Non-Club Members,
“Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”: Secret Gathering Sponsored by Bill Gates, 2009 Meeting of “The Good Club” , Michel Chossudovsky
Recent developments suggest that “Depopulation” is an integral part of the so-called Covid mandates including the lockdown policies and the mRNA “vaccine”.
Flash back to 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal: “Billionaires Try to Shrink World’s Population”.
In May 2009, the Billionaire philanthropists met behind closed doors at the home of the president of The Rockefeller University in Manhattan.
This Secret Gathering was sponsored by Bill Gates. They called themselves “The Good Club”.
Among the participants were the late David Rockefeller, Warren Buffett, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg Ted Turner, Oprah Winfrey and many more.
In May 2009, the WSJ as well as the Sunday Times reported: (John Harlow, Los Angeles) that
“Some of America’s leading billionaires have met secretly to consider how their wealth could be used to slow the growth of the world’s population and speed up improvements in health and education.”
The emphasis was not on population growth (i.e Planned Parenthood) but on “Depopulation”, i.e,. the reduction in the absolute size of the World’s population.
The US also wanted to keep its veto power in the IMF and the World Bank. And it’s continued to be led —the World Bank certainly — by US military strategists, and the IMF has in fact just continued American foreign policy.
So the story is that what was new is that the United States was able to pay in IOUs — Treasury securities — and which now we all know really are never going to be paid because they can’t be repaid...
...It enabled the United States to get so much revenue from its foreign investments, from its foreign lending, and from its control of the foreign trade system and the tariff system, that it was able to deindustrialize and actually become dependent on other countries for essentials. Just the opposite of what it had tried to make other countries do.
And this was a kind of poison chalice. It left the United States in what we now know is an untenable position.
How can it live off the surplus exports and payments of others while it itself is being deindustrialized? What is the basis for its power if not ultimately military? ...
RADHIKA DESAI:...I should say here that this was a very complex moment — the quadrupling of oil prices — for the US because in part of course the US itself had big oil companies which were of course happy to benefit from it...And the other thing that this did of course, is that by raising prices of oil and ensuring of course that and still dominating it in dollars, meant that the rest of the world now acquired four times as many reasons to hold dollars. So again this in itself played a role in stabilizing, temporarily at least, the value of the dollar...Americans basically persuaded the OPEC countries to deposit their money in Western financial institutions, US financial institutions, particularly those based in London but elsewhere as well. And they of course had to go on a lending spree... Third World countries were also using this money to industrialize. And in the end, this is not something that the United States wanted to see, because from the start the United States has always wanted to have its relative power unquestioned, not just its absolute power... So once the Committee of 20 negotiations were essentially scuttled by these means, the Europeans were essentially quite mad, and they said, “Ok, we are going to start our process of monetary integration” ... But they now took the first steps in European monetary integration which would eventually lead, almost thirty years later, into the creation of the euro. So this is also very important, because people fail to see this, but the euro itself constitutes the first example of exit — a planned exit from the dollar system. Because by creating the euro, the European countries essentially ejected the dollar from their mutual transactions...
MICHAEL HUDSON: I want to say what was happening in the banking sector.
The government wanted the banks to find it profitable to accept the oil OPEC deposits. When I was working at Chase in the 1960s, my job was to analyze whether countries could pay or not. But by the 1970s, I had a meeting at the Federal Reserve and they said, “You don’t need to analyze the ability to pay anymore. Because if a country can’t pay its debt to the United States, we will lend that country the money.”
And I said, “I don’t see how” — and I named some Latin American countries, Argentina and Chile. “How are they going to be able to pay?”
And the Federal Reserve officer said, “Well according to your analysis, Professor Hudson, England is insolvent. It can’t pay.”
And I said, “Oh I’m glad you mentioned that. Yes.”
And they said, “But is it going to pay? Of course it’s going to pay. We will always lend England the money to pay the money it owes the United States. It’ll just be indebted to us.” And we were going to do the same for Latin America.
So the American Banks were encouraged. They said, “Okay, we don’t have to look at the markets anymore. We don’t have to do an analysis of the ability to pay. The whole system has become political.”
Well, since you bring up the creation of the euro, Radhika — the euro was indeed meant to integrate the European economies, largely by combining the surplus run by the German economy, with the rest of the Eurozone that was running a deficit.
And so in that sense, they were trying to balance and stabilize their own exchange rates. However, the way in which the euro was created was basically the satellite currency of the United States... It was sort of crippled from the very beginning by the rules that made sure the government would not be able to create enough credit to enable European recovery to take place without very very heavy borrowing from the European banks and from the American banks.
So the euro was created in a way to minimize the role of government, maximize the role of banks, and essentially that’s what made it a right-wing Chicago School development from the very beginning, and we’ve now seen how it’s unfolded...
RADHIKA DESAI: ..The fact of the matter is that the euro did — the whole process of European monetary integration and eventually the euro — it did take the mutual transactions of the Europeans out of the dollar system. It made them independent of the dollar system...
..Now, we are still in the 1970s and another thing that I would like to point out and remind people of, is that the mid-1970s is also the period when the G7 meetings begin. Originally the G6 and then the United States brought in Canada as sort of a North American partner. And this made it the G7.
And the G7 meetings, which are annual, were forums where a lot of the extremely fraught politics of the dollar were played out. Where the Europeans, for example, would demand that the United States reduce its deficits, and so on.
And now remember they no longer needed dollars. So they kept saying the United States should reduce these deficits. They also put pressure on the United States to stop the war in Vietnam which was proving very inflationary. They essentially ensured that [Lyndon B.] Johnson would refuse to run for a second [presidential] term because they made it politically impossible, and people even said this was the Europeans dictating to the Americans...
..And so in that sense, you also see the depth of the crisis of the dollar system that you found in the 1970s.
And this crisis appears as though it is resolved by the Volcker shock. And essentially this is the point where in the late 1970s inflation is going out of control in the United States and Paul Volcker, who is regarded as a “sound money” man, is brought in as the new Federal Reserve chairman in order to deal with this problem.
And Volker does the only thing that capitalist country central banks know how to do — which is, the only way they know how to deal with inflation is to restrict money supply, and allow interest rates to rise as high as they want, a particularly rise above the rate of inflation, so that eventually by rising high enough they will create a recession and they will eventually — the recession will kill inflation, rather than any particularly deft monetary policy,
So this is what he did in 1978-79.
Well Volker was my old boss’s boss at Chase Manhattan, and I was the note taker on talks that he would give periodically to the banks. And when you say he was fighting inflation, he defined inflation as “what construction workers are paid.”
And he said, “I’m going to raise interest rates until I don’t see the wages of construction workers rising anymore.”
And they rose to a peak of twenty percent in 1980...
This set the stage for the Reagan decade, for Reaganomics. This set the stage for the largest bond rally in history.
Interest rates went down from twenty percent then to I guess you could say last year’s almost zero rates. There was a steady decline in interest rates, a creation of enormous interest credit and basically the banks were given enough money that all of a sudden the way to make money after Volcker was not by industry anymore.
It was by financial means: by corporate takeovers, by the leveraged buyout — all of that became the legacy under Reagan, combined with tax cuts for the financial sector, tax cuts for the high income people, but most of all the financialization of industry the transformed the whole role of the US economy in international affairs...
RADHIKA DESAI: ..But this sort of Volcker shock created the Third World debt crisis, beginning with the default of Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina. And this is also very important from our point of view today, because, again, first of all, the fact that the Volcker shock created the debt crisis, the fact that the dollar went up very high in this period — again this is used as grist for the mill by those who are boosting the dollar.
But in fact it is actually — this whole process was creating many contradictions.
As far as the Third World was concerned, it did look as though this was the United States not only bullying the Third World and oppressing the Third World but also getting away with it...
..Third World countries actually experienced a retardation in their growth. They had to work harder and harder to produce more and more of the cheap goods — whether it was coffee or cocoa or cotton goods or cheap manufactures or whatever it was that they were producing — they were producing their guts out in order to export to the rest of the world, particularly to the First World countries, in order to earn the dollars to repay the debt.
So this debt was being repaid. And of course, the fact that they were repaying the debt was also bringing fund flows into the dollar system. But this sort of dollar repayment was really repayment by punishment... And of course the whole process was overseen by the World Bank and the IMF. So when Michael says that these institutions were actually promoting underdevelopment rather than development...
..The Volcker shock basically induced a recession, and the recession was a double-dip, or double-u shaped, recession, so it extended over several years.
and in the first few years there was a manufacturing industry.
These people got together, they went and talked to Reagan, they talked to Volcker, they pleaded for a lowering of interest rates so that they could continue industrial expansion and so on. But they eventually failed, and what this also did is, when they failed, they essentially threw in the towel. They said, “If we can’t make money by producing, we are going to try to make money through financialization.”
So this set in process the financialization of many productive American corporations.
This is how — you may read in many places, a company like GM today is probably going to make more money by lending you money to buy their cars, rather than by making their cars...
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’ve described two parallel forms of deindustrialization.
I want to review just what you said about the Third World countries.
Mexico defaulted in 1982. It could not pay the interest on its Tesobonos. All of a sudden, the high interest rates that were created at that time were not renewed. A lot of Third World debts were falling due, and they couldn’t re-borrow...
..The only way they could balance their payments was to do what the US State Department told the IMF to tell them. “Sell off your industry. Sell off your public ownership of utilities, of basic natural monopolies. Your oil, your minerals.”
So there was a huge selloff, and there was no money at all under the austerity of the 1980s for the Third World countries to really develop.
But what happened in the United States was similar! ... This was the decade of junk bond takeovers, leveraged buyouts... they could begin to sell off the companies. They could carve them up. Companies were being bought out, broken up — [Henry] Kravis and KKR and all sorts of other companies were doing this.
And in fact it was free money for the investors, because they organized a criminal conspiracy, for which Drexel Burnham people and their clients, such as Ivan Boesky, were sent to jail...
..Wall Street understood exactly what was happening, and they became — ever since the Reagan administration — participants in this industrial suicide of the United States by financializing the company, replacing industrial engineering with financial engineering, and essentially transforming the whole character of capitalism itself — away from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism...
..It was creating financial wealth, not industrial means of production or what people had usually thought of as being tangible, real wealth.
The byproduct of all of this wealth is that it was very heavily concentrated in the wealthiest 1% — maybe 10% — of the economy. This financial wealth was not shared with the participants in the industrial economy of production and consumption. And so the economy was being distorted. Its shape was shifting. It was polarizing.
The wealth of the 1% really found its counterpart — on the opposite side of the balance sheet — in the debts of the 99%...
RADHIKA DESAI: And you know Michael, as you say, so much of the wealth in the United States over the past so many decades has become financial wealth.
And this underlines a point that our friend Jacob Assa has made in his concept of the financialization of GDP, which is that this vastly exaggerates the the wealth — because US method of counting GDP turns all this financial activity and makes it look as though it’s productive...
..So the whole point we’re trying to make is that these features of a neoliberal United States, based on financialization, have been on the one hand necessary to support the dollar system, and on the other hand they have strangulated productive activity and made the United States into a less productive and more and more unequal system.
And this policy paradigm has been continued from Reagan to Bush Senior to Clinton to Bush Junior to Obama, Trump, and today Biden...
..And in this context, it’s also important to see that part of the reason why the Third World got so badly punished by the system — essentially by having to repay their debts — is that their elites, their ruling classes, did not have the courage and the political will to default...
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the 1990s really were the turning point in this financialization. And what happened in America was very much like what had happened in England.
You could think of Clinton as the American Tony Blair. In England there were certain things that even the Thatcherite government couldn’t do to privatize. Tony Blair went much further than Thatcher in privatizing the railroads and just driving the nail into what had been Britain’s industrial economy...[He] ended the Glass-Steagall act, which led commercial banks to become brokerage houses. That diverted credit creation away from the industrial economy into the purchase of stocks and bonds and speculative investments and real estate. And then it deregulated the commodity markets, essentially...And that was sort of the Rubinomics that was turned over to the Fed under Alan Greenspan to essentially let the financial system run wild while basically ending — winding down — the American tradition of social protection of labor and consumers and the poor and welfare...
RADHIKA DESAI: ..People call this 2008 crisis the “global” financial crisis. But you see why in this instance it’s actually more accurate to call it the “North Atlantic” financial crisis.
Because the overwhelming majority of international funds that went into the toxic securities being generated by the United States were coming from Britain and from the Eurozone financial institutions, because these were the guys who gorged themselves on the toxic securities being generated.
And that is why the bulk of the financial distress was concentrated in Europe...
RADHIKA DESAI: ..I should say that now we’ve gone for more than an hour... But for now let me bring this discussion to a conclusion by saying a couple of things.
So what we’ve done is, we’ve tried to show that what’s seen as this period of easy dollar dominance after 1971, has been a heavily managed process, but also a process in which American attempts to try to manage the system in order to keep the dollar going have been full of contradictions...
And now we are moving into a period of serious reckoning. Because on the one hand, the Federal Reserve’s capacity to generate asset bubbles and to keep money flowing into the United States is being exhausted.
Moreover, and this is the first thing I want to say, and that is that the fact that these asset bubbles now exist, and that the bulk of the wealth of rich people in the United States depends on these asset bubbles, means that the Federal Reserve is now caught in a bind.
Because on the one hand, these asset bubbles are necessary for keeping the dollar’s value high, etc. But on the other hand, dealing with inflation will require increasing interest rates to an extent where this will burst these asset bubbles... If inflation goes high, the dollar’s value will suffer. If the asset bubbles are burst, the dollar’s value will suffer. So the Federal Reserve is caught between a rock and a hard place...
..Since the 1960s the rest of the world has complained that the United States has been living beyond its means. So as early as 1961, as gold was flowing out and a gold pool had been necessary — we discussed this in the previous episode — it had been necessary to back the dollar with adequate gold, this is when you first hear the first denial that the United States was living beyond its means... "At the end of the 1960s the US government owned foreign assets totalling twenty-one billion dollars, in addition to gold holdings of eighteen billion dollars.” Of course they had been much bigger before.
To quote further, “And US citizens owned fifty billion in assets abroad. These US claims on foreigners,” the Economic Report claimed, “gave a ‘basic long-run strength to the dollar’ even though some of these claims were private and long-term and could not be quickly mobilized.
Now by 2001 you have a very different scenario. The US international investment position has turned negative. It has moved from an accumulated surplus of less than ten percent of GDP in the late 1970s, to a deficit of nearly twenty percent of GDP in 2001. (These are statistics from the Economic Report of the President from 2003.) ....
MICHAEL HUDSON: This is the plan already in the 1960s and 1970s. That America would buy the highest profit European and Third World sectors and they would recycle the money by buying Treasury Securities. So America would owe low interest on Treasury Securities, make a killing on what it had bought from their privatization of infrastructure, and buying out their commanding heights, their leading companies.
That was very explicitly said in the 1960s and 1970s...
RADHIKA DESAI: In fact in 2005 Paul Volcker actually said, “As a nation we are consuming and investing about six percent more than we are producing, and this cannot continue.” Already by this time the United States was absorbing about eighty percent of the net worth of the world’s capital ...So this is the way in which the dollar’s very contradictory problematic world role has been naturalized or has been sought to be naturalized. But we are now increasingly looking at the end of that system.
https://michael-hudson.com/
Economists are warning that huge subsidies could trigger a new wave of inflation.
Poorer EU member states are crying unfair-game on the part of the wealthy ones.
Simplicuis Updates on the Ukraine war are extensive. My excerpts are not in order.:
Let’s talk about Ukraine’s new terrorist attack on the Kerch Bridge before diving into other updates.
Why does Putin specifically call it a terrorist attack? Because, as he states, the Kerch Bridge is actually no longer used for military supplies and has not been for many months, and is therefore exclusively a civilian corridor. This is an interesting admission on his behalf because it appears to possibly point to a secret agreement with the West/Kiev, perhaps as part of the Grain Deal and other such backdoor handshakes that go on all the time, both explicit and implicit... I’d be more inclined to believe it was done by simple fast-traveling surface drones of a similar variety to the ones used on Sevastopol repeatedly. The satellite photos I posted earlier which claimed to have picked them up appear to confirm this...
..The most important thing to note, though, is that the timing of this attack happened on exactly July 17th, which was the long awaited grain deal expiration date, if you’ll recall. That is not by coincidence. It means this attack was specifically done to try to stymy Russia as much as possible in terms of putting it between rock and hard place in making its decisions. In essence, it’s designed to erode Russia’s stature with its allies, particularly Turkey... This appears to imply that not attacking the bridge was part of the grain deal, and that Kiev attacked it on the exact day of the deal’s expiration as a ‘message’ to Moscow...
..Where does that leave us then? Likely, Russia will await the West to ‘crawl back on its knees’ with some concessions in hand. Putin had already made the statement last week, if you’ll recall, in light of the upcoming grain deal’s expiration, that Russia will no longer make the initiative themselves but will wait for the West to ‘come bearing gifts’ in the form of their own concessions first...
..I did another report that highlighted major new findings in Russian Lancets—that they in fact had autonomous capabilities and were already tested and used in the SMO in autonomous mode. In the manufacturer video above, they actually confirm this fact... Now, this new generation variant they have already developed does the same, however it does it in swarms. The Lancets are fired in large batches from batched containers rather than slingshot-launched one by one.
..None of this is confirmed so it’s difficult to make a true analysis until we get further information. But if this is the case, then it clearly points to an ongoing Russian MOD purge of anyone showing even the slightest insubordination in the wake of the Wagner rebellion. The MOD clearly wants to build a strong military hierarchy based on a foundation of loyalty, all the old guards who are used to the corrupt ways of the 2000-2010 era, where feuding warlord Generals carved out their own fiefdoms and could do or say anything they want because they had major leverage against the MOD command simply from the fact that they aligned their soldiers to themselves, and not to the then-weak MOD—those days are gone. The MOD is now designing a professional, futuristic force with a strong central command, and anyone of the corrupt old guard who doesn’t like it is getting the boot.
The problem is, many of these generals had gotten lax and comfortable with the status quo of the ‘good ol’ days’. Remember those days? The RuAF of the Serdyukov era where weekly reports about soldier ‘hazing’ played on CNN, showing Russian troops brutally abusing and sometimes even killing each other in dungeon-like conditions. Shoigu has reversed all that and is designing a modern armed force based on respect, leadership, and proper chain of command. Many of the ‘old guard’ generals were so used to having their little sinecures and acting like mafia bosses that they take this as an affront. You see, in the old days, threats and violence was how you got things done and the armed forces were run more like a mafia, with each general controlling his own private little ‘brotherhood’ cell. Like I said, the ones who can’t handle being reformed into a modern force can go off to the pastures. Some people may not like to hear it but an effective armed force is built on a strict system of loyalty and subordination.
The jury is still out on the Surovikin case, however there is a new report that Putin will be meeting with him personally next week, so we’ll see what happens...
..Russian Duma Defense Committee chair hints that the true role of Wagner in Belarus is to recapture the Suwalki Gap: Given that he’s a high ranking defense insider one can only assume this means that Russia is anticipating the type of future Polish-Lithuanian military actions we’ve discussed here before. This follows a French LCI TV channel report which re-iterates the growing threat of Poland itching to enter the war. https://simplicius76.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suwa%C5%82ki_Gap#Military_considerations
The US-based news outlet quoted US officials as saying that the latest incident, which occurred on 16 July was "a significant escalation in a series of confrontations between US and Russian aircraft in Syria in recent weeks," adding that "the interception of the Russian Su-35 aircraft impeded the ability of the American crew to safely operate their MC-12 aircraft."
On Sunday, Netanyahu was constrained to expel from his far right Likud Party the activist Itzik Zarqa. Zarqa had gotten into an argument with protesters, who are generally coded as Ashkenazi or European Jews, while the current coalition draws a great deal of support from the Jews of the Middle East, called Mizrahim.
Zarqa was caught on video shouting, “It’s not for nothing that six million were killed. I’m proud that six million of you were burned!”
He quickly backtracked, but that moment of intense political hatred that turned into an ethnic slur and a glorification of the horrific Nazi genocide of six million European Jews crystallized the rhetorical civil war that has gripped Israel.
More than a thousand Israeli military reservists have threatened to stop reporting for duty -- or resign altogether -- if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government proceeds with a plan to overhaul the country's judicial system this month. Among those threatening to withhold their service are hundreds of elite fighter pilots and commandos.
Given reservists are an essential part of Israel's military, and especially its air force, the country's military leaders say such a mass walkout could have a significant impact on the country's military operational capacity. They also fear a scenario where activism by reservists could inspire absenteeism among the country's full-time service members. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/israeli-fighter-pilots-commandos-threaten-resign-if-judicial-reform-proceeds
Robert Kennedy Jr recently caused quite a tempest in the “progressive” media goo (his sister Kerry stated to NBC that she “strongly condemned his deplorable and untruthful remarks”). His crime - he publicly mentioned that ethnic targeting was studied with respect to whatever was the covid-19 poisoning agent.
Of course, the woke tantrum about this subject is a politically motivated slander. To them an ideological opponent is a racist when he mentions anything that has to do with race or ethnicity. Or mentions anything at all. Or exists.
If autism is not caused by vaccines, the reported rates of autism should be proportional to the number of doses of the vaccine since these are all coincidences. But they aren't.
WEATHER MAKERS (Thanks Christine. Thanks especially, Anastasia.)
Forests supply the world with rain. A controversial Russian theory claims they also make wind.
For more than a decade, Makarieva has championed a theory, developed with Victor Gorshkov, her mentor and colleague at the Petersburg Nuclear Physics Institute (PNPI), on how Russia's boreal forests, the largest expanse of trees on Earth, regulate the climate of northern Asia. It is simple physics with far-reaching consequences, describing how water vapor exhaled by trees drives winds: winds that cross the continent, taking moist air from Europe, through Siberia, and on into Mongolia and China; winds that deliver rains that keep the giant rivers of eastern Siberia flowing; winds that water China's northern plain, the breadbasket of the most populous nation on Earth.
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