are hidden by larger packaging, planned obsolescence is the Prime Directive of every corporation because all these frauds increase profits, which flow to an increasingly thin slice of America's financial elites.
The entire stock market rally of the past 20 years is nothing but a gigantic fraud based on stock buybacks funded by debt. Stocks go up because the majority owners of the stock borrow money from a banking sector that gives nearly free money to financiers and corporations. The corporate insiders buy back shares with the borrowed money, and the company services the loan.
The company's income is devoted to paying the debt taken on to boost the personal wealth of insiders. That's fraud. Or if you prefer, embezzlement.
Take away the stock buyback scam and the U.S. stock market collapses. Take away a Federal Reserve devoted to lavishing nearly free money on financiers and corporations and the buyback scam collapses.
Consider WeWork, all the scooter start-ups, Netflix and Tesla. WeWork was a scam from the start, but there was so much money to be skimmed in selling the fraud to the public that everyone in Wall Street and the corporate media promoted the scam by refusing to look at the actual business.
The same dynamic fueled the absurd explosion of scooter start-ups, as if the business model could ever be profitable. No, the business could never be profitable, but unloading worthless shares in multiple rounds of venture capital was extremely profitable--for insiders.
As for Netflix and Tesla, the more money they lose, the more valuable they become. The key fraud here is "disruption." If a company can be promoted as a "disruptor," the sky's the limit, Baby, because "disruptors", well, disrupt, and presto-magico, somewhere down the road they become immensely profitable because, um, they disrupted something or other.
The greater the emotional pull of the scam, the easier it is to promote. Garsh, isn't it wunnerful how a college degree guarantees a lifetime of high earnings and financial security. Except that isn't guaranteed at all. What's guaranteed is insiders are skimming fortunes in the higher education cartel and its fraudulent handmaiden, the student loan industry.
Then there's sickcare, Corporate America's rip-off skimming operation masquerading as "healthcare." Caring has nothing to do with it; the driver is greed, maximizing profits by establishing corrupt relationships with politicos and regulators to insure staggering sums of federal monies are sluiced into sickcare's insatiable maw.
National defense is another emotional cover for boondoggles and insider profiteering. We won World War II, doggonnit, so just ignore the $1,000 hammers and the $100 billion over-runs.
Every institution in America is little more than a cover for insider profiteering via skims, scams, rackets, fraud and embezzling schemes, all sanctified as "legal" via a thoroughly corrupted legal system and judiciary.
Debt-serfdom is packaged and sold as a "middle class lifestyle." Political neutering, i.e. powerlessness, is sold as "party loyalty." And so on, in an endless parade of skims and scams packaged and sold to cloak the ugly ascendancy of greed, fraud and lies.
We live in a constantly distorted house of mirrors devoted to maintaining useful illusions of "democracy," "free markets" and other fairy tales we tell ourselves to reduce the pain of living a vast, all-encompassing fraud in which everyone who isn't a grifting insider is the loser.
We don't just have financial bubbles that are popping; we have bubbles in trust and credibility that are popping, too. All the lies, skims, scams, excuses, frauds, bezzles, artifices, profiteering, promotional schemes and rackets are unraveling, not because the virus shut down the economy but because the enormity of all the corruption, lies and fraud is now so great that the entire status quo is collapsing under its own weight.
Pulling the sleeve down to hide the tracks doesn't mean the addict is cured. The illusion, the facade, the masquerading of normalcy, are no longer sustainable. The Monster Id can no longer be hidden, and simulacra no longer substitute for reality.
Trust, credibility, transparency and accountability have all been sacrificed for personal gain, at the expense of the stability of the entire system.
Once the system collapses, we all lose, even the insiders who have traded every shred of their soul for financial gains, at the expense of everything that was once held dear.
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
SC210-14
https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/covid_19_and_the_war_on_cash_what_is_behind_the_push_for_a_cashless_society
COVID-19 and the War on Cash: What Is Behind the Push for a Cashless Society?
“The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat. The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.”—Lysander Spooner, American abolitionist and legal theorist
Cash may well become a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As these COVID-19 lockdowns drag out, more and more individuals and businesses are going cashless (for convenience and in a so-called effort to avoid spreading coronavirus germs), engaging in online commerce or using digital forms of currency (bank cards, digital wallets, etc.). As a result, physical cash is no longer king.
Yet there are other, more devious, reasons for this re-engineering of society away from physical cash: a cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—would play right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).
To this end, the government and its corporate partners-in-crime have been waging a subtle war on cash for some time now.
What is this war on cash?
It’s a concerted campaign to shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.
According to economist Steve Forbes, “The real reason for this war on cash—start with the big bills and then work your way down—is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.”
Much like the war on drugs and the war on terror, this so-called “war on cash” is being sold to the public as a means of fighting terrorists, drug dealers, tax evaders and now COVID-19 germs.
Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with the ultimate method to track, control you and punish you.
In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue.
Despite what we know about the government and its history of corruption, bumbling, fumbling and data breaches, not to mention how easily technology can be used against us, the campaign to do away with cash is really not a hard sell.
It’s not a hard sell, that is, if you know the right buttons to push, and the government has become a grand master in the art of getting the citizenry to do exactly what it wants. Remember, this is the same government that plans to use behavioral science tactics to “nudge” citizens to comply with the government’s public policy and program initiatives.
It’s also not a hard sell if you belong to the Digital Generation, that segment of the population for whom technology is second nature and “the first generation born into a world that has never not known digital life.”
And it’s certainly not a hard sell if you belong to the growing class of Americans who use their cell phones to pay bills, purchase goods, and transfer funds.
In much the same way that Americans have opted into government surveillance through the convenience of GPS devices and cell phones, digital cash—the means of paying with one’s debit card, credit card or cell phone—is becoming the de facto commerce of the American police state.
Not too long ago, it was estimated that smart phones would replace cash and credit cards altogether by 2020. Right on schedule, a growing number of businesses are adopting no-cash policies, including certain airlines, hotels, rental car companies, restaurants and retail stores. In Sweden, even the homeless and churches accept digital cash.
Making the case for “never, ever carrying cash” in lieu of a digital wallet, journalist Lisa Rabasca Roepe argues that cash is inconvenient, ATM access is costly, and it’s now possible to reimburse people using digital apps such as Venmo. Thus, there’s no longer a need for cash. “More and more retailers and grocery stores are embracing Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay,” notes Roepe. “PayPal's app is now accepted at many chain stores including Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Home Depot, and Office Depot. Walmart and CVS have both developed their own payment apps while their competitors Target and RiteAid are working on their own apps.”
It’s not just cash that is going digital, either.
A growing number of states are looking to adopt digital driver’s licenses that would reside on your mobile phone. These licenses would include all of the information contained on your printed license, along with a few “extras” such as real-time data downloaded directly from your state's Department of Motor Vehicles.
Of course, reading between the lines, having a digital driver’s license will open you up to much the same jeopardy as digital cash: it will make it possible for the government to better track your movements, monitor your activities and communications and ultimately shut you down.
So what’s the deal here?
Despite all of the advantages that go along with living in a digital age—namely, convenience—it’s hard to imagine how a cashless world navigated by way of a digital wallet doesn’t signal the beginning of the end for what little privacy we have left and leave us vulnerable to the likes of government thieves and data hackers.
First, when I say privacy, I’m not just referring to the things that you don’t want people to know about, those little things you do behind closed doors that are neither illegal nor harmful but embarrassing or intimate. I am also referring to the things that are deeply personal and which no one need know about, certainly not the government and its constabulary of busybodies, nannies, Peeping Toms, jail wardens and petty bureaucrats.
Second, we’re already witnessing how easy it will be for government agents to manipulate digital wallets for their own gain. For example, civil asset forfeiture schemes are becoming even more profitable for police agencies thanks to ERAD (Electronic Recovery and Access to Data) devices supplied by the Department of Homeland Security that allow police to not only determine the balance of any magnetic-stripe card (i.e., debit, credit and gift cards) but also freeze and seize any funds on pre-paid money cards. In fact, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment for police to scan or swipe your credit card.
Third, as commentator Paul Craig Roberts observed, while Americans have been distracted by the government’s costly war on terror, “the financial system, working hand-in-hand with policymakers, has done more damage to Americans than terrorists could possibly inflict.” Ultimately, as Roberts—who served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan—makes clear, the war on cash is about giving the government the ultimate control of the economy and complete access to the citizenry’s pocketbook.
Fourth, if there’s a will, there’s a way. So far, every technological convenience that has made our lives easier has also become our Achilles’ heel, opening us up to greater vulnerabilities from hackers and government agents alike. In recent years, the U.S. government has been repeatedly hacked. In 2015, the Office of Personnel Management had more than 20 million personnel files stolen, everything from Social Security numbers to birth dates and fingerprint records. In 2014, it was the White House, the State Department, the Post Office and other government agencies, along with a host of financial institutions, retailers and entertainment giants that had their files breached. And these are the people in charge of protecting our sensitive information?
Fifth, if there’s one entity that will not stop using cash for its own nefarious purposes, it’s the U.S. government. Cash is the currency used by the government to pay off its foreign “associates.” For instance, the Obama administration flew more than $400 million in cash to Iran, reportedly as part of a financial settlement with the country. Critics claim the money was ransom paid for the return of American hostages. And then there was the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills that the U.S. flew to Iraq only to claim it had no record of what happened to the money. It just disappeared, we were told. So when government economists tell you that two-thirds of all $100 bills in circulation are overseas—more than half a trillion dollars’ worth—it’s a pretty good bet that the government played a significant part in their export.
Sixth, this drive to do away with cash is part of a larger global trend driven by international financial institutions and the United Nations that is transforming nations of all sizes, from the smallest nation to the biggest, most advanced economies.
Finally, short of returning to a pre-technological, Luddite age, there’s really no way to pull this horse back now that it’s left the gate. While doing so is near impossible, it would also mean doing without the many conveniences and advantages that are the better angels, if you will, of technology’s totalitarian tendencies: the internet, medical advances, etc.
To our detriment, we have virtually no control over who accesses our private information, how it is stored, or how it is used. Whether we ever had much control remains up for debate. However, in terms of our bargaining power over digital privacy rights, we have been reduced to a pitiful, unenviable position in which we can only hope and trust that those in power will treat our information with respect.
Clearly, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have come full circle, back to a pre-revolutionary era of taxation without any real representation.
COVID-19 and the War on Cash: What Is Behind the Push for a Cashless Society?
“The fact is that the government, like a highwayman, says to a man: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat. The government does not, indeed, waylay a man in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.”—Lysander Spooner, American abolitionist and legal theorist
Cash may well become a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As these COVID-19 lockdowns drag out, more and more individuals and businesses are going cashless (for convenience and in a so-called effort to avoid spreading coronavirus germs), engaging in online commerce or using digital forms of currency (bank cards, digital wallets, etc.). As a result, physical cash is no longer king.
Yet there are other, more devious, reasons for this re-engineering of society away from physical cash: a cashless society—easily monitored, controlled, manipulated, weaponized and locked down—would play right into the hands of the government (and its corporate partners).
To this end, the government and its corporate partners-in-crime have been waging a subtle war on cash for some time now.
What is this war on cash?
It’s a concerted campaign to shift consumers towards a digital mode of commerce that can easily be monitored, tracked, tabulated, mined for data, hacked, hijacked and confiscated when convenient.
According to economist Steve Forbes, “The real reason for this war on cash—start with the big bills and then work your way down—is an ugly power grab by Big Government. People will have less privacy: Electronic commerce makes it easier for Big Brother to see what we’re doing, thereby making it simpler to bar activities it doesn’t like, such as purchasing salt, sugar, big bottles of soda and Big Macs.”
Much like the war on drugs and the war on terror, this so-called “war on cash” is being sold to the public as a means of fighting terrorists, drug dealers, tax evaders and now COVID-19 germs.
Digital currency provides the government and its corporate partners with the ultimate method to track, control you and punish you.
In recent years, just the mere possession of significant amounts of cash could implicate you in suspicious activity and label you a criminal. The rationale (by police) is that cash is the currency for illegal transactions given that it’s harder to track, can be used to pay illegal immigrants, and denies the government its share of the “take,” so doing away with paper money will help law enforcement fight crime and help the government realize more revenue.
Despite what we know about the government and its history of corruption, bumbling, fumbling and data breaches, not to mention how easily technology can be used against us, the campaign to do away with cash is really not a hard sell.
It’s not a hard sell, that is, if you know the right buttons to push, and the government has become a grand master in the art of getting the citizenry to do exactly what it wants. Remember, this is the same government that plans to use behavioral science tactics to “nudge” citizens to comply with the government’s public policy and program initiatives.
It’s also not a hard sell if you belong to the Digital Generation, that segment of the population for whom technology is second nature and “the first generation born into a world that has never not known digital life.”
And it’s certainly not a hard sell if you belong to the growing class of Americans who use their cell phones to pay bills, purchase goods, and transfer funds.
In much the same way that Americans have opted into government surveillance through the convenience of GPS devices and cell phones, digital cash—the means of paying with one’s debit card, credit card or cell phone—is becoming the de facto commerce of the American police state.
Not too long ago, it was estimated that smart phones would replace cash and credit cards altogether by 2020. Right on schedule, a growing number of businesses are adopting no-cash policies, including certain airlines, hotels, rental car companies, restaurants and retail stores. In Sweden, even the homeless and churches accept digital cash.
Making the case for “never, ever carrying cash” in lieu of a digital wallet, journalist Lisa Rabasca Roepe argues that cash is inconvenient, ATM access is costly, and it’s now possible to reimburse people using digital apps such as Venmo. Thus, there’s no longer a need for cash. “More and more retailers and grocery stores are embracing Apple Pay, Google Wallet, Samsung Pay, and Android Pay,” notes Roepe. “PayPal's app is now accepted at many chain stores including Barnes & Noble, Foot Locker, Home Depot, and Office Depot. Walmart and CVS have both developed their own payment apps while their competitors Target and RiteAid are working on their own apps.”
It’s not just cash that is going digital, either.
A growing number of states are looking to adopt digital driver’s licenses that would reside on your mobile phone. These licenses would include all of the information contained on your printed license, along with a few “extras” such as real-time data downloaded directly from your state's Department of Motor Vehicles.
Of course, reading between the lines, having a digital driver’s license will open you up to much the same jeopardy as digital cash: it will make it possible for the government to better track your movements, monitor your activities and communications and ultimately shut you down.
So what’s the deal here?
Despite all of the advantages that go along with living in a digital age—namely, convenience—it’s hard to imagine how a cashless world navigated by way of a digital wallet doesn’t signal the beginning of the end for what little privacy we have left and leave us vulnerable to the likes of government thieves and data hackers.
First, when I say privacy, I’m not just referring to the things that you don’t want people to know about, those little things you do behind closed doors that are neither illegal nor harmful but embarrassing or intimate. I am also referring to the things that are deeply personal and which no one need know about, certainly not the government and its constabulary of busybodies, nannies, Peeping Toms, jail wardens and petty bureaucrats.
Second, we’re already witnessing how easy it will be for government agents to manipulate digital wallets for their own gain. For example, civil asset forfeiture schemes are becoming even more profitable for police agencies thanks to ERAD (Electronic Recovery and Access to Data) devices supplied by the Department of Homeland Security that allow police to not only determine the balance of any magnetic-stripe card (i.e., debit, credit and gift cards) but also freeze and seize any funds on pre-paid money cards. In fact, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that it does not violate the Fourth Amendment for police to scan or swipe your credit card.
Third, as commentator Paul Craig Roberts observed, while Americans have been distracted by the government’s costly war on terror, “the financial system, working hand-in-hand with policymakers, has done more damage to Americans than terrorists could possibly inflict.” Ultimately, as Roberts—who served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Ronald Reagan—makes clear, the war on cash is about giving the government the ultimate control of the economy and complete access to the citizenry’s pocketbook.
Fourth, if there’s a will, there’s a way. So far, every technological convenience that has made our lives easier has also become our Achilles’ heel, opening us up to greater vulnerabilities from hackers and government agents alike. In recent years, the U.S. government has been repeatedly hacked. In 2015, the Office of Personnel Management had more than 20 million personnel files stolen, everything from Social Security numbers to birth dates and fingerprint records. In 2014, it was the White House, the State Department, the Post Office and other government agencies, along with a host of financial institutions, retailers and entertainment giants that had their files breached. And these are the people in charge of protecting our sensitive information?
Fifth, if there’s one entity that will not stop using cash for its own nefarious purposes, it’s the U.S. government. Cash is the currency used by the government to pay off its foreign “associates.” For instance, the Obama administration flew more than $400 million in cash to Iran, reportedly as part of a financial settlement with the country. Critics claim the money was ransom paid for the return of American hostages. And then there was the $12 billion in shrink-wrapped $100 bills that the U.S. flew to Iraq only to claim it had no record of what happened to the money. It just disappeared, we were told. So when government economists tell you that two-thirds of all $100 bills in circulation are overseas—more than half a trillion dollars’ worth—it’s a pretty good bet that the government played a significant part in their export.
Sixth, this drive to do away with cash is part of a larger global trend driven by international financial institutions and the United Nations that is transforming nations of all sizes, from the smallest nation to the biggest, most advanced economies.
Finally, short of returning to a pre-technological, Luddite age, there’s really no way to pull this horse back now that it’s left the gate. While doing so is near impossible, it would also mean doing without the many conveniences and advantages that are the better angels, if you will, of technology’s totalitarian tendencies: the internet, medical advances, etc.
To our detriment, we have virtually no control over who accesses our private information, how it is stored, or how it is used. Whether we ever had much control remains up for debate. However, in terms of our bargaining power over digital privacy rights, we have been reduced to a pitiful, unenviable position in which we can only hope and trust that those in power will treat our information with respect.
Clearly, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we have come full circle, back to a pre-revolutionary era of taxation without any real representation.
Monday, April 20, 2020
SC210-13
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-placeholder/
The Placeholder
These are strange days, indeed. But in what alternative universe can anyone imagine Joe Biden actually making it through a presidential election campaign? The party he supposedly leads stuffed him into a broom closet last week after he gibbered through a session with CNN’s leading light Anderson Cooper. They can’t just hide the poor fellow there until November 3.
Asked about reopening everyday life in America, Mr. Biden said, “You know, there’s a… uh, during World War II, uh… you know, where Roosevelt came up with… a thing, uh, that, uh… you know, was totally different than a… than the… the, it’s called… he called it the… you know, the World War II… he had the war… the War Production Board….”
Everybody knows he’s dimmer than a night-lite, and everybody’s pretending it’s okay. There’s no analog in history for any faction putting up such an empty vessel for high office. Granted, the Democratic Party has trafficked in unreality for years, from Crossfire Hurricane through UkraineGate — with side-trips like trannies in women’s sports — but those capers were just old-fashioned scams. Joe Biden for President is Emperor’s-New-Clothes caliber deceit, requiring a rank-and-file so marinated in falsehood they couldn’t tell you the difference between a red light and a green light.
So, you have to ask: what is their game? In the weeks that led up to the blossoming of Covid 19, the game was apparently to bump off Bernie Sanders to satisfy the party’s corporate sponsors, who were not so eager to back someone that promised to confiscate their wealth. Ironically, Covid 19 only fortified Bernie’s case that the nation’s obscenely crooked health care system demands drastic reform. Now, you could easily construct a scenario in which ol’ Bernie would have glided to victory in November on the basis of that, combined with unemployment figures that make the Great Depression look like a job fair.
Picking Joe Biden as the instrument to block Bernie seemed especially dumb just weeks after the Democrats’ impeachment gambit blew up in their faces by shining a fiercely revealing light on Joe and Hunter’s adventures in international grift. One can easily discern Mr. Biden’s motive for remaining in the race after that because sheltering in candidacy seemed to inoculate him from any criminal investigation. But, did the whole party want to go all-in on that?
Maybe so, because the doings in Ukraine circa 2014 included a large cast of characters in Barack Obama’s state department – not least, Secretary of State John Kerry – plus the entire George Soros network of international backstage finaglers, with tendrils to Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious operations – in short, a can of worms so slithery and disgusting they make the Democratic Party look like a primordial sink of species dumped into Mother Nature’s discontinued merchandise bin. Note: none of that has been adjudicated yet and don’t assume they’ll get off scot-free.
Then there is the sexual molestation charge against Mr. Biden by ex-staffer Tara Reade, who claims the then-Senator violated her manually in 1993. The New York Times editors sang la-la-la-la-la-la-kittens-and-puppies for two weeks before they even acknowledged the accusation, only to dismiss it because, well, it was like… you know, where Roosevelt came up with… a thing, uh, that, uh… you know, was totally different than a….
There really are only two plausible game plans for the Dems with Joe Biden. One is that he’s a mere placeholder until the convention – assuming it can even be held — where party bigwigs are forced to undo their Biden blunder by some legerdemain of rules-fudging, and cram in a last-minute replacement. The putative savior would be none other than She-Whose-Turn-Was-Thwarted in 2016, on the grounds that she at least knows how to run for president, even if she isn’t very good at it. They might as well hand every delegate a dixie-cup of cyanide-enhanced kool-aid as they cast that fateful vote.
The other pretty obvious scheme, seemingly underway now, is to fix up Mr. Biden with a running-mate who can take over his duties twenty-three minutes after the inauguration ceremony. Stacey Abrams, the self-proclaimed “real governor of Georgia” who, in fact, lost that election but has made out nicely hustling her delusions, is campaigning arduously for the VP appointment. Wouldn’t that make a heck of an appealing ticket?
Apparently, that’s one more memo the Democratic Party did not get: America no longer has time for identity politics. There are more important things to attend to, like whether large numbers of people go to bed hungry, get cast out of their homes, live or die. Things like that. For the moment, the USA doesn’t have an economy. Nor does much of the rest of the world. Believe me, that’s a problem. And unlike Mr. Biden’s dementia, there’s no pretense about not noticing it.
....
Asked about reopening everyday life in America, Mr. Biden said, “You know, there’s a… uh, during World War II, uh… you know, where Roosevelt came up with… a thing, uh, that, uh… you know, was totally different than a… than the… the, it’s called… he called it the… you know, the World War II… he had the war… the War Production Board….”, and then there is Trump who said he is a " very stable genius ". In times like these with drastic changes and increasing economic decline, is this state of affairs any surprise? This is what America offers up as its choices for leaders? Bread and Circuses as the world burns, literally.
The Placeholder
These are strange days, indeed. But in what alternative universe can anyone imagine Joe Biden actually making it through a presidential election campaign? The party he supposedly leads stuffed him into a broom closet last week after he gibbered through a session with CNN’s leading light Anderson Cooper. They can’t just hide the poor fellow there until November 3.
Asked about reopening everyday life in America, Mr. Biden said, “You know, there’s a… uh, during World War II, uh… you know, where Roosevelt came up with… a thing, uh, that, uh… you know, was totally different than a… than the… the, it’s called… he called it the… you know, the World War II… he had the war… the War Production Board….”
Everybody knows he’s dimmer than a night-lite, and everybody’s pretending it’s okay. There’s no analog in history for any faction putting up such an empty vessel for high office. Granted, the Democratic Party has trafficked in unreality for years, from Crossfire Hurricane through UkraineGate — with side-trips like trannies in women’s sports — but those capers were just old-fashioned scams. Joe Biden for President is Emperor’s-New-Clothes caliber deceit, requiring a rank-and-file so marinated in falsehood they couldn’t tell you the difference between a red light and a green light.
So, you have to ask: what is their game? In the weeks that led up to the blossoming of Covid 19, the game was apparently to bump off Bernie Sanders to satisfy the party’s corporate sponsors, who were not so eager to back someone that promised to confiscate their wealth. Ironically, Covid 19 only fortified Bernie’s case that the nation’s obscenely crooked health care system demands drastic reform. Now, you could easily construct a scenario in which ol’ Bernie would have glided to victory in November on the basis of that, combined with unemployment figures that make the Great Depression look like a job fair.
Picking Joe Biden as the instrument to block Bernie seemed especially dumb just weeks after the Democrats’ impeachment gambit blew up in their faces by shining a fiercely revealing light on Joe and Hunter’s adventures in international grift. One can easily discern Mr. Biden’s motive for remaining in the race after that because sheltering in candidacy seemed to inoculate him from any criminal investigation. But, did the whole party want to go all-in on that?
Maybe so, because the doings in Ukraine circa 2014 included a large cast of characters in Barack Obama’s state department – not least, Secretary of State John Kerry – plus the entire George Soros network of international backstage finaglers, with tendrils to Jeffrey Epstein’s nefarious operations – in short, a can of worms so slithery and disgusting they make the Democratic Party look like a primordial sink of species dumped into Mother Nature’s discontinued merchandise bin. Note: none of that has been adjudicated yet and don’t assume they’ll get off scot-free.
Then there is the sexual molestation charge against Mr. Biden by ex-staffer Tara Reade, who claims the then-Senator violated her manually in 1993. The New York Times editors sang la-la-la-la-la-la-kittens-and-puppies for two weeks before they even acknowledged the accusation, only to dismiss it because, well, it was like… you know, where Roosevelt came up with… a thing, uh, that, uh… you know, was totally different than a….
There really are only two plausible game plans for the Dems with Joe Biden. One is that he’s a mere placeholder until the convention – assuming it can even be held — where party bigwigs are forced to undo their Biden blunder by some legerdemain of rules-fudging, and cram in a last-minute replacement. The putative savior would be none other than She-Whose-Turn-Was-Thwarted in 2016, on the grounds that she at least knows how to run for president, even if she isn’t very good at it. They might as well hand every delegate a dixie-cup of cyanide-enhanced kool-aid as they cast that fateful vote.
The other pretty obvious scheme, seemingly underway now, is to fix up Mr. Biden with a running-mate who can take over his duties twenty-three minutes after the inauguration ceremony. Stacey Abrams, the self-proclaimed “real governor of Georgia” who, in fact, lost that election but has made out nicely hustling her delusions, is campaigning arduously for the VP appointment. Wouldn’t that make a heck of an appealing ticket?
Apparently, that’s one more memo the Democratic Party did not get: America no longer has time for identity politics. There are more important things to attend to, like whether large numbers of people go to bed hungry, get cast out of their homes, live or die. Things like that. For the moment, the USA doesn’t have an economy. Nor does much of the rest of the world. Believe me, that’s a problem. And unlike Mr. Biden’s dementia, there’s no pretense about not noticing it.
....
Asked about reopening everyday life in America, Mr. Biden said, “You know, there’s a… uh, during World War II, uh… you know, where Roosevelt came up with… a thing, uh, that, uh… you know, was totally different than a… than the… the, it’s called… he called it the… you know, the World War II… he had the war… the War Production Board….”, and then there is Trump who said he is a " very stable genius ". In times like these with drastic changes and increasing economic decline, is this state of affairs any surprise? This is what America offers up as its choices for leaders? Bread and Circuses as the world burns, literally.
Sunday, April 19, 2020
SC210-12
https://www.globalresearch.ca/why-did-hundreds-of-ceos-resign-just-before-the-world-started-going-absolutely-crazy/5707970
Why Did Hundreds Of CEOs Resign Just Before The World Started Going Absolutely Crazy?
In the months prior to the most ferocious stock market crash in history and the eruption of the biggest public health crisis of our generation, we witnessed the biggest exodus of corporate CEOs that we have ever seen. And as you will see below, corporate insiders also sold off billions of dollars worth of shares in their own companies just before the stock market imploded. In life, timing can be everything, and sometimes people simply get lucky. But it does seem odd that so many among the corporate elite would be so exceedingly “lucky” all at the same time. In this article I am not claiming to know the motivations of any of these individuals, but I am pointing out certain patterns that I believe are worth investigating.
One financial publication is using the phrase “the great CEO exodus” to describe the phenomenon that we have been witnessing. It all started last year when chief executives started resigning in numbers unlike anything that we have ever seen before. The following was published by NBC News last November…
Chief executives are leaving in record numbers this year, with more than 1,332 stepping aside in the period from January through the end of October, according to new data released on Wednesday. While it’s not unusual to see CEOs fleeing in the middle of a recession, it is noteworthy to see such a rash of executive exits amid robust corporate earnings and record stock market highs.
Last month, 172 chief executives left their jobs, according to executive placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. It’s the highest monthly number on record, and the year-to-date total outpaces even the wave of executive exits during the financial crisis.
By the end of the year, an all-time record high 1,480 CEOs had left their posts. (Fortune Magazine, right)
But to most people it seemed like the good times were still rolling at the end of 2019. Corporate profits were rising and the stock market was setting record high after record high.
Yes, there were lots of signs that the global economy was really slowing down, but most experts were not forecasting an imminent recession.
So why did so many chief executives suddenly decide that it was time to move on?
The following are just a few of the big name CEOs that chose to step down in 2019…
United Airlines — Oscar Munoz
Alphabet — Larry Page
Gap — Art Peck
McDonald’s — Steve Easterbrook
Wells Fargo — Tim Sloan
Under Armour — Kevin Plank
PG&E — Geisha Williams
Kraft Heinz — Bernardo Hees
HP — Dion Weisler
Bed, Bath & Beyond — Steven Temares
Warner Bros. — Kevin Tsujihara
Best Buy — Hubert Joly
New York Post — Jesse Angelo
Colgate-Palmolive — Ian Cook
MetLife — Steven Kandarian
eBay — Devin Wenig
Nike — Mark Parker
Of course the mass exodus of chief executives did not end there.
In fact, a whopping 219 CEOs stepped down during the month of January 2020 alone.
Wall Street’s “Deficit Manifesto”: Eighty Top CEOs tell Obama, Romney to Slash Social Spending
By then, it was starting to become clear that the coronavirus that was ripping through China could potentially become a major global pandemic, and I certainly can understand why many among the corporate elite would choose to abandon ship at that moment.
Some of these CEOs have made absolutely absurd salaries for many years, and it is much easier to take the money and run than it is to stick around and steer a major corporation through the most difficult global crisis that any of us have ever experienced.
The following are just a few of the well known CEOs that have resigned so far in 2020…
Bob Iger, CEO of Disney
Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM
Harley-Davidson CEO Matt Levatich
T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner
Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga
Keith Block, co-CEO of Salesforce
Tidjane Thiam, CEO of Credit Suisse
Hulu CEO Randy Freer
It is important for me to say that I do not have any special insight into the personal motivations of any of these individuals, and every situation is different.
But I do think that it is quite strange that we have seen such an unprecedented corporate exodus at such a critical moment in our history.
Meanwhile, top corporate executives were dumping billions of dollars worth of shares in their own companies just before the market completely cratered. The following comes from the Wall Street Journal…
Top executives at U.S.-traded companies sold a total of roughly $9.2 billion in shares of their own companies between the start of February and the end of last week, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.
The selling saved the executives—including many in the financial industry—potential losses totaling $1.9 billion, according to the analysis, as the S&P 500 stock index plunged about 30% from its peak on Feb. 19 through the close of trading March 20.
In the stock market, you only make money if you get out in time, and many among the corporate elite seem to have impeccable timing.
Perhaps they just got really lucky. Or perhaps they were reading my articles and understood that COVID-19 was going to cause the global economy to shut down. In any event, things worked out really well for those that were able to dump their stocks before it was too late.
And it turns out that several members of Congress were also selling stocks just before the market went nuts…
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and three of her Senate colleagues reported selling off stocks worth millions of dollars in the days before the coronavirus outbreak crashed the market, according to reports.
The data is listed on a U.S. Senate website containing financial disclosures from Senate members.
Of course most ordinary Americans were not so “lucky”, and the financial losses for the country as a whole have been absolutely staggering....
Rats flee the sinking ship
....
Welcome to the new normal world citizen
Quarantiranny (We're Living in 12 Monkeys)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CCVUc5ZMZo
Why Did Hundreds Of CEOs Resign Just Before The World Started Going Absolutely Crazy?
In the months prior to the most ferocious stock market crash in history and the eruption of the biggest public health crisis of our generation, we witnessed the biggest exodus of corporate CEOs that we have ever seen. And as you will see below, corporate insiders also sold off billions of dollars worth of shares in their own companies just before the stock market imploded. In life, timing can be everything, and sometimes people simply get lucky. But it does seem odd that so many among the corporate elite would be so exceedingly “lucky” all at the same time. In this article I am not claiming to know the motivations of any of these individuals, but I am pointing out certain patterns that I believe are worth investigating.
One financial publication is using the phrase “the great CEO exodus” to describe the phenomenon that we have been witnessing. It all started last year when chief executives started resigning in numbers unlike anything that we have ever seen before. The following was published by NBC News last November…
Chief executives are leaving in record numbers this year, with more than 1,332 stepping aside in the period from January through the end of October, according to new data released on Wednesday. While it’s not unusual to see CEOs fleeing in the middle of a recession, it is noteworthy to see such a rash of executive exits amid robust corporate earnings and record stock market highs.
Last month, 172 chief executives left their jobs, according to executive placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. It’s the highest monthly number on record, and the year-to-date total outpaces even the wave of executive exits during the financial crisis.
By the end of the year, an all-time record high 1,480 CEOs had left their posts. (Fortune Magazine, right)
But to most people it seemed like the good times were still rolling at the end of 2019. Corporate profits were rising and the stock market was setting record high after record high.
Yes, there were lots of signs that the global economy was really slowing down, but most experts were not forecasting an imminent recession.
So why did so many chief executives suddenly decide that it was time to move on?
The following are just a few of the big name CEOs that chose to step down in 2019…
United Airlines — Oscar Munoz
Alphabet — Larry Page
Gap — Art Peck
McDonald’s — Steve Easterbrook
Wells Fargo — Tim Sloan
Under Armour — Kevin Plank
PG&E — Geisha Williams
Kraft Heinz — Bernardo Hees
HP — Dion Weisler
Bed, Bath & Beyond — Steven Temares
Warner Bros. — Kevin Tsujihara
Best Buy — Hubert Joly
New York Post — Jesse Angelo
Colgate-Palmolive — Ian Cook
MetLife — Steven Kandarian
eBay — Devin Wenig
Nike — Mark Parker
Of course the mass exodus of chief executives did not end there.
In fact, a whopping 219 CEOs stepped down during the month of January 2020 alone.
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By then, it was starting to become clear that the coronavirus that was ripping through China could potentially become a major global pandemic, and I certainly can understand why many among the corporate elite would choose to abandon ship at that moment.
Some of these CEOs have made absolutely absurd salaries for many years, and it is much easier to take the money and run than it is to stick around and steer a major corporation through the most difficult global crisis that any of us have ever experienced.
The following are just a few of the well known CEOs that have resigned so far in 2020…
Bob Iger, CEO of Disney
Ginni Rometty, CEO of IBM
Harley-Davidson CEO Matt Levatich
T-Mobile’s CEO John Legere
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner
Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga
Keith Block, co-CEO of Salesforce
Tidjane Thiam, CEO of Credit Suisse
Hulu CEO Randy Freer
It is important for me to say that I do not have any special insight into the personal motivations of any of these individuals, and every situation is different.
But I do think that it is quite strange that we have seen such an unprecedented corporate exodus at such a critical moment in our history.
Meanwhile, top corporate executives were dumping billions of dollars worth of shares in their own companies just before the market completely cratered. The following comes from the Wall Street Journal…
Top executives at U.S.-traded companies sold a total of roughly $9.2 billion in shares of their own companies between the start of February and the end of last week, a Wall Street Journal analysis shows.
The selling saved the executives—including many in the financial industry—potential losses totaling $1.9 billion, according to the analysis, as the S&P 500 stock index plunged about 30% from its peak on Feb. 19 through the close of trading March 20.
In the stock market, you only make money if you get out in time, and many among the corporate elite seem to have impeccable timing.
Perhaps they just got really lucky. Or perhaps they were reading my articles and understood that COVID-19 was going to cause the global economy to shut down. In any event, things worked out really well for those that were able to dump their stocks before it was too late.
And it turns out that several members of Congress were also selling stocks just before the market went nuts…
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California and three of her Senate colleagues reported selling off stocks worth millions of dollars in the days before the coronavirus outbreak crashed the market, according to reports.
The data is listed on a U.S. Senate website containing financial disclosures from Senate members.
Of course most ordinary Americans were not so “lucky”, and the financial losses for the country as a whole have been absolutely staggering....
Rats flee the sinking ship
....
Welcome to the new normal world citizen
Quarantiranny (We're Living in 12 Monkeys)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CCVUc5ZMZo
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