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https://ourfiniteworld.com/2021/08/30/the-afghanistan-fiasco-and-todays-high-level-of-conflict-reflect-an-energy-problem/

The Afghanistan Fiasco (and Today’s High Level of Conflict) Reflect an Energy Problem

There is a saying, “Everything happens for a reason.” The fiasco in Afghanistan is no exception to this rule. Even though it is not obvious, the United States is up against energy limits. It needed to pull back from Afghanistan to try to have enough energy to continue in its other roles, such as providing benefits for its growing army of retirees, and building infrastructure to mitigate the COVID-19 downturn.

The fundamental problem is that governments can add debt and other indirect promises of resources that create goods and services, but they cannot actually create the low-cost energy, water and mineral resources needed to fulfill those promises.

The way energy limits play out is not at all intuitive. Most people assume that we will run out of oil, leading to a spike in oil prices. We will then transition to renewables. As I see it, this understanding is completely wrong. Limited energy supply first leads to a need for simplification: Stepping back from Afghanistan would be one such type of simplification. It would save energy supplies and reduce the need for greater tax revenue or added debt.

In this post, I will try to explain some pieces of the problem.

[1] Afghanistan was, and continues to be, in some sense, a “handicapped country.”

Everyone knows that the way a country can succeed in the world market is by providing needed goods or services to other economies at low cost. Afghanistan is a landlocked country. It also doesn’t have any big rivers it can use to transport goods out of the country. It isn’t a member of a trade alliance such as the EU to allow smooth transport of goods out of the country. The difficulty of transit into and out of the country adds a layer of costs that tends to make the country uncompetitive in the world market. No matter how much investment any country makes in Afghanistan, this handicap will still persist.

Also, Afghanistan has too high a population relative to its resources. We know that most wars are resource wars. The fact that Afghanistan has been involved in wars for many years hints at this problem. According to UN 2019 estimates, Afghanistan’s population was 7.8 million in 1950, 21.6 million in 2001, and 38.9 million in 2020, which is about five times the 1950 population. Water needs, in particular, tend to escalate as population rises.

[2] The US doesn’t know how to fight a guerrilla war.

The weapons developed by the US are too complex to be used in a guerrilla war. They tend to break down and require replacement parts. Needless to say, these parts are not available in Afghanistan. Even if Afghan soldiers are trained to use these weapons, they may not be available or suitable when needed.

George W. Bush should have known from the outcome of the 20-year Vietnam conflict (1955-1975) that any guerrilla war was likely to have a bad ending. In Afghanistan, the plan was to train Afghan soldiers, thus keeping US citizens out of the battlefield. This strategy kept the Afghan conflict off the front page of US newspapers, but the overall result seems to be similar.

[3] When George W. Bush took office in 2001, he seems to have had access to more funds than he knew what to do with. Starting a war in Afghanistan probably seemed like a good use for these funds. He could perhaps build military bases, and perhaps raise the standard of living of the people there.

The price of oil was especially low in the 1998 to 2001 period. This allowed tax revenue to “go farther” in providing benefits to the economy, allowing a temporary budget surplus. With such a surplus, getting funds appropriated for any purpose would likely have been easy.

Figure 1. US Budget Deficits and Surpluses by Year. Chart by Steve Benen. Source.

Even more importantly, with a fairly young population, the Social Security system had been collecting funds in advance of when they were needed, with the plan of building up the plan’s Trust Fund for use when a bulge in retirements was expected, starting about 2010. Figure 2 shows one chart that roughly illustrates the overfunding and planned use for the funds. Unfortunately, Figure 2 doesn’t treat investment income in the way it is actually collected; it leaves out past investment income and uses discounted cash flow assumptions for the future, so a person cannot readily estimate net contributions to the Trust Fund balance by year from this chart.

Figure 2. Forecast of Social Security surpluses and deficits. Chart by Peter G. Peterson Foundation, based on Social Security Administration, The 2020 Annual Report of the Board of Trustees of the Federal Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Federal Disability Trust Funds. Source.

Figure 2 indicates that there was considerable overfunding starting in the late 1980s. The thing that actuaries (and others) didn’t consider is the fact that there is a real difference between debt and the physical resources that will be needed when these older people retire. Retirees will need food, water and energy to heat their homes. They will need medicine and long term care institutions. They should also be able to provide their share of the upkeep of roads and electricity transmission networks.

Debt is a promise of future funds to purchase goods and services, but it doesn’t make the resources required to create these goods and services materialize out of “thin air.” To keep these promises, oil needs to be extracted, refined, and delivered to farmers. There needs to be enough fresh water available to irrigate adequate farmland to produce the required food. There need to be supply lines that are working to deliver the required food. There need to be enough young people who are willing to work on farms and in care centers for the aged. The wages for these young workers need to be high enough so that they too can have food, shelter and other things that we consider necessities.

When the extra Social Security funds were collected, the officials who collected them figured out that as a practical matter, there was little that they could do with them besides spend them at the time they were collected. They couldn’t set up warehouses with food, clothing, building materials and energy resources to keep on hand for 30 or 40 years. If they invested the money in the stock market, the money would simply cause a bubble in stock prices. If they built new factories or nursing homes, they would be unfairly competing with existing businesses.

I am not sure that there is any good record of how these extra funds were spent. My understanding is that they provided a very large slush fund that allowed expanded military activities among other things. From an accounting point of view, non-marketable government debt was substituted for the funds that were spent. Thus, when an actuary looks at the Trust Fund, it is fully funded. It is just that it is funded with more US government debt.

The catch is that the non-marketable US government debt doesn’t actually correspond to any resources. Any food used in 2022 (or 2050) will need to be grown in that year, using resources available in that year. Most clothing used in a given year will need to be produced with resources available at that time. Putting together a model that assumes business as usual forever tends to give a rosy picture because it leaves out this detail.

The 2020 OSDAI Trustees Report provides actual income, outgo, and interest income through 2019. From this report, it can be concluded that the extra Social Security slush fund is rapidly disappearing. In fact, it seems to be turning to a hidden source of required year-by-year funding starting as soon as 2020 or 2021.

In some sense, the “real economy” operates on a “cash basis,” rather than an “accrual basis.” This has not been recognized in our accounting or our models. Ignoring the way the system really works likely leads to a hidden crunch, starting about 2021. We know that retirements were high in 2020, adding to the potential problem. I am certain that President Biden and his advisors are aware of this issue, even though it is never reported on the front pages of newspapers.

[4] There is really a two-sided energy price problem. Consumers can afford only low energy prices but, as the result of depletion and population growth in oil exporting countries, producers need high oil prices.

Figure 3 is a chart I prepared a few years ago. In it, there is a pattern of rapidly rising wages when oil prices were very low. Workers became more productive with new factory equipment and vehicles, produced with oil, and operated using oil products. As a result, their wages rose.

Figure 3. Average wages in 2017$ compared to Brent oil price, also in 2017$. Oil prices in 2017$ are from BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2018. Average wages are total wages based on BEA data adjusted by the GDP price deflator, divided by total population. Thus, they reflect changes in the proportion of the population employed as well as changes in wage levels.

On the other hand, when oil prices spiked, the prices of many goods, including food, airline tickets, and the fuel used for commuting to work, rose. People cut back on discretionary income, such as eating in restaurants and vacation travel. Businesses with fewer customers laid off workers. The workers who could find jobs often found lower-paid or part time jobs. The result was a dip in average wages, both in the 1970s and at the time of the Great Recession of 2007-2009.

We now live in a world with depleted resources. The oil and other types of energy that are available are high in cost, but the prices tend to stay too low for producers when all costs are included. Oil resources from the Middle East and Venezuela, especially, need a higher oil price because the governments of these countries need very high taxes on oil revenue to support their large populations. Even shale oil from the United States needs a higher price than is available today.

If we want OPEC to supply the rest of the world with more oil, the price will need to rise much higher than today’s Brent oil price of about $73. It likely will need to rise to at least $100 per barrel and show that it can stay at this high level. Otherwise, the supposed reserves of OPEC will mostly stay in the ground.

Even the US needs a higher oil price. Its oil, gas and coal production fell during the pandemic in 2020. Through May 2021 (and even later using weekly data, not shown), oil and natural gas production has not rebounded to the 2019 level.

Figure 4. US fossil fuel average daily production by month through May 2021, based on data from the US Energy Information Administration. NGPL means natural gas plant liquids. NGPL are extracted with natural gas but condensed out and sold as liquids.

Note that oil and gas production also dipped in 2016. Figure 3 shows that oil prices were also low then. If prices are too low, would-be producers leave them in the ground.

Adding in nuclear and renewables (hydroelectric, ethanol, wood, wind, solar and geothermal) still leaves a large dip in recent production.

Figure 5. US average daily production by type based on data of the US Energy Information Administration.

President Biden is no doubt aware of the fact that the US’s production of energy products, especially crude oil, is now low. In fact, earlier in August he asked OPEC and its allies to increase their oil production to try to keep prices from rising too much. Why would OPEC want to increase its production, if the US can’t increase its own production at the current price level? All of the producers need a higher price level; it is consumers who cannot afford the higher price level.

[5] The world seems to have already begun shifting to a falling energy consumption per capita situation.

The amount of energy required tends to rise with population because all of the people require food, housing and transportation. Energy, especially oil and coal, are needed for these.

Figure 6. Energy consumption per capita for all energy sources combined based on data from BP’s Statistical Review of Energy 2021.

Many countries, including the United States, have been able to hold down their internal energy consumption per capita by moving much of their industry to China and India.

Figure 7. US energy consumption per capita, divided between industrial and other, based on information of the US Energy Information Administration. Energy consumption includes both electricity and fuels such as oil, coal, natural gas, ethanol and wood burned for heat. All transportation fuels are in the “Ex. Industrial” portion.

Figure 7 shows that US industrial production reached its peak in 1973, which was shortly after US oil production started to turn down in 1971. This partly reflects auto manufacturing moving to Japan and Europe, where smaller, more fuel-efficient cars were already being sold. Home heating and electricity generation also shifted away from oil to other fuels.

The issue now is that “Ex. Industrial” consumption has been falling since the Great Recession. In some sense, the economy has been losing strength since 2008 and continues to lose strength. Fewer and fewer people can feel like they are really getting ahead. They are saddled with low wage jobs and too much debt.

Figure 8 shows similar patterns for the European Union and Japan. Energy consumption per capita was rising until a few years before the Great Recession, and then it plateaued. It has been declining since.

Figure 8. Energy consumption per capita for the European Union and Japan from BP’s 2021 Statistical Review of World Energy.

The pattern shown on Figure 8 suggests that energy prices are still too high for consumers, even though they are, at the same time, too low for producers. Travel restrictions imposed by governments may also be contributing to this pattern.

GDP data indications are prepared on an accrual basis. In other words, they reflect the impact of added debt. If missing energy can be replaced with a promise of debt to pay for more goods and services in the future, made with future energy, then perhaps all will be well. The quantity of debt that is required, relative to the GDP impact, keeps rising, suggesting this substitution is not working very well.

Figure 9. Dollars of additional debt required to add $1 dollar of GDP growth (including inflation), based on data of the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

With the addition of growing amounts of debt, GDP increases are reported to be much larger than expected growth, based only on the growth in energy consumption.

Figure 10. Average annual increase in energy consumption for the period shown based on EIA data versus average increase in real (inflation-adjusted) GDP for the period shown, based on data of the US Bureau of Economic Analysis.

[6] We now seem to be reaching the end of the line with respect to what can be done with added debt to make the economy seem like it is performing adequately well.

Interest rates show a very distinct pattern. They rise until about 1981, and then they decline.

Figure 11. US 10-year and 3-month interest rates through July 2021, in a chart prepared by FRED.

When the US economy was growing rapidly, it could withstand high and rising interest rates. Since 1981, the general pattern has been one of falling interest rates, making a larger quantity of debt affordable. Indirectly, these falling interest rates also helped prop up asset prices, such as those of homes and shares of stock. In recent years, interest rates have fallen about as far as they can go. To some extent, these lower rates were made possible by Quantitative Easing (QE). But at some point, QE needs to be stopped.

Today, interest rates are approximately at the level they were during the Great Depression of the 1930s. This makes sense; interest rates to some extent reflect the return an investor can expect to make. Right now, without a lot of government support programs, “Main Street” businesses around the world are struggling. This indicates that the economy is doing very poorly. There are too many people who cannot afford even basic goods and services. Indirectly, this feeds back to commodity prices that are not high enough for producers of energy products.

Recently, governments of many countries have tried a different approach. Instead of loans, they are providing something closer to giveaways. Renters are allowed to stay rent-free in their apartments. Or, checks are given to all citizens earning below some specified amount. What we seem to be finding is that these giveaways produce inflation in the price of goods that poor people buy most frequently, such as food and used cars.

The giveaways don’t actually produce more of the required goods and services, however. Instead, would-be workers decide that they really don’t want to take a low-paid job if the giveaways provide nearly as much income. The loss of workers then acts to reduce production. With lower production of goods and services, a smaller quantity of oil is required, so the oil price tends to fall. The price certainly does not rise to the level needed by oil producers.

[7] In a finite world, longer-term models need to take into account the fact that resources deplete and the population keeps rising.

Any modeler who tries to take into account the fact that resources deplete and the overall population keeps rising will quickly come to the conclusion that, at some point, every economy will have to collapse. This has been known for a very long time. Back in 1957, Admiral Hyman Rickover of the US Navy said,

Surplus energy provides the material foundation for civilized living – a comfortable and tasteful home instead of a bare shelter; attractive clothing instead of mere covering to keep warm; appetizing food instead of anything that suffices to appease hunger. . .

For it is an unpleasant fact that according to our best estimates, total fossil fuel reserves recoverable at not over twice today’s unit cost, are likely to run out at some time between the years 2000 and 2050, if present standards of living and population growth rates are taken into account.

Now, in 2021, as it looks as if this problem is starting to hit us. But no one (since Jimmy Carter, who was not re-elected) has dared tell the general public. Instead, accrual accounting with more and more debt is used in financial statements, including GDP statements. Actuaries put together Social Security funding estimates as if the resources to provide the promised benefits will really be there. Climate change models are prepared as if business as usual can go on for the next hundred years. Everything published by the mainstream media is based on the underlying assumption that we will have no problems other than climate change for the next 100 years.

[8] About all that can be done now is to start cutting back on the less necessary parts of the economy.

President Biden’s abrupt pullout from Afghanistan reflects a reality that increasingly has to take place in the world. The US needs to start pulling back because there are too many people and not enough inexpensive to extract resources to fulfill all of the commitments that the US has made. As mentioned earlier, there are a number of obstacles to success in Afghanistan. Thus, it is a good place to start.

With the need to pull back, there is a much higher level of conflict, both within and between countries. The big issue becomes who, or what, is going to be “voted off the island” next. Is it the elderly or the poor; the military or the oversized US medical establishment; university education for a large share of students or classroom teaching for young children?

We don’t seem to have a good way out of our current predicament. This seems to be what is behind all of the recent internet censorship. Renewables and nuclear require fossil fuel energy for their production and maintenance. The powers that be don’t want anyone to know that nearly all of the “happily ever after using renewables” stories we hear are based on wishful thinking.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/video-who-concedes-virus-like-common-flu-500000-americans-dead-vaccine/5752427

Video: PCR Test is an Outrageous Fraud, Corona Virus Is Just Like the Common Flu. Reiner Fuellmich

The PCR test is an outrageous fraud that was never meant to detect a virus.

The main goal of this pandemic fraud was to vaccinate the entire world and that seems to be working out quite well for these evil globalist criminals.

Excellent points made in this video, view at the article web address.

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/coiling-and-rattling/

Coiling and Rattling

Actually, Progressive-Liberal abortion policy never went far enough. If only abortion were retroactive! We could send “Joe Biden” (and maybe all of Wokedom) back to the pre-embryonic cosmic darkness preceding conception? Otherwise, we’ll have to run him out of the Oval Office like some short-timer Guatemalan generalissimo, since he has completed the transition of the USA into a Third World backwater… and thus, served his purpose.

Was that it, by the way? Was “Joe Biden” a kind of suicide bomber sent into the White House overtly by dimly-perceived parties to blow up the ragged remnants of a once-dignified republic? There’s a cohort of observers, including many sage commenters on this blog, who would say so. One way or another, Ol’ White Joe’s days at the helm are numbered now. Even the claque of quasi-literate brown-nosers in the news media are turning on him since he glanced at his watch too many times while the dead marines’ bodies were rolled out before him at Dover AFB. At least he didn’t yawn or light a cigarette, too.

These cool and lovely, pre-Fall nights, Kamala Harris must be chugging Gray Goose by the liter, chasing  her Xanax, up at the Veep’s mansion, the old Naval Observatory, probably the nicest house she’ll ever live in because she’s not ever moving into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., nosiree. The parties dimly-perceived behind all this … this meshugas… got it so wrong with her. She was supposed to be an insurance policy against removing “JB,” while he acted as an automatic legislation signing machine.

But it’s rock-and-a-hard-place time now for the power players in our nation’s capital, and I’m thinking that Kamala’s thinking that they’re thinking that maybe Kamala has to go, too… and maybe not in a pretty way… like maybe something goes wrong on Air Force Two a hundred miles east of Ascension Island in the South Atlantic en route to Botswana… and the long-awaited official meet-and-greet with President Mokgweetsi Masisi… which never happens…. Wake up Kammie!!!! Oh no, it’s even worse than a bad dream, she’s thinking. It’s reality!

Those parties dimly perceived surely think they can get away with anything now. There is no accountability, nor any memory of what it used to mean. Things just happen and unhappen, like in some raw, pre-conscious nasty-and-brutish animal kingdom, which is exactly what our country has become when you factor-in mass Woke lobotomization, meth and fentanyl addiction, social media mind-fuckery, and Covid hysteria. Klaus Schwab, you are taking this a little too far now, yes? It’s one thing to own nothing and be happy, but to remember nothing, too? That compliant surviving population of a half-billion serfs you wish to reserve to peel your grapes won’t even be able to carry out the simplest instructions. Something has gone very wrong with your Great Reset… if that’s what this is.

I prefer to label it the long emergency, simply the endgame of the techno-industrial hypertrophic phase of history. You could see it coming from a hundred months away, but now that it’s here, Western Civ has turned from tragedy to farce to psychosis. The pharmaceutical lobbying group known as the American Medical Association called this week for an “immediate end” to the use of ivermectin to treat Covid-19. They forbid member doctors to prescribe it. They follow the CDC and the FDA in condemning the drug, sentencing it to the ducking stool… burning it at the stake! “Use of ivermectin for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19 has been demonstrated to be harmful to patients,” they say.

They lie, of course. And they want all the doctors to lie. How many of them will go along to get along? Do they care if this psychotic nonsense destroys what remains of medical practice just as race-and-gender studies have destroyed higher ed? One not-so-distant day the docs will show up for work, but the overgrown hospitals will be out of business, doors shuttered, and the docs will be back to making house-calls with a little black bag… no more German cars for you… and maybe a chicken in exchange for a little bootleg Ivermectin, if you’re lucky! As it happens, I take the veterinary-grade Ivermectin myself as a prophylactic, because that’s all you can get easily around here. I haven’t felt better in years. Perhaps I had pinworms (Enterobius vermicularis). Anyway, I don’t have Covid. I also take Vitamin D3 and zinc. Anathemize that, you chiseling bastards!

Everybody I consort with has had enough of the whole nauseating game — the lying politicians, the lying media, the lying medical bureaucrats, the lying generals, the lying teachers, the lying celebrities, the lying tech moguls, the entire armature of counter-reality you want to impose on a once-fair land. We will never do your bidding. We will never peel your grapes. There are more of us than you. Go ahead, push just a little bit harder.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogsept21/illusion-stability9-21.html

The Illusion of Stability, the Inevitability of Collapse

Imagine being at a party celebrating the vast wealth generated in the last ten months in stocks, cryptocurrencies, real estate and just about every other asset class. The lights flicker briefly but the host assures the crowd the generator powering the party is working perfectly.

Being a skeptic, you slip out on the excuse of bringing in more champagne and pay a visit to the generator room. To your horror, you find the entire arrangement held together with duct tape and rotted 2X4s, the electrical panel is an acrid-smelling mess of haphazard frayed wire and the generator is over-heated and vibrating off its foundation bolts. Whatever governor the engine once had is gone, it clearly won't last the night.

The party is the U.S. economy, and the generator room is the Federal Reserve, its proxies and the U.S. Treasury, all running to failure. What we're experiencing in real time is the illusion of stability and the inevitability of collapse. I've prepared a few charts to illuminate this reality graphically.

Here's the illusion of stability in a nutshell: while the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP) has continued marching higher (in both nominal and real/inflation-adjusted terms), the amount of Federal Reserve stimulus and Federal debt required to keep pushing GDP up at the same rate has exploded higher and is tracking a parabolic blow-off.

Let's start with a chart of GDP, which I've divided into four eras. Era #1 was the period of broad-based prosperity, defined as productivity gains that increased wages faster than inflation, i.e. the purchasing power of wages rose so each hour of labor bought more goods and services. Note that the GDP was not skyrocketing in this period, as the gains in productivity and prosperity were real and not based on financial trickery, debt, leverage or Fed stimulus. This era lasted from the 1950s through the mid-1970s, at which point stagflation put an end to the era of rising purchasing power of labor / wages.

Era #2 began around 1981 and lasted until 1999: this was the era of financialization, when debt and leverage replaced productivity as the source of profits and as a result speculation, leveraged buy-outs and other financial gimmicks proved far more profitable than actually producing goods and services. A key element of financialization is globalization, as the big profits only flow when debt, risk, income streams and phantom financial instruments can be commoditized (i.e. produced, packaged and sold as commodities) and sold globally.

Era #3 was the logical extension of financialization and speculation: the U.S. economy became dependent on debt-asset bubbles for its "growth" and expansion of phantom wealth. Bubble #1, the dot-com speculative frenzy, imploded in 2000, and Bubble #2, the debt-housing speculative frenzy, imploded in 2008.

Era #4 is the logical extension of the bubbles popping: a permanent Fed-fueled speculative frenzy that requires ever greater quantities of Fed stimulus and federal and private debt, and ever larger extremes of speculative frenzy to keep from imploding.

Here's nominal GDP: it looks great until we look beneath the surface.



Here's real GDP, adjusted for official inflation (in chained 2012 dollars). Looks very similar to nominal GDP: if we look at the steady ascent of real GDP, we'd imagine the nation's prosperity is even more broad-based and solid than in Era #1, but we'd be wrong: Eras #2, #3 and #4 are characterized by rising inequality, the death-spiral decay of middle class purchasing power and total dependence on skyrocketing stimulus, debt, leverage and speculation.



Here's a glance beneath the surface: federal debt has exploded higher: in Era #2 (Financialization), federal debt rose from less than $1 trillion in 1981 to $5.7 trillion in 2000-- about a 6-fold increase over 20 years. The next 20 years saw federal debt rise from $5.7 trillion to $23.3 trillion in early 2020 (pre-pandemic), and since then, a sharp ramp to $28.5 trillion.

You see the trend: GDP rose about 7-fold while federal debt rose 30-fold--mostly in the last 13 years of Era #4.



This chart of federal debt as a percentage of GDP is enlightening: notice than in Era #1 (broad-based prosperity), the percentage declined as GDP grew at a faster rate than federal debt. In Era #2 (financialization), debt rose far faster than GDP, but the dot-com boom reduced the percentage to around 60%, double the percentage in Era #1.

Era #3, the bubble-economy, remained in the same range, but the trend changed in Era #4, after the Fed's Bubble #2 popped, almost bringing down the entire global financial system. In the era of speculative Fed frenzy (Era #4), the debt quickly rose to 100% of GDP and then made another quantum leap above 120%--a developing-world-kleptocracy level.

While prosperity was replaced by inequality and Fed-inflated speculative bubbles, debt as a percentage of GDP rose 4-fold.



Speaking of parabolic blow-offs, here's the Federal Reserve balance sheet, up 10-fold in a mere 13 years. Remarkable, isn't it, that the U.S. economy managed decades of expansion with the Fed balance sheet far below $1 trillion, decade after decade, but now the economy needs the Fed to create $7.5 trillion and throw it on the bonfire of speculative bubbles to keep the economy from imploding.

GDP in 2007 was $14.7 trillion and the Fed balance sheet was $800 billion, or 5.4% of GDP. Now the Fed balance sheet is over 36% of GDP, about a 7-fold increase in a mere 13 years. Notice the rate of expansion is near-parabolic, even as GDP has recovered to pre-pandemic levels.



Other central banks followed this same expansion of monetary stimulus. If GDP has normalized, then why the continuing panic-expansion of monetary stimulus? The only logical explanation is the system was breaking down before the pandemic and its decay has accelerated.



We all know what happens when the expansion of debt, leverage, speculation and central bank stimulus falter by even the tiniest bit: the entire global phantom wealth bubble pops: this is visible in the chart of total debt, public and private:



Beneath the illusory stability of rising GDP, the extremes of debt, leverage, stimulus and speculative frenzy required to keep the phantom wealth bubble from imploding are all rising parabolically. Every attempt to return to an economy that's not dependent on debt-asset bubbles and unsustainable expansions of debt and monetary stimulus has triggered a global market crash which can only be saved by doubling, tripling or quadrupling the previous levels of debt and stimulus.

This is why collapse is now inevitable. Parabolic blow-off expansions generate instabilities that cannot be suppressed by doing more of what's failing; that is called run to failure for a reason: the only possible outcome is systemic failure, i.e. the collapse of the phantom wealth bubble, a collapse which will bring down the entire machinery of bubble-blowing.

Before you pop that bottle of champagne, you better check out the generator room first. Duct tape, frayed wiring, the scent of overheated metal and rotted 2X4s are not going to keep the party lights going much longer. 

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http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-no-insight-after-afghanistan/

No Insight After Afghanistan

Remaking the world — all of it — in the U.S. image has been a foundation stone of American foreign policy since the Wilson administration — a century ago.

Tragedy, a scholarly friend reminds me, does not mean merely a disastrous event or events — serial murders, a ravaging hurricane, losses in war, famines. Tragedy entails self-knowledge through suffering, transcendent clarity after great destruction.

In Sophocles’ celebrated tragedy, pride and hubris have blinded Oedipus to who he is and what he has done. He hunts his father’s murderer only to discover he is the patricidal killer. When he blinds himself in despair, it signifies he has seen the truth. He knows himself at last by way of another kind of sight and that is insight. 

The debacle in Afghanistan is not a tragedy however many times we call it one. The 20 years of violence and destruction are a disaster, yes. Nearly 160,000 people have died, the Watson Institute’s Cost of War Project tells us, and the U.S. wasted $2.3 trillion it could have spent bettering the human condition anywhere it wanted at home or abroad.  Is there clarity, self-recognition, insight? Don’t look for any now that the Afghan adventure is over.

Sarah Abdallah, a Lebanese journalist with a lively presence on Twitter, compiled a list of eight U.S. presidents who had a hand in the Afghanistan war — her chronology extending back not two decades but four.

None of these eight is a tragic figure, given they never got past the blinding pride and hubris that drive the American imperium. The possible exception is Jimmy Carter, who seemed to have looked back after he left the White House, seen what he had done and acted accordingly by way of his various projects, including Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (Simon and Schuster, 2006), a book that nearly got him tarred and feathered.

For the rest, they proved merely stupid or without conscience. President Joe Biden is both, despite all the effusive nonsense lately as to his “surfeit of empathy,” as The New York Times weirdly put it in a piece on his “values” last week.

‘Lessons of Vietnam’

Aug. 10, 1968: Protest against the Vietnam War as Chicago was preparing to host the Democratic National Convention. (David Wilson, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

People — people with no memories and no history before 2001 — talk about “the lessons of Vietnam.” We must ask what they could possibly mean. Among the only things Washington learned after April 30, 1975, were that the American public must be kept ignorant of U.S. conduct abroad and, in the interest of that objective, the American press must be turned into a permanent propaganda machine. We cannot dignify these as lessons. There is nothing in them worthy of the term “insight.”

Now there is talk of “the lessons of Afghanistan.” Let us not descend into silliness.

The fashion of the moment among the liberal commentators appears to be a sort of purgative acknowledgement that America’s insistence that all nations conform to our standards (such as they are), our “model,” our free-market fundamentalism has been wrong all along.

Kathleen Parker, that reliable font of deep thinking on The Washington Post’s opinion page, had a piece last week headlined, “Afghanistan shows us that we can’t invent other nations in our image.”

Don’t you wish weather vanes such as Ms. Parker did something more than make it up as they go along? We are now invited to think that Afghanistan was a one-off error in this regard. The topic she and others do not even know they are exploring is American universalism, sibling of American exceptionalism and in my view the more insidious of the two ideologies. Remaking the world — all of it — in the U.S. image has been one of the foundation stones of American foreign policy since the Wilson administration — neatly enough a century ago.

It is perfectly true that our policy cliques could learn the lesson Parker and others propose, that they could achieve cathartic insights into who they are and what they have done and then begin to do things very differently. But to suggest that they will now learn these lessons or achieve these insights is simply irresponsible.

Those of us who manage, somehow, to see beyond the passing admissions of error we now read — which will fade into oblivion in a trice, mark my word — must take lessons our corporate press has no intention of urging upon us. I propose two.

Lesson No. 1  

Taliban fighters in Kabul, Aug. 17. (VOA, Wikimedia Commons)

One, the failure in Afghanistan after 20 years of wastage and war-profiteering is an imperial failure, and our lesson — a paradox here — is that the American empire will learn no lessons from it. The withdrawal, however bungled, is an important step and Biden deserves credit for it. To read this as a suggestion that Washington will now step back from a century of universalist ideology and seven decades of hegemonic ambition is a mistake so obvious even the Eagle Scouts among us can avoid it.

There will be no change whatsoever in post–Afghanistan foreign policy, in short. The evidence in this regard accumulates as we speak. Let us reach back all of five days into the annals of American diplomacy.

Last Thursday the Treasury Department announced yet another set of sanctions against Cuba, these against senior Defense Ministry officials, in response to the July 11 protests in various Cuban cities. This is, count ’em, the fourth set of new sanctions imposed on Cuba in the past five weeks. Biden’s people promise more.

As noted previously in this space, the demonstrations at issue were funded and orchestrated by the National Endowment for Democracy and the Agency for International Development, two coup-cultivating U.S. institutions. So it comes to this: We will foment unrest and protests against the privations resulting from American sanctions, then sanction you again and again in response to the demonstrations we backed.

Last Friday was a big day in this line.

Treasury announced that it was sanctioning nine officials and two divisions of the FSB, Russia’s security service, “in response to the state-sponsored poisoning of Russian opposition leader Aleksey Navalny that took place one year ago today.”

The Navalny incident, like the Skripal poisonings in 2018, has never been definitively linked to the Kremlin. But what difference does that make these days?

The same day, the Biden White House advised Congress of a new executive order authorizing a set of sanctions against those participating in the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project. The wording is a blur, as is the provenance of this latest EO. It “blocks the property and interests in property of foreign persons … engaging in certain activities or providing certain services to facilitate construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, among others.”

Why, why now, and why so vaguely stated?

The order says NS 2 threatens Western Europe’s energy independence —which is of course Western Europe’s to decide — and therefore threatens “the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.” But who wrote this EO? It would appear someone other than Biden, who earlier dropped the sanctions related to NS 2 that the Trump administration had in place.

The order was issued, we should note, the day the soon-to-retire Angela Merkel had her final summit with Vladimir Putin in Moscow, during which the German and Russian leaders noted differences but also the enduring Russo–German relationship.

The move most deserving of attention concerns Afghanistan. It now appears that Washington will replace aid to support the Afghan economy with sanctions. Just before the weekend the U.S. blocked Kabul’s access to Afghanistan’s $9.4 billion in foreign reserves — a small sum but key to a crippled economy’s survival. The always warm-of-heart International Monetary Fund simultaneously suspended distribution of $400 million in emergency funding.

How’s that from the people with all those thoughts and prayers for Afghans?  

Memo to Kathleen Parker: These are the acts of a desperate but determined empire that intends to alter its coercive post–Afghanistan policies toward other nations not one jot. You need a new lead.

Lesson No. 2 

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, left, and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in March, while meeting with Chinese officials in Anchorage, Alaska. (State Department, Ron Przysucha)

The second lesson for those of us determined to pay attention despite the incessant churn of the American fog machine concerns the question of competence. This was another preoccupation in the press last week—not competence exactly, but whether other nations, allies and adversaries alike, still think Americans are competent after the display of incompetence since the collapse of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.

Here is Biden Friday, as the chaos in Kabul fell around his ears:

“I cannot promise what the final outcome will be, or what it will be that it will be without risk of loss.”

I had to read it three times. Now you know that the appearance of competence is not America’s problem. Straight-out incompetence is America’s problem.

I urged elsewhere after the president’s performance at his June 16 summit with Putin, shockingly choreographed to keep his appearance in public to the barest minimum, that we had better set aside what partisan animosities we may entertain and face the shared reality that we have a president who is mentally impaired. We do not, in short, have an able leader.

We can mark down the Geneva summit with Putin as an embarrassment. Now the problem of incompetence grows greatly more serious. This administration is as opaque as Trump’s, if for different reasons. However, from all appearances it is being run not by an experienced president but by appointed technocrats and yes-men and yes-women who are in far over their heads.

Brett Bruen, a top official on the foreign policy side during the Obama administration, published an opinion piece in USA Today a week ago calling on Biden to fire Jake Sullivan. Here is what Bruen has to say about Biden’s national security adviser:

“The national security adviser has two jobs. As the name suggests, they are the last and ideally closest counselor to the president in the Situation Room. Their second duty is to translate the commander in chief’s decisions and direction into practical policies. Sometimes that requires speaking truth to power. On all of these scores, the current occupant of the office appears to have failed.”

Coming from a Democratic apparatchik, an insider, this is a serious assertion. And I am certain Bruen knows without saying so that the Sullivan problem is not the half of it. Antony Blinken is visibly drowning as secretary of state — no idea what he is doing. Ned Price, Blinken’s mouthpiece at State, should be checked to confirm he is not an artificial-intelligence robot — incapable of a rational exchange with diligent diplomatic correspondents such as the AP’s Matt Lee.

We are riding for a fall so long as Biden is in office. It begins to look worse than the later years of the Reagan administration, when the permanent apparatus ran the country while the Great Communicator napped all afternoon. And one begins to wonder whether this is not how said permanent apparatus — the national security state and its visible appendages — prefers it.

Biden was right to get the U.S. out of Afghanistan, although we have to see whether he will continue intervening by way of crippling, coercive sanctions, special forces, CIA contractors and Air Force bombers. The only thing that makes Biden look good post–Afghanistan is the thought of a Kamala Harris presidency, and I don’t have it in me to go into that just yet.

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

Bring All the Troops Home: Stop Policing the Globe and Put an End to Endless Wars

It’s time to bring all our troops home.

Bring them home from Somalia, Iraq and Syria. Bring them home from Germany, South Korea and Japan. Bring them home from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Oman. Bring them home from Niger, Chad and Mali. Bring them home from Turkey, the Philippines, and northern Australia.

It’s not enough to pull American troops out of Afghanistan, America’s longest, bloodiest and most expensive war to date.

It’s time that we stop policing the globe, stop occupying other countries, and stop waging endless wars.

That’s not what’s going to happen, of course.

The U.S. military reportedly has more than 1.3 million men and women on active duty, with more than 200,000 of them stationed overseas in nearly every country in the world.

Those numbers are likely significantly higher in keeping with the Pentagon’s policy of not fully disclosing where and how many troops are deployed for the sake of “operational security and denying the enemy any advantage.” As investigative journalist David Vine explains, “Although few Americans realize it, the United States likely has more bases in foreign lands than any other people, nation, or empire in history.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda, though.

America’s military forces aren’t being deployed abroad to protect our freedoms here at home. Rather, they’re being used to guard oil fields, build foreign infrastructure and protect the financial interests of the corporate elite. In fact, the United States military spends about $81 billion a year just to protect oil supplies around the world.

The reach of America’s military empire includes close to 800 bases in as many as 160 countries, operated at a cost of more than $156 billion annually. As Vine reports, “Even US military resorts and recreation areas in places like the Bavarian Alps and Seoul, South Korea, are bases of a kind. Worldwide, the military runs more than 170 golf courses.”

This is how a military empire occupies the globe.

After 20 years of propping up Afghanistan to the tune of trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost, the U.S. military may have finally been forced out, but those troops represent just a fraction of our military presence worldwide.

In an ongoing effort to police the globe, American military servicepeople continue to be deployed to far-flung places in the Middle East and elsewhere.

This is how the military industrial complex, aided and abetted by the likes of Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and others, continues to get rich at taxpayer expense.

Yet while the rationale may keep changing for why American military forces are policing the globe, these wars abroad aren’t making America—or the rest of the world—any safer, are certainly not making America great again, and are undeniably digging the U.S. deeper into debt.

War spending is bankrupting America.

Although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world's population, America boasts almost 50% of the world's total military expenditure, spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined.

In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.

The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.

Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $4.7 trillion waging its endless wars.

Having been co-opted by greedy defense contractors, corrupt politicians and incompetent government officials, America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $32 million per hour.

In fact, the U.S. government has spent more money every five seconds in Iraq than the average American earns in a year.

Future wars and military exercises waged around the globe are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

Talk about fiscally irresponsible: the U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on a military empire it can’t afford.

As investigative journalist Uri Friedman puts it, for more than 15 years now, the United States has been fighting terrorism with a credit card, “essentially bankrolling the wars with debt, in the form of purchases of U.S. Treasury bonds by U.S.-based entities like pension funds and state and local governments, and by countries like China and Japan.”

War is not cheap, but it becomes outrageously costly when you factor in government incompetence, fraud, and greedy contractors. Indeed, a leading accounting firm concluded that one of the Pentagon’s largest agencies “can’t account for hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of spending.”

Unfortunately, the outlook isn’t much better for the spending that can be tracked.

A government audit found that defense contractor Boeing has been massively overcharging taxpayers for mundane parts, resulting in tens of millions of dollars in overspending. As the report noted, the American taxpayer paid:

$71 for a metal pin that should cost just 4 cents; $644.75 for a small gear smaller than a dime that sells for $12.51: more than a 5,100 percent increase in price. $1,678.61 for another tiny part, also smaller than a dime, that could have been bought within DoD for $7.71: a 21,000 percent increase. $71.01 for a straight, thin metal pin that DoD had on hand, unused by the tens of thousands, for 4 cents: an increase of over 177,000 percent.

That price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire is a sad statement on how little control “we the people” have over our runaway government.

Mind you, this isn’t just corrupt behavior. It’s deadly, downright immoral behavior.

Americans have thus far allowed themselves to be spoon-fed a steady diet of pro-war propaganda that keeps them content to wave flags with patriotic fervor and less inclined to look too closely at the mounting body counts, the ruined lives, the ravaged countries, the blowback arising from ill-advised targeted-drone killings and bombing campaigns in foreign lands, or the transformation of our own homeland into a warzone.

That needs to change.

The U.S. government is not making the world any safer. It’s making the world more dangerous. It is estimated that the U.S. military drops a bomb somewhere in the world every 12 minutes. Since 9/11, the United States government has directly contributed to the deaths of around 500,000 human beings. Every one of those deaths was paid for with taxpayer funds.

The U.S. government is not making America any safer. It’s exposing American citizens to alarming levels of blowback, a CIA term referring to the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Chalmers Johnson, a former CIA consultant, repeatedly warned that America’s use of its military to gain power over the global economy would result in devastating blowback....

....The U.S. military’s ongoing drone strikes will, I fear, spur yet more blowback against the American people. The latest drone strike reportedly killed seven children, ages 2 to 10, in Afghanistan.

The war hawks’ militarization of America—bringing home the spoils of war (the military tanks, grenade launchers, Kevlar helmets, assault rifles, gas masks, ammunition, battering rams, night vision binoculars, etc.) and handing them over to local police, thereby turning America into a battlefield—is also blowback.

James Madison was right: “No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” As Madison explained, “Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.”

We are seeing this play out before our eyes.

The government is destabilizing the economy, destroying the national infrastructure through neglect and a lack of resources, and turning taxpayer dollars into blood money with its endless wars, drone strikes and mounting death tolls.

Clearly, our national priorities are in desperate need of an overhauling.

At the height of its power, even the mighty Roman Empire could not stare down a collapsing economy and a burgeoning military. Prolonged periods of war and false economic prosperity largely led to its demise. As historian Chalmers Johnson predicts:

The fate of previous democratic empires suggests that such a conflict is unsustainable and will be resolved in one of two ways. Rome attempted to keep its empire and lost its democracy. Britain chose to remain democratic and in the process let go its empire. Intentionally or not, the people of the United States already are well embarked upon the course of non-democratic empire.

This is the “unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex” that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us more than 50 years ago not to let endanger our liberties or democratic processes.

Eisenhower, who served as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, was alarmed by the rise of the profit-driven war machine that emerged following the war—one that, in order to perpetuate itself, would have to keep waging war.

We failed to heed his warning.

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, there’s not much time left before we reach the zero hour.

It’s time to stop policing the globe, end these wars-without-end, and bring the troops home.

 

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https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/a-heedless-aftermath/

A Heedless Aftermath

For all the seeming power of the Deep State — a.k.a. the “Intel Community” — one really has to be impressed by its stupidity and desperation. It can’t keep secrets or cover its tracks. Anyone who was paying attention to the RussiaGate operation has seen the published evidence of all the lawless behavior it spawned and knows the names of all the players. Ditto, the effort to engineer the 2020 election and install an obviously senile puppet-stooge in the White House. And ditto the effort to manufacture the Covid-19 crisis by hijacking the public health apparatus of the federal government.

Yet, this Deep State rogue menace is stumbling badly now because it didn’t figure out the basic dynamic of the long emergency: that over-investments in complexity inexorably produce disorder and collapse. This includes the complexity of the Deep State itself, a sprawling enterprise choking on the immense stream of data it feeds on and the fumbling efforts of its all-too-human agents to weaponize all that. The question now is whether the Deep State will collapse — even perhaps get forcefully defeated by Americans who oppose it — before the entire country and all its support systems collapse.

Events are on the loose well beyond the Deep State’s control now. Its front man, “Joe Biden,” sealed his fate last week with the bungled exit from Afghanistan. Thirteen dead US soldiers may only be the preview of a Grand-Guignol to come as the victorious Islamic maniacs get to stage atrocities starring the thousands of Americans and other Westerners left behind. Why wouldn’t they? For decades, they’ve promised to defeat and humiliate their “infidel” enemies. Remember the video-recorded beheadings of Nicholas Berg, Daniel Pearl and many others? The roasting of the captured Syrian pilot in a steel cage?

There’s no need to even ask the rhetorical question: who planned and executed the buggered-up evacuation of Kabul? It is self-evident: the entire chain-of-command. This is finally galvanizing half the country not in thrall to the Deep State to move against it, and that’s what you’ll see in the weeks to come. They will get rid of this imposter “Joe Biden” — if the Deep State doesn’t try to do it first — and then they will “cancel” the Deep State’s attempt to manage any succession to the vacancy at the top.

Do you suppose that you will not be hearing any results of the Arizona election audit just because the endeavor went silent last week when three audit team members got sick with Covid? The process was not stopped or squashed. The report will show a gross and startling disparity between the results certified and the actual ballots counted. That will blow away the tatters of legitimacy “Joe Biden” has been wearing, revealing the larval, sightless creature hiding inside.

The CDC and its allied agencies have maxed-out on Americans willing to vax-up. The latest FDA switcheroo move to “approve” the not-yet-produced (or trialed) genetic therapy agent, “Comirnaty” was intended to fool the public into thinking that the current Pfizer-BioNTech “vaccine” was likewise approved. It is not approved. It is still being administered under the emergency use authorization. The quisling news media is lying about it. Anyway, the half of the country that declines to take a cocktail that fails to act as a true vaccine (i.e., preventing disease), and threatens to fatally attack the lining of their blood vessels… that large swathe of the public is good and goddam sick of being pushed around with mandates and threats.

We will not submit. We’re nearing the end of this medical reign of terror. The trouble is, the medical establishment won’t survive it. They’ve perverted and undermined what used to be called science — truth-driven inquiry into what’s real and what is not — and, anyway, the medical system had already poisoned itself with racketeering so outlandish and cruel that it makes the old Mafia look like a charity organization. Not only do Americans get a Covid virus whose development was funded and guided by America’s chief public health official, Tony Fauci, but if it puts them in the hospital, their doctors deny them treatment with efficacious medicines, and, if the patients happen to survive the ordeal, they’re hit up with million-dollar bills. This conduct exhibits a kind of sadism that goes beyond just adding insult to injury.

Half the country is also paying attention to the invasion of border-jumpers coming in from Mexico with the assistance of the Deep State. They’re also noticing “Joe Biden’s” failure to comply with the recent US Supreme Court decision that he must enforce the standing procedure to return “asylum-seekers” to Mexico to await any decision on their eligibility. Many of these migrants come from the farthest corners of the world, including places full of people who don’t like us or our country. How many of them are coming here to blow things up and shoot American citizens? Nobody knows. The Deep State doesn’t want to know and they don’t want you to find out.

Finally, there is the question of the financial system which, lately, has become the proxy for what used to be the productive US economy, its Potemkin false front. The various plans to spend about $8-trillion in non-existent money on more social experiments such as paying citizens to be idle, would have been enough to sink American money, the US dollar. Now that the world has witnessed the humiliating withdrawal of the US from our 20-year-long war in Afghanistan, the process will accelerate. The world sees that we can’t be depended on in any foreign crisis. They know we no longer produce things of value. What are we good for, exactly? Absurd ventures in gender confusion and race hustling? Drugs and pornography? Is that what stands behind the dollar?

Former (as of yesterday) Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller returned to YouTube yesterday. He represents exactly how pissed off that better half of the nation is, the half that refuses to bend over for the Deep State, the half that is looking to run it down and call it to account for attempting to destroy the country six ways to Sunday.

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/jaccuse-governments-worldwide-are-lying-to-you-the-people-to-the-populations-they-purportedly-serve/5750650

The Gene-based “Vaccines” are Killing People. Governments Worldwide Are Lying to You the People, to the Populations They Purportedly Serve

Urgent Open Letter For The Information Of:

All Citizens Of The European Union (EU), The European Economic Area (EEA) And Switzerland

All Citizens Of The United Kingdom Of Great Britain And Northern Ireland (UK)

All Citizens Of The United States Of America (USA)

To:

The European Medicines Agency (EMA)

The Medicines And Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA)

The United States Food And Drug Administration (FDA)

The Centers For Disease Control And Prevention (CDC)

From:

Doctors For Covid Ethics (D4CE)

21 July 2021

Dear Sirs/Mesdames,

1. Official sources, namely EudraVigilance (EU, EEA, Switzerland), MHRA (UK) and VAERS (USA), have now recorded many more deaths and injuries from the COVID-!9 “vaccine” roll-out than from all previous vaccines combined since records began.

Below are the latest data as at 30 August 2021 (the earlier data appear in the Appendix below):

EU/EEA/Switzerland to 28 August 2021 – 23,252 Covid-19 injection related deaths and 2,166,285 injuries, per EudraVigilance Database.

.

UK to 18 August 2021 – 1,609 Covid-19 injection related deaths and 1,165,636 injuries, per MHRA Yellow Card Scheme.

USA to 20 August 2021 – 13,627 Covid-19 injection related deathsand 2,932,001 injuries, per VAERS database.

TOTAL for EU/UK/USA – 38,488 Covid-19 injection related deaths and 6,263,922 injuries reported as at 30 August 2021.

Nota Bene:

It is important to be aware that the official figures above (reported to the health authorities) are but a small percentage (1 to 10%) of the actual figures.

Furthermore, people continue to die (and suffer injury) from the injections with every day that passes.

Please bear in mind, therefore, that the official figures are higher at the time of writing (30 August 2021) than on the cut-off dates shown above i.e. 28 August 2021 (EU/EEA/Switzerland), 18 August 2021 (UK), 20 August 2021 (USA).

This catastrophic number of injection related deaths has NOT been reported by the mainstream media, despite the official figures above being publicly available.

2. The signal of harm is now indisputably overwhelming, and, in line with universally accepted ethical standards for clinical trials, Doctors for Covid Ethics demands that the COVID-19 “vaccination” programme be halted immediately worldwide.

3. Continuation of the programme, in the full knowledge of ongoing serious harm and death to both adults and children, constitutes Crimes Against Humanity/Genocide, for which those found to be responsible or complicit will ultimately be held personally liable.

IMPORTANT MESSAGE TO THE PEOPLE:

1. Governments worldwide are lying to you the people, to the populations they purportedly serve.

2. The figures above demonstrate that the gene-based vaccines are deadly.

....

https://www.globalresearch.ca/3-mass-trauma-events-used-destroy-america-jfk-murder-911-covid-19-genocide/5754326

Three Mass Trauma Events Used to Destroy America: JFK Murder, 9/11 and COVID-19 Genocide

The use of the Hegelian Dialectic of problem, reaction, solution (otherwise known as thesis, antithesis, synthesis) has served the ruling elite as its formulaic playbook for nonstop violence, death, global destabilization, and deepening human enslavement through nonstop perpetuation of false flags as the cabal answer to every perceived, heavily promoted global problem, and the covert, illegally engineered disaster through bankers’ wars, state-sponsored terrorism, economic downturns, assassinations and overthrow coups, right up to today’s promoted viral pandemic as the projected danger and threat posing as its causative reaction to the bogusly identified problem.

The elite’s artificially created reaction rolled out in cahoots with the Mockingbird CIA-controlled press, always saturating media’s staged airwaves with singularly defined false narratives, is extended over a concentrated period of time in order to adequately sell the demonized enemy lurking behind every tragic false flag attack.

If the lie gets robotically repeated often enough, the public will robotically believe almost anything. Former CIA director William Casey once smugly stated:

We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.

This embedded reality is always then used to justify the proposed crime cabal solution that often involves launching another empire war or nefarious authoritarian intervention, stealthily conceding yet more freedom and autonomy slipping away from the sovereign citizenry to the increasingly centralized power and control, invariably delivering draconian measures in the name of “security” that incrementally lead to full-blown fascist totalitarian dictatorship, or the globalist agenda of a cashless, digitalized, godless society living as slaves under the dystopian nightmare of one world government tyranny.

The proposed solution invariably involves defeating the next highly propagandized, demonized bogeyman created enemy that’s used to justify more war, more terrorism, more regime change, more genocide, more assassination, more destabilization, more financial recession/depressions, more pandemic lockdowns, mandated masks and vaccine passports and never-ending unconstitutional infringements on our civil liberties and rights. It will never end until We the People en masse find the collective courage to civilly disobey.

The classic case in point is the widespread private gun ownership in America, despite being a Second Amendment right, as the identified radical left’s problem, next comes the staging of an unending series of false flag mass shooting events as the reaction, eventually gaining enough pressure to pass gun control legislation that ultimately leads to gun confiscation as another “final” solution. I was asked to contribute a chapter to Kevin Barrett’s edited 2016 Orlando False Flag: Clash of Histories, breaking down the staged nightclub shooting utilizing the filtered lens of the Hegelian Dialectic.

The standard Hegelian Dialectical formula, constantly interwoven with the elite’s divide and conquer strategy, keeps the masses powerless and blindly ignorant, and its incessant application recycled ad nauseam as the one-two sucker punch against humanity.

This matrix control formula has been on overdrive bombardment, subversively drilled into the public psyche ever since the first of three modern mass traumas were laid upon American society – the 1963 JFK assassination. Two years before his murder, Kennedy warned US citizens of the shadow Deep State cabal, lurking in subterfuge, accurately depicting his own future assassins plotting his downfall.

Kennedy was wisely resolute in avoiding a catastrophic war in Southeast Asia, expressed his resolve “to splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds,” and moved to drastically undercut the Federal Reserve’s power and control, returning the function of America’s money supply and printed paper currency back over to the Treasury Department, rather than the Rothschild et al central banking monopoly. Had our president lived, the world undoubtedly would have been far better off. The problem of losing one of America’s greatest leaders has lasting negative repercussions still felt today.

The inside hit jobs on JFK, his brother Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr, all less than five years apart, in one fell swoop eliminated America’s most dynamically gifted modern leaders, posing the a serious threat and impediment to the power hungry crime cabal that only grew more brazenly deadly and impugn in its unstoppable addiction for limitless power and control.

Their successful cover-ups only emboldened ruthless, lawless cabal mafia gangsters.

All these tragic losses cut deep wounds of grief and pain into our nation’s psyche. This potent concentration of violence on America’s best and brightest created an enormous problem, proving that powerful, behind the scenes murderers were free to repeatedly get away with silencing America’s most talented moral leadership.

The dialectic reaction of profound loss and grief of our cut down heroes plummeted the United States into years of political, social and economic upheaval, a growing, tragically senseless and increasingly unpopular Vietnam War deeply dividing the country, while youth’s counterculture rebellion and women’s liberation brought radical change in gender roles.

The social engineering in a cultural shift, covertly funded and influenced by the CIA, including CIA control over the mass media.

The era of the late 1960s and 1970s sparked the sexual revolution and mass consumption of drugs. The defiant disenchantment and disillusionment experienced by younger generations, and the public rejection of conservative moral values and mores, created increasing divisiveness and strain of a major generation gap between the young and not-so-young, the embattled civil rights struggle including race riots, acute divide and conquer polarization was largely orchestrated by the elite ruling class. Meanwhile, the violent breakdown of the cohesive nuclear family unit as the social bedrock institution no longer provided youth with a sense of belonging and fundamental security. Communes and alternative lifestyles were the order of the day.

A significant rise in the divorce rates, single parent families and a widening gap between the rich and poor were also unfolding.

The tumultuous sixties and seventies were characterized by radical change, strife and instability. Much of these socioeconomic developments were exacerbated, if not created and triggered by the same Deep State crime cabal players that killed America’s shining lights that no doubt would have helped navigate and mitigate America’s passage through the storm, reducing the level of violence and destruction caused by malevolent forces in power, all the while not-so-hidden in plain sight.

These couple erratic decades of radical sociological shifts and instability might be considered in part linked to a causal reaction to America’s unresolved deep sense of loss, adrift misdirection and malaise. Other than glimpses of Trump populism, every president since JFK has served the ruling elite as a mere puppet, while during the ensuing decades the government has increasingly morphed into a full-blown oligarchy, a far cry from the constitutional republic the founding fathers had ingeniously created.

The power structure’s solution to all this turmoil and colossal change as a reaction to the problem of America’s loss of slain leadership was the 1980s globalization, neoliberalism and consolidation of elitist power and political and economic control. It’s been ongoing ever since reaching a crescendo with the elite’s overplayed despotic hand of a fake virus and biowarfare genocide now in process.

The social and political tumult typified by the radical hippie movement protesting against the war and the radical Black Panthers as well as the American Indian Movement (AIM), rebelling against historical and institutional racism as a reaction to loss of representative leadership and gross inequities was also met by the establishment’s heavy-handed solution – engaging in subversive infiltration, covert surveillance, illegal harassment and even murder by the FBI’s COINTELPRO program (short for counterintelligence program).

Malcolm X at Wayne State University in 1963

This was the early manifestation of usurping targeted individuals’ and groups’ rights of privacy, freedom and civil liberties guaranteed on paper by the US Constitution’s First Amendment.