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http://endoftheamericandream.com/anger-is-rapidly-growing-as-economic-conditions-steadily-deteriorate-all-over-the-world/

Anger Is Rapidly Growing As Economic Conditions Steadily Deteriorate All Over The World

 We are in the early stages of a global economic collapse, and people all over the globe are getting extremely angry.  Here in the United States, higher prices are an inconvenience, but in other parts of the world higher prices can mean the difference between feeding your family or not.  And once people get to a point where they cannot even survive on the incomes that they are bringing in, they can become very unpredictable and very violent.  For example, a large economic protest that just happened in Lebanon quickly descended into violence as protesters aggressively clashed with government security forces…

Although the protest began peacefully, demonstrators clashed with security forces, who repeatedly shot tear gas into the crowd after demonstrators breached the barbed wire in front of the government building.

“It’s not just our salaries, we’re fighting for our lives,” a retired officer told The National after escaping a cloud of tear gas.

“After serving our country for over 30 years, we can’t even live off our pensions,” he said.

Cries of “Shame on you!” could be heard as protesters ran from the smog of tear gas.

We are seeing similar protests in the western world.  On Sunday, an absolutely massive protest in Prague called on government leaders to resign because of “high inflation and energy prices”…

Thousands of people rallied again in the Czech capital, Prague, on Sunday calling on the government to resign as they protested against high inflation and energy prices.

It was the second such rally in the central Wenceslas Square, called for by a new non-parliamentary political party PRO, which in English stands for Law, Respect, and Expertise.

“We want to express our disapproval of this government, of the political situation, of what’s going on in the Czech Republic and in fact in the whole of Europe,” said one protestor, Renata Urbanova.

Unfortunately, economic protests such as these have become quite common over the past year.

In fact, one team of researchers determined that there were 12,500 such protests during 2022…

Last September, Italians in Rome, Milan and Naples burned their energy bills in a coordinated protest against soaring prices. In October, thousands took to French streets to decry government inaction over the high cost of living. And in November, Spanish workers rallied for higher wages, chanting “salary or conflict.”

Researchers have defined an unprecedented global wave of more than 12,500 protests across 148 countries over food, fuel and cost of living increases in 2022. And the largest were in Western Europe.

Will that number be even higher in 2023?

All over the world, people need to eat, and food prices just keep rising.

In March, food prices in the UK rose “at their fastest rate for 45 years”.

And it is now being projected that the global rice shortfall this year will be the largest in 20 years.  That will mean even higher prices for the billions of people that eat rice.

Even here in the United States, food prices are becoming extremely oppressive.  Earlier today, I was stunned to learn that one bakery in New York is actually selling a ham and cheese sandwich for 29 dollars.

Can you believe that?

Up until just recently, we haven’t seen economic protests in North America like we have around the rest of the world, but that has started to change.  Right now, approximately 155,000 government workers in Canada have gone on strike because the cost of living has been rising much faster than their paychecks have…

The mushroom cloud of central bank monetary destruction keeps growing, and is increasingly fueling discontent among workers whose standards of living are eroding along with the purchasing power of their wages.

Europe has already seen a wave of strikes aimed at securing inflation-offsetting pay raises. Now it’s Canada’s turn: At midnight, more than 155,000 Canadian federal government workers went on strike in what’s being described as the largest walkout against a single employer in the country’s history.

The strike was called by the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) union, which has been in negotiations for a new contract since 2021. This strike primarily encompasses two groups of federal employees: 120,000 at the Treasury Board and 35,000 at the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA).

No matter who you are or where you live, you can see that the cost of living is rising at a very alarming pace.

And that isn’t likely to change any time soon.

In the U.S., one recent survey discovered that a whopping 67 percent of all Americans believe that their incomes are falling behind inflation…

Continual inflation has hurt Americans, with roughly two-thirds of them reporting their wages cannot keep up, according to the most recent CNBC All-America Economic Survey.

Only 5% of Americans say their household income is outpacing inflation, with 67% stating it is falling behind and 26% saying it is keeping up, according to CNBC. The vast majority of the public is adjusting their spending habits and lifestyles due to inflation, with 81% saying they are taking measures like reducing entertainment spending and travel or dipping into savings to cover expenses.

The Federal Reserve has been rapidly increasing interest rates in a desperate attempt to contain inflation, but those higher rates have pushed us into a very serious economic downturn.

Large companies are laying off workers all over America, and that list includes Disney and Facebook…

This year, 596 tech firms have laid off 171,308 workers. The list is anticipated to expand, with Meta Platforms Inc. initiating job cuts today and Walt Disney Co. preparing to reduce its workforce by thousands in the coming week.

According to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg, the Facebook parent company told managers they should prepare for job cuts on Wednesday. The memo states jobs across Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs will be affected.

The move to reduce headcount by at least 10,000 positions at the company was outlined by founder Mark Zuckerberg’s goal of greater efficiency earlier this year. Another round of job cuts is expected next month.

I know that I have covered an enormous amount of material very quickly in this article.

But people need to understand the seriousness of what we are now facing.

It isn’t just the U.S. economy that is in trouble.

The entire global system is beginning to shake and tremble, and eventually it will completely implode.

According to Google, there are currently 7.888 billion people living on this planet.

Approximately half of those people live on $6.85 or less a day.

Poverty and hunger are rapidly growing all over the world, and we are going to witness so much pain and suffering in the months and years ahead.

But most people don’t understand any of this, because the mainstream media just continues to insist that everything will work out just fine somehow.

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https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/speak_your_truth_dont_let_the_government_criminalize_free_speech

Speak Your Truth: Don’t Let the Government Criminalize Free Speech

“If freedom of speech is taken away, then dumb and silent we may be led, like sheep to the slaughter.”—George Washington

What the police state wants is a silent, compliant, oblivious citizenry.

What the First Amendment affirms is an engaged citizenry that speaks truth to power using whatever peaceful means are available to us.

Speaking one’s truth doesn’t have to be the same for each person, and that truth doesn’t have to be palatable or pleasant or even factual.

We can be loud.

We can be obnoxious.

We can be politically incorrect.

We can be conspiratorial or mean or offensive.

We can be all these things because the First Amendment takes a broad, classically liberal approach to the free speech rights of the citizenry: in a nutshell, the government may not encroach or limit the citizenry’s right to freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly and protest.

This is why the First Amendment is so critical.

It gives the citizenry the right to speak freely, protest peacefully, expose government wrongdoing, and criticize the government without fear of retaliation, arrest or incarceration.

Nowhere in the First Amendment does it permit the government to limit speech in order to avoid causing offense, hurting someone’s feelings, safeguarding government secrets, protecting government officials, discouraging bullying, penalizing hateful ideas and actions, eliminating terrorism, combatting prejudice and intolerance, and the like.

When expressive activity crosses the line into violence, free speech protections end.

However, barring actual violence or true threats of violence, there is a vast difference between speech that is socially unpopular and speech that is illegal, and it’s an important distinction that depends on our commitment to safeguarding a robust First Amendment.

Increasingly, however, the courts and the government are doing away with that critical distinction, adopting the mindset that speech is only permissible if it does not offend, irritate, annoy, threaten someone’s peace of mind, or challenge the government’s stranglehold on power.

Take the case of Counterman v. Colorado which is before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Under the pretext of clamping down on online stalking, Colorado wants the power to be able to treat expressive activities on social media as threats without having to prove that the messages are both reasonably understood as threatening an illegal act and intended by the speaker as a threat.

While protecting people from stalking is certainly a valid concern and may be warranted in this particular case, the law does not require speech to be a “true threat” in order to be criminally punished. The Supreme Court has defined a “true threat” as “statements where the speaker means to communicate a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals.”

Indeed, Colorado’s stalking law is so broad that a person can be charged with stalking for repeatedly contacting, surveilling or communicating with an individual in such a way that a reasonable person would feel serious emotional distress.

In the absence of any substantive guidelines on what constitutes a true threat on social media, such laws could empower the government to misinterpret any speaker’s intent and meaning in order to criminalize legitimate political speech that is critical of government officials and representatives.

Case in point: in Oklahoma, a street preacher who expressed his moral outrage over public drag queen performances that occur in front of children and churches that endorse same-sex marriage was given a five-year restraining order and threatened with arrest after citing Bible verses on social media about God’s judgment of sin.

The Rutherford Institute has taken on the case, warning that the ramifications of it going unchallenged could render anyone who quotes the Bible a criminal if it makes a listener feel unsafe or threatened or judged.

This is what it means to criminalize free speech: it turns those who exercise their free speech rights into criminals.

This criminalization of free speech, which is exactly what the government’s prosecution of those who say the “wrong” thing using an electronic medium amounts to, was at the heart of Elonis v. United States, a case that wrestled with where the government can draw the line when it comes to expressive speech that is protected and permissible versus speech that could be interpreted as connoting a criminal intent.

The case arose after Anthony Elonis, an aspiring rap artist, used personal material from his life as source material and inspiration for rap lyrics which he then shared on Facebook.

For instance, shortly after Elonis’ wife left him and he was fired from his job, his lyrics included references to killing his ex-wife, shooting a classroom of kindergarten children, and blowing up an FBI agent who had opened an investigation into his postings.

Despite the fact that Elonis routinely accompanied his Facebook posts with disclaimers that his lyrics were fictitious, and that he was using such writings as an outlet for his frustrations, he was charged with making unlawful threats (although it was never proven that he intended to threaten anyone) and sentenced to 44 months in jail.

The question the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to decide in Elonis was whether his activity, in the absence of any overt intention of committing a crime, rose to the level of a “true threat” or whether it was protected First Amendment activity.

In an 8-1 decision that concerned itself more with “criminal-law principles concerning intent rather than the First Amendment’s protection of free speech,” the Court ruled that prosecutors had not proven that Elonis intended to harm anyone beyond the words he used and context.

That was back in 2015.

Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in Elonis, Corporate America has taken the lead in policing expressive activity online, with social media giants such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube using their formidable dominance in the field to censor, penalize and regulate speech and behavior online by suspending and/or banning users whose content violated the companies’ so-called community standards for obscenity, violence, hate speech, discrimination, conspiracy theories, etc.

The fallout is as one would expect.

The internet has become a forum for the government—and its corporate partners—to monitor, control and punish the populace for speech that may be controversial but is far from criminal.

Everything is now fair game for censorship if it can be construed as hateful, hurtful, bigoted or offensive provided that it runs counter to the established viewpoint.

In this way, the most controversial issues of our day—race, religion, sex, sexuality, politics, science, health, government corruption, police brutality, etc.—have become battlegrounds for those who claim to believe in freedom (of religion, speech, assembly, press, redress, privacy, bodily integrity, etc.) but only when it favors the views and positions they support.

In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices.

Indeed, there is a long and growing list of the kinds of speech that the government considers dangerous enough to red flag and subject to censorship, surveillance, investigation and prosecution: hate speech, conspiratorial speech, treasonous speech, threatening speech, inflammatory speech, radical speech, anti-government speech, extremist speech, etc.

In recent years, the government has used the phrase “domestic terrorist” interchangeably with “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” to describe anyone who might fall somewhere on a very broad spectrum of viewpoints that could be considered “dangerous.”

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

You see, the government doesn’t care if you or someone you know has a legitimate grievance. It doesn’t care if your criticisms are well-founded. And it certainly doesn’t care if you have a First Amendment right to speak truth to power.

It just wants you to shut up.

Yet no matter what one’s political persuasion might be, the right to disagree with and speak out against the government is the quintessential freedom. When exercised regularly and defended vigorously, these First Amendment rights serve as a bulwark against tyranny.

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 https://brownstone.org/articles/what-they-meant-by-essential-and-nonessential/

 What They Meant by Essential and Nonessential

In all my thinking about the lockdown years, I’ve only had time now to think carefully about this strange distinction between essential and nonessential. What did it mean in practice and where did it come from? 

The edict to divide the workforce came from a previously unknown agency called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency or CISA. The edict came down March 18, 2020, two days following the initial lockdown orders from Washington. 

Management and workers all over the country had to dig through regulations that came out of the blue to find out if they could go to work. The terms essential and nonessential were not used in the way one might initially intuit. It sharply demarcated the whole of the commercial world in ways that are inorganic to all of human experience. 

In the background was a very long history and cultural habit of using terms to identify professions and their interaction with difficult subjects like class. During the Middle Ages, we had lords, serfs, merchants, monks, and thieves. As capitalism dawned, these strict demarcations melted away and people got access to money despite accidents of birth. 

Today we speak of “white collar” meaning dressed up for a professional setting, even if literal white collars are not common. We speak of the “working classes,” an odd term that implies others are not working because they are members of the leisure class; this is clearly a holdover from 19th-century habits of the aristocracy. In the 20th century, we invented the term middle class to refer to everyone who is not actually poor. 

The Department of Labor has traditionally deferred to common usage, and speaks of “professional services,” “information services,” “retail,” and “hospitality,” while the tax authorities offer hundreds of professions into which you are supposed to fit yourself. 

The deployment of the terms essential and nonessential, however, has no precedent in our language. This is because of a view stemming from the democratic ethos and real-world commercial experience that everyone and everything is essential to everything else. 

When I worked as part of a department-store cleaning crew, I became profoundly aware of this. My job was not only to clean the restrooms – certainly essential – but also to pick tiny pins and needles from the carpets in the changing rooms. Missing one could end in terrible injury for customers. My job was as essential as the accountants or salespeople. 

What precisely did government in March 2020 mean by nonessential? It meant things like haircutters, make-up stylists, nail salons, gyms, bars, restaurants, small shops, bowling alleys, movie theaters, and churches. These are all activities that some bureaucrats in Washington, DC decided that we could do without. After months of no haircuts, however, things started to get desperate as people cut their own hair and called someone to sneak over to the house. 

I had a friend who heard through the grapevine that there was a warehouse in New Jersey that had a secret knock for the backdoor to a barber. He tried it and it worked. Not one word was spoken. The haircut took 7 minutes and he paid in cash, which is all the person would accept. He came and went and told no one. 

This is what it meant to be nonessential: a person or service that society could do without in a pinch. The lockdown order of March 16, 2020 (“indoor and outdoor venues where people congregate should be closed”) applied to them. But it did not apply to everyone and everything. 

What was essential? This is where matters got very complicated. Did one want to be essential? Maybe but it depends on the profession. Truck drivers were essential. Nurses and doctors were essential. The people who keep the lights on, the water running, and the buildings in good repair are essential.

These are not laptoppers and Zoomers. They had actually to be there. Those professions include what are considered “working class” jobs but not all of them. Bartenders and cooks and waiters were not essential. 

But also included here was government, of course. Can’t do without that. Additionally this included media, which turned out to be hugely important in the pandemic period. Education was essential even if it could be conducted online. Finance was essential because, you know, people have to make money in stock markets and banking. 

All in all, the category of essential included the “lowest” ranks of the social pecking order – garbage collectors and meat processors – and also the highest ranks of society from media professionals to permanent bureaucrats. 

It was an odd pairing, a complete bifurcation between highest and lowest. It was the served and the servers. The serfs and the lords. The ruling class and those who deliver food to their storesteps. When the New York Times said we should go medieval on the virus, they meant it. That’s exactly what happened. 

This even applied to surgery and medical services. “Elective surgeries,” meaning anything on a schedule including diagnostic check-ups, were forbidden while “emergency surgeries” were permitted. Why are there no real investigations into how this came to be?

Think of totalitarian societies like in The Hunger Games, with a District One and everyone else, or perhaps the old Soviet Union in which the party elites dined in luxury and everyone else stood in bread lines, or perhaps a scene from Oliver! in which the owners of the orphanage got fat while the kids in the workhouse lived on gruel until they could escape to live in the underground economy. 

It appears that the pandemic planners think of society the same way. When they had the chance to decide what was essential and nonessential, they chose a society massively segregated between the rulers and those who make their lives possible, while everyone else was dispensable. This is not an accident. This is how they see the world and perhaps how they want it to function in the future. 

This is not conspiracy theory. This really happened. They did it to us only 3 years ago, and that should tell us something. It is contrary to every democratic principle and flies in the face of everything we call civilization. But they did it anyway. This reality gives us a peak into a mindset that is deeply troubling and should truly alarm us all. 

So far as I know, none of the authors of this policy have been dragged before Congress to testify. They have never given testimony in court. A search of the New York Times turns up no news that this tiny agency, created only in 2018, blew apart the whole of the organic class markers that have charted our progress for the last 1,000 years. It was a shocking and brutal action and yet merits no comment at all from the ruling regime in government, media, or otherwise. 

Now that we know for sure who and what our rulers consider essential and nonessential, what are we going to do about it? Should someone be called to account for this? Or will we continue to allow our overlords to gradually make the reality of life under lockdowns our permanent condition?