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https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2021/06/13/financial-blowout-ahead-lobotomized-economists-clash-on-deck-of-titanic/

Financial Blowout Ahead: Lobotomized Economists Clash on the Deck of the Titanic

As the geniuses running the western financial bubble sometimes called an “economy” continue to double down on their obsession to pump a dead financial system with ever more trillions in stimulus spending, arguments are raging among brainwashed economists living in denial over the oncoming systemic collapse. The thought of engineers on the Titanic passionately arguing over whether they should accelerate or decelerate the speed of the boat whose hull has long been torn to shreds by an iceberg comes to mind.

On one side of the debate, figures like U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell champion an emerging new wave of high interests as “a plus for society’s point of view” in order to counteract the increasing rates of inflation sweeping across every sector of the economy. This camp asserts that this spike in interest rates should not be done immediately however, and only begin in 2023, and until then interest rates should be kept at near zero percent.

On the other side of the debate, economists among Germany’s largest bank scream that waiting until 2023 is deadly. Not a second should be lost before increasing interest rates now in order to stop a “time bomb” from destroying both the USA and the world. On June 7, Deutsche Bank Chief Economist David Folkerts-Landau wrote passionately that Washington’s decision to wait until 2023 before raising interest rates “could create a significant recession and set off a chain of financial distresses around the world” leading to “a time bomb” waiting to explode… unless interest rates were hiked up to 20% just as they had been done in 1980 by then Fed Chairman Paul Volcker which saw interest rates collapse from 12.5% in 1980 to 3.8% in 1982.

Both sides however, are either completely ignorant or outright liars trying to distract citizens and policy makers from the real systemic nature of the oncoming meltdown that can only be dealt with if certain fundamental facts of recent history are kept in mind.

Why is Inflation going to Skyrocket?

Since a pandemic induced nations to lockdown their economies, rescue packages and unlimited money printing to keep people from literally starving, and banks from collapsing has become a new normal. $24 trillion dollars in COVID related debts have been generated internationally, while U.S. Federal Reserve balance sheets have doubled over the same period to $8 trillion with increasing rates of liquidity injections flushed into the Too Big to Fail banks since September 2019. So far, consumer price inflation has risen by 4.2% in 12 months, but based on the obvious reality of $28 trillion of totally unpayable U.S. debt, sustaining a $1.2 quadrillion derivatives bubble time bomb alongside the breakdown of supply chains and a dysfunctional green infrastructure program pushed by Biden, the runaway threat of inflation and even hyperinflation is firmly (or should be) on everyone’s mind.

Now if Deutsche Bank’s Folkerts-Landau was talking about the insane money printing disassociated from any systemic restructuring of the over-bloated Too Big to Fail zombie banks or serious recovery program, then he should be applauded for raising the spectre of unbounded inflation. His nation did after all have a direct experience with this disastrous policy back in 1923 when hyperinflation tore the German economy to shreds and set the stage for the rise of Nazism shortly thereafter. (1)

Sadly, both Folkerts-Landau and Yellen are instead pushing policies that will not only accelerate hyperinflation a century after Weimar, but usher in a new central bankers’ dictatorship that had only been subverted in 1933 due to the fortuitous intervention of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.

So What Did Volcker Do?

Since economists are told repeatedly that Volcker’s interest rate hikes of 1979-1982 saved the U.S. economy, let’s look at what really happened and why Volcker described his philosophy as a “controlled disintegration”.

While inflation did indeed spread across the USA in the 1970s, it is worth asking: why did this actually happen and did Volcker’s reforms have anything to do with solving that problem? Or did both the problem and its nominal solution drive a singular agenda of controlled destruction of the USA now playing out four decades later?

For one, the shift away from industrial long term development with the 1971 floating of the U.S. dollar off of the gold reserve standard went a long way to turning a once-forward thinking productive, manufacturing-driven economy into a consumer cult, post-industrial waste. This “post industrial” age was characterized by outsourced industries relying ever more on increased rates of imports of things the USA once made for itself. A FIRE economy (of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate speculation) increasingly took over the once powerful manufacturing sector.

This detachment of the “valuation” of the dollar from all physical measurable standards went a long way to killing the buying power and raising inflation as monetary circulation increased ever more by speculation on oil, currencies or other goods that often had no connection with reality. Investment rates into cutting edge science both in the atomic realm of fusion and the macro realm of space exploration were cut off drastically (see graphs) as general vital infrastructure maintenance and improvement collapsed drastically across all OECD nations trapped in the “new post-industrial normal”.

Non-military related science R & D also saw a collapse during this period from 2.5% of GDP in 1971 to a mere 0.4% of GDP in 2020

Deregulation and market liberalization castrated the role of the sovereign nation state ever more from 1971 onward, as “laissez faire” policies dominated a once-protectionist landscape. Rather than continuing the successful practice of “parity pricing” which defined the real growth of western nations during the 25 post-WW2 years, the markets run by speculators looking only towards maximizing profit defined the prices of goods.

Last but not least, oil price increases of 400% during the 1973 OPEC crisis is admitted to have played a big role driving the 1973-79 inflation, but as researcher William Engdahl demonstrated in his 1992 Century of Oil, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had more of a role in manufacturing this crisis from scratch by keeping hundreds of tankers replete with petrol from being unloaded in the USA and facilitating the 400% increase with the assistance of several high level oil ministers in the Middle East beholden to Kissinger. In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s former OPEC minister at the time corroborated Engdahl’s research stating:

“I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil. The oil companies were in in real trouble at that time, they had borrowed a lot of money and they needed a high oil price to save them.”

Putting the Trilateral Commission into Perspective

This shift of the U.S. economy from its former role as an industrial producer economy to a consumer cult of speculation and monetarism was accompanied by a broader international shift then being orchestrated by a cabal of misanthropic technocrats managing an organization known as the Trilateral Commission founded in 1973 by Chase Manhattan President David Rockefeller III and a sociopathic grand strategist named Zbigniew Brzsinski.

The aim of the Trilateral Commission was to destroy the sovereign manufacturing base of both the USA and international developing sector alike.

For anyone who might consider this paranoid “conspiracy theorizing”, it is useful to be reminded that among the highest echelons of the U.S. executive branch under President Carter included members such as Brzezinski, Walter Mondale (Vice President), Harold Brown (Defense Secretary), Cyrus Vance (Secretary of State), Michael Blumenthal (Treasury Secretary), James Schlesinger (Energy Czar) and Paul Volcker himself as Fed Chair. Henry Kissinger was also a leading member of this group.

Among the many goals of the Trilateral Commission laid out Brzezinski in his 1970 Manifesto “Between Two Ages” was the need to drive the transition of society towards what Brzezinski referred to as the “technetronic era” saying:

“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

During a 1975 Trilateral Commission study called Crisis in Democracy, overseen by Zbigniew, Clash of Civilizations ideologue Samuel Huntington wrote: “we have come to recognize that there are potential desirable limits to economic growth. There are also potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of democracy… a government which lack authority will have little ability to impose on its people the sacrifices that will be necessary”.

So what sort of sacrifices did these Trilateral Commission technocrats think necessary in a healthy society liberated from its foolish belief in scientific and technological progress that animated the policy outlook of such rifraf as Franklin Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, Charles De Gaulle or Bobby Kennedy?

This is where Volcker steps in.

The Meaning of ‘Controlled Disintegration’

In 1978, faced with unbounded inflation, Paul Volcker spoke at a conference at Warwick University London stating that “a controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate object in the 1980s”.

Upon ascending to the chair of the Fed a year later, he wasted no time in applying this program. Not only did he render available credit impossible for many small and medium enterprises by raising interest rates to 20%, Volcker also ensured that third world nations then being sucked back into a neocolonial debt slavery under the IMF and World Bank economic hitmen, would be sucked into ever greater rates of unpayable debts as a new form of slavery. Between 1979-1982, third world debt skyrocketed from 40-70% across the board leading to a major debt crisis.

During this period U.S. agricultural output collapsed, metal cutting machine tools fell by 45%, automobile production fell by 44.3% and steel production fell by 49.4% as bankruptcies skyrocketed leaving only mega-corporations strong enough to pay the draconian rates while absorbing small bankrupted companies and farms like a modern day Borg consuming ever greater rates of cheap labor and cheap resources from poor nations.

To understand how these countries remained poor and exploitable, one need only visit the Malthusian State Department/CIA Report authored by Henry Kissinger in 1974 called NSSM-200 that called for a total depopulation program targeting 14 poor nations then desirous of industrial growth. Those targeted included India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. Kissinger’s logic was simple: If these nations develop, their populations will grow. If their populations grow they will use their resources. BUT since it is in the strategic interests of the USA to use those resources, these nations must be kept down.

Nationalist leaders among those target nations who had a different idea were targeted for assassination or regime change throughout the 1980s.

Back in the USA, Paul Volcker additionally took aim at commercial banks by forcing vast increases in reserve requirements making lending additionally difficult (although speculation in investment banks were facilitated with the Garn-St. Germaine Act of 1982). This act and accompanying financial de-regulation during this period of “Reaganomics” led the way to the new age of universal banking beginning with Thatcher’s Big Bang in 1986, the end of Canada’s Four Pillars that same year and finally the killing of Glass-Steagall in 1999. The dream of social Darwinists of an unregulated world of each against all where only the strongest and fittest and most sociopathic survive was now real. In the Soviet Union, this process of nation stripping and deregulation that took decades to wreck havoc on western economies was accelerated in the space of a decade of shock therapy. In China, where agents of Soros and the CIA like Zhao Ziyang (Prime Minister and CCP General Secretary from 1987-89) attempted to impose liberalizing reforms like a Chinese Gorbachev, the rape was luckily stopped before a Russian model could be imposed.

With Glass-Steagall out of the way, commercial and investment banks could unite to form “the ultimate, all-powerful, many-headed financial conglomerate” as outlined by Lord Jacob Rothschild in 1983 (2).

In 2001, as Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Islamicist monstrosity created to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan had been incubated throughout the 1990s, a new program of never-ending wars in the Middle East was launched. While the Middle East was turned inside out under a new age of war, the financial services sector avoided several near blowouts in 1997, 1998 and 2000 (with the collapse of the dot com/Y2K bubble). This was done by deregulating over-the-counter derivatives which turned a $70 trillion time bomb (in 2001) into a $650 trillion time bomb in 2008 when the housing market collapsed.

While opportunities then existed to impose Glass-Steagall and break up the banks as had been done earlier by FDR in 1933, hyperinflationary money printed was chosen instead resulting in another 12 years of insanity as the bubble continued to expand and the physical economic productive base continued to atrophy.

Today, we sit on not one bubble concentrated in housing prices, or oil, or currencies, but rather a multitude of bubbles in literally everything from commodities, bitcoin, housing, commercial real estate, bundled student debts, automotive loans, and the over-valued U.S. currency itself.

The COVID Pandemic did not “cause” the current systemic crisis as many fools have parroted for over a year, but has merely served as cover to obscure the real systemic causes of the long-awaited collapse and accelerate the controlled disintegration of the system as the world is prepared to transition into a “new technetronic age” which has come to be dubbed a “Great Reset” or “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

We are told by the likes of Klaus Schwab, or World Economic Forum trustees Mark Carney, Christine Lagarde, and Chrystia Freeland that the age of free market capitalism which reined from 1971-2020 has come to an end, and that a new epoch of “green finance” under a decarbonizing world is upon us. Under this new world order of “stakeholder capitalism” citizens will learn to own nothing and be happy, while polluting companies who commit climate sins will be choked of all credit.

As former Bank of England head Mark Carney recently wrote of the new age of “net zero” in his new book Values Building a Better World for All, (which many of recognized as a precursor to his replacement for Canada’s Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister):

“It could be generations before the gains of the fourth industrial revolution are widely shared. In the interim, there could be a long period of technological unemployment sharply rising inequalities and intensifying social unrest”.

Klaus Schwab has publicly fantasized of this new age of human-machine merging of microchipped brains interfacing with the global net, and Tony Blair has giddily said that “vaccination is, in the end, going to be your route to liberty”.

So, while that story might sound a tad bleak, there remains one tiny obstacle to the successful implementation of this anti-human program.

This obstacle is located in the Greater Eurasian Partnership led by Russia and China and joined by 135 nations of the world that have signed onto the Belt and Road Initiative. These are nations who would rather have a multipolar future vectored around large scale industrial growth than be sacrificed on the alter of Gaia by a technocratic neo-Malthusian priesthood. This multipolar paradigm operates under a financial and geopolitical philosophy at total odds with the closed, entropic obsession of the forces associated with Kissinger, Blair, Carney or Schwab, and that is a very good thing not only for the Eurasian world, but for nationalist forces within the west as well.

....

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/26/ufo-report-provides-no-new-information-but-plenty-of-fodder-for-cold-warrior-policymakers/

UFO Report Provides No New Information But Plenty Of Fodder For Cold Warrior Policymakers  

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has released its hotly anticipated UFO report, which at nine pages in length with no new information is about as spectacular a letdown for UFO enthusiasts as you could possibly get. It does however contain multiple lines which will likely be useful for cold warrior policymakers going forward, just as we forecast earlier.

In summary:

• The ODNI says there do appear to be unidentified objects in US airspace behaving in ways the government can’t yet explain.
• No direct mention is made of the possibility that these objects could be extraterrestrial in origin.
• Direct mention is made of the possibility that UFOs could be highly advanced Russian or Chinese technology.
• UFOs “pose a hazard to safety of flight” and could be a national security threat.

Those last two points are the only ones which US policymakers of any significance are going to pay attention to.

“UAP [Unidentified Aerial Phenomena] clearly pose a safety of flight issue and may pose a challenge to U.S. national security,” the report says. “Safety concerns primarily center on aviators contending with an increasingly cluttered air domain. UAP would also represent a national security challenge if they are foreign adversary collection platforms or provide evidence a potential adversary has developed either a breakthrough or disruptive technology.”

“UAP pose a hazard to safety of flight and could pose a broader danger if some instances represent sophisticated collection against U.S. military activities by a foreign government or demonstrate a breakthrough aerospace technology by a potential adversary,” the report adds.

“Some UAP may be technologies deployed by China, Russia, another nation, or a non-governmental entity,” it also says.

While the authors of the report also say they “currently lack data to indicate any UAP are part of a foreign collection program or indicative of a major technological advancement by a potential adversary,” the fact that Russia or China magically leapfrogging US technology by centuries seventy years ago has been validated as a possibility by the report is a gift to cold warriors eager to ramp up aggressions and inflame a high-budget arms race against those nations.

Among those cold warriors is Senator Marco Rubio, one of the handful of individuals behind this strange new UFO narrative’s entry into mainstream attention. Rubio released the following statement shortly before the report was published:

“For years, the men and women we trust to defend our country reported encounters with unidentified aircraft that had superior capabilities, and for years their concerns were often ignored and ridiculed. This report is an important first step in cataloging these incidents, but it is just a first step. The Defense Department and Intelligence Community have a lot of work to do before we can actually understand whether these aerial threats present a serious national security concern.”

As I’ve been saying repeatedly, the odds of this new UFO narrative entering mainstream consciousness courtesy of the Pentagon, military/intelligence operatives, and corrupt warmongering politicians at the same moment the US begins implementing a new cold war against Russia and China is far too convenient for mere coincidence to be a likely explanation. We can expect to see the hawkish agendas of warmongers like Marco Rubio further advanced by this new UFO narrative going forward.

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https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune21/social-order6-21.html

America's Social Order is Unraveling

What kind of nation boasts a record-high stock market and an unraveling social order? Answer: a failed nation, a nation that has substituted artifice for realism for far too long, a nation that now depends on illusory phantoms of capital, prosperity and democracy to prop up a crumbling facade of "wealth" that the populace now understands is largely in the hands of a few families and corporations, most of which pay little to support the citizenry they dominate politically and financially.

The social order sounds abstract, but it is all too real. The social order has two primary components: social cohesion, the glue of common purpose and shared sacrifice binding the social order, and the social contract, the implicit contract between the ruling elite, the state (government) and commoners (the middle class, the working poor and state dependents) that their labor, taxes and sacrifices will nourish a society with a level playing field, broad-based opportunity and security.

America's social cohesion has been lost, ground under the heel of soaring inequality, a two-tiered economic/political order, systemic unfairness and the elite's divide-and-conquer manipulation of the political and cultural orders.

Historian Peter Turchin characterized this social unraveling as disintegrative: people no longer find reasons to cooperate and share sacrifices to work towards a common national purpose. Rather, they find a multitude of reasons to offload sacrifices onto others, hoard their own wealth and seek to expand their power by accelerating the disintegrative forces.

There is no debate about the collapse of America's social contract, there are only varying levels of self-serving denial. Commoners have awakened to the emptiness of the conventional promise to get a college degree, work hard and you'll be rewarded with security and prosperity. Huge swaths of America are a ransacked, decaying shell of a society reminiscent of developing nations suffering under the jackboot of kleptocrats.

America's fast-expanding class of billionaires are doing their best to mimic the clueless French nobility just before France's convulsive revolution in 1789: America's billionaires bleat that they should pay more taxes while their lobbying bulldozes gigantic loopholes in the tax code, enabling Apple and other global giants to escape U.S. taxes.

America's billionaires are busy building $500 million private yachts and private spaceships while proclaiming their globally distributed sweatshops are raising all boats in a tide of money conjured out of thin air by the billionaires' central bankers.

America's ruling elite has rewritten the social contract to benefit itself at the expense of the bottom 99.9%. Studies have confirmed that the bottom 99.9% hold virtually no political power, and the bottom 90% collect a pitiful 3% of all income generated by capital and hold an inconsequentially thin slice of the nation's wealth.

Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens

Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018
$50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.

Monopoly Versus Democracy: How to End a Gilded Age
Ten percent of Americans now control 97 percent of all capital income in the country. Nearly half of the new income generated since the global financial crisis of 2008 has gone to the wealthiest one percent of U.S. citizens. The richest three Americans collectively have more wealth than the poorest 160 million Americans.

As I pointed out in Is a Cultural Revolution Brewing in America? (4/9/21), actions have consequences and cultural revolutions result from the suppression of legitimate political expression and the failure of the regime to meet its lofty idealistic goals.

When there is no relief valve in a collapsing social order, the explosive pressure is eventually released in a Cultural Revolution that unleashes all the bottled-up frustrations on elites. These frustrations have no outlet politically because they're threatening to the status quo and therefore suppressed at every turn.

Put another way, if the pendulum is pushed to an extreme of exploitation, suppression and inequality, when it's released, it will reach an equivalent extreme (minus a bit of friction) at the opposite end. That could be an unexpected but entirely foreseeable Cultural Revolution.

Those who claim that can't happen in America are safely outside the pressure cooker, protected by a delusional confidence that since I'm doing great, everyone is doing great. Since real political agency is no longer allowed, the pressure will find release outside the political system. The lobbyists will still be haunting the hallways of governance, but no one will care, for The falcon will no longer hear the falconer.

The unraveling of America's social order is accelerating, and denial will not save us from the consequences of the plundering of the social contract.

I've written a number of books on these topics over the years; free sample chapters can be found on My Books:

Inequality and the Collapse of Privilege

Will You Be Richer or Poorer?

Pathfinding Our Destiny

Resistance, Revolution, Liberation

Money and Work Unchained

A Hacker's Teleology: Sharing the Wealth of Our Shrinking Planet 

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https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2021/06/23/rules-based-international-order-means-washington-based-international-order/

‘Rules-Based International Order’ Means Washington-Based International Order

The US government has shut down multiple news media websites based in the Middle East, including Iran’s state-owned Press TV, and al-Masirah TV which is owned by the Houthi group Ansarullah in Yemen. The Department of Justice said on Tuesday it had seized 36 Iranian-linked websites, claiming without evidence that they were associated with “either disinformation activities or violent organizations” and were shut down for a violation of US sanctions.

This would be the same US government that is imprisoning Julian Assange for journalism which exposed US war crimes, the same US government which paid for the weapons used to destroy more than 20 Palestinian media outlets in Gaza last month, the same US government whose unipolar domination of the planet is made possible by the journalism-destroying propaganda of the media-owning plutocratic class in alliance with sociopathic government agencies.

This would also be the same US government which constantly pays lip service to the need to protect the freedom of the press, as part of the “rules-based international order” it purports to uphold in the world.

The Biden administration has been bleating “rules-based order” so frequently and with such obvious meaninglessness that even The New York Times voiced some criticism of the way that vapid, idiotic phrase is being used instead of the well-defined term “international law”. As Medea Benjamin and Nicolas JS Davies wrote for Salon last month:

For Blinken, the concept of a “rules-based order” seems to serve mainly as a cudgel with which to attack China and Russia. At a May 7 UN Security Council meeting, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov suggested that instead of accepting the already existing rules of international law, the United States and its allies are trying to come up with “other rules developed in closed, non-inclusive formats, and then imposed on everyone else.”

Today, far from being a leader of the international rules-based system, the United States is an outlier. It has failed to sign or ratify about 50 important and widely accepted multilateral treaties on everything from children’s rights to arms control. Its unilateral sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Venezuela and other countries are themselves violations of international law, and the new Biden administration has shamefully failed to lift these illegal sanctions, ignoring UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ request to suspend such unilateral coercive measures during the pandemic.

Indeed, US government officials babble endlessly about “rules”, and the “rules” are literally always tools used for the benefit of the US government, and the US government literally always flouts those “rules” exponentially worse than any other government on earth.

What the phrase “rules-based order” actually means is Washington-based order. It means a world order imposed by the US government and its lackey states on pain of devastation and death, which exists solely to keep the US at the head of a unipolar empire. It means do as I say, not as I do. It means rules for thee but not for me. It means we decide what happens based on what suits our interests.

If you peel away all the narrative spin and outward politeness, the US empire just looks like any other tyrannical force that has ever existed throughout human history, except it kills a lot more people than most of the others. In the old days the thugs with the most effective killing force would dominate everyone else using terror, wearing frightening battle costumes adorned with the body parts of their enemies. Nowadays they still dominate everyone else using terror, except they do it while wearing suits, and while waxing self-righteously about the “rules-based international order”. And they are much better at killing.

There is no other government on earth that is less qualified to impose any “order” upon the world. This is the only government on earth which has killed millions of people and displaced tens of millions just since the turn of this century, the only government on earth that is circling the planet with hundreds of military bases and working to destroy any nation which disobeys its dictates. Yemen alone completely delegitimizes any claim the US may have had to be the arbiter of “order” in the world, to say nothing of Iraq, Vietnam, Libya and all the other innumerable atrocities that this monstrous regime has inflicted upon our species.

The sooner humanity can extract the parasite that is the US empire from its skin, the better off the whole world will be.

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https://stephenlendman.org/2021/06/will-toxic-covid-jabs-be-mandated-in-the-us-and-west/

Will Toxic Covid Jabs Be Mandated in the US and West?

Toxic covid jabs are designed to destroy health, shorten lifespans, and kill maximum numbers of people worldwide.

Their widespread use is all about a diabolical depopulation scheme — planned genocide on an unparalleled scale.

If mass-jabbing for seasonal flu-renamed covid is mandated ahead in the US, West, or elsewhere, the ruling will breach the Nuremberg Code that requires voluntary consent on all things related to health.

US federal law prohibits mandated use of vaccines and other drugs not approved by the FDA.

Experimental, fast-tracked, inadequately tested, toxic covid mRNA drugs and vaccines were given emergency use authorization alone after 6 – 8 months of development when no emergency exists.

The same applies to PCR tests not designed to detect viral infections, face masks that don’t protect and risk respiratory harm from longterm use, and social distancing that destroys normal interactions among Americans in breach of the First Amendment’s right of assembly — while serving no public health purpose.

All of the above also breach the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and other international laws.

If covid mass-jabbing is mandated in the US, West and/or elsewhere, it’ll be an unparalleled breach of the right to life, liberty, as well as other essential human and civil rights.

Yet time and again, politicians, bureaucrats and judges ignore international law or twist it to serve their interests.

In flagrant breach of the Nuremberg Cods, other international law and US federal law, Texas US District Court Judge Lynn Hughes acted this way by dismissing a lawsuit by over 100 Houston Methodist Hospital (HMH) staff members.

They were unlawfully suspended for refusing to self-inflict harm from toxic covid jabs as a condition of employment.

Hughes ruled that Texas law — overridden by federal and international law he failed to explain — only protects employees from sacking if asked to commit criminality, adding:

“Receiving a (covid jab) is not an illegal act (sic).”

Plaintiff Jennifer Bridges et al’s claim that covid jabs are “experimental and dangerous (is) false (sic) and…irrelevant (sic).”

She and they “can freely choose to accept or refuse (covid jabs).” 

If refuse, they “need to work somewhere else.” 

“If a worker refuses an assignment, changed office, earlier start time, or other directive, he (or she) may be properly fired.” 

“Every employment includes limits on the worker’s behavior in exchange for remuneration. That is all part of the bargain (sic).”

Ignored by Hughes is that employers have no legal right to mandate that their staff self-inflict harm.

Covid jabs harm health. Mandating their use breaches international and US federal law.

Representing Bridges et al, attorney Jared Woodfil vowed to appeal the unlawful ruling against them, adding:

He’s “committed to fighting (the hospital’s) unjust policy.”

“The problem with that line of thinking is that you’re telling (its) employees (that) they are going to be human guinea pigs.”

According to Children’s Health Defense president and general counsel Mary Holland:

“(T)here are grounds for an appeal,” adding:

“(T)he judge has misinterpreted federal law and does not fully understand the true implications of Emergency Use Authorization status.” 

“Because EUA means the product is experimental, you can’t be forced to take it.” 

“No employer can mandate (covid jabs) while (they’re) under EUA.”

HMH CEO Dr. Marc Boom falsely claimed that “employees who refuse to” be jabbed for covid risk harm to patients.

According to Pfizer documents reported by Pandemic News, individuals jabbed with its experimental covid mRNA drug “shed…spike protein particles” through bodily fluids, breath and skin, infecting others around them.

Jon Rapport’s No More Fake News revealed it, saying covid jabbed individuals are “shed(ing) (and spreading) something harmful” from themselves to others, adding:

“(M)any different dangerous and harmful processes can be detonated in the human body…”

“(G)enetic effects (drift) from person to person, whether” covid jabbed or not.

Covid jabbed individuals and others in close contact with them are unwittingly part of a diabolical human experiment that can only end badly for countless millions or billions of people if continues unchecked.

Toxic covid jabs compromise human immunity instead of boosting it as falsely claimed.

Israeli researchers discovered the same thing, saying individuals jabbed with Pfizer’s mRNA covid drug were “disproportionately” more likely to contact the disease compared to their unjabbed counterparts.

What applies to Pfizer’s toxic mRNA drug is true as well for Moderna, J & J, AstraZeneca and Novavax, the latter firm’s vaccine the latest entry into the covid mass-jabbing sweepstakes.

They’re all toxic, unapproved, experimental and destructive of health when taken as direct.

We’ve been consistently and repeatedly scammed by diabolical dark forces and their press agent media to believe that what destroys health is beneficial.

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https://www.globalresearch.ca/international-alert-message-about-covid-19-united-health-professionals/5737680

International Alert Message about COVID-19. United Health Professionals 

The lockdown « a global scientific fraud of unprecedented proportions

We bring to the attention of our readers, this important international statement by health professionals, medical doctors and scientists,  which has been sent to the governments of thirty countries

Below is the complete text which was sent to the governments.

Link to original document: Very Urgent : International Alert message about COVID-19

See here for list of governments to which the letter  was sent.

The text includes quotations from prominent scholars and health professionals

Related Health Professionals Document (pdf version uploaded to GR)

Selected Highlights 

Stay home, save lives » was a pure lie.

Remove the following illegal, non-scientific and non-sanitary measures : lockdown, mandatory face masks for healthy subjects, social distancing of one or two meters.

The lockdown not only killed many people but also destroyed physical and mental health, economy, education and other aspects of life.

The natural history of the virus [the coronavirus] is not influenced by social measures [lockdown, face masks, closure of restaurants, curfew

When the state knows best and violates human rights, we are on a dangerous course.

Exclude your experts and advisers who have links or conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies :

Stop the vaccination campaigns and refuse the scam of the pseudo-health passport which is in reality a politico-commercial project

***

 

We are health professionals of the international collective : United Health Professionals, composed of more than 1,500 members (including professors of medicine, intensive care physicians and infectious disease specialists) from different countries of Europe, Africa, America, Asia and Oceania and, on August 26, 2020, we addressed to governments and citizens of countries around the world an alert message regarding the COVID outbreak.

First, let’s start with the conclusions of the 2010 report of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the management of the H1N1 epidemic : 

« The Parliamentary Assembly is alarmed about the way in which the H1N1 influenza pandemic has been handled, ot only by the World Health Organization (WHO) but also by the competent health authorities at the level of the European Union and at national level. It is particularly troubled by some of the consequences of decisions taken and advice given leading to distortion of priorities of public health services across Europe, waste of large sums of public money and also unjustified scares and fears about health risks…grave shortcomings have been identified regarding the transparency of decision-making processes relating to the pandemic which have generated concerns about the possible influence of the pharmaceutical industry on some of the major decisions….unregulated or secret lobbying may be a danger and can undermine democratic principles and good governance ».

Know that the same mistakes made in the H1N1 epidemic are being repeated today in the COVID epidemic. You are the victims of the biggest health scam of the 21st century regarding the real danger of the virus, the measures to be taken, the figures, the tests and the treatments, and this was done with the same techniques of manipulation used during the epidemic of H1N1 or the Iraq war. Experts, professors of medicine as well as scientific and medical collectives began to alert others of this as early as March 2020.

The countries of the world (except rare cases like : Sweden, Belarus or Tanzania), without thinking, have only imitated and blindly followed others.

This epidemic is amplified, dramatized and instrumentalised by criminals who take advantage of it to achieve economic, political and ideological goals and agendas that are harmful to humanity and we will prove this to you. You must stop this global scam quickly (because it is a serious danger to your people and your country in terms of : health, economy, education, ecology and human rights) by immediately taking the following actions :

1-Lift all restrictions 

Remove the following illegal, non-scientific and non-sanitary measures : lockdown, mandatory face masks for healthy subjects, social distancing of one or two meters. These crazy and stupid measures are heresies invented in 2020 that do not exist in medicine or public health and they are not based on any scientific evidence.

This is not how we manage an outbreak :

– « The world went mad » with coronavirus lockdowns which « fly in the face of what is known about handling virus pandemics » (Dr Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, June 24, 2020).

– « The infection fatality rate seems to be about the same as for influenza, but we have never introduced these drastic measures before, when we had influenza pandemics. And we cannot live with them for years to come » (Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, December 1, 2020).

– « The decision of lockdown as the decision of wearing masks…are not based on scientific data…» (Prof. Didier Raoult, June 24, 2020).

– « The natural history of the virus [the coronavirus] is not influenced by social measures [lockdown, face masks, closure of restaurants, curfew, etc.]…The lockdown did not trigger the decrease in cases…As for the closure of restaurants which had very strict health protocols in place…of course, I have no way of defending it…it has not influenced the epidemic at all…The lockdown has not changed anything…» (Prof. Philippe Parola, December 3, 2020).

– « There is no scientific evidence to support the disastrous two-metre rule. Poor quality research is being used to justify a policy with enormous consequences for us all » (Professors Carl Heneghan and Tom Jefferson, June 19, 2020).

– « Grotesque, absurd and very dangerous measures…a horrible impact on the world economy…self- destruction and collective suicide… » (Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, March 2020. He also sent, at the time, a letter to German Chancellor Angela Merkel).

In addition, these tyrannical measures violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in its articles: 3, 5, 9, 12, 13, 17, 18, 20, 26, 27, 28, 30 and the UNICEF Convention on the Rights of the Child in its articles : 28, 29, 32, 37.

– « When the state knows best and violates human rights, we are on a dangerous course. The pandemic has led to the violation of basic human rights…There has not been the slightest ethical analysis of whether this was justified. It is not» (Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, December 4, 2020).

Forcing non-sick people to wear masks is not only a heresy but it is also harmful to health as well as to ecology and is a form of mistreatment :

– « Dictatorship of masks totally unfounded » (Prof. Christian Perronne, September 22, 2020).

– « The curfew…was used during the German occupation when the militia and the Gestapo went to the houses. And now we’ll have the police making visits to see if there are more than six people at the table ! What is this madness ?! » (Prof. Christian Perronne, October 15, 2020).

– « Every winter in Paris, the ICU beds are totally saturated. We transfer patients…every winter, in normal circumstances » (Prof. Bruno Mégarbane, anesthesiologist and intensive care physician, September 27, 2020)

 « In neither of the 2 waves… all the ICU were not saturated, it is false ! » (Prof. Michaël Peyromaure, January 18, 2021)

2-Open up economy, schools, universities, air transport and hospital units.

3-Exclude your experts and advisers who have links or conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies

The 2010 report of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on the management of the H1N1 epidemic also said :

« The Assembly calls on public health authorities at international, European and national level -and notably WHO-…to ensure that all persons subject to conflicts of interest are excluded from sensitive decision-making processes ».

Countries’ experts who pushed for these totally heretical measures are either followers, ignorant or corrupted by the pharmaceutical industry.

4-Require an international and independent investigation and that those responsible for this scam be tried

On October 1st, 2020, German lawyer Reiner Fuellmich announced that an international network of lawyers will argue the biggest tort case ever :

« The anti-corona measures have caused and continue to cause such devastating damage to the world’s population’s health and economy that the crimes committed by (…) the WHO must be legally qualified as actual crimes against humanity as defined in section 7 of the international criminal code ».

He said also that this must be called « a corona scandal and those responsible for it must be criminally prosecuted and sued for civil damages ». The investigation must focus, among others, on Bruce Aylward (WHO) and Neil Ferguson (ICL).

-On January 10, 2021 : A letter relayed by The Sun and written by lawyers, a member of Parliament, human rights activists and a former US Air Force general was addressed to the FBI and MI-5 along with security services in Canada, Germany and Australia, where the authors say :

« We are writing this letter to request that a federal investigation be commenced and/or expedited regarding the scientific debate on major policy decisions during the COVID-19 crisis. In the course of our work, we have identified issues of a potentially criminal nature and believe this investigation necessary to ensure the interests of the public have been properly represented by those promoting certain pandemic policies ».

The letter call which was « deliberately promulgated…to impoverish the nations who implemented it »

Rare countries like Sweden, Tanzania or Belarus -which can be congratulated- have refused the lockdown and have not blindly followed others and if we apply the reasoning of the lockdown defenders, the outcome must be a massacre or the saturation of their hospital system. Is this the case in these three countries ?

The answer is of course : no. Moreover, on September 15, 2020, The BMJ published an article entitled :

« COVID-19 : How does Belarus have one of the lowest death rates in Europe ? ».

These three countries are living proof of the lockdown scam and since this reality might wake up public opinion and people see that they have been lied to, a corrupt press has been spreading, from the beginning, articles and even fake news, against Sweden and Belarus.

The famous international slogan:

« Stay home, save lives » was a pure lie. On the contrary, the lockdown not only killed many people but also destroyed physical and mental health, economy, education and other aspects of life. For example, the lockdown in the USA has killed thousands of Alzheimer’s patients who have also died far from their families. In the United Kingdom : the lockdown killed 21,000 people.

The effects of the lockdown « have been absolutely deleterious. They did not save the lives they had announced they could be able to save…It is a weapon of mass destruction and we see its health…social…economic effects…which form the real second wave » (Prof. Jean-François Toussaint, September 24, 2020).

– « This country is making a dramatic mistake…What are we going to suggest ? That everyone stay locked up all his life because there are viruses outside ?! You’re all crazy, you’ve become all nuts !…we are setting the planet on fire » (Prof. Didier Raoult, October 27, 2020).

– « It is a big delirium but which is instrumentalised by big pharma and also politicians…It is a fear organized for political and economic reasons » (Prof. Christian Perronne, August 31, 2020).

– « It is just a global scam to make huge profits, bail out the banks and meanwhile ruin the middle classes in the name of an epidemic…made destructive by liberticidal, allegedly health measures » (Dr Nicole Delépine, December 18, 2020).

– « We have medical evidences that this is a scam » (Dr Heiko Schöning, July 2020).

– « Think about these two questions :…Is the coronavirus man-made ?…Have they tried to use this viral disease or this psychosis for their own ends & interests ?» (Alexander Lukashenko, President of Belarus). –

« There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians. It’s outrageous. This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public….it should be known as nothing more than a bad flu season. this is not Ebola. It’s not SARS » (Dr Roger Hodkinson, November 13, 2020).

5-No longer blindly follow the recommendations of the WHO and require that it be totally reformed

An investigation carried out in 2016 (WHO in the clutches of lobbyists) showed an edifying radiography of the WHO ; a weakened structure subject to multiple conflicts of interest. This investigation has shown how private interests dominate public health in the WHO. Another investigation (Trust WHO) also revealed these serious anomalies.

6-Use the recognized measures for the management of epidemics 

Such as recommendations of hand washing, sneeze or cough into the elbow, use a mask but only for patients and healthcare professionals (in specific situations), isolation of the sick, etc. The severity of an epidemic is assessed by the case fatality rate (CFR), among other things. However, the latter is very low (0.03-0.05%) and there is therefore no justification for taking measures that are not only disproportionate but also unscientific.

7-Make the media aware of their responsabilities 

The media must, for example, stop talking about the coronavirus.

8-Remove the requirement for tests

The people who push for mandatory testing are defrauding governments and pursuing only economic goals. Nothing in this coronavirus (which is a benign virus and with a low CFR) justifies it. The flu infects one billion people each year, far more than SARS-CoV-2, spreads faster and has more populations at risk than this coronavirus and yet no test is required for travel. This is why Professor Didier Raoult called « a delirium » the claim that it is a serious illness and said, on August 19, 2020, that « it is not worse than the flu ».

– « The infection fatality rate for this new coronavirus is likely to be in the same ballpark as seasonal influenza » (Prof. John Ioannidis, April 17, 2020).

– « Reassure the large majority of the population that their risk of dying or getting severe disease from COVID-19 is very low » (Prof. John Ioannidis, April 22, 2020).

– « Do you realize ? Today, we are destroying the economy whereas finally the figures are comparable with those we experienced with the flu ! » (Prof. Christian Perronne, October 25, 2020).

9-Stop the vaccination campaigns and refuse the scam of the pseudo-health passport which is in reality a politico-commercial project 

– « We don’t need it [the vaccine] at all…All this is about purely commercial goals » (Prof. Christian Perronne, June 16, 2020).

– « It is an old marketing principle of pharmaceutical companies : if they want to sell their product well, consumers must be afraid and see it as their salvation. So, we create a psychosis so that consumers crack up and rush on the vaccine in question » (Prof. Peter Schönhöfer).

– « As a doctor, I do not hesitate to anticipate the decisions of the government ; we must not only refuse these vaccines [against COVID-19], but we must also denounce and condemn the purely mercantile approach and the abject cynicism which guided their production » (Dr Pierre Cave, August 7, 2020).

– The COVID vaccine is « so, so unnecessary » (Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, December 2, 2020).

– « I have never seen in the history of medicine that we urgently develop vaccines to vaccinate millions, billions of individuals for a virus that no longer kills except people at risk that we can identify, that we can treat…I have never seen a vaccine coming out after 2 months !…it takes years ! » (Prof. Christian Perronne, December 2, 2020).

– « We’re going too fast. If there was an emergency,…if today COVID-19 kills 50% of people, I will say let’s take risks…but here we have a virus that kills 0,05% and we will take all the risks ! I know there are billions behind this…Be carefull, this is very dangerous ! » (Prof. Christian Perronne, December 2, 2020).

To the question : « We do not need a general vaccine for the whole humanity with 0.05% deaths ? », Professor Christian Perronne replied : « It’s obvious ! ».

-In November 30, 2020 : Professor Christian Perronne wrote a letter in which he alerted on the danger of the vaccines based on genetic engineering :

« The people who promote these gene therapies, falsely called “vaccines”, are sorcerer’s apprentices and take…the citizens of the world for guinea pigs ».

-On October 19, 2020, in a correspondence to the journal The Lancet, scientists expressed concerns and warned :

« we are concerned that use of an Ad5 vector for immunisation against severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) could similarly increase the risk of HIV-1 acquisition among men who receive the vaccine ».

-If people accept the COVID-19 vaccine, it will be :

« a mistake because we risk having absolutely unpredictable effects : for example, cancers…We are playing the total sorcerer’s apprentice…Man must not serve as a guinea pig, children must not serve as guinea pigs, it is absolutely unethical. There must not be deaths from vaccines » (Prof. Luc Montagnier, Virologist and Nobel Prize in Medicine, December 17, 2020.

-In Switzerland, a group of 700 doctors and health professionals called on January 15, 2021 for stopping the vaccination campaign

– « I think it’s [the COVID vaccine] downright dangerous. And I warn you, if you go along these lines, you are going to go to your doom » (Prof. Sucharit Bhakdi, December 2, 2020).

-On December 30, 2020 : Réaction 19 (a French association founded by lawyers with nearly 60,000 members) informed, in a press release, that it has filed a complaint concerning the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna “vaccines” for : deliberately endangering the life of others, aggravated deception, abuse of weakness and aggravated extortion.

-Recently, several Members of the European Parliament have alerted the population because they are forbidden to consult the contracts signed with pharmaceutical laboratories. This opacity is a proof that there are compromising things they want to hide. Michèle Rivasi, a Member of the European Parliament, even lodged a complaint5. As a reminder6: in 2009, Pfizer was fined $ 2.3 billion, the largest fine ever imposed by the courts of the United States on a pharmaceutical group. It was found guilty of fraudulent commercial practices.

In 2010, AstraZeneca was fined 520 million euros for recommending unauthorized use of a drug. In 2011, Merck payed a fine of $ 628.36 million to resolve allegations of off-label marketing and false statements about the cardiovascular safety of a drug.

In 2013, a fine of 1.62 billion euros was imposed on Johnson & Johnson to resolve criminal and civil liability arising from allegations relating to the prescription of three drugs including promotion for uses not approved as safe and effective by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and payment of kickbacks to physicians and to the nation’s largest long-term care pharmacy provider.

You must stop this global scam where the politico-economic (even ideological) agendas of criminals are to COVID what the Iraq war was to the attacks of September 11th, 2001 (here’s a reminder of the scam of the Iraq war :

These criminals manipulate the countries of the world and want to make the epidemic last as long as possible to achieve their goals when the COVID epidemic should have been declared over at a certain period of the past year ; indeed, in medicine, the epidemic threshold from which the beginning and the end of an epidemic are declared is between 150 and 200 cases per 100,000 inhabitants. The Tanzanian president is one of the few presidents who understood this because he declared on June 8, 2020 that the COVID epidemic was over in his country.

« The epidemic is over ! » (Professor Yoram Lass, July 2, 2020)7.

In this epidemic, the danger is not the coronavirus but the people who instrumentalise it and who are the real virus to fight.

The virus is completely innocent of what is happening (impoverishment, job losses, suicides, deaths, economic recession, unemployment, etc.) and the real culprits are those who have pushed the world to use these measures and the governments that continue to implement these measures despite alerts and warnings.

« The World Bank has just estimated that the corona pandemic has caused an increase of about 100 million people living in extreme poverty. This is not because of COVID-19. It is because of the draconian measures we have introduced » (Prof. Peter Gøtzsche, December 1, 2020).

The discrepancy and disproportion between the level of dangerousness of the virus and the magnitude of the measures taken (which are moreover totally heretical) are so obvious that it inevitably leads to the conclusion that there are other objectives behind. You have to be really blind or naive not to see it.

With these measures which have nothing to do with medicine or science, governments are not fighting the dangers of the virus but are fighting the basic rights of their people and destroying their health, economy, education, ecology, culture and other aspects of life.

« We have been living a kind of delirium from the start…We live in a world which is crazy :…the conditions that have been taken to fight this disease are conditions from another century…it is not even the level of the Middle Ages ! » (Prof. Didier Raoult, December 7, 2020).

On December 28, 2020, Randy Hillier, a Canadian MP, wrote this message on Twitter along with the hashtags : #We Are Living A Lie and #No More Lockdowns : « The lies and deceptions of Covid are over. How & why so many allowed themselves to be deceived will take years to uncover ».

It is not because the majority of countries are doing the same thing that it means that it is good or that it is the right thing to do. The number is not a criterion for knowing whether or not countries are right to apply these measures. On the contrary, many historical examples show that the majority is often wrong ; Iraq war (rare countries like France did not follow and were right), H1N1 (rare countries like Poland did not follow and were right), World War II, etc.

The charge of conspiracy theories is the response of those who have no arguments and a technique of mass manipulation because all what has been reported in this letter does not consist of theories but of truths and statements made by eminent experts including Nobel laureates for medicine.

This letter will be kept as proof that your government has been alerted. Everything must return immediately to normal and this global hostage-taking must stop because you have known that you have been the victims of the biggest health scam of the 21th century.

Please, don’t make the mistake of underestimating our letter or ignoring it. Here are 2 examples of what happens when a government makes this mistake :

Despite warnings from several experts about the danger of Dengvaxia (dengue vaccine), the Philippine government decided in 2016 to launch a vaccination campaign that ended later in a public scandal. According to the office of the prosecutor Persida Acosta, 500 children died as a result of this vaccine and several thousand are sick.

According to the prosecutor, the responsibilities are shared between the laboratory which sold “a dangerous vaccine” and the government which set up a “massive and indiscriminate” vaccination campaign, in deplorable conditions. This vaccine, however, promised to be a planetary triumph ; in 2015, Sanofi confirmed with great fanfare the marketing of a revolutionary dengue vaccine. It was a world first, the product of twenty years of research and 1,5 billion euros of investment.

Yet from the beginning, voices raised in the scientific community : Doctor Antonio Dans tried to warn about the inconclusive results of the first clinical trials. In the USA, Professor Scott Halstead, a world renowned specialist in the disease, even sent a video broadcasted in the Senate of the country to urge to suspend the vaccination program. The former health minister of the country has been charged in this scandal. « It’s the lure of profit that killed these children », said prosecutor Persida Acosta.

The second example is the scandal of the H1N1 vaccine which was bought by several countries despite alerts from Dr Wolfgang Wodarg, the chairman of the Health Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, who in a motion for a recommendation entitled « Faked Pandemics – a threat for health » said : « In order to promote their patented drugs and vaccines against flu, pharmaceutical companies have influenced scientists and official agencies, responsible for public health standards, to alarm governments worldwide.

They have made them squander tight health care resources for inefficient vaccine strategies and needlessly exposed millions of healthy people to the risk of unknown side-effects of insufficiently tested vaccines ». He was totally right because, later, in Europe alone the vaccine made 1,500 victims of narcolepsy including 80% of children, so much so that on November 24, 2013, the Swedish Minister of Social Affairs, Göran Hägglund, said he was ready to publicly apologize to the victims of the swine flu vaccine.

We cannot tell you everything in this letter, that is why you must consult the following documents very carefully because everything you have been told is detailed and argued there, and because you will discover other things that you do not know and by which you will be even shocked :

For footnotes and references click here

See here for list of countries

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

 One Nation Under Greed: The Profit Incentives Driving the American Police State

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” ― Frédéric Bastiat, French economist

If there is an absolute maxim by which the American government seems to operate, it is that the taxpayer always gets ripped off.

Not only are Americans forced to “spend more on state, municipal, and federal taxes than the annual financial burdens of food, clothing, and housing combined,” but we’re also being played as easy marks by hustlers bearing the imprimatur of the government.

With every new tax, fine, fee and law adopted by our so-called representatives, the yoke around the neck of the average American seems to tighten just a little bit more.

Everywhere you go, everything you do, and every which way you look, we’re getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

The overt and costly signs of the despotism exercised by the increasingly authoritarian regime that passes itself off as the United States government are all around us: warrantless surveillance of Americans’ private phone and email conversations by the FBI, NSA, etc.; SWAT team raids of Americans’ homes; shootings of unarmed citizens by police; harsh punishments meted out to schoolchildren in the name of zero tolerance; drones taking to the skies domestically; endless wars; out-of-control spending; militarized police; roadside strip searches; privatized prisons with a profit incentive for jailing Americans; fusion centers that collect and disseminate data on Americans’ private transactions; and militarized agencies with stockpiles of ammunition, to name some of the most appalling.

Meanwhile, the three branches of government (Executive, Legislative and Judicial) and the agencies under their command—Defense, Commerce, Education, Homeland Security, Justice, Treasury, etc.—have switched their allegiance to the Corporate State with its unassailable pursuit of profit at all costs and by any means possible.

By the time you factor in the financial blowback from the COVID-19 pandemic with its politicized mandates, lockdowns, and payouts, it becomes quickly apparent that we are now ruled by a government consumed with squeezing every last penny out of the population and seemingly unconcerned if essential freedoms are trampled in the process.

As with most things, if you want to know the real motives behind any government program, follow the money trail.

When you dig down far enough, you quickly find that those who profit from Americans being surveilled, fined, scanned, searched, probed, tasered, arrested and imprisoned are none other than the police who arrest them, the courts which try them, the prisons which incarcerate them, and the corporations, which manufacture the weapons, equipment and prisons used by the American police state.

Examples of this legalized, profits-over-people, government-sanctioned extortion abound.

On the roads: Not satisfied with merely padding their budgets by issuing speeding tickets, police departments have turned to asset forfeiture and red light camera schemes as a means of growing their profits. Despite revelations of corruption, collusion and fraud, these money-making scams have been being inflicted on unsuspecting drivers by revenue-hungry municipalities. Now legislators are hoping to get in on the profit sharing by imposing a vehicle miles-traveled tax, which would charge drivers for each mile behind the wheel.

In the prisons: States now have quotas to meet for how many Americans go to jail. Increasing numbers of states have contracted to keep their prisons at 90% to 100% capacity. This profit-driven form of mass punishment has, in turn, given rise to a $70 billion private prison industry that relies on the complicity of state governments to keep the money flowing and their privately run prisons full, “regardless of whether crime was rising or falling.” As Mother Jones reports, “private prison companies have supported and helped write … laws that drive up prison populations. Their livelihoods depend on towns, cities, and states sending more people to prison and keeping them there.” Private prisons are also doling out harsher punishments for infractions by inmates in order to keep them locked up longer in order to “boost profits” at taxpayer expense. All the while, prisoners are being forced to provide cheap labor for private corporations. No wonder the United States has the largest prison population in the world.

In the schools: The security industrial complex with its tracking, spying, and identification devices has set its sights on the schools as “a vast, rich market”—a $20 billion market, no less—just waiting to be conquered. In fact, the public schools have become a microcosm of the total surveillance state which currently dominates America, adopting a host of surveillance technologies, including video cameras, finger and palm scanners, iris scanners, as well as RFID and GPS tracking devices, to keep constant watch over their student bodies. Likewise, the military industrial complex with its military weapons, metal detectors, and weapons of compliance such as tasers has succeeded in transforming the schools—at great taxpayer expense and personal profit—into quasi-prisons. Rounding things out are school truancy laws, which come disguised as well-meaning attempts to resolve attendance issues in the schools but in truth are nothing less than stealth maneuvers aimed at enriching school districts and court systems alike through excessive fines and jail sentences for “unauthorized” absences. Curiously, none of these efforts seem to have succeeded in making the schools any safer.

In the endless wars abroad: Fueled by the profit-driven military industrial complex, the government’s endless wars are wreaking havoc on our communities, our budget and our police forces. 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. 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. War spending is bankrupting America.

In the form of militarized police: The Department of Homeland Security routinely hands out six-figure grants to enable local municipalities to purchase military-style vehicles, as well as a veritable war chest of weaponry, ranging from tactical vests, bomb-disarming robots, assault weapons and combat uniforms. This rise in military equipment purchases funded by the DHS has, according to analysts Andrew Becker and G.W. Schulz, “paralleled an apparent increase in local SWAT teams.” The end result? An explosive growth in the use of SWAT teams for otherwise routine police matters, an increased tendency on the part of police to shoot first and ask questions later, and an overall mindset within police forces that they are at war—and the citizenry are the enemy combatants. Over 80,000 SWAT team raids are conducted on American homes and businesses each year. Moreover, government-funded military-style training drills continue to take place in cities across the country.

In profit-driven schemes such as asset forfeiture: Under the guise of fighting the war on drugs, government agents (usually the police) have been given broad leeway to seize billions of dollars’ worth of private property (money, cars, TVs, etc.) they “suspect” may be connected to criminal activity. Then—and here’s the kicker—whether or not any crime is actually proven to have taken place, the government keeps the citizen’s property, often divvying it up with the local police who did the initial seizure. The police are actually being trained in seminars on how to seize the “goodies” that are on police departments’ wish lists. According to the New York Times, seized monies have been used by police to “pay for sports tickets, office parties, a home security system and a $90,000 sports car.”

Among government contractors: We have been saddled with a government that is outsourcing much of its work to high-paid contractors at great expense to the taxpayer and with no competition, little transparency and dubious savings. According to the Washington Post, “By some estimates, there are twice as many people doing government work under contract than there are government workers.” These open-ended contracts, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, “now account for anywhere between one quarter and one half of all federal service contracting.” Moreover, any attempt to reform the system is “bitterly opposed by federal employee unions, who take it as their mission to prevent good employees from being rewarded and bad employees from being fired.”

By the security industrial complex: We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. In the so-called name of “precrime,” this government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing. This far-reaching surveillance, carried out with the complicity of the Corporate State, has paved the way for an omnipresent, militarized fourth branch of government—the Surveillance State—that came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum. That doesn’t even touch on the government’s bold forays into biometric surveillance as a means of identifying and tracking the American people from birth to death.

By a government addicted to power: It’s a given that you can always count on the government to take advantage of a crisis, legitimate or manufactured. Emboldened by the citizenry’s inattention and willingness to tolerate its abuses, the government has weaponized one national crisis after another in order to expand its powers. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands. Now that the government has gotten a taste for flexing its police state powers by way of a bevy of COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, restrictions, contact tracing programs, heightened surveillance, censorship, overcriminalization, etc., “we the people” may well find ourselves burdened with a Nanny State inclined to use its draconian pandemic powers to protect us from ourselves.

These injustices, petty tyrannies and overt acts of hostility are being carried out in the name of the national good—against the interests of individuals, society and ultimately our freedoms—by an elite class of government officials working in partnership with megacorporations that are largely insulated from the ill effects of their actions.

This perverse mixture of government authoritarianism and corporate profits has increased the reach of the state into our private lives while also adding a profit motive into the mix. And, as always, it’s we the people, we the taxpayers, we the gullible voters who keep getting taken for a ride by politicians eager to promise us the world on a plate.

This is a far cry from how a representative government is supposed to operate.

Indeed, it has been a long time since we could claim to be the masters of our own lives. Rather, we are now the subjects of a militarized, corporate empire in which the vast majority of the citizenry work their hands to the bone for the benefit of a privileged few

Adding injury to the ongoing insult of having our tax dollars misused and our so-called representatives bought and paid for by the moneyed elite, the government then turns around and uses the money we earn with our blood, sweat and tears to target, imprison and entrap us, in the form of militarized police, surveillance cameras, private prisons, license plate readers, drones, and cell phone tracking technology.

All of those nefarious deeds by government officials that you hear about every day: those are your tax dollars at work.

It’s your money that allows for government agents to spy on your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and your movements. It’s your money that allows out-of-control police officers to burst into innocent people’s homes, or probe and strip search motorists on the side of the road. And it’s your money that leads to Americans across the country being prosecuted for innocuous activities such as growing vegetable gardens in their front yards or daring to speak their truth to their elected officials.

Just remember the next time you see a news story that makes your blood boil, whether it’s a police officer arresting someone for filming them in public, or a child being kicked out of school for attending a virtual class while playing with a toy gun, remember that it is your tax dollars that are paying for these injustices.

There was a time in our history when our forebears said “enough is enough” and stopped paying their taxes to what they considered an illegitimate government. They stood their ground and refused to support a system that was slowly choking out any attempts at self-governance, and which refused to be held accountable for its crimes against the people.

Their resistance sowed the seeds for the revolution that would follow.

Unfortunately, in the 200-plus years since we established our own government, we’ve let bankers, turncoats and number-crunching bureaucrats muddy the waters and pilfer the accounts to such an extent that we’re back where we started.

Once again, we’ve got a despotic regime with an imperial ruler doing as they please.

Once again, we’ve got a judicial system insisting we have no rights under a government which demands that the people march in lockstep with its dictates.

And once again, we’ve got to decide whether we’ll keep marching or break stride and make a turn toward freedom.

But what if we didn’t just pull out our pocketbooks and pony up to the federal government’s outrageous demands for more money?

What if we didn’t just dutifully line up to drop our hard-earned dollars into the collection bucket, no questions asked about how it will be spent?

What if, instead of quietly sending in our checks, hoping vainly for some meager return, we did a little calculating of our own and started deducting from our taxes those programs that we refuse to support?

As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, if the government and its emissaries can just take from you what they want, when they want, and then use it however they want, you can’t claim to be anything more than a serf in a land they think of as theirs.

This is not freedom, America.

....

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjune21/always-ends6-21.html

It Always Ends The Same Way: Crisis, Crash, Collapse

One of the most under-appreciated investment insights is courtesy of Mike Tyson: "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." At this moment in history, the plan of most market participants is to place their full faith and trust in the status quo's ability to keep asset prices lofting ever higher, essentially forever.

In other words, the vast majority of punters are convinced they will never suffer the indignity of getting punched in the mouth by a market crash. What makes this confidence so interesting is massively distorted markets always end the same way: crisis, crash and collapse.

The core dynamic here is distorted markets provide false feedback and misleading information which then lead to participants making catastrophically misguided decisions. Investment decisions made on poor information will also be poor, leading participants to end up poor, to their very great surprise.

The surprise comes from the falsity of the feedback, as those who are distorting markets want punters to believe "the market" is functioning transparently. If you're manipulating the market, the last thing you want is for the unwary marks to discover that the market is generating false signals and misleading information on risk, as knowing the market is being distorted would alert them to the extraordinary risks intrinsic to heavily distorted markets.

The risks arise from the disconnect between the precariousness of the manipulated market and the extreme confidence punters have in its stability and predictability. The predictability comes not from transparent feedback and market signals but from the manipulation. This stability is entirely fabricated and therefore it lacks the dynamic stability of truly open markets.

Markets that are being distorted/manipulated to achieve a goal that is impossible in truly open markets--for example, markets that only loft higher with near-zero volatility--lull participants into a dangerous perception that because markets are so stable, risk has dissipated.

In actuality, risk is skyrocketing beneath the surface of the artificial stability because the market has been stripped of the mechanisms of dynamic stability. This artificial stability derived from sustained manipulation has the superficial appearance of low-risk markets, i.e., low levels of volatility, but this lack of volatility derives not from transparency but from behind-the-scenes suppression of volatility.

Another source of risk in distorted markets is the illusion of liquidity: in low-volume markets of suppressed volatility, participants are encouraged to believe that they can buy and sell whatever securities they want in whatever volumes they want without disturbing market pricing and liquidity. In other words, participants are led to believe that the market will always have a bid due to the near-infinite depth of liquidity: no matter how many billions of dollars of securities you want to sell, there will always be a bid for your shares.

In actual fact, the bid is paper-thin and it vanishes altogether once selling rises above very low levels. Heavily manipulated markets are exquisitely sensitive to selling because the entire point is to limit any urge to sell while encouraging the greed to increase gains by buying more.

The illusions of low risk, essentially guaranteed gains for those who increase their positions and near-infinite liquidity generate overwhelming incentives to borrow more and leverage it to the hilt to maximize gains. The blissfully delusional punter feels the decision to borrow the maximum available and leverage it to the maximum is entirely rational due to the "obvious" absence of risk, the "obvious" guaranteed gains offered by markets lofting ever higher like clockwork and the "obvious" abundance of liquidity, assuring the punter they can always sell their entire position at today's prices and lock in profits at any time.

On top of all these grossly misleading distortions, punters have been encouraged to believe in the ultimate distortion: the Federal Reserve will never let markets decline again, ever. This is the perfection of moral hazard: risk has been disconnected from consequence.

In this perfection of moral hazard, punters consider it entirely rational to increase extremely risky speculative bets because the Federal Reserve will never let markets decline. Given the abundant evidence behind this assumption, it would be irrational not to ramp up crazy-risky speculative bets to the maximum because losses are now impossible thanks to the Fed's implicit promise to never let markets drop.

This is why distorted, manipulated markets always end the same way: first, in an unexpected emergence of risk, which was presumed to be banished; second, a market crash as the paper-thin bid disappears and prices flash-crash to levels that wipe out all those forced to sell by margin calls, and then the collapse of faith in the manipulators (the Fed), collapse of the collateral supporting trillions of dollars in highly leveraged debt and then the collapse of the entire delusion-based financial system.

Gordon Long and I illuminate the many layers of distortion, manipulation and moral hazard in our new video presentation, It Always Ends The Same Way (34:33). Amidst the ruins generated by well-meaning manipulation and distortion, the "well meaning" part will leave an extremely long-lasting bitter taste in all those who failed to differentiate between the false signals and distorted information of manipulated markets and the trustworthy transparency of signals arising in truly open markets.

In summary: risk has not been extinguished, it is expanding geometrically beneath the false stability of a monstrously manipulated market. As I often note here, risk cannot be extinguished, it can only be transferred. By distorting markets to create an illusion of low-risk stability, the Federal Reserve has transferred this fatal supernova of risk to the entire financial system.