Could the focus on HIV testing, especially in combination with the warning of a new HIV strain, be an effort to hide the fact that the COVID jabs are destroying people’s immune function, and possibly promoting HIV infection?
Perhaps. But there’s also another possibility. The same week as Prince Harry’s media appearance and the publication of the new HIV strain, Moderna also announced its launch of a human trial for the world’s first mRNA HIV vaccine. The timing of all of these reports strongly indicate that this is a coordinated PR plan.
When media start raising an issue all at the same time, it’s usually a coordinated campaign directed by a PR company on the behalf of a client. There’s a reason for it, and the reason is to sow a desired narrative in the minds of people. They plant ideas so that when something happens, people are already prepped with certain prejudices or assumptions.
So, what then might be the reason for everyone suddenly talking about AIDS? In December 2021, President Biden announced a White House plan to “end the HIV/AIDS epidemic by 2030.”1 The same exact vow had been announced by the British Health Security Agency a week earlier.2 Even as they seek to dump this pandemic in a shallow grave, they are already prepping the public for the next health scare — AIDS. ~ Off-Guardian
Meanwhile, Prince Harry was out there urging everyone to get an HIV test, and Dutch researchers announced the discovery of a concerning HIV strain. All of this is happening at the same time that COVID is starting to fade out.
As noted by Off-Guardian,3 “just because they’re giving slack on COVID does not mean the agenda behind COVID is gone. Far from it. In fact, even as they seek to dump this pandemic in a shallow grave, they are already prepping the public for the next health scare — AIDS.”
Prince Harry Urges Everyone to Get Tested for HIV
In recent weeks, Prince Harry has been making the rounds urging people to get an HIV test. According to a February 10, 2022, report by the BBC,4 “the Duke of Sussex … wants to continue his mum’s ‘unfinished’ work in removing the stigma around the virus.”
Prince Harry has pointed out that during the last two years, HIV testing among heterosexual men and women in the U.K. has dropped by 33%, compared to just 7% lower testing rates among gays and bisexuals. At the same time, AIDS diagnoses among heterosexuals are outpacing those among gays for the first time in a decade.5
Similarly, a February 9, 2022, opinion piece by Ian Green, chief executive of the Terrence Higgins Trust (a British charity that provides HIV-related services), in The Guardian highlighted the need for a “new strategy” to combat HIV. “Continuing to solely target those traditionally most at risk won’t work,” he said. The answer, according to Green, is more widespread testing of all people, regardless of preconceived assumptions about risk.
New, More Infectious HIV Variant Discovered
While Prince Harry’s fame is milked for all it’s worth to get people to start thinking about getting HIV-tested, the discovery of a new HIV variant in The Netherlands has also been announced.6 Is that a coincidence?
According to researchers, this mutated HIV virus, dubbed the VB variant, is more infectious and causes more severe illness, twice as fast. As of early February 2022, there were 109 known cases of the VB variant in The Netherlands. Curiously, scientists said the variant had been circulating for decades. As reported by NPR, February 4, 2022:7
“They discovered a total of 109 people who had this particular variant and never knew it, dating all the way back to 1992. The variant probably emerged in the late ’80s … picking up steam around 2000 and then eventually slowing down around 2010.
People with this variant have a viral load that is three to four times higher than usual for those with HIV. This characteristic means the virus progresses into serious illness twice as fast — and also makes it more contagious …
There’s no need to develop special treatments for this variant … It shows no signs at all of resisting medications, as some HIV variants do. But because the variant moves quickly, people need to receive medicine as fast as possible.”
Researchers said they also observed a large rise in viral load in individuals with this variant by a 3.5 to 5.5 point increase. What this means is that infected persons could develop AIDS faster without immediate treatment; which could explain the sudden call for mass testing, They wrote:8
“By the time they were diagnosed, these individuals were vulnerable to developing AIDS within 2 to 3 years … Without treatment, advanced HIV — CD4 cell counts below 350 cells per cubic millimeter, with long-term clinical consequences — is expected to be reached, on average, 9 months after diagnosis for individuals in their thirties with this variant.”
Several member states contribute nothing to America’s security and would be impossible to defend from Russian attack regardless. President Biden can allow Europe to oversee its own defenses as he exits the Cold War-era alliance, and forge a new path with the world’s second-largest nuclear power.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has agreed to recognize two break-off republics in eastern Ukraine as independent states, stoking cries of horror and condemnation from the Western keepers of the ‘rules-based international order.’
The Russian legislature passed a bill last week calling on Putin to recognize the ‘People’s Republics’ of Donetsk and Luhansk, which each declared secession from Ukraine following a U.S.-sponsored coup there in 2014. While the Kremlin initially dismissed the idea, saying the move would run afoul of ceasefire agreements struck in Minsk, the president reversed course on Monday following appeals from leaders of the break-away states. He later deployed soldiers for a peacekeeping mission in the war-torn region, where fighting between Kiev and separatist forces has sharply escalated in recent days.
Moscow’s decision to recognize the republics—which have now operated outside Kiev’s control for some seven years—was met with predictable outrage from Western officials. The U.S. State Department dubbed the move a “clear attack on Ukraine’s sovereignty,” comments echoed by the United Nations, the European Union and the NATO military alliance. The EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borell, meanwhile, has accused Russia of a “determined effort to redefine the multilateral order” established in the wake of the Second World War.
Proponents of that post-war system have long maintained that it has kept the peace over the last 80 years. A key tenet of the global order states that borders drawn after WWII must remain set in stone, and Russia’s seizure of the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and its earlier recognition of South Ossetia have been cited as major destabilizing actions. Its move in the Donbas will almost certainly be added to the list.
However, coming from a group of nations that have spent the better part of the last century shaping the world as they saw fit—ranging from national partitions and redrawn borders to invasions and regime-change operations—the vocal condemnations of Russia ring slightly hypocritical.
Israel stands as a prime example of the double-standards at work. Since its creation by a United Nations partition scheme in what was formally Palestine, the U.S. has given Israel over $100 billion in aid—all as the regime in Tel Aviv grabs Arab land and terrorizes the civilians who live on it. Israel’s decades-long project of occupation and dispossession has created millions of refugees, as well as a system of “apartheid,” according to world bodies like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International.
Additionally, under President Donald Trump, Washington recognized Israel’s claim to the Golan Heights—territory seized from Syria decades ago during the 1967 Six Day War and later formally annexed. Despite presenting himself as a fair critic of Tel Aviv, Joe Biden has since affirmed his predecessor’s decision regarding the Golan.
Biden has also continued U.S. support for Morocco’s land-grab in the disputed Western Sahara. To coax the country to sign a normalization deal with Israel (and help his 2020 reelection bid), Trump agreed to recognize Morocco’s claim to the area, though its inhabitants consider it an independent territory. Despite Morocco’s brutal occupation of the region—including “widespread arrests, the torture of dissidents, and violent suppression of peaceful protests,” according to journalist Stephen Zunes—the Biden administration refuses to reverse course.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, moreover, Washington backed the partitioning of Sudan and helped bring a new state into existence, installing a cowboy hat-wearing war criminal to run the newly created South Sudan. The U.S. government’s own estimates suggest some 400,000 people have been killed throughout Sudan’s civil war, which continues to this day alongside brutal acts of ethnic cleansing.
While nowhere near an exhaustive list, the cases above suggest the West’s commitment to its own ‘liberal world order’ is paper-thin, with its transgressions often far more extensive and bloody than any of Russia’s actions in Ukraine or South Ossetia.
The Ukrainian example offers a unique comparison of the American and Russian approaches to foreign policy. The U.S.-sponsored coup in Kiev empowered neo-Nazi militias and ultra-nationalist factions to oust a leader more friendly to Russia, with the newly installed government immediately launching a ‘War on Terror’ against Russian-speaking separatists in the Donbas. The civil war has dragged on for years, claiming up to 15,000 lives.
At the same time, Russia’s seizure of the Crimea—historically a Russian territory—was done largely without bloodshed, and residents later voted in a referendum to support the move. As the United States hands Kiev hundreds of millions in “lethal aid” to wage its war, helping to decimate infrastructure in the Donbas, Moscow has poured billions of investment dollars into Crimea.
While annexations and other territorial meddling often lead to violence, America’s regime-change wars have proven to be the most significant breaches of world peace over the past three decades. Ahead of the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, then-Senator Joe Biden played a key role in helping President George W. Bush topple Saddam Hussein. The ensuing violence has killed over one million Iraqis, according to some estimates, while the blowback from the war played a significant role in stoking conflict in Libya and Syria, where hundreds of thousands more have died of violence and deprivation.
Though countless pundits in the U.S. foreign policy establishment have placed sole blame on Russia for the ongoing war in Syria, it was Washington, not Moscow, that armed, trained and equipped many of the jihadist groups driving the violence there. Under Obama’s CIA, ‘Operation Timber Sycamore’ handed hundreds of millions in weapons and gear to Salafist groups seeking to overthrow Bashar al-Assad, with some even making its way to the likes of the Islamic State.
Currently, NATO member Turkey supports what remains of Syria’s jihadist-led ‘moderate opposition,’ while the United States continues to illegally occupy one-third of the country alongside Kurdish proxy forces. America’s closest ally in the region, Israel, also conducts regular air raids on Syrian government positions, with former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu acknowledging “hundreds” of offensive operations over the years.
For American leaders, however, it is Russia that is “disrupting the world order” and “destroying democracies”—in the words of Senator Lindsay Graham following Putin’s decision to recognize the Ukrainian break-off states.
When it comes to thugs like Putin disrupting world order and destroying democracies – enough is enough.
The ‘world order’ challenged by Putin is not intended to preserve international peace, but rather retain the United States as the world’s sole superpower, able to extend its reach from the former USSR to the South China Sea and beyond. With its move in the Donbas, Russia has made it known that the West does not determine the destiny of the entire developed world, insisting on a multi-polar model in which Washington must cooperate with, and not merely dictate to, other powers.
Biden now faces a tough reality. America is overextended and has squandered any credibility it may have once had with an endless series of catastrophic interventions with nothing to show for it. The current administration’s laundry list of foreign policy objectives includes confronting China and Russia, denuclearizing North Korea, containing Iran, overthrowing Venezuela’s Maduro and Syria’s Assad, as well as driving the development of Africa in a direction friendly to the West.
Given Putin’s action in the Donbas, the standard foreign policy playbook calls to bring heavy sanctions on Russia and make the country an international pariah. However, that gambit has already been tried and failed. In 2014, the response to the seizure of Crimea was to drown Russia in sanctions—said to be the most extensive penalties against the country since the fall of the USSR—yet, eight years later, Crimea remains firmly held Russian territory.
In a speech Tuesday, the 79-year-old president announced new sanctions and troop deployments. While Biden did not shut the door on diplomacy, his unwillingness to take a new approach ensures further tensions with Russia over Ukraine.
In recent weeks, Biden has acknowledged that U.S. forces will not fight to defend Ukrainian soil, and sanctions on Europe’s top energy exporter and a major trade partner could wreak havoc on Western economies. Instead, approaching Putin to reestablish the three bilateral arms control pacts abandoned by previous U.S. administrations would be a good place to start in reviving the U.S.-Russia relationship. Further common ground, and indeed a full retrenchment of American policy, may then follow.
Though he will face charges of ‘weakness’ typically hurled at Democratic presidents, Biden should also make clear that NATO has become the kind of entangling alliance our founders warned about. Several member states contribute nothing to America’s security and would be impossible to defend from Russian attack regardless. President Biden can allow Europe to oversee its own defenses as he exits the Cold War-era alliance, and forge a new path with the world’s second-largest nuclear power.
By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997 – “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” – the expansion was already happening.
As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”
Fifty-nine years ago, Bob Dylan recorded “With God on Our Side.” You probably haven’t heard it on the radio for a very long time, if ever, but right now you could listen to it as his most evergreen of topical songs:
I’ve learned to hate the Russians All through my whole life If another war comes It’s them we must fight To hate them and fear them To run and to hide And accept it all bravely With God on my side
In recent days, media coverage of a possible summit between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin has taken on almost wistful qualities, as though the horsemen of the apocalypse are already out of the barn.
Fatalism is easy for the laptop warriors and blow-dried studio pundits who keep insisting on the need to get tough with “the Russians,” by which they mean the Russian government. Actual people who suffer and die in war easily become faraway abstractions. “And you never ask questions / When God’s on your side.”
During the last six decades, the religiosity of U.S. militarism has faded into a more generalized set of assumptions – shared, in the current crisis, across traditional political spectrums. Ignorance about NATO’s history feeds into the good vs. evil bromides that are so easy to ingest and internalize.
On Capitol Hill, it’s hard to find a single member of Congress willing to call NATO what it has long been: an alliance for war (Kosovo, Afghanistan, Libya) with virtually nothing to do with “defense” other than the defense of vast weapons sales and, at times, even fantasies of regime change in Russia.
The reverence and adulation gushing from the Capitol and corporate media (including NPR and PBS) toward NATO and its US leadership are wonders of thinly veiled jingoism. About other societies, reviled ones, we would hear labels like “propaganda.” Here the supposed truisms are laundered and flat-ironed as common sense.
Glimmers of inconvenient truth have flickered only rarely in mainstream US media outlets, while a bit more likely in Europe. “Biden has said repeatedly that the US is open to diplomacy with Russia, but on the issue that Moscow has most emphasized – NATO enlargement – there has been no American diplomacy at all,” Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Financial Times as this week began. “Putin has repeatedly demanded that the US forswear NATO’s enlargement into Ukraine, while Biden has repeatedly asserted that membership of the alliance is Ukraine’s choice.”
As Sachs noted, “Many insist that NATO enlargement is not the real issue for Putin and that he wants to recreate the Russian empire, pure and simple. Everything else, including NATO enlargement, they claim, is a mere distraction. This is utterly mistaken. Russia has adamantly opposed NATO expansion towards the east for 30 years, first under Boris Yeltsin and now Putin…. Neither the US nor Russia wants the other’s military on their doorstep. Pledging no NATO enlargement is not appeasement. It does not cede Ukrainian territory. It does not undermine Ukraine’s sovereignty.”
Whether or not they know much about such history, the USA’s media elites and members of Congress don’t seem to care about it. Red-white-and-blue chauvinism is running wild. Yet there are real diplomatic alternatives to the collision course for war.
Speaking Monday on Democracy Now, Katrina vanden Heuvel – editorial director of The Nation and a longtime Russia expert – said that implementing the Minsk accords could be a path toward peace in Ukraine. Also, she pointed out, “there is talk now not just of the NATO issue, which is so key, but also a new security architecture in Europe.”
Desperately needed is a new European security framework, to demilitarize and defuse conflicts between Russia and US allies. But the same approach that for three decades pushed to expand NATO to Russia’s borders is now gung-ho to keep upping the ante, no matter how much doing so increases the chances of a direct clash between the world’s two nuclear-weapons superpowers.
The last US ambassador to the Soviet Union before it collapsed, Jack Matlock, wrote last week: “Since President Putin’s major demand is an assurance that NATO will take no further members, and specifically not Ukraine or Georgia, obviously there would have been no basis for the present crisis if there had been no expansion of the alliance following the end of the Cold War, or if the expansion had occurred in harmony with building a security structure in Europe that included Russia.”
But excluding Russia from security structures, while encircling it with armed-to-the-teeth adversaries, was a clear goal of NATO’s expansion. Less obvious was the realized goal of turning Eastern European nations into customers for vast arms sales.
A gripping chapter in “The Spoils of War,” a new book by Andrew Cockburn, spells out the mega-corporate zeal behind the massive campaigns to expand NATO beginning in the 1990s. Huge Pentagon contractors like Lockheed Martin were downcast about the dissolution of the USSR and feared that military sales would keep slumping. But there were some potential big new markets on the horizon.
“One especially promising market was among the former members of the defunct Warsaw Pact,” Cockburn wrote. “Were they to join NATO, they would be natural customers for products such as the F-16 fighter that Lockheed had inherited from General Dynamics. There was one minor impediment: the [George H. W.] Bush administration had already promised Moscow that NATO would not move east, a pledge that was part of the settlement ending the Cold War.”
By the time legendary foreign-policy sage George F. Kennan issued his unequivocal warning in 1997 – “expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the post-Cold War era” – the expansion was already happening.
As Cockburn notes, “By 2014, the 12 new members had purchased close to $17 billion worth of American weapons.”
If you think those weapons transactions were about keeping up with the Russians, you’ve been trusting way too much US corporate media. “As of late 2020,” Cockburn’s book explains, NATO’s collective military spending “had hit $1.03 trillion, or roughly 20 times Russia’s military budget.”
Let’s leave the last words here to Bob Dylan, from another song that isn’t on radio playlists. “Masters of War.”
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could?
Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction.org and the author of a dozen books including Made Love, Got War: Close Encounters with America’s Warfare State, published this year in a new edition as a free e-book. His other books include War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. He was a Bernie Sanders delegate from California to the 2016 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions. Solomon is the founder and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy.
The Communist Party of Canada approves of the Emergency Powers Act…for the same reason as Trudeau.
This episode was recorded on February 19th, 2022. Rex Murphy joins Dr. Peterson to discuss the most recent actions of Trudeau’s Government, including the arresting of protestors, the freezing of the bank accounts of Canadians suspected of participating in the protests, and the long-term consequences of these extreme measures. Rex is a Canadian commentator and author who deals primarily with Canadian political and social matters. He is best known for working on and for CBC Here and Now, CBC Radio 1’s Cross Country Checkup, writing for The Globe and Mail, and writing for The National Post. He is a well-recognized and loved figure.
As I reported a week or two ago, the vaccine passport systems in various American cities
Since the last time I wrote, the system in Boston has also been removed. That holds special significance for me. I could not bear to see the city of my youth placed under those useless, cruel, and unscientific orders.
Here’s a chart you can try to stump your friends with.
These are two neighboring counties in California: Los Angeles County, which has a widespread vaccine passport system, and Orange County, which has no passport system at all.
These people live right next to each other. It’s a perfect test.
We are told that the shots are supposed to reduce hospitalizations. So let’s have a look.
Hospitalizations in Los Angeles County vs. hospitalizations in Orange County.
There had better be a huge difference in Los Angeles County’s favor to justify all this.
And yet….
And yet.
Here is the chart, generated from covidactnow dot org:
I haven’t labeled the counties. Can you tell them apart?
Can your friends?
Shouldn’t they be able to?
The answer almost doesn’t matter, since the curves for the two places are essentially indistinguishable. But if you’re really curious, I’ll tell you that the blue line, which is slightly worse, is Los Angeles County, the place with county-mandated vaccine requirements to participate in normal life, and the orange line, which is slightly better, is Orange County, which has no such requirements.
They’ve destroyed businesses, torn families apart, turned people’s lives upside down — and it’s all for nothing.
Nothing at all.
I know my good readers will tell me: this has never been about a virus.
If you’ve doubted that, doubt no longer.
It is about compliance and control. The chart speaks for itself.
The same goes for the rest of the alleged mitigation measures. There’s no evidence masking children (or anyone) does anything, and yet they’re going to die on the hill of keeping masks on kids.
What are masks doing to little children who are still learning language and human communication in general?
As it happens, one of my podcast listeners just designed a product that does something like the opposite of this.
Not only does it not impede children’s mastery of communication, but to the contrary it actually teaches the littlest among them — toddlers and even infants — language, math, and reading.
We know it’s much easier to learn a new language from birth than it is to try to learn it later. So instead of building on this principle, our overlords are putting masks on everyone’s faces.
Anyway, I decided to affiliate with this product, because it sure seems as if now is pretty much the most urgent time, in order to counteract the mask weirdness, to enrich the development of the littlest.
Feb 21 – According to numbers released by the US government, consumer prices have increased by 7.5 percent in the past year, the steepest increase since 1982. The actual price increases are even worse than the government numbers suggest, given that the “official” statistics are manipulated to understate the real rate of price increases. According to John Williams of ShadowStats, prices have actually increased by around 15 percent over the past year.
The fact that prices remain at historically high levels shows that inflation is far from “transitory,” as Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell had described it. The continuing inflation has led the Federal Reserve Board to suggest the Fed will start increasing interest rates earlier than previously announced. The Fed may also break with its practice of only raising rates by 25 basis points at a time and increase rates by increments of up to 50 basis points. However, the increases the Fed is discussing would still leave interest rates at historic lows. Thus, such interest rate increases would do little or nothing to ease the pain rising prices cause for average consumers.
Most policy “experts” and politicians, including President Biden, support interest rate increases to deal with inflation. However, some progressives oppose raising rates. Opponents of rate increases fear that increasing interest rates will slow economic growth, increase unemployment, and depress wages. These progressives believe the old fallacy that workers benefit from easy money. The truth is workers are inflation’s main victims.
Workers may see their nominal pay (pay unadjusted for inflation) increase while the Fed-produced price increases cause real wages to plummet. That is certainly the case today. In contrast, the Federal Reserve’s money creation benefits crony capitalists who receive the new money created by the Fed before the injection of new money causes prices to rise. This increases the elite’s purchasing power, furthering income inequality.
The Federal Reserve’s creation of new money does more than erode the value of the currency. It also artificially lowers interest rates, which are the price of money. This distorts the signals sent to market actors, leading to investment decisions that do not reflect the real condition of the market. The result is a temporary boom, followed by a bust. Workers who find new jobs in the boom lose those jobs in the bust. These workers are then not just unemployed. They are also often saddled with unmanageable debt incurred during the low interest rate, easy money phase of the business cycle.
Progressives could help workers by joining the movement for market-based money. Free-market money will be safe from government manipulation, and thus its value will remain stable. A step toward restoring a free-market monetary system is letting the people know the truth about the Federal Reserve by passing Audit the Fed. Another step is legalizing alternative currencies by repealing legal tender laws and ending all capital gains taxes on precious metals and cryptocurrencies. Congress must also begin to cut spending, starting by making major cuts in our 750 billion dollars military budget and ending all corporate welfare.
Fiat money benefits financial and political elites at the expense of working people whose standard of living is eroded by Federal Reserve actions. As a Texas labor leader once told me, “Gold has always been the working man’s friend.” I would add that fiat money is the worker’s foe.
One surmises that all the meshugas over Ukraine was designed as a distraction from the financial disorders now at hand.
But “Joe Biden” needs a big win so he can brag on something in his State of the Union address. His Democratic Party is looking every day more and more like some hell-born spawn of Satan bent on wrecking what’s left of the old USA.
Woo-wee, that was a close call, huh? But remind me: what was the war supposedly about? Protecting Ukraine’s hallowed border? Bwahahahaha…! Borders? We don’t care about no steenkin’ borders (especially our own border). Upholding the sacred honor of NATO? Really? Who exactly would be punished if the US tries to shut down the Nord Stream-2 pipeline that will send much-needed Russian natgas to gasless Germany? (Did you guess our NATO ally, Germany?) Would Germany suddenly discover that the pipeline is none of America’s business? I think so.
Anyway, what’s the beef in Ukraine? Its easternmost Donbas region has rebelled against administration by Kiev. At America’s direction, Kiev harasses the majority ethnic Russian population there with US-made weaponry. Yet Ukraine’s president Zelensky claims he doesn’t want to antagonize Russia, and certainly wants his much-stomped-upon country — the doormat of Europe — to not get stomped-on all over again in any hypothetical war. Ukraine is already an economic basket-case, supported only by CIA-sponsored grifting operations.
Enter Monsieur Macron of France. After two years of antagonizing his countrymen with lockdowns and put-downs, he needs a boost for the national election forthcoming in April. So, he has heroically sued Mr. Putin of Russia for a Ukraine “ceasefire.” Note: the Russians haven’t fired. Anyway, that opened the way for a proposed “summit” meeting between “Joe Biden” and Mr. Putin — when the Russians feel like it. They’re playing it a little coy for the moment, letting the West twist slowly, slowly in the wind. If a summit does happen, what will the two summiteers talk about? Mr. Putin will reiterate that the US and NATO made a solemn promise (in writing) to not expand NATO along Russia’s borderland in 1990 when the Soviet Union fell apart, and y’all reneged on that… and now it stops with Ukraine… really… got it?
One school of thought has it that, although the US has long claimed that it possesses roughly 8,000 tonnes of gold in Fort Knox, there has not been an audit of Fort Knox since 1953. (That’s not encouraging.) Is it 8,000 tonnes? 4,000? None? We’re unlikely to ever get a truthful answer on this question.
In 1971, the US abruptly went off the gold standard, and in making the public announcement, US President Richard Nixon looked into the television camera and said, “We’re all Keynesians now.”
I was a young man at the time and had previously bought gold, albeit on a very small scale, but I recall looking into the face of this delusional man and thinking, “This is not good.”
However, the world at large apparently agreed with Mister Nixon, and within a few years, the other countries also went off the gold standard, which meant that, from that point on, no currency was backed by anything other than a promise.
Party Time
It didn’t take long before countries began playing with their currencies. At one time, the German mark, the French franc, the Italian lire, and the British shilling had all been roughly equivalent in value, and four or five of any one of them was worth about a dollar.
That had already begun to change prior to 1971, but following the decoupling from gold, the governments of the world really began to see the advantages of manipulating their own currencies against the currencies of other nations.
From that point on, a currency note from any country, which was already no more than an “I owe you,” was increasingly degraded to an “I owe you an undetermined and fluctuating amount.”
This fixation with monetary manipulation began much like the 1960s youths’ experimentation with drugs, and by the millennium, had morphed into something more akin to heroin addiction. Unfortunately, those who had become the addicts were the national leaders in finance and politics.
Well, here we are, in the second decade of the millennium. The party has deteriorated and is soon to come to a bad end.
As we get closer, those of us who have, for many years, predicted an eventual realisation that Mister Keynes and Mister Nixon were dead wrong and that the world will once again look to gold are, at this late date, gaining a bit of traction.
We’re seeing an increase in the number of people who recognise that all fiat currencies eventually come to an end and gold will continue to shine.
But there are two remaining questions that have even the best of prognosticators puzzling.
1. What Will the Role of Gold Be in the Future?
When currencies collapse, will there be an immediate and complete switch to gold? Unlikely.
Will further fiat currencies be put forward as solutions to paper money? Almost definitely.
Will future currencies be backed by gold? Probably, especially as so many governments and banking institutions are quietly scrambling to buy gold whilst trying not to let on the extent of their stockpiling.
Will gold-backed currencies stabilise money for the rest of our lives? Quite unlikely.
Even those countries who may agree to audits to demonstrate they own the gold they claim to own will, at some point in the future, look for ways to “do a Nixon” and once again get off the gold standard. (The short-term benefits of fiddling with currency is too tempting.)
2. Who’s Got the Gold?
Currencies come and go in the world with remarkable frequency (the last hundred years has been witness to over twenty hyperinflations worldwide).
In that quiet scrambling we were talking about, no one is being really truthful about how much gold they have. In addition, even between the foremost experts on the subject (and here, I refer not to the pundits on television, but to those economists that I personally hold in the highest regard), there is broad speculation as to who holds what.
One school of thought has it that, although the US has long claimed that it possesses roughly 8,000 tonnes of gold in Fort Knox, there has not been an audit of Fort Knox since 1953. (That’s not encouraging.) Is it 8,000 tonnes? 4,000? None? We’re unlikely to ever get a truthful answer on this question.
In addition, the US has held roughly 6,000 tonnes of gold for European countries since the Cold War.
Now that the US has become the world’s foremost debtor nation, Europe is getting a bit antsy, and some are asking to have it back. In response, the Federal Reserve has sent Germany a small portion of their gold but avoids shipping the remainder and denies them even the ability to inspect the remainder. (Again, not encouraging.)
On the other hand, we have equally astute economists—US government insiders—who state that they are fairly certain the gold is there—in both Fort Knox and the New York Federal Reserve Bank’s underground vault. In the latter case, they state that, although much or all of the gold has been leased to the bullion banks, it has never left the building.
What does this mean to the rightful owners? There are multiple legitimate claims on the very same bars of gold.
Leftist movements have always been the brainchild of angry academics envious of the wealthy. The working-class were only meant to be pawns, cannon fodder, holding the frontline so that Marxist academics could make their demands from behind closed doors and be lifted to the status of elites. Their disdain for the working-class had remained whispers until recently—“Why do they vote against their own self-interest?” they would ask with contempt.
Nearly a month ago a convoy of tractor trailers and passenger vehicles full of protesters descended on Ottawa, the capitol of Canada. Their message has been clear: “lift all mandates and COVID restrictions.”
The Canadian Government’s response (in addition to invoking emergency powers) has been to call them racists, fascists, NAZIs, seditionists, and white separatists despite the diversity of people protesting the draconian measures. The Ottawa City Counsel continues to call on strong-arm police tactics to silence opposition to their technocratic rule, and the left has gleefully joined the government in the fight against the working-class citizens asking for their lives to go back to the normalcy of 2018.
If you hadn’t been paying attention this could be confusing. The workers of the world unite, and those ideologues historically demanding a worker revolution are opposed to the movement? They must be hypocrites, right?
Well, no.
Leftist movements have always been the brainchild of angry academics envious of the wealthy. The working-class were only meant to be pawns, cannon fodder, holding the frontline so that Marxist academics could make their demands from behind closed doors and be lifted to the status of elites. Their disdain for the working-class had remained whispers until recently—“Why do they vote against their own self-interest?” they would ask with contempt. But that was as far as they would take their criticisms because their goals always required the blue-collar workers to further their doctrine.
The election of Donald Trump and Brexit changed that. The unspoken alliance of corporatists, media, and academics finally revealed itself as an oppositional force of the every-man. They went on tirades about deplorables and the uneducated. They labeled all opposition to their plans of global governance fascists and racists. They mobilized student groups, political activists, media personalities, and NGOs to fight “disinformation” and “racism” worldwide. They were set into death-throes in an attempt to preserve their power and influence.
They weren’t surprised by the desires and political identities of the working-class; they were surprised that the working-class became aware of their own desires and mobilized in a cooperative way to realize those desires and combat the established order that this unsavory faction had so carefully crafted.
In the decades leading up to the Civil Rights Movement the Marxists concluded that the workers of the world wouldn’t unite to bring forth their socialist utopia. In fact, the workers rejected their collectivist ideas altogether. This epiphany led to the development of cultural or racial Marxism, and the goal of the establishment moved from mobilizing the proletariat to igniting a revolution that was fashioned after the Maoist Cultural Revolution. They would utilize the race-based politics of identity and the evils of history to bring forth their ends. The trick was that in order to accomplish this goal they had to distract and divide the proles just long enough to propagandize their children to turn against them, but they got greedy.
Most blue-collar people are not ideological. They spend their time oriented towards the goal of improving their lives and the lives of their children. They want to be left alone to pursue their dreams in order to leave a legacy future generations may enjoy. As politics have become pop culture, invading every aspect of life, they have become more uncomfortable. Their children come home spewing Marxist propaganda, calling them racists, and questioning their sexuality at inappropriate ages. (There’s absolutely no reason a five-year-old should be concerned with sexual orientation or identity.)
The left rejects this. In their worldview everything is political, and everyone must be coerced to submit to their ideology. When the working-class stands up against CRT, sexual practices, and the demonizing of traditional families being taught in public schools they must be brought to submission. When they refuse to submit, they are ostracized and labeled bigots. But the corporatist left didn’t predict that they would encounter so much opposition to their cultural revolution. Calling people racist, sexist, homophobe, transphobe, NAZI, fascist, and bigot are their only tool. They’ve overused these terms to the point that they have no significant definition or utility anymore. The hard-working small business owner, contractor, farmer, plumber, electrician, and truck driver (etc.) is not going to be bullied. They are going to fight for their children and grandchildren. They are going to fight for the future of freedom. That’s what the Marxists realized nearly a century ago—the proletariat want freedom, not revolution. The trucker protest in Canada is a microcosm, and it reflects this fact. The elites and the left are seeing what a real workers revolution is, and it is what they always feared. Their utility belt of insults has become feckless, and they must only comply to the demands to end the technocratic shift to totalitarianism because the honking will continue until freedom improves.
MCViewPoint 