“Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.” - Plato
Seeking Truth in a World of Propaganda. Links do not necessarily indicate agreement with stories or perspectives.
One of the comforts of studying history is that, no matter how bad things get, you can always find a moment in the past when things were much, much worse. Some commentators on our current crisis have been throwing around comparisons to earlier pandemics, and the Black Death of 1347 — 50 inevitably gets mentioned. Please. The Black Death wiped out half the population of Europe in the space of four years. In some places the mortality was far swifter and deadlier than that. The novelist Giovanni Boccaccio, who gave us the most vivid picture of the Black Death in literature, estimated that 100,000 people died in Florence in the four months between March and July 1348. The population of the city in 1338, according to one contemporary chronicler, stood at 120,000.
Boccaccio at the time was a city tax official and saw the whole thing at ground level. Every morning bodies of the dead—husbands, wives, children, servants—were pushed out into the street where they were piled on stretchers, later on carts. They were carried to the nearest church for a quick blessing, then trundled to graveyards outside the city for burial. As the death toll rose, traditional burial practices were abandoned. Deep trenches were dug into which bodies were dumped in layers with a thin covering of soil shoveled on top. Boccaccio writes that “no more respect was accorded the dead than would today be shown to dead goats.”
Like COVID-19, the disease spread with bewildering rapidity, but unlike in the modern pandemic, it infected everyone, young and old, rich and poor, not mainly the old and infirm. And again unlike the current virus, the effects of bubonic plague were particularly humiliating. Tumor-like growths as big as apples, called “bubos,” would appear in the groin or armpit. Gangrenous blotches would appear on hands and feet causing the skin to turn black and die. The victims would start coughing up blood, all their bodily fluids stank and their breath became putrid. “The stench of dead bodies, sickness and medicines seemed to fill and pollute the whole atmosphere.” There was no dying with dignity during the Black Death.
It’s no surprise that a kind of extreme social distancing became the norm, even without urging from governments. Boccaccio’s stories are shocking. Everyone ran in panic from the sick. Neighbors shunned neighbors, relatives relatives. Children abandoned elderly parents and priests their flocks. Incredibly, “even fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.” Some reacted by locking themselves up with a few friends in some comfortable place stocked with food and fine wines. They would entertain themselves with music and refuse to receive any news of the dead. Others, often those without the means to escape, became fatalistic and began looting the houses of the dead, stuffing themselves with food and drink, heedless of the risks of infection.
It is not yet certain that COVID-19 will become the fifth endemic coronavirus in the world today. The far more deadly bubonic plague long remained endemic in Europe, turning pandemic again some 17 times before its last outbreak in 1664 — 67—about once a generation. Over time a kind of bush telegraph developed in cities to keep track of new outbreaks. Transmitting news of the plague became a regular topic of private and public correspondence. The questions sound familiar to us now: Has the plague come to Bologna? How long has it been there? How many are infected? How many have died? Has a quarantine been imposed? Public authorities, predictably, took drastic measures to isolate the sick. In Venice, physicians were forbidden to leave the city during plague—as today, there was no social distancing for medical personnel. Plague doctors were required to wear the premodern equivalent of the hazmat suit: a long linen gown, a hat covering the hair, eyeglasses, and a mask with a long beak containing antidotes and perfumes to mask the stench of death. Today, the plague doctor’s dress still exists as a popular costume during Carnival.
Were there any silver linings to so horrible a pestilence? There were surely a few, though some of them remain speculative even now. Florentine Republicans began to appreciate Madonna Peste (Lady Pestilence) when she carried off their great nemesis, the duke of Milan, in 1402, at a critical moment during their long war with the great tyrant. After the Black Death there was an “inheritance effect” that led to far greater concentrations of wealth among those who survived. Some modern historians have claimed that this concentrated wealth led to an upmarket “investment in culture” that made possible the Renaissance itself. That’s a bit of a stretch.
Plague Doctor (wikicommons)
But there was one lasting benefit of plague that is with us still. In Renaissance Italy, the most effective form of social distancing turned out to be villeggiatura—withdrawing from the city to a country farm or villa and waiting for the pestilence to subside. After the first few outbreaks of plague in the later 1300s, many city folk began to invest in country estates, in part to secure reliable food supplies for their families in times of crisis. They began to spend more time in the country, especially during the hot summer months when the plague was at its worst. The Medici eventually owned 27 villas in the Tuscan countryside, many of them designed and decorated by leading architects like Giuliano da Sangallo and painters like Filippino Lippi and Jacopo Pontormo. Villa life became generally popular for wealthier bourgeois families, and over time a villa culture developed. Boccaccio’s Decameron provided an early literary model. It depicted a group of noble young men and women escaping to the hills outside Florence during the plague, entertaining each other with witty stories, song, and dancing. Renaissance literati, being passionate lovers of antiquity, adored Cicero and longed to imitate the urbane conversations on literature and philosophy he described in his dialogues, held in his classical villa at Tusculum. Even the less sophisticated learned to enjoy more spacious living in the country, reading in cool, manicured gardens or viewing scenic landscapes. They began to cultivate summer sports, musical events, and festivals. The summer vacation was born.
James Hankins is a professor of Renaissance history at Harvard University.
Featured image: “Bring Out Your Dead” courtesy of Wellcome Images
The post Social Distancing During the Black Death appeared first on Quillette.
A savvy investor friend called me last night and asked me how it is that the Federal Reserve Bank’s website address is suddenly now on a “.gov” domain?
He checks the site regularly and he’s had a bookmark for it in his browser forever but the site’s address has always been a “.org” site. Suddenly, it’s federalreserve.gov.
I was happily excited to hear this because his question confirmed the rumors that had been swirling on Twitter all evening, that the Fed and Treasury are being merged into one organization.
Despite this being incredibly newsworthy, there has been no public announcement of this and it only seems to have been published in a negative opinion piece by Jim Bianco on Bloomberg and syndicated by Yahoo! News.
The only reason why MAGA Twitter was aware of this obscure piece – and jubilant over it – was because someone tweeted the link and then Q almost immediately posted it, at 4:58:17PM (17:17) with the comment, “This is not another [4] year election. Q”
“Haven’t you heard?” I asked my friend, “Twitter has been celebrating joyously over the demise of the Federal Reserve Bank all evening.”
My friend had not heard because he he’s not a Twitter addict. (LOL)
According to the Bloomberg piece, the Fed will finance a special purpose vehicle (SPV) to allow them to buy commercial paper, asset-backed securities, corporate bonds and bond ETFs in the secondary market:
“The Treasury, using the Exchange Stabilization Fund, will make an equity investment in each SPV and be in a ‘first loss’ position. What does this mean? In essence, the Treasury, not the Fed, is buying all these securities and backstopping of loans; the Fed is acting as banker and providing financing. The Fed hired BlackRock Inc. to purchase these securities and handle the administration of the SPVs on behalf of the owner, the Treasury.
“In other words, the federal government is nationalizing large swaths of the financial markets. The Fed is providing the money to do it. BlackRock will be doing the trades.
“This scheme essentially merges the Fed and Treasury into one organization. So, meet your new Fed chairman, Donald J. Trump.”
On Twitter, @3Days3Nights explained it like this:
“Old Fed – [They] OWNED the secured assets & interest on our $22T debt while our US Treasury OWED all the $22T debt.
New Fed – US Treasury will OWN the secured assets & interest on our $22T debt & the Fed will OWE all the $22T debt.
This will take a few months. #QANON
“For example, our Treasury will now treat the NewFed like the NYSE. A broker of sorts that owns no collateral. It just processes transactions for our Treasury for micro fees.
“The KEY is that our Treasury will hold the collateral on debt & not the Fed. That makes debt our asset.
“So when our Treasury loans money to a company like Goldman, it receives a convertible note as equity. If the company fails to pay, our Treasury converts debt to equity and owns a big chunk of Goldman. Old way let the Fed own the convertible note. Outrageous. Those days are dead.
“Even better, out of the $22T in debt, about $6T could be waived immediately because it is a non-marketable security owed internally to another branch of government. I expect all non-marketable debt to disappear over time. Just simply remove it from the Treasury balance sheet.
“Since the NewFed will be a clearinghouse of sorts, and since we clearly now have control of it, we can force nations to remove their deep state in exchange for a chance to participate in this new era of debt freedom. Iran, NK & other rogue nations will play ball for debt relief.
“Never forget that the Fed used blackmail and coercion to convince our Congress to vote them into existence over 100 years ago. And they never stopped using the same tactic to make sure no law was ever passed to legally remove them from power. Until today.
“Now ask yourself what entity funded the creation of the Fed in the first place. And what same entity has people pay them to freely confess their sins to a non-paid employee only to allow their mafia branch to then blackmail that same person into submission.
“Less debt on Treasury balance sheet means less interest payments. And it frees up trillions to remove debt from college students, mortgage interest, car loans, corporate debt, which stimulates the economy to create jobs which generates more tax revenue which means lower taxes.
“Restructure not reset. Gentle…
“The changeover just started. It is not anywhere near complete. However our Treasury is raiding the Fed legally right now. We are using the Fed’s own tools against it because they never anticipated a Cabinet or Congress that couldn’t be coerced into doing what they wanted.”
According to Dave at the X22 Report, this means that, “Trump and the Patriots have taken the first step in getting rid of the central bank system. It has now been confirmed, other nations now are going to be moving in on their central bank establishments…
“We knew this was coming. We knew that this day was going to arrive.
“What’s the next stage? Take control of the currency. Bring us back to sound money. Who’s waiting on deck? Judy Shelton [Trump economic advisor known for her advocacy for a return to the gold standard and for her criticisms of the Federal Reserve] and others.
“Once this merges into the Treasury – and actually Judy Shelton has mentioned this – she will then, once she’s on the board, she will then restructure the entire system.
“We are now moving in a completely different direction. Everything that we knew about the system; the way it works, it’s about to change. We’ve said this for quite a while.
“We are now watching it, in real time change. We will no longer live under debt. We will no longer live under a corporate central bank system. We will no longer struggle the way we’ve been struggling.
“Everything that we knew, everything that we were taught, everything that they were telling us it’s all going to change. Remember, when the central bank’s establishment came into existence, everything changed for the people; in the ’40s, in the ’70s in 2008, it got harder and harder for the people.
“The currency will no longer devalue the way it has. We will not see inflation, which really means the currency is devaluing. It takes more dollars to buy that same item. We will not see that anymore we will not have to live on credit. We will not have to work the way we’ve been working and come home with nothing in our check. It’s all about to change.
“And an anon on the boards wrote something very interesting. ‘We have just taken the power away from the central bank establishment.’ This is what he wrote:
“‘Mnuchin just bankrupted the Fed, Goldman, Sachs, JP Morgan, Chase, etc. It started. The market liquidity is now controlled by Steve Mnuchin and the Treasury Department. That also means we own all central bank requests for credit, for all 186 foreign nations. Folks, a power transfer just went down. The world just went from asking the Rothschilds for credit swaps to asking Steve Mnuchin and the US Treasury for credit swaps.’
“BOOM. We have just seen it happen. This is not about a four-year election this is about a new way of life and it’s happening right now.”
In American politics, it is not often that one sees an assassination carried out in public, but that is exactly what the Democratic Party establishment did to peace candidate Tulsi Gabbard. She was sidelined right from the beginning of …
The post Tulsi Gabbard Falls on Her Sword: America’s Leading Antiwar Voice Is Destroyed by Hillary appeared first on Global Research.
Canadian alternative news journalist and Former Forbes Asia-Pacific Bureau Chief, Benjamin Fulford is joined by Hanna Kazahari and Fabiola Tsugami-Shaba, of the the Polish-Japanese language YouTube channel, FAB News to discuss world events on the 9th anniversary of March 11 Fukushima disaster.
Of the coronavirus pandemic, Fulford says, “It’s very clear that this is a bio weapon and it’s not having the intended effect they wanted it to kill millions of people and fortunately – I shouldn’t say fortunately, in the sense that 4,000 people dead but fortunately, in the sense that millions haven’t died – it’s not nearly as bad as the intended but Fort Detrick, the US bioweapons research laboratories been shut down the scientists who created these viruses have been arrested…
“But nonetheless, like I say, they’re gonna still use this for a major propaganda exercise but please don’t let them scare you it’s fear porn…as long as you’re healthy and eat properly and sleep and rest and everything you’re not going to catch anything…
“26,000 scientists signed a petition saying 5G is dangerous. It’s a very similar wavelength of human thought and they used it in South Africa and experiment to manipulate mobs, either calm them down or to get them excited. I have this from a South African secret police whistleblower.
“And I’ve heard now…the CIA sent some people in from Thailand to Wuhan to check out the situation and they say that about 3 million people were killed and it was caused not by a virus but by a satellite overwhelming their 5G network, which they just installed and using it to emit dangerous electromagnetic radiation and that’s what caused the damage there.
“So, it was a serious attack on China and the people responsible will be brought to justice…They’re using the virus as a cover for the 5G, in most cases. Certainly, in Wuhan.
“Here, in Japan they were going to try to have 5G all over the country by end of March and I’ve been fighting against the…mafiosi and Abe cabinet, to make sure that doesn’t happen. I think that we’re going to stop it in Japan…
“Ebola is a bioweapon, a lot of these new types of Bird Flus were bioweapons but they also create antidotes for themselves, so that they don’t catch their own pandemic and that’s what they’ve been using. They’re also using Ebola drugs for this new bioweapon and like I say, it’s not gonna be nearly as bad as they try to make it out to be.
“Mostly about fear and as I said before, it’s almost entirely old people with pre-existing conditions and even more, I hate to say this but it’s mostly old Asian people, especially men that are getting it, because of the way it was designed…
“They have a NATO military exercise going on in Europe, example, where 40,000 US troops have been deployed and I have been told that they’re being used to [make] arrests in Europe, in Switzerland, all over Europe; they’re arresting mainly bankers, as part of military move against the Satan-worshiping cult that owns the central banks. So, it’s being used as a cover for a military campaign against Satan-worshipers located at the top of the corporate power structure…
“It’s about carrying out a series of arrests. I’ve heard there’s going to be a lot of people arrested in Germany and Switzerland all over Europe. So, simply it’s a cover for a a large military campaign to take out a mafia who have been proven to be trying to kill 90% of the world’s population, so we’re removing a dangerous cancer from the top of the power system, in the West,that’s whats happening…
“The owners of the United States of America Corporation, which was established in 1871 and is not to be mistaken to the Republic of the United States of America, that was established in 1776 – the owners of this corporation went bankrupt on February 16th and that’s been the trigger for all these things and it was the owners of the Corporation, in a desperate move to keep in power who were behind the attacks on Wuhan and a lot of other nasty incidents but they are losing.
“We are rounding them up. Their ability to terrorize us is going to end soon and yeah, that’s why all these CEOs are quitting.”
Recently, we’ve discussed the obscured health effects of 5G millimeter wave technology and now this video has an excellent, brief discussion of how 5G doesn’t merely represent faster speeds and more data, it takes the surveillance state to such an extreme, it’s unacceptable.
Brigadier General Robert S. Spalding, author of ‘Stealth War’ explains, “If you go back to 2007, when the iPhone came out, the top 5 [corporations], in market cap were AT&T, General Electric, Microsoft, Exxon, Mobil and Shell.
“The iPhone comes out in in 2007…I had one – 3G networking – it’s not a very good experience. 4G network comes out…now, you’ve got something, right?
“When you took the the platform, which was the iPhone married up to the 4G network, which is the pipe for data – and it was a fast enough pipe – and now, you can create the apps services and business models that in 10 years, led to the top 5 [corporations] in market cap being Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Google and Microsoft (FAANGs)…
“Look at that iPhone: It’s a hardware-software, tightly-integrated, closed-walled system, like Steve Jobs liked – and the data was encrypted. Why was the data encrypted? Why did San Bernardino happen? Because Apple’s an American company…they encrypt the phone…it’s meant to be a private device. Why? It’s an American product.
“Fast-forward to 2009. China starts to look at that and says, ‘Okay, we want to dominate the next level, not just the technology, we want the app services and business models to be Chinese companies.’
“So, Huawei gets hundreds of billions of dollars to develop 5G and ZTE – and then you have Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.
“So, they’re there, behind the Chinese firewall. They’re protected. You can’t have the FAANGs going in there. It’s just the BATs that control the economy within China…
“So, you walk into a restaurant after you’ve ordered your food and a camera picks you up and it says, ‘David, welcome. Here’s your food. ‘ So, you you’re starting to get the feel of what a 5G world is.
“And what is a 5G world? The platform is the network. So, this is mobile computing, paired with the pipe. 5G is computing and networking combined, on the same platform.
“So, this (points to cellphone) goes away. You walk outside your door and you say ‘Uber.’ You don’t get on your phone and say, ‘I want an Uber.’ The camera picks up your face or microphone [and the car] picks you up…then the Uber shows up…That’s what 5G is.
“In the Uber, there’s a camera on the car that sees you, knows who you are. Doesn’t have to ask you your name you get in and you go to wherever you want…
“In the 4G world, this (indicating cellphone) is a platform. It’s yours. You don’t want to be built [into it]. You don’t want to be part of all of that data…If you don’t want all that data to be out there about what you’re doing, just don’t carry one of these, right? Just opt out.
“In a 5G world, you cannot opt out…In the 5G world, not only can you not opt out, because it’s built around the city, it’s not in your phone, anymore.
“Not only can you not opt out, you don’t know who owns the data. Everything that you do can be watched and…by 2022, there’s going to be…two people for every camera in China.
“They have a billion…cameras in China with Artificial Intelligence for facial recognition. So all of this is getting built right now in China – and who’s helping them do it? Microsoft, Google, right? All of these companies that want to deploy this world into our country!
“So, 4G network, 10,000 devices per square mile. 5G network, 3 million devices per square mile…the connectivity explodes.
“So, that allows you to put devices literally everywhere, that can make your life more ‘convenient’ or can track you…you never have to carry a wallet, you never have to carry key it’s all done on your phone. You can pay any anybody anywhere for anything – and they do. 900 million people are on WeChat and they spend 90% of their time in-app, doing things…that’s how wired Beijing is right now.”
Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away– Percy Shelley, Ozymandias
It didn’t take long for the most opportunistic, nefarious and corrupt actors in the U.S. to turn a pandemic crisis into another massive power grab attempt. We’ve seen it before; after 9/11 and also throughout the response to the financial crisis a decade ago. The irredeemable sociopaths who always make the big, important decisions used those crises to consolidate wealth and power. They’re going for it again.
There are many examples, but let me list a few:
– The EARN IT bill, by which senators are attempting to destroy widespread public use of encryption, i.e. private communications. (EFF)
– The White House and the CDC are asking Facebook, Google and other tech giants to give them greater access to Americans’ smartphone location data. (CNBC)
– The Justice Department has quietly asked Congress for the ability to ask chief judges to detain people indefinitely without trial during emergencies. (Politico)
– U.S. Senators are attempting to use the crisis as an opportunity to pull off a gigantic corporate coup. (Matt Stoller, BIG)
"U.S Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin is seeking to tap executives from Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and other Wall Street firms to help oversee more than $200 billion in bailout packages."
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) March 23, 2020
You almost just have to laugh at this point.https://t.co/7eqAObKamG
Then there’s the really big one, the Federal Reserve. An institution with more unaccountable power to shape and manipulate our world than any other, yet whose actions remain subject to virtually zero public debate.
The Federal Reserve is lending to speculators and the loans are non-recourse, meaning that the speculator doesn't lose anything if they can't repay the loan.
— Matt Stoller (@matthewstoller) March 23, 2020
This is a *direct* billionaire bailout. https://t.co/snHLVwxpwY
While we’re at it…
Lost in Fed shuffle today, they relaxed bank total loss-absorbing capacity (TLAC) buffer restriction *specifically* to allow banks to continue discretionary bonus payments. Don't just read the press release. Read the rule.
— Ben Hunt (@EpsilonTheory) March 23, 2020
Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down.https://t.co/aIeP1EO5JB
I wrote about the scam that is the Federal Reserve last year in the post, Monetary Looting, and what they’re doing now makes those repo operations look like child’s play.
Lost in Fed shuffle today, they relaxed bank total loss-absorbing capacity (TLAC) buffer restriction *specifically* to allow banks to continue discretionary bonus payments. Don't just read the press release. Read the rule.
— Ben Hunt (@EpsilonTheory) March 23, 2020
Burn. It. The. Fuck. Down.https://t.co/aIeP1EO5JB
We often get distracted debating the implications of Fed actions, and in the process lose sight of the bigger picture. The real question we need to be asking is why do we allow a handful of unelected banker welfare agents the right to shape our entire world? It’s a crazy system, and until we start questioning the underlying premises of everything about our world, we’ll remain confused and subjugated.
That said, I remain more optimistic than ever that once we get through this crisis and a rough transition period, a far better era awaits on the other side. I say this because I believe this pandemic will shake enough people to such an extent they’ll emerge from it very different people with a more enlightened understanding of the world and their roles in it. An event like this can make people less conscious, or it can make them more conscious. I think humanity will expand its consciousness.
Of course, the future is not written in stone. Each and every one of us needs to grow up and step up if we’re going to build a better world. We each have our skillsets, so I ask everyone reading this to think about how they can repurpose their talents to the great work of ushering in a new era. I don’t do any of this to change the world. I can’t do that. I do this to inspire as many people as possible to change their own worlds. Then everything changes.
If I had to summarize where we’ve been and where I think we’re going, it would be with the following.
2010-2020 was mostly bullshit. Financial engineering scams, war and oligarchy looting.
— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) March 23, 2020
Once we pass this crisis period I expect real innovation this decade. New industries that will change the world.
The last 10 years was bullshit.
The world you lived in no longer exists, but the world to come has not yet been created. The worst people in society will attempt to create it in their image, but we can’t allow that. We must step up and create it ourselves. It’s entirely possible. Get to work.
* * *
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Amid the COVID-19 panic, it has hardly been noticed that Carphone Warehouse went bust, with 2,900 people losing their jobs. Its co-founder, David Ross, is of course the billionaire that Boris Johnson claimed paid for his luxury holiday to Mustique, whereas Ross claimed he only organised it. Who actually paid is one of those Johnson peccadilloes, like the promotion of Jennifer Arcuri, the Garden Bridge fiasco, the Guppy conversation over beating up Stuart Collier, the Russian Influence report, the question of how many children he really has – I could go on rather a long while here – which will be discreetly downplayed by the state and media nexus.
Ross, like Branson and so many others of the “entrepreneurs” that we are taught to worship, came from a very wealthy background and had the great advantages of capital and connections to boost him up the ladder. To be fair to Ross, unlike for example Philip Green, there is no suggestion that he made his fortune from Carphone Warehouse by systematic asset-stripping. What he did do, which is typical of capitalism today, is with the other directors systematically and legally remove capital as it accumulated from the company into their own personal bank accounts. In the long term this left Carphone Warehouse unable to restructure and adapt to changed market conditions, which it needed to do, as its High Street model failed for reasons unrelated to the current health crisis. Ross also had illegally used his shares as collateral for £162 million of personal loans, for which this major Tory party donor has inexplicably never been prosecuted.
Ross had inherited a very large chunk of shares in, and the chairmanship of, Cosalt Ltd, a maritime supplies company. It went bust with £70 million debt and a £50 million pensions deficit, which ruined the lives of many employees and ex-employees. Inexplicably, after it went bankrupt its best assets were sold by the administrators Price Waterhouse at a knockdown price to… major Tory Party donor David Ross. Who thus made money from his own family company going bust and its pensioners being shafted.
Inexplicably, major Tory Party donor David Ross was not disqualified as a director of other companies by the Insolvency Service when Cosalt, of which he was a chairman, went bankrupt.
About 7% of Ross’s wealth would pay the entire Carphone Warehouse staff being made redundant for a year. That of course will never happen because it is absolutely contrary to the model of capitalism currently operating, in which the ultra wealthy view companies as sources of short term wealth extraction and feel zero connection to the workforce.
There is room to be congratulatory of Rishi Sunak’s active interventionism in the face of the economic crisis caused by the reaction to coronavirus. Many of his interventionist measures are very good, in particular in subsidising wages. It has been rightly and widely noted that to date there is not enough to support those self-employed in the gig economy, while to rely on universal credit to support anybody in crisis is plainly insufficient. But I am here more concerned with the larger macroeconomic measures. Quantitative easing as ever will merely push more money into the financial institutions for them to looad into financial instruments of zero real economic benefit.
The vast bulk of the £330 billion business bailout will find its way in huge tranches into mega-companies. The airline industry has already requested £7.5 billion, to give just one example. That is a series of simple large cheques for an overstretched civil service to write. I strongly suspect that the loans to small businesses, started today, will be slow and bureaucratic and difficult to access. They will be subject to bank interest – the bankers always win – which for a period will be paid by the taxpayer. Many of these measures when you analyse them are in the long term more transfers of money from the taxpayers to the banks.
It has been widely noted that money is suddenly magically available which was denied to industrial strategy and to the NHS for decades. But do not be fooled; this is not a conversion to Keynes by the Tories. In bailing out the airlines, Branson is not going to be asked to put back one penny of his personal wealth, and nor is David Ross nor any of the other billionaires. Those who have made vast fortunes in our ever-expanding wealth gap are not going to be asked to put anything back into the companies or system which they exploited. Massive state subsidies will predominantly go to the biggest companies and benefit the paid agency of the bankers. You and I will pay. The taxpayer will ultimately pick up the tab through what may prove to be another decade of austerity imposed as a result of another transfer of wealth from us to banks, financial institutions and big companies. The small and medium companies which will go to the wall – and a great many will – are going to provide rich pickings in a few months time for the vultures of the hedge funds and other disaster capitalists.
It is fashionable to write articles at the moment stating the Government has discovered the value of socialist intervention. I suspect history will show that nothing could be further from the truth.
——————————————
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The post It’s Not Socialism. It’s Another Mega Wealth Transfer. appeared first on Craig Murray.
New York City is currently the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in the US, reporting over 15,000 cases, which is 1,500 cases more than the rest of the US combined. Late last night, I received this Facebook message from my cousin, who’s lived in New York City her whole life:
“I have 4 friends in ICU with COVID-19 all younger and healthier than you or me. I’ve never had friends hospitalized with flu. This is not the same. Please don’t add to the chaos and misinformation. This is real. My friends are fighting for their lives.” And she sent me this link from the World Health Organization.
Given her legitimate concerns and what must be a tense environment in the City, I won’t remind her that I was warning city dwellers who use public transportation to be careful way back in January, in a post that caused some to unfriend me on social media.
We are all fellow targets of an unprecedented hybrid war waged by the Globalists that has pitted us against each other since Donald Trump took office, consisting largely of information warfare disseminated by the Mainstream Media, with biological- and economic warfare now added to this siege.
Dr. Francis Boyle, an international law professor who drafted the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 believes the SARS-CoV-2 virus is a bioweapon that’s been genetically modified with “gain of function” properties and that it escaped from the Biosafety Level 4 laboratory (BSL-4) in Wuhan, China, which is why the Chinese government has been trying to cover it up.
He thinks it’s likely that the virus was stolen by Dr. Xiangguo Qiu from a Canadian BSL-4 in Winnepeg last July, from where she was expelled from her position as a government scientist. Dr. Xiangguo Qiu “made at least five trips to China in 2017-18, including one to train scientists and technicians at China’s newly certified Level 4 lab [in Wuhan, China], which does research with the most deadly pathogens,” according to travel documents obtained by CBC News.
The BSL-4 in Wuhan, China is a specially designated World Health Organization (WHO) research lab and Dr. Boyle contends that the WHO knows full well what has occurred.
New York is now in the thick of it and what’s alarming – and germane to my cousin’s message – is that the epidemiology of COVID-19 in the greater New York area diverges from the reports in Italy or even Washington State, with younger adults making up a big portion of recent coronavirus hospitalizations.
Last week, the New York Times reported that, “New CDC data shows that nearly 40% of patients sick enough to be hospitalized were age 20 to 54. But the risk of dying was significantly higher in older people.”
Could this be because New York City has 5G hotspots?
Where I live in Suffolk County, New York 50% of cases are people in their 40s and 50s. Of the 459 total cases in Suffolk County, Dr. Gregson Pigott, Commissioner, Suffolk County Department of Health Services says there are 50 cases among people in their 20s, 50 cases of those in their 30s, with 50% of all cases reported among those in their 40s and 50s. Similar to the epidemiology of Italy, there are slightly more males who have confirmed positive.
With this in mind, I’m sharing this animated video produced by Kurzgesagt, the Munich-based design house that makes artful yet strictly science-based videos. This one illustrates the mechanism of the disease being called COVID-19, that is caused by the “novel” severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), first identified in Wuhan, Hubei, China in December 2019.
