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GLOBAL FINANCIAL MELTDOWN
2022: THE YEAR THE US ACHIEVES COLLAPSE


Dmitry Orlov
December 30, 2021: Information Clearing House



I have been studying the forthcoming collapse of the USA for 25 years and publishing books and articles on this subject for the last 15, with good results: CCCP 2.0 is developing quite nicely. The 30-year reprieve which the US was granted thanks to the collapse of the USSR has now expired, every effort at imperial expansion since then (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya and the “suicide belt” of Eastern Europe) has been a total failure. Meanwhile a reborn Russia, backed by much of the rest of Eurasia, is now turning the tables and ordering the US around in perfectly undiplomatic terms. And now this: Barbara Water of US San Diego recently appeared on CNN to explain that the US is now in a zone of high risk for political violence and civil war.


And what this means is that the US has finally achieved Total Collapse Preparedness. Let us look into the details of this.


Washington’s Crime and Punishment

Just yesterday Russia Foreign Ministry published a couple of documents which people have been struggling to interpret ever since, to little useful effect. I would like to offer my own explanation of what these documents mean, which will probably differ a great deal from most other explanations you are likely to hear. Time will tell how close they are to the truth; for now, I am happy to simply add to the spectrum of ideas that are available to it.

The two documents describe in detail what Washington must do to avoid the consequences of breaking its verbal agreement entered into with Mikhail Gorbachev to not expand NATO eastward toward Russia’s borders—essentially, to freeze NATO forces where they were in 1997, before NATO expanded farther east. The documents also address other aspects of deescalation, such as removing all US nuclear weapons from foreign territory and confining US forces to waters and airspace from which they cannot threaten the territory of Russia.

One line of explanation, most recently expressed in Washington and elsewhere, is that these documents are a negotiating gambit (not an ultimatum), to be discussed privately (to avoid complete loss of face by the US) and in consultation with NATO members and partners, plus, maybe, the European Union, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, Amnesty International and Greenpeace (to avoid making their combined irrelevance apparent to all). I agree that there is little to be gained from public discussions; after all Moscow has already achieved the required bombshell effect through the public release of these documents and in forcing Washington to acknowledge their receipt and to consent to “negotiations”.


I disagree that there is anything to be negotiated: these documents are not intended to be used as a starting point for negotiations; they are an invitation for Washington to acknowledge and remedy its transgressions. Washington broke the deal it made with Moscow not to expand east. It could do so because in the years following the breakup of the USSR Moscow was too weak to resist and run by people who thought it possible for Russia to integrate into the West, perhaps even to join NATO. But that era has ended some time ago and the collective West now has to put its collective toes back behind the red line—whether voluntarily or not—and that is the only thing yet to be determined. That is the only choice to be made: stand down voluntarily and make amends or refuse and be punished.



I also disagree that this choice—between making amends and accepting punishment—has anything to do with the EU, or NATO, or various “members” or “partners”. Moscow has no relationship with NATO, seeing it as a mere piece of paper that grants Washington rather questionable legal authority to deploy its military forces in countries around the world. Moscow has some vestigial diplomatic representation with the EU, but doesn’t see it as important and concentrates on bilateral relations with EU members. As for its Eastern European neighbors, the Ukraine is, viewed from Moscow, a US colony and thus entirely a
US concern, Poland can go and partition itself again (or not), and, as far as those tiny yet politically annoying statelets of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, so sorry, but the Russian army
is equipped with binoculars, not microscopes.



The choice, really, is between facing an increasing risk of a nuclear exchange between two nuclear superpowers—one that is rapidly fading in strength and one that is growing stronger all the time—and reducing that risk as much as possible. Only the two nuclear superpowers need to come to an understanding;everyone else can simply do as they say so that nobody gets hurt. In the case of the Europeans, they should be quite interested in doing so (if they still know what’s good for them) because NATO’s eastward expansion has left them with huge nuclear target signs painted all over them which they would do well to try to remove. Not only that, but NATO’s encroachment on Russia’s borders has increased the risk of a nuclear confrontation breaking out accidentally: all those nuclear-armed bombers, ships and submarines could make a wrong turn somewhere and then—kaboom!—no more Europe.



You might thing that those bombers and ships and submarines must loiter around Russia’s borders in order to “contain” Russia, but this is false. Russia does an acceptably good job of containing itself, and the little territorial disputes that are likely to crop up here and there periodically are certainly not going to be solved by increasing the risk of nuclear war. The Russian Federation has land borders with over a dozen countries, most of which have Russian citizens living on both sides of them, and that makes land disputes inevitable, but none of them will ever be worth blowing up the planet over.



You might think that NATO forces need to show activity and act dangerous in order to justify their existence and their ridiculously bloated defense budgets. Also, if they didn’t get a chance to be threatening toward Russia, they might become despondent and just sit around drinking, doing drugs and having gay sex, and that would be bad for morale. (But then what’s wrong with a little gay sex between consenting off-duty gender-ambiguous servicepersons?) I’d think that these are all rather minor, if not trifling, concerns, considering that what’s on the other side of the scale is the risk of a planetary conflagration.



You might also think that Washington’s eastward expansion is not a crime because, you see, Gorbachev failed to get its promise not to expand east committed to in writing. Well, let me offer you a tiny insight into the inner workings of Russian civilization. If you enter into a verbal agreement with the Russians, break it, and then taunt them by saying “But you didn’t get it in writing!” you have just made the problem much worse for yourself. We all make mistakes and must sometimes break our promises, in which the proper course of action is to be contrite, apologize sincerely and offer to make amends. If, instead, you claim that the promise is null and void because a certain piece of paper cannot be located, then you have compounded you dishonorable conduct with willful disregard and have singled yourself out for exemplary punishment. This punishment may be slow to arrive, taking decades, perhaps even centuries, but you can be sure that you will be punished eventually.


Once upon a time Moscow was weak and Washington strong, but now the balance has shifted in Moscow’s favor and the time for Washington’s punishment has finally come. The only remaining question is, What form will this punishment take? The one proposed by Moscow is in the form of submission to public humiliation: Washington signs the security guarantees drafted in Moscow, drags itself back to its kennel and lies quietly like a good doggo licking its balls to console itself. And that’s the more pleasant alternative, a win-win sort of thing, offered in good faith.



The less pleasant alternative would be, I can’t help but imagine, much less pleasant, very confusing and quite dangerous. Think about Poseidons—undetectable nuclear-powered torpedos—endlessly cruising in thousands of feet of water of water off the continental shelf along the US coasts, ready to wash them off with entirely accidental tsunamis, their sporadic pings causing the Joint Chiefs of Staff to soil their diapers every time. Think about NATO planes, ships and submarines quietly going missing for no adequately explored reason, their crews later turning up on some faraway beach very drunk and wearing Speedos in the colors of the Russian flag. Think of hypersonic something-or-others periodically doing zigzags in low Earth orbit over the US mainland, causing every cable TV channel to broadcast Russia Today, in turn causing CNN’s talking heads to explode in impotent fury.

I would think that, in their own enlightened best interest, right-thinking Americans, regardless of party affiliation or lack thereof, would want to clamor for their elected representatives to quit making any more trouble and to just sign the damned security guarantees! But that’s just my own, private opinion.2.







WILL THE FEDERAL RESERVE CRASH GLOBAL FINANCIAL MARKETS AS A MEANS TO IMPLEMENTING THEIR “GREAT RESET”?
https://www.globalresearch.ca/will-the-f...et/5764816



It’s looking increasingly likely that the US Federal Reserve and the globalist powers that be will use the dramatic rising of inflation as their excuse to bring down the US financial markets and with it, crash the greatest financial bubble in history.


The enormous inflation rise since the malicious political lockdowns and the trillions of dollars in emergency spending by both Trump and Biden, coupled with the continuation of the Fed’s unprecedented near-zero interest rate policies and asset purchases of billions in bonds to keep the bubble inflated a bit longer– have set the stage for an imminent market collapse. Unlike what we are told, it is deliberate and managed.


Supply chain disruptions from Asia to normal truck transport across North America are feeding the worst inflation in four decades in the USA. The stage is set for the central banks to bring down the debt-bloated system and prepare their Great Reset of the world financial system. However this is not an issue of inflation as some mysterious or “temporary” process.



The context is key. The decision to crash the financial system is being prepared amid the far-reaching global pandemic measures that have devastated the world economy since early 2020. It is coming as the NATO powers, led by the Biden Administration, are tipping the world into a potential World War by miscalculation. They are pouring arms and advisers into Ukraine provoking a response by Russia.


They are escalating pressures on China over Taiwan, and waging proxy wars against China in Ethiopia and Horn of Africa and countless other locations.


The looming collapse of the dollar system, which will bring down most of the world with it owing to debt ties, will come as the major industrial nations go fully into economic self-destruction via their so-called Green New Deal in the EU, and USA and beyond.


The ludicrous Zero Carbon policies to phase out coal, oil, gas and even nuclear have already brought the EU electric grid to the brink of major power blackouts this winter as dependency on unreliable wind and solar make up a major part of the grid. On December 31, the “green” new German government oversees the forced closing of three nuclear power plants that generate the electricity equivalent of the entire country of Denmark. Wind and solar can in no way fill the gaps. In the USA Biden’s misnamed Build Back Better policies have driven fuel coats to record highs. To raise interest rates in this conjuncture will devastate the entire world, which seems to be precisely the plan.



The Fake US Inflation Data



Ever since the early 1970s when President Nixon asked his pal, Arthur Burns, then head of the Federal Reserve, to find a way to get rid of politically damaging consumer inflation monthly data that reflected soaring oil prices along with grain, the Fed has used what they called “core inflation” which means consumer price rises MINUS energy and food. At the time energy made up a significant 11% of inflation data. Food had a weight of 25%. Presto by 1975 a 400% OPEC rise in oil prices and a 300% global grain price rise owing to harvest failures in the Soviet region, “core inflation” fell significantly. This, despite the fact that American consumers had to pay far more for gasoline and bread. Very few real people can live without energy or food. Core inflation is a scam.




By 1975 the Burns Fed had eliminated major costs of housing and other factors leaving a Consumer Price Index that was a mere 35% of the original basket of commodities measured. By then real everyday inflation was out of control. In the real world, USA gasoline today is 58 percent more expensive than in 2020 and over the last 12 months, food prices have gone up by more than 6 percent on average. Today the US Consumer Price Index does not include the cost buying and financing houses, and also not of property taxes or home maintenance and improvement. These factors have been soaring across America in the past year. Now all that is lacking is a statement by the Fed that inflation is more alarming than they thought and required aggressive rate hikes to “squeeze inflation out of the system,” a common central bank myth made dogma under Paul Volcker in the 1970s.


The Bloated US Stock Market



Wall Street markets, today with stocks at historic bloated highs, aided by near zero Fed rates and $120 billion of monthly purchases by the Fed of bonds as well, are at a point where a policy reverse by the Fed, expected now in early 2022, could begin a panic exit from stocks to “get out while the getting is good.” That in turn will likely trigger panic selling and a snowballing market collapse that will make the recent China Evergrande real estate and stock collapse look like nothing at all.



Since the global financial crisis of September 2008, the Federal Reserve and other major central banks such as the ECB in the EU and Bank of Japan have pursued unprecedented zero interest rates and often “quantitative easing” purchases of bonds to bail out the major financial institutions and Wall Street and EU banks. It had little to do with the health of the real economy. It was about the largest bailout in history of brain dead banks and financial funds. The predictable result of the Fed and other central banks’ unprecedented policies has been the artificial inflation of the greatest speculative bubble in stocks in history.



As President, Donald Trump constantly pointed to new record rises in the S&P 500 stocks as proof of the booming economy, even though as a savvy businessman he knew it was a lie. It was rising because of the Fed zero interest rate policy. Companies were borrowing at low rates not to expand plant and equipment investment so much as to buy back their own stocks from the market. That had the effect of boosting stocks in companies from Microsoft to Dell to Amazon, Pfizer, Tesla and hundreds of others. It was a manipulation that corporate executives, owning millions of their own company shares as options, loved. They made billions in some cases, while creating no real value in the economy or the economy.



How big is today’s US stock market bubble? In October 2008 just after the Lehman crisis, US stocks were listed at a total of $13 trillion capitalization. Today it is over $50 trillion, an increase of almost 400% and more than double the total US GDP. Apple Corp. alone is $3 trillion.



Yet with massive labor shortages, lockdowns across America and huge disruptions to trade supply chains especially from China, the economy is sinking and Biden’s phony “infrastructure” bill will do little to rebuild the vital economic infrastructure of highways, rains, water treatment plants and electric grids. For millions of Americans after the 2008 housing collapse, buying stocks has been their best hope for retirement income. A stock crash in 2022 is being prepared by the Fed, only this time it will be used to usher in a real Great Depression worse than the 1930’s as tens of millions or ordinary Americans see their life savings wiped out.


Stock Buyback Game



Over the past four quarters, S&P 500 companies bought back $742 billion of their own shares. Q4 of 2021 will likely see a record increase in that number as companies rush to pump their shares ahead of a reported Biden tax on corporate stock buybacks. Since the beginning of 2012, the S&P 500 companies have bought back nearly $5.68 trillion of their own shares. This is no small beer. The dynamic is so insane that amid a Microsoft decision last month to buy back ever more shares, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dumped over 50% of his Microsoft stock in one day. But the stock barely budged because Microsoft itself was busy buying back shares. That indicates the level of unreality in today’s US market. The insiders know it’s about to crash. Tesla’s Elon Musk just sold $10 billion of his stock, allegedly to pay taxes.



Making the stock market even more vulnerable to a panic selloff once it is clear the Fed will raise interest rates, there is nearly $1 trillion in margin debt as of data from October, debt for those buying stocks on borrowed money from their brokers. Once a major market selloff begins, likely early in 2022, brokers will demand repayment of their margin debt, so-called margin calls. That in turn will accelerate the forced selling to raise the cash calls.



Taper?



There is much discussion about when the Fed will reduce its buying of US Treasury securities as well as government-linked home mortgage bonds. That buying has been huge. Since the start of the covid pandemic hysteria in February 2020, total Federal Reserve holdings of such securities have more than doubled from $3.8 trillion to $8 trillion as of end of October 2021. That has kept home mortgage rates artificially low and fueled panic home buying as citizens realize the low rates are about to end. That the Fed calls “taper”, reducing the monthly buying of bonds to zero at the same time it raises key interest rates, a double whammy. This is huge, and blood will flow from Wall Street beginning 2022 when the Fed taper picks up momentum early in 2022 combined with raising rates.



Already in November the Fed began reducing its monthly market supporting buying. “In light of the substantial further progress the economy has made toward the Committee’s goals of maximum employment and price stability,” the FOMC declared in its recent minutes. It announced that it is decreasing the amount of Treasury and Mortgage backed securities purchases in November and December.



Since the Vietnam War era under President Lyndon Johnson, the US Government has manipulated employment data as well as inflation numbers to give a far better picture than exists. Private economist John Williams of Shadow Government Statistics, estimates that actual USA unemployment far from the reported 4.2% for November, is actually over 24.8%. As Williams further notes, “The Inflation Surge Reflects Extreme Money Supply Creation, Extreme Federal Deficit Spending and Federal Debt Expansion, Pandemic Disruptions and Supply Shortages; It Does Not Reflect an Overheating Economy.” Federal Budget Deficits are running a record $3 trillion a year with no end in sight.



Raising rates at this precarious juncture will bring down the fragile US and global financial system, paving the way for a crisis where citizens might beg for emergency relief in the form of digital money and a Great Reset. It is worth noting that every major US stock market crash since October 1929 including 2007-8, has been a result of deliberate Fed actions, disguised under the claims of “containing inflation.”



This time the damage could be epochal. In September the Washington-based Institute of International Finance estimated that global debt levels, which include government, household and corporate and bank debt, rose $4.8 trillion to $296 trillion at the end of June, $36 trillion above pre-pandemic levels. Fully $92 trillion of that is owed by emerging markets such as Turkey, China, India and Pakistan.





Rising interest rates will trigger default crises across the globe as borrowers are unable to repay. This has been deliberately created by central banks, led by the Fed, since their 2008 crisis by pushing interest rates to zero or even negative.


F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics.






A SELF FULFILLING PROPHECY
SYSTEMIC COLLAPSE AND PANDEMIC SIMULATION

https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/a-self...simulation
Fabio Vighi

Ayear and a half after the arrival of Virus, some may have started wondering why the usually unscrupulous ruling elites decided to freeze the global profit-making machine in the face of a pathogen that targets almost exclusively the unproductive (over 80s). Why all the humanitarian zeal? [i]Cui bono[/i]? Only those who are unfamiliar with the wondrous adventures of GloboCap can delude themselves into thinking that the system chose to shut down out of [i]compassion[/i]. Let us be clear from the start: the big predators of oil, arms, and vaccines could not care less about humanity.

Follow the money

In pre-Covid times, the world economy was on the verge of another colossal meltdown. Here is a brief chronicle of how the pressure was building up:


June 2019: In its Annual Economic Report, the Swiss-based Bank of International Settlements (BIS), the ‘Central Bank of all central banks’, sets the international alarm bells ringing. The document highlights “overheating […] in the leveraged loan market”, where “credit standards have been deteriorating” and “collateralized loan obligations (CLOs) have surged – reminiscent of the steep rise in collateralized debt obligations [CDOs] that amplified the subprime crisis [in 2008].” Simply stated, the belly of the financial industry is once again full of junk.


9 August 2019: The BIS issues a working paper calling for “unconventional monetary policy measures” to “[i]insulate the real economy[/i] from further deterioration in financial conditions”. The paper indicates that, by offering “direct credit to the economy” during a crisis, central bank lending “can replace commercial banks in providing loans to firms.”


15 August 2019: Blackrock Inc., the world’s most powerful investment fund (managing around $7 trillion in stock and bond funds), issues a white paper titled [i]Dealing with the next downturn[/i]. Essentially, the paper instructs the US Federal Reserve to inject liquidity [i]directly[/i] into the financial system to prevent “a dramatic downturn.” Again, the message is unequivocal: “An unprecedented response is needed when monetary policy is exhausted and fiscal policy alone is not enough. That response will likely involve ‘going direct’”: “finding ways to get central bank money directly in the hands of public and private sector spenders” while avoiding “hyperinflation. Examples include the Weimar Republic in the 1920s as well as Argentina and Zimbabwe more recently.”


22-24 August 2019: G7 central bankers meet in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, to discuss BlackRock’s paper along with urgent measures to prevent the looming meltdown. In the prescient words of James Bullard, President of the St Louis Federal Reserve: “We just have to stop thinking that next year things are going to be normal.”

15-16 September 2019: The downturn is officially inaugurated by a sudden spike in the repo rates (from 2% to 10.5%). ‘Repo’ is shorthand for ‘repurchase agreement’, a contract where investment funds lend money against collateral assets (normally Treasury securities). At the time of the exchange, financial operators (banks) undertake to buy back the assets at a higher price, typically overnight. In brief, repos are short-term collateralized loans. They are the main source of funding for traders in most markets, especially the derivatives galaxy. A lack of liquidity in the repo market can have a devastating domino effect on all major financial sectors.


17 September 2019: The Fed begins the emergency monetary programme, pumping hundreds of billions of dollars per week into Wall Street, effectively executing BlackRock’s “going direct” plan. (Unsurprisingly, in March 2020 the Fed will hire BlackRock to manage the bailout package in response to the ‘COVID-19 crisis’).

19 September 2019: Donald Trump signs Executive Order 13887, establishing a [i]National Influenza Vaccine Task Force[/i] whose aim is to develop a “5-year national plan (Plan) to promote the use of more agile and scalable vaccine manufacturing technologies and to accelerate development of vaccines that protect against many or all influenza viruses.” This is to counteract “an influenza pandemic”, which, “unlike seasonal influenza […] has the potential to spread rapidly around the globe, infect higher numbers of people, and cause high rates of illness and death in populations that lack prior immunity”. As someone guessed, the pandemic was imminent, while in Europe too preparations were underway (see here and here).


18 October 2019: In New York, a global zoonotic pandemic is simulated during [i]Event 201[/i], a strategic exercise coordinated by the Johns Hopkins Biosecurity Center and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

21-24 January 2020: The World Economic Forum’s annual meeting takes place in Davos, Switzerland, where both the economy and vaccinations are discussed.

23 January 2020: China puts Wuhan and other cities of the Hubei province in lockdown.

11 March 2020: The WHO’s director general calls Covid-19 a pandemic. The rest is history.

Joining the dots is a simple enough exercise. If we do so, we might see a well-defined narrative outline emerge, whose succinct summary reads as follows: lockdowns and the global suspension of economic transactions were intended to 1) Allow the Fed to flood the ailing financial markets with freshly printed money while deferring hyperinflation; and 2) Introduce mass vaccination programmes and health passports as pillars of a neo-feudal regime of capitalist accumulation. As we shall see, the two aims merge into one.

In 2019, world economy was plagued by the same sickness that had caused the 2008 credit crunch. It was suffocating under an unsustainable mountain of debt. Many public companies could not generate enough profit to cover interest payments on their own debts and were staying afloat only by taking on new loans. ‘Zombie companies’ (with year-on-year low profitability, falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cashflow, and highly leveraged balance sheet) were rising everywhere. The repo market meltdown of September 2019 must be placed within this fragile economic context.


When the air is saturated with flammable materials, any spark can cause the explosion. And in the magical world of finance, [i]tout se tient[/i]: one flap of a butterfly’s wings in a certain sector can send the whole house of cards tumbling down. In financial markets powered by cheap loans, any increase in interest rates is potentially cataclysmic for banks, hedge funds, pension funds and the entire government bond market, because the cost of borrowing increases and liquidity dries up. This is what happened with the ‘repocalypse’ of September 2019: interest rates spiked to 10.5% in a matter of hours, panic broke out affecting futures, options, currencies, and other markets where traders bet by borrowing from repos. The only way to defuse the contagion was by throwing as much liquidity as necessary into the system – like helicopters dropping thousands of gallons of water on a wildfire. Between September 2019 and March 2020, the Fed injected more than $9 trillion into the banking system, equivalent to more than 40% of US GDP.


The mainstream narrative should therefore be reversed: the stock market did not collapse (in March 2020) because lockdowns had to be imposed; rather, lockdowns had to be imposed because financial markets were collapsing. With lockdowns came the suspension of business transactions, which drained the demand for credit and stopped the contagion. In other words, restructuring the financial architecture through extraordinary monetary policy [i]was contingent on the economy’s engine being turned off[/i]. Had the enormous mass of liquidity pumped into the financial sector reached transactions on the ground, a monetary tsunami with catastrophic consequences would have been unleashed.


As claimed by economist Ellen Brown, it was “another bailout”, but this time “under cover of a virus.” Similarly, John Titus and Catherine Austin Fitts noted that the Covid-19 “magic wand” allowed the Fed to execute BlackRock’s “going direct” plan, literally: it carried out an unprecedented purchase of government bonds, while, on an infinitesimally smaller scale, also issuing government backed ‘COVID loans’ to businesses. In brief, only an [i]induced economic coma[/i] would provide the Fed with the room to defuse the time-bomb ticking away in the financial sector. Screened by mass-hysteria, the US central bank plugged the holes in the interbank lending market, dodging hyperinflation as well as the ‘Financial Stability Oversight Council’ (the federal agency for monitoring financial risk created after the 2008 collapse), as discussed here. However, the “going direct” blueprint should also be framed as a [i]desperate[/i] measure, for it can only prolong the agony of a global economy increasingly hostage to money printing and the artificial inflation of financial assets.

At the heart of our predicament lies an insurmountable structural impasse. Debt-leveraged financialization is contemporary capitalism’s [i]only[/i] line of flight, the inevitable forward-escape route for a reproductive model that has reached its historical limit. Capitals head for financial markets because the labour-based economy is increasingly unprofitable. How did we get to this?


The answer can be summarised as follows: 1. The economy’s mission to generate surplus-value is both the drive to [i]exploit[/i] the workforce and to [i]expel[/i] it from production. This is what Marx called capitalism’s “moving contradiction”.[1] While it constitutes the essence of our mode of production, this contradiction today backfires, turning political economy into a mode of permanent devastation. 2. The reason for this change of fortune is the[i] objective[/i] failure of the labour-capital dialectic: the unprecedented acceleration in technological automation since the 1980s causes more labour-power to be ejected from production than (re)absorbed. The contraction of the volume of wages means that the purchasing power of a growing part of the world population is falling, with debt and immiseration as inevitable consequences. 3. As less surplus-value is produced, capital seeks immediate returns in the debt-leveraged financial sector rather than in the real economy or by investing in socially constructive sectors like education, research, and public services.


The bottom line is that the paradigm shift underway is the necessary condition for the (dystopian) survival of capitalism, which is no longer able to reproduce itself through mass wage-labour and the attendant consumerist utopia. The pandemic agenda was dictated, ultimately, by systemic implosion: the profitability downturn of a mode of production which rampant automation is making obsolete. For this [i]immanent[/i] reason, capitalism is increasingly dependent on public debt, low wages, centralisation of wealth and power, a permanent state of emergency, and financial acrobatics.


If we ‘follow the money’, we will see that the economic blockade deviously attributed to Virus has achieved far from negligible results, not only in terms of social engineering, but also of financial predation. I will quickly highlight four of them.


1) As anticipated, it has allowed the Fed to reorganise the financial sector by printing a continuous stream of billions of dollars out of thin air; 2) It has accelerated the extinction of small and medium-sized companies, allowing major groups to monopolise trade flows; 3) It has further depressed labour wages and facilitated significant capital savings through ‘smart working’ (which is particularly smart for those who implement it); 4) It has enabled the growth of e-commerce, the explosion of Big Tech, and the proliferation of the pharma-dollar – which also includes the much disparaged plastic industry, now producing millions of new facemasks and gloves every week, many of which end up in the oceans (to the delight of the ‘green new dealers’). In 2020 alone, the wealth of the planet’s 2,200 or so billionaires grew by $1.9 trillion, an increase without historical precedent. All this thanks to a pathogen so lethal that, according to official data, only 99.8% of the infected survive (see here and here), most of them without experiencing any symptoms.

 

[b][b]Doing capitalism differently[/b][/b]

The economic motif of the Covid whodunit must be placed within a broader context of social transformation. If we scratch the surface of the official narrative, a neo-feudal scenario begins to take form. Masses of increasingly unproductive consumers are being regimented and cast aside, simply because Mr Global no longer knows what to do with them. Together with the underemployed and the excluded, the impoverished middle-classes are now a problem to be handled with the stick of lockdowns, curfews, mass vaccination, propaganda, and the militarisation of society, rather than with the carrot of work, consumption, participatory democracy, social rights (replaced in collective imagination by the civil rights of minorities), and ‘well-earned holidays.’

It is therefore delusional to believe that the purpose of lockdowns is therapeutic and humanitarian. When has capital ever cared for the people? Indifference and misanthropy are the typical traits of capitalism, whose only real passion is profit, and the power that comes with it. Today, capitalist power can be summed up with the names of the three biggest investment funds in the world: BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Global Advisor. These giants, sitting at the centre of a huge galaxy of financial entities, manage a mass of value close to half the global GDP, and are major shareholders in around 90% of listed companies. Around them gravitate transnational institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Economic Forum, the Trilateral Commission, and the Bank for International Settlements, whose function is to coordinate consensus within the financial constellation. We can safely assume that all key strategic decisions – economic, political and military – are at least heavily influenced by these elites. Or do we want to believe that Virus has taken them by surprise? Rather, SARS-CoV-2 – which, by admission of the CDC and the European Commission has never been isolated nor purified – is the name of a special weapon of psychological warfare that was deployed in the moment of greatest need.


Why should we trust a mega pharmaceutical cartel (the WHO) that is [i]not[/i] in charge of ‘public health’, but rather of marketing private products worldwide at the most profitable rates possible? Public health problems stem from abysmal working conditions, poor nutrition, air, water, and food pollution, and above all from [i]rampant poverty[/i]; yet none of these ‘pathogens’ are on the WHO’s list of humanitarian concerns. The immense conflicts of interest between the predators of the pharmaceutical industry, national and supranational medical agencies, and the cynical political enforcers, is now an open secret. No wonder that on the day COVID-19 was classified as a pandemic, the WEF, together with the WHO, launched the Covid Action Platform, a “protection of life” coalition run by over 1,000 of the world’s most powerful private companies.


The only thing that matters for the clique directing the health emergency orchestra is to feed the profit-making machine, and every move is planned to this end, with the support of a political and media front motivated by opportunism. If the military industry needs wars, the pharmaceutical industry needs diseases. It is no coincidence that ‘public health’ is by far the most profitable sector of the world economy, to the extent that Big Pharma spends about three times as much as Big Oil and twice as much as Big Tech on lobbying. The potentially endless demand for vaccines and experimental gene concoctions offers pharmaceutical cartels the prospect of almost unlimited profit streams, especially when guaranteed by mass vaccination programmes subsidised by public money (i.e., by more debt that will fall on our heads).


Why have all Covid treatments been criminally banned or sabotaged? As the FDA candidly admits, the use of emergency vaccines is only possible if “there are no suitable, approved and available alternatives”. A case of truth hidden in plain sight. Moreover, the current vaccine religion is closely linked to the rise of the pharma-dollar, which, by feeding on pandemics, is set to emulate the glories of the ‘petro-dollar’, allowing the United States to continue to exercise global monetary supremacy. Why should the whole of humanity (including children!) inject experimental ‘vaccines’ with increasingly worrying yet systematically downplayed adverse effects, when more than 99% of those infected, the vast majority asymptomatic, recover? The answer is obvious: because vaccines are the golden calf of the third millennium, while humanity is ‘last generation’ exploitation material in guinea pig modality.


Given this context, the staging of the emergency pantomime succeeds through an unheard-of manipulation of public opinion. Every ‘public debate’ on the pandemic is shamelessly [i]privatised[/i], or rather monopolised by the religious belief in technical-scientific committees bankrolled by the financial elites. Every ‘free discussion’ is legitimised by adherence to pseudo-scientific protocols carefully purged from the socio-economic context: one ‘follows the science’ while pretending not to know that ‘science follows the money’. Karl Popper’s famous statement that “real science” is only possible under the aegis of liberal capitalism in what he called “the open society”,[1] is now coming true in the globalist ideology that animates, among others, George Soros’s Open Society Foundation. The combination of “real science” and “open and inclusive society” makes the Covid doctrine almost impossible to challenge.


For COVID-19, then, we could imagine the following agenda. A fictitious narrative is prepared based on an epidemic risk presented in such a way as to promote fear and submissive behaviour. Most likely a case of diagnostic reclassification. All that is needed is an epidemiologically ambiguous influenza virus, on which to build an aggressive tale of contagion relatable to geographical areas where the impact of respiratory or vascular diseases in the elderly and immunocompromised population is high – perhaps with the aggravating factor of heavy pollution. There is no need to make much up, given that intensive care units in ‘advanced’ countries had already collapsed in the years preceding the arrival of Covid, with mortality peaks for which no one had dreamed of exhuming quarantine. In other words, public health systems had already been demolished, and thus prepared for the pandemic scenario.


But this time there is method in madness: a state of emergency is declared, which triggers panic, in turn causing the clogging up of hospitals and care homes (at high risk of sepsis), the application of nefarious protocols, and the suspension of medical care. [i]Et voilà[/i], the killer Virus becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy! The propaganda raging across the main centres of financial power (especially North America and Europe) is essential to maintaining the ‘state of exception’ (Carl Schmitt), which is immediately accepted as the only possible form of political and existential rationality. Entire populations exposed to heavy media bombardment surrender through self-discipline, adhering with grotesque enthusiasm to forms of ‘civic responsibility’ in which coercion morphs into altruism.


The whole pandemic script – from the ‘contagion curve’ to the ‘Covid deaths’ – rests on the PCR test, which was authorised for the detection of SARS-CoV-2 by a study produced in record time on commission from the WHO. As many will know by now, the diagnostic unreliability of the PCR test was denounced by its inventor himself, Nobel laureate Kary Mullis (unfortunately passed away on 7 August 2019), and recently reiterated by, among others, 22 internationally renowned experts who demanded its removal for clear scientific flaws. Obviously, the request fell on deaf ears.


The PCR test is the driving force behind the pandemic. It works through the infamous ‘cycle thresholds’: the more cycles you make, the more false positives (infections, Covid-deaths) you produce, as even guru Anthony Fauci recklessly admitted when he stated that swabs are worthless above 35 cycles. Now, why is it that during the pandemic, amplifications of 35 cycles or more were routinely carried out in laboratories all over the world? Even the [i]New York Times[/i] – certainly not a den of dangerous Covid-deniers – raised this key question last summer. Thanks to the sensitivity of the swab, the pandemic can be turned on and off like a tap, allowing the health regime to exert full control over the ‘numerological monster’ of Covid cases and deaths – the key instruments of everyday terror.


All this fearmongering continues today, despite the easing of some measures. To understand why, we should return to the economic motif. As noted, several trillions of newly printed cash have been created with a few clicks of a mouse by central banks and injected into financial systems, where they have in great part remained. The aim of the printing-spree was to plug calamitous liquidity gaps. Most of this ‘magic-tree money’ is still frozen inside the shadow banking system, the stock exchanges, and various virtual currency schemes that are [i]not[/i] meant to be used for spending and investment. Their function is solely to provide cheap loans for financial speculation. This is what Marx called ‘fictitious capital’, which continues to expand in an orbital loop that is now completely independent of economic cycles on the ground.


The bottom line is that all this cash cannot be allowed to flood the real economy, for the latter would overheat and trigger hyperinflation. And this is where Virus continues to come in handy. If it initially served to “insulate the real economy” (to quote again from the BIS paper), it now oversees its [i]tentative[/i] reopening, characterized by submission to the vaccination dogma and chromatic methods of mass regimentation, which may soon include climate lockdowns. Remember how we were told that only vaccines would give us back our ‘freedom’? All too predictably, we now discover that the road to freedom is littered with ‘variants’, that is to say, iterations of Virus. Their purpose is to increase the ‘case count’ and therefore prolong those states of emergency that justify central banks’ production of virtual money aimed at monetizing debt and financing deficits. Rather than returning to normal interest rates, the elites opt to normalize the health emergency by feeding the contagion ghost. The much-publicised ‘tapering’ (reduction of monetary stimulus) can therefore wait – just like Pandexit.

In the EU, for instance, the European Central Bank’s €1.85 trillion ‘pandemic emergency purchase program’, known as PEPP, is currently set to continue until March 2022. However, it has been intimated it might need to be extended beyond that date. In the meantime, the Delta variant is wreaking havoc on the travel and tourism industry, with new restrictions (including quarantine) disrupting the summer season. Again, we seem to be caught within a self-fulfilling prophecy (especially if, as Nobel laureate Luc Montagnier and many others have intimated, variants, however mild, are the consequence of aggressive mass vaccination campaigns). Whatever the case, the fundamental point is that Virus is still needed by senile capitalism, whose only chance of survival depends on generating a paradigm shift from liberalism to oligarchic authoritarianism.



While their crime is far from perfect, the orchestrators of this global [i]coup[/i] must nevertheless be credited with a certain sadistic brilliance. Their sleight of hand succeeded, perhaps even beyond expectations. However, any power aiming at totalisation is destined to fail, and this applies also to the high priests of the Covid religion and the institutional puppets they have mobilised to roll out the health emergency psyop. After all, power tends to delude itself about its omnipotence. Those sitting in the control room fail to realise the extent to
which their dominance is uncertain. What they do not see is that their authority depends on a ‘higher mission’, to which they remain partly blind, namely the anonymous self-reproduction of the capitalist matrix. Today’s power lies with the profit-making machine whose only purpose is to continue its reckless journey, potentially leading to the premature extinction of Homo sapiens. The elites who have conned the world into Covid-obedience are the anthropomorphic manifestation of the capitalist automaton, whose invisibility is as cunning as that of Virus itself. And the novelty of our era is that the ‘locked-down society’ is the model that best guarantees the reproducibility of the capitalist machine, irrespective of its dystopian destination.

 
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GLOBAL FINANCIAL MELTDOWN - by moeenyaseen - 08-27-2006, 09:59 AM
RE: THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL MELTDOWN - by globalvision2000administrator - 09-03-2021, 08:05 AM

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