From branding parents speaking out against critical race theory and sexual ideology in schools as terrorists to the Mar-a-Lago raid, Attorney General Merrick Garland’s radicalized Justice Department transforms pre-election political opposition into national security threats.
The infamous DOJ letter on schools was sent out a month before the gubernatorial election in Virginia, where the National School Board Association, not to mention much of the D.C. establishment, is based. Much as Garland’s DOJ operatives feared, the school protests helped elect Gov. Glenn Younkin and nearly toppled New Jersey’s Democrat governor in the bargain.
The Mar-a-Lago raid was carefully timed around the DOJ’s day policy of avoiding politically sensitive moves 90 days before an election. The real election it has its eye on is in 2024.
And, if it has its way, 2024 will be the new 1984.
The Steele dossier, the Mueller investigation, the Mar-a-Lago raid, and everything before and after are part of the larger Spygate continuum which is marked by the use of national security tools to suppress the political opposition especially before and during elections. The claims of national security, whether they involve the Russians or classified documents, are just a tactic that allow Democrat officials to wield virtually unlimited investigative powers cloaked in secrecy.
Beyond the details of these investigations, which turn as hollow as Steele or Mueller on closer examination, is the larger construct of a crisis that is described as a “threat to democracy”.
The “threat to democracy” is shorthand for a threat to Democrats. The source of that threat are conservatives and Republicans. The vectors of that threat can be described as coming from Russia, school board parents, electoral activism or “disinformation” on the internet. The common denominator is that political activities which are inherently “democratic”, speech, protest and electioneering, are defined as a national security “threat to democracy”.
The net of this crisis extends from individuals posting on social media to political candidates and institutions. Meeting the “threat to democracy” requires the government to monitor social media and for social media companies to censor unapproved speech, for candidates who believe the wrong things to be barred from office, for the IRS to investigate conservative non-profits, for companies to be pressured into pulling donations to conservative candidates and for the military to be prepared to intervene once again in the event of another grave “threat to democracy”.
The threat to democracy or rather the republic here is coming from the Democrats.
The Spygate targeting of Trump is only one strand of a number of threads drawing together to criminalize opposition to leftist agendas. Cancel culture had already contrived to economically punish speech. The next step was criminal investigations of people who non-violently stood up to Black Lives Matter race rioters or drove over BLM’s racial supremacist slogan on streets.
The underlying rationale was that racism was a public health crisis and another threat to democracy. Individuals were components of the crisis. Those who would not take a knee and admit their privilege were perpetuating the crisis and posed a threat to the nation at large.
The same collectivist machinery is being ramped up to enforce global warming dogma by using financial institutions, insurance companies, SEC regulations, real estate codes and countless other financial minutiae to extra-legislatively impose the Green New Deal, punishing companies and individuals until they conform. Dot com monopolies are already censoring those who don’t.
Once again the argument is that all human life on the planet is endangered. Anyone who doesn’t toe the line is a threat to the race. And must either conform or be silenced.
Race and the environment are not the real issues here, no more than Russia or classified documents are with Spygate. Manufactured crises are used to justify totalitarian fascist abuses of power. The details of any individual crisis or allegation matter much less than the tactics used to suppress dissent in the face of this latest imminent emergency. Every crisis is met with a centralized response weaving together federal authority, corporate complicity, national media outlets, cultural elites and all the commanding heights of power in the United States of America.
As FBI raids blend into congressional investigations, National Security Council aides, political campaigns, opposition research labs and media outlets appear to speak with one voice because they operate as arms of the same machine. Likewise, school board leaders, DOJ officials, media outlets and publishing giants start functioning as components of a single political entity.
Because they are just different ways of describing members of the Left.
In true Orwellian fashion, the “threat to democracy”, like most leftist slogans, should be interpreted to mean the opposite of what it appears to. It’s democracy that is a threat to a political system that is undemocratic and built around undemocratic institutions.
The threat to democracy manifests itself when conservative candidates win elections and is most pronounced in the least democratic institutions, government bureaucracies, national media outlets, elite universities and the upper ranks of corporations. This increasingly integrated ruling class springs into action when it’s unable to rig an election and warns of a “threat to democracy”. The worse it loses, the more urgent the crisis and the more ruthless the method of dealing with it. Having lost one election and fearing losses in 2022 and 2024, it’s getting more ruthless.
The solutions to all the crises come down to the components of the machine, the administrative state, corporate leaders, technocratic monopolies, educational bosses, activist front groups and many others urgently grabbing more power to cope with the threat of losing elections.
The Mar-a-Lago raid is a warning that the machine is rapidly preparing to fight off the “threat of democracy” to the 2022 and 2024 elections by once again weaponizing national security, censoring “misinformation”, and stamping out the political opposition. It will do whatever it takes to win, not because it needs to win elections to pursue its agenda, but because winning elections is a convenient cover to explain the amount of power it wields.
Democracy is not just in its name, but its facade. When it loses the facade, people start to notice that elections don’t seem to change very much. And that things still run the same way.
America is in a bad and dangerous place. But it will be in an even worse one by 2024.
This is not just about winning elections, but about making them irrelevant. The goal is to eliminate the opposition, not just in the voting booth, but across society. The Left will use all the powers at its disposal to ban any kind of ideological non-conformity employing government, corporations, and the culture to prosecute, fire and cancel anyone who dissents.
All of this is being done in the name of a rotating series of crises, threats to democracy, social harmony or the environment, not because these threats are real, but because they enable the system to invoke different components to leverage against its political enemies.
California is about to give people a third option for what to do with a body after death.
A demonstration “vessel” for the deceased is pictured among the other vessels during a tour of the Return Home funeral home, which specializes in human composting, in Auburn, Wash., on March 14, 2022.
JASON REDMOND/AFP via Getty Images
Instead of just burial or cremation, the state will now allow people to choose human composting – or natural organic reduction (NOR) starting in 2027, after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 351 last week, according o SF Gate.
The process of composting a cadaver, already legalized in Washington, Colorado and Oregon, involves placing the body in a reusable container, surrounding it with wood chips and aerating it to let microbes and bacteria grow. After about a month, the remains will decompose and be fully transformed into soil. Companies such as Recompose in Washington offer the service at a natural organic reduction facility. -SF Gate
The process is considered ‘green’ – as it doesn’t require the burning of fossil fuels and emission of carbon monoxide. According to National Geographic, cremations in the US alone emit around 360,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year.
An example vessel that is used in the natural organic reduction process created by Recompose, which converts human bodies into soil. Photo by Sabel Roizen, courtesy of Recompose (via RNS)
And according to the author of the bill, Asemblymember Cristina Garcia (D), the threat of climate change motivated the new law, particularly after LA County suspended regulations on cremation emissions during the pandemic.
“AB 351 will provide an additional option for California residents that is more environmentally-friendly and gives them another choice for burial,” Garcia said in a statement. “With climate change and sea-level rise as very real threats to our environment, this is an alternative method of final disposition that won’t contribute emissions into our atmosphere.”
Garcia says she herself may elect NOR when she dies. “I look forward to continuing my legacy to fight for clean air by using my reduced remains to plant a tree.”
The idea of composting human remains has raised some ethical questions.Colorado’s version of the law dictates that the soil of multiple people cannot be combined without consent, the soil cannot be sold and it cannot be used to grow food for human consumption. The California bill bans the combining of multiple peoples’ remains, unless they are family, but unlike Colorado, California is not explicitly banning the sale of the soil or its use growing food for human consumption.
The process has met opposition in California from the Catholic Church, which say the process “reduces the human body to simply a disposable commodity.” -SF Gate
“NOR uses essentially the same process as a home gardening composting system,” said the executive director of the California Catholic Conference, Kathleen Domingo, who noted that the process involved in NOR was developed for livestock, not humans.
“These methods of disposal were used to lessen the possibility of disease being transmitted by the dead carcass,” she continued. “Using these same methods for the ‘transformation’ of human remains can create an unfortunate spiritual, emotional and psychological distancing from the deceased.”
She added that the process, which may lead to human remains being scattered in public locations, “risks people treading over human remains without their knowledge while repeated dispersions in the same area are tantamount to a mass grave.”
If people do not speak up when faced with a vocal minority trying to impose their radical views on society, the silent majority and their children will face dire consequences, said rapper and social commentator Zuby, encouraging the “silent majority” to stop censoring themselves.
“A silent majority may as well not exist,” he said. “I think there’s a silenced majority.”
Zuby, a rapper, author, fitness coach, and political commentator, in New York on June 25, 2022. (Otabius Williams/The Epoch Times)
As long as people stay silenced, then that vocal minority—even if it makes up only 1 percent of the population—will not be afraid to state their opinions, he said, because they are very vocal and bold.
People like talking about a “silent majority” because it makes them think that somehow by magic, things are going to turn around for the better, Zuby said in a recent interview for EpochTV’s “Crossroads” program.
”How can you win a fight if you don’t fight? How can you win a debate when you don’t speak?” he asked.
In a debate, if one person is “spouting off the goofiest, most ludicrous ideas” and the other person just sits there silently and nods, then the one who talks will win the debate, he said.
“Most Americans aren’t on board with the most extreme and radical and bizarre notions that are floating around out there,” he said, referring to the recent assertions that men can become pregnant or give birth. “Over90 percentofpeopledon’tbelievethat, butthosepeopleneedtobewillingtosaysomething.”
A silentmajorityisweakwhenfacedwitha vocal minority, he added.
Then people wonder why the world has gone crazy, Zuby said, and his answer is that “it’s happened because most people have let it happen.”
“Most people are not being censored by the government or even censored by big tech or censored by social media,” Zuby said. “They’re censoring themselves.”
Breaking From Cowardice
“Over the past 10 years, we have had this pandemic of cowardice, and people are unwilling to say things in many cases that are objectively true. … They are afraid of repercussions,” he said, adding that cowardice and courage are both habits and they’re also both contagious.
When people start acting like cowards, it can affect others around who will start behaving like cowards, Zuby said.
“When one person stands up, starts speaking out, and using their platform to either state their opinions or to state objective facts, it encourages other people to do the same,” he said.
“I know for a fact that I’ve encouraged thousands, if not millions of people out there in this world, to be a little bit more bold, a little bit more courageous.”
Zuby made a disclaimer that he does not encourage anybody to be radical or go to extremes. He said he encourages people to be willing to say what they believe to be true, or what is true; to have conversations, debates, and discussions; and to stand up and say “no” when being forced into something the person does not want to go along with, such as a mask mandate, a vaccination mandate, or calling people by made-up pronouns.
The rapper believes that nobody should be coerced to accept others’ opinions or punished for not accepting them.
He said that if a man decides he identifies as a chicken and feels most comfortable wearing a chicken costume and eating birdseed, that’s his right.
“I think it’s weird. I support your right to do it, though,” he said. “But then if you want me to—you want to force me to say that you’re a chicken and you want to force me to treat you as a chicken … no, I’m not doing that.”
People in the West understand the concept of “freedom of religion” and “freedom from religion,” he said.
Zuby explained that he has a right to his beliefs, a right to worship and pray, but he does not have a right to force others to accept his beliefs.
In the same way, people should not be coerced into believing or affirming radical new social dogmas.
‘The Power Is Always With the People’
People are giving up too many of their freedoms, Zuby said. “If you give them an inch, they’re gonna take a yard. If you give them a yard, they’re gonna take a mile.”
There are mayors, governors, presidents, prime ministers, World Economic Forum members, and other unelected people who like to call themselves the elites, Zuby said. “But they are less than 0.1 percent of the population. The power is always, ultimately, with the people.”
“Ultimately, you are the one who makes your choices. And when you understand this, and you take responsibility for it, and you take accountability, it can be a little bit scary to begin with, but it’s actually a very powerful and an empowering message,” he said.
One person can get their own life and family in order, and that helps the wider community to get in order, he said, adding that a country is a collection of communities.
“I look at things much more bottom-up than top-down,” he said.
Biden CDC Awarded Millions To Soros-Funded Activist Group Suing DeSantis
In February, 2021, the Biden administration-run Centers for Disease Control (CDC) awarded a Soros-backed pro-migrant nonprofit $7.5 millionunder the guise of pandemic-related support for “LATINX ESSENTIAL WORKERS AS HEALTH PROMOTERS,” and aimed “to reduce the spread of COVID-19 and mitigate impacts among Latinx and Latin American immigrants,” according to an analysis by the Daily Caller.
The group, Alianza Americas, is currently suing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and other Florida officials over migrant flights to Martha’s Vineyard earlier this month.
The group has also received nearly $1.4 million from George Soros’ Open Society Network.
Alianza Americas is “focused on improving the quality of life of all people in the U.S.-Mexico-Central America migration corridor.” The membership-based group, which Soros’ Open Society Foundations network (OSF) sent almost $1.4 million to between 2016 and 2020, was awarded a $7.5 million CDC grant in February 2021, according to a grant listing reviewed by the Daily Caller News Foundation. -Daily Caller
The CDC funds were distributed under a program called “Protecting and Improving Health Globally: Building and Strengthening Public Health Impact, Systems, Capacity and Security.”
“The CDC grant is another example of Biden abusing tax dollars to promote illegal immigration and to enrich his liberal friends, under the guise of increasing ‘awareness’ of an emergency even Biden admitted is over,” Brian Harrison, who under former President Donald Trump was chief of staff for the Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees the CDC, told the Caller.
On Tuesday, Alianza Americas filed the DeSantis lawsuit through advocacy law firm Lawyers for Civil Rights, after the Florida governor overwhelmed Martha’s Vineyard with 50 migrants – a move Democratic lawmakers labeled “inhumane.”
According to the lawsuit, DeSantis “intentionally targeted only individuals who are non-white and born outside the United States.”
The 1998 movie Enemy of the State starring Gene Hackman and Will Smith seemed like fiction at the time. Why I didn’t regard that movie – which still holds up in nearly every detail – as a warning I do not know. It pulls back the curtain on the close working relationship between national security agencies and the communications industry – spying, censorship, blackmailing, and worse. Today, it seems not just a warning but a description of reality.
There is no longer any doubt at all about the symbiotic relationship between Big Tech – the digital communications industry in particular – and government. The only issue we need to debate is which of the two sectors are more decisive in driving the loss of privacy, free speech, and liberty in general.
Not only that: I’ve been involved in many debates over the years, always taking the side of technology over those who warned of the coming dangers. I was a believer, a techno-utopian and could not see where this was headed.
The lockdowns were the great shock for me, not only for the unconscionably draconian policies imposed on the country so quickly. The shock was intensified by how all the top tech companies immediately enlisted in the war on freedom of association. Why? Some combination of industry ideology, which shifted over 30 years from a founding libertarian ethos to become a major force for techno-tyranny, plus industry self-interest (how better to promote digital media consumption than to force half the workforce to stay home?) were at work.
For me personally, it feels like betrayal of the most profound sort. Only 12 years ago, I was still celebrating the dawning of the Jetsons World and dripping with disdain for the Luddites among us who refused to get with it and buy and depend on all the latest gizmos. It seemed inconceivable to me at the time that such wonderful tools could ever be taken over by power and used as a means of social and economic control. The whole idea of the Internet was to overthrow the old order of imposition and control! The Internet was anarchy, to my mind, and therefore had some built-in resistance to all attempts to monopolize it.
And yet here we are. Just this weekend, The New York Times carries a terrifying story about a California tech professional who, on request, texted a doctor’s office a picture of his son’s infection that required a state of undress, and then found himself without email, documents, and even a phone number. An algorithm made the decision. Google has yet to admit wrongdoing. It’s one story but emblematic of a massive threat that affects all our lives.
Amazon servers are reserved only for the politically compliant, while Twitter’s censorship at explicit behest of the CDC/NIH is legion. Facebook and Instagram can and does bodybag anyone who steps out of line, and the same is true of YouTube. Those companies make up the bulk of all Internet traffic. As for escaping, any truly private email cannot be domiciled in the US, and our one-time friend the smartphone operates now as the most reliable citizen surveillance tool in history.
In retrospect, it’s rather obvious that this would happen because it has happened with every other technology in history, from weaponry to industrial manufacturing. What begins as a tool of mass liberation and citizen empowerment eventually comes to be nationalized by the state working with the largest and most politically connected firms. World War I was the best illustration of just such an outrage in the 20th century: the munitions manufacturers were the only real winners of that one, while the state acquired new powers of which it never really let go.
It’s hard to appreciate just what a shock that “Great War” was to a whole generation of liberal intellectuals. My mentor Murray Rothbard wrote an extremely thoughtful reflection on the naive liberalism of Victorian-age techno enthusiasts, circa 1880-1910. This was a generation that saw progress emancipation on every front: the end of slavery, a burgeoning middle class, the crumbling of the old aristocracies of power, and new technologies. All these enabled the mass production of steel, cities rising to the heavens, electricity and lighting everywhere, flight, and countless consumer improvements from indoor plumbing and heating to mass availability of food that enabled enormous demographic shifts.
Reading the greats from that period, their optimism about the future was palpable. One of my favorite writers, Mark Twain, held such a view. His moral outrage toward the Spanish-American War, the remnants of family feuds in the South, and reactionary class-based biases were everywhere in his writings, always with a sense of profound disapproval that these signs of revanchist thinking and behaving were surely one generation away from full expiration. He shared in the naivete of the times. He simply could not have imagined the carnage of the coming total war that made the Spanish-American war look like a practice drill. The same outlook on the future was held by of Oscar Wilde, William Graham Sumner, William Gladstone, Auberon Herbert, Lord Acton, Hillaire Belloc, Herbert Spencer, and all the rest.
Rothbard’s view was that their excessive optimism, their intuitive sense of the inevitability of the victory of liberty and democracy, and their overarching naivete toward the uses of technology actually contributed to the decline and fall of what they considered civilization. Their confidence in the beautiful future – and their underestimate of the malice of states and the docility of the public – created a mindset that was less driven to work for truth than it otherwise would have been. They positioned themselves as observers of ever-increasing progress of peace and well-being. They were the Whigs who implicitly accepted a Hegelian-style view of their invincibility of their causes.
Of Herbert Spencer, for example, Rothbard wrote this scathing criticism:
Spencer began as a magnificently radical liberal, indeed virtually a pure libertarian. But, as the virus of sociology and Social Darwinism took over in his soul, Spencer abandoned libertarianism as a dynamic historical movement, although at first without abandoning it in pure theory. In short, while looking forward to an eventual ideal of pure liberty, Spencer began to see its victory as inevitable, but only after millenia of gradual evolution, and thus, in actual fact, Spencer abandoned Liberalism as a fighting, radical creed; and confined his Liberalism in practice to a weary, rear-guard action against the growing collectivism of the late nineteenth-century. Interestingly enough, Spencer’s tired shift “rightward” in strategy soon became a shift rightward in theory as well; so that Spencer abandoned pure liberty even in theory.
Rothbard was so sensitive to this problem due to the strange times in which his ideological outlook took shape. He experienced his own struggle in coming to terms with the way in which the brutality of real-time politics poisons the purity of ideological idealism.
The bulk of the Rothbardian paradigm had been complete by the time he finished his PhD in economics from Columbia University. By 1963-1964, he published his massive economic treatise, a reconstruction of the economics of the origins of the Great Depression, and put together the core of the binary that became his legacy: history is best understood as a competitive struggle between market and state. One of his best books on political economy – Power and Market – that appeared years later was actually written in this period but not published because the publisher found it too controversial.
Implicit in this outlook was a general presumption of the universal merit of free enterprise compared with the unrelenting depredations of the state. It has the ring of truth in most areas of life: the small business compared with the plotting and scamming of politics, the productivity and creativity of entrepreneurs vs the lies and manipulations of bureaucratic armies, the grimness of inflation, taxation, and war vs the peaceful trading relationships of commercial life. Based on this outlook, he became the 20th century’s foremost advocate of what became anarcho-capitalism.
Rothbard also distinguished himself in those years for never joining the Right in becoming a champion of the Cold War. Instead he saw war as the worst feature of statism, something to be avoided by any free society. Whereas he once published in the pages of National Review, he later found himself as the victim of a fatwa by Russia-hating and bomb-loving conservatives and thereby began to forge his own school of thought that took over the name libertarian, which had only recently been revived by people who preferred the name liberal but realized that this term had long been appropriated by its enemies.
What happened next challenged the Rothbardian binary. It was not lost on him that the major driving force beyond the building of the Cold War security state was private enterprise itself. And the conservative champions of free enterprise had utterly failed to distinguish between private-sector forces that thrive independently of the state and those who not only live off the state but exercise a decisive influence in further fastening the yoke of tyranny on the population through war, conscription, and general industrial monopolization. Seeing his own binary challenged in real life drove him to found an intellectual project embodied in his journal Left and Right, which opened in 1965 and ran until 1968. Here we find some of the most challenging writing and analysis of the second half of the twentieth century.
The first issue featured what might be his most mighty essay on political history: “Left, Right, and the Prospects for Liberty.” This essay came from a period in which Rothbard warmed up to the left simply because it was only on this side of the political spectrum where he found skepticism of the Cold War narrative, outrage at industrial monopolization, disgust at reactionary militarism and conscription, dogged opposition to violations of civil liberties. and generalized opposition to the despotism of the age. His new friends on the left in those days were very different from the woke/lockdown left of today, obviously. But in time, Rothbard too soured on them and their persistence in economic ignorance and un-nuanced hatred of capitalism in general and not just the crony variety.
So on it went through the decades as Rothbard was drawn ever more toward understanding class as a valuable desiderata of political dynamics, large corporate interests in a hand-in-glove relationship to the state, and the contrast between elites and common people as an essential heuristic to pile on top of his old state vs market binary. As he worked this out more fully, he came to adopt many of the political tropes we now associate with populism, but Rothbard was never fully comfortable in that position either. He rejected crude nationalism and populism, knew better than anyone of the dangers of the Right, and was well aware of the excesses of democracy.
While his theory remained intact, his strategic outlook for getting from here to there underwent many iterations, the last of which before his untimely death in 1995 landed him with an association with the burgeoning movement that eventually brought Trump to power, though there is every reason to believe that Rothbard would have regarded Trump as he did both Nixon and Reagan. He saw them both as opportunists who talked a good game – though never consistently – and ultimately betrayed their bases with anti-establishment talk without the principle reality.
One way to understand his seeming shifts over time is the simple point with which I began this reflection. Rothbard dreamed of a free society, but he was never content with theory alone. Like the major intellectual activists who influenced him (Frank Chodorov, Ludwig von Mises, and Ayn Rand) he believed in making a difference in his own time within the intellectual and political firmament he was given. This drove him toward ever more skepticism of corporate power and the privileges of the power elite in general. By the time of his death, he had traveled a distance very far from the simple binaries of his youth, which he had to do in order to make sense of them them in the face of grim realities of the 1960s through the 1990s.
Would he have been shocked as I have been about the apostasies of Big Tech? Somehow I doubt it. He saw the same thing with the industrial giants of his own time, and fought them with all his strength, a passion that led him to shifting alliances all in the interest of pushing his main cause, which was the emancipation of the human population from the forces of oppression and violence all around us. Rothbard was the Enemy of the State. Many people have even noted the similarities of Gene Hackman’s character in the movie.
The astonishing policy trends of our time are truly calling on all of us to rethink our political and ideological opinions, as simple and settled as they might have been. For this reason, Brownstone publishes thinkers on all sides. We are all disaffected in our own ways. And we know now that nothing will be the same.
Do we give up? Never. During lockdowns and medical mandates, the power of the state and its corporate allies truly reached its apotheosis, and failed us miserably. Our times cry out for justice, for clarity, and for making a difference to save ourselves and our civilization. We should approach this great project with our eyes wide open and with ears to hear different points of view on how we get from here to there.
Nuclear War Is “Possible” For 1st Time Since Cold War: US Commander
Soon after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s speech announcing partial mobilization of national forces for the operation in Ukraine, which included a hint of willingness to resort to nuclear defense of Russia’s territorial integrity, Navy Admiral Charles A. Richard – who currently serves as the US Strategic Command chief – confirmed that the Pentagon is taking the Russian nuclear threat seriously.
Putin had said in his early Wednesday address that “If Russia feels its territorial integrity is threatened, we will use all defense methods at our disposal, and this is not a bluff,” while also decrying what he called the West’s “nuclear blackmail”.
Admiral Richard addressed a national security panel event later on the same day entitled “America Under Attack—Defending the Homeland” held in Maryland. He began by acknowledging that “All of us in this room are back in the business of contemplating competition through crisis and possible direct armed conflict with a nuclear-capable peer.”
Adm. Charles A. Richard, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, via AP
“We have not had to do that in over 30 years. The implications of that are profound,” he emphasized. Speaking of both Russia and China as major nuclear armed powers and rivals of the US, he continued, “We just haven’t faced competitors and opponents like that in a long time,” asserting that “Russia and China can escalate to any level of violence that they choose in any domain with any instrument of power worldwide.”
He spoke of increasing threats from both at a moment the US recently its nuclear posture review:
“We need to execute this very good strategy as the threat from China continues to increase.
“We don’t know where that’s going to end, as the threat from Russia continues to increase, along with the other challenges that we face.”
As tough as Putin’s initial words were, his top national security official, Dmitry Medvedev, followed up by doubling down on the nuclear warning with even bolder words. “The Donbas [Donetsk and Luhansk] republics and other territories will be accepted into Russia,” he posted to Telegram. That’s when the former president and deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council stated:
Russia has announced that not only mobilization capabilities, but also any Russian weapons, including strategic nuclear weapons and weapons based on new principles, could be used for such protection.
‘You Think I Would Tell You?’ Biden Scoffs When 60 Minutes’ Pelley Asks What US Response to a Putin Nuke Would Be https://t.co/vvycJAFjFi
Medvedev also invoked the far reach of Russia’s hypersonic weapons, saying, “Various retired idiots wearing a general’s insignia should know better than to try to scare us with speculations about a NATO strike at Crimea. Hypersonic retaliation is be able to reach targets in Europe and the United States much faster, it’s guaranteed.”
He added that “the Western establishment and, in general, all citizens of the NATO countries, need to understand that Russia has chosen its own path. There is no turning back.”
Most people think that George Orwell was writing about, and against, totalitarianism – especially when they encounter him through the prism of his great dystopian novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four.
This view of Orwell is not wrong, but it can miss something. For Orwell was concerned above all about the particular threat posed by totalitarianism to words and language. He was concerned about the threat it posed to our ability to think and speak freely and truthfully. About the threat it posed to our freedom.
He saw, clearly and vividly, that to lose control of words is to lose control of meaning. That is what frightened him about the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia – these regimes wanted to control the very linguistic substance of thought itself.
And that is why Orwell continues to speak to us so powerfully today. Because words, language and meaning are under threat once more.
Totalitarianism in Orwell’s time
The totalitarian regimes of Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union represented something new and frightening for Orwell. Authoritarian dictatorships, in which power was wielded unaccountably and arbitrarily, had existed before, of course. But what made the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century different was the extent to which they demanded every individual’s complete subservience to the state. They sought to abolish the very basis of individual freedom and autonomy. They wanted to use dictatorial powers to socially engineer the human soul itself, changing and shaping how people think and behave.
Totalitarian regimes set about breaking up clubs, trade unions and other voluntary associations. They were effectively dismantling those areas of social and political life in which people were able to freely and spontaneously associate. The spaces, that is, in which local and national culture develops free of the state and officialdom. These cultural spaces were always tremendously important to Orwell. As he put it in his 1941 essay, ‘England Your England’: ‘All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official – the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the “nice cup of tea”.’
Totalitarianism may have reached its horrifying zenith in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s USSR. But Orwell was worried about its effect in the West, too. He was concerned about the Sovietisation of Europe through the increasingly prominent and powerful Stalinist Communist Parties. He was also worried about what he saw as Britain’s leftwing ‘Europeanised intelligentsia’, which, like the Communist Parties of Western Europe, seemed to worship state power, particularly in the supranational form of the USSR. And he was concerned above all about the emergence of the totalitarian mindset, and the attempt to re-engineer the deep structures of mind and feeling that lie at the heart of autonomy and liberty.
Orwell could see this mindset flourishing among Britain’s intellectual elite, from the eugenics and top-down socialism of Fabians, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb and HG Wells, to the broader technocratic impulses of the intelligentsia in general. They wanted to remake people ‘for their own good’, or for the benefit of the race or state power. They therefore saw it as desirable to force people to conform to certain prescribed behaviours and attitudes. This threatened the everyday freedom of people who wanted, as Orwell put it, ‘the liberty to have a home of your own, to do what you like in your spare time, to choose your own amusements instead of having them chosen for you from above’.
Edmond O’Brien as Winston Smith and Jan Sterling as Julia, in an adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, 3 June 1955.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, this new intellectual elite started to gain ascendancy. It was effectively a clerisy – a cultural and ruling elite defined by its academic achievements. It had been forged through higher education and academia rather than through traditional forms of privilege and wealth, such as public schools.
Orwell was naturally predisposed against this emergent clerisy. He may have attended Eton, but that’s where Orwell’s education stopped. He was not part of the clerisy’s world. He was not an academic writer, nor did he position himself as such. On the contrary, he saw himself as a popular writer, addressing a broad, non-university-educated audience.
Moreover, Orwell’s antipathy towards this new elite type was long-standing. He had bristled against the rigidity and pomposity of imperial officialdom as a minor colonial police official in Burma between 1922 and 1927. And he had always battled against the top-down socialist great and good, and much of academia, too, who were often very much hand in glove with the Stalinised left.
The hostility was mutual. Indeed, it accounts for the disdain that many academics and their fellow travellers continue to display towards Orwell today.
The importance of words
Nowadays we are all too familiar with this university-educated ruling caste, and its desire to control words and meaning. Just think, for example, of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have turned ‘fascism’ from a historically specific phenomenon into a pejorative that has lost all meaning, to be used to describe anything from Brexit to Boris Johnson’s Tory government – a process Orwell saw beginning with the Stalinist practice of calling Spanish democratic revolutionaries ‘Trotsky-fascists’ (which he documented in Homage to Catalonia (1938)).
Or think of the way in which our cultural and educational elites have transformed the very meanings of the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’, divesting them of any connection to biological reality. Orwell would not have been surprised by this development. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, he shows how the totalitarian state and its intellectuals will try to suppress real facts, and even natural laws, if they diverge from their worldview. Through exerting power over ideas, they seek to shape reality. ‘Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together in new shapes of your own choosing’, says O’Brien, the sinister party intellectual. ‘We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull… You must get rid of these 19th-century ideas about the laws of nature.’
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the totalitarian regime tries to subject history to similar manipulation. As anti-hero Winston Smith tells his lover, Julia:
‘Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.’
As Orwell wrote elsewhere, ‘the historian believes that the past cannot be altered and that a correct knowledge of history is valuable as a matter of course. From the totalitarian point of view history is something to be created rather than learned.’
This totalitarian approach to history is dominant today, from the New York Times’ 1619 Project to statue-toppling. History is something to be erased or conjured up or reshaped as a moral lesson for today. It is used to demonstrate the rectitude of the contemporary establishment.
But it is language that is central to Orwell’s analysis of this form of intellectual manipulation and thought-control. Take ‘Ingsoc’, the philosophy that the regime follows and enforces through the linguistic system of Newspeak. Newspeak is more than mere censorship. It is an attempt to make certain ideas – freedom, autonomy and so on – actually unthinkable or impossible. It is an attempt to eliminate the very possibility of dissent (or ‘thoughtcrime’).
As Syme, who is working on a Newspeak dictionary, tells Winston Smith:
‘The whole aim… is to narrow the range of thought. In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?’
The parallels between Orwell’s nightmarish vision of totalitarianism and the totalitarian mindset of today, in which language is policed and controlled, should not be overstated. In the dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the project of eliminating freedom and dissent, as in Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia, was backed up by a brutal, murderous secret police. There is little of that in our societies today – people are not forcibly silenced or disappeared.
However, they are cancelled, pushed out of their jobs, and sometimes even arrested by the police for what amounts to thoughtcrime. And many more people simply self-censor out of fear of saying the ‘wrong’ thing. Orwell’s concern that words could be erased or their meaning altered, and thought controlled, is not being realised in an openly dictatorial manner. No, it’s being achieved through a creeping cultural and intellectual conformism.
The intellectual turn against freedom
But then that was always Orwell’s worry – that intellectuals giving up on freedom would allow a Big Brother Britain to flourish. As he saw it in The Prevention of Literature (1946), the biggest danger to freedom of speech and thought came not from the threat of dictatorship (which was receding by then) but from intellectuals giving up on freedom, or worse, seeing it as an obstacle to the realisation of their worldview.
Interestingly, his concerns about an intellectual betrayal of freedom were reinforced by a 1944 meeting of the anti-censorship organisation, English PEN. Attending an event to mark the 300th anniversary of Milton’s Areopagitica, Milton’s famous 1644 speech making the case for the ‘Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing’, Orwell noted that many of the left-wing intellectuals present were unwilling to criticise Soviet Russia or wartime censorship. Indeed, they had become profoundly indifferent or hostile to the question of political liberty and press freedom.
‘In England, the immediate enemies of truthfulness, and hence of freedom of thought, are the press lords, the film magnates, and the bureaucrats’, Orwell wrote, ‘but that on a long view the weakening of the desire for liberty among the intellectuals themselves is the most serious symptom of all’.
Orwell was concerned by the increasing popularity among influential left-wing intellectuals of ‘the much more tenable and dangerous proposition that freedom is undesirable and that intellectual honesty is a form of anti-social selfishness’. The exercise of freedom of speech and thought, the willingness to speak truth to power, was even then becoming seen as something to be frowned upon, a selfish, even elitist act.
An individual speaking freely and honestly, wrote Orwell, is ‘accused of either wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privilege’.
These are insights which have stood the test of time. Just think of the imprecations against those who challenge the consensus. They are dismissed as ‘contrarians’ and accused of selfishly upsetting people.
And worst of all, think of the way free speech is damned as the right of the privileged. This is possibly one of the greatest lies of our age. Free speech does not support privilege. We all have the capacity to speak, write, think and argue. We might not, as individuals or small groups, have the platforms of a press baron or the BBC. But it is only through our freedom to speak freely that we can challenge those with greater power.
Orwell’s legacy
Orwell is everywhere today. He is taught in schools and his ideas and phrases are part of our common culture. But his value and importance to us lies in his defence of freedom, especially the freedom to speak and write.
His outstanding 1946 essay, ‘Politics and the English Language’, can actually be read as a freedom manual. It is a guide on how to use words and language to fight back.
Of course, it is attacked today as an expression of privilege and of bigotry. Author and commentator Will Self cited ‘Politics and the English Language’ in a 2014 BBC Radio 4 show as proof that Orwell was an ‘authoritarian elitist’. He said: ‘Reading Orwell at his most lucid you can have the distinct impression he’s saying these things, in precisely this way, because he knows that you – and you alone – are exactly the sort of person who’s sufficiently intelligent to comprehend the very essence of what he’s trying to communicate. It’s this the mediocrity-loving English masses respond to – the talented dog-whistler calling them to chow down on a big bowl of conformity.’
Lionel Trilling, another writer and thinker, made a similar point to Self, but in a far more insightful, enlightening way. ‘[Orwell] liberates us’, he wrote in 1952:
‘He tells us that we can understand our political and social life merely by looking around us, he frees us from the need for the inside dope. He implies that our job is not to be intellectual, certainly not to be intellectual in this fashion or that, but merely to be intelligent according to our lights – he restores the old sense of the democracy of the mind, releasing us from the belief that the mind can work only in a technical, professional way and that it must work competitively. He has the effect of making us believe that we may become full members of the society of thinking men. That is why he is a figure for us.’
Orwell should be a figure for us, too – in our battle to restore the democracy of the mind and resist the totalitarian mindset of today. But this will require having the courage of our convictions and our words, as he so often did himself. As he put it in The Prevention of Literature, ‘To write in plain vigorous language one has to think fearlessly’. That Orwell did precisely that was a testament to his belief in the public just as much as his belief in himself. He sets an example and a challenge to us all.
* * *
This is an edited version of a speech given at this year’s Living Freedom, an annual residential school organised by the Battle of Ideas.
Planned Parenthood Stealth-Edits Website To Match Stacey Abrams ‘Heartbeat’ Claim
Planned Parenthood, founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger, stealth-edited their website to match comments made by Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, who claimed that unborn children do not have detectable heartbeats at six weeks, the Washington Examiner reports.
“There is no such thing as a heartbeat a six weeks,” said Abrams. “It is a manufactured sound designed to convince people that men have the right to take control of a woman’s body..”
Shortly after, Planned Parenthood altered its website without any acknowledgement to say that under the five to six-week mark of pregnancy “a part of the embryo starts to show cardiac activity. It sounds like a heartbeat on an ultrasound, but it’s not a fully-formed heart — it’s the earliest stage of the heart developing.”
The website had previous said that “a very basic beating heart and circulatory system develop,” as National Review‘s John McCormack noted on Twitter.
Planned Parenthood edited its own website to conform to political messaging against heartbeat laws:
As the Post Millennial points out, Mayo Clinic says “A baby’s cardiovascular system begins developing five weeks into pregnancy, or three weeks after conception. The hearts starts to beat shortly afterward.”
More via the Post Millennial’s Libby Emmons:
In 2021, in response to the pro-life laws that were proposed then passed in Texas, that prohibited abortions from taking place after a fetal heartbeat could be detected, a post on Planned Parenthood read “In truth, the ‘fetal heartbeat’ talking point is misinformation intended to deceive the press and public. As gynecologist Dr. Jennifer Gunter explains, at six weeks of fetal development, there is no ‘heart’ that beats — instead, there is detectable activity within a four-millimeter wide growth known as a fetal pole.”
In 2017, The Atlanticreported that “At six weeks, the ‘heartbeat’ is not audible; it is visible, a flickering that takes place between 120 and 160 times per minute on a black-and-white playback screen. As cardiac cells develop, they begin to send electrical pulses that cause their neighbors to contract. Scientists can observe the same effect if they culture cells in a petri dish.” This article, too, was in response to pro-life laws being written in some states.
Prior to these laws being proposed, there appears to have been broad consensus that fetal heartbeats began somewhere around 5 or 6 weeks post conception, and that the beating heart was visible on ultra-sounds, and could be audible as well.
“If you’re wondering when you’ll hear baby’s heartbeat, fear not,” Parents Magazine reports, “The answer may be sooner than you think. In fact, the ‘whoosh whoosh’ of your little one’s little organ is one of the first things doctors look (and listen) for. A fetal heartbeat may first be detected by a vaginal ultrasound as early as 5 1/2 to 6 weeks.”
Russia’s war with Ukraine is first and foremost a tragedy for the people of both countries, especially those who live—and die—in the battle zones. The priority for humanity, though apparently not for the political class, is to encourage Moscow and Kyiv to stop killing men, women and children and negotiate a peace deal.
Beyond the immediate confines of the conflict, the war is also seen by some as representative of an alleged clash between great powers and, perhaps, between civilisations. All wars are momentous, but the ramifications of Ukrainian war are already global.
Consequently, there is a perception that it is the focal point of a confrontation between two distinct models of global governance. The NATO-led alliance of the Western nations continues to push the unipolar, G7, international rules-based order (IRBO). It is opposed, some say, by the Russian and Chinese-led BRICS and the G20-based multipolar world order.
In this 3 part series we will explore these issues and consider if it is tenable to place our faith in the emerging multipolar world order.
There are very few redeeming features of the unipolar world order, that’s for sure. It is a system that overwhelmingly serves capital and few people other than a “parasite class” of stakeholder capitalist eugenicists. This has led many disaffected Westerners to invest their hopes in the promise of the multipolar world order:
Many have increasingly come to terms with the reality that today’s multipolar system led by Russia and China has premised itself upon the defense of international law and national sovereignty as outlined in the UN Charter. [. . .] Putin and Xi Jinping have [. . .] made their choice to stand for win-win cooperation over Hobbesian Zero Sum thinking. [. . .] [T]heir entire strategy is premised upon the UN Charter.
If only that were so! Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be the case. But even if it were true, Putin and Xi Jinping basing “their entire strategy” upon the UN Charter, would be cause for concern, not relief.
For the globalist forces that see nation-states as squares on the grand chessboard and that regard leaders like Putin, Biden and Xi Jinping as accomplices, the multipolar world order is manna from heaven. They have spent more than a century trying to centralise global power. The power of individual nation-states at least presents the possibility of some decentralisation. The multipolar world order finally ends all national sovereignty and delivers true global governance.
World Order
We need to distinguish between the ideological concept of “world order” and the reality. This will help us identify where “world order” is an artificially imposed construct.
Authoritarian power, wielded over populations, territory and resources, restricted by physical and political geography, dictates the “world order.” The present order is largely the product of hard-nosed geopolitics, but it also reflects the various attempts to impose a global order.
The struggle to manage and mitigate the consequences of geopolitics is evident in the history of international relations. For nearly 500 years nation-states have sought to co-exist as sovereign entities. Numerous systems have been devised to seize control of what would otherwise be anarchy. It is very much to the detriment of humanity that anarchy has not been allowed to flourish.
In 1648, the two bilateral treaties that formed the Peace of Westphalia concluded the 30 Years War (or Wars). Those negotiated settlements arguably established the precept of the territorial sovereignty within the borders of the nation-state.
This reduced, but did not end, the centralised authoritarian power of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE). Britannica notes:
The Peace of Westphalia recognized the full territorial sovereignty of the member states of the empire.
This isn’t entirely accurate. That so-called “full territorial sovereignty” delineated regional power within Europe and the HRE, but full sovereignty wasn’t established.
The Westphalian treaties created hundreds of principalities that were formerly controlled by the central legislature of the HRE, the Diet. These new, effectively federalised principalities still paid taxes to the emperor and, crucially, religious observance remained a matter for the empire to decide. The treaties also consolidated the regional power of the Danish, Swedish, and French states but the Empire itself remained intact and dominant.
It is more accurate to say that the Peace of Westphalia somewhat curtailed the authoritarian power of the HRE and defined the physical borders of some nation states. During the 20th century, this led to the popular interpretation of the nation-state as a bulwark against international hegemonic power, despite that never having been entirely true.
Consequently, the so-called “Westphalian model” is largely based upon a myth. It represents an idealised version of the world order, suggesting how it could operate rather than describing how it does.
Signing of the Peace of Westphalia, in Münster 1648, painting by Gerard Ter Borch
If nation-states really were sovereign and if their territorial integrity were genuinely respected, then the Westphalian world order would be pure anarchy. This is the ideal upon which the UN is supposedly founded because, contrary to another ubiquitous popular myth, anarchy does not mean “chaos.” Quite the opposite.
Anarchy is exemplified by Article 2.1 of the UN Charter:
The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
The word “anarchy” is an abstraction of the classical Greek “anarkhos,” meaning “rulerless.” This is derived from the privative prefix “an” (without) in conjunction with “arkhos” (leader or ruler). Literally translated, “anarchy” means “without rulers”—what the UN calls “sovereign equality.”
A Westphalian world order of sovereign nation-states, each observing the “equality” of all others while adhering to the non-aggression principle, is a system of global, political anarchy. Unfortunately, that is not the way the current UN “world order” functions, nor has there ever been any attempt to impose such an order. What a shame.
Within the League of Nations and subsequent UN system of practical “world order,”—a world order allegedly built upon the sovereignty of nations—equality exists in theory only. Through empire, colonialism, neocolonialism—that is, through economic, military, financial and monetary conquest, coupled with the debt obligations imposed upon targeted nations—global powers have always been able to dominate and control lesser ones.
National governments, if defined in purely political terms, have never been the only source of authority behind the efforts to construct world order. As revealed by Antony C. Sutton and others, private corporate power has aided national governments in shaping “world order.”
Neither Hitler’s rise to power nor the Bolshevik Revolution would have occurred as they did, if at all, without the guidance of the Wall Street financiers. The bankers’ global financial institutions and extensive international espionage networks were instrumental in shifting global political power.
These private-sector “partners” of government are the “stakeholders” we constantly hear about today. The most powerful among them are fully engaged in “the game” described by Zbigniew Brzezinski in The Grand Chessboard.
Brzezinski recognised that the continental landmass of Eurasia was the key to genuine global hegemony:
This huge, oddly shaped Eurasian chess board—extending from Lisbon to Vladivostok—provides the setting for “the game.” [. . .] [I]f the middle space rebuffs the West, becomes an assertive single entity [. . .] then America’s primacy in Eurasia shrinks dramatically. [. . .] That mega-continent is just too large, too populous, culturally too varied, and composed of too many historically ambitious and politically energetic states to be compliant toward even the most economically successful and politically pre-eminent global power. [. . .] Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. [. . .] [I]t would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.
The “unipolar world order” favoured by the Western powers, often referred to as the “international rules-based order” or the “international rules-based system,” is another attempt to impose order. This “unipolar” model enables the US and its European partners to exploit the UN system to claim legitimacy for their games of empire. Through it, the transatlantic alliance has used its economic, military and financial power to try to establish global hegemony.
In 2016, Stewart Patrick, writing for the US Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a foreign policy think tank, published World Order: What, Exactly, are the Rules? He described the post-WWII “international rules-based order” (IRBO):
What sets the post-1945 Western order apart is that it was shaped overwhelmingly by a single power [a unipolarity], the United States. Operating within the broader context of strategic bipolarity, it constructed, managed, and defended the regimes of the capitalist world economy. [. . .] In the trade sphere, the hegemon presses for liberalization and maintains an open market; in the monetary sphere, it supplies a freely convertible international currency, manages exchange rates, provides liquidity, and serves as a lender of last resort; and in the financial sphere, it serves as a source of international investment and development.
The idea that the aggressive market acquisition of crony capitalism somehow represents the “open markets” of the “capitalist world economy” is risible. It is about as far removed from free market capitalism as it is possible to be. Under crony capitalism, the US dollar, as the preferred global reserve currency, is not “freely convertible.” Exchange rates are manipulated and liquidity is debt for nearly everyone except the lender. “Investment and development” by the hegemon means more profits and control for the hegemon.
The notion that a political leader, or anyone for that matter, is entirely bad or good, is puerile. The same consideration can be given to nation-states, political systems or even models of world order. The character of a human being, a nation or a system of global governance is better judged by their or its totality of actions.
Whatever we consider to be the source of “good” and “evil,” it exists in all of us at either ends of a spectrum. Some people exhibit extreme levels of psychopathy, which can lead them to commit acts that are judged to be “evil.” But even Hitler, for example, showed physical courage, devotion, compassion for some, and other qualities we might consider “good.”
Nation-states and global governance structures, though immensely complex, are formed and led by people. They are influenced by a multitude of forces. Given the added complications of chance and unforeseen events, it is unrealistic to expect any form of “order” to be either entirely good or entirely bad.
That being said, if that “order” is iniquitous and causes appreciable harm to people, then it is important to identify to whom that “order” provides advantage. Their potential individual and collective guilt should be investigated.
This does not imply that those who benefit are automatically culpable, nor that they are “bad” or “evil,” though they may be, only that they have a conflict of interests in maintaining their “order” despite the harm it causes. Equally, where systemic harm is evident, it is irrational to absolve the actions of the people who lead and benefit from that system without first ruling out their possible guilt.
Since WWII, millions of innocents have been murdered by the US, its international allies and its corporate partners, all of whom have thrown their military, economic and financial weight around the world. The Western “parasite class” has sought to assert its IRBO by any means necessary— sanctions, debt slavery or outright slavery, physical, economic or psychological warfare. The grasping desire for more power and control has exposed the very worst of human nature. Repeatedly and ad nauseam.
Of course, resistance to this kind of global tyranny is understandable. The question is: Does imposition of the multipolar model offer anything different?
Signing the UN Charter – 1948
Oligarchy
Most recently, the “unipolar world order” has been embodied by the World Economic Forum’s inappropriately named Great Reset. It is so malignant and forbidding that some consider the emerging “multipolar world order” salvation. They have even heaped praise upon the likely leaders of the new multipolar world:
It is [. . .] strength of purpose and character that has defined Putin’s two decades in power. [. . .] Russia is committed to the process of finding solutions to all people benefiting from the future, not just a few thousand holier-than-thou oligarchs. [. . .] Together [Russia and China] told the WEF to stuff the Great Reset back into the hole in which it was conceived. [. . .] Putin told Klaus Schwab and the WEF that their entire idea of the Great Reset is not only doomed to failure but runs counter to everything modern leadership should be pursuing.
Sadly, it seems this hope is also misplaced.
While Putin did much to rid Russia of the CIA-run, Western-backed oligarchs who were systematically destroying the Russian Federation during the 1990s, they have subsequently been replaced by another band of oligarchs with closer links to the current Russian government. Something we will explore in Part 3.
Yes, it is certainly true that the Russian government, led by Putin and his power bloc, has improved the incomes and life opportunities for the majority of Russians. Putin’s government has also significantly reduced chronic poverty in Russia over the last two decades.
Wealth in Russia, measured as the market value of financial and non-financial assets, has remained concentrated in the hands of the top 1% of the population. This pooling of wealth among the top percentile is itself stratified and is overwhelmingly held by the top 1% of the 1%. For example, in 2017, 56% of Russian wealth was controlled by 1% of the population. The pseudopandemic of 2020–2022 particularly benefitted Russian billionnaires—as it did the billionaires of every other developed economy.
According to the Credit Suisse Global Wealth Report 2021, wealth inequality in Russia, measured using the Gini coefficient, was 87.8 in 2020. The only other major economy with a greater disparity between the wealthy and the rest of the population was Brazil. Just behind Brazil and Russia on the wealth inequality scale was the US, whose Gini coefficient stood at 85.
In terms of wealth concentration however, the situation in Russia was the worst by a considerable margin. In 2020 the top 1% owned 58.2% of Russia’s wealth. This was more than 8 percentage points higher than Brazil’s wealth concentration, and significantly worse than wealth concentration in the US, which stood at 35.2% in 2020.
Such disproportionate wealth distribution is conducive to creating and empowering oligarchs. But wealth alone doesn’t determine whether one is an oligarch. Wealth needs to be converted into political power for the term “oligarch” to be applicable. An oligarchy is defined as “a form of government in which supreme power is vested in a small exclusive class.”
Members of this dominant class are installed through a variety of mechanisms. The British establishment, and particularly its political class, is dominated by men and women who were educated at Eton, Roedean, Harrow and St. Pauls, etc. This “small exclusive class” arguably constitutes a British oligarchy. The UK’s new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, has been heralded by some because she is not a graduate of one of these select public schools.
Educational privilege aside, though, the use of the word “oligarch” in the West more commonly refers to an internationalist class of globalists whose individual wealth sets them apart and who use that wealth to influence policy decisions.
Bill Gates is a prime example of an oligarch. The former advisor to the UK Prime Minister, Dominic Cummings, said as much during his testimony to a parliamentary committee on May 2021 (go to 14:02:35). As Cummings put it, Bill Gates and “that kind of network” had directed the UK government’s response to the supposed COVID-19 pandemic.
Gates’ immense wealth has bought him direct access to political power beyond national borders. He has no public mandate in either the US or the UK. He is an oligarch—one of the more well known but far from the only one.
CFR member David Rothkopf described these people as a “Superclass” with the ability to “influence the lives of millions across borders on a regular basis.” They do this, he said, by using their globalist “networks.” Those networks, as described by Antony C. Sutton, Dominic Cummings and others, act as “the force multiplier in any kind of power structure.”
This “small exclusive class” use their wealth to control resources and thus policy. Political decisions, policy, court rulings and more are made at their behest. This point was highlighted in the joint letter sent by the Attorneys General (AGs) of 19 US states to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink.
The AGs observed that BlackRock was essentially using its investment strategy to pursue a political agenda:
The Senators elected by the citizens of this country determine which international agreements have the force of law, not BlackRock.
Their letter describes the theoretical model of representative democracy. Representative democracy is not a true democracy—which decentralises political power to the individual citizen—but is rather a system designed to centralise political control and authority. Inevitably, “representative democracy” leads to the consolidation of power in the hands of the so-called “Superclass” described by Rothkopf.
There is nothing “super” about them. They are ordinary people who have acquired wealth primarily through conquest, usury, market rigging, political manipulation and slavery. “Parasite class” is a more befitting description.
Not only do global investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street use their immense resources to steer public policy, but their major shareholders include the very oligarchs who, via their contribution to various think tanks, create the global political agendas that determine policy in the first place. There is no space in this system of alleged “world order” for any genuine democratic oversight.
As we shall see in Part 3, the levers of control are exerted to achieve exactly the same effect in Russia and China. Both countries have a gaggle of oligarchs whose objectives are firmly aligned with the WEF’s Great Reset agenda. They too work with their national government “partners” to ensure that they all arrive at the “right” policy decisions.
US President Joe Biden, left, and CFR President Richard N. Haass, right.
The United Nations’ Model of National Sovereignty
Any bloc of nations that bids for dominance within the United Nations is seeking global hegemony. The UN enables global governance and centralises global political power and authority. In so doing, the UN empowers the international oligarchy.
As noted previously, Article 2 of the United Nations Charter declares that the UN is “based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.” The Charter then goes on to list the numerous ways in which nation-states are not equal. It also clarifies how they are all subservient to the UN Security Council.
Despite all the UN’s claims of lofty principles—respect for national sovereignty and for alleged human rights—Article 2 declares that no nation-state can receive any assistance from another as long as the UN Security Council is forcing that nation-state to comply with its edicts. Even non-member states must abide by the Charter, whether they like it or not, by decree of the United Nations.
The UN Charter is a paradox. Article 2.7 asserts that “nothing in the Charter” permits the UN to infringe the sovereignty of a nation-state—except when it does so through UN “enforcement measures.” The Charter states, apparently without reason, that all nation-states are “equal.” However, some nation-states are empowered by the Charter to be far more equal than others.
While the UN’s General Assembly is supposedly a decision-making forum comprised of “equal” sovereign nations, Article 11 affords the General Assembly only the power to discuss “the general principles of co-operation.” In other words, it has no power to make any significant decisions.
Article 12 dictates that the General Assembly can only resolve disputes if instructed to do so by the Security Council. The most important function of the UN, “the maintenance of international peace and security,” can only be dealt with by the Security Council. What the other members of the General Assembly think about the Security Council’s global “security” decisions is a practical irrelevance.
Article 23 lays out which nation-states form the Security Council:
The Security Council shall consist of fifteen Members of the United Nations. The Republic of China, France, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics [Russian Federation], the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the United States of America shall be permanent members of the Security Council. The General Assembly shall elect ten other Members of the United Nations to be non-permanent members of the Security Council. [. . .] The non-permanent members of the Security Council shall be elected for a term of two years.
The General Assembly is allowed to elect “non-permanent” members to the Security Council based upon criteria stipulated by the Security Council. Currently the “non-permanent” members are Albania, Brazil, Gabon, Ghana, India, Ireland, Kenya, Mexico, Norway and the United Arab Emirates.
Article 24 proclaims that the Security Council has “primary responsibility for the maintenance of international peace and security” and that all other nations agree that “the Security Council acts on their behalf.” The Security Council investigates and defines all alleged threats and recommends the procedures and adjustments for the supposed remedy. The Security Council dictates what further action, such as sanctions or the use of military force, shall be taken against any nation-state it considers to be a problem.
Article 27 decrees that at least 9 of the 15 member states must be in agreement for a Security Council resolution to be enforced. All of the 5 permanent members must concur, and each has the power of veto. Any Security Council member, including permanent members, shall be excluded from the vote or use of its veto if they are party to the dispute in question.
UN member states, by virtue of agreeing to the Charter, must provide armed forces at the Security Council’s request. In accordance with Article 47, military planning and operational objectives are the sole remit of the permanent Security Council members through their exclusive Military Staff Committee. If the permanent members are interested in the opinion of any other “sovereign” nation, they’ll ask it to provide one.
The inequality inherent in the Charter could not be clearer. Article 44 notes that “when the Security Council has decided to use force” its only consultative obligation to the wider UN is to discuss the use of another member state’s armed forces where the Security Council has ordered that nation to fight. For a country that is a current member of the Security Council, use of its armed forces by the Military Staff Committee is a prerequisite for Council membership.
The UN Secretary-General, identified as the “chief administrative officer” in the Charter, oversees the UN Secretariat. The Secretariat commissions, investigates and produces the reports that allegedly inform UN decision-making. The Secretariat staff members are appointed by the Secretary-General. The Secretary-General is “appointed by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council.”
Under the UN Charter, then, the Security Council is made king. This arrangement affords the governments of its permanent members—China, France, Russia, the UK and the US—considerable additional authority. There is nothing egalitarian about the UN Charter.
The suggestion that the UN Charter constitutes a “defence” of “national sovereignty” is ridiculous. The UN Charter is the embodiment of the centralisation of global power and authority.
UN Headquarters New York – Land Donated by the Rockefellers
The United Nations’ Global Public-Private Partnership
The UN was created, in no small measure, through the efforts of the private sector Rockefeller Foundation (RF). In particular, the RF’s comprehensive financial and operational support for the Economic, Financial and Transit Department (EFTD) of the League of Nations (LoN), and its considerable influence upon the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), made the RF the key player in the transformation of the LoN into the UN.
The UN came into being as a result of public-private partnership. Since then, especially with regard to defence, financing, global health care and sustainable development, public-private partnerships have become dominant within the UN system. The UN is no longer an intergovernmental organisation, if it ever was one. It is a global collaboration between governments and a multinational infra-governmental network of private “stakeholders.”
In 1998, then-UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the World Economic Forum’s Davos symposium that a “quiet revolution” had occurred in the UN during the 1990s:
[T]he United Nations has been transformed since we last met here in Davos. The Organization has undergone a complete overhaul that I have described as a “quiet revolution”. [. . .] [W]e are in a stronger position to work with business and industry. [. . .] The business of the United Nations involves the businesses of the world. [. . .] We also promote private sector development and foreign direct investment. We help countries to join the international trading system and enact business-friendly legislation.
In 2005, the World Health Organisation (WHO), a specialised agency of the UN, published a report on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) in healthcare titled Connecting for Health. Speaking about how “stakeholders” could introduce ICT healthcare solutions globally, the WHO noted:
Governments can create an enabling environment, and invest in equity, access and innovation.
The 2015, Adis Ababa Action Agenda conference on “financing for development” clarified the nature of an “enabling environment.” National governments from 193 UN nation-states committed their respective populations to funding public-private partnerships for sustainable development by collectively agreeing to create “an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development;” and “to further strengthen the framework to finance sustainable development.”
In 2017, UN General Assembly Resolution 70/224 (A/Res/70/224) compelled UN member states to implement “concrete policies” that “enable” sustainable development. A/Res/70/224 added that the UN:
[. . .] reaffirms the strong political commitment to address the challenge of financing and creating an enabling environment at all levels for sustainable development [—] particularly with regard to developing partnerships through the provision of greater opportunities to the private sector, non-governmental organizations and civil society in general.
In short, the “enabling environment” is a government, and therefore taxpayer, funding commitment to create markets for the private sector. Over the last few decades, successive Secretary-Generals have overseen the UN’s formal transition into a global public-private partnership (G3P).
Nation-states do not have sovereignty over public-private partnerships. Sustainable development formally relegates government to the role of an “enabling” partner within a global network comprised of multinational corporations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), civil society organisations and other actors. The “other actors” are predominantly the philanthropic foundations of individual billionaires and immensely wealthy family dynasties—that is, oligarchs.
Effectively, then, the UN serves the interests of capital. Not only is it a mechanism for the centralisation of global political authority, it is committed to the development of global policy agendas that are “business-friendly.” That means Big Business-friendly. Such agendas may happen to coincide with the best interests of humanity, but where they don’t—which is largely the case—well, that’s just too bad for humanity.
Kofi Annan (8 April 1938 – 18 August 2018)
Global Governance
On the 4th February 2022, a little less then three weeks prior to Russia launching its “special military operation” in Ukraine, Presidents Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping issued an important joint statement:
The sides [Russian Federation and Chinese People’s Republic] strongly support the development of international cooperation and exchanges [. . .], actively participating in the relevant global governance process, [. . .] to ensure sustainable global development. [. . .] The international community should actively engage in global governance[.] [. . .] The sides reaffirmed their intention to strengthen foreign policy coordination, pursue true multilateralism, strengthen cooperation on multilateral platforms, defend common interests, support the international and regional balance of power, and improve global governance. [. . .] The sides call on all States [. . .] to protect the United Nations-driven international architecture and the international law-based world order, seek genuine multipolarity with the United Nations and its Security Council playing a central and coordinating role, promote more democratic international relations, and ensure peace, stability and sustainable development across the world.
Global governance encompasses the totality of institutions, policies, norms, procedures and initiatives through which States and their citizens try to bring more predictability, stability and order to their responses to transnational challenges.
Global governance centralises control over the entire sphere of international relations. It inevitably erodes a nation’s ability to set foreign policy. As a theoretical protection against global instability, this isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but in practice it neither enhances nor “protects” national sovereignty.
Domination of the global governance system by one group of powerful nation-states represents possibly the most dangerous and destabilising force of all. It allows those nations to act with impunity, regardless of any pretensions about honouring alleged “international law.”
Global governance also significantly curtails the independence of a nation-state’s domestic policy. For example, the UN’s Sustainable Development Agenda 21, with the near-time Agenda 2030 serving as a waypoint, impacts nearly all national domestic policy—even setting the course for most domestic policy—in every country.
National electorates’ oversight of this “totality” of UN policies is weak to nonexistent. Global governance renders so-called “representative democracy” little more than a vacuous sound-bite.
As the UN is a global public-private partnership (UN-G3P), global governance allows the “multi-stakeholder partnership”—and therefore oligarchs—significant influence over member nation-states’ domestic and foreign policy. Set in this context, the UN-DESA report (see above) provides a frank appraisal of the true nature of UN-G3P global governance:
Current approaches to global governance and global rules have led to a greater shrinking of policy space for national Governments [. . . ]; this also impedes the reduction of inequalities within countries. [. . .] Global governance has become a domain with many different players including: multilateral organizations; [. . .] elite multilateral groupings such as the Group of Eight (G8) and the Group of Twenty (G20) [and] different coalitions relevant to specific policy subjects[.] [. . .] Also included are activities of the private sector (e.g., the Global Compact) non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and large philanthropic foundations (e.g., Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Turner Foundation) and associated global funds to address particular issues[.] [. . .] The representativeness, opportunities for participation, and transparency of many of the main actors are open to question. [. . .] NGOs [. . .] often have governance structures that are not subject to open and democratic accountability. The lack of representativeness, accountability and transparency of corporations is even more important as corporations have more power and are currently promoting multi-stakeholder governance with a leading role for the private sector. [. . .] Currently, it seems that the United Nations has not been able to provide direction in the solution of global governance problems—perhaps lacking appropriate resources or authority, or both. United Nations bodies, with the exception of the Security Council, cannot make binding decisions.
A/Res/73/254 declares that the UN Global Compact Office plays a vital role in “strengthening the capacity of the United Nations to partner strategically with the private sector.” It adds:
The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development acknowledges that the implementation of sustainable development will depend on the active engagement of both the public and private sectors[.]
While the Attorneys General of 19 states might rail against BlackRock for usurping the political authority of US senators, BlackRock is simply exercising its power as valued a “public-private partner” of the US government. Such is the nature of global governance. Given that this system has been constructed over the last 80 years, it’s a bit too late for 19 state AGs to complain about it now. What have they been doing for the last eight decades?
The governmental “partners” of the UN-G3P lack “authority” because the UN was created, largely by the Rockefellers, as a public-private partnership. The intergovernmental structure is the partner of the infra-governmental network of private stakeholders. In terms of resources, the power of the private sector “partners” dwarfs that of their government counterparts.
Corporate fiefdoms are not limited by national borders. BlackRock alone currently holds $8.5 trillion of assets under management. This is nearly five times the size of the total GDP of UN Security Council permanent member Russia and more than three times the GDP of the UK.
So-called sovereign countries are not sovereign over their own central banks nor are they “sovereign” over international financial institutions like the IMF, the New Development Bank (NDB), the World Bank or the Bank for International Settlements. The notion that any nation state or intergovernmental organisation is capable of bringing the global network of private capital to heel is farcical.
At the COP26 Conference in Glasgow in 2021, King Charles III—then Prince Charles—prepared the conference to endorse the forthcoming announcement of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). He made it abundantly clear who was in charge and, in keeping with UN objectives, clarified national governments role as “enabling partners”:
The scale and scope of the threat we face call for a global systems level solution based on radically transforming our current fossil fuel based economy. [. . .] So ladies and gentleman, my plea today is for countries to come together to create the environment that enables every sector of industry to take the action required. We know this will take trillions, not billions of dollars. [. . .] [W]e need a vast military style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector, with trillions at [its] disposal far beyond global GDP, and with the greatest respect, beyond even the governments of the world’s leaders. It offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition.
Unless Putin and Xi Jinping intend to completely restructure the United Nations, including all of its institutions and specialised agencies, their objective of protecting “the United Nations-driven international architecture” appears to be nothing more than a bid to cement their status as the nominal leaders of the UN-G3P. As pointed out by UN-DESA, through the UN-G3P, that claim to political authority is extremely limited. Global corporations dominate and are currently further consolidating their global power through “multi-stakeholder governance.”
Whether unipolar or multipolar, the so-called “world order” is the system of global governance led by the private sector—the oligarchs. Nation-states, including Russia and China, have already agreed to follow global priorities determined at the global governance level. The question is not which model of the global public-private “world order” we should accept, but rather why we would ever accept any such “world order” at all.
This, then, is the context within which we can explore the alleged advantages of a “multipolar world order” led by China, Russia and increasingly India. Is it an attempt, as claimed by some, to reinvigorate the United Nations and create a more just and equitable system of global governance? Or is it merely the next phase in the construction of what many refer to as the “New World Order”?
Dozens Of Chicago Inmates Scored PPP Loans To Make Bond
At least 25 people in Joliet, Illinois who were facing drug or weapons charges obtained PPP loans for fake businesses, and then used the money to make bond to get out of jail, Fox32 Chicago reports.
So far, 15 people have been arrested and charged with offenses ranging from wire fraud to theft, during an investigation dubbed “Operation Triple P.”
(Joliet police)
Another 10 individuals are wanted for the same crimes.
(Joliet police)
According to officials, inmates at the Will County Jail had been applying for, and receiving Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loans using fraudulent information. It’s unclear if any of the inmates claimed to own a motorcycle dealer.
“Some of the targets bonded out on their felony cases days after receiving their fraudulent PPP loan,” said Joliet Police Chief William Evans during a Wednesday press conference.
The scheme was uncovered in November 2021, when Joliet detectives began comparing names on PPP loans to the names of inmates facing felonies – which should have disqualified them from the program.
“The majority of them also use their home address. So we did several periodic spot checks on the residence,” said Detective James Kilgore of the Joliet PD.
Maria Beach and Adrian Clark were locked up during the pandemic for unrelated gun offenses.
Police say from their cellphone, they applied for and received PPP loans. Beach claimed to run a barbershop from a home in Rockdale, while Clark claimed to run a barbershop from an apartment in a Joliet house.
According to records, Beach received nearly $21,000 dollars in PPP loans. Clark got two PPP loans for the same barbershop location totaling nearly $42,000.
Both are now part of the 15 people locked up again. –Fox32 Chicago
Joliet PD worked with US Marshals and the Will County State Attorney’s office, as well as the Department of Labor and Chicago’s office of Homeland Security Investigations.
“These triple-P loans, that they’re obtaining fraudulently, they are taking that money out of the businesses in our local area that actually need them,” said Acting Special Agent in charge of the Chicago DHS Investigations office, adding that this type of PPP loan fraud has happened across the country.
The smartphone has begun to play a huge role In dumbing down America. Rather than being a source to move us forward, it has become an albatross around the necks of many weak-minded souls that depend on them. People turn to these devices for all kinds of unneeded updates including performing simple math problems so they don’t have to think.
Originated in 1933, the term “dumbing down” was movie-business slang, used by screenplay writers, meaning: “to revise to appeal to those of little education or intelligence.” For those with little drive or purpose, the tendency to seek distraction and relief from unpleasant realities, especially by seeking entertainment or engaging in fantasy find great comfort in the constant flow of dribble a cell phone can provide. In short, dumbing down is the deliberate oversimplification of intellectual content in education, literature, cinema, news, video games, and culture.
It should be noted this is being written just as the world is on the cusp of being offered a whole new recipe that may lead to more social dysfunction. That comes in the form of “virtual reality” which offers an even stronger form of escapism that may result in damaging the ability of people to relate to each other in the real world. Especially worrisome is the effect it might have on children that experience and embrace it. Their ability to separate this fake virtual world from reality could become impaired.
A great deal of the problems with smartphones are rooted in the idea everyone deserves one. Yes, I said deserves, not needs. Smartphones are now considered by many people as an extension of their being. A government program started years ago has mushroomed in size and transfers a huge amount of wealth down the social ladder. Years ago I wrote an article that outlined a government program supplying free phones to people with low incomes or that have been declared needy. At that time these phones have become known as “Obama Phones.” Below I give some of the details about the program including who qualifies. If you want to be popular with the voters give them free stuff and let them know that they should not bite the hand that feeds them.
The term “Obama phone” is not a myth as an online search rapidly confirms. This popular government program explains why we see so many people that would appear to not have a dime in their pockets walking along or driving down the street talking on a cell phone. What exactly is the free Obama phone? It is a program that is meant to help the financially unstable who cannot afford access to a cell phone. It seems that communication should not be limited to people based on what they can afford. The Lifeline program started decades ago to help low-income families have access to landlines has been expanded. Over the years the cost of cell phones and cellular service has decreased and the program has been extended to cover cell phones.
So who qualifies? It appears little has changed over the years, it seems that if you or members of your household are, receiving the following benefits you automatically qualify for the Lifeline program. The best way to know if you qualify is by filling out an application for a Lifeline provider in your state. Those interested in the program must have an income of less than 135% of the Federal Poverty Guidelines or about $22,350 per year for a family of four.
Food Stamps or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)
Medicaid
Supplemental Security Income – commonly known as SSI
Health Benefit Coverage under Child Health Insurance Plan (CHIP)
The National School Lunch Program’s Free Lunch Program.
Low-Income Energy Assistance Program – LIHEAP
Federal Public Housing Assistance ( Section 8 )
If you are a low-income Eligible Resident of Tribal Lands
Temporary Assistance to Needy Families – TANF
Lifeline is a government-sponsored program, but who is paying for it? Some people claim that the government is using taxpayers’ money to run this program, however, the claim is false. The clever clowns we have sent to Washington found a backhanded under-the-table sort of way to make it appear it is not taxpayer money. Universal Service Fund (USF) which is administered by the Federal Communication Commission along with the Universal Service Administration Company (USAC), pays for the Lifeline phone assistance program. The Universal Service Fund (USF) was created back in 1997 by Federal Communication Commission to achieve the goals set by Congress under the Telecommunication Act of 1996. According to the Act, service providers are obliged to contribute a portion of their interstate and international telecommunications revenues. In short, paying phone customers are paying for it.
It is written that if you are one of those people who have lost their jobs due to the recession, then probably you’re having a hard time with your daily expenses. On top of that, paying telephone bills is just another pressure. You can get rid of this burden by applying to the “Lifeline Assistance Program” run by the government.To get a phone contact the provider of this service. The government has approved many companies at the national and regional levels to provide this service to eligible people.
Just how much might one of these free government cell phones change your life?
An employer can more easily reach you with a job offer if you have a free government cell phone.
You can stay in touch with your doctor and other emergency medical professionals more easily with a free government cell phone.
A free government cell phone can help you keep in touch with family and other loved ones.
And the good news is that while a government-assisted cell phone provides you with up to 250 monthly minutes to go with your free cell phone. While that’s a generous contribution from the government, it’s barely enough airtime to last many people a month. But good news is they can easily buy more minutes for the phone from each of the major Lifeline cell phone companies. You can see this is what has happened when it has gotten to the point where people carry their phone in their hand as they go about their business. Apparently, if you use a promotion code, you can get some very good deals.
A great deal of attention has been given to some of the ideas and visions the World Economic Forum has floated. A powerful and very visible glimpse was contained in the public relations video entitled: “8 Predictions for the World in 2030. Its 2030 agenda promotes the idea that by 2030, “You will own nothing. And you’ll be happy.” Smartphones dovetail with edging the general population towards such an existence. With the government transferring the costs for millions of customers to those that pay full price, another face of corporate welfare is exposed.
Over The Years This Addiction Has Only Grown Stronger
Interestingly while many people admit they are addicted to these phones that seem to offer a form of escapism from the real world, some users are moving back to dumbphones. A video by ColdFusion (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02mIRnPJm6g), an Australian-based online media company, looks into this “Anti-Smartphone Revolution.” It points out how the dumbphone or what is sometimes called a brick is far less intrusive in our lives. Surprisingly, it is those users between the age of 25-35 that are leading this charge.
We should never underestimate the role of the smartphone in dumbing down America.We can only hope people will begin to take a closer look at these society-changing devices. When a phone will provide the answer to simple math problems many people no longer feel compelled to learn or memorize the things which give us perspective and help us to understand the world around us. It has become apparent, that smartphones change more than society. They change people, too. Being able to push a few buttons does not necessarily make you smarter.
China’s “Zombie” Housing Market Could Persist Due To Lack Of Marriages
For the most part, everybody understands that China’s property market is in a precarious position, suffering from a massive inventory glut and little demand.
But what most people haven’t considered is that the lack of demand may actually be attributable to a “decline in the number of marriages” in the country, SCMP pointed out this week.
A revival of the industry “won’t work” because the government, despite being able to cut debt costs and ease financial pressure for developers, can’t revive the marriage rate, the report says.
SCMP notes how marriage creates demand for the housing market:
The industry has enjoyed an incredible combination of huge volumes and high prices for so long partly due to the unique dynamics of China’s modern marriage market – men looking to marry were expected to own property, preferably debt-free.
The man’s parents and grandparents tended to pitch in, often exhausting their savings. The prospective bride’s family, free of financial pressure, would often push for purchase regardless of the price. Debt was sometimes used to plug the cash shortfall, borrowed under the names of the groom’s parents. Such demand has been a pillar of the property market.
The report then notes that marriages have fallen to a record low of 7.6 million last year, about half of what it was during its peak in 2013.
In China, the financial burden for housing has traditionally fallen on the groom, which has acted as a tailwind for the property market.
But now, marriage has become more expensive and demand has “plummeted”. With traditional ideas of marriage and financial responsibility being questioned, social change is taking place that has slowed the rush to elope and, in turn, the rush to collectively own property.
Author Andy Xie writes that China’s real estate industry is simply becoming a “zombie” – and so are “many local governments”.
And while he makes the argument for China to restructure its economy, China is unlikely to do so, he says.
Instead, he predicts a “long slog” before the market returns to any type of normalcy. Xie says that if every marriage leads to a property purchase in the country, and if marriages don’t fall further, it would still take about 10 years to run through the inventory currently on the market.
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) urged on Sept. 22 for the repeal of the years-long national emergency declaration following President Joe Biden’s recent remarks that the COVID-19 pandemic “is over.”
Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) speaks in Washington in a file photograph. (Greg Nash/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
The Republican lawmaker of Kansas introduced on Thursday a privileged resolution that calls for a vote to end the undergoing emergency declaration over the global pandemic, which has been in place since being firstly announced by then-President Donald Trump in March 2020.
GOP lawmakers in the House previously attempted in March to end the state of emergency yet failed to scrap the declaration.
The latest move came after Biden made the comments during CBS’s “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday night. “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over,” the president said.
“Since President Biden used his appearance on 60 Minutes to declare COVID is over, he must immediately terminate the COVID-19 national emergency declaration and wind down other emergency authorities that his Administration continues to force us to live under,” Marshall said in a Sept. 22 statement.
“The American people are fatigued and yearning to operate outside of the confines of supersized government. They long for their God-given freedoms, and for leaders to take their side,” said Marshall. “It’s high time for Joe Biden and his Administration to stop using COVID to implement their partisan political agenda and focus on the surge in crime and the fentanyl epidemic.”
The ongoing use of the emergency declaration has allowed the administration to leverage Congress into steer additional funds to address the pandemic, provides a legal basis for suspending payment interest and deadlines for student loans, and shut down ports of entry.
Hot Water
Biden’s off-the-cuff comment has surprised his health officials and other Democrat colleagues, with White House chief medical adviser Dr. Anthony Fauci attempting to reshape the president’s narrative, warning that “people should not be cavalier that we’re out of the woods.”
Earlier this month, the Biden administration asked Congress for more than $22 billion in additional COVID-19 funding to support research on vaccines, testing, preparations, and treatment. Republicans argued that the additional relief funding isn’t necessary given Biden’s comment. Previously, GOP lawmakers signaled they aren’t willing to back the White House’s latest request.
Moreover, the president announced in August he would wipe out the federal student loan balances of millions of people with up to $20,000 in debt per recipient, using authority under the 2003 HEROES Act that allows the government to waive or modify student loans during national emergencies such as a war.
Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel went on an epic rant against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Friday.
Appearing on CNBC as the market melted down, the longtime market guru argued that the Fed made a massive error last year by not moving to tighten monetary policy before inflation got out of hand – and then mocked Powell and crew for assuming inflation would simply fade away on its own.
“When we had all commodities going up at rapid rates, Chairman Powell and the Fed said, ‘We don’t see any inflation. We see no need to raise interest rates in 2022.’
Now when all those very same commodities and asset prices are going down, he says, ‘Stubborn inflation that requires the Fed to stay tight all the way through 2023.’ It makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever,” Siegel said during CNBC’s “Halftime Report.”
Siegel expects central bank errors to hit working and middle-class Americans in what he thinks will be a serious recession – and that instead of continuing to hike rates to tame inflation, the Fed should let falling commodity prices shoulder more of the burden.
“I think the Fed is just way too tight,” he said, adding “They’re making exactly the same mistake on the other side that they made a year ago.”
The FBI responded Tuesday after alleged bureau whistleblowers came forward and accused it of moving agents from child abuse cases to “domestic violent extremist” cases.
The J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building in Washington on July 21, 2022. (Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times)
On Monday evening, House Judiciary Republicans wrote on Twitter that an unnamed whistleblower came forward and told them that the FBI is moving agents from child sexual abuse cases to pursue investigations relating to the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
The whistleblower, according to Republicans and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), “told that child sexual abuse material investigations were no longer an FBI priority and should be referred to local law enforcement agencies.” Jordan sent a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking why there is a purported shift in focus from the child abuse cases to Jan. 6.
When contacted by The Epoch Times for comment on Tuesday, a spokesperson for the FBI said that “the FBI is charged with protecting the American people from a wide variety of threats, from terrorism, cyber threats, and violent crime to public corruption, hate crimes, and crimes against children.”
“Our commitment to one does not come at the expense of another,” the spokesperson added, disputing House Republican’s key assertion. “The threat posed by domestic violent extremists is persistent, evolving, and deadly. The FBI’s authority to investigate a case as domestic terrorism requires the existence of a potential criminal federal violation, the unlawful use or threat of force or violence, and ideological motivation of any type.”
The spokesperson added that the bureau does “not investigate ideology” and only “investigates individuals who commit or intend to commit violence and other criminal activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security.”
“We are committed to upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans and will never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment activity,” the FBI said.
Letter
The Monday letter from House Republicans alleged that the FBI is breaking its own rules and miscategorizes files to create the impression that domestic violent extremism cases are emerging across the United States.
“New whistleblowers have come forward with concerning information about how the FBI is deliberately manipulating the way case files related to Jan. 6 investigations are maintained in order to create a false and misleading narrative that domestic violent extremism is increasing around the country,” the letter said. “The whistleblower alleged ‘the F.B.I. has not followed regular procedure’ with respect to Jan. 6 cases.”
I started out 2022 by predicting that the mainstream media was in the midst of losing the fight of its life at the hands of popular podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan.
No media outlet has proven me right this year quite like CNN has.
Through honest and open dialogue, often in good faith and jest, Rogan has earned himself innumerably more viewers than almost all outlets in mainstream media on both sides of the aisle. He officially started putting the screws to the mainstream media, in my opinion, when he refused to settle for the “company line” on Covid, dutifully peddled by Dr. Anthony Fauci and various government regulators, and welcomed alternative points of view on treatments, lockdowns and how the world was handling the pandemic.
I wrote back in January that I thought it was the invitations Rogan extended to iconoclastic guests, like Dr. Robert Malone, M.D., that officially marked the beginning of the end the “official” Covid narratives going unquestioned. I predicted that Rogan’s willingness to have an alternative dialogue would force the mainstream media to eventually fall in line, and would throw a wet blanket over the “journalism” of parroting whatever “the science” dictated was objective truth that week.
(Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot adhering to “the science” last Halloween.)
“For 2022, I’m gonna make a bold prediction. The media, and maybe even politicians, are going to start to realize that the narratives that they have been pushing with regard to Covid, lockdowns, vaccinations and our economy are no longer being accepted at face value by their viewers,” I wrote in January.
“The same capitalistic engine keeping Joe Rogan on the air is going to force the change in legacy media. While they may not correct themselves totally or do a full 180°turn, they will fall in line behind those breaking new ground in the space – content creators like Rogan – and they will start to commit more to reason and less to political narratives.”
Nine months later, CNN stands as a shell of its former self, with several personnel including Jeff Zucker, John Harwood and Brian Stelter either resigning or being cancelled, other anchors like Don Lemon being demoted, the company’s CNN+ streaming platform discarded as an abject $300 million failure, and the network desperately trying to adopt a business model that can cauterize the open wound of defecting viewers.
Or, as Sean Hannity put it:
Lo and behold, The New York Post summed up the pivot (or as I called it, the ‘falling in line’), as follows:
“[Chris] Licht, who has been at the helm of CNN for a few months, has been given a mandate by his corporate bosses at Warner Bros. Discovery to steer the cable network away from opinion-based programming and more toward hard news.”
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You certainly can’t say the whole thing wasn’t a mess of CNN’s own making. Not only did the network carry the “official” narrative for the Democratic Party over the last couple of years, they also made the mistake of targeting Joe Rogan directly, when the announced that he had used the drug ivermectin to treat Covid late last year.
CNN went on what I can only describe as a blatantly false misinformation campaign, inaccurately accusing Rogan of taking the veterinary form of ivermectin, used to de-worm horses, while plastering their network with both banners and lobotomized talking heads who were happy to prattle on about the network’s take on the situation.
The campaign was especially egregious because CNN was essentially alleging that Rogan was so stupid and such a conspiracy theorist that he would purposely take horse de-wormer instead of just falling in line, adhering to “the science” and sticking to Pfizer-endorsed Covid treatments only.
This hairbrained campaign by CNN was met by a casual threat when Rogan joked about potentially suing the network because of their claims.
“It’s a lie. It’s a lie on a news network. And it’s a lie that’s a willing…that they’re conscious of. It’s not a mistake. They’re unfavorably framing it as veterinary medicine,” Rogan said to Gupta.
“Why would you say that when you’re talking about a drug that’s been given out to billions and billions of people? Why would they lie and say that’s horse de-wormer?”
“They shouldn’t have said that,” Gupta was forced to uncomfortably admit.
“They shouldn’t have done that,” Gupta says again.
“It’s defamatory!” Rogan replies. “Six days after infection I was back at the gym.”
The Mortal Kombat-style “FINISH HIM” moment came when Rogan asked:
“You’re working for a news organization. If they’re lying about a comedian taking horse medication, what are they telling us about Russia? What are they telling us about Syria?”
The aftermath of the situation resulted in tremendous embarrassment for the news network, whose viewership at the time paled in comparison to that of Rogan’s.
It was a true comeuppance for CNN and it was long overdue.
After years of willingly peddling what turned out to be a false narrative regarding President Trump and Russia, CNN solidified any doubts anybody may have had about their true biases and who they were carrying water for with their coverage of Rogan.
It should come as no surprise that the network self-immolated in the months that followed.
CNN attempted to launch its own streaming service shortly thereafter, and effort that The New York Times characterized as a “near instant collapse” that “amounted to one of the most spectacular media failures in years.”
They called it a “$300 million experiment that ended abruptly with layoffs in the offing and careers in disarray.”
On the legacy network, Brian Stelter was canned because CNN’s boss reportedly was trying to get CNN to “evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with, and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing.”
Because, obviously, Brian Stelter wasn’t much of a journalist.
And the hits didn’t stop there. Like a drunk being escorted out of a bar at 2AM, fellow Mensa-candidate Don Lemon was ushered out of his primetime spot in favor of a morning time-slot. It was an obvious demotion that Lemon seemed to take well and handle with grace.
Just kidding. Lemon had an embarrassing full-scale on-air toke of the copium in a cringe-worthy segment, smiling maniacally and raving about how he wasn’t actually demoted.
Further proving that he is fully in touch with reality, with absolutely no cognitive distortions whatsoever, Lemon went with the bold strategy of referring to his demotion as a promotion.
“I was not demoted. None of that. This is an opportunity. This is a promotion. This is an opportunity for me to create something around me and I get to work with two great ladies [Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins] who you know.”
As I wrote above, there’s no doubt in my mind that the moment it became clear that Rogan was doing the work the mainstream media should have been doing was when he brought on Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone to offer their opinions about Covid.
Putting aside your thoughts on these two credentialed doctors – and their opinion on Covid – it was simply the willingness to engage them in dialogue that I think finally made it clear to the public, and perhaps the higher ups at CNN, that carrying water for “the science” and the Biden administration was no longer a winning strategy. Instead, it was likely having the opposite effect.
And when all was said and done the entire ordeal was a relatively low-key flex for Rogan. Despite a couple of moments chuckling about it, he didn’t seem to take the whole incident too seriously after it had passed and he allowed the situation to resolve itself. After all, when you’re the king of the media world, that’s likely the winning attitude to adopt; there’s no point in routinely punching downward.
But for me, CNN and the rest of the mainstream media are still upwards of my trajectory – which is why I have no problem sharing my opinion that CNN’s last six months of scorched Earth could very well also play out for other obviously biased news organizations that let their emotions get the best of them and, as a result, cross boundaries in their reporting.
My mother, who leans left, often makes a great point about news networks. She says that no matter what side they are rooting for, they all have their own agenda. She is 100% right, but, in my opinion, CNN took it one step further than just having an agenda. Now, they’re facing the very real consequences. And don’t get me wrong, I think the same exact thing would happen to Fox News if they branched out too far on the right and simply started to lie, openly, about popular public figures.
The mainstream media has definitely hit an immovable object in The Joe Rogan Experience. He’s doing everything they aren’t: asking open-minded questions, not pandering to either political party, thinking for himself and encouraging others to do the same.
The lesson that other media organizations can now learn the easy way is the same one that CNN just learned the hard way: stay in your (heavily biased) lane. The “mainstream” has a new face.
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As some of you know, I’m an aficionado of ancient history. I thought it might be worthwhile to discuss what happened to Rome and based on that, what’s likely to happen to the U.S. Spoiler alert: There are some similarities between the U.S. and Rome.
But before continuing, please seat yourself comfortably. This article will necessarily cover exactly those things you’re never supposed to talk about—religion and politics—and do what you’re never supposed to do, namely, bad-mouth the military.
There are good reasons for looking to Rome rather than any other civilization when trying to see where the U.S. is headed. Everyone knows Rome declined, but few people understand why. And, I think, even fewer realize that the U.S. is now well along the same path for pretty much the same reasons, which I’ll explore shortly.
Rome reached its peak of military power around the year 107, when Trajan completed the conquest of Dacia (the territory of modern Romania). With Dacia, the empire peaked in size, but I’d argue it was already past its peak by almost every other measure.
The U.S. reached its peak relative to the world, and in some ways its absolute peak, as early as the 1950s. In 1950 this country produced 50% of the world’s GNP and 80% of its vehicles. Now it’s about 21% of world GNP and 5% of its vehicles. It owned two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves; now it holds one-fourth. It was, by a huge margin, the world’s biggest creditor, whereas now it’s the biggest debtor by a huge margin. The income of the average American was by far the highest in the world; today it ranks about eighth, and it’s slipping.
But it’s not just the U.S.—it’s Western civilization that’s in decline. In 1910 Europe controlled almost the whole world—politically, financially, and militarily. Now it’s becoming a Disneyland with real buildings and a petting zoo for the Chinese. It’s even further down the slippery slope than the U.S.
Like America, Rome was founded by refugees—from Troy, at least in myth. Like America, it was ruled by kings in its early history. Later, Romans became self-governing, with several Assemblies and a Senate. Later still, power devolved to the executive, which was likely not an accident.
U.S. founders modeled the country on Rome, all the way down to the architecture of government buildings, the use of the eagle as the national bird, the use of Latin mottos, and the unfortunate use of the fasces—the axe surrounded by rods—as a symbol of state power. Publius, the pseudonymous author of The Federalist Papers, took his name from one of Rome’s first consuls. As it was in Rome, military prowess is at the center of the national identity of the U.S. When you adopt a model in earnest, you grow to resemble it.
A considerable cottage industry has developed comparing ancient and modern times since Edward Gibbon published The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776—the same year as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and the U.S. Declaration of Independence were written. I’m a big fan of all three, but D&F is not only a great history, it’s very elegant and readable literature. And it’s actually a laugh riot; Gibbon had a subtle wit.
There have been huge advances in our understanding of Rome since Gibbon’s time, driven by archeological discoveries. There were many things he just didn’t know, because he was as much a philologist as an historian, and he based his writing on what the ancients said about themselves.
There was no real science of archeology when Gibbon wrote; little had been done even to correlate the surviving ancient texts with what was on the surviving monuments—even the well-known monuments—and on the coins. Not to mention scientists digging around in the provinces for what was left of Roman villas, battle sites, and that sort of thing. So Gibbon, like most historians, was to a degree a collector of hearsay.
And how could he know whom to believe among the ancient sources? It’s as though William F. Buckley, Gore Vidal, H. L. Mencken, Norman Mailer, and George Carlin all wrote about the same event, and you were left to figure out whose story was true. That would make it tough to tell what really happened just a few years ago… forget about ancient history. That’s why the study of history is so tendentious; so much of it is “he said/she said.”
In any event, perhaps you don’t want a lecture on ancient history. You’d probably be more entertained by some guesses about what’s likely to happen to the U.S. I’ve got some.
Let me start by saying that I’m not sure the collapse of Rome wasn’t a good thing. There were many positive aspects to Rome—as there are to most civilizations. But there was much else to Rome of which I disapprove, such as its anti-commercialism, its militarism and, post-Caesar, its centralized and increasingly totalitarian government. In that light, it’s worth considering whether the collapse of the U.S. might not be a good thing.
So why did Rome fall? In 1985, a German named Demandt assembled 210 reasons. I find some of them silly—like racial degeneration, homosexuality, and excessive freedom. Most are redundant. Some are just common sense—like bankruptcy, loss of moral fiber, and corruption.
Blinken Warns China FM Against Support To Russia At UN
Secretary of State Antony Blinken met his Chinese counterpart Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Friday – at a moment tensions over Taiwan are still on edge following Nancy Pelosi’s early August trip to the self-ruled island.
Blinken took the opportunity to again warn Beijing against providing any support to ongoing Russian operations amid the invasion of Ukraine. A statement said the top US diplomat “reiterated the United States’ condemnation of Russia’s war against Ukraine and highlighted the implications if the PRC [People’s Republic of China] were to provide support to Moscow’s invasion of a sovereign state.”
“He underscored that the United States remains open to cooperating with the PRC where our interests intersect,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said of Blinken’s meeting with the Chinese FM.
Blinken told Wang that the US administration desires to keep lines of communication open and wants peace, directly invoking the Taiwan crisis, also after a recent sail through of a US Navy warship of contested waters in the strait.
Blinken “emphasized that the United States is committed to maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, consistent with our longstanding one China policy,” Price said.
President Biden’s address to the UNGA the day prior struck a conciliatory tone when compared to his 60 Minutes interview last week, wherein he said the US would intervene militarily if China invaded Taiwan:
In remarks to the UNGA on Wednesday, Biden said the US opposes “unilateral changes in the status quo” in Taiwan by either side. He also stressed that Washington does not want a confrontation with Beijing.
“Let me be direct about the competition between the United States and China as we manage shifting geopolitical trends: the United States will conduct itself as a reasonable leader,” Biden said.
“We do not seek conflict. We do not seek a cold war. We do not ask any nation to choose between the United States or any other partner,” Biden had followed with, also speaking in the general context of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.
This is majorly funny. Let’s flash back to a 2016 post of mine.
Central Banks Fail in Efforts to Destroy Currency
In 2016, Japan complained about “one-sided” moves, a signal of possible intervention. Instead, of taking the warning into account, the yen soared to its highest since October 2014.
Japan is angry. Rightfully so, in a perverse way. What is Japan angry about? It has not succeeded in destroying its own currency, a seemingly simple task.
It’s pretty damn pathetic when you cannot destroy your own currency. But that’s where we are given the competitive currency devaluation madness.
Strong “One Sided” Yen Synopsis
From January 2012 until the tip of the decline in May 2015, the Yen declined 39.43% vs. the US dollar
Since then, the Yen has gained 13.54%
Alternatively, using the same starting point of January 2012, the Yen is down a mere 29.95% vs. the US dollar.
Supposedly, this is one-sided “strength”.
How one-sided can you get going down while complaining about going up?
Mish Advice
If you cannot destroy your own currency, don’t blame others with “one-sided” complaints, just try harder.
Yen Daily Chart
In inverse pairs, up is getting weaker. Think of it this way. In April it took 121 Yen to buy a dollar, now it takes 142. That’s a weakening of 14.8 percent.
Yen Monthly Chart
What a Hoot!
Japan wanted a weaker Yen. It should be pleased. But it isn’t.
Instead, Japan is complaining with words and intervention actions about getting what it wanted.
Will Currency Interventions Work?
They never have, so why would this time be any different?
This reminds me of the Bank of England – George Soros story. The Bank of England was defending the British Pound from a speculative short attack.
A reporter told Soros something to the effect that the BOE just spent some number of £ to defend the pound. Soros replied with a question “Ok, what is the BOE going to do tomorrow?”
Black Wednesday (or the 1992 Sterling crisis) occurred on 16 September 1992 when the UK Government was forced to withdraw sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM), after a failed attempt to keep its exchange rate above the lower limit required for the ERM participation. At that time, the United Kingdom held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
The crisis damaged the credibility of the second Major ministry in handling of economic matters. The ruling Conservative Party suffered a landslide defeat five years later at the 1997 United Kingdom general election and did not return to power until 2010. The rebounding of the UK economy in the years after Black Wednesday led to a reassessment of the legacy of the crisis, as John Major’s government adopted an inflation targeting policy as an alternative to the ERM and set the foundation for a prospering economy in the years prior to the financial crisis of 2007–08, and the British public turned increasingly Eurosceptic.
OK, What Will the BOJ Do Tomorrow?
It’s a fool’s move to waste foreign reserves defending a currency. Nothing good ever comes from it because all it does is paper over a problem.
Japan’s intervention will never work although it’s possible that it will later look like it did.
For example, if this is an exhaustion move on the dollar, and the Yen slide stops, it is because that was going to happen anyway, not because of the intervention.
Japan Playing With Fire
Japan is playing with fire.
The more currency reserves it blows now, the greater the Yen will collapse later when the BOJ, like the BOE finally throws in the towel.
If Japan wants to stop the slide, it needs to aggressively hike interest rates, something it refuses to do.
End of the 40-Year Bull in Debt and a “Global Depression” Threat
I have been discussing the possibility of a currency crisis for years, suggesting that Japan was a likely candidate.
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