Are We Brewing a New Feudalism?

Source

With permission from

http://www.paulcraigroberts.org

Paul Craig Roberts

April 16, 2020

The answer to the question is “YES.”  The large bailed-out creditors will end up with the property of the non-bailed-out debtors who are being pushed deeper into debt with “bail-out loans” and fees and penalties for missed debt payments. Write-offs for the One Percent, and more indebtedness for everyone else.

Turn your mind to the economy.  The US has a work force of 164,000,000.  The unemployment forecast from the work closedowns is 30%.  That would mean 49,000,000 people who are potential rioters. (We are half way there with today’s report of a 16% unemployment rate with 22 million unemployed). Many of these people were already living paycheck to paycheck, could not raise $400, and their debts leave them no discretionary income.  As they could barely service their debts when employed, how do they service them when unemployed and when their small businesses are closed and incurring costs but have no revenues?  Loans further indebt them. The cash payouts to the unemployed might cover food and housing but will not service their debts.  

Fast food franchises and stores in malls are saying they are not paying their rents for three months.  Mall owners won’t be able to pay their creditors.  The bailout works for no one except those who caused the problem. As they are being bailed out, they will have the money to buy up or foreclose on the bankrupted businesses. More property will be concentrated in fewer hands.  

The bail-out scheme concocted by the New York banks and Trump’s Treasury Secretary, who earned the name “the foreclosure king” during his Wall Street career, leaves creditors whole and debtors deeper in debt.  

The more debt is concentrated in fewer hands and the more indebted everyone else becomes, the less consumer purchasing power there is to drive the economy.  The foreclosed assets become less valuable as their profitability declines with consumer purchasing power.

The destruction of the US economy has been underway since global corporations moved middle-class jobs offshore. It has been underway since the financial sector diverted a larger share of consumer income to the service of debt.  It has been underway since corporations invested their profits in buying back their own shares instead of expanding their production capabilities.  It has been underway since Quantitative Easing inflated stock and bond prices beyond realistic values. It has been going on since the rules against concentration were set aside and the Glass-Steagall Act was repealed.  It has been going on since endless wars crowded out infrastructure investment and social safety net expansion.  

Is this a plot or stupidity?  Whatever the answer, the economy is being destroyed.  

The economic problem is that private sector debt, both personal and corporate, is too great to be paid.  This problem existed prior to the closedown.  The closedown means that there is even less income with which to service the unsustainable level of debt.  This is not a problem that can be fixed with more debt.

The problem is that banks lend to finance the purchase of existing financial assets, not to expand the economy’s productive potential.

The problem is that corporations use their profits and borrow money in order to buy back their own equity instead of investing in their businesses.  The executives indebt the corporations while decapitalizing them, and they are rewarded for doing so with “performance bonuses.”

The problem is that global corporations thinking short-term moved high-productivity, high-value-added US jobs to Asia, thus reducing earned income in the US, impairing state and local tax base, and causing the Federal Reserve to substitute a growth in consumer debt in place of the lost consumer income growth.

The people in charge of the fix are only fixing it for themselves and in a short-sighted way.  There is only one way to fix the situation, and that is to write down private sector debts to levels that can be serviced.  As the creditors are being bailed out regardless, their loan losses don’t matter.

The bank and corporate bailouts are an opportunity to fix the economy in other important ways. In effect, the bailouts amount to nationalization.  The government should accept the ownership that it is purchasing.  Then the government can break up the “banks too big to fail” and separate investment from commercial banking without having to pass new Glass-Steagall legislation and without having to battle against financial lobbying in Congress.  Once broken up, the banks could be sold off.  This would take enormous vulnerability out of the financial system and restore financial competition.  With corporations in government hands, the jobs could be brought home from overseas.  The middle class would be restored. 

These measures together with a debt writedown would restore consumer purchasing power. Pent-up demand would propel the economy to higher growth as occurred following World War II.  

This is a real solution to a real problem.  But with the One Percent in charge of the problem, we are not going to get a real solution.  We are going to get more money used to push up prices of financial assets and paper over unsustainable debt and a dying economy with an artificially-inflated stock market.

The elite have failed us too many times.  It is time to dethrone them.

Working-class Londoners risk their lives fighting COVID-19 as the city’s billionaires decamp

I wonder how long it will take us, the vast majority of real humans, to remove or recycle these useless parasites that have prevented the evolution of the species since the beginning?

“There is the pandemic experienced as an inconvenience by the super-rich, and the pandemic experienced as a catastrophe by the working class. Only a revolutionary overturn can protect the population from the virus and remove from society the cancerous growth of multimillion and billion-pound wealth threatening its very existence.”

http://www.wsws.org

Source

By Michael Barnes
4 April 2020

“London is to billionaires what the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan. It is their natural habitat”—Boris Johnson, Conservative Party Mayor of London, 2014.

“I welcome the fact that we have got 140-plus billionaires in London. That’s a good thing. I welcome the fact that there are more than 400,000 millionaires. That’s a good thing”—Sadiq Khan, Labour Party Mayor of London, 2016.

London, the centre of grotesque inequality in Britain before the COVID-19 pandemic, has inevitably become an epicentre of the pandemic within the UK. The city is a concentrated example of the class divisions cleaving through the whole of British society.

On the evenings of March 26 and April 2, as millions of Londoners joined a country-wide applause for the self-sacrifice of grossly underequipped NHS staff, where were the super-rich that Johnson and Khan lauded as essential to society’s wellbeing? While the Tory government bailed out big business to the tune of £380 billion, the multi-millionaires and billionaires escaped to secluded islands and safe havens in private jets, climbed aboard luxury yachts for extended vacations, settled into their country retreats, or bunkered down in their mansions and luxury apartments.

A few weeks ago, private jet booking service PrivateFly said it saw a huge increase in bookings as clients evacuated back to the UK from disease-hit countries. Others were arranging private flights out of Britain to avoid planned lockdowns.

Those poorer multi-millionaires who could not afford private jets were using concierge company Quintessentially. The company’s spokesperson said, “Members who are travelling commercially are choosing to book elite services at airports, not your typical first-class lounge. For example, private terminals where guests are greeted and given their own suite. Check-in, customs and security are all done privately, and guests are then taken to the doors of the aircraft. Members can request for the jetty to be cleared so they minimise the interactions with other passengers on their way to their seat.”

Luxury retail agency Quintessentially Estates said that early in the crisis their phones were hot with inquiries about “Scottish castles, mansions with bunkers, Cotswolds manor houses with moats, uninhabited Caribbean islands to buy, superyachts for a long charter and private jets to get clients home from abroad without their having to go near international airports.”

The London rich who could not escape buy designer face masks and attend eye-wateringly expensive Harley Street practices for private testing and expensive intravenous vitamin infusions. Others have moved to country homes or leased them for up to ￡50,000 a month, according to the Daily Mail.

As reports began to emerge that London doctors, hospital workers, bus workers and a 13-year-old child were dying of COVID-19 across the capital in horrific circumstances, the elite had other concerns. One London financier is reported by Forbes to have complained that the lockdown was preventing her showing off her expensive jewellery: “I’m just not sure when my next ball will be.”

While the super-rich complain of being bored in their gated mansions, masses of workers in London have lost their jobs or are forced to work in unsafe conditions with next to no protection from the virus. Every journey on London Underground has turned into a nightmare. Poorly paid workers wrap scarfs and handkerchiefs around their faces and crowd into train carriages. Labour Party Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has closed 40 out of 265 tube stations due to the numbers of staff self-isolating at home with COVID-19 symptoms because no serious safety measures were put in place.

Among those travelling on packed transport systems are tens of thousands of the capital’s construction workers—many on their way to build high-value apartments and houses. Both the Tory government and Mayor Khan have made deliberately vague statements about what constitutes “essential work,” allowing construction firms to decide for themselves. Twitter has been rife with the barbed comments of construction workers questioning why the luxury flats they must build were considered “essential.”

Another thriving industry is private tutoring. Tutors International, which provides elite tutoring services, says it has seen “a massive upswing in requests” since the COVID-19 outbreak.

While the super-rich carry on with their luxurious lifestyles as normal, the situation facing the working class is indicated by the Nightingale field hospital, officially opened on Friday in east London. The effort put in by workers to construct a facility from scratch has been tremendous. But the need for a 4,000-bed facility at such short notice highlights the gutting of the National Health Service (NHS) in London—leaving the population perilously exposed to the pandemic. Two new mortuaries, one in Newham and the other in Hillingdon, are also being built.

In the words of one health chief, a “tsunami” of cases is set to overwhelm London’s hospitals. On March 19, well in advance of the expected peak of cases, Northwick Park hospital in north-west London declared a critical incident after it ran out of ventilator capacity. One senior figure told the Health Service Journal, “Given we’re in the low foothills of this virus, this is f***ing petrifying.”

On Thursday, it was reported that one London hospital had nearly run out of oxygen over the weekend. NHS trusts in England have been given an urgent warning to limit the number of people on mechanical ventilators and continuous positive airway pressure machines.

Health chiefs are warning that an already overstretched London Ambulance Service will be unable to cope with the hundreds of extra patients needing hospital admission. Vehicles used to transport patients to non-urgent visits are being commandeered, but do not have the same medical equipment as an ambulance.

These conditions are putting London’s healthcare workers in danger. The lack of personal protective equipment and testing available to medical staff has become a national scandal. On Sunday, Thomas Harvey, a healthcare assistant at Goodmayes Hospital, London, died after treating a patient with COVID-19 with only gloves for protection. Across the capital, some hospital trusts have staff self-isolation rates of between 30 and 50 percent.

This Monday, a nurse in her 20s at King’s College Hospital, where eight COVID-19 deaths have occurred, committed suicide. Although the investigation into her death has drawn no conclusions, the experience in Italy where several health workers have committed suicide during the pandemic points to a similar trend beginning in the UK. Shortages are forcing medical staff to work incredibly long, harrowing shifts and make the traumatic decision to deny treatment to the most vulnerable.

The World Socialist Web Site reported on the crisis at Kings College Hospital Trust in January this year: “King’s hospital has a vacancy rate of 19.4 percent for nursing posts in cancer care, 15.4 percent in children’s care and 12 percent in operating theatres. At the Princess Royal hospital managed by the King’s Trust, 26.3 percent of nursing posts in acute and emergency care and 12.4 percent in the children’s care unit are vacant.”

The terrible personal consequences of such sharp social inequalities were summed up last weekend by the contrasting fates of Prince Charles, tested and cared for while presenting only mild symptoms of the disease, and Kayla Williams, a 36-year-old mother of three from Peckham, south London. Williams, the wife of Fabian, a refuse worker, died in her flat of suspected COVID-19 a day after calling 999 and being told to look after herself at home.

Fabian said, “I called 999 because my wife was breathless, she was vomiting, and she had pains in her stomach. As I was talking to them, she was getting worse and they told me to put her on the floor and to make her body flat. She [the paramedic] told me the hospital won’t take her, she is not a priority.” Williams was dead the next day.

Twitter erupted as Londoners contrasted the brutal inequality in treatment between Kayla and Britain’s royalty. The lesson has been burned into popular consciousness that we are not “all in this together,” as the government claims. There is the pandemic experienced as an inconvenience by the super-rich, and the pandemic experienced as a catastrophe by the working class. Only a revolutionary overturn can protect the population from the virus and remove from society the cancerous growth of multimillion and billion-pound wealth threatening its very existence.

The rich pull up the drawbridges

People are finally waking up to the fact that the rich and wealthy, the vast majority of them, are simple scum. It took this Covid-19 crisis to expose the truth finally. 

This is from my 70-year-old Buddhist friend:

Lotus Johnson

“Rich Covidiots!! The super rich are fleeing from their fellow countrymen. Where is their compassion? Their entitlement, greed, and ignorance is beyond belief I’m reminding myself to boycott their companies… “

Source

http://www.axios.com

Jennifer A. Kingson

April 3, 2020

Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios

From hastily-chartered superyachts to fortresslike country estates, the wealthiest Americans have found places to ride out the pandemic far away from the masses.

Why it matters: The contrast between the rich vs. poor experience of coronavirus exposes class differences — in housing, access to health care, etc. — that are less obvious in normal times.

Where it stands: Even as elected officials tell us that the novel coronavirus does not discriminate — New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo called it “the great equalizer” — it’s still true that the moneyed classes are walling themselves off and, on the whole, suffering less.

• People with second (and third) homes have stampeded from hot spots like New York City to pastoral and less-afflicted areas — like the Hamptons, Cape Cod, Hilton Head and Palm Beach.
• Thanks to “concierge medicine,” where people pay hefty annual fees in exchange for near-unlimited access to their doctors, the rich have been getting faster access to COVID-19 tests, plus more attention when they’re sick.

Headlines that tell the story:

• “Chic Hamptons food stores ransacked by the wealthy amid coronavirus pandemic” (NY Post)
• “Private jets ‘pour in’ to Martha’s Vineyard as rich flee coronavirus” (The Telegraph)
• “Billionaires are chartering superyachts for months at a time to ride out the coronavirus pandemic” (Business Insider)
• “The U.S. has a shortage of coronavirus tests, so the ultra-wealthy are paying concierge doctors to do their own,” (Business Insider)

What they’re saying: “There is an undercurrent of unequal sacrifice,” Chuck Collins, a senior scholar at the progressive Institute for Policy Studies, tells Axios.

Seasonal vacation resorts don’t have the doctors, hospital beds and other resources to care for throngs of sick people — prompting calls for the moneyed interlopers (renters and owners alike) to go home.

• The mayor of Honolulu wants the Trump administration to suspend nonessential travel to Hawaii.
• The governor of New Jersey is urging people not to come to the Jersey Shore — even enlisting Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino to spread the “stay home” word.
• The chiefs of Nantucket Cottage Hospital (which has 15 beds) and Martha’s Vineyard Hospital (25 beds) are asking people to keep off the islands.
• Angry Cape Cod residents are circulating a (probably doomed) petition to close the bridges to their area.

While the wealthy were among the first in the U.S. to contract the virus (as they’re more apt to travel abroad), the brunt of the pandemic has hurt the working poor.

• Per the WSJ: “The new coronavirus has struck hardest in working-class neighborhoods in New York City’s outer boroughs, city data shows, underlining how the pandemic has ravaged densely packed lower-income areas where social-distancing guidelines have proved difficult to implement.”

People who live in poverty are more likely to have underlying illnesses that make them more susceptible to coronavirus — asthma, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes.

• “Income in the United States is our pre-existing condition,” Collins said. “This infection is landing on an extremely unequal society — much more unequal than 40 years ago.”

A tale of two pandemics: As soon as NYC schools closed, real estate agents were flooded with calls from people begging to rent houses in the Hamptons — where a single summer’s lease can easily cost $100,000 — immediately and sight unseen.

• “You have people calling in and saying, ‘We’re going to be in a car tomorrow, give me a house that I can move into,’ ” Eddie Shapiro, founder and CEO of Nest Seekers International, tells Axios. “We’ve never seen that.”

To drive there, the renters would have had to pass through Queens — the city’s hardest-hit borough — where “apocalyptic” conditions at a 545-bed public hospital in Elmhurst have turned the neighborhood into a poster child for the virus’ wrath.

Who Can NOW Say America Hasn’t Become a Mega-Corporate Dictatorship?

Source

http://www.strategic-culture.org

Eric Zuesse

February 8, 2020

Jon Hellevig posted on January 16th at The Saker, “Capitalism in America: How a Dismal Decimal is Robbing Americans Blind” the most extensive and up-to-date compendium anywhere, of data on economic inequality in America, and one fact especially stands out from it: “Today Top 1% are losers compared with Top 0.1% – the Dismal Decimal – who are where the music plays. Top 0.1% now holds as much wealth as Bottom 90% combined.” These top 0.1% people also donate the lions’ share of the money that finances political ads and organizations for their candidates and against the candidates who are financed instead by the other Party’s billionaires. Any candidate who isn’t backed by the billionaires of any Party is a rarity and (except for the independent Bernie Sanders, who is truly an exception) has no realistic chance of winning or keeping a seat in Congress.

That drastic inequality of wealth in America — “Top 0.1% now holds as much wealth as Bottom 90% combined” — is calculated by Deutsche Bank, in their January 2018 study “U.S. Income and Wealth Inequality”. Here’s more from that study:

—

On page 3 is shown that U.S. is comparable to Chile, Israel, Mexico, Portugal, and Turkey, as being at the top of the nations studied, in “inequality in household disposable income.”

On page 6: “A record high 30% of households have no wealth” in the United States.

On page 7: All-time high median net worth in constant dollars was 2007, at $119,000, declined to $67,000 in 2010, and rose to $78,000 by 2016.

On page 8: “U.S.: Top 0.1% owns as many assets as the bottom 90%”

On page 10: U.S. has higher income-inequality than any other OECD nation.

On page 11: Income-inequality is rising faster in U.S. than any other OECD nation.

On page 15: Top 1% in pre-tax income in the U.S. in 2014 was $1.3 million+.

Top 0.1% was $6 million+.

So: if the top 0.1% in income in America are also the top 0.1% in wealth in America, then the individuals in America who draw $6 million+ annual income own as much as do all 90% who aren’t in the top 10%.

—

When a nation’s billionaires control not only its mega-corporations but its government, that small group — who do business with one-another — constitute a national dictatorship which is just as bad as in feudal times when a tiny aristocracy (who also did business with one-another) controlled the government and were a collective dictatorship over the entire nation’s population. A king isn’t required in order for there to be a dictatorship. Most dictatorships are aristocratic, not monarchical. Furthermore, in almost all monarchies, the king represents, and comes from, his class — the aristocracy. A collective dictatorship is no better, or worse, than is a one-person dictatorship.

There are, according to the latest count by Forbes (as of 2019), 607 billionaires in the U.S., and these people include, for example, Jack Dorsey who controls Twitter, and Eric Schmidt and John Doerr who mainly control Google, as well as Mark Zuckerberg who controls Facebook. Of course, Bezos, Buffett, the Waltons, the Kochs, and hundreds of others, are also among these 607: but, still, it’s this group of people (plus perhaps a hundred of the mere centi-millionaires) who actually control mega-corporate America including its government — they also hire and control millions of employees and other agents such as law firms and lobbyists — and the other 330 million Americans do not possess such control, but instead only work for them, and sell to them, and buy from them, and view the world through their media. Most importantly, the other 330 million Americans receive their television and radio and newspaper and magazine ‘news’ from the country’s billionaires, and vote for the U.S. President and members of Congress on the basis of that news, which is virtually entirely filtered by appointees of these 607 people, not only as being controlling owners of the media but as being (controlling) the largest advertisers in all of the major media. The largest advertisers participate, with the media-owners, in controlling the media. It’s all the same group of fewer than a thousand individuals, who collectively control America.

Some of them — such as Trump, and Bloomberg, and Steyer — are also in politics or trying to be, because they want to be controlling America even more directly than they already do, so that their power will be even greater than it already is. Of course, Trump has already succeeded at this, and we can see from what he has been doing to America as its President, a fair representation of the billionaire class’s political intentions, though he is more blatant about it than, for Example, Tom Steyer is, who was the biggest political donor in the 2016 campaign year, having given $91 million to help Hillary Clinton and other Democratic politicians. He was the top donor that year to defeat Bernie Sanders, and thus help Clinton win the Party’s Presidential nomination; so, that’s the type of Democrat which this billionaire actually is: a neoconservative and a neoliberal. No matter what Tom Steyer and another Democratic Party Presidential candidate, Michael Bloomberg, might say in order to win votes, that’s what they all actually are: neoconservative, and neoliberal. They support American imperialism, and they support America’s billionaires — they are the actual beneficiaries from American imperialism, and from an American economy that funnels more and more of the nation’s wealth into their control.

Here are some recent studies which document this dictatorship:

“After U.S. killing of Iran’s Soleimani, narrative control on social media is getting worse”

“Top Assange Defense Account Deleted By Twitter”

“The U.S. Police-State Is Now Undeniable: The Assange Case”

“America Is One-Dollar-One-Vote, Not Really One-Person-One Vote.”

“Trump Tax Cut Hands $32 Billion Windfall to America’s Top Banks”

“Capitalism in America: How a Dismal Decimal is Robbing Americans Blind”

If America were a democracy, then there would ne no “narrative control on social media,” because social media wouldn’t be allowed to censor whatever they want to censor. They wouldn’t have that power. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits the Government from punishing anyone for any type of “speech,” but doesn’t say anything to limit America’s aristocrats from censoring out whatever they want to be censored-out — using their “social media” so as to reduce the ability of anyone to say or to link to what those super-rich don’t want the public to have access to. Censorship by the billionaires is accepted in America.

Consequently, Julian Assange is kept imprisoned (in one way or another) for around a decade and is now being drugged in a British maximum-security prison while awaiting extradition to the U.S. for final slaughter, and he has never been convicted of anything, but Americans — alone of all the world’s people in this regard — approve of this, and accept both a Democratic President Obama and a Republican President Trump perpetrating this illegal punishment of him for revealing truths about their dictatorship.

And, also consequently, the United States has a higher percentage of its people in prison than does any other nation — and virtually all of them are lower class, not the type of criminal who murders by giving an order or by signing a contract or by selling a dangerous or toxic product but by knifing or shooting someone. The crooks who do the most harm are the richest ones, and they don’t merely violate the laws, they (through their lobbyists etc.) also write the laws.

This working through agents, whom they pay, is how it comes to be that America is now scientifically proven to be one dollar one vote instead of one person one vote.

And that is how it comes to be the case that the billionaire Trump can push into law a $32 billion taxpayer-giveaway to the investors and top executives in America’s biggest banks, which then use the money to increase stockholder dividends and to cut their workforce.

And, as “Capitalism in America: How a Dismal Decimal is Robbing Americans Blind” documents, it’s no longer the top 1% but now is instead the top tenth of one percent who are raking money in from the poorer 99.90% of the U.S. population. You’ve now got to be pretty rich in today’s America in order to be robbing from virtually everyone else. “Top 0.1% now holds as much wealth as Bottom 90% combined.” The top 0.1% are now scamming even the rest of the top 1%. But, of course, in this nation where the top 0.01% have been writing the laws (via their lobbyists) for decades now, none of them is anywhere among the millions of Americans who are in prison. To be that rich is to have a stay-out-of-prison card, no matter how many people you’ve harmed or even killed by your dangerous or harmful products or services, such as trick mortgage contracts or toxic pharmaceuticals.

So, realistically, now: Who can say that America hasn’t become a mega-corporate dictatorship?

How Long Will It Take For The US To Collapse?

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

Fri, 01/03/2020

There are a multitude of false assumptions out there on what the collapse of a nation or “empire” looks like. Modern day Americans have never experienced this type of event, only peripheral crises and crashes. Thanks to Hollywood, many in the public are under the delusion that a collapse is an overnight affair. They think that such a thing is impossible in their lifetimes, and if it did happen, it would happen as it does in the movies – They would simply wake up one morning and find the world on fire. Historically speaking, this is not how it works. The collapse of an empire is a process, not an event.

This is not to say that there are not moments of shock and awe; there certainly are. As we witnessed during the Great Depression, or in 2008, the system can only be propped up artificially for so long before the bubble pops. In past instances of central bank intervention, the window for manipulation is around ten years between events, give or take a couple of years. For the average person, a decade might seem like a long time. For the banking elites behind the degradation of our society and economy, a decade is a blink of an eye.

In the meantime, danger signals abound as those analysts aware of the situation try to warn the populace of the underlying decay of the system and where it will inevitably lead. Economists like Ludwig Von Mises foresaw the collapse of the German Mark and predicted the Great Depression; almost no one listened until it was too late. Multiple alternative economists predicted the credit crisis and derivatives crash of 2008; and almost no one listened until it was too late. People refused to listen because their normalcy bias took control of their ability to reason and accept the facts in front of them.

There are a number factors that cause mass blindness to economic and social reality. First and foremost, establishment elites deliberately create the illusion of prosperity by rigging economic data to the upside. In almost every case of economic crisis or geopolitical disaster, the public is conditioned to believe they are in the midst of a financial “boom” or era of “peace”. They are encouraged to ignore fundamental warning signs in favor of foolish faith in the system. Those people that try to break the apathy and expose the truth are called “chicken little” and “doom monger”.

In the minds of the cheerful lemmings a “collapse” is something very obvious; they think they would know it when they saw it. It’s like trying to teach a blind person about colors; it’s not impossible, but it’s very difficult to get all these Helen Kellers to understand that what they perceive is not the whole reality. There’s a vast world hidden from them and they have no concept of how to observe it.

Crash events are like stages in the process of collapse; they create moments of clarity for the blind. However, they are also often engineered to benefit the establishment. There’s a reason why the elites put so much energy into hiding the real data on the state of the economy, and it’s not because they are trying to keep the system from faltering by using sheer public ignorance. Rather, a crash event is a tool, a means to an end. As Congressman Charles Lindbergh Sr. warned after the panic of 1920:

“Under the Federal Reserve Act, panics are scientifically created; the present panic is the first scientifically created one, worked out as we figure a mathematical problem…”

Central bankers and their cohorts manipulate economic data and promote the false notion of a boom before almost every major crash because they WANT to ambush the populace. They WANT to create panic, and then use it to their advantage as they rebuild and mutate the system into something unrecognizable only decades ago. Each consecutive crash contributes to the collapse of the whole, until eventually the society we once had is barely a distant memory.

This process can take decades, and the US has been subject to it for quite some time now. Once again in 2019 we are seeing the lie of an “economic boom” being perpetuated in the mainstream. The public was growing too aware of the danger and had to be subdued. More specifically, conservatives were growing too aware. The sad thing is that the boom propaganda is most prominent today among conservatives, who are desperately trying to ignore the fundamentals in an attempt to defend the Trump Administration.

The same people who were pointing out the economic bubble under Obama are now denying its existence under Trump. Trump himself argued that the markets were a dangerous economic fraud created by the Federal Reserve during his campaign, yet once he was in office he flip-flopped and started taking full credit for the bubble. What is mind-boggling to me is that many people, even in the liberty movement, still choose to dismiss this behavior in favor of worshiping Trump as some kind of hero on a white horse.

This only reinforces my theory that the system is due for another major engineered crash event, and that the ongoing collapse of the US is soon to accelerate. Each case of economic calamity in modern history was preceded by peak delusional optimism and peak greed. When the people traditionally most vigilant against crisis suddenly capitulate and claim victory, this is when reality strikes hardest. This is when the establishment triggers yet another controlled demolition.

In order to determine how long an empire will last, one has to take into account the agenda of the elites that control its institutions. As long as they are in key positions of power within the system and as long as they can inject their own puppet politicians, they will have the ability to influence the collapse timeline of that system.

Can they prolong and stave off crisis? Yes, for a short while. However, once the machine of a crash has been set in motion the best they can do is slow down the Titanic; they cannot change its path towards the iceberg. And frankly, at this point why would they? I hear it argued often that the elites are going to “keep the plates spinning” on the economy and that they don’t want to lose their “golden goose” in the US economy. This reveals a naivety among skeptics of the true agenda.

Firstly, the elites have a highly useful political puppet in the form of Donald Trump; he is useful in that he inspires sharp national division, and, he is a self proclaimed conservative champion and nationalist. If the elites did not trigger a crash under Trump, then this would give the public the impression that conservative ideals and national sovereignty works. This is the opposite of what they want. Why would globalists that want the erasure of nation states and the creation of a centralized socialist “Utopia” seek to make conservatives and nationalists look good? Well, they wouldn’t.

The only concern of the banks is that they do not take the blame as their engineered collapse of the old world order hits the public with increasingly painful consequences. These consequences are already becoming visible.

The next major crash has begun in the form of plunging fundamentals, and far too many conservatives are placing their heads in the sand for the selfish sake of proving the political left wrong. Declines in US manufacturing, US freight, global exports and imports, mass closures in US retail, as well as all time highs in consumer debt, corporate debt and national debt are being shrugged off and rationalized as nothing more than “hiccups” in an otherwise booming economy. The Fed’s repo market purchases, barely keeping up with demand from liquidity starved corporations are also not being taken seriously.

Conservatives and analysts are going to have to forget about supporting Trump, a Rothschild owned proxy, and start acknowledging reality once again. The only question now is, will the elites allow the crash to spread further into mainstreet and strike markets before or after the 2020 election?

As noted above, to predict the timing of a collapse in a nation or empire, one has to examine the agendas of the elites that dominate its institutions. We can gain some sense of timing from the public admissions of globalist organizations like the IMF and the UN. Each has announced the year 2030 as a target date for the finalization of globalization, a cashless society and sustainability goals. This means that the elites have around ten years to create a crisis and then “solve” that crisis with globalism.

Ten years is a narrow window, and if the elites intend for conservatives to take the blame for the next crash, they will have to initiate it soon. They may not have a choice anyway, as the chain of dominoes was already been set in motion by the Fed in 2018 with its liquidity tightening policies.

We can also gauge timing of a collapse to a point by understanding the common tactics the establishment uses to hide what they are doing.  Generally, when a collapse is about to accelerate the elites use crisis events as cover to distract the public and produce scapegoats.  In my article ‘Globalists Only Need One More Major Event To Finish Sabotaging The Economy’, I outlined three potential distractions that could be used in the near term, and if any of these events took place, then people should watch for the collapse to move faster.  Two of these events now appear imminent:  The first being a war with Iran, and the second being a ‘No Deal’ Brexit.

Finally, we can take into account the globalist need for a scapegoat, and it appears that conservatives and nationalists are their target for blame.  This leaves less than one year for a crisis event if Trump is intended to leave the White House in 2020, or less than four years if he is intended to stay in for a second term.  Keep in mind that A LOT can happen in a single year, and a second Trump term is certainly not guaranteed yet.

But why create a collapse in the first place?  Crash events allow the establishment to consolidate control over hard assets as poverty forces the population to sell what they have to survive. This poverty also creates fear, which makes the public malleable and easier to control. Each new crisis opens doors to political and social changes, changes which end in less freedom and more centralization. Collapse is a succession of crashes leading to a complete erasure of the original society. It’s not a Mad Max event, it’s a hidden and insidious cancer that takes over the national body and warps it into a wretched form.  The collapse is complete when the nation either breaks apart, or is so damaged for so long that no one can remember what it used to look like.

What we are witnessing today is the beginning of a new crash, and the final phases of a collapse of our way of life. The economic boom narrative among conservatives is a farce designed to trick us into complacency. The bubble that we warned about under the Obama Administration has been popped under the Trump Administration. Nothing has changed in the ten years since the 2008 crash except that the motivation for keeping the crash hidden is quickly disappearing.

Crashes are inevitable, but collapse is only possible when the public remains unprepared. Our civilization and its values are under attack, but they can only be destroyed if we stay apathetic to the threat and refuse to prepare for their defense.  We must adopt a philosophy of decentralization.  We need localized and self-sufficient economies, as well as a return to localized production.  Beyond that, we have to prepare for the eventuality of a fight.  The fate of the US economy has already been sealed, but the people who are destroying it can still be stopped before they use the collapse to force society into subservience.  We have to offer security, we have to offer alternatives to the “new world order” and we have to remove the globalist threat permanently.

Make no mistake, we are living in the midst of an epoch moment; the outcome of collapse depends on us and our reactions. This is not the task of the next generation, it is a task for our generation. We do not have another couple of decades to take the danger seriously. The plates are not spinning, they have already dropped.

*  *  *

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The Faux Generosity of the Super-Wealthy: Why Bill Gates is a Menace to Society

AN AMERICAN OLIGARCH

BernieSanders

If you had a couple billion dollars, you could announce your candidacy for president and be taken seriously, even if you were the dumbest person on Earth.

Billionaires should not be able to buy our elections and we’re going to change that.

The Faux Generosity of the Super-Wealthy: Why Bill Gates is a Menace to Society

Let us stop glorifying these greedy scumbags. They need mental health assistance more than your sympathy. By the way, gates did not invent anything, he was given the golden egg by the NSA. 

As former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee said, “Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.”

mintpressnews.com

by Alan Macleod

December 06th, 2019

If Gates represents a net negative force in world politics, why does he receive such good press? For starters, he makes sizeable donations to a host of mainstream corporate media outlets.

Last month Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates surpassed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to once again become the world’s richest individual, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Buoyed by an enormous 48 percent increase in Microsoft’s share price this year, Gates has retaken the title he last held in 2017.

That outcome is partially owed to the whims of Donald J. Trump. Microsoft recently surprisingly defeated Amazon’s bid for an extremely lucrative $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract that sees the company instantly become one of the world’s most important military and security contractors. This decision, Amazon alleges, was due to interference from the president who holds a personal grudge against Bezos, whose Washington Post has maintained a campaign of “resistance” against him.

Gates was also recently in the news attacking the wealth tax that Democratic presidential nomination candidates Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have proposed. “I’m all for super-progressive tax systems but when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to do a little math about what I have left over,” the Seattle native said. (For the record, he would still have over $6 billion).
In response, Warren was apologetic, asking for an opportunity to meet with Gates to explain how much he would pay under the plan. “I promise it’s not $100 billion,” she said. But Sanders has been far more forthright in his opposition to the super-wealthy, categorically stating, “billionaires should not exist.”

Bernie Sanders

✔@BernieSanders

If you had a couple billion dollars, you could announce your candidacy for president and be taken seriously, even if you were the dumbest person on Earth.

Billionaires should not be able to buy our elections and we’re going to change that.

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Across the media, Gates is presented as one of the “good billionaires”: a warm-hearted philanthropist dedicated to giving away his entire fortune to needy causes. His charitable organization, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is the largest of its sort in the world, holding over $50 billion in assets. His insight and generosity are constantly emphasized in headlines, as the following examples demonstrate.

“Bill Gates: Philanthropist,” BBC, (2/1/10).

“Why Bill Gates Thinks Ending Polio Is Worth It,” NPR, (5/8/13).

“How Bill Gates aims to Clean Up the Planet,” The Guardian, (2/4/18).

“What Einstein and Bill Gates Teach Us About Time Travel,” NBC News, (5/10/17).

“Bill Gates And Other Billionaires Pledge To Take On Climate Change,” NPR, (11/30/15).

“Bill Gates on ending disease, saving lives: ‘Time is on our side,’” Al-Jazeera, (4/27/19).

“Bill Gates gives $4.6bn to charity in biggest donation since 2000,” The Guardian, (8/15/17).

There are a few problems with that narrative. Firstly, if Gates is so committed to giving his money away, why does he keep getting richer? This is not a trivial question: his net worth has increased from $75 billion in March 2016 to a staggering $106 billion today, according to Forbes Magazine, an over 40 percent increase in three years alone.

Lee Camp, a political comedian who covers topics like rampant inequality on his show, Redacted Tonight, told MintPress News:

It is a sickness of our system that billionaires even exist. The UN estimates it would take 30 billion dollars to end world hunger per year. Gates or Bezos could end world hunger for multiple years. We can’t even comprehend that level of wealth. It’s sociopathic. So I’m not saying Gates doesn’t do good things sometimes, but he should not be viewed as a hero. All billionaires should be viewed as sick in the head. They need mental health professionals to work on them before it’s too late for humankind.”

Linsey McGoey, Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex, UK, and author of No Such Thing as a Free Gift: The Gates Foundation and the Price of Philanthropy, is profoundly skeptical of philanthropy as a whole, claiming it can actually sometimes harm democracy in the long run: “Philanthropy can and is being used deliberately to divert attention away from different forms of economic exploitation that underpin global inequality today” she told MintPress News,

The new ‘philanthrocapitalism’ threatens democracy by increasing the power of the corporate sector at the expense of the public sector organizations, which increasingly face budget squeezes, in part by excessively remunerating for-profit organizations to deliver public services that could be delivered more cheaply without private sector involvement.”

Thus, huge donations give Gates enormous power over the education, health and social policies of entire countries.

 

Where do Bill’s billions go?

As Foreign Affairs noted, “few policy initiatives or normative standards set by the World Health Organization are announced before they have been casually, unofficially vetted by Gates Foundation staff.” In this sense, his wealth is extraordinarily anti-democratic, giving him veto power over the decisions and directions of organizations that should be collectively made by the highest representatives of the world’s population, not by one very rich man. And Gates is far from omnipotent, holding many of the patronizing assumptions about developing countries and how best to organize the world that one would expect a rich American tech geek to hold.

McGoey spells out the problem with this corporate attitude to development:

The Gates Foundation has spent twenty years relentlessly championing ‘business solutions’ to inequality and poverty. Through this corporate approach, Mr. Gates personally and the Gates Foundation more generally have enhanced the power and clout of corporations at every level of decision-making, at the regional, national and international level. The Gates Foundation has helped make philanthropy a handmaiden to corporate power rather than helped to empower the non-profit sector to act as a check on corporate profiteering and abuses of power.”

Bill Gates just surpassed Jeff Bezos as the richest person on Earth, with a net worth of $110 billion.

I struggled to imagine this huge number, so I animated some bar graphs that put it in proportion with other points of reference. The scale is quite stark. pic.twitter.com/uteU9h72fC

— bog witch 🌞 (@betty__cam) November 19, 2019

One example of the Foundation enhancing corporate power is its close relationship with highly controversial pharmaceutical and chemical giant Monsanto Corporation, whom it helped gain a stronger foothold in Africa. It also oversaw a flawed clinical trial of the HPV vaccine in India in 2009, where 23,000 impoverished girls aged 9-15 were exposed to potentially lethal drugs without even their parents’ consent, leading to seven deaths. He is also preoccupied with controlling Africa’s population through family planning, fearing a population boom. As such, he appears almost more interested in eliminating the people who are suffering than the source of the suffering itself.

Gates is also one of the most important individuals leading the assault on the American public education network in the form of charter schools. Charter schools effectively privatize the public school system, where the public continues to foot the bill for the school, but has no influence or say in how it is run. They have not been found to increase test scores, but are very popular with both the private sector and the religious right, whereas the vast majority of unionized public school teachers oppose them. But, as the Associated Press stated, there is “no bigger champion [of charter schools] than Bill Gates,” who has plowed enormous amounts of money into the movement, even funding the pro-charter school documentary Waiting For Superman.

 

Buying power and influence

If Gates represents a net negative force in world politics, why does he receive such good press? One reason may be his sizeable donations to a host of mainstream corporate media outlets. For example, the Gates Foundation underwrites the entire Global Development section of the Guardian, and has given the British newspaper over $9 million. Studying its donation database, it transpires it has also contributed over $3 million to NBC Universal, over $4 million to the influential French newspaper, Le Monde, over $4.5 million to NPR, $1 million to Al-Jazeera, and an astonishing $49 million to the BBC’s Media Action program, to name only a few. He who pays the piper, it is said, calls the tune. McGoey claims that the motive of billionaires giving to media organizations is primarily “to help legitimate the spurious idea that large corporate actors can rectify the economic harms and economic inequality that their practices have often compounded.”

Gates himself is the head of a gigantic media empire. We already rely on Microsoft for social media (LinkedIn), entertainment (Xbox), hardware and software like the Windows Phone and Windows OS. The company also owns stakes in media giants like Comcast and AT&T. And the “MS” in “MSNBC” stands for “Microsoft.”

Bill Gates, second left, poses with Hollywood studio execs in March 1995 ahead of the unveiling of cable TV channel MSNBC. Dave Weaver | AP

It is a similar story for Jeff Bezos, who, in addition to Amazon’s myriad media ventures, owns the Washington Post, which media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has constantly shown often descends into little more than a propaganda outlet for its boss’s interests. It appears that once billionaires have purchased every worldly material good possible, the only things left to buy are power and influence.

While the media may be full of stories singing Gates’ praises, presenting him as a good billionaire (as opposed to the current president), the reality is that one man with that amount of power, be it political (like Trump) or economic (like Gates and Bezos) has a highly corrosive effect on democracy and society more generally.

While they are portrayed as visionaries, multi-billionaires are often blinkered in other, very important ways. Just as reports about Amazon workers’ poor pay and shocking working conditions were surfacing, Bezos declared that the only way he could see to spend the financial resources he accrued was to explore the solar system and beyond. Sharing the profit with his beleaguered workforce appears to genuinely not have occurred to him.

If we are to move towards a better society, the philanthropy of the super-wealthy must be scrutinized, as all too often, what appears to be a generous gift is actually a calculated action intended to increase their power, image or influence. As former British Prime Minister Clement Attlee said, “Charity is a cold grey loveless thing. If a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.” Bill Gates is not just some rich guy who is unsure about paying more tax: he’s a menace to society.

Feature photo | Former Microsoft CEO and co-founder Bill Gates attends the World Health Summit & Grand Challenges Annual Meeting in Berlin, Oct. 16, 2018. Markus Schreiber | AP

Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting was published in April.

The Only Truly Civilized People are Anti-War

The Only Truly Civilized People Are Anti-War

lewrockwell.com

By Gary D. Barnett

December 5, 2019

“What is left after war is silence: The silence of the death; the silence of the debris; the silence of the birds! After war even the screams of sadness are silent because the pain is in the very depths of the soul!”  ~ Mehmet Murat ildan

Justification for war has taken many paths. All those paths were tainted and immoral, and all those paths led only to death and destruction. There is never a need for war; there is only a want for war. This hard fact is very disturbing to those who have been manipulated through fear to not only support and accept war, but to embrace the very concept of national pride and aggression. This I believe exposes the major failing of man, as the killing of others is also the killing of the human soul.

War knows no bounds. It is indiscriminate in its brutality, in its scope, and in its torturous methods. It matters not who are the victims, whether men, women, children, entire families, communities, or the flora and fauna of nature. It breeds massive suffering, famine, death, and homelessness, and leaves only stark landscapes filled with the lifeless bodies of rotting flesh. It is literally the curse of mankind.

If war were waged in order to solve a legitimate local threat due to an active attack on our soil, it would be self-defense, not war, and would have to end immediately once that threat was squelched. Any force evident after the immediate threat subsided, would be nothing more than pure aggression, and therefore criminal and immoral. Considering that all U.S. wars since the inception of this country have never been due to any direct attack on the mainland, and therefore not self-defense, the entirety of U.S. war history has been one of only barbarous invasion. This is a difficult truth to accept, but until accepted by the masses, war will be unending, and intensely perilous to civilization.

The idea of war is not normally one of the people at large, unless that idea is planted in their psyche due to the trickery of the controlling class. This is normally accomplished by fomenting fear among the common citizenry due to the creation of false-flag strategies of terror meant to cause alarm. Heavy mainstream media propaganda is used to spread lies about alleged monsters from afar. The state can create an enemy simply by false claims and accusations about everything from unfair trade, non-existent weapons production, charges of human rights abuses, and a myriad of other reasons that can lead to regime change operations through aggressive measures. Natural human emotions are easy to stoke, and the general populace is often fooled into a false sense of rage that turns into acceptance of heinous acts carried out by the state.

Elite controllers and the puppet political class seek war in order to gain support in times of popular dissent or disapproval. They seek war to support the banking and corporate class for monetary gain. They seek war to gain territory, whether by actual possession or in order to take geopolitical control. They seek war to steal the natural resources of other countries, and in the process exploit the people for their own gain. And in all cases, mortal invasion by these warmongers is meant to expand empire. Currently, especially considering the U.S., this seems to be a primary factor, as the future of war appears to be in large part based on a global consolidation of power by a select group of oligarchs mainly outside the political arena, but in concert with them.

Many refer to this plot as the creation of a “New World Order,” including some of those responsible for orchestrating this coup. In fact, this seems to be the desired and planned agenda of the fascist oligarchs. Of course, this is almost always attributed by the mainstream to “conspiracy theory,” but then that gives credence to my assertion, as those who scream “conspiracy theory,” a term coined purposely by the CIA, are normally trying to eliminate or marginalize the truth tellers. Actually, the globalization of the politics of control is now in the advanced stage, so a conspiracy is already evident, and is not theory.

It is crucial to understand that war is always about money, power, and control. Without ever being directly threatened or having its mainland attacked, the United States has been at war 93% of its entire existence. How could this be possible since there has never been any legitimate reason to defend this country from aggression at home? This should be a stark reminder to the bourgeoisie who in the past were fooled into supporting state murder, to rethink their undying support for the criminal and murderous policies advanced by this nation-state called America.

There have been plenty of bad people and bad regimes, and countries that have a history of committing heinous acts of war in the past. There is any number of brutal dictators, tyrants, and evil politicians in this world, all with control over military might. But none have ever reached the level of death, destruction, and military presence as the U.S. Empire. This is not pleasant to hear, but it is the truth. With that knowledge, it is time for Americans to stop the terror and murderous wars committed by their own country, because this country is the world leader in violence. It is unethical to condemn the acts of those in other lands when one’s own acts are far more savage and deadly. Common ethics require correcting self before attempting to correct others.

Civilized society requires a peace-loving, anti-war stance. With war, no true civilization exists, as war brings about barbarity, depravity, and inhumanity toward mankind. That is the essence of a cold and heartless society, not one that embraces culture, intellect, art, compassion and enlightenment. Peace and harmony amongst people is the only way to create a civilized society, and one that will sustain and prosper throughout time.

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