by John Ward
Dodgy batteries and burned-out circuit thermostats having rendered two “modern” laptops hors de combat this week, I’ve been reduced to using my veteran HP Pavilion (born 2007, still going
strong) in extremis.
Like the old cameras of yesteryear, ‘Pav’ is now scratched and grubby to the point of having some
degree of character. He’s accompanied me to the US, Australia, Singapore, India, five separate African countries, Hungary, Greece, Spain, Italy, Ireland and now The Gambia. After I’ve gone, Sothebys will almost certainly hold an auction and Chinese billionaires will fight on social media for the right to own Pav. I thought maybe a reserve price of $5.7m. No sense in being greedy.
Greed comes in all the sizes and all the colours. After $23 trillion mysteriously went missing around the world in 2009, later analysis showed how just eleven banks benefited from most of it, compounding the bailout by paying nobody any interest on their deposits and savings for years afterwards, and receiving QE write-offs for all their stupid lending policies long after QE was officially “tapered off”. Meanwhile, banker salaries and bonuses continued to rise way beyond reason.
In 2011, I and millions of others pointed out how normalisation of rates could never happen again, because doing that would bankrupt most banks and destroy Treasury finances around the world. But equally, the only way to keep the economic circus on the road after Big Short Bailout was loose, cheap credit…because neoliberalism in practice demands that the masses have lower net worth and lots of spending power at the same time. At the first sign of a credit squeeze, what we used to call stagflation turns into Pompeii II.
Well, push has now come to shove: the US Fed’s Jerome Powell pretended not to notice rumbling inflation in early 2021, and his idiotically dismissed ‘transient blip’ turned out to be anything but. At the time, I wrote:
‘Jerome Powell continues to insult the intelligence of thinking people on the subjects of employment and inflation. He’s demonstrated his consummate skills as a serial liar over many months, but credulity is now being stretched to breaking point. Inflation first dismissed as a blip has become first, something that “will peak in 2022”, then something readjusted as the real rate overtook the forecast, then something at 4% by the year-end, and now something “likely to last for at least four years”. Corporate income lost by manufacturers and their suppliers/distributors is being made up (in every sense) in a way so obvious, one can’t miss it here in France. The same is true in Spain. As for unemployment, predictably, no developed “sovereign” State is prepared to admit the obvious (that many jobs will never come back) and that the world’s dependence on Asian giants like China and India to feed the supply chain is now a crisis’
In a last-ditch attempt to reverse the incoming tide, Powell has adopted the German 1923 strategy, acquiescing in an unprecedented spending bonanza. The size of it is hard to comprehend, but this calculation from the Zero Hedge chaps gives us a clue:
It took 227 years to print the first $6 trillion US Dollars. But in just a matter of months recently, the US government printed another $6 trillion.
Imagine the reception you might have received from Friedman fans had you suggested in 2012 that a monetarist Fed supremo would, within a decade, be spending money the US doesn’t have at more than 550 times the rate of American history including a civil war and two world wars.
Forget precedent: there isn’t one. There is only a context which – awful or not – we have to face. It is so grotesquely abnormal, the giga-rich 0.03% have had to invent a false confection of existential horror crises to fit that context….and distract from the only part of it that is real – the econo-fiscal Globalist Gargoyle Goolies-Up.
The thought process goes like this:
“Oh boy have we screwed up. We have so obviously screwed up the relatively simple idea of mutualist capitalism, exporting surplus and putting the health of the whole tribe first, the only solution is to suggest we did it to save them from something much worse than having all their money stolen.
“We could come clean of course, and tell them the truth. But they’d tear us limb from limb, and we don’t want our arms and eyes pulled out of their sockets. I mean….they outnumber us 40,000 to 1, right? Those are tough odds. So, like – it’d be a good idea to get those odds down.
“Don’t panic, fellas…stay calm and ask, ‘What’s worse than being dirt poor?’ And the answer is, being dead. Nobody wants to be dead. So we tell them we made them poor to save their lives. From horrible stuff….like – I dunno – Eboli, or some kinda plague where first you go mad and then even worse your dick falls off and then you’re banned from the pub.
“There’s plenty of stuff that kills you, right? Having no air, no water or no food. Alien invasions. Frying to death. Drowning. Sun spots. We could keep this shit going for years.
“War kills. But it’s the other guys that kill yer, am I right? So we have to protect our citizens but of course wars are expensive too, but they’re never our fault so that’s…..wait a minute: EUREKA! That’s it!
“We spent all the money protecting the People.”
There it is, folks.
It’s why we let loose a make-believe “killer” virus to necessitate a genuine killer vaccine – genius! Lots of stuff to keep the plebs scared, and then a life saver (aka bioweapon) to reduce the odds of being outnumbered.
Lots of pharma spending to empty the Treasuries, and bonkers lockdowns to destroy the economies, disguise the giga-greed and then present the consequent depopulation as more
virus mutants, deaths based on climate change or failure to keep to all those nice pc diets based on zero meat and the odd insect.
For in life, we are in the midst of death. In fact, to have life we need death. And ergo sum, death is also life.
It’s not hard to see how Big Brother Belief gets going, is it?
Yesterday here, I noted how casually the World Vaccine Congress in October this year will include a session entirely about biodefence – that is, the use of biolab weapons of medicine (the lifesaver calling) in order to kill people.
I rest my case.
Now of course, once events start unfolding in any drama, things don’t happen in quite the fully planned way I suggest above: history is never that neat….only later historians suggest such a degree of psychopathic calumny from Day 1.
But shoved into a corner, the sociopath will look for every way out, however abhorrent. Almost all conspiracies are there to cover up the thirst for power among the Unelected…..that megalomanic thirst for more and more that is the Human Greed Syndrome.
I have never believed in, for example, Zionist Ancients ruling the world for centuries. But I’m certain that – over time, in periods of alta tribulatio – loose alliances of opportunistic controlling ideology freaks do ally in order to get their way. Such certainty explains the over-representation of hardline communists in health research and the WHO, the flourishing of simplistic neo-Nazi eugenics among the Davos mob, the presence of Hollywood self-styled liberals among Schwab’s admirers, the connection between Wuhan and the CDC/CIA, the links between the vaccine and bioweapon developments from Moderna to the Ukraine, and the obvious MSM global branding push that has made New Normal, New World Order, Energy Inflation, Build Back Better, Food Shortages, Evil Putin and Climate Crisis so widely accepted at the same time as being so obviously contrived.
Perhaps the next Clinton will have a notice behind his desk saying, ‘It’s the species, stoopid’.