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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2022/05/16/pentagon-funded-think-tank-simulates-war-with-china-on-nbc/

Pentagon-Funded Think Tank Simulates War With China On NBC

NBC’s Meet the Press just aired an absolutely freakish segment in which the influential narrative management firm Center for a New American Security (CNAS) ran war games simulating a direct US hot war with China.

CNAS is funded by the Pentagon and by military-industrial complex corporations Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin, as well as the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office, which as Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp notes is the de facto Taiwanese embassy in the US.

The war game simulates a conflict over Taiwan which we are informed is set in the year 2027, in which China launches strikes on the US military in order to open the way to an invasion of the island. We are not told why there needs to be a specific year inserted into mainstream American consciousness about when we can expect such a conflict, but then we are also not told why NBC is platforming a war machine think tank’s simulation of a military conflict with China at all.

It happens that the Center for a New American Security was the home of the man assigned by the Biden administration to lead the Pentagon task force responsible for re-evaluating the administration’s posture toward China. That man, Ely Ratner, is on record saying that the Trump administration was insufficiently hawkish toward China. Ratner is now the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs in the Biden administration.

It also happens that the Center for a New American Security has openly boasted about the great many of its other “experts and alumni” who have assumed senior leadership positions within the Biden administration.

It also happens that CNAS co-founder Michele Flournoy, who appeared in the Meet the Press war games segment and was at one time a heavy favorite to become Biden’s Pentagon chief, wrote a Foreign Affairs op-ed in 2020 arguing that the US needed to develop “the capability to credibly threaten to sink all of China’s military vessels, submarines, and merchant ships in the South China Sea within 72 hours.”

It also happens that CNAS CEO Richard Fontaine has been featured all over the mass media pushing empire narratives about Russia and China, telling Bloomberg just the other day that the war in Ukraine could serve the empire’s long-term interests against China.

“The war in Ukraine could end up being bad for the pivot in the short-term, but good in the long-term,” Fontaine said. “If Russia emerges from this conflict as a weakened version of itself and Germany makes good on its defense spending pledges, both trends could allow the US to focus more on the Indo-Pacific in the long run.”

It also happens that CNAS is routinely cited by the mass media as an authoritative source on all things China and Russia, with no mention ever made of the conflict of interest arising from their war machine funding. Just in the last few days here’s a recent NPR interview about NATO expansion with CNAS senior fellow Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a Washington Post quote from CNAS fellow Jacob Stokes about the Chinese threat to Taiwan, a Financial Times quote from CNAS “Indo-Pacific expert” Lisa Curtis (who I’ve previously noted was cited by the mass media for her “expert” opposition to the US Afghanistan withdrawal), and a Foreign Policy citation of the aforementioned Richard Fontaine saying “The aim of U.S. policy toward China should be to ensure that Beijing is either unwilling or unable to overturn the regional and global order.”

As we’ve discussed previously, citing war machine-funded think tanks as expert analysis without even disclosing their financial conflict of interest is plainly journalistic malpractice. But it happens all the time in the mass media anyway, because the mass media exist to circulate propaganda, not journalism.

This is getting so, so crazy. That the mass media are now openly teaming up with war machine think tanks to begin seeding the normalization of a hot war with China into the minds of the public indicates that the propaganda campaign to manufacture consent for the US-centralized empire’s final Hail Mary grab at unipolar domination is escalating even further. The mass-scale psychological manipulation is getting more and more overt and more and more shameless.

This is headed somewhere very, very bad. Hopefully humanity wakes up in time to stop these lunatics from driving us off a precipice from which there is no return.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogmay22/long-cycles5-22.html

Checking In On Five Long-Term Cycles

Way back in 2007 I charted five long-wave cycles that I reckoned consequential:
1. Public debt (accumulating federal deficits)
2. Inflation
3. Oil (energy)
4. Interest rates
5. Speculative fever

Fifteen years ago, my chart look-ahead was about three years, to 2010, with the basic idea being that these long-term cycles had already turned or were about to turn. Looking back, I should have added a few other long cycles: demographics, for example.

I have two takeaways looking at this chart 15 years later. You probably have similar takeaways.

1. I underestimated the status quo's ability to kick the can down the road for a decade. The motivation to kick the can down the road was never in doubt; what was in doubt was the system's ability to respond to doing more of what's failed spectacularly and keep on keeping on more or less unfazed.

2. After 15 years of frantic can-kicking, the cycles have indeed turned. I would say the predicted turns were correct but frantic can-kicking extended the existing cycle of hyper-financialization / hyper-globalization an extra decade.

Various dynamics extended the hyper-financialization / hyper-globalization bubble phase. Fracking in the U.S.--funded by the massive expansion of cheap credit--extended the global energy abundance as the resulting losses were swept away in a tsunami of cheap credit. Zombie frackers were fed as many billions in new loans as were needed to keep the cheap oil flowing.

The whole shebang was at risk of unraveling in 2011, but China's gargantuan credit expansion saved the day, and did so again in 2016. But China's credit expansion has now reached systemic limits, and so those relying on China to save the global economy yet again from the banquet of consequences are about to be severely disappointed.

The Federal Reserve's ten-fold expansion of its balance sheet artificially suppressed interest and mortgage rates while various gaming-how-we-measure-what-we-measure tricks understated real-world inflation while hyper-globalization continued deflating costs by shifting production to the lowest-cost regions.

The success of frantic can-kicking to extend hyper-financialization / hyper-globalization pushed speculation into hyper-speculation. The monumental bubbles in stocks and housing 1999-2008 now look modest compared to today's Everything Bubble. The past 20 years have "proven" the profitability of buying the dip which is essentially a bet that there are no limits on frantic can-kicking.

Alas, it is now clear that at long last there are limits on frantic can-kicking, and the cycles have turned. The 40-year decline in interest rates has turned, the four-decade quiescence of inflation has turned, the era of low-cost extraction of abundant hydrocarbons has turned, the cycle of being able to "borrow our way out of trouble" has turned and the era of rewarding hyper-speculation has turned.

How gradual or dramatic the new cycle will be is unknown. If we imagine all these dynamics as a pendulum, the pendulum has been pushed by frantic can-kicking to systemic extremes that will reverse to extremes at the other end of the spectrum (minus a bit of friction).

The decline phase of S-Curves can be gradual or a cliff-dive. While we don't know the decay / unraveling trajectory yet, we can anticipate all these long cycle turns reinforcing each other. It's all one system, after all, and the decay / unraveling of each subsystem will accelerate the decay / unraveling of the other subsystems.

As a general rule, it's a good idea not to stand in the way of the pendulum. Put another way, it's considerably safer to be in the stands watching the great beasts slouching towards Bethlehem than being on the blood-soaked sand of the Coliseum, clutching a wooden sword and a shredded net.  

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https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2022/05/16/the-social-credit-system-is-the-elites-means-of-control/

The Social Credit System is the Elite’s Means of Control

Duff Cooper, Viscount Norwich, was the only British minister who resigned over the Munich Agreement of 1938.  His autobiography was titled Old Men Forget.

I expect they do, but I remember.  

I remember when business, even large business, operated on handshakes without contracts.  Business could operate this way because people in those days had good character and integrity.  A person who welched on a handshake was finished in business.  

I grew up when America was still America.  We were taught that you had to be able to look yourself in the mirror every morning.  That required that you were truthful and honorable in your relations with others.

Today you can’t look yourself in the mirror unless you have ripped off, to your financial benefit, others.  Just read any of the books by Wall Street whistleblowers or government officials about how the system really operates.

Today, lawyers tell me, even iron-clad contracts cannot protect a deal.

Governments confronted with self-serving behavior other than their own are frustrated by the difficulty of organizing people behind the government’s, or its controlling agents’, agendas.  China is consolidating control over its population by creating a “Social Credit System.”  The Chinese population is monitored in its behavior.  A Chinese citizen who disagrees with the government, drinks while driving, or demonstrates any politically or socially undesirable traits and behaviors gets a very low rating that prevents the citizen from traveling abroad, from attending university, from using public transport, or whatever restriction and punishment the government decides to inflict.

This Social Credit System is in the process of being established throughout the Western World  It is the hallmark of the Davos World Economic Forum and America’s Department of Homeland Security.  Most of America’s global corporations are its champions.

The Social Credit system requires “citizens” to be subservient to government.  Such governments are still called “democracies,” but the citizens have no voice.  All voices different from the narrative are cancelled.

I do not think the United States as a country can escape this. States with a semi-aware government, such as Florida with Governor DeSantis, have a chance, but past efforts of states to defend their constitutional authority against an invasive federal government have failed.

Notice that the tyrannical Social Credit system is trying to recreate the reliable, predictable old character system, with the difference being that a citizen’s loyalty is not to his character but to the Government’s agenda.

The first step in establishing a Social Credit system is to gain control over the media.  This was accomplished during the Clinton regime when six mega-companies were allowed to buy up and concentrate in a few hands 90% of what was an independent media.

The next step is to use fear–9/11, Covid, Russia–to get a fearful and gullible population to agree to the loss of their constitutional protections in order “to be safe.”

Once this is accomplished, there are no constraints on those who wield power.  The Constitution becomes a document without authority.  

This is precisely the point at which we stand at this moment.