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RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - awakened53 - 08-19-2020
Lockdowns, Coronavirus, and Banks: Following the Money
By Anthony James Hall
It usually makes sense to follow the money when seeking understanding of almost any major change. The strategy of following the money in our current convergence of crises in late summer of 2020 leads us directly to the lockdowns. The lockdowns were first imposed on people in the Wuhan area of China. Then other populations throughout the world were told to “shelter in place,” all in the name of combating the COVID-19 virus.
Understanding of the enormous impact of the lockdowns is still developing. The lockdowns are proving to pack a far more devastating punch than any other aspect of the strange sequence of events that is making 2020 a year like no other. Even when the issues are narrowed to those of human health, the lockdowns have had, and will continue to have, far more wide-ranging and devastating impacts than the celebrity virus.
The lockdowns have, for starters, been directly responsible for explosive rates of suicide, domestic violence, overdoses, and depression. In the long run, these maladies from the lockdowns will probably kill and harm many more people than COVID-19.
But this comparison does not tell the full story. The nature and length of the lockdowns are causing millions of people to lose their jobs, businesses and financial viability. It seems that the economic descent is still gathering force. The assault of the lockdowns on our economic wellbeing still has much farther to go.
The lockdowns have proven to be a powerful instrument of social control. This attribute is becoming very attractive especially to some politicians. They have discovered they can derive considerable political traction from hyping and exploiting the largely manufactured pandemic panic.
The lockdowns are still a work-in-progress. There are past lockdowns, revolving lockdowns, partial lockdowns, mandatory lockdowns, voluntary lockdowns, severe lockdowns and probably an array of many lockdown types yet to be invented.
The lockdowns extend to disruptions in supply chains, disruptions in money flows, drops in consumption, breakdowns in transport and travelling, increased bankruptcies, losses of finance leading to losses of housing, as well as the inability to pay taxes and debts.
The lockdowns extend beyond personal habitations to prohibitions on large assemblies of people in stadiums, concert halls, churches, and a myriad of places devoted to public recreation and entertainment. On the basis of this way of looking at what is happening, it becomes clear the economic and health effects of the lockdowns are far more pronounced than the damage wrought directly by the new coronavirus.
This approach to following the money leads to the question of whether the spread of COVID-19 was set in motion as a pretext. Was COVID-19 unleashed as an expedient for bringing about the lockdowns with the goal of crashing the existing economy? What rationale could there possibly be for purposely crashing the existing economy?
One possible reason might have been to put in place new structures to create the framework for a new set of economic relationships. With these changes would come accompanying sets of altered social and political relationships.
Among the economic changes being sought are the robotization of almost everything, cashless financial interactions, and elaborate AI impositions. These AI impositions extend to digital alterations of human consciousness and behavior. The emphasis being placed on vaccines is very much interwoven with plans to extend AI into an altered matrix of human nanobiotechnology.
There are other possibilities to consider. One is that in the autumn of 2019 the economy was already starting to falter. Fortuitously for some, the new virus came along at a moment when it could be exploited as a scapegoat. By placing responsibility for the economic debacle on pathogens rather than people, Wall Street bankers and federal authorities are let off the hook. They can escape any accounting for an economic calamity that they had a hand in helping to instigate.
A presentation in August of 2019 by the Wall Street leviathan, BlackRock Financial Management, provides a telling indicator of foreknowledge. It was well understood by many insiders in 2019 that a sharp economic downturn was imminent.
At a meeting of central bankers in Jackson Hole Wyoming, BlackRock representatives delivered a strategy for dealing with the future downturn. Several months later during the spring of 2020 this strategy was adopted by both the US Treasury and the US Federal Reserve. BlackRock’s plan from August of 2019 set the basis of the federal response to the much-anticipated economic meltdown.
Much of this essay is devoted to considering the background of the controversial agencies now responding to the economic devastation created by the lockdowns. One of these agencies is empowered to bring into existence large quantities of debt-laden money.
The very public role in 2020 of the Federal Reserve of the United States resuscitates many old grievances. When the Federal Reserve was first created in 1913 it was heavily criticized as a giveaway of federal authority.
The critics lamented the giveaway to private bankers whose firms acquired ownership of all twelve of the regional banks that together constitute the Federal Reserve. Of these twelve regional banks, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York is by far the largest and most dominant especially right now.
The Federal Reserve of the United States combined forces with dozens of other privately-owned central banks throughout the world to form the Bank for International Settlements. Many of the key archetypes for this type of banking were developed in Europe and the City of London where the Rothschild banking family had a large and resilient role, one that persists until this day.
Along with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, BlackRock was deeply involved in helping to administer the bailout in 2008. This bailout resuscitated many failing Wall Street firms together with their counterparties in a number of speculative ventures involving various forms of derivatives.
The bailouts resulted in payments of $29 trillion, much of it going to restore failing financial institutions whose excesses actually caused the giant economic crash. Where the financial sector profited greatly from the bailouts, taxpayers were abused yet again. The burden of an expanded national debt fell ultimately on taxpayers who must pay the interest on the loans for the federal bailout of the “too big to fail” financial institutions.
Unsettling precedents are set by the Wall Street club’s manipulation of the economic crash of 2007-2010 to enrich its own members so extravagantly. This prior experience bodes poorly for the intervention by the same players in this current round of responses to the economic crisis of 2020.
In preparing this essay I have enjoyed the many articles by Pam Martens and Russ Martens in Wall Street on Parade. These hundreds of well-researched articles form a significant primary source on the recent history of the Federal Reserve, including over the last few months.
In this essay I draw a contrast between the privately-owned regional banks of the Federal Reserve and the government-owned Bank of Canada that once issued low-interest loans to build infrastructure projects.
With this arrangement in place, Canada went through a major period of national growth between 1938 and 1974. Canada emerged from this period with a national debt of only $20 billion. Then in 1974 Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau dropped this arrangement to enable Canada to join the Bank of International Settlements. One result is that national debt rose to $700 billion by 2020.
We need to face the current financial crisis by developing new institutions that avoid the pitfalls of old remedies for old problems that no longer prevail. We need to make special efforts to change our approach to the problem of excessive debts and the overconcentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands.
Locking Down the Viability of Commerce
Of all the facets of the ongoing fiasco generally associated with the coronavirus crisis, none has been so widely catastrophic as the so-called “lockdowns.” The supposed cure of the lockdowns is itself proving to be much more lethal and debilitating than COVID-19’s flu-like impact on human health.
Many questions arise from the immense economic consequences attributed to the initial effort to “flatten the curve” of the hospital treatments for COVID-19. Did the financial crisis occur as a result of the spread of the new coronavirus crisis? Or was the COVID-19 crisis set in motion to help give cover to a long-building economic meltdown that was already well underway in the autumn of 2019?
The lockdowns were first instituted in Wuhan China with the objective of slowing down the spread of the virus so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Were the Chinese lockdowns engineered in part to create a model to be followed in Europe, North America, Indochina and other sites of infection like India and Australia? The Chinese lockdowns in Hubei province and then in other parts of China apparently set an example influencing the decision of governments in many jurisdictions. Was this Chinese example for the rest of the world created by design to influence the nature of international responses?
The lockdowns represented a new form of response to a public health crisis. Quarantines have long been used as a means of safeguarding the public from the spread of contagious maladies. Quarantines, however, involve isolating the sick to protect the well. On the other hand the lockdowns are directed at limiting the movement and circulation of almost everyone whether or not they show symptoms of any infections.
Hence lockdowns, or, more euphemistically “sheltering in place,” led to the cancellation of many activities and to the shutdown of institutions. The results extended, for instance, to the closure of schools, sports events, theatrical presentations and business operations. In this way the lockdowns also led to the crippling of many forms of economic interaction. National economies as well as international trade and commerce were severely impacted.
The concept of lockdowns was not universally embraced and applied. For instance, the governments of Sweden and South Korea did not accept the emerging orthodoxy about enforcing compliance with all kinds of restrictions on human interactions. Alternatively, the government of Israel was an early and strident enforcer of very severe lockdown policies.
At first it seemed the lockdown succeeded magnificently in saving Israeli lives. According to Israel Shamir, in other European states the Israeli model was often brought up as an example. In due course, however, the full extent of the assault on the viability of the Israeli economy began to come into focus. Then popular resistance was aroused to reject government attempts to enforce a second wave of lockdowns against a second wave of supposed infections. As Shamir sees it, the result is that “Today Israel is a failed state with a ruined economy and unhappy citizens.”
In many countries the lockdowns began with a few crucial decisions made at the highest level of government. Large and proliferating consequences would flow from the initial determination of what activities, businesses, organizations, institutions and workers were to be designated as “essential.”
The consequences would be severe for those individuals and businesses excluded from the designation identifying what is essential. This deep intervention into the realm of free choice in market relations set a major precedent for much more intervention of a similar nature to come.
The arbitrary division of activities into essential and nonessential categories created a template to be frequently replicated and revised in the name of serving public heath. Suddenly central planning took a great leap forward. The momentum from a generation of neoliberalism was checked even as the antagonistic polarities between rich and poor continued to grow.
To be defined as “nonessential” would soon be equated with job losses and business failures across many fields of enterprise as the first wave of lockdowns outside China unfolded. Indeed, it becomes clearer every day that revolving lockdowns, restrictions and social distancing are being managed in order to help give false justification to a speciously idealized vaccine fix as the only conclusive solution to a manufactured problem.
What must it have meant for breadwinners who fed themselves and their families through wages or self-employment to be declared by government to be “non-essential”? Surely for real providers their jobs, their businesses and their earnings were essential for themselves and their dependents. All jobs and all businesses that people depend on for livelihoods, sustenance and survival are essential in their own way.
Was COVID-19 a Cover for an Anticipated or Planned Financial Crisis?
A major sign of financial distress in the US economy kicked in in mid-September of 2019 when there was a breakdown in the normal operation of the Repo Market. This repurchase market in the United States is important in maintaining liquidity in the financial system.
Those directing entities like large banks, Wall Street traders and hedge funds frequently seek large amounts of cash on a short-term basis. They obtain this cash from, for instance, money market funds by putting up securities, often Treasury Bills, as collateral. Most often the financial instruments go back, say the following night, to their original owners with interest payments attached for the use of the cash.
In mid-September the trust broke down between participants in the Repo Market. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York then entered the picture making trillions of dollars available to keep the system for short-term moving of assets going. This intervention repeated the operation that came in response to the first signs of trouble as Wall Street moved towards the stock market crash of 2008.
One of the major problems on the eve of the bailout of 2008-09, like the problem in the autumn of 2019, had to do with the overwhelming of the real economy by massive speculative activity. The problem then, like a big part of the problem now, involves the disproportionate size of the derivative bets. The making of these bets have become a dangerous addiction that continues to this day to menace the viability of the financial system headquartered on Wall Street.
By March of 2020 it was reported that the Federal Reserve Bank of New York had turned on its money spigot to create $9 trillion in new money with the goal of keeping the failing Repo Market operational. The precise destinations of that money together with the terms of its disbursement, however, remain a secret. As Pam Martens and Russ Martens write,
Quote:Since the Fed turned on its latest money spigot to Wall Street [in September of 2019], it has refused to provide the public with the dollar amounts going to any specific banks. This has denied the public the ability to know which financial institutions are in trouble. The Fed, exactly as it did in 2008, has drawn a dark curtain around troubled banks and the public’s right to know, while aiding and abetting a financial coverup of just how bad things are on Wall Street.Looking back at the prior bailout from their temporal vantage point in January of 2020, the authors noted “During the 2007 to 2010 financial collapse on Wall Street – the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, the Fed funnelled a total of $29 trillion in cumulative loans to Wall Street banks, their trading houses and their foreign derivative counterparties.”
The authors compared the rate of the transfer of funds from the New York Federal Reserve Bank to the Wall Street banking establishment in the 2008 crash and in the early stages of the 2020 financial debacle. The authors observed, “at this rate, [the Fed] is going to top the rate of money it threw at the 2008 crisis in no time at all.”
The view that all was well with the economy until the impact of the health crisis began to be felt in early 2020 leads away from the fact that money markets began to falter dangerously in the autumn of 2019. The problems with the Repo Market were part of a litany of indicators pointing to turbulence ahead in troubled economic waters.
For instance, the resignation in 2019 of about 1,500 prominent corporate CEOs can be seen as a suggestion that news was circulating prior to 2020 about the imminence of serious financial problems ahead. Insiders’ awareness of menacing developments threatening the workings of the global economy were probably a factor in the decision of a large number of senior executives to exit the upper echelons of the business world.
Not only did a record number of CEOs resign, but many of them sold off the bulk of their shares in the companies they were leaving.
Pam Marten and Russ Marten who follow Wall Street’s machinations on a daily basis have advanced the case that the Federal Reserve is engaged in fraud by trying to make it seem that “the banking industry came into 2020 in a healthy condition;” that it is only because of “the COVID-19 pandemic” that the financial system is” unravelling,”
The authors argue that this misrepresentation was deployed because the deceivers are apparently “desperate” to prevent Congress from conducting an investigation for the second time in twelve years on why the Fed, “had to engage in trillions of dollars of Wall Street bailouts.” In spite of the Fed’s fear of facing a Congressional investigation after the November 2020 vote, such a timely investigation of the US financial sector would well serve the public interest.
The authors present a number of signs demonstrating that “the Fed knew, or should have known…. that there was a big banking crisis brewing in August of last year. [2019]” The signs of the financial crisis in the making included negative yields on government bonds around the world as well as big drops in the Dow Jones average. The plunge in the price of stocks was led by US banks, but especially Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase.
Another significant indicator that something was deeply wrong in financial markets was a telling inversion in the value of Treasury notes with the two-year rate yielding more than the ten-year rate.
Yet another sign of serious trouble ahead involved repeated contractions in the size of the German economy. Moreover, in September of 2019 news broke that officials of JP Morgan Chase faced criminal charges for RICO-style racketeering. This scandal added to the evidence of converging problems plaguing core economic institutions as more disruptive mayhem gathered on the horizons.
Accordingly, there is ample cause to ask if there are major underlying reasons for the financial crash of 2020 other than the misnamed pandemic and the lockdowns done in its name of “flattening” its spikes of infection. At the same time, there is ample cause to recognize that the lockdowns have been a very significant factor in the depth of the economic debacle that is making 2020 a year like no other.
Some go further. They argue that the financial crash of 2020 was not only anticipated but planned and pushed forward with clear understanding of its instrumental role in the Great Reset sought by self-appointed protagonists of creative destruction. The advocates of this interpretation place significant weight on the importance of the lockdowns as an effective means of obliterating in a single act a host of old economic relationships. For instance Peter Koenig examines the “farce and diabolical agenda of a universal lockdown.”
Koenig writes, “The pandemic was needed as a pretext to halt and collapse the world economy and the underlying social fabric.”
Inflating the Numbers and Traumatizing the Public to Energize the Epidemic of Fear
There have been many pandemics in global history whose effects on human health have been much more pervasive and devastating than the current one said to be generated by a new coronavirus. In spite, however, of its comparatively mild flu-like effects on human health, at least at this point in the summer of 2020, there has never been a contagion whose spread has generated so much global publicity and hype. As in the aftermath of 9/11, this hype extends to audacious levels of media-generated panic. As with the psyop of 9/11, the media-induced panic has been expertly finessed by practitioners skilled in leveraging the currency of fear to realize a host of radical political objectives.
According to Robert E. Wright in an essay published by the American Institute for Economic Research, “closing down the U.S. economy in response to COVID-19 was probably the worst public policy in at least one-hundred years.” As Wright sees it, the decision to lock down the economy was made in ignorant disregard of the deep and devastating impact that such an action would spur. “Economic lockdowns were the fantasies of government officials so out of touch with economic and physical reality that they thought the costs would be fairly low.”
The consequences, Wright predicts, will extend across many domains including the violence done to the rule of law. The lockdowns, he writes, “turned the Constitution into a frail and worthless fabric.” Writing in late April, Wright touched on the comparisons to be made between the economic lockdowns and slavery. He write, “Slaves definitely had it worse than Americans under lockdown do, but already Americans are beginning to protest their confinement and to subtly subvert authorities, just as chattel slaves did.”
The people held captive in confined lockdown settings have had the time and often the inclination to imbibe much of the 24/7 media coverage of the misnamed pandemic. Taken together, all this media sensationalism has come to constitute one of the most concerted psychological operations ever.
The implications have been enormous for the mental health of multitudes of people. This massive alteration of attitudes and behaviours is the outcome of media experiments performed on human subjects without their informed consent. The media’s success in bringing about herd subservience to propagandistic messaging represents a huge incentive for more of the same to come. It turns out that the subject matter of public health offers virtually limitless potential for power-seeking interests and agents to meddle with the privacies, civil liberties and human rights of those they seek to manipulate, control and exploit.
The social, economic and health impacts of the dislocations flowing from the lockdowns are proving to be especially devastating on the poorest, the most deprived and the most vulnerable members of society. This impact will continue to be marked in many ways, including in increased rates of suicide, domestic violence, mental illness, addictions, homelessness, and incarceration far larger than those caused directly by COVID-19. As rates of deprivation through poverty escalate, so too will crime rates soar.
The over-the-top alarmism of the big media cabals has been well financed by the advertising revenue of the pharmaceutical industry. With some few exceptions, major media outlets pushed the public to accept the lockdowns as well as the attending losses in jobs and business activity. In seeking to push the agenda of their sponsors, the big media cartels have been especially unmindful of their journalistic responsibilities. Their tendency has been to avoid or censor forums where even expert practitioners of public health can publicly question and discuss government dictates about vital issues of public policy.
Whether in Germany or the United States or many other countries, front-line workers in this health care crisis have nevertheless gathered together with the goal of trying to correct the one-sided prejudices of of discriminatory media coverage. One of the major themes in the presentations by medical practitioners is to confront the chorus of media misrepresentations on the remedial effects of hydroxychloroquine and zinc.
On July 27 a group of doctors gathered on the grounds of the US Supreme Court to try to address the biases of the media and the blind spots of government.
Another aspect in the collateral damage engendered by COVID-19 alarmism is marked in the fatalities arising from the wholesale postponement of many necessary interventions including surgery. How many have died or will die because of the hold put on medical interventions to remedy cancer, heart conditions and many other potentially lethal ailments?
Did the unprecedented lockdowns come about as part of a preconceived plan to inflate the severity of an anticipated financial meltdown? What is to be made of the suspicious intervention of administrators to produce severely padded numbers of reported deaths in almost every jurisdiction? This kind of manipulation of statistics raised the possibility that we are witnessing a purposeful and systemic inflation of the severity of this health care crisis.
Questions about the number of cases arise because of the means of testing for the presence of a supposedly new coronavirus. The PCR system that is presently being widely used does not test for the virus but tests for the existence of antibodies produced in response to many health challenges including the common cold. This problem creates a good deal of uncertainty of what a positive test really means.
The problems with calculating case numbers extend to widespread reports that have described people who were not tested for COVID-19 but who nevertheless received notices from officials counting them as COVID-19 positive. Broadcaster Armstrong Williams addressed the phenomenon on his network of MSM media outlets in late July.
From the mass of responses he received, Williams estimated that those not tested but counted as a positive probably extends probably to hundreds of thousands of individuals. What would drive the effort to exaggerate the size of the afflicted population?
This same pattern of inflation of case numbers was reinforced by the Tricare branch of the US Defense Department’s Military Health System. This branch sent out notices to 600,000 individuals who had not been tested. The notices nevertheless informed the recipients that they had tested positive for COVID 19.
Is the inflation of COVID-19 death rates and cases numbers an expression of the zeal to justify the massive lockdowns? Were the lockdowns in China conceived as part of a scheme to help create the conditions for the public’s acceptance of a plan to remake the world’s political economy? What is to be made of the fact that those most identified with the World Economic Forum (WEF) have led the way in putting a positive spin on the reset arising from the very health crisis the WEF helped introduce and publicize in Oct. of 2019?
As Usual, the Poor Get Poorer
The original Chinese lockdowns in the winter of 2020 caused the breakdowns of import-export supply chains extending across the planet. Lockdowns in the movement of raw materials, parts, finished products, expertise, money and more shut down domestic businesses in China as well as transnational commerce in many countries outside China. The supply chain disruptions were especially severe for businesses that have dispensed with the practice of keeping on hand large inventories of parts and raw material, depending instead on just-in-time deliveries.
As the supply chains broke down domestically and internationally, many enterprises lacked the revenue to pay their expenses. Bankruptcies began to proliferate at rates that will probably continue to be astronomical for some time. All kinds of loans and liabilities were not paid out in full or at all. Many homes are being re-mortgaged or cast into real estate markets as happened during the prelude and course of the bailouts of 2007-2010.
The brunt of the financial onslaught hit small businesses especially hard. Collectively small businesses have been a big creator of jobs. They have picked up some of the slack from the rush of big businesses to downsize their number of full-time employees. Moreover, small businesses and start-ups are often the site of exceptionally agile innovations across broad spectrums of economic activity. The hard financial slam on the small business sector, therefore, is packing a heavy punch on the economic conditions of everyone.
The devastating impact of the economic meltdown on workers and small businesses in Europe and North America extends in especially lethal ways to the massive population of poor people living all over the world. Many of these poor people reside in countries where much of the paid work is irregular and informal.
At the end of April the International Labor Organization (ILO), an entity created along with the League of Nations at the end of the First World War, estimated that there would be 1.6 billion victims of the meltdown in the worldwide “informal economy.” In the first month of the crisis these workers based largely in Africa and Latin America lost 60% of their subsistence level incomes.
As ILO Director-General, Guy Ryder, has asserted,
Quote:This pandemic has laid bare in the cruellest way, the extraordinary precariousness and injustices of our world of work. It is the decimation of livelihoods in the informal economy – where six out of ten workers make a living – which has ignited the warnings from our colleagues in the World Food Programme, of the coming pandemic of hunger. It is the gaping holes in the social protection systems of even the richest countries, which have left millions in situations of deprivation. It is the failure to guarantee workplace safety that condemns nearly 3 million to die each year because of the work they do. And it is the unchecked dynamic of growing inequality which means that if, in medical terms, the virus does not discriminate between its victims in its social and economic impact, it discriminates brutally against the poorest and the powerless.Guy Ryder remembered the optimistic rhetoric in officialdom’s responses to the economic crash of 2007-2009. He compares the expectations currently being aroused by the vaccination fixation with the many optimistic sentiments previously suggesting the imminence of remedies for grotesque levels of global inequality. Ryder reflected,
Quote:We’ve heard it before. The mantra which provided the mood music of the crash of 2008-2009 was that once the vaccine to the virus of financial excess had been developed and applied, the global economy would be safer, fairer, more sustainable. But that didn’t happen. The old normal was restored with a vengeance and those on the lower echelons of labour markets found themselves even further behind.Wall Street and 9/11
The internationalization of increased unemployment and poverty brought about in the name of combating the corona crisis is having the effect of further widening the polarization between rich and poor on a global scale. Ryder’s metaphor about the false promises concerning a “vaccine” to correct “financial excess” can well be seen as a precautionary comment on the flowery rhetoric currently adorning the calls for a global reset.
The world economic crisis of 2020 is creating the context for large-scale repeats of some key aspects of the bailout of 2007-2010. The bailout of 2007-2008 drew, in turn, from many practices developed in the period when the explosive events of 9/11 triggered a worldwide reset of global geopolitics.
While the events of 2008 and 2020 both drew attention to the geopolitical importance of Wall Street, the terrible pummelling of New York’s financial district was the event that ushered in a new era of history, an era that has delivered us to the current financial meltdown/lockdown.
It lies well beyond the scope of this essay to go into detail about the dynamics of what really transpired on 9/11. Nevertheless, some explicit reckoning with this topic is crucial to understanding some of the essential themes addressed in this essay.
Indeed, it would be difficult to overstate the relevance of 9/11 to the background and nature of the current debacle. The execution and spinning of 9/11 were instrumental in creating the repertoire of political trickery presently being adapted in the manufacturing and exploiting of the COVID-19 hysteria. A consistent attribute of the journey from 9/11 to COVID-19 has been the amplification of executive authority through the medium of emergency measures enactments, policies and dictates.
Wall Street is a major site where much of this political trickery was concocted in planning exercises extending to many other sites of power and intrigue. In the case of 9/11, a number of prominent Wall Street firms were involved before, during and after the events of September 11. As is extremely well documented, these events have been misrepresented in ways that helped to further harness the military might of the United States to the expansionistic designs of Israel in the Middle East.
The response of the Federal Reserve to the events of 9/11 helped set in motion a basic approach to disaster management that continues to this day. Almost immediately following the pulverization of Manhattan’s most gigantic and iconographic landmarks, Federal Reserve officials made it their highest priority to inject liquidity into financial markets. Many different kinds of scenario can be advanced behind the cover of infusing liquidity into markets.
For three days in a row the Federal Reserve Bank of New York turned on its money spigots to inject transfusions of $100 billion dollars of newly generated funds into the Wall Street home of the financial system. The declared aim was to keep the flow of capital between financial institutions well lubricated. The Federal Reserve’s infusions of new money into Wall Street took many forms. New habits and appetites were thereby cultivated in ways that continue to influence the behaviour of Wall Street organizations in the financial debacle of 2020.
The revelations concerning the events of 9/11 contained a number of financial surprises. Questions immediately arose, for instance, about whether the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers had obliterated software and hardware vital to the continuing operations of computerized banking systems. Whatever problems arose along these lines, it turned out that there was sufficient digital information backed up in other locations to keep banking operations viable.
But while much digital data survived the destruction of core installations in the US financial sector, some strategic information was indeed obliterated. For instance, strategic records entailed in federal investigations into many business scandals were lost. Some of the incinerated data touched on, for instance, the machinations of the energy giant, Enron, along with its Wall Street partners, JP Morgan Chase and Citigroup.
The writings of E. P Heidner are prominent in the literature posing theories about the elimination of incriminating documentation as a result of the controlled demolitions of 9/11. What information was eliminated and what was retained in the wake of the devastation? Heidner has published a very ambitious account placing the events of 9/11 at the forefront of a deep and elaborate relationship linking George H. W. Bush to Canada’s Barrick Gold and the emergence of gold derivatives.
The surprises involving 9/11 and Wall Street included evidence concerning trading on the New York Stock Exchange. A few individuals enriched themselves significantly by purchasing a disproportionately high number of put options on shares about to fall precipitously as a result of the anticipated events of 9/11. Investigators, however, chose to ignore this evidence because it did not conform to the prevailing interpretation of who did what to whom on 9/11.
Another suspicious group of transactions conducted right before 9/11 involved some very large purchases of five-year US Treasury notes. These instruments are well known hedges when one has knowledge that a world crisis is imminent. One of these purchases was a $5 billion transaction. The US Treasury Department would have been informed about the identity of the purchaser. Nevertheless the FBI and the Securities Exchange Commission collaborated to point public attention away from these suspect transactions. (p. 199)
On the very day of 9/11 local police arrested Israeli suspects employed in the New York area as Urban Movers. The local investigators were soon pressured to ignore the evidence, however, and go along with the agenda of the White House and the media chorus during the autumn of 2001.
In the hours following the pulverization of the Twin Towers the dominant mantra was raised “Osama bin Laden and al-Qeada did it.” That mantra led in the weeks, months and years that followed to US-led invasions of several Muslim-majority countries. Some have described these military campaigns as wars for Israel.
Soon New York area jails were being filled up with random Muslims picked up for nothing more than visa violations and such. The unrelenting demonization of Muslims collectively can now be seen in retrospect as a dramatic psychological operation meant to poison minds as the pounding of the war drums grew in intensity. In the process a traumatized public were introduced to concepts like “jihad.” At no time has there ever been a credible police investigation into the question of who is responsible for the 9/11 crimes.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chose September 10, the day before 9/11, to break the news at a press conference that $2.3 trillion had gone missing from the Pentagon’s budget. Not surprisingly the story of the missing money got buried the next day as reports of the debacle in Manhattan and Washington DC dominated MSM news coverage.
As reported by Forbes Magazine, the size of the amount said to have gone missing in Donald Rumsfeld’s 2001 report of Defense Department spending had mushroomed by 2015 to around $21 trillion. It was Mark Skidmore, an Economics Professor at the University of Michigan, who became the main sleuth responsible for identifying the gargantuan amount of federal funds that the US government can’t account for.
As the agency that created the missing tens of trillions that apparently has disappeared without a trace, wouldn’t the US Federal Reserve be in a position to render some assistance in tracking down the lost funds? Or is the Federal Reserve somehow a participant or a complicit party in the disappearance of the tens of trillions without a paper trail?
The inability or unwillingness of officialdom to explain what happened to the lost $21 trillion, an amount comparable to the size of the entire US national debt prior to the lockdowns, might be viewed in the light of the black budgets of the US Department of Defense (DOD). Black budgets are off-the-books funds devoted to secret research and to secret initiatives in applied research.
In explaining this phenomenon, former Canadian Defense Minister, Paul Hellyer, has observed, “thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects about which Congress and the Commander In Chief have deliberately been kept in the dark.” Eric Zuess goes further. As he explains it, the entire Defense Department operates pretty much on the basis of an unusual system well outside the standard rules of accounting applied in other federal agencies.
When news broke about the missing $21 trillion, federal authorities responded by promising that special audits would be conducted to explain the irregularities. The results of those audits, if they took place at all, were never published. The fact that the Defense of Department has developed in a kind of audit free zone has made it a natural magnet for people and interests engaged in all kinds of criminal activities.
Eric Zuess calls attention to the 1,000 military bases around the world that form a natural network conducive to the cultivation of many forms of criminal trafficking. Zuess includes in his reflections commentary on the secret installations in some American embassies but especially in the giant US Embassy in Baghdad Iraq.
The US complex in Baghdad’s Green Zone is the biggest Embassy in the world. Its monumental form on a 104 acre site expresses the expansionary dynamics of US military intervention in the Middle East and Eurasia following 9/11.
The phenomenon of missing tens of trillions calls attention to larger patterns of kleptocratic activity that forms a major subject addressed here. The shifts into new forms of organized crime in the name of “national security” began to come to light in the late 1980s. An important source of disclosures was the series of revelations that accompanied the coming apart of the Saudi-backed Bank of Credit and Commerce International, the BCCI.
The nature of this financial institution, where CIA operatives were prominent among its clients, provides a good window into the political economy of drug dealing, money laundering, weapons smuggling, regime change and many much more criminal acts that took place along the road to 9/11.
The BCCI was a key site of financial transactions that contributed to the end of the Cold War and the inception of many new kinds of conflict. These activities often involved the well-financed activities of mercenaries, proxy armies, and a heavy reliance on private contractors of many sorts.
The Enron scandal was seen to embody some of the same lapses facilitated by fraudulent accounting integral to the BCCI scandal. Given the bubble of secrecy surrounding the Federal Reserve, there are thick barriers blocking deep investigation into whether or not the US Central Bank was involved in the relationship of the US national security establishment and the BCCI.
The kind of dark transactions that the BCCI was designed to facilitate must have been channelled after its demise into other banking institutions probably with Wall Street connections. Since 9/11, however, many emergency measures have been imposed that add extra layers of secrecy protecting the perpetrators of many criminal acts from public exposure and criminal prosecutions.
The events of 9/11 have sometimes been described as the basis of a global coup. To this day there is no genuine consensus about what really transpired to create the illusion of justification for repeated US military invasions of Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East and Eurasia.
The 9/11 debacle and the emergency measures that followed presented Wall Street with an array of new opportunities for profit that came with the elaborate refurbishing and retooling of the military-industrial complex.
The response to 9/11 was expanded and generalized upon to create the basis of a war directed not at a particular enemy, but rather at an ill-defined conception identified as “terrorism.” This alteration was part of a complex of changes adding trillions to the flow of money energizing the axis of interaction linking the Pentagon and Wall Street and the abundance of new companies created to advance the geopolitical objectives emerging from the 9/11 coup.
According to Pam Martens and Russ Martens, the excesses of deregulation helped induce an anything-goes-ethos on Wall Street and at its Federal Reserve regulator in the wake of 9/11. As the authors tell it, the response to 9/11 helped set important precedents for the maintaining flows of credit and capital in financial markets.
Often the destination of the funds generated in the name of pumping liquidity into markets was not identified and reported in transactions classified as financial emergency measures. While the priority was on keeping financial pumps primed, there was much less concern for transparency and accountability among those in positions of power at the Federal Reserve.
The financial sector’s capture of the government instruments meant to regulate the behaviour of Wall Street institutions was much like the deregulation of the US pharmaceutical industry. Both episodes highlight a message that has become especially insistent as the twenty-first century unfolds.
The nature of the response to 9/11 emphasized the mercenary ascent of corporate dominance as the primary force directing governments. Throughout this transformation the message to citizens became increasingly clear. Buyer Beware. We cannot depend on governments to represent our will and interests. We cannot even count on our governments to protect citizens from corporatist attacks especially on human health and whatever financial security we have been able to build up.
Bailouts, Derivatives, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York
The elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 was essential to the process of dramatically cutting back the government’s role as a protector of the public interest on the financial services sector. The Glass-Steagall Act was an essential measure in US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Some view the New Deal as a strategy for saving capitalism by moderating ts most sharp-edged features. Instituted in 1933 in response to the onset of the Great Depression, the Glass-Steagall Act separated the operations of deposit-accepting banks from the more speculative activity of investment brokers.
The termination of the regulatory framework put in place by the Glass Steagall Act opened much new space for all kinds of experiments in the manipulation of money in financial markets. The changes began with the merger of different sorts of financial institutions including some in the insurance field. Those overseeing the reconstituted entities headquartered on Wall Street took advantage of their widened latitudes of operation. They developed all sorts of ways of elaborating their financial services and presenting them in new packages.
The word, “derivative” is often associated with many applications of the new possibilities in the reconstituted financial services sector. The word, derivative, can be applied to many kinds of transactions involving speculative bets of various sorts. As the word suggests, a derivative is derived from a fixed asset such as currency, bonds, stocks, and commodities. Alterations in the values of fixed assets affect the value of derivatives that often take the form of contracts between two or more parties.
One of the most famous derivatives in the era of the financial crash of 2007-2010 was described as mortgaged-backed securities. On the surface these bundles of debt-burdened properties might seem easy to understand. But that would be a delusion. The value of these products was affected, for instance, by unpredictable shifts in interest rates, liar loans extended to homebuyers who lacked the capacity to make regular mortgage payments, and significant shifts in the value of real estate.
Mortgage-backed securities were just one type of a huge array of derivatives invented on the run in the heady atmosphere of secret and unregulated transactions between counterparties. Derivatives could involve contracts formalizing bets between rivals gambling on the outcome of competitive efforts to shape the future. An array of derivative bets was built around transactions often placed behind the veil of esoteric nomenclature like “collateralized debt obligations” or “credit default swaps.”
The variables in derivative bets might include competing national security agendas involving, for instance, pipeline constructions, regime change, weapons development and sales, false flag terror events, or money laundering. Since derivative bets involve confidential transactions with secret outcomes, they can be derived from all sorts of criteria. Derivative bets can, for instance, involve all manner of computerized calculations that in some cases are constructed much like war game scenarios.
The complexity of derivatives became greater when the American Insurance Group, AIG, began selling insurance programs to protect all sides in derivative bets from suffering too drastically from the consequences of being on the losing side of transactions.
The derivative frenzy, sometimes involving bets being made by parties unable to cover potential losses, overwhelmed the scale of the day-to-day economy. The “real economy” embodies exchanges of goods, services, wages and such that supply the basic necessities for human survival with some margin for recreation, travel, cultural engagement and such.
The Swiss-based Bank for International Settlements calculated in 2008 that the size of the all forms of derivative products had a monetary value of $1.14 quadrillion. A quadrillion is a thousand trillions. By comparison, the estimated value of all the real estate in the world was $75 trillion in 2008.
[Bank for International Settlements, Semiannual OTC derivative statistics at end-December, 2008.]
As the enticements of derivative betting preoccupied the leading directors of Wall Street institutions, their more traditional way of relating to one another began to falter. It was in this atmosphere that the Repo Market became problematic in December of 2007 just as it showed similar signs of breakdown in September of 2019.
In both instances the level of distrust between those in charge of financial institutions began to falter because they all had good reason to believe that their fellow bankers were overextended. All had reason to believe their counterparts were mired by too much speculative activity enabled by all sorts of novel experiments including various forms of derivative dealing.
In December of 2007 as in the autumn of 2019, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York was forced to enter the picture to keep the financial pumps on Wall Street primed. The New York Fed kept the liquidity cycles flowing by invoking its power to create new money with the interest charged to tax payers.
As the financial crisis unfolded in 2008 and 2009 the Federal Reserve, but especially the privately-owned New York Federal Reserve bank, stepped forward to bail out many financial institutions that had become insolvent or near insolvent. In the process precedents and patterns were established that are being re-enacted with some modifications in 2020.
One of the innovations that took place in 2008 was the decision by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York to hire a large Wall Street financial institution, BlackRock, to administer the bailouts. These transfers of money went through three specially created companies now being replicated as Special Purpose Vehicles in the course of the payouts of 2020.
In 2008-09 BlackRock administered the three companies named after the address of the New York Federal Reserve Bank on Maiden Lane. BlackRock emerged from an older Wall Street firm called Blackstone. Its former chair, Peter C. Peterson, was a former Chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The original Maiden Lane company paid Bear Stearns Corp $30 billion. This amount from the New York Fed covered the debt of Bear Stearns, a condition negotiated to clear the way for the purchase of the old Wall Street institution by JP Morgan Chase. Maiden Lane II was a vehicle for payouts to companies that had purchased “mortgage-backed securities” before these derivative products turned soar.
Maiden Lane III was to pay off “multi-sector collateralized debt obligations.” Among these bailouts were payoffs to the counterparties of the insurance giant, AIG. As noted, AIG had developed an insurance product to be sold to those engaged in derivative bets. When the bottom fell out of markets, AIG lacked the means to pay off the large number of insurance claims made against it. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York stepped in to bail out the counterparties of AIG, many of them deemed to be “too big to fail.”
Among the counterparties of AIG was Goldman Sachs. It received of $13 billion from the Federal Reserve. Other bailouts to AIG’s counterparties were $12 billion to Deutsche Bank, $6.8 billion to Merrill Lynch, $5 billion to Switzerland’s UBS, $7.9 billion to Barclays, and $5.2 billion to Bank of America. Some of these banks received additional funds from other parts of the overall bailout transaction. Many dozens of other counterparties to AIG also received payouts in 2008-2009. Among them were the Bank of Montreal and Bank of Scotland.
The entire amount of the bailouts was subsequently calculated to be a whopping $29 trillion with a “t.” The lion’s share of these funds went to prop up US financial institutions and the many foreign banks with which they conducted business.
Much of this money went to the firms that were shareholders in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York or partners of the big Wall Street firms. Citigroup, the recipient of the largest amount, received about $2.5 trillion in the federal bailouts. Merrill Lynch received $2 trillion,
The Federal Reserve Bank was established by Congressional statute in 1913. The Federal Reserve headquarters is situated in Washington DC. The Central Bank was composed of twelve constituent regional banks. Each one of these regional banks is owned by private banks.
The private ownership of the banks that are the proprietors of the Federal Reserve system has been highly contentious from its inception. The creation of the Federal Reserve continues to be perceived by many of its critics as an unjustifiable giveaway whereby the US government ceded to private interests its vital capacity to issue its own currency and to direct monetary policy like the setting of interest rates.
Pam Martens and Russ Martens at Wall Street on Parade explain the controversial Federal Reserve structure as follows
Quote:While the Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington, D.C. is deemed an “independent federal agency,” with its Chair and Governors appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate, the 12 regional Fed banks are private corporations owned by the member banks in their region. The settled law under John L. Lewis v. the United States confirms: “Each Federal Reserve Bank is a separate corporation owned by commercial banks in its region.”There was no genuine effort after the financial debacle of 2007-2010 to correct the main structural problems and weaknesses of the Wall Street-based US financial sector. The Dodd-Frank Bill signed into law by US President Barack Obama in 2010 did make some cosmetic changes. But the main features of the regulatory capture that has taken place with the elimination of the Glass-Steagall Act remained with only minor alterations. In particular the framework was held in place for speculative excess in derivative bets.
In the case of the New York Fed, which is located in the Wall Street area of Manhattan, its largest shareowners are behemoth multinational banks, including JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
In the summer edition of The Atlantic, Frank Partnoy outlined a gloomy assessment of the continuity leading from the events of 2007-2010 to the current situation. This current situation draws a strange contrast between the lockdown-shattered quality of the economy and the propped-up value of the stock market whose future value will in all probability prove unsustainable. Partnoy writes,
It is a distasteful fact that the present situation is so dire in part because the banks fell right back into bad behavior after the last crash–taking too many risks, hiding debt in complex instruments and off-balance-sheet entities, and generally exploiting loopholes in laws intended to rein in their greed. Sparing them for a second time this century will be that much harder.
Wall Street Criminality on Display
The frauds and felonies of the Wall Street banks have continued after the future earnings of US taxpayers returned them to solvency after 2010. The record of infamy is comparable to that of the pharmaceutical industry.
The criminal behaviour in both sectors is very relevant to the overlapping crises that are underway in both the public health and financial sectors. In 2012 the crime spree in the financial sector began with astounding revelations. . .
Click here to read the entire article on the American Herald Tribune website.
Anthony James Hall has been Editor In Chief of the American Herald Tribune since its inception. Between 1990 and 2018 Dr. Hall was Professor of Globalization Studies and Liberal Education at the University of Lethbridge where he is now Professor Emeritus. The focus of Dr. Hall’s teaching, research, and community service came to highlight the conditions of the colonization of Indigenous peoples in imperial globalization since 1492.
Originally published on www.ahtribune.com
Sourced from GreenMedInfo
https://www.activistpost.com/2020/08/lockdowns-coronavirus-and-banks-following-the-money.html
RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - awakened53 - 08-23-2020
Dr. Ron Paul: The Case For Lock-Downs, Masks, School Closures, ‘Distancing’ Has Just Collapsed
Political & Fear-Based Public Health Policies
From the beginning of this COVID pandemic, US health policies have been led more by fear, hysteria, and disinformation than real data. Maybe we didn’t have much data early on, but now we do. Unfortunately, there is a larger fear-driven political agenda and narrative at play that continues to dominate the headlines. This narrative excludes any opposing viewpoints, data, or even rational thought in many cases.
The political agenda is clearly evidenced by our politician’s odd behavior. Why else would politicians and their faithful media be in favor of prosecuting people trying to open their business to regain their livelihood or arresting people in parks while ignoring tens of thousands of rioters in the streets destroying our cities? How are thousands of “peaceful protesters” in the street who are not social distancing in the middle of a pandemic, not a threat to public safety but some guy surfing in the ocean deemed a threat to public safety?
Early on, doctors came out and tried to discuss raw data from the frontline, but they were quickly censored. It’s ironic because the two doctors from California who were censored for warning against the lockdowns are being proven correct by the new data. More recently, many other doctors have spoken out about alternate treatments to COVID and they were censored too. What we are witnessing is nothing more than politicians not letting a “crisis go to waste.” From the start, this pandemic was sensationalized and politicized. There has also been a concerted effort to exaggerate the mortality statistics.
Hospitals were financially incentivized to diagnose as many Covid-19 cases as possible to make it appear there were many more cases. There were also many other ways the COVID death counts were manipulated in favor of keeping the fear-based agenda alive. Thousands of elderly people in nursing homes were needlessly sacrificed by governors forcing COVID-19 positive patients to be admitted. (Governor Andrew Cuomo is one such governor whose decision ended up being responsible for the death of thousands in nursing homes. Cuomo just kicked off his new book tour, which leaves little doubt he is trying to revise history and further his political career). Alternate methods of treatment for COVID like HCQ were broadly attacked and there were even fake studies published in a coordinated effort to keep mass vaccinations as the only option for us to return to a “new normal.”
https://youtu.be/G3s01R0lPdw
RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - awakened53 - 08-25-2020
UK Government Scientist Admits Lockdown Was a ‘Monumental Mistake on a Global Scale’
A scientific advisor to the UK government says the coronavirus lockdown was a “panic measure” and a “monumental mistake on a global scale.”
Infectious diseases expert and University of Edinburgh professor Mark Woolhouse acknowledged that the decision to lockdown in March was a “crude measure” that was enacted because “we couldn’t think of anything better to do.”
“Lockdown was a panic measure and I believe history will say trying to control Covid-19 through lockdown was a monumental mistake on a global scale, the cure was worse than the disease,” said Woolhouse, who is now calling on the government to unlock society before more damage is done.
“I never want to see national lockdown again,” he added. “It was always a temporary measure that simply delayed the stage of the epidemic we see now. It was never going to change anything fundamentally.”
The professor asserts that the impact of the response to coronavirus will be worse than the virus itself.
“I believe the harm lockdown is doing to our education, health care access, and broader aspects of our economy and society will turn out to be at least as great as the harm done by COVID-19,” said Woolhouse.
Richard Sullivan, professor of cancer at King’s College London, previously warned that there will be more excess cancer deaths over the next 5 years than the number of people who die from coronavirus in the UK due to the disruption caused by the coronavirus lockdown, which is preventing cancer victims from getting treatment.
Figures also show that there were more excess deaths during the 2017-18 flu season (around 50,000) than the total number of people in the UK who have died from coronavirus (41,433).
Oxford Professor Says People Have Become ‘Overly Frightened of the ‘virus’. I can’t think why – I mean governments and the media have not been lying to us 24/7 on a scale that beggars belief, right? So why would people get the wrong impression?
Carl Heneghan, a professor of evidence-based medicine at Oxford University, says governments have failed in accurately communicating the actual threat posed by coronavirus, leading people to become “overly frightened” due to misplaced fear.
Heneghan was responsible for the UK government significantly lowering its official COVID-19 death toll after he revealed that health authorities were counting coronavirus deaths even if someone had subsequently died of other causes.
Urging people to “get on with your lives!” Heneghan said that exaggerated fears over the pandemic had led to “people going about their daily lives misunderstanding and overestimating their risk.”
“We reset how we calculate the death rates. We now need to reset how we communicate the risks of the virus,” said Heneghan.
“I am concerned people have become overly frightened and throughout this pandemic, the fear instilled in people has been a real problem,” he added.
“Many people misunderstand and overestimate their risk of Covid. This uncertainty is leaving them highly anxious and affecting schools, offices and how we go about our daily lives. The government needs to intervene to explain to people their true risks,” concluded Heneghan.
As we previously highlighted, a survey last month found that across the western world, populations drastically overestimated the number of people who had been killed by coronavirus.
In the UK, respondents thought that an average of 7 per cent of the population, around 5 million people, had died from coronavirus, 100 times the actual figure which is 41,429.
RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - The Apprentice - 08-25-2020
It the human tide does not turn and run from the cure, all will be in vain.
https://youtu.be/CeTliWwDPOg
RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - awakened53 - 08-31-2020
The Rise of Authoritarianism: From Parasite Stress Theory to Lock Step
By Derrick Broze
Empirical evidence indicates that the spread of pathogens leads populations to become more conformist and accepting of authoritarian behavior from governments – what does this mean for the world of COVID19?
As discussed in Multiple Studies Predicted Governments Become Authoritarian in Response to Pandemics, we have an abundance of scientific data highlighting how humans react to perceived threats and how that relates to the type of government the people will accept. I examined the study Pathogens and Politics: Further Evidence That Parasite Prevalence Predicts Authoritarianism, as well as other studies focused on the “parasite stress theory.”
The theory proposes that when a species faces parasites and diseases their values are shaped by the experience. In this context, “parasite” is used to refer to any pathogenic organism, including bacteria and viruses. The theory states that depending on how a disease stresses people’s development it can lead to differences in mating preferences and changes in culture. Proponents of the parasite stress theory also note that disease can alter the psychological and social norms of societies.
“According to a “parasite stress” hypothesis, authoritarian governments are more likely to emerge in regions characterized by a high prevalence of disease-causing pathogens,” the researchers wrote. They define authoritarian governance as “highly concentrated power structures that repress dissent and emphasize submission to authority, social conformity, and hostility towards outgroups.”
Due to the invisible nature of “disease-causing parasites,” attempts to control the spread of a disease “historically depended substantially on adherence to ritualized behavioral practices that reduced infection risk.” The researchers also found that society tends to promote a collectivist worldview, favoring obedience and conformity from the population, in response to parasites.
Unfortunately, according to the parasite stress theory, humanity is prone to accepting violent behavior from governments during pandemics. As noted in Politics and Pathogens, the threat of exposure to a pathogen need not even be realistic for it to create a desire for conformity and obedience to authority.
The book The Parasite Stress Theory of Values and Sociality: Infectious Disease, History and Human Values Worldwide further outlines how populations respond to the uncertainty felt during pathogen spread. The authors discuss how reducing social prejudice and authoritarianism can be accomplished by emancipating people from infectious diseases. However, the authors also note that a government which desired more authoritarian powers – including “full-blown fascism or genocide” – could achieve this goal by “promoting widespread mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases.”
The authors reach similar conclusions as the researchers in the Politics and Pathogens study which showed that populations facing pandemics become more supportive of collectivist mindsets over individualistic ones. “These patterns arise, in part, from the reverence collectivists place on people in authority (authoritarianism), which gives those in authority greater freedom to violate the interests of the populace and impunity when such violations occur,” the authors note.
Clearly, the conclusions of this research have profound implications for our world and the current COVID-19 crisis. As previously noted, we are seeing a massive increase in authoritarian actions from governments around the world. Thermal imaging scanners, documents for travel, fines and arrests of those who fail to wear masks or stay home, and shutting down protests against these actions – have all become regular events in the so-called “New Normal.”
The Gates Foundation Connection
While researching the Politics and Pathogen study I discovered that the editor, Aric Gregson, has some tangential connections to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation through his work on a Malaria vaccine.
Dr. Aric Gregson, MD is an infectious disease specialist in Los Angeles, California. Dr. Gregson currently practices at Ag Infectious Diseases: A Medical Corporation in California. According to his LinkedIn page, from July 2003 to September 2005, Gregson participated in the “Vaccinology Fellowship” at the University of Maryland’s Center for Vaccine Development.
He also participated in the Malaria Vaccine Technology Roadmap Process which included two different doctors working with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. The Roadmap Process also involved Dr. Zarifah Hussain Reed of the World Health Organization (WHO), which is largely funded by the Gates Foundation.
From September 2005 to January 2007, Gregson served as a consultant and clinical vaccinologist for the PATH Malaria Vaccine Initiative. PATH is described as “an international nonprofit organization that drives transformative innovation to save lives and improve health” which works with “private industry, government, and academia to develop malaria vaccines.”
According to their website, “MVI is a global program established at PATH through an initial grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.” Gregson’s LinkedIn specifies that he was a “Program Officer” for the RTS,S malaria vaccine trials in Africa at the time. The RTS,S is described as “the world’s first malaria vaccine shown to provide partial protection against malaria in young children.”
One press release about the development of a new malaria vaccine notes that the vaccine was developed by a partnership with pharmaceutical company GSK and the Path Malaria Vaccine Initiative. Once again it is noted that “major funding for clinical development comes from a grant by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to MVI.”
The press release also states that should the vaccine be approved by the regulatory authorities and recommended by the WHO “it will be used for African children, who are most at risk from the disease.” No mention is made regarding the fact that the Gates Foundation is the second top funding source for the WHO, while also funding the MVI and other health authorities.
The connection between the Gates Foundation and the editor of the Politics and Pathogens study is concerning when one understands the outsized influence and control Bill Gates has over global health policy, particularly through the WHO and the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Marching Lock Step To Authoritarianism
In part 3 of my investigation into the life, finances, and goals of Bill Gates, I noted that the Gates Foundation was involved in the Event 201 exercise:
Quote:On October 18, 2019, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation partnered with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the World Economic Forum on a high-level pandemic exercise known as Event 201. Gates is a long time “Agenda Contributor” for the WEF and has donated to Johns Hopkins. Event 201 simulated how the world would respond to a coronavirus pandemic which swept around the planet. The simulation imagined 65 million people dying, mass lock downs, quarantines, censorship of alternative viewpoints under the guise of fighting “disinformation,” and even floated the idea of arresting people who question the pandemic narrative.We also noted that the Gates Foundation’s partners in “philanthropy” – the Rockefeller Foundation – imagined a similar scenario as part of their 2010 document, “Scenarios for the Future of Technology and International Development.” This document includes a scenario called “Lock Step,” which describes a pandemic sweeping the world and resulting in more authoritarian control from governments in developed countries.
Interestingly, Lock Step notes that while the “pandemic blanketed the planet” the countries which took a more aggressive, authoritarian approach fared better.
“The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter postpandemic recovery,” the document states.
The document describes how national leaders around the world “flexed their authority and imposed airtight rules and restrictions.” These included mandatory wearing of face masks and body-temperature checks at train stations and markets, as well as “scanners using advanced functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology… to detect abnormal behavior that may indicate ‘antisocial intent.’” Lock Step also describes the implementation of biometric ID for all people.
Notably, the paper states, “Even after the pandemic faded, this more authoritarian control and oversight of citizens and their activities stuck and even intensified.”
At first, the population approves of a more controlled world and citizens even willingly gave up “some of their sovereignty—and their privacy—to more paternalistic states in exchange for greater safety and stability.” The scenario outlines how some of the population were tolerant, and even eager, for “top-down direction and oversight.”
The document goes on to describe how, eventually, the people of the world tire of the control and civil unrest would begin:
[b]By 2025, people seemed to be growing weary of so much top-down control and letting leaders and authorities make choices for them. Wherever national interests clashed with individual interests, there was conflict. Sporadic pushback became increasingly organized and coordinated, as disaffected youth and people who had seen their status and opportunities slip away—largely in developing countries—incited civil unrest.[/b]
Final Thoughts
Considering the abundance of evidence indicating that Parasite Stress theory is an accurate representation of how humanity will respond to perceived threats, we must ask whether the Gates or Rockefeller Foundations were aware of the potential for pathogens to lead to more obedient populations and increasingly authoritarian governments. Here’s what we know:
[ul]
[li]We know for a fact that the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations are extremely influential when it comes to global health and education.[/li]
[li]We also know that at least one researcher involved with Parasite Stress theory has worked with the Gates Foundation.[/li]
[/ul]
Reflect back to the passage from The Parasite Stress Theory of Values and Sociality which notes that if someone wanted to encourage authoritarianism – including “full-blown fascism or genocide” – they could achieve this goal by “promoting widespread mortality and morbidity from infectious diseases.” Armed with this knowledge, unlimited financial capital, and global influence, one could easily sway the world towards conformity and authoritarianism.
Is it possible these organizations knew exactly how the people would respond to a perceived threat of a pandemic? Are we witnessing the unfolding of the Lock Step scenario as predicted by the Rockefeller Foundation a decade ago?
RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - awakened53 - 09-03-2020
It was always coming – excess deaths at home caused by lockdown now higher than even the manufactured ‘Covid’ figures and this was blatantly predictable from the start so making it premeditated
https://www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-news/2020/09/02/non-covid-excess-deaths-in-private-homes-now-outnumber-virus-deaths-ons/
RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - awakened53 - 09-05-2020
LIBERTY IN LOCKDOWN
Is it time to release democracy from quarantine and resuscitate the rule of law?
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/september-2020/liberty-in-lockdown/
RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - awakened53 - 09-11-2020
Puppet dictator Johnson facing open revolt from Tory backbenchers over new lockdown restrictions
Boris Johnson is facing open revolt from some Tory backbenchers over new lockdown restrictions, with one former minister declaring: “It is time for us to actually start living like a free people, not subjecting ourselves to constantly shifting legal requirements.”
It comes after reports that ministers are divided over new social distancing rules in England which will limit social gatherings to groups of six people both indoors and outside from Monday.
The Daily Telegraph reported on Friday that senior Tories also want younger children to be exempt from the so-called “rule of six” in England, while the Daily Mail claimed Health Secretary Matt Hancock was the only Cabinet minister on Boris Johnson’s coronavirus strategy committee to support the plan at a meeting on Tuesday, the day before it was announced by the Prime Minister.
Speaking on Friday, Tory former minister Steve Baker told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think it is now time to say that this is not a fit legal environment for the British people.
Read more: Puppet dictator Johnson facing open revolt from Tory backbenchers over new lockdown restrictions
https://www.expressandstar.com/news/uk-news/2020/09/11/pm-facing-open-revolt-from-tory-backbenchers-over-new-lockdown-restrictions/
RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - awakened53 - 09-11-2020
THE EVIDENCE KEEPS PILING UP.... LOCKDOWNS DON'T WORK
The toll lockdowns have taken on human life and human rights has been incalculable. Increases in child abuse, suicide, and even heart attacks, all appear to be a feature of mandatory stay-at-home orders issued by politicians who now rule by decree without any legislative or democratic due process. And then, of course, there is the economic toll on employment, which will feed negative impacts into the longer term. The economic burden has fallen the most on the young and on working-class families, whose earners are least able to work from home.
These measures also have made a mockery of basic human rights while essentially expropriating private property. Mom-and-pop business owners were told to shut their doors indefinitely or face arrest. The unemployed were told it was now illegal to work for a living if their careers were deemed “nonessential.” Police officers have beaten citizens for not “social distancing” while mothers have been manhandled by cops for attempting to use playground equipment.
This was all done because some politicians and bureaucrats—who were in no danger of losing their large paychecks—decided it was a great idea to carry out a bizarre and risky experiment: forcing large swaths of the population to stay at home in the name of preventing the spread of disease.
An Experiment Concocted by Governments
Indeed, politicians have long dreamed of forcing people into isolation en masse. But this was most recently revived during the George W. Bush administration. As the New York Times reported in April:
Quote:Fourteen years ago, two federal government doctors, Richard Hatchett and Carter Mecher, met with a colleague at a burger joint in suburban Washington for a final review of a proposal they knew would be treated like a piñata: telling Americans to stay home from work and school the next time the country was hit by a deadly pandemic.Lockdowns Don’t Work
Drs. Hatchett and Mecher were proposing…that Americans in some places might have to turn back to an approach, self-isolation, first widely employed in the Middle Ages.
How that idea — born out of a request by President George W. Bush to ensure the nation was better prepared for the next contagious disease outbreak — became the heart of the national playbook for responding to a pandemic is one of the untold stories of the coronavirus crisis.
The concept of social distancing is now intimately familiar to almost everyone. But as it first made its way through the federal bureaucracy in 2006 and 2007, it was viewed as impractical, unnecessary and politically infeasible.
And why was it considered impractical and unnecessary? There is more than one reason, but one major reason is that lockdowns have never been shown to be particularly effective. And this lack of success in containment must also be weighed with the very real costs of forced isolation. This was explained in a 2006 paper in Biosecurity and Bioterrorism called “Disease Mitigation Measures in the Control of Pandemic Influenza” by Thomas V. Inglesby, Jennifer B. Nuzzo, Tara O’Toole, and D.A. Henderson. The authors conclude:
Quote:There are no historical observations or scientific studies that support the confinement by quarantine of groups of possibly infected people for extended periods in order to slow the spread of influenza. A World Health Organization (WHO) Writing Group, after reviewing the literature and considering contemporary international experience, concluded that “forced isolation and quarantine are ineffective and impractical.” Despite this recommendation by experts, mandatory large-scale quarantine continues to be considered as an option by some authorities and government officials.Not surprisingly, then, it’s now becoming apparent that lockdowns don’t work when actually tried. Earlier this month, for example, Donald Luskin noted in the Wall Street Journal:
The interest in quarantine reflects the views and conditions prevalent more than 50 years ago, when much less was known about the epidemiology of infectious diseases and when there was far less international and domestic travel in a less densely populated world. It is difficult to identify circumstances in the past half-century when large-scale quarantine has been effectively used in the control of any disease. The negative consequences of large-scale quarantine are so extreme (forced confinement of sick people with the well; complete restriction of movement of large populations; difficulty in getting critical supplies, medicines, and food to people inside the quarantine zone) that this mitigation measure should be eliminated from serious consideration.
Quote:Measuring from the start of the year to each state’s point of maximum lockdown—which range from April 5 to April 18—it turns out that lockdowns correlated with a greater spread of the virus. States with longer, stricter lockdowns also had larger Covid outbreaks. The five places with the harshest lockdowns—the District of Columbia, New York, Michigan, New Jersey and Massachusetts—had the heaviest caseloads.Basically, Luskin searched for a clear correlation between lockdowns and better health outcomes in relation to covid-19. He found none. He continues:
Quote:It could be that strict lockdowns were imposed as a response to already severe outbreaks. But the surprising negative correlation, while statistically weak, persists even when excluding states with the heaviest caseloads. And it makes no difference if the analysis includes other potential explanatory factors such as population density, age, ethnicity, prevalence of nursing homes, general health or temperature. The only factor that seems to make a demonstrable difference is the intensity of mass-transit use.This is just the most recent of many studies of this sort.
We ran the experiment a second time to observe the effects on caseloads of the reopening that began in mid-April. We used the same methodology, but started from each state’s peak of lockdown and extended to July 31. Confirming the first experiment, there was a tendency (though fairly weak) for states that opened up the most to have the lightest caseloads. The states that had the big summer flare-ups in the so-called “Sunbelt second wave”—Arizona, California, Florida and Texas—are by no means the most opened up, politicized headlines notwithstanding….
[T]here’s no escaping the evidence that, at minimum, heavy lockdowns were no more effective than light ones, and that opening up a lot was no more harmful than opening up a little. So where’s the science that would justify the heavy lockdowns many public-health officials are still demanding?
A July study published by The Lancet concluded: “The authors identified a negative association between the number of days to any lockdown and the total reported cases per million, where a longer time prior to implementation of any lockdown was associated with a lower number of detected cases per million.”
In April, T.J. Rogers looked at “a simple one-variable correlation of deaths per million and days to shutdown” and found that “The correlation coefficient was 5.5%—so low that the engineers I used to employ would have summarized it as “no correlation” and moved on to find the real cause of the problem. (The trendline sloped downward—states that delayed more tended to have lower death rates—but that’s also a meaningless result due to the low correlation coefficient.)”
In May, Elaine He at Bloomberg showed “there’s little correlation between the severity of a nation’s restrictions and whether it managed to curb excess fatalities.”
In an August 1 study, also published by The Lancet, the authors concluded, “Rapid border closures, full lockdowns, and wide-spread testing were not associated with COVID-19 mortality per million people.”
A June study published in Advance by Stefan Homburg and Christof Kuhbandner found that the data “strongly suggests" that
Quote:the UK lockdown was both superfluous (it did not prevent an otherwise explosive behavior of the spread of the coronavirus) and ineffective (it did not slow down the death growth rate visibly).In fact, the overall trend of infection and death appears to be remarkably similar across many jurisdictions regardless of what nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) are taken by policymakers.
In a paper published with the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), authors Andew Atkeson et al. found that covid-19 deaths followed a similar pattern “virtually everywhere in the world” and that “Failing to account for this familiar pattern risks overstating the importance of policy mandated NPIs for shaping the progression of this deadly pandemic.”
Along these lines, Simon Wood, examined the progression of the disease in the United Kingdom and in Sweden and found that the data
Quote:strongly suggest that the decline in infections in England and Wales began before full lockdown, and that community infections, unlike deaths, were probably at a low level well before lockdown was eased. Furthermore, such a scenario would be consistent with the infection profile in Sweden, which began its decline in fatal infections shortly after the UK, but did so on the basis of measures well short of full lockdown.Is the Prolockdown Data Good Enough to Justify Massive Human Rights Violations?
Extraordinary measures require extraordinary evidence. And the burden of proof is on those who seek to use the coercive power of the state to force people into their homes, cripple the economy, and abolish countless basic freedoms for the duration. Have the advocates for lockdowns made their case? It's hard to see how they have. For one, advocates for lockdowns need to present obvious and overwhelming evidence that lockdowns bring big benefits far in excess of the no-lockdown approach. They have not done so. Moreover, they have not shown that a lack of lockdowns is anywhere near as dangerous as they have claimed in the name of pushing lockdowns to begin with. We can already see what the no-lockdown scenario looks like. It looks like Sweden, and that's a better outcome than many prolockdown regimes can claim. Governments are nonetheless likely to continue claiming their lockdowns worked. In ancient days, a witch doctor might perform a rain dance on Tuesday and claim credit when it rained on Wednesday. Lockdowns are increasingly looking like the modern equivalent of a rain dance.
Reprinted with permission from Mises.org.
RE: Lock Downs and Shut Downs - awakened53 - 09-18-2020
Governments Will Impose New Lockdowns if They Think They Can Get Away With It
This year’s stay-at-home orders and lockdowns imposed by governments on their populations represent a watershed moment in the history of the modern state.
Before March 2020, it is unlikely that many politicians—let alone many ordinary people—thought it would be feasible or likely for government officials to force hundreds of millions of human beings to “self-isolate.”
But it turns out governments were indeed able to force a sizable portion of the population to abandon jobs, religious practices, extended families, and community life in the name of “flattening the curve.”
READ MORE....
https://beforeitsnews.com/opinion-conservative/2020/09/governments-will-impose-new-lockdowns-if-they-think-they-can-get-away-with-it-3543493.html