Category: zerohedge

Authored by Martin Sieff via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Major patterns of the global coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic are now all too clear: But the patterns that have emerged are never discussed in the 24/7 American Mainstream Media (MSM) and its European liberal wannabe cheerleaders led by the always ineffable BBC in Britain.

The right-wing old Reagan imperialists and fundamentalists continue to endlessly proclaim that the crisis has mortally wounded China’s standing in the world; That is simply a lie.

The same voices continue to witlessly proclaim the superiority of American exceptionalism in the face of the mounting tsunami wave of evidence to the contrary. They will endlessly continue do so in the Kingdom of the Mad and the Asylums of the Delusional Insane.

The clear facts are these: First, China’s crackdown got its pandemic crisis under control – impressively fast.

The reaction to this great achievement, as that great Healer Doctor Sigmund Freud warned us – has been denial: For China;s centralized form of government “cannot” ever succeed according to both the conservative right and liberal fake left in the United States.

Therefore China’s figures are conveniently being denied. Its data has become in the words of the brilliant American (indeed he was a New Yorker) iconoclastic questioner of all Conventional Wisdom Charles Fort a century ago “damned.”

That is to say, facts that are “damned” because they contradict and disprove prevailing absurd paradigms of belief that falsely and fashionably masquerade as scientific truth.

Russia’s achievement must also be ignored. As I have noted before, it was the very success of the crazed Russia-hating liberals in the Democratic Party and all their “me-too!” Republican wimp allies in Congress in imposing such swingeing economic sanctions on Russia that protected and saved the Russian people.

Contrast the paucity of COVID-19 cases in Russia so far with the disasters sweeping Italy, Spain, France and Germany in the European Union as well as Britain: By cutting Russia out of the global free trade system at least since 2014, her Western liberal enemies have only insulated and protected the Russian people from the inexorable consequences of Universal Free Trade and Open Borders.

What I call the Audit of Pandemic is delivering a death blow to the already disintegrating European Union.The institutions of Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg are dissolving before our eyes. Their Proud Tower, 75 years in the building is collapsing. “Thou art weighed in the balance and found wanting.”

Judgment is also coming on the antiquated political system of the United States. As I write (obviously the figures change everyday) the Coronavirus Resource Center at Johns Hopkins University lists 331,000 cases of the virus in the United States as opposed to only 81,000 in China.

What this really means is that the venerable US federal system simply cannot handle the threat of pandemic in a modern mass society.

Liberals scapegoat President Donald Trump for this but his hands are tied. It is the policies of state governors and city mayors, especially on the ultra liberal East and West Coasts and in such teeming unregulated urban centers as Detroit, Chicago, Boston and New Orleans, that are directly responsible for this catastrophe. The biggest urban center – New York City – is the most hard hit of all.

Out of lemons, make lemonade: The Deep State and Mainstream Media are now trying to create yet another absurd and fraudulent liberal national leader out of this sordid mess. Where ludicrous toy-men “Beto” O’Rourke and “Pete” Buttigieg and the Feminist Knight Elizabeth Warren failed to strike any spark whatsoever, “America ‘s Governor” – the complacent and downright creepy Andrew Cuomo is being marketed – as a new heroic figure.

Yet no state and no major US city failed to prepare for the pandemic as egregiously as Cuomo did. At least, the cowardly and useless Mayor of New York City Bill De Blasio had a fig leaf of shame to keep a low profile through the pandemic, Cuomo is milking his own shameful criminal incompetence for all he can.

The Democratic National Committee would love to replace old Joe Biden now that he has served his purpose in blocking Bernie Sanders with the infinitely more pliable and preferable Cuomo, as Joaquin Flores has rightly pointed out on this platform.

My own observation is that all the 60 million mindless American liberals who revere every sentence in the New York Times, the Washington Post and on MSNBC and CNN as coming straight from the teats of their feminized “god” are swallowing all the latest fawning lies about Cuomo with their full, brainless glee. Dostoevsky’s Gadarene Swine have found yet another cliff to jump off.

However, in the real world, the crisis is exposing the bankruptcy of the US federal system.

It is not the federal government or the US armed services that have failed here: It is the individual US states, primarily on the East and West Coasts. They have blocked any centralized, coherent national response at every step.

The ludicrous Sanctuary Cities remained obsessed with bringing in millions of illegal immigrants. Yet those people, by their own adult choices defy and deny established laws of the country they are invading. And they have spread the disease like wildfire. Outbreaks of the virus and rapid spreads of it are worse by a vast margin all the metropolitan centers that proudly practice sanctuary policies.

Such illegals are the least likely to respect voluntary restrictions on travel. They are also most likely to abuse such freedoms regardless of the dangers they pose to all others.

In protecting these Illegals at all costs, the wealthy, comfortable liberals in the US suburbs and cities have violated the most fundamental basis of John Locke’s Social Contract: The obligation for society to defend its own members from outside predators.

The EU is now obviously collapsing before our eyes while the United States teeters on the Tipping Point of total disintegration. Russia and China will emerge from this crisis as world leaders in responsible social policies far more rapidly than anyone imagines.

Authored by Matthew Ehret via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

A little over 20 years ago, North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) conducted a military exercise that involved a “hypothetical scenario” of hijacked planes flying into both the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

One year later, on October 24-26, 2000, another “hypothetical” military exercise was played out featuring an airline crashing into the Pentagon killing 341 people followed by yet another May 2001 Department of Defense “hypothetical scenario” which saw hundreds of medical personnel training for a “guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner” crashing into the Pentagon.

What arose from the smoke and debris of September 11, 2001 was unlike anything the sleeping masses or international community expected.

The shock effect so traumatized the masses that quite suddenly, citizens found themselves willing to give up their liberties at home while acquiescing to any retaliatory action desired by their government abroad.

The scale of horror was so great that the international community banded together and showed their love and solidarity towards America in the wake of the tragedy with candlelight vigils across Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Russia and South America. Humanity’s natural tendency to embrace and aid our fellow man in times of crisis expressed itself like a bright light in a world of confused darkness and a hope for a durable peace awoke in the hearts of many.

Alas, as the world came soon to discover, that hope was short lived.

The Neocon Takeover of America

Police State measures grew swiftly with the Patriot Act and mass internal surveillance under the “crisis management” run by the neocon cabal in the White House. While a new type of regime change war was created abroad, Dangerous protocols for Cheney’s “Continuity of Government” were set into motion and with these procedures, new mandates for Martial Law were created amplifying the powers, financing and deployment of U.S. Military capabilities both within the USA “under crisis conditions” and around the world.

Governments that had no connection to 9/11 were swiftly targeted for destruction using false evidence of “yellowcake” produced in the bowels of MI6, and a broader unipolar military encirclement of both Russia and China was set into motion which President Putin called out brilliantly in his famous 2007 Munich Security Conference Speech.

Of course this should not have been a surprise for anyone who took the time to read the Project for a New American Century manifesto published in October 2000 entitled Rebuilding America’s Defenses’ (RAD).

Under the Chairmanship of William Kristol (a neocon agent today leading the charge to impeach President Trump) and co-authored by John Bolton, Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Elliot Abrams, and Donald Rumsfeld, RAD stated that to “further the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one-absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event- like a new Pearl Harbor”. Going further to describe its Hobbesian agenda, the cabal stated that “the Cold War was a bipolar world; the 21st century world is- for the moment at least- decidedly unipolar with America as the world’s sole superpower”.

While much has been said about the “inside job” of 9/11, a lesser appreciated terrorist act occurred over several weeks beginning on September 18, 2001 killing five and infective 17 in the form of envelopes laced with bio-weaponized anthrax.

The Age of Bioweapons and PNAC

This anthrax attack led quickly into the 2004 Bioshield Act with a $5 billion budget and mandate to “pre-empt and defend further bioweapon attacks”. This new chapter of the revolution in military affairs was to be coordinated from leading bioweapons facility at the Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. Since 2002, over $50 billion has been spent on Bioweapons research and defense to date.

The earlier October 2000 RAD document emphasized the importance which the neocon cabal placed on bioweapons (and other next generation war tech) stating:

“Combat will likely take place in new dimensions: In space, cyber-space and perhaps the world of microbes… advanced forms of biological warfare that can “target” specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool”.

Lawyer and bioweapons expert Francis Boyle stated in 2007 that Fort Detrick’s mandate includes “acquiring, growing, modifying, storing, packing, and dispersing classical, emerging and genetically engineered pathogens for offensive weapon programs.” These new post-9/11 practices fully trashed the 1975 UN Convention Against Biological Weapons ratified by the USA by establishing a vast international network of bioweapons labs coordinated from Fort Detrick which would be assigned the role of doing much of the dirty work that the U.S. was “officially” prevented from doing on its own soil.

Where Hitler used the burning of the Reichstag to justify his enabling Acts, the neocons had their 9/11. The difference in the case of America was that Cheney failed to achieve the same level of absolute control over his nation as Hitler captured by 1934 (evidenced by pushback from patriotic American military intelligence circles against Cheney’s Iran war agenda). With this neocon failure, the republic lurched on.

The Rot Continues Under Obama

Obama’s rise was seen as a hopeful light to many naïve Democrats who still had not realized how a “false left” vs “false right” clash had been slowly constructed over the post WWII years. Either camp increasingly found itself converging towards the same world government agenda through using somewhat dissimilar paths and flavors.

It didn’t take long for many of Obama’s more critically-minded supporters to realize that the mass surveillance/police state measures, regime change wars, and military confrontation of Russia and China begun under Cheney not only failed to stop, but even expanded at faster rates than ever.

In the months before Obama left office in July 2016, the classified Directive 40: National Continuity Policy was enacted creating a line of “Devolution authority” for all branches of the government to a “duplicate chain of individuals secreted outside Washington available in a catastrophic emergency”. Days prior to Trump’s inauguration, Federal Continuity Directive 1 was issued to transfer authority to military forces who could be used to suppress “insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination or conspiracy.”

The Importance of Knowing This History

There are very clearly two diametrically opposing methods of analyzing, and solving the existential crisis threatening our world currently: Multipolar or Unipolar.

While Russia and China represent a multipolar/pro-nation state vision driven by large scale development projects that benefit all- rich and poor alike exemplified by the New Silk Road, Polar Silk Road, Space Silk Road and now Health Silk Road, something much darker is being promoted by the same financial oligarchy that owns both right and left sides of the deep state coin. These later forces have provably positioned themselves to take control of western governments under crisis conditions and are not afraid to use every weapon in their arsenal to destroy their perceived enemies… including bioweaponry. This latter uncomfortable reality was asserted quite candidly by leading officials of Iran and even the Chinese Foreign Ministry just weeks ago.

Admittedly, whether or not the current coronavirus pandemic is a bioweapon is not yet fully proven (although growing body of evidence asserts that it is, as seen here and here and here and here). What we know for certain are the following facts:

Numbers are being systematically misrepresented to convey much greater rates of death vs infections as dozens of leading medical experts have proven.

Contaminated test kits have started showing up in the UK on March 30 and countless false results are showing up since covid test kits are often not differentiating between covid-19 and the typical coronavirus strains of the flu that average between 7-14% of flu cases every year. This doesn’t mean that COVID-19 should not be taken seriously, but only that the reported numbers are being artificially falsified to generate heightened panic.

The COVID-19 Task Force at London’s Imperial College has been found to be the singular source of the false “left” vs “right” debate poisoning the west’s response to the pandemic. Teams working out of this British Intelligence nexus have generated BOTH the “do-nothing-and-wait-until-natural-resistance-evolves” herd immunity theory while simultaneously creating the “shut everything down one-size-fits-all” doomsday models being used by the WHO, UN, and leading Deep State assets like Michael Bloomberg, Steve Bannon, Bill Gates and George Soros. In case you doubt the influence of the Imperial College on world policy, a March 17 New York Times article described them in the following terms: “With ties to the World Health Organization and a team of 50 scientists, led by a prominent epidemiologist, Neil Ferguson, Imperial is treated as a sort of gold standard, its mathematical models feeding directly into government policies.”

Investigative Journalist Whitney Webb’s February 2020 research demonstrated conclusively that DARPA had received funding in tandem with Fort Detrick since 2017 on genetic modification of novel coronaviruses (with a focus on bats) as well as the development of never before used DNA and mRNA vaccines which change the structure of DNA both for an individual and potentially for a whole race.

Lastly, and most importantly, the pre-9/11 military exercises were not merely hypothetical scenarios but exercises which led directly into a new “Pearl Harbor” that modified the behaviour of Americans under terror, panic and misinformation like nothing ever seen before.

The parallels to today’s coronavirus outbreak cannot be missed for anyone who has taken a serious look at the strange case of the Event 201 Global Pandemic Exercise on October 19, 2019 in New York.

Event 201 was sponsored by the Michael Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, and World Economic Forum which ran simulations under the “hypothetical” scenario of a novel coronavirus pandemic killing 60 million people. Reviewing just one of Event 201’s many recordings openly available on their official site features some very disturbing parallels to the events unfolding today:

Unipolar Martial Law or Multipolar Marshall Plan?

As I outlined in my previous paper, the mass-panic generated by COVID-19 has created a 9/11-situation with the expected police state laws being passed under the radar of many people who would normally be paying attention to such things. One of the most dangerous measures enacted involved a classified bill in February which formally mandates the head of NORTHCOM (who is also the head of NORAD) to become acting President of the United States under conditions of Martial Law, un-governability of the executive branch or general chaos in America. This later scenario is not terribly unlikely considering the danger of a financial blowout of the banking system combined with economic lockdowns of the west.

China and Russia both understand the nature of the game and both nations have acted responsibly in dealing with the outbreak of Coronavirus with China’s successful containment having won seven consecutive days of no new cases. It is important that unlike the remedies promoted by London’s Imperial College, neither Russia or China have totally shut down their nations, but have rather kept their economies alive which selecting methods for selective quarantines and lockdowns (China only locked down 15 nations plus Wuhan while the remaining 95% of their economy continued to produces and support the recovering component).

We know that President Trump has resisted the pressure by Deep State Experts to shut down America and has stated so repeatedly, but up until his recent conversations with Xi Jinping and Putin, there were very few options available to him beyond those proposed by Dr. Fauci, the Green New Dealing Dems or “bailout everything” monetarists around Mnuchin and Kudlow.

Now that China and Russia have begun sending cargo ships of vital medical equipment to America as part of the Health Silk Road (over the screams of neocons and neoliberal technocrats like), a new possibility for a cure has presented itself.

• If Trump acts decisively with courage and intelligence, there is still a chance that sovereign nation states may yet stay in the drivers’ seat and use this crisis as an opportunity to force through a debt jubilee, banking reform and new Bretton Woods emergency conference to establish a foundation for a new just economic system.

• If Trump is unsuccessful in this task, it is more than a little scary to think about what hell will beset the world in the coming months and years.

San Francisco supervisors have filed a resolution urging health officials from six Bay Area counties to assess the ‘public health threat’ of ‘panic buying weapons’ during the a time of crisis.

In other words, if you feel that the country is about to fall into a crime-ridden depression where thugs might kick down your door for what’s in your fridge, you shouldn’t be able to defend yourself or your family.

The resolution calls on the counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara to conduct surveys on the health threat posed by the surge in weapons purchases – using completely unsupported claims in the text, according to Breitbart.

For example:

WHEREAS, The NRA has induced such panic buying by engaging in reckless fear-mongering, using this national crisis as an excuse to grow corporate profits and scare more people into buying guns.

WHEREAS, More guns do not keep Americans safe because in reality, nearly 400 million civilian-owned guns in America have not stopped 40,000 annual gun deaths and thousands of gun injuries.

WHEREAS, Multiple studies have concluded that where there are more guns, there are more gun deaths and more guns do not stop crimes

(Funny, Wyoming has the most guns per capita in the country and one of the lowest murder rates, while Illinois 38th in the nation in per capita ownership, yet has a sky-high murder rate).

WHEREAS, More guns in homes during these precarious times compounds the risks of death and serious injury likely to further increase our hospital loads.

You can read the rest here. 

The NRA-ILA responded to the resolution with the following statement:

As the old saying goes, never let a crisis go to waste, and that’s exactly how this resolution begins.  By citing the COVID-19 crisis as creating the rush to purchase firearms and ammunition, and then blaming the NRA for inducing panic buying to increase corporate profits, the resolution denies the basic truth the current crisis illustrates: Americans believe in their right to defend themselves and will seek the available means to do so.  The resolution shows how incredibly out of touch the San Francisco Board of Supervisors remain in a city that has been grossly mismanaged for decades.

“Instead of focusing on real issues, [San Francisco supervisors] would rather waste taxpayer time and money to once again blame guns for their problems,” the NRA added.

In short, San Francisco only wants bad guys to own guns during a crisis – while law-abiding citizens shouldn’t be able to match force and defend themselves.

Authored by Max Parry via The Unz Review,

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary” 

– H.L. Mencken

As the global pandemic grips world attention, completely unnoticed by mainstream media was the release of a final report of an academic study pertaining to another previously calamitous event of international significance.

On March 25th, the conclusion of a four year investigation by researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks was published which determined that the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11th, 2001 was not caused by fire. The peer-reviewed inquiry was funded by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, a nonprofit organization composed of more than 3,000 building architects and engineers who are a signatory to the group’s formal appeal calling for a new investigation into the three — not two — WTC skyscrapers destroyed on 9/11. The researchers infer that the collapse of Building 7 was actually the result of a controlled demolition:

“The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.”

With or without a pandemic, it is likely corporate media would have ignored the study anyway, just as they have anything that contradicts the official story of 9/11. However, it is notable that many have drawn parallels between the COVID-19 outbreak and the 9/11 attacks based on the widespread changes to daily life as a result of the crisis going forward. Already there is talk of nationwide lockdowns as a “new normal” with many rightly expressing concerns over civil liberties, press freedoms, the surveillance state, and other issues just as there were following 9/11. By the same measure, a false dichotomy is being established by political gatekeepers in order to silence those who dare challenge the official account as to how the coronavirus began. It is a stigmatization that is all too familiar to those who have never believed the conventional narrative that 19 Arab hijackers loyal to Osama bin Laden armed only with box-cutters were solely responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on that fateful day.

There is a common misconception that to believe in so-called “conspiracy theories” is to somehow lose sight of the bigger picture or systemic problems. Behind this phenomenon is a mistakenly presumed conflict between understanding the broader, overarching system versus the sinister motives of those in power who administer it — when they are inextricably linked. Political scientist Michael Parenti, who drew the ire of many of his fellow left-wing colleagues for his work on the Kennedy assassination, refers to it in his lecture “Understanding Deep Politics” as a perceived incompatibility between “the structural and the functional.” The anti-conspiracists wrongly assume that the more impersonal or wider the lens, the more profound an analysis. By this logic, the elite are absolved of conscious intent and deliberate pursuit of nefarious self-interest, as if everything is done by incidental chance or out of incompetence. Not to say efficacy applies without exception, but it has become a required gesture to disassociate oneself from “conspiracies” to maintain credibility — ironically even by those who are often the target of such smears themselves.

This applies not only to mainstream media and academics, but even leading progressive figures who have a mechanical, unthinking resistance to assigning intent or recognizing the existence of hidden agendas. As a result, it disappears the class interests of the ruling elite and ultimately assists them in providing cover for their crimes. With the exception of the Kennedy assassination — coincidentally the subject of a new epic chart-topping song by Bob Dylan — nowhere has there been more hostility to ‘conspiracism’ than regarding the events of 9/11. Just as they assailed Parenti, David Talbot and others for challenging the Warren Commission’s ‘lone gunman’ theory, leading figures on the left such as Noam Chomsky and the late Alexander Cockburn railed against the 9/11 Truth movement and today it is often wrongly equated with right-wing politics, an unlikely trajectory given it occurred under an arch-conservative administration but an inevitable result of the pseudo-left’s aversion to “conspiracies.” If polls are any indication, the average American certainly disagrees with such elitist misleaders as to the believability of the sham 9/11 Commission findings, yet another example of how out-of-touch the faux-left is with ordinary people.

A more recent example was an article by left-wing journalist Ben Norton proclaiming that to call 9/11 a false flag or an “inside job” is “fundamentally a right-wing conspiracy”, in complete disregard of the many dedicated truther activists on the left since its inception. Norton insists the 9/11 attacks were simply “blowback”, or an unintended consequence of previous U.S. foreign policy support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviets during the 1980s which later gave birth to Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Norton argues “Al-Qaeda’s unofficial strategic alliance with the US eventually broke down” resulting in 9/11 as retaliation, completely overlooking that Washington was still supporting jihadist factions during the 1990s in Bosnia (two of which would be alleged 9/11 hijackers) and Kosovo in the Yugoslav wars against Serbia, even while the U.S. was ostensibly pursuing bin Laden for the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000.

A 1997 Congressional document by the Republican Policy Committee (RPC) throws light on how Washington never discontinued its practice in Afghanistan of using jihadist proxies to achieve its foreign policy goals in the Balkans. Although it was a partisan GOP attack meant to discredit then-U.S. President Bill Clinton, nevertheless the memo accurately presents how the U.S. had “turned Bosnia into a Militant Islamic Base”:

“In short, the Clinton administration’s policy of facilitating the delivery of arms to the Bosnian Muslims made it the de facto partner of an international network of governments and organizations pursuing their own agenda in Bosnia: the promotion of Islamic revolution in Europe. That network not only involves Iran but Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan (a key ally of Iran), and Turkey, together with front groups supposedly pursuing humanitarian and cultural activities. For example, one such group about which details have come to light is the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization which has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia. TWRA is believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Bin Laden , a wealthy Saudi émigré believed to bankroll numerous militant groups…”

It was also in Bosnia where a raid was conducted in 2002 by local police at the Sarajevo branch of a Saudi-based purported charitable organization, Benevolence International Foundation, which was discovered to be a front for Al-Qaeda. Seized on the premises was a document, dubbed the “Golden Chain”, which listed the major financial sponsors of the terrorist organization to be numerous Saudi business and government figures, including some of Osama bin Laden’s own brothers. By the 9/11 Commission Report’s own admission, this same fake Islamic charity “supported the Bosnian Muslims in their conflict with Serbia” at the same time as the CIA.

It cannot go without mentioning that the common link between Al-Qaeda and subsequent extremist groups like ISIS/Daesh and Boko Haram is the doctrine of Wahhabism, the puritanical sect of Sunni Islam practiced in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and founded in the 18th century by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the religious leader who formed an alliance with the founder of the first Saudi state, Muhammad bin Saud, whose descendants make up the House of Saud royal family. The ultra-orthodox teachings of Wahhabism were initially rejected in the Middle East but reestablished by British colonialism which aligned with the Saud family in order to use their intolerant strain of Islam to undermine the Ottoman empire in a divide-and-conquer strategy. In a speech to the House of Commons in 1921, Winston Churchill admitted the Saudis to be “intolerant, well-armed and bloodthirsty.”

This did not stop the British from supporting the House of Saud so long as it was in the interest of Western imperialism, an unholy alliance which continues to this day. However, U.S.-Saudi relations did come under scrutiny when the infamous 28 redacted pages of the December 2002 report of the “Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001” conducted by the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence were finally disclosed in 2016. The section revealed not only the numerous U.S. intelligence failures in the lead-up to the attacks but the long suspected culpability of Saudi Arabia, whose nationals were not the focus of counterterrorism because of Riyadh’s status as a U.S. ally. The declassified pages show that some of the hijackers, 15 of them Saudi citizens, received financial and logistical support from individuals linked to the Saudi government, which FBI sources believed at least two of which to be Saudi intelligence officers. One of those Saudi agents received large payments from Princess Haifa, the wife of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan, a stipend from the latter’s bank account which inevitably went from the go-betweens to the sleeper cell.

President George W. Bush and Prince Bandar bin Sultan at Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Texas in 2002

A key member of the House of Saud and then-Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar has such a long and close relationship to the Bush family he was given the nickname “Bandar Bush.” For obvious reasons, when the congressional joint inquiry report was first published in 2003, the 28-page portion on the Saudi ties to the attacks was completely censored at the insistence of the Bush administration. Yet the Bush family’s connection to the Gulf state kingdom is not limited to the ruling monarchy but includes one of the petrodollar theocracy’s other wealthiest families— the bin Laden family itself. While Michael Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11 mostly whitewashed the real conspiracy of 9/11 , it did reveal that numerous unquestioned members of the bin Laden family were given special treatment and suspiciously evacuated on secret flights out of the U.S. shortly after the attacks in coordination with the Saudi government.

The Bush-bin Laden connection goes all the way back to the beginning of George W. Bush’s business career prior to his political involvement in 1976 with the founding of an oil drilling company, Arbusto Energy, whose earliest investors included a Texas businessman and fellow reservist in the Texas Air National Guard, James R. Bath, who oddly enough was the American liaison for Salem bin Laden, Osama’s half brother. To put it differently, the bin Laden family and its construction fortune helped finance Bush’s start in the oil industry, a relationship that would continue through the 1990s with Harken Energy, later the recipient of an offshore oil contract in Iraq’s reconstruction alongside Dick Cheney’s Halliburton. The Bush dynasty’s financial ties to both the Saudi royals and bin Laden family went on as co-investors in the Carlyle Group private equity firm where the elder Bush’s previous government service contacts were exploited for financial gain. In fact, on the morning of 9/11, Bush Sr. just happened to be attending a Carlyle business conference where another bin Laden sibling was the guest of honor in what we are supposed to believe is another astounding coincidence. Just days later, Shafiq bin Laden would be spirited off on a chartered flight back to Saudi Arabia in an exodus overseen by Prince Bandar himself.

Osama bin Laden himself also got an evacuation of sorts when the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001. It was legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh who first reported that bin Laden and thousands of other Al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters were suspiciously allowed to escape to Pakistan in an evacuation dubbed the ‘airlift of evil.’ This was corroborated in a leaked 2009 Hillary Clinton State Department email published by WikiLeaks regarding a Senate report on the Battle of Tora Bora and bin Laden’s escape where Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal is shown discussing the controversial airlift as having been requested by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and approved by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney — but don’t dare call it a conspiracy:

“Gary Berntsen, the head of the CIA armed operation in eastern Afghanistan, is a major source for the report. I am in contact with him and have heard his entire story at length, key parts of which are not in his book, Jawbreaker, or in the Senate report. In particular , the story of the Kunduz airlift of the bulk of key AQ and Taliban leaders, at the request of Musharaff and per order Cheney/Rumsfeld, is absent.”

Could it have anything to do with just a few years earlier the Taliban visiting Texaswhen Bush was Governor to discuss with the Unocal Corporation the construction of a gas pipeline through Afghanistan into Pakistan? It is also well known that the Pakistani government and its Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) had supported the Taliban for decades and during the 1980s had been the CIA’s main conduit for supplying arms to the Afghan mujahideen, including bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri’s Maktab al-Khidamat, the organizational precursor to Al-Qaeda. As shown in the documentary 9/11: Press for Truth, little in their relations changed in the years between the Afghan-Soviet war and 9/11, as ISI director Mahmud Ahmed was reportedly busted wiring $100,000 to alleged hijacker ringleader Mohamed Atta not long before the WTC attacks. Throughout 2001 both before and after 9/11, General Ahmed had repeatedly visited the U.S. and met with top Pentagon and Bush administration officials, including CIA Director George Tenet, making Prince Bandar not the only figure to have been caught financing the operation and where a direct line can be drawn between the White House and the hijackers.

While Bandar has thus far eluded justice, one year after the release of the 28 pages a lawsuit was filed on behalf of the families of the victims against the government of Saudi Arabia which presented new evidence that two years prior to the attacks in 1999, the Saudi Embassy paid for the flights of two Saudi agents living undercover in the U.S. to fly from Phoenix to Washington “in a dry run for the 9/11 attacks” where they attempted to breach the cockpit and test flight security. This means the Saudi government was likely involved in planning the attacks from the very beginning, in addition to providing the subsidies and patsy hijacker personnel for the smokescreen of blaming Al-Qaeda and making bin Laden the fall guy, whose links to 9/11 are tenuous at best. After all, the “confession” from supposed planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was extracted only after his being water-boarded 183 times while bin Laden himself initially denied any role in the attacks before questionable videos were released of his admittance.

The Saudi nationals who participated in the hijacking rehearsal were posing as students. However, the Sunni dictatorship was not the only country conducting a mass espionage operation in the U.S. prior to 9/11 under such a front. In the first half of 2001, several U.S. federal law enforcement agencies documented more than 130 different instances of young Israelis impersonating “art students” while aggressively trying to penetrate the security of various government and military facilities as part of a Mossad spy ring. Several of the Israelis were found to be living in locations within the near vicinity of the hijackers as if they were eavesdropping on them. The discovery of the Israeli operation raised many questions, namely whether Mossad had advanced knowledge or involvement in 9/11. Ironically, Fox News of all places was one of the few outlets to cover the story in a four-part series which never re-aired and was eventually scrubbed from the network website.

The Israeli “art student” mystery never gained traction in the rest of the media, much like another suspicious case in the “Dancing Israelis”, a smaller group of Mossad spies posing as furnishing movers who were arrested in New Jersey on the morning of 9/11 taking celebratory pictures with the twin towers burning in the background of the Manhattan skyline. The five men were not only physically present at the waterfront prior to the first plane impact but found with thousands of dollars in cash, box-cutters, fake passports, and Arab clothing after they were reported for suspicious behavior and intercepted at the Lincoln tunnel heading into Manhattan. Initially misreported as Arabs by the media, the men were connected to Mossad by an FBI database and held for five months before their deportation to Israel while the owner of the front moving company fled to Jerusalem before further questioning. It should be noted that if Israel were to have participated in a ‘false flag’ attack on the U.S., it would not have been the first time. During the Six-Day War in 1967, the Israeli Air Force and Navy launched an unprovoked attack on the USS Liberty, a U.S. Navy spy ship that was surveilling the Arab-Israeli conflict from international waters in the Mediterranean, an “accidental” assault which killed 34 Americans in an attempt to blame Egypt and provoke U.S. intervention.

If Israel turned out to be co-conspirators with the Saudis, it too is not as unlikely a scenario as it may seem. Wrongly assumed to be sworn enemies, it is an open secret that the two British-created states have maintained a historical covert alliance since the end of World War I when the first monarch of the modern Saudi state, King Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, defeated his rival the Sharif of Mecca who opposed the Balfour Declaration. Authored by British Foreign Secretary Lord Balfour and presented to Zionist leader Baron Rothschild, the 1917 letter guaranteed a Jewish homeland in Palestine by colonization with European Jews. Once Sharif was out the way, the Zionist movement had the green light to move forward with its colonial project. Although Ibn Saud publicly opposed Zionism, behind the scenes he negotiated with them through an intermediary in his advisor, British agent St. John Philby, who proposed a £20 million compensation to the Saudi king for delivering Palestine to the Jews.

Ibn Saud communicated his willingness to compromise in a 1940 letter from Philby to Chaim Weizmann, the president of the World Zionist Organization and later the first Israeli president. However, Philby himself was an anti-Zionist and sabotaged the plan by leaking it to other Arab leaders who voiced their vehement opposition and it was only after this exposure that the Saudi king claimed to have turned down the bribe, something the Zionists would only solicit if they thought he would accept. Ever since, the ideologies of Saudi Wahhabism and Israeli Zionism have been center to the West’s destabilization of the Middle East which contrary to misperceptions was not uniquely plagued by conflict historically more than the Occident until the West nurtured Salafism and Zionism. Predictably, discussing either the Saudi or Israeli role in 9/11 has been strictly forbidden in corporate media, since both are among Washington’s geo-strategic allies and each hold immense lobbying power over large media institutions.

Less than five months after 9/11, Bush notoriously declared the nations of Iran, Iraq and North Korea as comprising an “axis of evil” in his 2002 state of the union address. In reality, the phrase is better suited to describe the tripartite of Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the U.S. government itself who are likely the real trio of conspirators behind 9/11. The infamous choice of words were attributed to neoconservative pundit and Bush speechwriter, David Frum, who claimed to have taken inspiration from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “a date that will live infamy” speech given the day after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It was a continuation of a theme present in the manifesto of the neoconservative cabal authored one year prior to 9/11 — “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) think tank, whose members included Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush. The strategic military blueprint called for a massive increase in U.S. defense spending in order to “fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theatre wars”before ominously predicting:

“The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

Ten members of PNAC would be subsequently appointed to positions in the Bush White House where their vision of a “new Pearl Harbor” conveniently materialized. Then again, there is plenty of evidence that Pearl Harbor itself was a ‘false flag’, or that U.S. intelligence and President Franklin D. Roosevelt had foreknowledge of an impending Japanese attack on the naval base in Oahu, Hawaii, on December 7th, 1941. As pointed out by the film Loose Change, it is probable that Roosevelt allowed it to happen on purpose in order to win public support for a U.S. entry into the European theatre of World War II, a move opposed by a majority of Americans prior to the ‘surprise’ Japanese attack. Given what is known about Pearl Harbor and the abandoned Operation Northwoods, which proposed both fabricating and committing terrorist attacks on civilian aircraft to be pinned on Fidel Castro in order to justify a U.S. invasion of Cuba in 1962, there are no grounds to assume that such false flag operations were ever phased out of military procedure before 9/11 or since.

Loose Change also made a useful historical analogy between 9/11 and the Reichstag fire, the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building that occurred a month after Adolf Hitler was inaugurated as Chancellor and pinned on a 24-year old half-blind Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe. While there is no denying the incident was used a pretext by the Nazi regime to consolidate power and suspend law and order, there is still a heated debate between historians as to whether van der Lubbe was the real culprit. However, it was coincidentally in 2001 when a group of historians uncovered evidence that a Nazi stormtrooper who died under mysterious circumstances in 1933 had previously confessed to prosecutors that members of Hitler’s Storm Detachment had set fire to the edifice under orders from paramilitary leader Karl Ernst, lending credence to the widely held suspicion that it was a Nazi-engineered ‘false flag’ all along.

Most Americans are unaware that a similar coup d’etat nearly took place during the same year in the United States in an attempt to remove President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install an authoritarian government modeled on Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as part of a scheme hatched by an inner circle of right-wing bankers otherwise known as the the ‘Business Plot.’ It was a conspiracy that only became public after it was heroically thwarted by a whistleblower in decorated Marine Corps veteran turned anti-imperialist, Major General Smedley Butler, after he was recruited to form the junta. Incredibly, one of the prominent business figures implicated in the putsch was none other than future Connecticut Senator Prescott Bush, George H.W. Bush’s father and George W. Bush’s grandfather, who at the time was the director and shareholder of a bank owned by German industrialist and prominent Nazi financier Fritz Thyssen seized by the U.S. government under the Trading with the Enemy Act.

After his transformation, in 1935 Smedley Butler famously penned War is a Racketand there is perhaps no better phrase that would sum up the so-called ‘War on Terror’ today. Not only did the American Reichstag fire of 9/11 trigger a domestic police state transformation that overrode the U.S. constitution in an American equivalent of the 1933 Enabling Act and the Heimatschutz (“homeland protection”) defense forces with the passing of the USA-Patriot Act and founding of the Department of Homeland Security, but it fulfilled the prophecy of political scientist Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations in a face-off between Islam and Christianity abroad. The prediction that religion and culture would be the primary source of geopolitical conflict in the post-Cold War world was an apocalyptic paradigm envisioned by right-wing orientalist philosophers like Huntington and Bernard Lewis which the PNAC neocon ideologues put into practice. Today, the ongoing COVID-19 crisis appears likely to have similar broad and long-term political, social and economic consequences and those who have doubts about the official explanation for the pandemic can hardly be blamed for their distrust given this history unless the lessons of 9/11 have gone unlearned.

To cope with lockdown stress, job loss, and or just being housebound and bored over the last month, millions of Americans have resorted to watching porn, drinking beer, smoking pot, and or devouring chocolate amid coronavirus lockdowns that covers at least 90% of the country, reported Reuters.

From February 24 to March 17, Pornhub recorded a 12% increase in global traffic. We noted in mid-March, the porn site offered free premium accounts to anyone in Italy as the virus crisis intensified. By the end of March, Americans were given free access to Pornhub Premium as a way to “Help Flatten the Curve.” During the month, a huge influx of coronavirus themed porn videos hit the site, as it appears amateur porn stars in quarantine had nothing else better to do. 

The love lockdown, as some are calling it, also saw people panic buying sex toys. Lingerie chain Ann Summers reported that dildos sales surged 27% in the last week of March over the same period the previous year.

For the four weeks ending March 22, dollar sales for top beer companies jumped over last year’s figures. With restaurants and bars closed, Americans panic hoarded beer, according to Brewbound. Over the period, beer sales from top brands erupted: Anheuser-Busch InBev recorded +11.6%, Molson Coors +10.6%, Constellation Brands +24%, Mark Anthony Brands +124%, Heineken USA +7.5%, Boston Beer +55.1%, Diageo +13.3, and Pabst +11.1%. 

Top hard seltzer brands, Mark Anthony’s White Claw and Boston Beer’s Truly saw triple-digit growth trends, up 363.5% and 226.1%, respectively, over the period.

If porn watching and boozing weren’t enough, Americans were self-medicating with marijuana, melting in their couches as they “Netflix and quarantined.” Flowhub said California, Colorado, Oregon, and Alaska reported a 50% increase in pot sales from Mach 16-22.

As a result of the pandemic, many Americans have resorted to comfort food, such as chocolate and pizza:

“I think as you look across all of the categories, we are seeing really big increases,” Nestle USA Chairman and CEO Steve Presley recently told Yahoo Finance’s The First Trade.

Nestle not only makes chocolate products. “We have such a broad portfolio in the U.S. we see spikes across all of our businesses really with the exception being the out of home business obviously,” Presley said.

The risk many Americans have in quarantine is that they’re not exercising and living healthy lifestyles. Instead, they’re resorting to life’s vices to numb the pain of a pandemic.

And the question everyone is asking, how much longer are Americans going to be confined to their homes.

Well, the so-called Wall Street virologists at JPMorgan believe the US could be in the late accumulation phase with a possible inflection point in the coming weeks.

But as Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health recently noted in a study titled “Social distancing strategies for curbing the COVID-19 epidemic,” some form of social distancing could remain in place through 2022, which would suggest American better get used to extended lockdowns while enjoying life’s vices… 

Earlier today we reported that following a dramatic objection to the OPEC+ production cut which was agreed upon by Russia and Saudi Arabia (but few other OPEC members), Mexico had initially threatened to quit OPEC as it refused to comply with the imposed 23% cut forced on all members, but less than an hour later the southern US neighbor reportedly had changed its mind as Reuters reported that Mexico had in fact agreed to the OPEC+ production cut deal after all.

Well, scratch all that because it appears the Reuters “news” was fake, sourced from some conflicted Saudi minister who wanted to put Mexico in a position where it had no choice but to accept the reality that had been imposed upon it. Unfortunately for the Saudis, this “plan” was laughable and late on Thursday, Mexico logged off the OPEC+ alliance’s videoconference emergency meeting after nine hours of talks Thursday, without agreeing to the landmark 10 million b/d production cut accord that members were hoping could stem a bruising rout in oil prices caused by the coronavirus pandemic and send the price of oil surging, S&P Global Platts reported, whose sources we can now confirm are far more credible than those of Reuters.

The rest of the coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia, were in discussions over how to proceed, with many ministers angry over the potential blow-up of the deal.  The coalition will likely try to convince Mexico again Friday at a G20 energy ministerial that was originally scheduled to seek the participation of the US, Canada, Brazil and other key producers outside of OPEC+ to join its efforts.

But while the participation of G-20 non-OPEC members in the production cut deal is optional, Mexico’s isn’t and in fact has veto power, with Bloomberg reporting that unless Mexico agrees to be bound by the deal (something about a cartel and what not), the rest of OPEC+ wont’ cut oil production, threatening to send the price of oil crashing on Friday if oil exporters fail to agree on removing 10MM b/d from the market, an outcome that would result in storage spaces running out as soon as May and sending landlocked oil prices negative.

So what does Mexico want?

Well, it wants to have its cake, and eat almost all of it too: Mexico proposed an oil production cut of just 100k b/d over the next 2 months to help stabilize oil prices, Energy Secretary Rocio Nahle Garcia said in a statement on Twitter.

México en el consenso para estabilizar el precio del petróleo en la reunión de la @OPECSecretariat ha propuesto una reducción de 100 mil barriles por día en los próximos 2 meses. De 1.781 mbd de producción que reportamos en marzo del 2020 disminuiremos a 1.681 mbd. @GobiernoMX

— Rocío Nahle (@rocionahle) April 10, 2020

This is a problem because it means that while all OPEC+ members are equal – all those who are cutting production by roughly 23% – some are more equal than others, namely Mexico, whose production would have dropped to 1.681m b/d from 1.781m b/d in March, while under the OPEC plan, Mexico was required to cut production by 400,000 barrels a day, from a starting point of 1,753 million barrels a day to 1,353m barrels a day.

And if Mexico is granted a loophole, then all other OPEC members – at least the non-Saudi ones – would demand similar treatment, forcing Saudi Arabia to should all of the production cuts, which would then nearly double from 4MMb/d to 8MMb/d. Needless to say that is a nonstarter, and explains why OPEC was quick to balk and warn that unless Mexico also agrees to cut by 23%, then the entire deal is off, and Brent, which was last trading at $32 would plunge 30%, maybe 40% overnight as the massive oversupply into a world which has 35MMb/d less oil demand, would continue indefinitely.

As we reported earlier, under the proposed deal, the 10 million b/d OPEC+ cuts would cover the months of May and June, and then be rolled back to 8 million b/d for the rest of 2020, and then down to 6 million b/d for all of 2021 through April 22.

Each member would lower its output 23% from its October 2018 levels, except for Saudi Arabia and Russia, who would make their cuts from a baseline of 11 million b/d. That means both countries would limit their production to 8.5 million b/d for the initial two months of the deal.

Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest crude exporter, said it had ramped up its crude output to a record 12 million b/d this month. Russia, meanwhile, pumped 10.5 million b/d of crude in March, according to S&P Global Platts Analytics.

But Mexico balked at its new quota of 1.353 million b/d, as the country plans to unveil a $13.5 billion energy investment package to help state oil company Pemex raise its production to 2 million b/d by the end of the year, according to Platts. In other words, the country’s entire budget depends on pumping as much oil as possible. Furthermore, with Mexico’s industrial production now imploding even as domestic coronavirus cases rise exponentially, the last thing AMLO will do is accept a world in which the country’s much needed dollar-denominated revenues are cut by almost a quarter.

In the end it was AMLO who killed the deal: Mexico initially agreed to the cut and the coalition was on the verge of finalizing the deal, before its delegation asked for time to consult with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, sources said. Those consultations and continued haggling over its cut went on for almost four hours, but Mexico stayed firm.

As the impasse lingered, US President Donald Trump, who had convinced Saudi Arabia and Russia to set aside their oil price war and come to the negotiating table, made a phone call with Saudi King Salman and Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Dan Scavino Jr., a White House aide.

After speaking with the leaders for 90 minutes, he told reporters that he believed the OPEC+ coalition was close to a deal but did not reveal any details.

“We had a really good talk, but we’ll see what happens,” Trump said. “As you know, OPEC met today and I would say they are getting close to a deal and we will soon find out.”

Little did he know that his southern neighbor president had different plans, and now the entire deal is on the verge of collapse.

Today’s OPEC webcast came after a week of furious petrodiplomacy and back channel pressure by Trump for a deal that could rescue ailing US shale producers, even as Trump is reluctant to commit US companies to participating in any OPEC+ pact, despite urging by Saudi Arabia and Russia, and antitrust laws make any collective action legally impossible.

Instead, US Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette is expected to tell the G20 ministerial meeting Friday that some 2 million b/d of US production is forecast to be shut in over the next year, according to a person briefed on his plans; this was a non-starter for Russia and the Saudis until yesterday, but then the two nations quietly conceded to the US position.

And then, Mexico’s unexpected objection could make it all moot.

Meanwhile, the price of oil is one flashing red headline from cratering. The OPEC secretariat has forecast a 6.8 million b/d contraction in global oil demand for the whole of 2020, including close to 12 million b/d “and expanding” for the second quarter, Barkindo told the ministers who earlier toldthe group that the market outlook was “horrifying” and explained that at current rates of supply and demand, global crude oil storage capacity will fill up in the month of May, he said.

“These are staggering numbers,” he said, adding that the coronavirus outbreak had “upended market supply and demand fundamentals.”

Sources said Saudi Arabia had sought an even bigger OPEC+ cut of 15 million b/d but could not get Russia to agree. The two countries had feuded at the last OPEC+ meeting on March 6, when the impact of the coronavirus was already forcing analysts to downgrade their demand forecasts, with Russia balking at a Saudi-led proposal for cuts totaling 3.2 million b/d.

Back at the table again this time, they first agreed a deal between themselves, then spent most of Thursday’s meeting trying to convince smaller producers and tweaking the numbers.

Mexico was the last holdout, and with the deal requiring unanimous agreement, the relatively small oil producer suddenly had infinite leverage to demand its own deal. The problem is that unless AMLO concedes to the terms of the deal, it is about to get exponentially worse for Mexico and the rest of the cartel.

One last point: even a 10mmb/d production cut – the best the world can expect at this point – is nothing considering the 35mmb/d plunge in oil demand. According to Goldman, even with a 10mmb/d cut – the biggest in history – shut ins will still be required until June to balance the market. We doubt anyone will volunteer…

Which means it all depends on tomorrow’s Friday’s G20 meeting which will be chaired by Saudi energy minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman and is scheduled to begin at 1400 GMT: either Mexico agrees to the cut, or oil is about to crater (even more), while the Mexican peso will plunge to new all time lows. Finally, as Platts reports, with Mexico not the only country needing convincing, the G20 summit promises to be another test of geopolitical wills.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

You don’t need to read Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand that neoliberalism – in deep crisis since at least 2008 – is a control/governing technique in which surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded.

But now, with the world-system collapsing at breathtaking speed, neoliberalism is at a loss to deal with the next stage of dystopia, ever present in our hyper-connected angst: global mass unemployment.

Henry Kissinger, anointed oracle/gatekeeper of the ruling class, is predictably scared. He claims that, “sustaining the public trust is crucial to social solidarity.” He’s convinced the Hegemon should “safeguard the principles of the liberal world order.” Otherwise, “failure could set the world on fire.”

That’s so quaint. Public trust is dead across the spectrum. The liberal world “order” is now social Darwinist chaos. Just wait for the fire to rage.

The numbers are staggering. The Japan-based Asian Development Bank (ADB), in its annual economic report, may not have been exactly original. But it did note that the impact of the “worst pandemic in a century” will be as high as $4.1 trillion, or 4.8 percent of global GDP.

This an underestimation, as “supply disruptions, interrupted remittances, possible social and financial crises, and long-term effects on health care and education are excluded from the analysis.”

We cannot even start to imagine the cataclysmic social consequences of the crash. Entire sub-sectors of the global economy may not be recomposed at all.

The International Labor Organization (ILO) forecasts global unemployment at a conservative, additonal 24.7 million people – especially in aviation, tourism and hospitality.

The global aviation industry is a humongous $2.7 trillion business. That’s 3.6 percent of global GDP. It employs 2.7 million people. When you add air transport and tourism —everything from hotels and restaurants to theme parks and museums — it accounts for a minimum of 65.5 million jobs around the world.

According to the ILO, income losses for workers may range from $860 billion to an astonishing $3.4 trillion. “Working poverty” will be the new normal – especially across the Global South.

“Working poor,” in ILO terminology, means employed people living in households with a per capita income below the poverty line of $2 a day. As many as an additional 35 million people worldwide will become working poor in 2020.

Switching to feasible perspectives for global trade, it’s enlightening to examine that this report about how the economy may rebound is centered on the notorious hyperactive merchants and traders of Yiwu in eastern China – the world’s busiest small-commodity, business hub.

Their experience spells out a long and difficult recovery. As the rest of the world is in a coma, Lu Ting, chief China economist at Nomura in Hong Kong stresses that China faces a 30 percent decline in external demand at least until next Fall.

Neoliberalism in Reverse?

In the next stage, the strategic competition between the U.S. and China will be no-holds-barred, as emerging narratives of China’s new, multifaceted global role – on trade, technology, cyberspace, climate change – will set in, even more far-reaching than the New Silk Roads. That will also be the case in global public health policies. Get ready for an accelerated Hybrid War between the “Chinese virus” narrative and the Health Silk Road.

San Miguel, Bulacan, Philippines, 2016. (Judgefloro, CC0, Wikimedia Commons)

The latest report by the China Institute of International Studies would be quite helpful for the West — hubris permitting — to understand how Beijing adopted key measures putting the health and safety of the general population first.

Now, as the Chinese economy slowly picks up, hordes of fund managers from across Asia are tracking everything from trips on the metro to noodle consumption to preview what kind of economy may emerge post-lockdown.

In contrast, across the West, the prevailing doom and gloom elicited a priceless editorial from The Financial Times. Like James Brown in the 1980s Blues Brothers pop epic, the City of London seems to have seen the light, or at least giving the impression it really means it. Neoliberalism in reverse. New social contract. “Secure” labor markets. Redistribution.

Cynics won’t be fooled. The cryogenic state of the global economy spells out a vicious Great Depression 2.0 and an unemployment tsunami. The plebs eventually reaching for the pitchforks and the AR-15s en masse is now a distinct possibility. Might as well start throwing a few breadcrumbs to the beggars’ banquet.

That may apply to European latitudes. But the American story is in a class by itself.

Mural, Seattle, February 2017. (Mitchell Haindfield, Flickr)

For decades, we were led to believe that the world-system put in place after WWII provided the U.S. with unrivalled structural power. Now, all that’s left is structural fragility, grotesque inequalities, unpayable Himalayas of debt, and a rolling crisis.

No one is fooled anymore by the Fed’s magic quantitative easing powers, or the acronym salad – TALF, ESF, SPV – built into the Fed/U.S. Treasury exclusive obsession with big banks, corporations and the Goddess of the Market, to the detriment of the average American.

It was only a few months ago that a serious discussion evolved around the $2.5 quadrillion derivatives market imploding and collapsing the global economy, based on the price of oil skyrocketing, in case the Strait of Hormuz – for whatever reason – was shut down.

Now it’s about Great Depression 2.0: the whole system crashing as a result of the shutdown of the global economy. The questions are absolutely legitimate: is the political and social cataclysm of the global economic crisis arguably a larger catastrophe than Covid-19 itself?  And will it provide an opportunity to end neoliberalism and usher in a more equitable system, or something even worse?

 ‘Transparent’ BlackRock

Wall Street, of course, lives in an alternative universe. In a nutshell, Wall Street turned the Fed into a hedge fund. The Fed is going to own at least two thirds of all U.S. Treasury bills in the market before the end of 2020.

The U.S. Treasury will be buying every security and loan in sight while the Fed will be the banker – financing the whole scheme.

So essentially this is a Fed/Treasury merger. A behemoth dispensing loads of helicopter money.

And the winner is BlackRock—the biggest money manager on the planet, with tentacles everywhere, managing the assets of over 170 pension funds, banks, foundations, insurance companies, in fact a great deal of the money in private equity and hedge funds. BlackRock — promising to be fully  “transparent” — will buy these securities and manage those dodgy SPVs on behalf of the Treasury.

BlackRock, founded in 1988 by Larry Fink, may not be as big as Vanguard, but it’s the top investor in Goldman Sachs, along with Vanguard and State Street, and with $6.5 trillion in assets, bigger than Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank combined.

Now, BlackRock is the new operating system (OS) of the Fed and the Treasury. The world’s biggest shadow bank – and no, it’s not Chinese.

Compared to this high-stakes game, mini-scandals such as the one around Georgia Senator Kelly Loffler are peanuts. Loffler allegedly profited from inside information on Covid-19 by the CDC to make a stock market killing. Loffler is married to Jeffrey Sprecher – who happens to be the chairman of the NYSE, installed by Goldman Sachs.

While corporate media followed this story like headless chickens, post-Covid-19 plans, in Pentagon parlance, “move forward” by stealth.

The price? A meager $1,200 check per person for a month. Anyone knows that, based on median salary income, a typical American family would need $12,000 to survive for two months. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, in an act of supreme effrontry, allows them a mere 10 percent of that. So American taxpayers will be left with a tsunami of debt while selected Wall Street players grab the whole loot, part of an unparalleled transfer of wealth upwards, complete with bankruptcies en masse of small and medium businesses.

Fink’s letter to his shareholders almost gives the game away: “I believe we are on the edge of a fundamental reshaping of finance.”

And right on cue, he forecasted that, “in the near future – and sooner than most anticipate – there will be a significant reallocation of capital.”

He was referring, then, to climate change. Now that refers to Covid-19.

Implant Our Nanochip, Or Else?

The game ahead for the elites, taking advantage of the crisis, might well contain these four elements:

1. a social credit system,

2. mandatory vaccination,

3. a digital currency,

4. and a Universal Basic Income (UBI).

This is what used to be called, according to the decades-old, time-tested CIA playbook, a “conspiracy theory.” Well, it might actually happen.

West Virginia National Guard members reporting to a Charleston nursing home to assist with Covid-19 testing. April 6, 2020. (U.S. Army National Guard, Edwin L. Wriston)

A social credit system is something that China set up already in 2014. Before the end of 2020, every Chinese citizen will be assigned his/her own credit score – a de facto “dynamic profile”, elaborated with extensive use of AI and the internet of things (IoT), including ubiquitous facial recognition technology. This implies, of course, 24/7 surveillance, complete with Blade Runner-style roving robotic birds.

The U.S., the U.K., France, Germany, Canada, Russia and India may not be far behind. Germany, for instance, is tweaking its universal credit rating system, SCHUFA. France has an ID app very similar to the Chinese model, verified by facial recognition.

Mandatory vaccination is Bill Gates’s dream, working in conjunction with the WHO, the World Economic Forum (WEF) and Big Pharma. He wants “billions of doses” to be enforced over the Global South. And it could be a cover to everyone getting a digital implant.

Here it is, in his own words. At 34:15:

“Eventually what we’ll have to have is certificates of who’s a recovered person, who’s a vaccinated person…Because you don’t want people moving around the world where you’ll have some countries that won’t have it under control, sadly. You don’t want to completely block off the ability for people to go there and come back and move around.”

Then comes the last sentence which was erased from the official TED video. This was noted by Rosemary Frei, who has a master on molecular biology and is an independent investigative journalist in Canada. Gates says: “So eventually there will be this digital immunity proof that will help facilitate the global reopening up.”

This “digital immunity proof” is crucial to keep in mind, something that could be misused by the state for nefarious purposes.

The three top candidates to produce a coronavirus vaccine are American biotech firm Moderna, as well as Germans CureVac and BioNTech.

Digital cash might then become an offspring of blockchain. Not only the U.S., but China and Russia are also interested in a national crypto-currency. A global currency – of course controlled by central bankers – may soon be adopted in the form of a basket of currencies, and would circulate virtually. Endless permutations of the toxic cocktail of IoT, blockchain technology and the social credit system could loom ahead.

Already Spain has announced that it is introducing UBI, and wants it to be permanent. It’s a form insurance for the elite against social uprisings, especially if millions of jobs never come back.

So the key working hypothesis is that Covid-19 could be used as cover for the usual suspects to bring in a new digital financial system and a mandatory vaccine with a “digital identity” nanochip with dissent not tolerated: what Slavoj Zizek calls the “erotic dream” of every totalitarian government.

Yet underneath it all, amid so much anxiety, a pent-up rage seems to be gathering strength, to eventually explode in unforeseeable ways. As much as the system may be changing at breakneck speed, there’s no guarantee even the 0.1 percent will be safe.

The nuclear carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt coronavirus disaster has gotten worse, as on Thursday more than 400 sailors tested positive for COVID-19. Alarmingly, one sailor was found unresponsive as the ship was docked at a naval base in Guam and immediately transported to a military intensive care unit at the base.

“The sailor tested positive for coronavirus on March 30 and was found unconscious Thursday, he has been admitted to the intensive care unit of the US Navy Hospital on Guam,” a Navy statement said, according to CNN.

It’s being described as the first hospitalization after the crisis aboard the ship caused the USS Roosevelt to divert its mission from the Western Pacific two weeks ago.

The Navy says at this point 97% of the ship’s some 4,000+ crew members have been tested. “We’ve tested almost the whole crew now. We still have about 1,000 tests to report out,” the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. John Hyten said during a Pentagon briefing Thursday. “But 3,170 tested negative, 416 tested positive, 187 of those were symptomatic, 229 were asymptomatic. We still have 1,164 pending results.”

This means nearly ten percent of the crew is infected with COVID-19. “Sadly this morning we had our first hospitalization of the one sailor,” Hyten added. “We’re hoping that that sailor recovers, we are praying for him and his family and his shipmates.”

“I think it’s not a good idea to think the Teddy Roosevelt is a one-of-a-kind issue. We have too many ships at sea, we have too many deployed capabilities. There’s 5,000 sailors on a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier. To think it will never happen again is not a good way to plan. What we have to do is figure out how to plan in these kind of Covid environments,” Hyten said of the unprecedented crisis aboard the vessel, which has taken the multi-billion dollar nuclear carrier essentially out of commission for the time being.

The crisis led to an embarrassing public controversy over the Navy’s handling the outbreak. After the ship’s captain penned a fiery letter demanding greater action from top brass, subsequently leaked to the media, the captain was relieved of command of the ship. 

Capt. Brett Crozier, wrote an impassioned memo emailed to superiors on March 30 – which leaked to the press – describing an “accelerating” crisis as coronavirus swept through the ship. Crozier – who himself has contracted the virus – received a round of applause from crewmembers as he departed the ship.

Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly later resigned early this week over comments he made the ship’s crew calling Crozier’s actions “too stupid”. 

But here’s the kicker: “Modly’s trip to Guam cost the Defense Department an estimated $243,000, according to a Navy official,” reports CNN.

Via AlMasdarNews.com,

The Hebrew-language Channel 12 reported that despite the coronavirus outbreak, work is continuing and ongoing these days to complete the cement barrier on the Israeli-Lebanese border to prevent any infiltration or attacks by Hezbollah.

Channel 12 reported that the Israeli move is related to building a cement wall with a fence, and it has advanced monitoring methods, as Israel has completed the construction of a section of the wall – 15 km long – along the border of Israel and Lebanon, which reaches about 140 km.

The channel noted on its website that the Secretary-General of the Lebanese Hezbollah, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, had previously threatened Israel to penetrate the borders and take over parts of the Upper Galilee region.

The Israeli Defense Ministry has been concentrating their efforts on the Lebanese border for over a year now, following an operation to destroy a number of tunnels stretching between the two countries.

Work on the security barrier began at the start of last year [in 2018], with the joint IDF-Defense Ministry Borders and Security Fence Directorate having been cleared and received funding to build 13 kilometers (8 miles) of concrete walling along the approximately 130-kilometer (80-mile) border in order to protect the 22 adjacent Israeli villages.

Eventually the plan is to construct a barrier along the entire border — a project that would cost NIS 1.7 billion ($470 million).

The concrete barrier is designed to serve two main functions: protect Israeli civilians and soldiers from sniper attacks, and prevent infiltration into Israel by Hezbollah operatives. — The Times of Israel

N12 – המכשול בגבול לבנון – תמונת מצב https://t.co/uza682Cjt3 pic.twitter.com/FzdFL5FOGu

— מוקד החדשות של ישראל (@mokednewsil) April 8, 2020

In turn, Lebanon has issued a letter to the United Nations about Israel’s repeated airspace violations over the last few months.

The Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab said in a statement released on the National News Agency (NNA) that Lebanon will not allow Israel to continue to violate their airspace.

Japan has allocated $2.2 billion (US) of its $993 billion emergency stimulus package to help manufacturers relocate production out of China amid the COVID-19 pandemic which began in the communist nation.

According to SCMP, $2 billion (US) will be set aside for companies shifting production back to Japan, while roughly $223.5 million will be spent on helping companies move production to other countries, according to SCMP.

Under normal circumstances, China is Japan’s largest trading partner – however imports from China plummeted nearly 50% in February as the coronavirus pandemic resulted in closed factories and unfilled orders. Meanwhile, a planned visit by Chinese President Xi Jinping to Japan early this month – the first such trip in a decade – was postponed with no date rescheduled.

It remains to be seen how the policy will affect Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s years-long effort to restore relations with China.

“We are doing our best to resume economic development,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian told a briefing Wednesday in Beijing, when asked about the move. “In this process, we hope other countries will act like China and take proper measures to ensure the world economy will be impacted as little as possible and to ensure that supply chains are impacted as little as possible.” –SCMP

China’s production trainwreck has revived discussion among Japanese firms over reducing their reliance on China as a manufacturing base – while the government’s panel on future investment recommended last month that manufacturing of high-value products should shift back to Japan – while other goods should be diversified across Southeast Asia.

“There will be something of a shift,” according to Japan Research Institute economist Shinichi Seki, who noted that Japanese companies were already considering moving out of China. “Having this in the budget will definitely provide an impetus.” That said, certain industries such as automotive will likely stay put.

In an early sign of mended fences, Japan provided masks and protective gear to China at the beginning of the outbreak – with one shipment even accompanied by a fragment of ancient Chinese poetry. Beijing praised the gesture, and later declared an antiviral produced by Japan’s Fujufilm Holdings to be an effective treatment against the coronavirus despite its lack of approval by Japanese authorities.

Still, Japanese citizens have largely blamed China for fumbling the ball during the early stages of the outbreak, while Prime Minister Abe has been blamed for not restricting inbound travel from hina sooner.