Quite a lot of things can go wrong, especially if the mainstream’s rose-tinted sunglasses induce a delusional confidence in fantasy.
The conventional assumptions are remarkably rosy: the “recovery” is V-shaped in all the ways that count (i.e. the top 10% are once again doing well), the Federal Reserve will never let stocks go down or interest rates rise ever again (never never ever!), and the Federal government will borrow and blow endless trillions in stimulus ($2 trillion every six months seems about right, but since there’s no limit, we’ll double it if that’s needed to bail out every zombie corporation, bloated bureaucracy, skim and scam in the land).
what could go wrong? Gordon Long and I considered the question and came up with: quite a lot of things can go wrong, especially if the mainstream’s rose-tinted sunglasses induce a delusional confidence in fantasy.
1. A key part of the happy story is the US dollar (USD) will continue its decline, which is wunnerful for stocks and exporters: dollar down, stocks up, yea!
The official explanation for this free-fall is the USD will weaken as the Fed eases / prints. The mainstream thinking is that Japan and the Euro bloc are farther along in their socialization of debt (i.e. their central banks are monetizing fiscal deficits) and so the US will have to play catch-up, weakening the USD.
What could go wrong?
US-centric analysts forget the USD is the primary reserve currency and due to Triffin’s Paradox, it doesn’t just serve the US economy, it serves the global economy. You will never hear a Fed representative admit this publicly, because the PR / fantasy is that the Fed only cares about the American public (awww, gosh-darn it, aren’t they sweet?) and keeping inflation low and employment high.
In reality, the Fed’s core interests are enriching and protecting private banking globally, and maintaining U.S. global hegemony via a strong dollar. Recall that geopolitically, no empire ever got stronger by weakening its currency.
The Fed never addresses the USD’s global role and so conventional pundits ignore geopolitical forces: capital flows, the global need for dollars to service debt denominated in USD and reserves, etc.
Also recall that China pegs its currency to the US dollar, not the other way around. That alone tells you the role each currency plays in the global economy.
For the USD to weaken, the yen and the euro would need to significantly strengthen. But there’s a problem with this thesis.
Rather than being stronger, Japan and the EU are weaker than the US. Credit impulse is essentially zero in both Japan and the EU, both their banking sectors are insolvent, their economies have been stagnant for years (EU) or decades (Japan) and their demographic declines are accelerating. Both are export-dependent, an Achilles Heel as world trade / globalization enters a secular decline that could easily gather momentum.
The US needs capital flows into the US economy, so negative rates are a non-starter. Non-US borrowers have USD denominated debts of around $3 trillion, so demand for USD is not optional, it is a function of credit, commerce and reserves.
Simply put, the US is not about to sacrifice the euro-dollar / petro-dollar and its commercial hegemony just to satisfy domestic pleading for negative rates. Furthermore, Japan and Europe have proven that negative rates only weaken the private banking sector–the exact opposite of the Fed’s Prime Directive.
If the USD strengthens substantially, which it tends to do in crises, that will be very negative for equities. (No, no, no, the Fed has our backs! The Fed will never let my precious portfolio drop a single dollar!)
So sorry, but the Fed’s Prime Directives are not related to your portfolio at all. The Fed’s PR is all about domestic stocks, implicitly or explicitly, but when push comes to shove, your portfolio will be sacrificed without any hesitation to protect private banking and USD hegemony. The empire eats first, and only the tragically misguided believe US stocks are all that matters to the Fed.
2. The Fed’s easing, QE, etc. will spark a new round of credit expansion.
What could go wrong?
Credit expansion is on life support. There are very few investment opportunities, which is one reason why corporations have poured earnings into stock buybacks. The Fed can’t create low-risk, high-profit investment opportunities, not can it make poor credit risks into good credit risks.
Banks can’t afford to lend to insolvent households, zombie corporations or small businesses. The credit expansion impulse is impaired by the overhang of bad debt, excessive leverage, zombie corporations, etc. and there’s nothing the Fed can do about it. The Fed is pushing on a string.
Furthermore, the Fed is now encountering political resistance to its “enrich the wealthy and bail out zombie corporations” monetary policies. Its room to bail out the super-wealthy is increasingly constrained politically. The Fed is signaling that its focus is shifting from free money for financiers to funneling new money directly to households.
3. The federal government will borrow and spend trillions, sparking renewed growth.
What could go wrong?
As noted, banks cannot lend to poor credit risks, nor can they force those who don’t want to borrow more to take on new loans. Federal spending doesn’t magically create good credit risks or well-collateralized creditors.
Small businesses cannot lower their fixed costs enough to survive, and many of these costs such as taxes and fees will be rising as cash-starved local governments seek more revenues.
The free money will flow not into productive investments but into demand for goods and services which are constrained by declines in trade, high fixed production costs, retirement of key workers, etc.
Inflation will leap, surprising everyone who believed the “low inflation forever” story. As inflation soars, the purchasing power of the federal spending will plummet accordingly.
As UBI, Fed helicopter money, etc. becomes institutionalized, the working poor will exit low-paying, high-stress jobs, creating labor shortages. Small business won’t be able to pay higher wages and survive, and low-margin corporations will be squeezed as well.
Though NPR named thedefense contractor—South Carolina–based Advanced Technology International—they declined to explore the company’s deep ties to the CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense and how ATI is helping to lead those agencies’ efforts to militarize health care and create a surveillance panopticon that not only monitors the world around us but our physiology as well.
$6 billion in Covid-19 vaccine contracts awarded by Operation Warp Speed have been doled out by a secretive government contractor with deep ties to the CIA and DHS, escaping regulatory scrutiny and beyond the reach of FOIA requests.
Last Tuesday, while most Americans were distracted by the first US presidential debate, NPRquietly reported that the US government’s Operation Warp Speed, a public-private partnership launched by the Trump administration to rapidly develop and distribute a Covid-19 vaccine, had taken the unusual step of awarding contracts to vaccine companies, not directly, but through a secretive defense contractor.
Though NPR named thedefense contractor—South Carolina–based Advanced Technology International—they declined to explore the company’s deep ties to the CIA, Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Defense and how ATI is helping to lead those agencies’ efforts to militarize health care and create a surveillance panopticon that not only monitors the world around us but our physiology as well.
The “secret” vaccine contracts awarded through ATI as part of Warp Speed total approximately $6 billion, accounting for the majority of Operation Warp Speed’s $10 billion budget. Both Paul Mango, Health and Human Services’ deputy chief of staff for policy, and Robert Kadlec, HHS assistant secretary for preparedness and response (ASPR), personally signed off on the contracts.
Operation Warp Speed, which officially involves the combined efforts of HHS and the military to deliver over 300 million Covid-19 vaccines to Americans by next January, is a highly secretive program dominated by military personnel, most of whom have no experience in health care or vaccine production. The Trump administration has often compared Warp Speed to the Manhattan Project, which produced the atomic bomb.
Several very unsettling revelations about the true nature and scope of Warp Speed, including the out-sized role of ATI, began to emerge starting last Monday. Yet, most of this new information was not covered by US news outlets due to the media frenzy surrounding the first presidential debate and the subsequent news that President Trump and several other politicians and White House officials had tested positive for Covid-19.
NPR noted that the decision to use a nongovernment intermediary like ATI to issue the coronavirus vaccine contracts, as opposed to the government itself directly awarding those contracts, allows Operation Warp Speed to “bypass the regulatory oversight and transparency of traditional federal contracting mechanisms.” This means that, among other things, the vaccine contracts awarded under Operation Warp Speed are unlikely to be publicly released in the near future, if ever.
The report from NPR also noted that the Congressional Research Service reported just last year that using such intermediaries to award contracts can result in “significant risks, including potentially diminished oversight and exemption from laws and regulations designed to protect government and taxpayer interests.” Proponents of this unorthodox way of issuing contracts, known as “other transaction agreements” (OTAs), often argue that utilizing this alternative method for awarding contracts significantly hastens the process. However, the Congressional Research Service also noted that the Department of Defense, which has been increasingly relying on OTAs in recent years, has never tracked the information necessary to determine if OTAs are actually faster than traditional contracting methods. This suggests that claims regarding the alleged “speed advantage” of OTAs are based on assumptions rather than data-based evidence.
Johnson & Johnson, Novavax, Pfizer, and Sanofi are among the companies that have received these covert vaccine contracts through the OTA authorized by Operation Warp Speed and managed by ATI. Many of these companies, particularly Johnson & Johnson, have been involved in scandals related to selling and marketing products they knew to be unsafe to the public. This makes the lack of oversight and their exemption from federal regulations (including safety regulations) an issue of concern regarding their participation in Warp Speed.
This concern is further compounded by the fact that, on September 21, HHS Secretary Alex Azar told FOX Business that all Operation Warp Speed vaccine manufacturers would be exempt from liability for any damages their vaccines may cause and that those who administer their vaccines would also not be liable for damages. “Under the PREP Act, which is a provision in Congress, any treatment or vaccine for purposes of a national emergency pandemic like this actually comes with liability protection. Both the product as well as those who administer it or provide it,” Azar stated during the televised interview. The PREP Act that Azar referenced was originally signed into law in 2005 but was updated this past April, a few weeks before Operation Warp Speed was announced, so that vaccine and therapeutic manufacturers “cannot be sued for money damages in court” over injuries caused by medical countermeasures for Covid-19.
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 02: Flanked by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence (L) and Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, U.S. President Donald Trump leads a meeting with the White House Coronavirus Task Force and pharmaceutical executives in Cabinet Room of the White House on March 2, 2020 in Washington, DC. President Trump and his Coronavirus Task Force team met with pharmaceutical companies representatives who are actively working to develop a COVID-19 vaccine. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
Notably, the architect of that controversial April update to the PREP Act, HHS ASPR Kadlec, is intimately involved in deciding who is awarded Operation Warp Speed contracts.STAT News reported last week, citing senior HHS officials, that Kadlec “personally signs off” on every business agreement made on behalf of HHS for Operation Warp Speed. In addition to his past activities in lobbying for intelligence and defense contractors, Kadlec also previously worked as a lobbyist for the scandal-ridden biodefense company Emergent Biosolutions, which is also a major player in Operation Warp Speed as well as the manufacturer of the controversial anthrax vaccine BioThrax.
Despite top HHS officials allegedly overseeing every single one of these business agreements, NPR was told by HHS that the department has “no records” of the $1.6 billion Operation Warp Speed contract with Novavax, which was awarded through ATI. This is a strange response given that HHS is supposedly the lead agency overseeing Operation Warp Speed, yet they somehow lack a copy of a massive vaccine contract at the heart of the operation. NPR also asked the DoD for a copy of the Novavax contract and have yet to receive a response.
At a press conference in mid-September, Lt. Gen. Paul Ostrowski, a key figure in Operation Warp Speed, told reporters: “With respect to the contracts, the contracts are between ourselves, the United States government and private entities, and they are releasable to an extent. Obviously everything cannot be released, but they are releasable to an extent and they will be made available at some point in time.” Ostrowski declined to elaborate on when that “point in time” would be.
Also odd is that ATI told NPR that, at the time they were awarding these secretive vaccine contracts, it was never explicitly told by the Department of Defense that these contracts were part of Operation Warp Speed, with a former ATI executive describing that key fact as “invisible” to the company.
Spooks and Skunkworks
Advanced Technology International (ATI) is a nonprofit company that organizes consortia of public, private, and academic organizations that perform research and development (R&D) on behalf of the US government. ATI mostly manages R&D consortia for the Department of Defense for things like weapons manufacturing, metal casting and forging, ship production, and technology aimed at countering so-called weapons of mass destruction. They also manage the Border Security Technology Consortium (BSTC) for the Department of Homeland Security, primarily surveillance technology companies, among other DHS research projects.
ATI only currently manages two consortia that have any relationship to health care, the Medical Technology Enterprise Consortium (MTEC) and the Medical CBRN Defense Consortium (MCDC). The MTEC, operating on behalf of the US Army Medical Research and Development Command, aims to “accelerate the development of revolutionary medical solutions,” which include gene editing, nanotechnology, “telehealth solutions,” artificial limbs, and brain implants. They are also currently developing a wearable device that would diagnose individuals with Covid-19 before symptoms appear.
The other ATI-managed “health-care” consortia, the MCDC, is focused on “advanced development efforts to support the Department of Defense’s (DoD) medical pharmaceutical and diagnostic requirements to counter Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) threat agents.”
They are specifically involved in “enabling prototype technologies for therapeutic medical countermeasures targeting viral, bacterial and biological toxin targets of interest to the DoD,” including the development of vaccines. ATI told NPR that theywere contacted by the DoD sometime between March and April, before Warp Speed was announced in May, and asked to issue requests for proposals related to Covid-19 from MCDC members.
MCDC members include Emergent Biosolutions as well as DoD/CIA contractor Battelle Memorial Institute, with both of those companies having unsettling ties to the 2001 anthrax attacks. Another member of the MCDC is CIA/NSA contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and weapons manufacturer General Dynamics. MCDC’s membership has expanded significantly following ATI’s acquisition by Analytic Services Inc. (ANSER), the principal sponsor of the Dark Winter bioterror simulation, with eighteen new members added just three months after the acquisition had concluded.
In addition, there is considerable overlap between the MCDC and the vaccine companies that have been awarded secretive contracts through ATI as part of Operation Warp Speed. Sanofi, Novavax, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson are all MCDC members as well as recipients of Warp Speed vaccine contracts. In addition, Emergent Biosolutions, another MCDC member, was awarded a major Warp Speed contract to manufacture Covid-19 vaccines, but that contract was awarded through HHS Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), not ATI.
ANSER’s Rise, Its Fall, and Its Saving Grace
In February 2017, ATI was acquired by Analytic Services Inc. ANSER, like ATI, manages R&D projects for the federal government, historically for DHS, with ANSER being the long-time manager of one of the two DHS federally funded research and development centers. However, ANSER also provides services to the DoD, NASA, the State Department, and the US intelligence community.
ANSER was originally founded as a spin-off from the RAND Corporation in the late 1950s, but it became a much larger part of government operations, particularly in the realm of Homeland Security, after Ruth David became its president and CEO in 1998. Prior to becoming ANSER’s CEO, David had been the deputy director for science and technology at the CIA, where, among other things, she laid the groundwork for what would become In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm responsible for the rise of several Silicon Valley behemoths such as Google and Palantir. David led ANSER until 2015. After David took charge, ANSER became an early leader in promoting the use of biometric and facial recognition software by US law enforcement agencies and became a key driver in pivoting the government toward “homeland defense” and “homeland security” in the years leading up to the events of September 11, 2001.
As journalist Margie Burns noted in a 2002 article, the rise of “homeland defense” as a centerpiece of US government policy, including the push to create a new “homeland security” agency, began with former State Department official Richard Armitage’s alleged coining of the term in 1997 in a National Defense Policy document. In the years that followed, this pivot toward seeing the American homeland as a future battlefield was heavily promoted by a web of media outlets owned by South Korean cult leader and CIA asset Sun Myong Moon, including the Washington Times, Insight Magazine, and UPI. Allpublished numerous articles either penned by ANSER analysts or that heavily cited ANSER reports and employees regarding the need for a greatly expanded “homeland security” apparatus.
Lt. Gen. Paul A. Ostrowski, deputy commander at Army Futures Command under commanding general Mike Murray. (Photo by Catherine DeRan/U.S. Army)
In October 1999, at David’s behest, ANSER created the Institute for Homeland Security (ANSER-IHS). Though fully funded and established at that time, but for reasons still unclear, the ANSER-IHS was not formally launched until April 2001. The Institute’s first director was Randall Larsen, who was at that time—and still is today—a close associate of current HHS ASPR Robert Kadlec. Though ANSER has never explained the reason behind the lengthy delay in officially launching ANSER-IHS, it is possible that the timing was related to the introduction of H.R.1158 in March 2001. That bill called for the creation of the National Homeland Security Agency, which was the foundation of the later Department of Homeland Security.
One month after ANSER-IHS was created, Insight Magazine published an article in May 2001 entitled “Preparing for the Next Pearl Harbor,” which heavily cited ANSER and its Institute for Homeland Security as being among “the nation’s top experts” in warning that a terrorist attack on the US mainland was imminent. It also stated that “the first responders on tomorrow’s battlefield won’t be soldiers, but city ambulance workers and small-town firefighters.”
The following month, ANSER-IHS cohosted the Dark Winter exercise, with two top ANSER-IHS officials, Mark DeMier and Randall Larsen, cowriting the exercise with Tara O’Toole and Thomas Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies (now the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security). O’Toole, at the time, was on the ANSER-IHS board of advisers.
As previously detailed in the Engineering Contagion series, several of those involved in Dark Winter had foreknowledge of the 2001 anthrax attacks, and Dark Winter itself originated what became the initial, yet false, narrative for those attacks—that Iraq and Al Qaeda were working together to conduct acts of bioterrorism on US soil. However, the anthrax used in the attacks was quickly determined to have either originated from a US military lab or a US defense contractor.
ANSER’s convenient gamble that the US government would imminently pivot toward homeland security soon after April 2001 paid off tremendously. Thanks largely to the fear stoked by 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, the Department of Homeland Security was created, and ANSER-IHS quickly became the first government think tank, that is, federally funded research and development center.
Not long after its formal creation as an agency, DHS established its Science and Technology (S & T) Directorate in 2003 with the mission “to protect the homeland by providing . . . officials with state-of-the-art technology.” DHS later announced in 2004 that it had “selected [ANSER] to operate the Homeland Security Institute . . . [f]ollowing a full and open competition procurement process conducted by [DHS] Science and Technology.” This is despite this very institute having already been funded and established by ANSER in 1999 and then launched in 2001.
From 2009 to 2013, the head of DHS Science and Technology Directorate was Dark Winter coauthor and bioterror alarmist Tara O’Toole, who had long-standing, close ties to ANSER-IHS, as previously mentioned. With O’Toole at the helm, DHS focused on “more robust public-private sector partnerships” and “increasing the budget for innovative, longer-term technology projects,” such as those overseen by ANSER on the behalf of DHS. She also made it her mission to model the S & T Directorate more closely after the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
During her tenure, DHS also claimed to be “unaware” of how the department’s multibillion dollar research expenditures were being used, suggesting a lack of oversight in the millions of dollars DHS S & T was funneling to the ANSER-run research center and the other DHS research center, which is run by the equally shady MITRE Corporation.
Unexpectedly for ANSER, DHS declined to renew ANSER’s federally funded research and development center contract in October 2016. They instead awarded that contract to the RAND Corporation, which created a new research and development center with “a different set of focus areas, aligned more closely with current DHS priorities.” ANSER’s apparent plans for restructuring following the loss of this critical contract included its decision to acquire ATI, which took place just a few months later in February 2017.
The acquisition of ATI gave ANSER access to the key OTA research consortia that ATI manages, ensuring that ANSER’s board of former intelligence officials, military officers, and defense-industry executives continued to wield considerable influence over the direction of government-funded research projects. Per the press release, the acquisition was aimed at combining ANSER’s “government problem-solving heritage with ATI’s technical expertise,” allowing ANSER to continue to execute “thought leadership independent of commercial influences” over the “important defense technology developments” being overseen by ATI. Thus, whatever decisions are being made by ATI with respect to these secretive Operation Warp Speed vaccine contracts, it is ultimately ANSER that is signing off on them.
Mess Hall
Given that Operation Warp Speed’s official purpose is to use taxpayer funds to produce, accelerate, and distribute a medical treatment (i. e., vaccine) to Americans, there is no reason for such extreme secrecy and also no reason for the excessive role of the military and secretive contractors like ATI and ANSER in the execution of this “public health” effort.
While the officially stated purpose of Warp Speed makes the extreme secrecy involved seem not just unnecessary but absurd, it is worth noting that several recent revelations regarding Warp Speed’s structure, strategy, and execution strongly suggest that the reason for the operation’s covert nature is because its scope goes well beyond its publicly stated purpose.
For instance, Stat News noted last week that Operation Warp Speed “looks a lot more like a military operation than a science project,” adding that “roughly 60 military officials—including at least four generals—are involved in the leadership of Operation Warp Speed, many of whom have never worked in health care or vaccine development.” That report also pointed out that “just 29 of the roughly 90 leaders on the chart aren’t employed by the Department of Defense.”
Though the military’s initial justification for playing such a major role in Warp Speed was related to its “expertise” in logistics and supply chains, the recent release of the operation’s vaccine distribution strategy makes no direct mention of the military’s role in those aspects of Warp Speed. So noticeable was the disconnect that, soon after the release of the official distribution strategy, the Department of Defense “clarified” the military’s role in the operation by publishing an interview on its website with Lt. Gen. Ostrowski, who is leading Warp Speed’s efforts to supply, produce, and distribute vaccines. Per Ostrowski, the reason the military is playing such an outsize role in Warp Speed is because of the military’s “program management and contracting expertise.”
Yet, as this article has shown, Warp Speed contracts are being funneled through secretive contractors to avoid scrutiny and are apparently not being made available to HHS, the civilian agency supposedly “co-leading” Warp Speed alongside the military.
Such examples of extreme secrecy and conflicting statements appear to be just scratching the surface of what Operation Warp Speed truly aims to accomplish. An upcoming series of investigative reports produced by this author in collaboration with Ryan Cristián and Derrick Broze of The Last American Vagabond will explore in depth this operation and the individuals leading it in order to expose Operation Warp Speed as the most clandestine, and arguably most dangerous, US military operation in decades. Unlike such well-funded and secretive military operations of years past, this one is aimed directly at the American people.
Question Everything, Come To Your Own Conclusions.
De Jouvenel aptly wrote “strangely enough” to characterize the fact that as capitalists raised standards of living in each succeeding generation, the hatred of capitalists increased instead of diminished. This is paradoxical, but true. The more prosperous our society has become, the more the creators of that prosperity and the system that enables it have been vilified. How dare those wicked capitalists break the iron grip that abject poverty had held over the masses of human beings throughout millennia of history!
In Friedrich Hayek’s 1954 book Capitalism and the Historians, the late French philosopher and political economist Bertrand de Jouvenel noted a baffling historical trend: “Strangely enough, the fall from favor of the money-maker coincides with an increase in his social usefulness.”
In surveying the history of capitalism from its inception in the late eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century when he was writing, De Jouvenel was struck by an ironic and counterintuitive phenomenon. By “money-maker,” he meant the capitalist entrepreneurs who became rich by supplying the masses with more consumer goods. Entrepreneurs generated the economic growth that uplifted standards of living; hence, their “social usefulness.”
De Jouvenel aptly wrote “strangely enough” to characterize the fact that as capitalists raised standards of living in each succeeding generation, the hatred of capitalists increased instead of diminished. This is paradoxical, but true. The more prosperous our society has become, the more the creators of that prosperity and the system that enables it have been vilified. How dare those wicked capitalists break the iron grip that abject poverty had held over the masses of human beings throughout millennia of history!
This graph of world per capita wealth over the last two thousand years tells an amazing story. (A chart of US per capita GDP growth shows a similar trajectory over the last 230 years.)
Mass poverty was the norm for centuries. That finally began to change in the late 1700s with the emergence of capitalism. The nineteenth-century socialist reaction to capitalism condemned capitalism for not making every human being prosperous equally and simultaneously. It’s true: some prospered before others. As I have explained before, the reason that there was not faster economic progress for more people in the 1800s was not that evil capitalists were exploiting workers, but simply that there were not enough capitalists to “exploit” (employ) more workers and mass produce more goods.
Looking at the graph, you can see that economic growth accelerated explosively in the twentieth century. (Note that growth became much more rapid after the end of slavery, which debunks the fallacious assertion that America’s great wealth depended on slavery.) In the United States, per capita income rose (in 1990 dollars) from $5,301 in 1913 to $31,178 in 2008 and life expectancy from 53 years to 78 years. In short, more Americans are living longer lives at higher standards of living than ever before due to our capitalist system. That has happened despite the considerable handicaps of bureaucratic regulation, wasteful pork barrel politics, and government redistribution of wealth. (There is also more prosperity outside the United States than ever. See chart above and my article “Ready for Some Good News?”)
Despite the astounding success of the free enterprise system in producing unprecedented prosperity, antagonism toward capitalism is growing, and popular politicians are adopting platforms that are essentially socialist. Indeed, the paradox of prosperity that De Jouvenel noticed almost seventy years ago remains firmly intact, for capitalism has never been more fruitful and never more hated by its beneficiaries than it is today.
The present fascination with socialism and hatred of capitalism reflects a combination of willful historical blindness, lack of simple common sense, and inexcusable economic ignorance:
Anyone even casually familiar with twentieth-century history should know that socialism has failed miserably, causing economic retrogression and impoverishment wherever it has been tried.
Common sense should recognize that since capitalism is a system where entrepreneurs compete with each other to produce what people want, and socialism is a system in which producers produce what the state wants, then obviously people prosper more under capitalism.
Most appalling and bitterly ironic about so many Americans enthusiastically, even fanatically, espousing socialism in 2020 is that this year marks the centenary of the most important economic discovery of the twentieth century: in 1920, the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained with irrefutable logic that socialism must inevitably discombobulate and reduce economically rational production because it obliterates the market-based price system necessary to coordinate production. Shame on the economics profession for remaining silent about this fundamental truth and allowing dangerous economic ignorance to persist.
Fact: it is free market capitalism that has made us wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of our great-great grandparents. Fact: the socialist alternative simply does not work. For anyone to favor replacing the world’s greatest wealth-creating system with a proven wealth-destroying system is to spurn prosperity, forsake rationality, and court destruction. That is the grim reality of the paradox of prosperity. Author:
“According to our preliminary estimates, some 50 percent of Karabakh’s population and 90 percent of women and children — some 70,000 to 75,000 people — have been displaced,” Nagorno-Karabakh’s rights ombudsman Artak Beglaryan told AFP.
The latest numbers put the death toll for the battle that began on September 27th around 360, including dozens of civilians on both sides. The real number is believed to be much larger since Azerbaijan has yet to confirm military casualties.
Azerbaijan has been accused of indiscriminately shelling Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital Stepanakert. The human rights organization Amnesty International said it identified Israeli-made cluster bombs that appear to have been used by Azerbaijan in Stepanakert. Cluster munitions are banned under a convention signed by over 100 countries, although neither Azerbaijan, Armenia, or Israel have signed it.
Nagorno-Karabakh is an ethnic Armenian enclave within the internationally recognized borders of Azerbaijan. The collapse of the Soviet Union turned the border dispute deadly, and tens of thousands were killed until a ceasefire was reached in 1994. Since then, Nagorno-Karabakh has operated as a de facto independent state with Armenian support.
No matter what middle-class journalists like me tell you from their home offices, this will be a disaster on so many fronts. It will stamp on the teeth of an economy that’s already lying in the gutter crying for its mummy. It will send half the population either mad or into the streets with flaming torches. It will crank up the dial on already bitter societal divisions to 11. It will utterly wreck Christmas.
Andrew Dickens is an award-winning writer on culture, society, politics, health and travel for major titles such as the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Independent, the Daily Mail and Empire.
I supported the first national lockdown but a second one would be a mistake of titanic proportions. Here’s how we can wrestle control from governments and learn to live with Covid.
Sometimes, if you want a job done well, you have to do it yourself. Sadly, many jobs that need doing well are occupied by people whose gift for doing them isn’t just non-existent, it’s a black hole that sucks in and destroys any crumbs of talent that happen to be floating in the vicinity.
Here in the UK, the job of prime minister is taken by a man who, when the going gets tough, gets going on holiday. Other jobs, such as those of health secretary, home secretary, chancellor and education secretary are taken up by fawning lackeys with all the independent thought and qualifications of a reluctant 15-year-old intern who’s only there because their dad’s mates with the CEO.
And yet, despite this, when Covid-19 made its intentions and capabilities known, I backed this U-turning confederacy of dunces. I thought that a ‘lockdown’ was the right thing to do. I know there were arguments about the efficacy of various measures, about mortality rates and transmission. I also know that those arguments have become mind-numbingly tedious and repetitive, so let’s not go there. At the time, nearly all evidence and expert advice suggested that we should err on the side of caution. End of.
Lockdown here was a walk in the park, literally, compared with what some populations endured but it still hurt people – financially, emotionally, even physically. I lost thousands in income and sought help for my skyrocketing anxiety levels, and yet still I gave that flock of dangerous idiots leewayin what can comfortably be described as a very, very weird situation. Read more As Boris Johnson announces Britain’s ‘great reset’, were the Covid ‘conspiracy theorists’ right all along?
However, there’s a ‘but’ – one big enough to get Sir Mix-a-lot interested. There must not be a second lockdown.
After a summer of relative liberty, sharp rises in infection rates have triggered Boris Johnson and the man who operates him, Dominic ‘no-one talks to me at the office Christmas party’ Cummings, into burdening us with new draconian measures, somehow more confused and complicated than the original rules. It’s now clear that we’re weeks, maybe days, away from a return to the ‘all but essential’ mantra. No more nights out at the pub, no more nights in with friends. Back to the heavily-scraped bottom of the Netflix barrel.
No matter what middle-class journalists like me tell you from their home offices, this will be a disaster on so many fronts. It will stamp on the teeth of an economy that’s already lying in the gutter crying for its mummy. It will send half the population either mad or into the streets with flaming torches. It will crank up the dial on already bitter societal divisions to 11. It will utterly wreck Christmas.
Shutting the country down again, with no end in sight, will be like sticking a cork in one end of a balloon while filling it with a waste pipe at the other. Whether the balloon bursts or is uncorked at a later date, it’ll create a terrible mess.
You have, of course, the fact that it’ll be adding salt to particularly nasty economic wounds that are about to have the clumsy fist of Brexit shoved into them. The ruination of businesses, charities, families, support services, and the travel, hospitality, arts and entertainment industries, is a surefire bet. This is a government that simply doesn’t care if you don’t have music, film or theatre in your lives next year.
Jobs and homes will be lost, people will end up on the streets. The uncertainty and short-termism of the government’s measures (sometimes announced overnight in its signature cowardly style) make it impossible for anyone to plan or invest. Government aid is ending, so who’d keep staff, let alone hire them? Who’d book a holiday? Who’d order a turkey? Also on rt.com UK health secretary claims rise in Covid-19 cases is ‘very serious problem’
Then there’s people’s wellbeing. People are already dying of other diseases as a result of Covid-related measures. Some of this is due to a shift in resources towards dealing with the pandemic, but much is down to hospital services being limited or frozen and people being frightened to visit doctors. Workers will refuse to get tested because they fear quarantining without pay, making them more likely to spread the virus.
It’ll cause a mental health nightmare, plunging people into depression and causing unmanageable stress levels at a time when they can’t get proper help – not least students who already feel imprisoned in halls. Some will be forced to work in risky conditionsbecause a lack of financial support means they have no choice. Others will simply be fed up with arbitrary, ill-explained and increasingly short-notice limitations and therefore tempted to flick a collective V-sign at the authorities.
To misquote Newton’s third law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The harder you try to contain people, the more dramatically they’ll rebel.
Among these people will be the usual arseholes whose raison d’etre is to make life uncomfortable for other people, no matter what the situation; the cough-in-face types, the spoilers for fights over masks. There will always be the incurably stupid, too. And then there’ll be responsible citizens, of which I’m generally one, who have had enough. If this group sees no reason or effectiveness in the rules, perhaps sees their elected and unelected leaders continue to break the rules, then they’ll be less inclined to follow those rules.
A heavy, nationwide lockdown also won’t work because this virus isn’t going away any time soon. There will almost certainly be no widespread vaccine or divine intervention that sees it disappear by Christmas 2021, let alone this winter. And you can’t shut the country down forever.
So what do you do when something can’t be got rid of? You don’t hide from it, you learn to live with it. The problem is, as mentioned, this government, like many, doesn’t have the smarts to do that.
It specialises in things that don’t work. Effective track-and-trace app? Nope, sorry, can’t do that. Functioning testing system? You’re having a laugh, mate. A vague semblance of competency? It can’t even master an Excel spreadsheet. This is the government that didn’t think a return to schools and universities would cause a September surge in infections, that flips daily between telling us to get out and stay home, like a political hokey cokey, and whose hardline measures so far have still allowed more than 42,000 deaths (and that’s just from the virus).
This is why its role needs to be limited, like you would that of the aforementioned 15-year-old intern. It should provide, not instruct. It can supply data and advice, and can give people freedom and responsibility, and it can write cheques for things like testing and healthcare and for ideas with brains. But that’s it.
Decisions need to be taken on a micro level; national government is too macro for this situation. Blanket rules won’t work now. We need to adapt and adjust by location, age, job and risk. We need to give people clarity and reliability.
The R-rate in Birmingham should not be affecting my ability to have a pint and a pasty in Falmouth. If I’m 25 (I’m not) I should have more freedom than is currently being offered, because I’m statistically at less risk than someone who’s 85. However, I should also have more responsibility for the 85-year-olds, the asthmatics, the diabetics. Don’t punish me for being young and healthy, but encourage me to protect the vulnerable – and maybe have a punishment up your sleeve if I don’t.
Mini local lockdowns and short-term local furlough schemes with defined time limits could be used as ‘circuit-breakers’ for the spread of infection. If pubs shut for one weekend, for example, with help and clarity they can adjust and cope. As can pub-goers. These are bumps in the road, not walls to smash into.
People and businesses should be trusted to be ‘Covid-smart,’ too. Rule one of this pandemic (and of life) should read ‘Don’t be a d**k,’ and we work from that. Everyone should have the right to work from home if they can, but also the right to go to a safe place of work. Have restrictions in a cinema, sure, but not at a funeral. Give guidelines on hygiene and safety but allow us to be sensible with things like mask use, social-distancing and numbers at gatherings, particularly when it comes to friends and family. No one (well, very few people) want to give their nearest and dearest a dose of a potentially deadly bug. Not even at Christmas.
I’m just spitballing here but all of this makes more sense than harsher, ineffective rules that breed resentment, discord and disorder. It’s all about less pain, more gain – the opposite of that Newton principle. The less you press people, the less likely they are to overreact. Give them room to breathe and adjust and they’ll feel like they’re being treated as adults. But there will be idiots, so don’t spare the rod on those who flagrantly abuse that freedom to the detriment of others. Carrot dangled, stick held behind the back.
This is not about belittling the obvious dangers of the virus; too many people have died and suffered for anyone vaguely intelligent to do that (comparing it to other causes of illness isn’t logical or helpful, thanks). It’s about facing up to reality and necessity, and dealing with these two very annoying things in a way that allows people to live as normally and happily as possible, protects their jobs and businesses, and looks after their mental and physical health.
The UK government has consistently blamed its failings on the public, despite using Covid to give itself dictatorship-like powers. So we might as well be given the chance to fail – or succeed – on our own terms.
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And now, the healthy must pretend they are sick – and be treated as presumptively sick. The fact that they aren’t isn’t a mitigating factor. In fact, it is a kind of perverse crime in that they are punished for living normally – on the basis of the fact that they aren’t sick.
America is becoming Bergeron – a new country based on the principles laid out in Kurt Vonnegut’s depressingly prescient short story, Harrison Bergeron.
It is a country in which – as in the book – you may not act if anyone of lesser strength or ability or drive cannot act at the same level. You must accommodate yourself to their level.
Everything is leveled – ever downward.
Until all are depressingly . . . equal.
In misery. In poverty. In thrall to suffocating edicts limiting what they are permitted to do – and told they must not do – on the basis of what others can’t do. Or resent you for being able to do, which they can’t.
One of the most obvious expressions of this principle is on the road, where the law punishes competence as a kind of affront to the incompetent. If some people can’t handle making a right turn on red without creeping out in front of right-of-way traffic and causing a wreck thereby, no one else is allowed to make a right-on-red. If someone ignores the law forbidding it and makes a right-on-red safely and competently, by judging the flow of traffic and applying the necessary degree of acceleration to merge with it smoothly, he is punished for being competent.
For having ability – and daring to use it.
Some will say that, no, the offender ignored the law. True – but only superficially.
Consider that the competent execution of the action isn’t a mitigating factor. Just as health is no excuse for not Diapering.
Which is proof positive that the true offense – not mentioned but nonetheless – is lack of obedience premised on the acceptance of incompetence (and sickness) even in its absence.
At the first hint of snow, the roads are now inundated with liquid brine – if they’re not closed outright, as in my part of Virginia – where the Blue Ridge Parkway is closed even before it snows, stays closed if it doesn’t actually snow . . . because it might snow.
Because some people can’t deal with snow.
Highway speed limits are today what they were 60 years go – notwithstanding 60 years of improvements in tire/brake/suspension technology and half a dozen “safety assists” in addition to that.
Glaucomic granny sets the pace.
And now – because granny might die – everyone is treated as if they, too, were a granny and might die.
Healthy people at very little to no risk of death from catching a cold must live in perpetual fear of death. If they don’t fear it, having no reason to – they must be forced to act – and look – as if they did.
For the sake of those who do fear it.
Instead of sequestering granny, everyone else is sequestered.
And Diapered.
Soon, they will be Needled. Not because they need it – being healthy – but because some people aren’t. Everyone must be made unhealthy – by injecting them with substances that make them so, which suppress the competence of their own healthy immune system to ward off colds.
A public sneeze will soon be treated the same as spraying a crowd with machine gun fire – and there are Bergeronites who equate the two. Even if you don’t sneeze. Because you might.
Ergo, the Diaper.
It’s as vindictive a policy as forcing people who can drive to operate at the level of those who can’t – and punishing them if they don’t.
It all flows from the same ugly principle. The Sickness Regime is merely the latest and entirely predictable evolution of least common denominatorism – the Bergeroning of America.
It has been evolving for a long time, gradually – until it reached a critical mass – gesundheit! – this year.
Decades before the locking-down of the healthy population to protect the unhealthy portion of the population, it became common practice – in government schools – to limit the progression of instruction of the bright kids to accommodate the dullest kids.
It was called “mainstreaming.”
When kids played team sports, participation trophies were handed out to everyone in lieu of trophies for winning.
Adults lacking ability were hired for jobs over those with ability. This was called “affirmative action” – and it worked in the same way (and on the basis of the same motives) as forcing a champion sprinter to run in boots so that a mediocre rival could keep up with him.
Because some people can’t use a rearview mirror, everyone must be forced to buy a back-up camera. Because some people are terrible drivers when sober, the slightest amount of alcohol in the system of a good driver subjects him to a charge of “drunk” driving without regard to his actual driving.
Everything has to be idiot-proofed . . . for the sake of the idiots at the expense of those who aren’t.
People with the foresight to live below their means, who set aside money for their own retirement, are punished for their prudence by being forced to “contribute” money to subsidize the retirement of the imprudent, thereby rendering them just as dependent.
People who can competently handle a firearm – having never given reason to believe otherwise – are presumed incompetent to handle a firearm on account of the demonstrated incompetence of other people.
And now, the healthy must pretend they are sick – and be treated as presumptively sick. The fact that they aren’t isn’t a mitigating factor. In fact, it is a kind of perverse crime in that they are punished for living normally – on the basis of the fact that they aren’t sick.
This is being characterized as “selfish.”
It is an actionable offense in many areas.
Granny isn’t forced to enter a restaurant – and can enter wearing a Face Diaper if she likes.That’s not Bergeronic enough. The restaurant must force all of its employees and patrons to wear a Face Diaper.
Every level of American society is being pulled toward the floor like a tablecloth grabbed by a temper-tantruming toddler – who will never be allowed to grow up – by making the adults at the table sit on the floor, amid the spilled soup and broken plates.
Alexandra Snyder, the director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times that Harris’s “loyalty to Planned Parenthood” required “her to turn a blind eye to the organization’s criminal activities.” Harris did more than turn a blind eye. “Instead,” said Snyder, “she has launched an inquisition into David Daleiden.”
I do not use the term “fascist” lightly, but when even the liberal Los Angeles Times opens an article with a paragraph like the one that follows, I think fascist is apt:
“California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris is drawing fire from supporters of an anti-abortion activist whose undercover videos and identity cards were seized by the state Department of Justice this week after Harris’ political campaign sought to drum up support for Planned Parenthood.”
The activist is David Daleiden, 27 at the time of the April 2016 raid on his Huntington Beach apartment. In 2016, Harris was running for California’s open U.S. Senate seat. At the time of the raid, Harris’s campaign website was asking supporters “to take a stand and join Kamala in defending Planned Parenthood.”
In the course of Planned Parenthood’s history, no one had presented a greater threat to the organization’s federal funding than the young journalist whose apartment Harris’s agents had just raided.
In the way of background, Daleiden and his partner Sandra Merritt had gone undercover for two years posing as the brokers in the fetal tissue market.
David DaleidenIn July 2015 Daleiden started dropping the undercover videos the pair had shot at Planned Parenthood clinics in several states, including California.
The combination of callow words and cruel images, repeated in one video after another, rocked Washington. The timing was good. The 2016 presidential campaigns were revving up, and many Republicans spoke out about what they saw.
“The out-of-sight, out-of-mind mantra that propelled the pro-choice movement for decades is forever gone,” Kellyanne Conway, then a Republican pollster, told the New York Times. Reeling from the blow, even the Times had to wonder whether “the new offensive will succeed in crippling Planned Parenthood.”
Obama, the first president to speak at Planned Parenthood’s national convention, kept his distance from the hubbub. An indifferent media got no closer to the president than his press secretary, Josh Earnest.
On July 30, 2015, a young reporter asked Earnest if Obama had seen the video that was released on that day. The video in question begins with interview footage of harried Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards insisting, “It’s not a fee. It’s not a fee. It’s just the cost of trans- mitting this material.” The undercover footage that follows undercuts everything Richards said.
A doctor at a Planned Parenthood megaclinic in Colorado is seen explaining the clinic’s traffic in body parts. Aware that it is illegal to transfer “human fetal tissue” for “valuable consideration,” the doctor plays semantic games with the would-be purchasers.
“We don’t want to get called on, you know, selling fetal parts across states,” she jokes, unaware she is being recorded. This interview is followed by an on-site review of actual body parts with the doctor and a clinician.
What is impressive is how well Daleiden and Merritt play their roles as buyers. What is unnerving is how casually the doctor and clinician pick through trays of baby parts — a heart, a brain, a lung — while talking about the commercial viability of the “fetal cadaver.”
Running for president at the time, Hillary Clinton could not afford to be so dismissive. Although her first instinct was to attack the video producers, Clinton herself began to waver as each new video dropped.
“I have seen pictures from [the videos] and obviously find them dis- turbing,” Clinton told the New Hampshire Union Leader late that July. No one knew better than Clinton, however, what overwhelming force Planned Parenthood and its allies in the Democratic-media complex could bring to bear against a pair of citizen journalists.
For immediate assistance, Planned Parenthood turned to the well-connected fixers at — where else? — Fusion GPS. The beleaguered organization contracted with Fusion to review the unedited footage Daleiden had posted online.
Armed with a ten-page report from Fusion, Richards went on the offensive. Convincing people they did not see what they saw would not be easy, but the networks made the task possible by refusing to show the actual videos.
As to the newspapers and online journals, they did their bit by leaving the assessment of the videos to Fusion GPS. Faced with real journalists doing real work, the Obama courtiers reflexively turned stenographer. They welcomed this “forensic study” as heartily as they would Fusion GPS’s notorious “Steele dossier” a year later.
To complete the rout, the ambitious Harris had her agents seize Daleiden’s multiple computers and hard drives as well as the materials he had gathered from Planned Parenthood conferences.
Alexandra Snyder, the director of the Life Legal Defense Foundation, told the Los Angeles Times that Harris’s “loyalty to Planned Parenthood” required “her to turn a blind eye to the organization’s criminal activities.” Harris did more than turn a blind eye. “Instead,” said Snyder, “she has launched an inquisition into David Daleiden.”
In 2017, Harris’s successor as attorney general, Xavier Becerra, filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and Merritt and has tied them up in court ever since.
In May 2020, Daleiden filed suit against Becerra and Harris, claiming Harris violated his civil rights by conspiring with Planned Parenthood to silence him.
In Kamala’s America, killing and dismembering unborn babies and marketing their body parts is perfectly acceptable. Reporting on the practice is criminal. If that is not fascistic, I am not sure I know what is.
The UK Prime Minister’s remote speech to his party conference saw him dismiss the idea of returning to normality. Is he using Covid-19 to follow the World Economic Forum’s ‘Great Reset’ agenda, as many have warned?
‘It’s not really about public health or a virus. They have another agenda.’ That’s what the so-called ‘conspiracy theorists’ have been saying since March, when the first British lockdowns were imposed and our lives were turned upside down.
Those ‘conspiracy theorists’ were denounced, as always, as ‘cranks’ and ‘flat-Earthers’ but here we are in October, and, let’s face it, there is absolutely no sign, despite very low numbers of deaths ‘with’ Coronavirus, that we are returning to anything like normal. In fact, in his keynote speech yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson specifically ruled out a return to normal, not even with a vaccine.
“After all we have been through, it isn’t enough just to go back to normal. We have lost too much. History teaches us that things of this magnitude – wars, famines, plagues, events that affect the vast bulk of humanity, as this virus has – they do not just come and go. They can be the trigger for economic and social change.”
When I heard Johnson utter those words I thought, ‘where have I heard this stuff before?’ Well, the answer is in the book ‘Covid-19: The Great Reset’ by Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret. They too, like Johnson, invoked the Second World War as the trigger for fundamental changes, not only to the global order and global economy, but to society and the way human beings interact with one another. Like Johnson, they don’t want to return to normal. “Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is never.” Also on rt.com ‘No peasants, please’: BoJo’s love-in with Bill Gates on Twitter shows just how broken UK democracy really is
Instead, Schwab and Malleret want a world changed forever by a virus which they admit is only ‘mild’ compared to others in history. Covid-19 is seen as the catalyst for the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’.
As to where all this is heading, I recommend you read Schwab’s ‘Great Reset’, and his earlier ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, but please don’t do so late at night, because they will probably give you nightmares. Schwab’s elitist Davos-man utopia is a trans-human, socially distanced, utterly soulless dystopia for the rest of us. Think of the most terrifying sci-film you’ve ever watched and that still doesn’t go anywhere near it. And the worst thing is that it is sold to us as some kind of ‘progressive’ vision.
Johnson, in his speech yesterday, showed he’s a fully-signed up ‘Great Resetter’. It was, for me, the most chilling oration ever made by any British prime minister at a party conference.
The man who justified a national lockdown in March on a purely temporary three-week basis to ‘flatten the curve’, and ‘protect the NHS’, and who said in the summer, after the lockdown had lasted three months, that he hoped Britain would return to ‘significant normality’ by November, now tells us: “We have been through too much frustration and hardship just to settle for the status quo ante – to think that life can go on as it was before the plague; and it will not… We are resolving not to go back to 2019.”
For Johnson, using the globalists’ phrase ‘Build Back Better’, this is the time to launch Britain on the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’. “From internet shopping to working from home, it looks as though Covid has massively accelerated changes in the world of work… as old jobs are lost and as new ones are created… The Covid crisis is a catalyst for change…” he said.
Did Schwab actually write his speech? It looks like it. Although Johnson didn’t use the phrase ‘The Fourth Industrial Revolution’, he did mention a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ twice.
Johnson foresees a future in which every home in Britain relies on wind power (he certainly produces a lot of that), and “instead of being dragged on big commutes to the city” people can “start a business in their home town… and bring up their children in the neighbourhoods where they grew up themselves.”
Working from home is here to stay, with “gigabit broadband,” shopping from home, conferencing from home… in fact, let’s do everything from home. Who needs to meet other human beings? Not that there’d be anywhere to meet, with pubs, cinemas and theatres all closed down due to the never-ending coronavirus restrictions.
The World Economic Forum, founded by Schwab, has been incredibly influential when it comes to the changes we’ve already seen in 2020, and what is being openly planned for the future. It was the WEF which co-hosted the ‘Event 201’ conference in New York in October 2019, which modelled a fictional global pandemic.
It was at the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos on January 24, 2020 that Bill Gates’ Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovations (CEPI) held a press conference to announce a ‘new partnership’to develop vaccines for the virus, when the number of confirmed worldwide cases was still in the hundreds.
It was the WEF’s Schwab who declared in June: “The pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine and reset our world.”
It was the WEF that in July was promoting a Covid-19 ‘Health Passport’ app, the ‘brainchild’ of one of its ‘Young Global Leaders’, as the future for travel and attending events.
And for those who don’t have the app or a ‘negative‘ test result? Well, you can just stay at home.
Conspiracy theorists eh?”The World Economic Forum-backed project aims to create the first globally recognised proof that a passenger has tested negative for the virus before a flight, using a digital certificate downloaded to a mobile phone” https://t.co/4RHLzeXeCv— Simon Dolan #KBF (@simondolan) October 7, 2020
If you take a look at the ‘founding partners’ of the WEF’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution you’ll see names such as Microsoft, Palantir, Facebook, Netflix and Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, founded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Yes, that’s right, hi-tech online giants and hi-tech multi-billionaires supporting a big shift towards a stay-at-home, ‘do everything on the Internet’ society.
Is it a ‘conspiracy theory’ to say that Covid-19 is being used as a convenient opportunity to introduce long-planned changes to the economy and society, when those pushing for such changes like Schwab openly talk of there being a “rare but narrow window” for a major ‘reset’?
Actually, after Johnson’s speech yesterday, the biggest ‘conspiracy theorists’ now are those who DON’T think the British government is working to another agenda.
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As the OPCW’s first Director General, Bustani experienced first-hand the costs of challenging pro-war narratives. In 2002, he was personally threatened by John Bolton and ousted as OPCW chief after he facilitated inspections that stood in the way of the Bush administration’s drive to invade Iraq.
At the UN Security Council, the US, UK, France and allies have blocked the testimony of Jose Bustani, the OPCW’s first Director General, on the chemical watchdog’s Syria cover-up scandal. The Grayzone has obtained Bustani’s prepared statement and is publishing it in full.
Jose Bustani was invited to brief the Security Council on the OPCW’s cover-up of an investigation into an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria in April 2018. The US, UK, and France bombed Syria after accusing the Syrian government of dropping toxic gas in Douma. OPCW inspectors later found evidence that undermined the official narrative, but were censored by their superiors under US pressure.
As the OPCW’s first Director General, Bustani experienced first-hand the costs of challenging pro-war narratives. In 2002, he was personally threatened by John Bolton and ousted as OPCW chief after he facilitated inspections that stood in the way of the Bush administration’s drive to invade Iraq.
In his comments, Bustani voices support for the OPCW inspectors and urges the current Director General, Fernando Arias, to let them air their suppressed evidence in a transparent manner.
“At great risk to themselves, [the inspectors] have dared to speak out against possible irregular behaviour in your Organisation, and it is without doubt in your, in the Organisation’s, and in the world’s interest that you hear them out,” Bustani says. “Regardless of whether or not there is substance to the concerns raised about the OPCW’s behaviour in the Douma investigation, hearing what your own inspectors have to say would be an important first step in mending the Organisation’s damaged reputation. The dissenting inspectors are not claiming to be right, but they do want to be given a fair hearing.”https://www.youtube.com/embed/ZgIDlgD_txM?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent
TRANSCRIPT
Mr Chairman, Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, your excellencies, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen,
My name is José Bustani. I am honoured to have been invited to present a statement for this meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss the Syrian chemical dossier and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. As the OPCW’s first Director General, a position I held from 1997 to 2002, I naturally retain a keen interest in the evolution and fortunes of the Organisation. I have been particularly interested in recent developments regarding the Organisation’s work in Syria.
For those of you who are not aware, I was removed from office following a US-orchestrated campaign in 2002 for, ironically, trying to uphold the Chemical Weapons Convention. My removal was subsequently ruled to be illegal by the International Labour Organisation’s Administrative Tribunal, but despite this unpleasant experience the OPCW remains close to my heart. It is a special Organisation with an important mandate. I accepted the position of Director General precisely because the Chemical Weapons Convention was non-discriminatory. I took immense pride in the independence, impartiality, and professionalism of its inspectors and wider staff in implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention. No State Party was to be considered above the rest and the hallmark of the Organisation’s work was the even-handedness with which all Member States were treated regardless of size, political might, or economic clout.
Although no longer at the helm by this time, I felt great joy when the OPCW was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2013 “for its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons”. It was a mandate towards which I and countless other former staff members had worked tirelessly. In the nascent years of the OPCW, we faced a number of challenges, but we overcame them to earn the Organisation a well-deserved reputation for effectiveness and efficiency, not to mention autonomy, impartiality, and a refusal to be politicised. The ILO decision on my removal was an official and public reassertion of the importance of these principles.
More recently, the OPCW’s investigations of alleged uses of chemical weapons have no doubt created even greater challenges for the Organisation. It was precisely for this kind of eventuality that we had developed operating procedures, analytical methods, as well as extensive training programmes, in strict accordance with the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention. Allegations of the actual use of chemical weapons were a prospect for which we hoped our preparations would never be required. Unfortunately, they were, and today allegations of chemical weapons use are a sad reality.
It is against this backdrop that serious questions are now being raised over whether the independence, impartiality, and professionalism of some of the Organisation’s work is being severely compromised, possibly under pressure from some Member States. Of particular concern are the circumstances surrounding the OPCW’s investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria, on 7 April 2018. These concerns are emanating from the very heart of the Organisation, from the very scientists and engineers involved in the Douma investigation.
In October 2019 I was invited by the Courage Foundation, an international organisation that ‘supports those who risk life or liberty to make significant contributions to the historical record’, to participate in a panel along with a number of eminent international figures from the fields of international law, disarmament, military operations, medicine, and intelligence. The panel was convened to hear the concerns of an OPCW official over the conduct of the Organisation’s investigation into the Douma incident.
The expert provided compelling and documentary evidence of highly questionable, and potentially fraudulent conduct in the investigative process. In a joint public statement, the Panel was, and I quote, ‘unanimous in expressing [its] alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma’. The Panel further called on the OPCW, ‘to permit all inspectors who took part in the Douma investigation to come forward and report their differing observations in an appropriate forum of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention, in fulfilment of the spirit of the Convention.’
I was personally so disturbed by the testimony and evidence presented to the Panel, that I was compelled to make a public statement. I quote: “I have always expected the OPCW to be a true paradigm of multilateralism. My hope is that the concerns expressed publicly by the Panel, in its joint consensus statement, will catalyse a process by which the Organisation can be resurrected to become the independent and non-discriminatory body it used to be.”
The call for greater transparency from the OPCW further intensified in November 2019 when an open letter of support for the Courage Foundation declaration was sent to Permanent Representatives to the OPCW to, ‘ask for [their] support in taking action at the forthcoming Conference of States Parties aimed at restoring the integrity of the OPCW and regaining public trust.’
The signatories of this petition included such eminent figures as Noam Chomsky, Emeritus Professor at MIT; Marcello Ferrada de Noli, Chair of the Swedish Doctors for Human Rights; Coleen Rowley, whistle-blower and a 2002 Time Magazine Person of the Year; Hans von Sponeck, former UN Assistant Secretary-General; and Film Director Oliver Stone, to mention a few.
Almost one year later, the OPCW has still not responded to these requests, nor to the ever-growing controversy surrounding the Douma investigation. Rather, it has hidden behind an impenetrable wall of silence and opacity, making any meaningful dialogue impossible. On the one occasion when it did address the inspectors’ concerns in public, it was only to accuse them of breaching confidentiality. Of course, Inspectors – and indeed all OPCW staff members – have responsibilities to respect confidentiality rules. But the OPCW has the primary responsibility – to faithfully ensure the implementation of the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention (Article VIII, para 1).
The work of the Organisation must be transparent, for without transparency there is no trust. And trust is what binds the OPCW together. If Member States do not have trust in the fairness and objectivity of the work of the OPCW, then its effectiveness as a global watchdog for chemical weapons is severely compromised.
And transparency and confidentiality are not mutually exclusive. But confidentiality cannot be invoked as a smoke screen for irregular behaviour. The Organisation needs to restore the public trust it once had and which no one denies is now waning. Which is why we are here today.
It would be inappropriate for me to advise on, or even to suggest how the OPCW should go about regaining public trust. Still, as someone who has experienced both rewarding and tumultuous times with the OPCW, I would like to make a personal plea to you, Mr Fernando Arias, as Director General of the OPCW. The inspectors are among the Organisation’s most valuable assets. As scientists and engineers, their specialist knowledge and inputs are essential for good decision making. Most importantly, their views are untainted by politics or national interests. They only rely on the science. The inspectors in the Douma investigation have a simple request – that they be given the opportunity to meet with you to express their concerns to you in person, in a manner that is both transparent and accountable.
This is surely the minimum that they can expect. At great risk to themselves, they have dared to speak out against possible irregular behaviour in your Organisation, and it is without doubt in your, in the Organisation’s, and in the world’s interest that you hear them out. The Convention itself showed great foresight in allowing inspectors to offer differing observations, even in investigations of alleged uses of chemical weapons (paras 62 and 66 of Part II, Ver. Annex). This right, is, and I quote, ‘a constitutive element supporting the independence and objectivity of inspections’. This language comes from Ralf Trapp and Walter Krutzsch’s “A commentary on Verification Practice under the CWC”, published by the OPCW itself during my time as DG.
Regardless of whether or not there is substance to the concerns raised about the OPCW’s behaviour in the Douma investigation, hearing what your own inspectors have to say would be an important first step in mending the Organisation’s damaged reputation. The dissenting inspectors are not claiming to be right, but they do want to be given a fair hearing. As one Director General to another, I respectfully request that you grant them this opportunity. If the OPCW is confident in the robustness of its scientific work on Douma and in the integrity of the investigation, then it has little to fear in hearing out its inspectors. If, however, the claims of evidence suppression, selective use of data, and exclusion of key investigators, among other allegations, are not unfounded, then it is even more imperative that the issue be dealt with openly and urgently.
This Organisation has already achieved greatness. If it has slipped, it nonetheless still has the opportunity to repair itself, and to grow to become even greater. The world needs a credible chemical weapons watchdog. We had one, and I am confident, Mr Arias, that you will see to it that we have one again.
The progressivist Left goes much further. Indeed, the same demands for equality, and expanded and newly-discovered “rights,” in the slogans and proposals of Leftists often become props in an overpowering effort, not as much for desired “social justice,” but more for the acquisition of power: a means to an end, the control of society and its structures.
Over the past few years I have written about what I term a “triumph of lunacy” in our society—most significantly on our college campuses and in our schools, in our entertainment, in the media, but also in our culture generally. The post-Marxist progressivist Left, after the apparent political set-back of the 2016 elections, has redoubled its efforts with a frenzied fanaticism unknown in our history, at least since a few years before the War Between the States.
What distinguishes our revolutionary period from previous upheavals is that today’s revolutionaries have, in effect, created a “counter-reality” in which they base their thought and actions. That reality they have manufactured out of a critical misapprehension of the nature of creation and the nature of mankind. That counter-reality is totally subjective, anchored in fractured internal thinking processes which have been infected and warped from their inception. That counter-reality is the inverse of the two-millennia of Western civilization; it possesses its own language, its own precepts, its own rules of conduct, its own goals and objectives, undeterred by the inexorable laws of nature or the historic teachings of the Christian faith. Indeed, it is the contrary of historic Christianity.
In a very substantial sense the raging post-Marxist Left and its nostrums are grounded in the “idea of progress,” a broad conceptual movement in history that dates back several centuries, at least to the Enlightenment of the 18th century, but which achieved a large degree of intellectual triumph in society in the 19th, most especially with the social theories of Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer, and others. The late conservative philosopher, Robert Nisbet, wrote comprehensively about it in his volume, The History of the Idea of Progress. It posits that history is a process materially leading to the improvement and refinement of our technological and scientific environment, and, philosophically, leading to more “individual freedom” and the abolition of what are considered hindrances to that expanding freedom and what are perceived to be any obstacles to the irreversible expansion of “rights” and “equality”—which become over time almost inexhaustible and unlimited. Nothing can stand against the ideas that proponents of progress propound. If you do, you are a hopeless reactionary, a bigot, old-fashioned, and probably a racist and a misogynist.
Of course, material progress is observable, constant, and measurable, and is to be welcomed generally. Going from oil lamps to electric lights, or from horse-and-buggies to automobiles is seen positively by most everyone. There are, certainly, a few negatives in such progress (e.g., damage to the environment, altered living patterns, etc.), but most of those negatives are outweighed by the positives and the material enhancement of civilization.
The real problem comes when the “idea of progress” is made the benchmark for intellectual thought and how political and social goals are presented and achieved under its banner. For it then becomes, depending on how it is defined, the vehicle for ideologies that use it to shape and push their agendas—whether the liberals of the 19th century, or the Marxists and Communists of the 20th. To be “on the side of progress,” to be part of the irresistible “forces of history,” is to grant to one’s beliefs a kind of inescapable inevitability: you can’t oppose what I am saying and doing, because it’s simply going to happen, and you can’t stop it!
In our society, and in Western society generally, the inevitability and positive nature of intellectual progress is more or less taken for granted. Most conservatives, including those opposed supposedly to the current revolution on our campuses and in our streets, accept it as a given. They may demur and disagree about what the goals should or ought to be, but the essential premise, the template idea, remains fixed and unassailable.
Thus, on Fox News most pundits applaud greater “rights” for minorities, both racial and sexual. They just don’t agree with some of the more vigorous applications coming from the Left. For “establishment conservatives” increasingly same sex marriage must be a full constitutional right—full transgender normalization and acceptance in society is desirable—women must have equal access to every position or role that men have (e.g., no more male-only academies, no more “Boy” Scouts, etc.)—absolute racial equity, even if that means special advantages, must be pursued—and “American democratic values” are in all parts of the globe demanded (even at the point of an M-16 rifle).
The progressivist Left goes much further. Indeed, the same demands for equality, and expanded and newly-discovered “rights,” in the slogans and proposals of Leftists often become props in an overpowering effort, not as much for desired “social justice,” but more for the acquisition of power: a means to an end, the control of society and its structures.
Right after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the first violent riots here in North Carolina, a couple of black college students videotaped a group of exclusively-white “millennials” demonstrating in a frenzy in Raleigh, North Carolina. The black videotapers noticed and commented that all the demonstrators were white, probably the sons and daughters of wealthy white (liberal) parents, and graduates of prestigious universities like Duke or UNC. The irony wasn’t lost on the two blacks, who wondered: “What do those privileged whites know about black issues?” Indeed, what they know is undergirded by and laden with the intellectual progressivism and post-Marxist ideology they’ve learned in classrooms at those very same prestigious universities.
In effect, these protesters demonstrate against “white supremacy” and “institutional racism” in a not-so-hidden effort to expiate their own sin of “whiteness,” inculcated into them by “woke” professors and an ideologized educational system.
But they are also out in the streets attempting to create a “new world order” in which the real objective is power, and that power recurs to global elites. “Systemic racism” may be a target but actually and more significantly, opposition to it is a means of advancing the overall goal of completely restructuring and recasting society—and the destruction of two millennia of civilization and its culture, annealed by the Christian faith—on behalf of those elites.
Until conservatives understand the fundamental dangers in embracing the “idea of progress” philosophically and in praxis—until they learn that beginning with the same premises on “equality” and “rights” as their purported opponents will inevitably conduct them to giving way to those opponents…and to denying implicitly, if not finally explicitly God-given creation and its natural and Divine Positive Laws–until they recognize this, they will remain prisoners of a dialectic that leads them always to eventual surrender to the Left.
The post-War Between the States Southern divine and essayist Robert Lewis Dabney summed up this type of conservatism succinctly and presciently 150 years ago. That quotation is apt and applies to far too many members of today’s “conservative loyal opposition”:
“This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to each aggression of the progressive party, and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resisted novelty of yesterday is to-day one of the accepted principles of conservatism; it is now conservative only in affecting to resist the next innovation, which will to-morrow be forced upon its timidity, and will be succeeded by some third revolution, to be denounced and then adopted in its turn.
“American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor: wherewith shall it he salted? Its impotency is not hard, indeed, to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only, and not of sturdy principle. It intends to risk nothing serious, for the sake of the truth, and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always—when about to enter a protest—very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it essays to stop, that its ‘bark is worse than its bite,’ and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent rôle of resistance.
“The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to Radicalism to keep it ‘in wind,’ and to prevent its becoming pursy and lazy from having nothing to whip. No doubt, after a few years, when women’s suffrage shall have become an accomplished fact, conservatism will tacitly admit it into its creed, and thenceforward plume itself upon its wise firmness in opposing with similar weapons the extreme of baby suffrage; and when that too shall have been won, it will be heard declaring that the integrity of the American Constitution requires at least the refusal of suffrage to asses. There it will assume, with great dignity, its final position.” [From “Womens’ Rights Women,” Discussions, vol. IV, Secular Discussions.]
Will they learn before it is too late? Or will they—far more likely—give way like previous temporizers in the face of the lunacy?
A doctor at a Planned Parenthood megaclinic in Colorado is seen explaining the clinic’s traffic in body parts. Aware that it is illegal to transfer “human fetal tissue” for “valuable consideration,” the doctor plays semantic games with the would-be purchasers.
