Sunday, April 5, 2020

World War C

Combatants,

Eleni sent this essay, which ranges pretty far and wide, by author, Pepe Escobar:
​ ​For all practical purposes, the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has been replaced by the Global War on Virus (GWOV). But what is not being seriously analyzed is the Perfect Toxic Storm: a totally shattered economy; The Mother of ​​All Financial Crashes – barely masked by the trillions in helicopter money from the Fed and the ECB; the tens of millions of unemployed engendered by the New Great Depression; the millions of small businesses that will simply disappear; a widespread, global mental health crisis. Not to mention the masses of elderly, especially in the U.S., that will be issued an unspoken “drop dead” notice. 
​ ​Beyond any rhetoric about “decoupling”, the global economy is already, de facto, split in two. On one side, we have Eurasia, Africa and swathes of Latin America – what China will be painstakingly connecting and reconnecting via the New Silk Roads. On the other side, we have North America and selected Western vassals. A puzzled Europe lies in the middle.​..
​ ​There’s no question “a severe pandemic, which becomes ‘Event 201’ would require reliable cooperation among several industries, national governments, and key international institutions”, as spun by the sponsors. Covid-19 is eliciting exactly this kind of “cooperation”. Whether it’s “reliable” is open to endless debate.
​ ​The fact is that, all over Planet Lockdown, a groundswell of public opinion is leaning towards defining the current state of affairs as a global psyop: a deliberate global meltdown – the New Great Depression – imposed on unsuspecting citizens by design.

​ ​The powers that be, taking their cue from the tried and tested, decades-old CIA playbook, of course are breathlessly calling it a “conspiracy theory”.  

​ ​By the end of March 2020, the global framework had changed sufficiently to become — behind the headlines about COVID-19 — about which system and ideology would triumph in the decades after the watershed. That meant a race by each of the major antagonists to determine how quickly national productivity could be resumed​...
 ​I​t is clear that the best avenue which nation-states can take is one marked by gaining as much control over their own destinies as possible. That requires a growing focus on domestic food self-sufficiency, and domestic market bases for manufactured goods and services. In other words: a return to a sense of the nation. The age of globalization is ending; it was a brief window in which the technologies which were created to fight the Cold War became the technologies of global social integration.​..
​ What skills will be necessary in the post-2020 environment? Has the economy sobered enough to embrace the restoration of practical skills training instead of ideological education which has no market, while an impetus toward revived domestic manufacturing (rather than foreign-sourced manufacturing) will see significant demand for trained personnel?

​Alexander Korybko has insight, including on the big Russian shipment of medical supplies to the American people.
​ Now is the perfect time for defying the "deep state" with the support of the American people after they've come to suddenly have a much more favorable view of their country's rival after it urgently dispatched humanitarian assistance to them with Trump's support in order to help everyone improve their odds of surviving World War C. This soft power "coup" was made possible by Presidents Trump and Putin cooperating in pursuit of their shared interests...

Bill Gates: 
 "Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person […] Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around. So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”
​ ​Notably, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – which has an endowment of $52 billion – has given more than $2.4 billion to the World Health Organization (WHO) since 2000...

​The Things You Cannot Say about Coronavirus:
"Spy on your neighbors if they go outside", "Doctors are the New Soldiers, and brave doctors say to..."

Stealing the initiative in the battle for human societal consciousness... Go Team Rothschild!
 On the same day the British Labour party announced the election of a center-right new party leader to replace the much denigrated socialist Jeremy Corbyn, the Financial Times(!) calls for the socialist policies Corbyn had planned to implement.  
 "If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that it has injected a sense of togetherness into polarised societies. But the virus, and the economic lockdowns needed to combat it, also shine a glaring light on existing inequalities — and even create new ones. Beyond defeating the disease, the great test all countries will soon face is whether current feelings of common purpose will shape society after the crisis. As western leaders learnt in the Great Depression, and after the second world war, to demand collective sacrifice you must offer a social contract that benefits everyone."

​Charles Hugh Smith points out that this sell-off in financial markets will be like the 1970s, and for the some reasons of fundamental economic facts, not possible to paper-over with manipulation of financial markets. True capitulation at true market bottom usually happens when sentiment really gives up on speculation that things will ever get better. ​"Buy the dip" is still too deeply ingrained. Consider putting your IRA into gold, even the better "paper-gold" platforms, for awhile.
When Bulls Are Over-Anxious to Catch the Rocketship Higher, This Isn't the Bottom

Capitalist Afterthought

​looking up at God's rain falling on the just and the unjust at Yoakum, Texas vegetable patch

2 comments:

  1. I think it is delusional to believe that we can continue to live in large numbers as we do, withg massive mobility, withg a highly authoritarian systemn heavy on surveillance.

    No, I do not like that Rx, but then, I don't like having 7-going-on-8 billion people eating the planet alive.

    I'm sure you're familiar with this quote:

    “Reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.” T. McKenna

    ReplyDelete
  2. If the first step to a solution is acknowledging that there is a problem, the second might be to frame the problem in such a way as to try mitigation strategies, like vegetable gardening.
    It's not merely an intellectual exercise, this shared life on Earth.

    ReplyDelete