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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay22/RE-bubble5-22.html

Is Housing a Bubble That's About to Crash?

Are we heading into another real estate bubble / crash? Those who say "no" see the housing shortage as real, while those who say "yes" see the demand as a reflection of the Federal Reserve's artificial goosing of the housing market via its unprecedented purchases of mortgage-backed securities and "easy money" financial conditions.

My colleague CH at econimica.blogspot.com recently posted charts calling this assumption into question. The first chart (below) shows the U.S. population growth rate plummeting as housing starts soar, and the second chart shows housing unit per capita, which has just reached the same extreme as the 2008 housing bubble.

Demographics and housing do not reflect a housing shortage nationally, though there could be scarcities locally, of course, and other factors such as thousands of units being held off the market as short-term rentals or investments by overseas buyers who have no interest in renting their investment dwellings.

On a per capita basis, housing has reached previous bubble levels. That suggests housing shortages are artificial or local, not structural.

Next, let's consider how the current housing bubble differs from previous bubbles in the late 1970s and 2000s. In my view, the previous bubbles were driven by demographics, inflation and monetary policy: in the late 70s, the 65 million-strong Baby Boom generation began buying their first homes, pushing demand higher while inflation soared, making real-world assets such as housing more desirable.

Once the Federal Reserve pushed interest rates to 18%, mortgage rates rose in lockstep and housing crashed as few could afford sky-high housing prices at sky-high mortgage rates.

The housing bubble of 2007-08 was largely driven by declines in mortgage rates (as the Fed pursued an "easy money" policy to escape the negative effects of the Dot-Com stock market bubble crash) and a loosening of credit/mortgage standards. These fueled a bubble that morphed into a speculative free-for-all of no-down payment and no-document loans.

This decline in the cost of borrowing money (mortgage rates) enabled a sharp rise in the price of housing, a speculative boom that was greatly accelerated by "innovations" in the mortgage market such as zero down payments loans, interest-only loans, home equity loans, and no-document "liar loans"--mortgages underwritten without the usual documentation of income and net worth.

These forces generated a speculative frenzy of house-flipping, leveraging the equity in the family home to buy two or three homes under construction and selling them before they were even completed for fat profits, and so on.

Needless to say, the pool of potential buyers expanded tremendously when people earning $25,000 a year could buy $500,000 houses on speculation.

Once the bubble popped, the pool of buyers shrank along with the home equity.

If we study this chart below of new home prices (courtesy of Mac10), we can see that the 21st century's Bubble #2 rose as the Federal Reserve pushed mortgage rates far below historic norms. Once rates reached a bottom, the 7-year inflation of home prices (from 2011 to 2018) began rolling over.

This deflation of home prices was reversed by the pandemic recession, as the Fed's vast expansion of credit and mortgage-buying, which pushed mortgage rates to new lows. Trillions of dollars in new credit and cash stimulus ignited a speculative frenzy in stocks, bonds and real estate, a frenzy which drove bubble #3 to extraordinary heights.

All this unprecedented fiscal and monetary stimulus also ignited inflation, and so rates are rising in response. Bubble #3 is already deflating, at least by the measure of new home prices.

But the current bubble has a number of dynamics that weren't big factors in previous bubbles.

One is the rise of remote work. Many people have been working remotely since the late 1990s enabled Internet-based work, but the pandemic greatly increased the pool of employers willing to accept remote work as a permanent feature of employment.

This trend has been well documented, but the consequences are still unfolding: remote workers are no longer trapped in unaffordable, congested cities and suburbs.

Several other trends have attracted much less attention, but I see them as equally consequential.

1. Housing in many urban zones are out of reach of all but the top 10% without extraordinary sacrifice, and now that employment isn't necessarily tied to urban zones, the bottom 90% of young people without family wealth or high incomes are coming to realize the benefits of urban living are not worth the extreme sacrifices needed to buy an overvalued house.

A middle-class life--home ownership, financial security, leisure and surplus income to invest in one's family and well-being--is no longer affordable for the majority of young Americans.

Few are willing to concede this because it reveals the neofeudal nature of American life. Those who bought homes in coastal urban zones 20+ years ago are wealthy due to soaring housing valuations while young people can't even afford the rent, much less buying a house.

If you're not making $250,000 or more a year as a couple, the only hope for a middle-class life that includes leisure and some surplus income to invest is top move to some place with much lower housing and other costs. That place is rural America.

2. The benefits of urban living are deteriorating while the sacrifices and downsides are increasing. Urban living is fun if you're wealthy, not so fun if you don't have plenty of surplus income to spend.

Urban problems such as homelessness, traffic congestion and crime are endemic and unresolvable, though few are willing to state the obvious. Americans are expected to be optimistic and to count on some new whiz-bang technology to solve all problems.

Unfortunately, problems generated by dysfunctional, overly complex institutions, corruption and unaffordable costs can't be solved by some new technology, and so the decay of cities will only gather momentum.

The hope that billions of federal stimulus funding would solve these problems is about to encounter reality as the funds dry up and all the problems remain or have actually expanded despite massive "investments" in solutions.

Few analysts have looked at the finances of high-cost cities. The decline in bricks-and-mortar retail, rising crime, soaring junk fees, rents and property taxes have all made urban small business insanely costly and therefore risky.

Small businesses are the core sources of employment and taxes. As high costs, crime, etc. choke small businesses, employment and tax revenues drop and commercial real estate sits empty, generating decay and defaults.

Once office and retail space is no longer affordable or necessary, commercial real estate crashes in value as owners who bought at the top default and go bankrupt.

People need shelter but they don't need office space or to start a bricks-and-mortar retail business.

As urban finances unravel, cities won't have the funding to run their bloated, inefficient, overly complex and unaccountable bureaucracies.

3. In geopolitics, we speak of the core and the periphery. Empires have a core (Rome and central Italy in the Roman Empire) and a periphery (Britain, North Africa, Egypt, the Levant).

As finances and trade decay and costs soar, the periphery is surrendered to maintain the core.

In urban zones, the same dynamic will become increasingly visible: the peripheral neighborhoods will be underfunded to continue protecting the wealthy enclaves.

Crime will skyrocket in the periphery even as residents of the wealthy enclaves see little decay in their neighborhoods.

This asymmetry--already extreme--will drive social unrest and disorder. This is a self-reinforcing feedback: as the periphery neighborhoods deteriorate, the remaining businesses flee and the smart money sells and moves away.

Tax revenues plummet and city services decay even further, persuading hangers-on to move before it gets even worse. Cities compensate for the lower revenues by increasing taxes on the remaining residents and cutting services.

Each turn of the screw triggers more closures and selling and fewer tax revenues.

4. Dependency chains will become increasingly consequential: the greater a city's dependency on essentials trucked/shipped from hundreds or thousands of of kilometers/miles away, the more prone that city will be to disruptions of essentials: food, energy, materials and infrastructure.

Though few are willing to dwell on such vulnerabilities, most cities are totally dependent on diesel fueled fleets of trucks, rail and jet fuel for luxuries flown in from afar for virtually all goods. Cities produce very little in the way of essentials such as food and energy.

The past reliability of long supply chains has instilled a confidence that these supply chains stretching thousands of kilometers and miles are unbreakable and forever. They aren't, and the initial disruptions will be a great shock to Americans who believe full gas tanks and fully stocked store shelves are their birthright.

5. As I've explained in my new book Global Crisis, National Renewal, the era of cheap, reliable abundance has drawn to a close and now we are entering an era of scarcity in essentials.

Another reality few discuss is the relative stability of global weather over the past 40 years. As weather becomes less reliable, so too do crop yields and food supplies.

Globalization has poured capital into expanding acreage under cultivation to the point that the planet's forests are being decimated to grow more soy to feed animals to be slaughtered for human consumption.

On the margins, land that was once productive has been lost to desertification. Fresh water aquifers have been drained and glaciers feeding rivers are melting away. Soil fertility has declined even as fertilizer use has expanded.

The low-hanging fruit of GMO seeds, fertilizers, insecticides, herbicides and Green Revolution hybrids have all been plucked. The gains have been reaped but now the downsides of these dependencies are becoming increasingly consequential: fertilizer costs are rising fast, insects and diseases are evading chemicals and vaccines, and the vulnerabilities of mono-crop, industrialized agriculture and animal husbandry threaten to cascade into crop failures, soaring prices and shortages.

6. This will have two consequences: rural incomes which have been falling for decades due to globalization (i.e. bringing in cheap food from places with no environmental standards, cheap labor and few taxes / social costs) will start rising sharply, fueling a reversal in the long decline of rural communities based on agricultural income.

The soaring costs of essentials will reduce the disposable income of the bottom 90%, reducing the money they'll have to spend on eating out, retail shopping, etc.--all the surplus spending that drives cities' economies and tax revenues.

Few (if any) commentators forecast a cyclical reversal of the demographic trend of people moving from rural locales to cities. I think this trend has already reversed and will gather momentum as cities become increasingly unlivable, disposable incomes decline as scarcities push prices higher and people flee for lower cost, more secure environs.

7. As I often note, following what the super-wealthy are doing is a pretty sound investment strategy because the super-wealthy spend freely to buy the best advice and are highly motivated to protect their wealth.

People who live in well-known, highly desirable rural towns (Telluride, Jackson Hole, Lake Tahoe, etc.) are describing a feeding frenzy of wealthy urbanites buying multi-million dollar homes. Small cities such as Bozeman, MT and Ashville, NC are experiencing a flood of new residents that is straining infrastructure and pushing housing prices out of reach for local residents with average wages.

8. Rural towns in the U.S., Italy, Japan and even Switzerland are trying to attract new residents with offers of free land, subsidized rent, low cost homes, etc. This shows that the trends are global and not limited to any one nation. Would you take free land in rural America?

The decay of urban life isn't yet consequential enough to push people into making a major move, but once someone has been robbed, repeatedly found human feces on their doorstep or experienced scarcities that trigger the madness of crowds, the decision to leave becomes much, much easier.

Some cities will manage the decline of employment and tax revenues more gracefully than others. Most will suffer from the dynamic I've often described on the blog: the Ratchet Effect. Costs move effortlessly higher as tax revenues have increased in one speculative bubble after another, but once revenues drop, cities have no mechanisms or political constituency to manage a sharp, long-term decline in revenues.

They then become prone to the other dynamic I've described, the Rising Wedge Breakdown (see chart below): as agencies and institutions become sclerotic, unaccountable and self-serving, even a relatively modest cut in revenues triggers institutional collapse, as the system requires 100% funding to function. A 10% reduction doesn't cause a 10% decline in service, it causes an 50% decline in service, on the way to complete dysfunction.

Few believe cities can unravel, but remote work, geographic arbitrage (discussed below), tightening credit, rising crime, the decline of commercial real estate, end of massive stimulus, scarcities, the madness of crowds, the decline of civic services and amenities and an insanely high cost of living all have consequences and second-order effects.

What were beneficial synergies become fatal synergies as dynamics reverse and begin reinforcing each other.

So let's put all this together.

A. The cycle of declining interest rates and inflation has ended and a cycle of much higher interest and mortgage rates and inflation is beginning. Higher mortgages rates will depress housing prices as only the highest income households will be able to afford today's prices once mortgage rates rise.

B. The decay of urban finances and quality of life will accelerate as stimulus ends, credit dries up and inflation decimates disposable income.

C. The stress of trying to make enough money to afford the high costs of city/suburban living as the real estate bubble pops and the benefits of city living decline will burn out increasing numbers of people who will have no choice but to find more affordable, more secure and more livable places.

D. While the wealthy have already secured second or third homes in the toniest desirable towns, there are still opportunities for lower cost, more secure residences in rural areas.

E. This migration, even at the margins, will further depress urban housing prices and push prices in desirable rural locales higher.

F. This migration will have regional, ethnic and cultural variations. For example, some African-Americans leaving the upper Midwest are finding favor with communities in the South where family, church and cultural ties beckon.

G. Correspondent John F. used the phrase geographic arbitrage which means earning money remotely in high-wage sectors while living some place that's low cost and secure.

I wrote about this many years ago in my post about young Japanese maintaining a part-time remote-work gig while pursuing farming in rural communities: Degrowth Solutions: Half-Farmer, Half-X (July 19, 2014).

H. Though monetary / inflationary forces will pop housing prices based solely on low mortgage rates, this doesn't mean housing everywhere will decline: as burned out urbanites seek lower cost, more secure and livable places in rural locales, homes in desirable towns and small cities could rise sharply because they're starting from such low levels.

I. If urban areas decay rapidly, housing prices could plummet much faster than most people think possible.

When cities lose employment, tax revenues and desirability, they can go down fast. Property values can fall in half and then by 90%.

How is this possible? Supply and demand: if demand falls off a cliff, there won't be buyers for thousands of homes that come on the market all at once. This is just like a stock market in which buyers disappear, as no one wants to buy an asset that's rapidly losing value.

As I've noted many times, prices for assets are set on the margins: the last sale of a house resets the price for the entire neighborhood.

The stock market is easily manipulated by the big players, who can stop a slide in prices by buying huge chunks of stocks and call options. There are no equivalent forces which can stop a decline in housing prices.

And since rates will rise regardless of what the Federal Reserve does because global capital is demanding a real return above inflation, then the hope for lower mortgage rates to support bubble-level housing prices will be in vain.

How low could housing go? As explained above, there will likely be very asymmetric declines and increases in housing valuations going forward. But on a technical-analysis level, we can anticipate a general decline to previous lows, first to the 2019 lows and then to the 2011 lows.

Some analysts believe inflation will funnel capital into housing as investors seek assets that will go up with inflation, but this is a murky forecast: the bottom 90% of American households are already priced out of coastal housing, so inflation only robs their wages of purchasing power. They don't have any hope of buying a house anywhere near current prices.

Corporations are buying thousands of houses for the rental income, but once all the stimulus runs out and the excesses of speculation reverse, they'll find few renters can afford their sky-high rents. At that point corporate buyers become corporate sellers, but they won't find buyers willing or able to pay their asking prices, which are based on bubble pricing, not reality.

All these swirling currents will affect housing valuations in different places differently. Some areas could see 50% declines while others see 50% increases, regardless of mortgage rates or Fed policy.

What will become most desirable is a low cost of living, security and livability, which includes community, reduced dependency on long supply chains and local production of essentials.

We are all prone to believing the recent past is a reliable guide to the future. But in times of dynamic reversals, the past is an anchor thwarting our progress, not a forecast.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/who-will-eventually-own-everything-including-you/5778563

Who Will Eventually Own Everything, Including You?

BlackRock Is Buying Up Homes

By now you may be familiar with the World Economic Forum slogan, “By 2030, you will own nothing.” To that end, BlackRock and other investment firms are currently buying up every single-family home they can find, making cash offers of 20% to 50% above-asking price.²

Depending on where you live, you may have noticed that homes are selling within hours of being listed, making house hunting nearly impossible. Home buyers in my home state of Florida are certainly experiencing this phenomenon.

Investment firms are also buying up entire neighborhoods. As just one example, a 124-home neighborhood in Conroe, Texas, was bought for $32 million — 20% above listing — by Fundrise LLC, a real estate crowdfunding company, which then turned around and made all the homes into single-family rentals (SFRs).³

According to investment experts, SFRs are “exceptionally attractive investment assets,” and this is one aspect driving the trend. Demographic changes such as millennials starting families and affordability constraints are also said to be driving factors.⁴ But that really does not fully explain what’s happening.

The War Against Private Property

Buying a home has been part of the American dream since the founding of this country. It’s been a significant part of financial success and security. Now, lower to middle class Americans are being intentionally positioned to become permanent renters, which means they cannot build equity. Their ability to purchase a home, even if they can afford it, is being stripped from them by companies that can outbid them with cash offers.

In a recent episode of “60 Minutes” (above), Lesley Stahl actually did a good job exposing why home prices are going through the roof. It’s not just that these investment companies can snap up homes with the click of a button, but they’re also artificially driving up prices of both homes and rents.

For example, rents in Jacksonville, Florida, rose an average of 31% in 2021, and Austin, Texas, saw rents jump by 40%. The reason appears to be twofold: We’re not building enough housing, and what is being built is being bought by corporate landlords at above-market prices.

Corporate real estate investors don’t even look at the homes they’re bidding on, and typically waive inspections. The home can be in any shape and sell within hours. As Stahl notes, “this puts first-time home buyers at a serious disadvantage,” as they have many hoops to jump through before they can secure a loan and close the deal.

Government estimates we’re currently 4 million homes short, and that shortage continues to grow. One real estate investment firm interviewed by Stahl states that they list, on average, 200 to 300 homes for rent each week, and receive 10,000 leasing inquiries weekly.

Not-So-Hidden Wealth Redistribution

As noted in a tweet by Cultural Husbandry:⁵

“This is wealth redistribution, and it ain’t rich people’s wealth that is getting redistributed. It’s normal American middle class, salt of the earth wealth heading into the hands of the world’s most powerful entities and individuals. The traditional financial vehicle [is] gone forever.

Home equity is the main financial element that middle class families use to build wealth, and BlackRock, a federal reserve funded financial institution is buying up all the houses to make sure that young families can’t build wealth … This is a fundamental reorganization of society.”

Indeed, and it’s right in line with plans for societal reorganization described under banners such as The Great Reset, Build Back Better, Agenda 21 and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (see videos below)

These agendas all work together toward the same goal, which is a global monopoly on ownership and wealth, with a clear separation of the haves and have nots; the owners and the owned; the rulers and the ruled; the elite and the serfs.

‘Sustainable Development’ Agenda Is a Plan to Enslave You

The war against private property goes back decades. In 1976, during the first United Nations’ Conference on Human Settlements, called Habitat 1,⁸ the U.N. stated, in Item 10:⁹

“Land … cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to the pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice; if unchecked, it may become a major obstacle in the planning and implementation of development schemes. Public control of land use Is therefore indispensable.”

The idea, apparently, is that private investment firms like Vanguard and BlackRock can prevent social injustice by buying up all private property and renting it out. This way, no one (except their investors) can build wealth.

Private Property and freedom are inseparable. ~ George Washington

This is what “equity” is all about, and it has nothing to do with equality. “Social equity” is incredibly unfair, as it strips those with talent and drive of the ability to make something out of themselves.

Private Property and Freedom Are Inseparable

The UN’s Human Settlements agenda, Agenda 21 and the 2030 Sustainable Development agenda are in direct conflict with the U.S. Bill of Rights and the founding principles of this country. George Washington declared, “Private Property and freedom are inseparable.” Similarly, John Adams stated that “Property must be secure, or liberty cannot exist.”

In 1992 at the Earth Summit, under-secretary-general of the Convention on Climate Change and executive director of the UN Environment Program, Maurice Strong, stated that:¹⁰

“Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class, involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and workplace air-conditioning, and suburban housing, are not sustainable.”

If meat consumption, frozen foods, fossil fuel use, home appliances, air conditioning and single-family homes are “unsustainable,” it stands to reason that the goal of any sustainable development scheme is to eliminate all of those things. This is easier done in some countries than in others. As explained by the Cook Country News Herald back in 2012:¹¹

“Because Congress does not agree to all these United Nations schemes to steal our property and destroy our economy, they are passed by fiat, executive orders, proclamations, directives and generous grants given to local communities …”

In short, the technocratic elite are trying to circumvent the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights through various means, such as the effort to make the United Nations and the World Health Organization into global centers of power, with member states being forced to comply with whatever agendas they set, thereby undermining national sovereignty.

As explained in the Agenda 21 video above, Agenda 21 doesn’t stop at restricting private home and land ownership. It also includes:

In short, the global elite want you to believe that the only way to save the planet is for you to be their slave. It’s a tragic ultimate outcome for sure. If they are successful, virtually all of your constitutional rights and freedoms will be eliminated.

Who Owns the Farmland and Dictates Food Policy?

Private home ownership isn’t the only thing threatened by the encroaching monopoly of elitists. Bill Gates is now one of the largest private owners of U.S. farmland,¹² and he also wields unrivaled power over global food policy,¹³ as detailed in the AGRA Watch report,¹⁴ “The Man Behind the Curtain: The Gates Foundation’s Influence on the UN Food Systems Summit.”

While Gates is just one man, his clout is significantly leveraged and magnified by the fact that he funds such a large number of companies and organizations that they do his bidding on the sly. When you see long lists of groups, you automatically think there are many players in the game when, in fact, Gates is the singular thread running through most or all of them.

In its 2014 report,¹⁵ “Three Examples of Problems with Gates Foundation Grants,” AGRA Watch highlights why Gates’ massive investments in global food production have failed to solve any of the very real problems we face. First and foremost, many of the solutions that he backs are “Band-Aid solutions” that in fact worsen the root problems.

Examples include the funding of the development of genetically engineered (GE) foods designed to be higher in certain nutrients. The problem is that these crops then end up replacing local diversity with just a few GE varieties that don’t even take local conditions into account. So, by pushing for “fortified” crop varieties, malnutrition actually deepens, as biodiversity is reduced.

Secondly, “a stubborn focus on yield” is at odds with research showing that low yield or insufficient production is not causing world hunger. “There is ample evidence today that the problem instead is poverty and lack of access, which is deepened by destruction of local food systems and commercialization of food,” AGRA Watch notes, adding:

“Grants by the Gates’ Foundation and AGRA continue to focus on yield, priming Africa for a system suited to the needs of the profit-seeking, yield-oriented commercial farmer rather than the peasant or small farmer producing diverse crops for a local community.”

Additional observations can be found in the AGRA Watch article¹⁶ “Philanthrocapitalism: The Gates Foundation’s African Programs Are Not Charity,” published December 2017, in which philanthrocapitalism is described as “an attempt to use market processes to do good,” but which is inherently problematic “as markets are ill-suited to producing socially constructive ends.”

Put another way, Gates’ brand of philanthropy creates several new problems for each one it solves. Gates is also invested in the synthetic beef industry, and not surprisingly, he’s been calling on Western nations to transition to a 100% fake beef diet¹⁷ — all in the name of saving the environment. It’s the same argument pushed by Agenda 21 and the rest of the sustainable development schemes.

Media and Medicine Are Completely Controlled

Mainstream media and the pharmaceutical industry are two other important areas that have been taken over by a monopoly-centered “deep state.” Both industries are overwhelmingly owned by BlackRock and Vanguard,¹⁸ so to think the mainstream media will report on the truth is foolhardy to say the least, especially as it pertains to health and medicine.¹⁹

Allopathic medicine, by the way, has been controlled by those in the grip of greed ever since John D. Rockefeller founded the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in 1901 and campaigned to eliminate naturopathic medicine, which was the norm, in order to replace it with petroleum-based patented drugs.

Anything that couldn’t be patented was abolished and known cures were dismissed as quackery. Rockefeller accomplished this the same way Gates and other technocrats do it today — through control of the media.

WHO Treaty Is COVID Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

The WHO’s pandemic treaty is perhaps the greatest threat we’ve faced so far, and will go a long way toward implementing The Great Reset. As I noted in a March 2022 article,²⁰ the pandemic treaty is a direct threat to a nation’s sovereignty to make decisions for itself and its citizens, and will erode democracy everywhere, if enacted.

May 24, 2021, the European Council announced it supported the establishment of an international Pandemic Treaty, under which the WHO would have the power to replace the constitutions of individual nations with its own constitution under the banner of “pandemic prevention, preparedness and response.”²¹

March 3, 2022, the Council authorized the opening of negotiations for an international agreement. The infographic below, sourced from the European Council’s website,²² summarizes the process.

There’s simply no question that this treaty is part of the globalists’ plan to monopolize health systems worldwide,²³ and a way for them to force mandatory vaccinations, vaccine passports and digital identities on the uncooperative masses.

Any pandemic-related decision the WHO makes would supersede national and state laws. Eventually, all health-related decisions could come under the WHO’s jurisdiction, as the stated goals of the treaty include not only future pandemic response but also a stronger framework for health with the WHO as the coordinating authority on global health matters more generally.²⁴

Director-general of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, has also gone on record stating that his “central priority” as director-general of the WHO is to push the world toward universal health coverage.²⁵ As noted by Dr. Peter Breggin,²⁶ referring to Ghebreyesus’ address to the WHO Executive Committee on January 24, 2022, in which he spelled out his global health plan, “The spirit of Communism can be felt throughout the document.”

WEF: ‘World Is Best Managed by Self-Selected Coalition’

The WEF’s 2010 “Global Redesign” report²⁷ argues that the world is best managed by a self-selected coalition of “stakeholders” — multinational corporations, governments, international bodies such as the UN and the WHO, and select civil society organizations — that then make decisions on behalf of the global population.

If you look, you’ll find that all the globalist agendas, regardless of what they’re called, have this aim. They’re all working in lockstep to strip power from the people by making elected officials irrelevant. All the power is to be in the hands of a self-selected, self-nominated elite. If you believe they have any intention of doing what’s best for the people, it’s time to wake up, because you’re clearly dreaming.

For well over 100 years, they’ve done what’s best for them, even though their decisions poisoned our food supply, soils, air and water. Even though it destroyed our environment and resulted in unsafe medicines and toxic foods; even though it led to starvation, disease and death.

They’ve lied, cheated and used every underhanded, immoral and unethical trick in the book. They’ve coerced, bribed and manipulated at will. They’ve slowly but surely infiltrated every area of society with the intention of altering it to serve their own ends.

Technology, which is the foundation upon which technocracy rests, has allowed this self-selected group of megalomaniacs to thrive and build their power structure in the shadows. Only now are they starting to really show their true colors, their desire for absolute power and control.

As noted by New American contributor C. Mitchell Shaw,²⁸ “If you are not paying for the product, then you are the product.” YOU and your personal data are the products of Google, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. These platforms are all selling your personal data for profit. That’s the business they’re in.

Your data are also fed to artificial intelligence, and algorithms are created to profile and manipulate you. Everything you say and do is being used against you. The end goal of these megalomaniacs is always the same: to make money off you, even if it harms or kills you, and to manipulate you into accepting their proposition to rule over you. This all ends when enough people wake up to what they’re doing, and refuse to go along with their program.