https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/technofascism_digital_book_burning_in_a_totalitarian_age
Technofascism: Digital Book Burning in a Totalitarian Age
“Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices—taking advantage of our freedom of speech—who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.”—Nat Hentoff
We are fast becoming a nation—nay, a world—of book burners.
While on paper, we are technically free to speak—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—in reality, however, we are only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow.
That’s not a whole lot of freedom. Especially if you’re inclined to voice opinions that may be construed as conspiratorial or dangerous.
Take David Icke, for example.
Icke, a popular commentator and author often labeled a conspiracy theorist by his detractors, recently had his Facebook page and YouTube channel (owned by Google) deleted for violating site policies by “spreading coronavirus disinformation.”
The Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which has been vocal about calling for Icke’s de-platforming, is also pushing for the removal of all other sites and individuals who promote Icke’s content in an effort to supposedly “save lives.”
Translation: the CCDH evidently believes the public is too dumb to think for itself and must be protected from dangerous ideas.
This is the goosestepping Nanny State trying to protect us from ourselves.
In the long run, this “safety” control (the censorship and shadowbanning of anyone who challenges a mainstream narrative) will be far worse than merely allowing people to think for themselves.
Journalist Matt Taibbi gets its: “The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant.”
Don’t fall for the propaganda.
These internet censors are not acting in our best interests to protect us from dangerous, disinformation campaigns about COVID-19, a virus whose source and behavior continue to elude medical officials. They’re laying the groundwork now, with Icke as an easy target, to preempt any “dangerous” ideas that might challenge the power elite’s stranglehold over our lives.
This is how freedom dies.
It doesn’t matter what disinformation Icke may or may not have been spreading about COVID-19. That’s not the issue.
As commentator Caitlin Johnstone recognizes, the censorship of David Icke by these internet media giants has nothing to do with Icke: “What matters is that we’re seeing a consistent and accelerating pattern of powerful plutocratic institutions collaborating with the US-centralized empire to control what ideas people around the world are permitted to share with each other, and it’s a very unsafe trajectory.”
Welcome to the age of technofascism.
Technofascism, clothed in tyrannical self-righteousness, is powered by technological behemoths (both corporate and governmental) working in tandem. As journalist Chet Bowers explains, “Technofascism’s level of efficiency and totalitarian potential can easily lead to repressive systems that will not tolerate dissent.”
The internet, hailed as a super-information highway, is increasingly becoming the police state’s secret weapon. This “policing of the mind: is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”
It’s a slippery slope from censoring so-called illegitimate ideas to silencing truth.
Eventually, as George Orwell predicted, telling the truth will become a revolutionary act.
We’re almost at that point now.
What you are witnessing is the modern-day equivalent of book burning which involves doing away with dangerous ideas—legitimate or not—and the people who espouse them.
Today, the forces of political correctness, working in conjunction with corporate and government agencies, have managed to replace actual book burning with intellectual book burning.
“Free speech for me but not for thee” is how my good friend and free speech purist Nat Hentoff used to sum up this double standard.
This is about much more than free speech, however. This is about repression and control.
With every passing day, we’re being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called “government speech.”
The reasons for such censorship vary widely from political correctness, safety concerns and bullying to national security and hate crimes but the end result remains the same: the complete eradication of what Benjamin Franklin referred to as the “principal pillar of a free government.”
The upshot of all of this editing, parsing, banning and silencing is the emergence of a new language, what George Orwell referred to as Newspeak, which places the power to control language in the hands of the totalitarian state.
Under such a system, language becomes a weapon to change the way people think by changing the words they use.
The end result is control.
In totalitarian regimes—a.k.a. police states—where conformity and compliance are enforced at the end of a loaded gun, the government dictates what words can and cannot be used.
In countries where the police state hides behind a benevolent mask and disguises itself as tolerance, the citizens censor themselves, policing their words and thoughts to conform to the dictates of the mass mind lest they find themselves ostracized or placed under surveillance.
Even when the motives behind this rigidly calibrated reorientation of societal language appear well-intentioned—discouraging racism, condemning violence, denouncing discrimination and hatred—inevitably, the end result is the same: intolerance, indoctrination and infantilism.
It’s political correctness disguised as tolerance, civility and love, but what it really amounts to is the chilling of free speech and the demonizing of viewpoints that run counter to the cultural elite.
The police state could not ask for a better citizenry than one that carries out its own censorship, spying and policing: this is how you turn a nation of free people into extensions of the omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent police state, and in the process turn a citizenry against each other.
Tread cautiously: Orwell’s 1984, which depicts the ominous rise of ubiquitous technology, fascism and totalitarianism, has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.
1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not allowed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom, and advanced technology has become the driving force behind a surveillance-driven society. Snitches and cameras are everywhere. People are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of thought crimes. The government, or "Party," is headed by Big Brother who appears on posters everywhere with the words: "Big Brother is watching you."
We have arrived, way ahead of schedule, into the dystopian future dreamed up by not only Orwell but also such fiction writers as Aldous Huxley, Margaret Atwood and Philip K. Dick.
Much like Orwell’s Big Brother in 1984, the government and its corporate spies now watch our every move. Much like Huxley’s A Brave New World, we are churning out a society of watchers who “have their liberties taken away from them, but … rather enjoy it, because they [are] distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing.” Much like Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, the populace is now taught to “know their place and their duties, to understand that they have no real rights but will be protected up to a point if they conform, and to think so poorly of themselves that they will accept their assigned fate and not rebel or run away.”
And in keeping with Philip K. Dick’s darkly prophetic vision of a dystopian police state—which became the basis for Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Minority Report—we are now trapped in a world in which the government is all-seeing, all-knowing and all-powerful, and if you dare to step out of line, dark-clad police SWAT teams and pre-crime units will crack a few skulls to bring the populace under control.
What once seemed futuristic no longer occupies the realm of science fiction.
Incredibly, as the various nascent technologies employed and shared by the government and corporations alike—facial recognition, iris scanners, massive databases, behavior prediction software, and so on—are incorporated into a complex, interwoven cyber network aimed at tracking our movements, predicting our thoughts and controlling our behavior, the dystopian visions of past writers is fast becoming our reality.
In fact, our world is characterized by widespread surveillance, behavior prediction technologies, data mining, fusion centers, driverless cars, voice-controlled homes, facial recognition systems, cybugs and drones, and predictive policing (pre-crime) aimed at capturing would-be criminals before they can do any damage. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. Government agents listen in on our telephone calls and read our emails. And privacy and bodily integrity have been utterly eviscerated.
We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations wedded to the police state.
What many fail to realize is that the government is not operating alone. It cannot.
The government requires an accomplice.
Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of the massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental overreach.
In fact, Big Tech wedded to Big Government has become Big Brother, and we are now ruled by the Corporate Elite whose tentacles have spread worldwide.
The government now has at its disposal technological arsenals so sophisticated and invasive as to render any constitutional protections null and void. Spearheaded by the NSA, which has shown itself to care little to nothing for constitutional limits or privacy, the “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance—has come to dominate the government and our lives.
Money, power, control.
There is no shortage of motives fueling the convergence of mega-corporations and government. But who is paying the price?
“We the people,” of course. Not just we Americans, but people the world over.
We have entered into a global state of tyranny.
Where we stand now is at the juncture of OldSpeak (where words have meanings, and ideas can be dangerous) and Newspeak (where only that which is “safe” and “accepted” by the majority is permitted). The power elite has made their intentions clear: they will pursue and prosecute any and all words, thoughts and expressions that challenge their authority.
This is the final link in the police state chain.
Americans have been conditioned to accept routine incursions on their privacy rights. In fact, the addiction to screen devices—especially cell phones—has created a hive effect where the populace is not only watched, but is also controlled by AI bots. However, at one time, the idea of a total surveillance state tracking one’s every move would have been abhorrent to most Americans. That all changed with the 9/11 attacks. As professor Jeffrey Rosen observes, “Before Sept. 11, the idea that Americans would voluntarily agree to live their lives under the gaze of a network of biometric surveillance cameras, peering at them in government buildings, shopping malls, subways and stadiums, would have seemed unthinkable, a dystopian fantasy of a society that had surrendered privacy and anonymity.”
Having been reduced to a cowering citizenry—mute in the face of elected officials who refuse to represent us, helpless in the face of police brutality, powerless in the face of militarized tactics and technology that treat us like enemy combatants on a battlefield, and naked in the face of government surveillance that sees and hears all—we have nowhere left to go.
We have, so to speak, gone from being a nation where privacy is king to one where nothing is safe from the prying eyes of government.
In search of so-called terrorists and extremists hiding amongst us—the proverbial "needle in a haystack," as one official termed it—the Corporate State has taken to monitoring all aspects of our lives, from cell phone calls and emails to Internet activity and credit card transactions. This data is being fed through fusion centers across the country, which work with the Department of Homeland Security to make threat assessments on every citizen, including school children.
Wherever you go and whatever you do, you are now being watched, especially if you leave behind an electronic footprint.
When you use your cell phone, you leave a record of when the call was placed, who you called, how long it lasted and even where you were at the time. When you use your ATM card, you leave a record of where and when you used the card. There is even a video camera at most locations equipped with facial recognition software. When you use a cell phone or drive a car enabled with GPS, you can be tracked by satellite. Such information is shared with government agents, including local police. And all of this once-private information about your consumer habits, your whereabouts and your activities is now being fed to the U.S. government.
The government has nearly inexhaustible resources when it comes to tracking our movements, from electronic wiretapping devices, traffic cameras and biometrics to radio-frequency identification cards, satellites and Internet surveillance.
Speech recognition technology now makes it possible for the government to carry out massive eavesdropping by way of sophisticated computer systems. Phone calls can be monitored, the audio converted to text files and stored in computer databases indefinitely. And if any "threatening" words are detected—no matter how inane or silly—the record can be flagged and assigned to a government agent for further investigation. Federal and state governments, again working with private corporations, monitor your Internet content. Users are profiled and tracked in order to identify, target and even prosecute them.
In such a climate, everyone is a suspect. And you’re guilty until you can prove yourself innocent.
Here’s what a lot of people fail to understand, however: it’s not just what you say or do that is being monitored, but how you think that is being tracked and targeted.
We’ve already seen this play out on the state and federal level with hate crime legislation that cracks down on so-called “hateful” thoughts and expression, encourages self-censoring and reduces free debate on various subject matter.
Say hello to the new Thought Police.
Total Internet surveillance by the Corporate State, as omnipresent as God, is used by the government to predict and, more importantly, control the populace, and it’s not as far-fetched as you might think. For example, the NSA has designed an artificial intelligence system that can anticipate your every move. In a nutshell, the NSA feeds vast amounts of the information it collects to a computer system known as Aquaint (the acronym stands for Advanced QUestion Answering for INTelligence), which the computer then uses to detect patterns and predict behavior.
No information is sacred or spared.
Everything from cell phone recordings and logs, to emails, to text messages, to personal information posted on social networking sites, to credit card statements, to library circulation records, to credit card histories, etc., is collected by the NSA and shared freely with its agents.
Thus, what we are witnessing, in the so-called name of security and efficiency, is the creation of a new class system comprised of the watched (average Americans such as you and me) and the watchers (government bureaucrats, technicians and private corporations).
Clearly, the age of privacy is at an end.
So where does that leave us?
We now find ourselves in the unenviable position of being monitored, managed and controlled by our technology, which answers not to us but to our government and corporate rulers. This is the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction lesson that is being pounded into us on a daily basis.
It won’t be long before we find ourselves looking back on the past with longing, back to an age where we could speak to whom we wanted, buy what we wanted, think what we wanted without those thoughts, words and activities being tracked, processed and stored by corporate giants such as Google, sold to government agencies such as the NSA and CIA, and used against us by militarized police with their army of futuristic technologies.
To be an individual today, to not conform, to have even a shred of privacy, and to live beyond the reach of the government’s roaming eyes and technological spies, one must not only be a rebel but rebel.
Even when you rebel and take your stand, there is rarely a happy ending awaiting you. You are rendered an outlaw.
So how do you survive this global surveillance state?
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, we’re running out of options.
We’ll soon have to choose between self-indulgence (the bread-and-circus distractions offered up by the news media, politicians, sports conglomerates, entertainment industry, etc.) and self-preservation in the form of renewed vigilance about threats to our freedoms and active engagement in self-governance.
Yet as Aldous Huxley acknowledged in Brave New World Revisited: “Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time, not on the spot, not here and now and in their calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other worlds of sport and soap opera, of mythology and metaphysical fantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those would manipulate and control it.”
Which brings me back to this technofascist tyranny being meted out on David Icke and all those like him who dare to voice ideas that diverge from what the government and its corporate controllers deem to be acceptable.
The problem as I see it is that we’ve allowed ourselves to be persuaded that we need someone else to think and speak for us. And we’ve allowed ourselves to become so timid in the face of offensive words and ideas that we’ve bought into the idea that we need the government to shield us from that which is ugly or upsetting or mean.
The result is a society in which we’ve stopped debating among ourselves, stopped thinking for ourselves, and stopped believing that we can fix our own problems and resolve our own differences.
In short, we have reduced ourselves to a largely silent, passive, polarized populace incapable of working through our own problems and reliant on the government to protect us from our fears.
In this way, we have become our worst enemy.
You want to reclaim some of the ground we’re fast losing to the techno-tyrants?
Start by thinking for yourself. If that means reading the “dangerous” ideas being floated out there by the David Ickes of the world—or the John Whiteheads for that matter—and then deciding for yourself what is true, so be it.
As Orwell concluded, “Freedom is the right to say two plus two make four.”
Thursday, May 7, 2020
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
SC211-14
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/18-signs-that-we-are-facing-a-record-breaking-economic-implosion-in-2020
18 Signs That We Are Facing A Record Breaking Economic Implosion In 2020
In just six weeks, the entire global economy has completely come apart. All over the world we are seeing numbers fall faster than we ever have before, and the outlook for the rest of the year is exceedingly bleak. Fear of the coronavirus is going to paralyze global trade for the foreseeable future, and the lockdowns in some nations will last for many months to come. Here in the United States, some states are attempting to make an effort to “reopen”, but in most instances that will involve “multiple stages”. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans have already lost their jobs, much of the population has already run through their meager savings, and financial institutions are becoming extremely tight with their money. Even if COVID-19 disappeared tomorrow, our momentum would still take us into an economic depression, but of course this virus isn’t going to disappear any time soon. After 9/11 our society evolved into an anti-terror state, and COVID-19 is going to permanently alter our society as well. So anyone that was hoping for a quick “return to normal” can forget it, because “normal” is about to be completely redefined.
The pace at which economic conditions have deteriorated in recent weeks has been absolutely breathtaking, and the numbers just keep getting worse and worse.
The following are 18 signs that we are facing a record breaking economic implosion in 2020…
#1 According to economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal, the April jobs report will show that the unemployment rate in the United States is now above 16 percent.
#2 U.S. manufacturing orders just crashed by the most ever.
#3 U.S. gasoline consumption just dropped to the lowest level ever recorded.
#4 Light vehicle sales in the U.S. just fell to the lowest level that we have seen since the early 1970s.
#5 The government program that was supposed to get small businesses through this crisis has been a tremendous failure…
According to the CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey released Monday, which surveyed 2,200 small business owners across America, while the $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program was instituted to give them a lifeline through the coronavirus and economic shutdown, only 13% of the 45% who applied for the PPP were approved.
#6 The “coming meat shortages” are already here. According to the New York Post, Costco is now rationing meat and Kroger is warning customers of very serious supply problems…
Costco on Monday said it will be limiting customers to just three packages of meat per shopper, while Kroger supermarkets posted an alert on the meat section of its website warning that it may have limited inventory “due to high demand.”
Grocers have been bracing for a run on meat in mid-May as major meat processing plants, including Tyson Foods, have been forced to shut down production. But the shortages appear to have come earlier than expected as consumers worried about the meat shortage have been stocking up, experts say.
#7 Global smartphone shipments were down 11.7 percent in the first quarter compared to a year ago. That represents the fastest drop on record.
#8 Hong Kong just recorded the worst economic contraction in the city’s entire history.
#9 U.S. consumer spending was down 7.6 percent during the first quarter of 2020.
#10 American Airlines posted a loss of 2.2 billion dollars during the first quarter of 2020.
#11 It looks like retail giants Neiman Marcus, J. Crew and JC Penney are all headed for bankruptcy.
#12 Fox Business is reporting that Hertz is preparing to file for bankruptcy due to plunging car rental ridership.
#13 Gold’s Gym field for bankruptcy on Monday.
#14 Edmunds is projecting that auto sales in the United States this month will be down by more than half compared to April 2019.
#15 In Mexico, manufacturing activity is falling at the fastest pace ever recorded. The following comes from Zero Hedge…
While few have lofty expectations for economic performance with the global economy still largely shutdown, what is happening in Mexico is simply unprecedented. Here are some striking observations detailing the unprecedented economic collapse of the southern US neighbor, courtesy of Goldman.
Business confidence declined sharply in April (the seventh consecutive monthly decline) with the index now sitting deep within pessimist territory. The Manufacturing and Services PMIs also fell sharply in April, and are now at the lowest levels on record.
#16 More than 30 million Americans have already lost their jobs, and economists are projecting that millions more will lose their jobs in the weeks ahead.
#17 In March, U.S. home sales declined by double digit percentages in every region of the country.
#18 White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett is warning that U.S. GDP could fall by up to 30 percent during the second quarter of 2020.
For investors, the good news is that stock prices have bounced back quite a bit after the initial crash, and many market optimists are hoping that this Fed-fueled rally will keep on rolling.
But others are warning that this is a trap for bullish investors, and Kevin Smith is openly telling everyone that this could be the “last chance to sell” before another huge move downward…
The stock market may be flashing some ridiculously bullish signals, but hedge fund bear Kevin Smith is sticking by his prediction that the Dow and S&P 500 are on the verge of a Great Depression-level crash.
In fact, the Crescat Capital founder warns, this is your “last chance to sell” before the impending collapse.
We shall see what happens, but for the moment the financial markets are doing their best to try to defy economic reality.
Unfortunately, economic reality is hitting most Americans like a ton of bricks right now. We are in the middle of the greatest spike in unemployment that the United States has ever seen by a very wide margin, and most of the jobs that have been lost are never coming back.
And as bad as things are already, the truth is that this is just the beginning.
A whole lot more pain is on the way, and it is going to shake our nation to the core.
Our economic and financial bubbles lasted far longer than they should have, but now fear of COVID-19 has burst them all, and it isn’t going to be possible to reinflate them this time around.
18 Signs That We Are Facing A Record Breaking Economic Implosion In 2020
In just six weeks, the entire global economy has completely come apart. All over the world we are seeing numbers fall faster than we ever have before, and the outlook for the rest of the year is exceedingly bleak. Fear of the coronavirus is going to paralyze global trade for the foreseeable future, and the lockdowns in some nations will last for many months to come. Here in the United States, some states are attempting to make an effort to “reopen”, but in most instances that will involve “multiple stages”. Meanwhile, tens of millions of Americans have already lost their jobs, much of the population has already run through their meager savings, and financial institutions are becoming extremely tight with their money. Even if COVID-19 disappeared tomorrow, our momentum would still take us into an economic depression, but of course this virus isn’t going to disappear any time soon. After 9/11 our society evolved into an anti-terror state, and COVID-19 is going to permanently alter our society as well. So anyone that was hoping for a quick “return to normal” can forget it, because “normal” is about to be completely redefined.
The pace at which economic conditions have deteriorated in recent weeks has been absolutely breathtaking, and the numbers just keep getting worse and worse.
The following are 18 signs that we are facing a record breaking economic implosion in 2020…
#1 According to economists surveyed by the Wall Street Journal, the April jobs report will show that the unemployment rate in the United States is now above 16 percent.
#2 U.S. manufacturing orders just crashed by the most ever.
#3 U.S. gasoline consumption just dropped to the lowest level ever recorded.
#4 Light vehicle sales in the U.S. just fell to the lowest level that we have seen since the early 1970s.
#5 The government program that was supposed to get small businesses through this crisis has been a tremendous failure…
According to the CNBC/SurveyMonkey Small Business Survey released Monday, which surveyed 2,200 small business owners across America, while the $660 billion Paycheck Protection Program was instituted to give them a lifeline through the coronavirus and economic shutdown, only 13% of the 45% who applied for the PPP were approved.
#6 The “coming meat shortages” are already here. According to the New York Post, Costco is now rationing meat and Kroger is warning customers of very serious supply problems…
Costco on Monday said it will be limiting customers to just three packages of meat per shopper, while Kroger supermarkets posted an alert on the meat section of its website warning that it may have limited inventory “due to high demand.”
Grocers have been bracing for a run on meat in mid-May as major meat processing plants, including Tyson Foods, have been forced to shut down production. But the shortages appear to have come earlier than expected as consumers worried about the meat shortage have been stocking up, experts say.
#7 Global smartphone shipments were down 11.7 percent in the first quarter compared to a year ago. That represents the fastest drop on record.
#8 Hong Kong just recorded the worst economic contraction in the city’s entire history.
#9 U.S. consumer spending was down 7.6 percent during the first quarter of 2020.
#10 American Airlines posted a loss of 2.2 billion dollars during the first quarter of 2020.
#11 It looks like retail giants Neiman Marcus, J. Crew and JC Penney are all headed for bankruptcy.
#12 Fox Business is reporting that Hertz is preparing to file for bankruptcy due to plunging car rental ridership.
#13 Gold’s Gym field for bankruptcy on Monday.
#14 Edmunds is projecting that auto sales in the United States this month will be down by more than half compared to April 2019.
#15 In Mexico, manufacturing activity is falling at the fastest pace ever recorded. The following comes from Zero Hedge…
While few have lofty expectations for economic performance with the global economy still largely shutdown, what is happening in Mexico is simply unprecedented. Here are some striking observations detailing the unprecedented economic collapse of the southern US neighbor, courtesy of Goldman.
Business confidence declined sharply in April (the seventh consecutive monthly decline) with the index now sitting deep within pessimist territory. The Manufacturing and Services PMIs also fell sharply in April, and are now at the lowest levels on record.
#16 More than 30 million Americans have already lost their jobs, and economists are projecting that millions more will lose their jobs in the weeks ahead.
#17 In March, U.S. home sales declined by double digit percentages in every region of the country.
#18 White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett is warning that U.S. GDP could fall by up to 30 percent during the second quarter of 2020.
For investors, the good news is that stock prices have bounced back quite a bit after the initial crash, and many market optimists are hoping that this Fed-fueled rally will keep on rolling.
But others are warning that this is a trap for bullish investors, and Kevin Smith is openly telling everyone that this could be the “last chance to sell” before another huge move downward…
The stock market may be flashing some ridiculously bullish signals, but hedge fund bear Kevin Smith is sticking by his prediction that the Dow and S&P 500 are on the verge of a Great Depression-level crash.
In fact, the Crescat Capital founder warns, this is your “last chance to sell” before the impending collapse.
We shall see what happens, but for the moment the financial markets are doing their best to try to defy economic reality.
Unfortunately, economic reality is hitting most Americans like a ton of bricks right now. We are in the middle of the greatest spike in unemployment that the United States has ever seen by a very wide margin, and most of the jobs that have been lost are never coming back.
And as bad as things are already, the truth is that this is just the beginning.
A whole lot more pain is on the way, and it is going to shake our nation to the core.
Our economic and financial bubbles lasted far longer than they should have, but now fear of COVID-19 has burst them all, and it isn’t going to be possible to reinflate them this time around.
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
SC211-13
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/05/21/coming-collapse?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIj7DYi_Ka6QIVDNlkCh3mLAWtEAAYASAAEgIjF_D_BwE
The Coming Collapse
It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion.
The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.
The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It plays to the margins, especially in election seasons, refusing to address substantive political and social problems and instead focusing on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.
This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.
Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them. He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have become hostile forces. And for many who see no shift in the political landscape to alleviate their suffering, Trump’s cruelty and invective are at least cathartic.
Trump, like all despots, has no ethical core. He chooses his allies and appointees based on their personal loyalty and fawning obsequiousness to him. He will sell anyone out. He is corrupt, amassing money for himself—he made $40 million from his Washington, D.C., hotel alone last year—and his corporate allies. He is dismantling government institutions that once provided some regulation and oversight. He is an enemy of the open society. This makes him dangerous. His turbocharged assault on the last vestiges of democratic institutions and norms means there will soon be nothing, even in name, to protect us from corporate totalitarianism.
But the warnings from the architects of our failed democracy against creeping fascism, Madeleine Albright among them, are risible. They show how disconnected the elites have become from the zeitgeist. None of these elites have credibility. They built the edifice of lies, deceit and corporate pillage that made Trump possible. And the more Trump demeans these elites, and the more they cry out like Cassandras, the more he salvages his disastrous presidency and enables the kleptocrats pillaging the country as it swiftly disintegrates.
The press is one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It chatters endlessly like 17th-century courtiers at the court of Versailles about the foibles of the monarch while the peasants lack bread. It drones on and on and on about empty topics such as Russian meddling and a payoff to a porn actress that have nothing to do with the daily hell that, for many, defines life in America. It refuses to critique or investigate the abuses by corporate power, which has destroyed our democracy and economy and orchestrated the largest transfer of wealth upward in American history. The corporate press is a decayed relic that, in exchange for money and access, committed cultural suicide. And when Trump attacks it over “fake news,” he expresses, once again, the deep hatred of all those the press ignores. The press worships the idol of Mammon as slavishly as Trump does. It loves the reality-show presidency. The press, especially the cable news shows, keeps the lights on and the cameras rolling so viewers will be glued to a 21st-century version of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” It is good for ratings. It is good for profits. But it accelerates the decline.
All this will soon be compounded by financial collapse. Wall Street banks have been handed $16 trillion in bailouts and other subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at nearly zero percent interest since the 2008 financial collapse. They have used this money, as well as the money saved through the huge tax cuts imposed last year, to buy back their own stock, raising the compensation and bonuses of their managers and thrusting the society deeper into untenable debt peonage. Sheldon Adelson’s casino operations alone got a $670 million tax break under the 2017 legislation. The ratio of CEO to worker pay now averages 339 to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1. This circular use of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called “fictitious capital.” The steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately lead, as Nomi Prins writes, to “a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds.”
An economy reliant on debt for its growth causes our interest rate to jump to 28 percent when we are late on a credit card payment. It is why our wages are stagnant or have declined in real terms—if we earned a sustainable income we would not have to borrow money to survive. It is why a university education, houses, medical bills and utilities cost so much. The system is designed so we can never free ourselves from debt.
However, the next financial crash, as Prins points out in her book “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World,” won’t be like the last one. This is because, as she says, “there is no Plan B.” Interest rates can’t go any lower. There has been no growth in the real economy. The next time, there will be no way out. Once the economy crashes and the rage across the country explodes into a firestorm, the political freaks will appear, ones that will make Trump look sagacious and benign.
And so, to quote Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?
We must invest our energy in building parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power. These parallel institutions, including unions, community development organizations, local currencies, alternative political parties and food cooperatives, will have to be constructed town by town. The elites in a time of distress will retreat to their gated compounds and leave us to fend for ourselves. Basic services, from garbage collection to public transportation, food distribution and health care, will collapse. Massive unemployment and underemployment, triggering social unrest, will be dealt with not through government job creation but the brutality of militarized police and a complete suspension of civil liberties. Critics of the system, already pushed to the margins, will be silenced and attacked as enemies of the state. The last vestiges of labor unions will be targeted for abolition, a process that will soon be accelerated given the expected ruling in a case before the Supreme Court that will cripple the ability of public-sector unions to represent workers. The dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, causing a steep devaluation. Banks will close. Global warming will extract heavier and heavier costs, especially on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure, costs that the depleted state will be unable to address. The corporate press, like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism, its rhetoric so patently fictitious it will, as in all totalitarian states, be unmoored from reality. The media outlets will all sound as fatuous as Trump. And, to quote W.H. Auden, “the little children will die in the streets.”
As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the former Yugoslavia. It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.
The Coming Collapse
It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion.
The Trump administration did not rise, prima facie, like Venus on a half shell from the sea. Donald Trump is the result of a long process of political, cultural and social decay. He is a product of our failed democracy. The longer we perpetuate the fiction that we live in a functioning democracy, that Trump and the political mutations around him are somehow an aberrant deviation that can be vanquished in the next election, the more we will hurtle toward tyranny. The problem is not Trump. It is a political system, dominated by corporate power and the mandarins of the two major political parties, in which we don’t count. We will wrest back political control by dismantling the corporate state, and this means massive and sustained civil disobedience, like that demonstrated by teachers around the country this year. If we do not stand up we will enter a new dark age.
The Democratic Party, which helped build our system of inverted totalitarianism, is once again held up by many on the left as the savior. Yet the party steadfastly refuses to address the social inequality that led to the election of Trump and the insurgency by Bernie Sanders. It is deaf, dumb and blind to the very real economic suffering that plagues over half the country. It will not fight to pay workers a living wage. It will not defy the pharmaceutical and insurance industries to provide Medicare for all. It will not curb the voracious appetite of the military that is disemboweling the country and promoting the prosecution of futile and costly foreign wars. It will not restore our lost civil liberties, including the right to privacy, freedom from government surveillance, and due process. It will not get corporate and dark money out of politics. It will not demilitarize our police and reform a prison system that has 25 percent of the world’s prisoners although the United States has only 5 percent of the world’s population. It plays to the margins, especially in election seasons, refusing to address substantive political and social problems and instead focusing on narrow cultural issues like gay rights, abortion and gun control in our peculiar species of anti-politics.
This is a doomed tactic, but one that is understandable. The leadership of the party, the Clintons, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Tom Perez, are creations of corporate America. In an open and democratic political process, one not dominated by party elites and corporate money, these people would not hold political power. They know this. They would rather implode the entire system than give up their positions of privilege. And that, I fear, is what will happen. The idea that the Democratic Party is in any way a bulwark against despotism defies the last three decades of its political activity. It is the guarantor of despotism.
Trump has tapped into the hatred that huge segments of the American public have for a political and economic system that has betrayed them. He may be inept, degenerate, dishonest and a narcissist, but he adeptly ridicules the system they despise. His cruel and demeaning taunts directed at government agencies, laws and the established elites resonate with people for whom these agencies, laws and elites have become hostile forces. And for many who see no shift in the political landscape to alleviate their suffering, Trump’s cruelty and invective are at least cathartic.
Trump, like all despots, has no ethical core. He chooses his allies and appointees based on their personal loyalty and fawning obsequiousness to him. He will sell anyone out. He is corrupt, amassing money for himself—he made $40 million from his Washington, D.C., hotel alone last year—and his corporate allies. He is dismantling government institutions that once provided some regulation and oversight. He is an enemy of the open society. This makes him dangerous. His turbocharged assault on the last vestiges of democratic institutions and norms means there will soon be nothing, even in name, to protect us from corporate totalitarianism.
But the warnings from the architects of our failed democracy against creeping fascism, Madeleine Albright among them, are risible. They show how disconnected the elites have become from the zeitgeist. None of these elites have credibility. They built the edifice of lies, deceit and corporate pillage that made Trump possible. And the more Trump demeans these elites, and the more they cry out like Cassandras, the more he salvages his disastrous presidency and enables the kleptocrats pillaging the country as it swiftly disintegrates.
The press is one of the principal pillars of Trump’s despotism. It chatters endlessly like 17th-century courtiers at the court of Versailles about the foibles of the monarch while the peasants lack bread. It drones on and on and on about empty topics such as Russian meddling and a payoff to a porn actress that have nothing to do with the daily hell that, for many, defines life in America. It refuses to critique or investigate the abuses by corporate power, which has destroyed our democracy and economy and orchestrated the largest transfer of wealth upward in American history. The corporate press is a decayed relic that, in exchange for money and access, committed cultural suicide. And when Trump attacks it over “fake news,” he expresses, once again, the deep hatred of all those the press ignores. The press worships the idol of Mammon as slavishly as Trump does. It loves the reality-show presidency. The press, especially the cable news shows, keeps the lights on and the cameras rolling so viewers will be glued to a 21st-century version of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” It is good for ratings. It is good for profits. But it accelerates the decline.
All this will soon be compounded by financial collapse. Wall Street banks have been handed $16 trillion in bailouts and other subsidies by the Federal Reserve and Congress at nearly zero percent interest since the 2008 financial collapse. They have used this money, as well as the money saved through the huge tax cuts imposed last year, to buy back their own stock, raising the compensation and bonuses of their managers and thrusting the society deeper into untenable debt peonage. Sheldon Adelson’s casino operations alone got a $670 million tax break under the 2017 legislation. The ratio of CEO to worker pay now averages 339 to 1, with the highest gap approaching 5,000 to 1. This circular use of money to make and hoard money is what Karl Marx called “fictitious capital.” The steady increase in public debt, corporate debt, credit card debt and student loan debt will ultimately lead, as Nomi Prins writes, to “a tipping point—when money coming in to furnish that debt, or available to borrow, simply won’t cover the interest payments. Then debt bubbles will pop, beginning with higher yielding bonds.”
An economy reliant on debt for its growth causes our interest rate to jump to 28 percent when we are late on a credit card payment. It is why our wages are stagnant or have declined in real terms—if we earned a sustainable income we would not have to borrow money to survive. It is why a university education, houses, medical bills and utilities cost so much. The system is designed so we can never free ourselves from debt.
However, the next financial crash, as Prins points out in her book “Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World,” won’t be like the last one. This is because, as she says, “there is no Plan B.” Interest rates can’t go any lower. There has been no growth in the real economy. The next time, there will be no way out. Once the economy crashes and the rage across the country explodes into a firestorm, the political freaks will appear, ones that will make Trump look sagacious and benign.
And so, to quote Vladimir Lenin, what must be done?
We must invest our energy in building parallel, popular institutions to protect ourselves and to pit power against power. These parallel institutions, including unions, community development organizations, local currencies, alternative political parties and food cooperatives, will have to be constructed town by town. The elites in a time of distress will retreat to their gated compounds and leave us to fend for ourselves. Basic services, from garbage collection to public transportation, food distribution and health care, will collapse. Massive unemployment and underemployment, triggering social unrest, will be dealt with not through government job creation but the brutality of militarized police and a complete suspension of civil liberties. Critics of the system, already pushed to the margins, will be silenced and attacked as enemies of the state. The last vestiges of labor unions will be targeted for abolition, a process that will soon be accelerated given the expected ruling in a case before the Supreme Court that will cripple the ability of public-sector unions to represent workers. The dollar will stop being the world’s reserve currency, causing a steep devaluation. Banks will close. Global warming will extract heavier and heavier costs, especially on the coastal populations, farming and the infrastructure, costs that the depleted state will be unable to address. The corporate press, like the ruling elites, will go from burlesque to absurdism, its rhetoric so patently fictitious it will, as in all totalitarian states, be unmoored from reality. The media outlets will all sound as fatuous as Trump. And, to quote W.H. Auden, “the little children will die in the streets.”
As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the former Yugoslavia. It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.
Monday, May 4, 2020
SC211-12
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/when-the-birdies-sing-like-the-fat-lady/
When the Birdies Sing Like the Fat Lady
Spring is popping now with a ferocious energy that can only remind the sullenly sequestered masses that life is going on without them. Every living thing is busy making-and-doing out there, except the poor humans, idled without work or purpose. That won’t last long. People don’t submit automatically to zombification when some pissant bureaucrats issue them $1200 checks. They yearn to bust out like everything else on this living planet. And if they can’t do it in a good way, well….
The mega-machine we constructed to drive this society has sucked a valve and thrown a rod. The machine is broken, no matter how much more fuel the mechanics pump in. (One suspects somebody may have topped it off with Karo syrup.) Anyway, the machine got too big and too complex, with too many extraneous bells and whistles, and with way too much computerized cybernetic control built-in, so the mechanics barely noticed it was coming apart (they were too busy partying). That big machine is smoldering in a ditch for the moment. The dazed and bloodied passengers realize that the ride is over, and now they must march on to get somewhere, anywhere, away from this miserable ditch and the wreckage in it. The fine spring weather is their only consolation.
And so here we are at a fraught moment in the convergent crises of corona virus and the foundering economic system that it infected, with all its frightful pre-existing conditions. Of course, it isn’t capitalism, so-called, that is failing, but the perversions of capitalism, starting with the appendage of the troublesome term: ism. It isn’t a religion, or even a pseudo-religion like Zoroastrianism or communism. It’s simply the management system for surplus wealth. In a hyper-complex society, the management of wealth naturally grows hyper-complex, too, with lavish opportunities and temptations for chicanery, cheating, fraud, and swindling (the perversions of capital). It’s in the interest of the managers to cloak all that hyper-complex perversity in opaque language, to make it seem okay.
How many ordinary Americans have a clue what all the Municipal Liquidity Facilities, Primary Dealer Credit Facilities, Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities, Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facilities, Main Street New Loan Facilities and Expanded Loan Facilities, Commercial Paper Funding Facilities, currency swap lines, the TALFs TARPs, PPPs, SPVs represent — besides the movement, by keystrokes, of “money” from one netherworld to another (both conveniently located on Wall Street), usually to the loss of non-elite citizens generally and to their offspring’s offspring’s offspring?
Real capital is grounded in the production of real things of real value, of course, and when it’s detached from all that, it’s no longer real capital. Money represents capital, and when the capital isn’t real, the money represents…nothing! And ceases to be real money. Just now, America is producing almost nothing except money, money in quantities that stupefy the imagination — trillions here, there, and everywhere. The trouble is that money is vanishing as fast as it’s being created. That’s because it’s based on promises to be paid back into existence that will never be kept, on top of prior promises to pay back money that were broken or are in the process of breaking. The net result is that money is actually disappearing faster than it can be created, even in vast quantities.
All this sounds like metaphysical bullshit, I suppose, but we are obviously watching money disappear. Your paycheck is gone. That activity you started — a brew-pub, a gym, an ad agency — no longer produces revenue. The HR department at the giant company you work for told you: don’t bother coming into the office tomorrow, or possibly ever again. Your bills are piling up. The numbers in your bank account run to zero. That sure smells like money disappearing. Wait until the pension checks and the SNAP cards mysteriously stop landing in the mailbox.
There’s going to be a lot of trouble. Ordinary Americans are going to get super-pissed if money doesn’t disappear from the stock markets, too. They’ve seen this movie before. They will know for sure that they were played, that the class of people who hold most of the stocks are doing just fine while everybody else stares into that old abyss staring back at them. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the Hamptons on that fateful day.
All this because we just can’t face the task of reorganizing our national home economics to suit new circumstances. So, nature will do it for us. Nature will furnish us with a marvelously efficient black hole where we can conveniently stash our fake money so that we’ll never have to see it again. Nature will bust up our giant institutions, our giant corporations, our giant networks of financial obligations. And after a period of confusion and social disorder, some clever humans will aggregate into smaller networks and re-organize their activities on a smaller scale that actually supports truthful relationships between the production of things deemed to hold value and money that represents those things.
The beauty of springtime is sublime and, as Edmund Burke noted, that very beauty provokes our thoughts of pain and terror.
When the Birdies Sing Like the Fat Lady
Spring is popping now with a ferocious energy that can only remind the sullenly sequestered masses that life is going on without them. Every living thing is busy making-and-doing out there, except the poor humans, idled without work or purpose. That won’t last long. People don’t submit automatically to zombification when some pissant bureaucrats issue them $1200 checks. They yearn to bust out like everything else on this living planet. And if they can’t do it in a good way, well….
The mega-machine we constructed to drive this society has sucked a valve and thrown a rod. The machine is broken, no matter how much more fuel the mechanics pump in. (One suspects somebody may have topped it off with Karo syrup.) Anyway, the machine got too big and too complex, with too many extraneous bells and whistles, and with way too much computerized cybernetic control built-in, so the mechanics barely noticed it was coming apart (they were too busy partying). That big machine is smoldering in a ditch for the moment. The dazed and bloodied passengers realize that the ride is over, and now they must march on to get somewhere, anywhere, away from this miserable ditch and the wreckage in it. The fine spring weather is their only consolation.
And so here we are at a fraught moment in the convergent crises of corona virus and the foundering economic system that it infected, with all its frightful pre-existing conditions. Of course, it isn’t capitalism, so-called, that is failing, but the perversions of capitalism, starting with the appendage of the troublesome term: ism. It isn’t a religion, or even a pseudo-religion like Zoroastrianism or communism. It’s simply the management system for surplus wealth. In a hyper-complex society, the management of wealth naturally grows hyper-complex, too, with lavish opportunities and temptations for chicanery, cheating, fraud, and swindling (the perversions of capital). It’s in the interest of the managers to cloak all that hyper-complex perversity in opaque language, to make it seem okay.
How many ordinary Americans have a clue what all the Municipal Liquidity Facilities, Primary Dealer Credit Facilities, Primary and Secondary Market Corporate Credit Facilities, Money Market Mutual Fund Liquidity Facilities, Main Street New Loan Facilities and Expanded Loan Facilities, Commercial Paper Funding Facilities, currency swap lines, the TALFs TARPs, PPPs, SPVs represent — besides the movement, by keystrokes, of “money” from one netherworld to another (both conveniently located on Wall Street), usually to the loss of non-elite citizens generally and to their offspring’s offspring’s offspring?
Real capital is grounded in the production of real things of real value, of course, and when it’s detached from all that, it’s no longer real capital. Money represents capital, and when the capital isn’t real, the money represents…nothing! And ceases to be real money. Just now, America is producing almost nothing except money, money in quantities that stupefy the imagination — trillions here, there, and everywhere. The trouble is that money is vanishing as fast as it’s being created. That’s because it’s based on promises to be paid back into existence that will never be kept, on top of prior promises to pay back money that were broken or are in the process of breaking. The net result is that money is actually disappearing faster than it can be created, even in vast quantities.
All this sounds like metaphysical bullshit, I suppose, but we are obviously watching money disappear. Your paycheck is gone. That activity you started — a brew-pub, a gym, an ad agency — no longer produces revenue. The HR department at the giant company you work for told you: don’t bother coming into the office tomorrow, or possibly ever again. Your bills are piling up. The numbers in your bank account run to zero. That sure smells like money disappearing. Wait until the pension checks and the SNAP cards mysteriously stop landing in the mailbox.
There’s going to be a lot of trouble. Ordinary Americans are going to get super-pissed if money doesn’t disappear from the stock markets, too. They’ve seen this movie before. They will know for sure that they were played, that the class of people who hold most of the stocks are doing just fine while everybody else stares into that old abyss staring back at them. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near the Hamptons on that fateful day.
All this because we just can’t face the task of reorganizing our national home economics to suit new circumstances. So, nature will do it for us. Nature will furnish us with a marvelously efficient black hole where we can conveniently stash our fake money so that we’ll never have to see it again. Nature will bust up our giant institutions, our giant corporations, our giant networks of financial obligations. And after a period of confusion and social disorder, some clever humans will aggregate into smaller networks and re-organize their activities on a smaller scale that actually supports truthful relationships between the production of things deemed to hold value and money that represents those things.
The beauty of springtime is sublime and, as Edmund Burke noted, that very beauty provokes our thoughts of pain and terror.
SC211-11
https://www.peakprosperity.com/bombshell-covid-19-virus-lab-made-fauci-connected/
Bombshell! Covid-19 Virus Lab-Made? Fauci Connected?
A recent Newsweek report raises an awfully lot of urgent and important questions
One of the more acutely-asked questions since the covid-19 pandemic broke out has been: Is the virus man-made?
Debate on the matter has been wild and furious. After much investigation, Chris is now weighing in on the heels of an explosive Newsweek report.
Newsweek reveals that as recently as last year, the US funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology focused on conducting ‘gain of function’ research on bat coronaviruses.
The source of that funding? The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, headed by…..(drumroll please)….Dr Anthony Fauci, lead medical expert for America’s Covid-19 presidential task force.
Now, this doesn’t mean the virus was lab-engineered as a bio-weapon. But it does suggest a naturally-occuring bat virus could have been artificially accelerated along certain vectors....
....
More info in 42 minute video. " gain of function ", virus " artificially accelerated ", to what end?
Bombshell! Covid-19 Virus Lab-Made? Fauci Connected?
A recent Newsweek report raises an awfully lot of urgent and important questions
One of the more acutely-asked questions since the covid-19 pandemic broke out has been: Is the virus man-made?
Debate on the matter has been wild and furious. After much investigation, Chris is now weighing in on the heels of an explosive Newsweek report.
Newsweek reveals that as recently as last year, the US funded scientists at the Wuhan Institute of Virology focused on conducting ‘gain of function’ research on bat coronaviruses.
The source of that funding? The National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease, headed by…..(drumroll please)….Dr Anthony Fauci, lead medical expert for America’s Covid-19 presidential task force.
Now, this doesn’t mean the virus was lab-engineered as a bio-weapon. But it does suggest a naturally-occuring bat virus could have been artificially accelerated along certain vectors....
....
More info in 42 minute video. " gain of function ", virus " artificially accelerated ", to what end?
Saturday, May 2, 2020
SC211-10
https://kurtnimmo.blog/
Fear and Loathing of the COVID-19 Economy
COVID-19 authoritarianism is the new normal.
Let me begin by saying I don’t know anything definitive about the origin of COVID-19. I don’t know if it is a natural mutation or a manmade biological weapon. I don’t trust the government and its media corporations to report the truth on the virus or the actual number of victims it has claimed. The WHO—owned by Merck, the GAVI Alliance, and the Gates Foundation—and the CDC—allowed to receive “gifts” from Big Pharma and corporations—are corrupt institutions that have lied about pandemics in the past, so why should we believe them now?
Despite revised numbers and evidence computer models were seriously flawed—one might argue deliberately so—the corporate media continues to report COVID-19 as something akin to the Black Death. It has done a successful job of scaring the hell out of millions if not billions of people.
“The real number of COVID-19 deaths are not what most people are told and what they then think. How many people actually died from COVID-19 is anyone’s guess,” said Dr. Annie Bukacek in April. “Based on inaccurate, incomplete data, people are being terrorized by fear-mongers into relinquishing freedoms.”
But here is something a script-reading establishment media avoids reporting—the death toll from a decimated economy will be far higher than anything inflicted by this virus (or whatever it is).
COVID-19 is a near-perfect cover for the engineered crash of an economy already on Federal Reserve funny money life support. Instead of assigning blame to the responsible culprits—mega-banks, the financial and “investment” (speculation) class, transnational corporations, and their handmaids in government—blame is placed on an invisible virus that may or may not be manufactured precisely for the purpose of taking down the economy.
“If you take the kinds of drastic action that we are currently seeing [state-mandated lockdowns], it is unquestionably going to lead to massive job losses, huge redundancies, thousands of small to medium businesses going to the wall, future generations saddled with debt, and millions of people thrust into poverty with no way out,” writes Rob Slane.
This will result in “risks to the mental health of millions of people,” the “stripping of civil liberties on a scale never seen before and which may never be restored after the health crisis is over,” and the “frightening possibility of mass civil unrest the longer the measures continue,” Slane adds.
In fact, the US and much of the world has remained mired in financial ill-health in the wake of the last “too big to fail” bankster looting a dozen years ago. The media called it the “Great Recession,” although, by any standard, it was and is a depression. By the end of summer, it will mutate into a full-blown Greatest Depression. “We’ve entered a downturn that is going to be longer, deeper, and different than the unpleasantness of 1929-1946,” notes best-selling author Doug Casey.
According to the economist Nouriel Roubini:
Earlier this month [March 2020], it took just 15 days for the US stock market to plummet into bear territory (a 20% decline from its peak)—the fastest such decline ever. Now, markets are down 35%, credit markets have seized up, and credit spreads (like those for junk bonds) have spiked to 2008 levels. Even mainstream financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley expect US GDP to fall by an annualized rate of 6% in the first quarter, and by 24% to 30% in the second. US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has warned that the unemployment rate could skyrocket to above 20% (twice the peak level during the GFC [Global Financial Crisis]).
According to John Williams, publisher of Shadow Government Statistics, a second-quarter GDP contraction will rival the depths of the Great Depression. The current unemployment rate is 22% and it will get worse, far worse, possibly affecting more than half the working population. There are mounting risks of a hyperinflationary Great Depression, as the Federal Reserve and federal government launch unlimited money creation, deficit spending, and financial bailouts, Williams wrote on April 28.
More than 30 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance as a result of the state-mandated and enforced economic lockdown (millions of other unemployed workers are unable to file due to clogged online systems and the inefficiency of state bureaucracy). In less than a month, the 22.4 million jobs created after the manufactured Great Recession—primarily low-paid service sector jobs—were wiped out.
Desperate and poverty-stricken Americans will, as Henry Kissinger long ago remarked, run to the government and beg for protection. They will willingly—even enthusiastically—relinquish their natural rights for the false security of the state.
The massive violations of a moribund Constitution and Bill of Rights are dismissed as an excuse by irresponsible people to spread a disease that is, according to a scaremongering media, wafting through the air and laying in wait on all surfaces. In short, your natural rights are considered a threat to the rest of humanity.
In March, a poll was conducted on public support for killing off what remains of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. “We presented a nationally representative sample of 3,000 U.S. residents with eight possible policy responses to the outbreak, all of which may be unconstitutional, including forced quarantine in a government facility, criminal penalties for spreading misinformation, bans against certain people entering the country, and conscription of health-care workers,” writes Adam Chilton, Professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, and three of his associates.
“Even when we explicitly told half of our sample that the policies may violate the Constitution,” the group writes, “the majority supported all eight of them,” including the restrictions imposed on free speech.
In short, propagandized and frightened citizens, in fear of a New Black Death that is nothing of the sort, are abrogating their birthright of individual liberty in favor of allowing the state to impose ever-increasing draconian measures—including an audacious expansion of surveillance—to control humanity.
“After the threat has subsided,” Chilton and the law professors conclude, “Americans must recognize any constitutional violations for what they were, lest they become the new normal.”
It should be obvious by now COVID-19 authoritarianism is already the new normal.
Fear and Loathing of the COVID-19 Economy
COVID-19 authoritarianism is the new normal.
Let me begin by saying I don’t know anything definitive about the origin of COVID-19. I don’t know if it is a natural mutation or a manmade biological weapon. I don’t trust the government and its media corporations to report the truth on the virus or the actual number of victims it has claimed. The WHO—owned by Merck, the GAVI Alliance, and the Gates Foundation—and the CDC—allowed to receive “gifts” from Big Pharma and corporations—are corrupt institutions that have lied about pandemics in the past, so why should we believe them now?
Despite revised numbers and evidence computer models were seriously flawed—one might argue deliberately so—the corporate media continues to report COVID-19 as something akin to the Black Death. It has done a successful job of scaring the hell out of millions if not billions of people.
“The real number of COVID-19 deaths are not what most people are told and what they then think. How many people actually died from COVID-19 is anyone’s guess,” said Dr. Annie Bukacek in April. “Based on inaccurate, incomplete data, people are being terrorized by fear-mongers into relinquishing freedoms.”
But here is something a script-reading establishment media avoids reporting—the death toll from a decimated economy will be far higher than anything inflicted by this virus (or whatever it is).
COVID-19 is a near-perfect cover for the engineered crash of an economy already on Federal Reserve funny money life support. Instead of assigning blame to the responsible culprits—mega-banks, the financial and “investment” (speculation) class, transnational corporations, and their handmaids in government—blame is placed on an invisible virus that may or may not be manufactured precisely for the purpose of taking down the economy.
“If you take the kinds of drastic action that we are currently seeing [state-mandated lockdowns], it is unquestionably going to lead to massive job losses, huge redundancies, thousands of small to medium businesses going to the wall, future generations saddled with debt, and millions of people thrust into poverty with no way out,” writes Rob Slane.
This will result in “risks to the mental health of millions of people,” the “stripping of civil liberties on a scale never seen before and which may never be restored after the health crisis is over,” and the “frightening possibility of mass civil unrest the longer the measures continue,” Slane adds.
In fact, the US and much of the world has remained mired in financial ill-health in the wake of the last “too big to fail” bankster looting a dozen years ago. The media called it the “Great Recession,” although, by any standard, it was and is a depression. By the end of summer, it will mutate into a full-blown Greatest Depression. “We’ve entered a downturn that is going to be longer, deeper, and different than the unpleasantness of 1929-1946,” notes best-selling author Doug Casey.
According to the economist Nouriel Roubini:
Earlier this month [March 2020], it took just 15 days for the US stock market to plummet into bear territory (a 20% decline from its peak)—the fastest such decline ever. Now, markets are down 35%, credit markets have seized up, and credit spreads (like those for junk bonds) have spiked to 2008 levels. Even mainstream financial firms such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley expect US GDP to fall by an annualized rate of 6% in the first quarter, and by 24% to 30% in the second. US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin has warned that the unemployment rate could skyrocket to above 20% (twice the peak level during the GFC [Global Financial Crisis]).
According to John Williams, publisher of Shadow Government Statistics, a second-quarter GDP contraction will rival the depths of the Great Depression. The current unemployment rate is 22% and it will get worse, far worse, possibly affecting more than half the working population. There are mounting risks of a hyperinflationary Great Depression, as the Federal Reserve and federal government launch unlimited money creation, deficit spending, and financial bailouts, Williams wrote on April 28.
More than 30 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance as a result of the state-mandated and enforced economic lockdown (millions of other unemployed workers are unable to file due to clogged online systems and the inefficiency of state bureaucracy). In less than a month, the 22.4 million jobs created after the manufactured Great Recession—primarily low-paid service sector jobs—were wiped out.
Desperate and poverty-stricken Americans will, as Henry Kissinger long ago remarked, run to the government and beg for protection. They will willingly—even enthusiastically—relinquish their natural rights for the false security of the state.
The massive violations of a moribund Constitution and Bill of Rights are dismissed as an excuse by irresponsible people to spread a disease that is, according to a scaremongering media, wafting through the air and laying in wait on all surfaces. In short, your natural rights are considered a threat to the rest of humanity.
In March, a poll was conducted on public support for killing off what remains of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. “We presented a nationally representative sample of 3,000 U.S. residents with eight possible policy responses to the outbreak, all of which may be unconstitutional, including forced quarantine in a government facility, criminal penalties for spreading misinformation, bans against certain people entering the country, and conscription of health-care workers,” writes Adam Chilton, Professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, and three of his associates.
“Even when we explicitly told half of our sample that the policies may violate the Constitution,” the group writes, “the majority supported all eight of them,” including the restrictions imposed on free speech.
In short, propagandized and frightened citizens, in fear of a New Black Death that is nothing of the sort, are abrogating their birthright of individual liberty in favor of allowing the state to impose ever-increasing draconian measures—including an audacious expansion of surveillance—to control humanity.
“After the threat has subsided,” Chilton and the law professors conclude, “Americans must recognize any constitutional violations for what they were, lest they become the new normal.”
It should be obvious by now COVID-19 authoritarianism is already the new normal.
Friday, May 1, 2020
SC211-9
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/55107.htm
US a Washed-up Empire
The harder they come, the harder they fall, as reggae singer Jimmy Cliff once put it. No nation has come harder than the United States with its history of relentless wars and mass destruction, nauseatingly dressed up with virtuous rhetoric about supposedly leading the free world.
There was a time when the slick American propaganda held the world in thrall as if it were true. Many nations once gullibly looked to the US for leadership. Not any more.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed presumed US global power as a hollowed-out caricature. America’s response to the disease is abysmal. It is the world’s leader in the numbers of deaths and infections, unable to cope because of the woeful lack of an organized, functioning public health system. How damning is that?
Another factor in why the US has been hit so badly by the pandemic is due to the parlous conditions for tens of millions of its workers who live on the brink of poverty with little social safety net. That speaks to the real undemocratic nature of American society as opposed to all the arrogant delusions of “exceptionalism”.
This appalling disaster is against a backdrop of Washington spending trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons and maintaining hundreds of thousands of troops in military bases all around the world backed up by legions of warships and warplanes.
"The global coronavirus crisis… [has] quickly brought the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world to its knees," according to the US magazine, Politico.
US presidential historian Douglas Brinkley is quoted by Politico as saying: “The United States was once known for its can-do culture. We built the Panama Canal and we put a man on the moon. And now we can’t get a swab or a face mask or a gown and we have no real chain of command.”
Brinkley added: “We are not leading in the pandemic response, we are trailing other countries by a long shot. This is a crippling blow to America’s prestige around the world.”
China, South Korea, Germany, Russia and other nations, even US-sanctioned Iran and Cuba, have been much more effective in managing the COVID-19 crisis than the US. Why? Well, simply because they are not broke like the US is from its monstrous militarism and imperial overstretch. (Merely printing money is no solution.)
The calamity of the disease unfolding in the US is proof that its presumed global empire is all washed-up. Fitting the end of era mood, the country is being “led” by a president who thinks that injecting household bleach into the human body could be a cure for the virus. Trump increasingly sounds like mad Roman emperors Nero or Caligula.
American economist Joseph Stiglitz says the real state of US society is akin to a “third world country”.
In an interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, he commented: "The numbers turning to food banks are just enormous and beyond the capacity of them to supply. It is like a third world country… In the advanced world, the US is one of the countries with the poorest health overall and the greatest health inequality."
The upshot is that the United States is doomed to fail. Its moral corruption – festering over many decades – has finally reached a fatal level whereby profligacy for militarism and corporate bailouts has far outstripped what the rulers are willing to provide for meeting the basic health needs of the vast majority of working people.
This is isn’t just about President Trump. It encompasses the whole two-party charade that is a rubber-stamp for big business and militarism. Democrat contender Joe Biden will offer nothing better than the Republican buffoon. Because US capitalism is rotten to the core from its corporate cronyism and warmongering habits to feed the system.
Like past empires that imploded, the US ruling elite doesn’t see what’s coming because they and their media class are mired in their own echo chamber of vanity-propaganda and petty squabbling.
But the virus pandemic serves as a moment of empirical evidence showing that the US is a colossus with feet of clay.
The country is heading for an economic collapse on par with the Great Depression, according to Stiglitz. With an unemployment rate touching 30 per cent – over 26 million out of work – and federal handouts that are peanuts in the scale of things, the “American nightmare” is only just beginning.
The endemic, systematic corruption of US capitalist power means that it can’t save itself. There will be no reality-check for the rulers because they have long ago lost all sense of reality.
The reality-check may, however, come from the millions of citizens who realise that their nation has been turned into nothing more than a decadent empire.
US a Washed-up Empire
The harder they come, the harder they fall, as reggae singer Jimmy Cliff once put it. No nation has come harder than the United States with its history of relentless wars and mass destruction, nauseatingly dressed up with virtuous rhetoric about supposedly leading the free world.
There was a time when the slick American propaganda held the world in thrall as if it were true. Many nations once gullibly looked to the US for leadership. Not any more.
The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed presumed US global power as a hollowed-out caricature. America’s response to the disease is abysmal. It is the world’s leader in the numbers of deaths and infections, unable to cope because of the woeful lack of an organized, functioning public health system. How damning is that?
Another factor in why the US has been hit so badly by the pandemic is due to the parlous conditions for tens of millions of its workers who live on the brink of poverty with little social safety net. That speaks to the real undemocratic nature of American society as opposed to all the arrogant delusions of “exceptionalism”.
This appalling disaster is against a backdrop of Washington spending trillions of dollars on nuclear weapons and maintaining hundreds of thousands of troops in military bases all around the world backed up by legions of warships and warplanes.
"The global coronavirus crisis… [has] quickly brought the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world to its knees," according to the US magazine, Politico.
US presidential historian Douglas Brinkley is quoted by Politico as saying: “The United States was once known for its can-do culture. We built the Panama Canal and we put a man on the moon. And now we can’t get a swab or a face mask or a gown and we have no real chain of command.”
Brinkley added: “We are not leading in the pandemic response, we are trailing other countries by a long shot. This is a crippling blow to America’s prestige around the world.”
China, South Korea, Germany, Russia and other nations, even US-sanctioned Iran and Cuba, have been much more effective in managing the COVID-19 crisis than the US. Why? Well, simply because they are not broke like the US is from its monstrous militarism and imperial overstretch. (Merely printing money is no solution.)
The calamity of the disease unfolding in the US is proof that its presumed global empire is all washed-up. Fitting the end of era mood, the country is being “led” by a president who thinks that injecting household bleach into the human body could be a cure for the virus. Trump increasingly sounds like mad Roman emperors Nero or Caligula.
American economist Joseph Stiglitz says the real state of US society is akin to a “third world country”.
In an interview with Britain’s Guardian newspaper, he commented: "The numbers turning to food banks are just enormous and beyond the capacity of them to supply. It is like a third world country… In the advanced world, the US is one of the countries with the poorest health overall and the greatest health inequality."
The upshot is that the United States is doomed to fail. Its moral corruption – festering over many decades – has finally reached a fatal level whereby profligacy for militarism and corporate bailouts has far outstripped what the rulers are willing to provide for meeting the basic health needs of the vast majority of working people.
This is isn’t just about President Trump. It encompasses the whole two-party charade that is a rubber-stamp for big business and militarism. Democrat contender Joe Biden will offer nothing better than the Republican buffoon. Because US capitalism is rotten to the core from its corporate cronyism and warmongering habits to feed the system.
Like past empires that imploded, the US ruling elite doesn’t see what’s coming because they and their media class are mired in their own echo chamber of vanity-propaganda and petty squabbling.
But the virus pandemic serves as a moment of empirical evidence showing that the US is a colossus with feet of clay.
The country is heading for an economic collapse on par with the Great Depression, according to Stiglitz. With an unemployment rate touching 30 per cent – over 26 million out of work – and federal handouts that are peanuts in the scale of things, the “American nightmare” is only just beginning.
The endemic, systematic corruption of US capitalist power means that it can’t save itself. There will be no reality-check for the rulers because they have long ago lost all sense of reality.
The reality-check may, however, come from the millions of citizens who realise that their nation has been turned into nothing more than a decadent empire.
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