iftttwall

It appears the government of the tiny north African country of Tunisia thinks there is a competition on for the most absurd overreaction to citizens ignoring and defying national ‘stay at home’ orders. 

In late March, Tunisia made headlines by deploying a “robocop” to help enforce the virus lockdown in the capital of Tunis. At that time the interior ministry confirmed it deployed a four-wheeled robot that harasses people if they’re violating the strict public health orders to shelter-at-home.

Though that earlier method which resulted in bizarre dystopic scenes of a robot interrogating random citizens evoked widespread mockery and anger on the internet, it seems authorities were unfazed, as days ago the Tunisian Army actually deployed a military helicopter against a group of young people playing a pick-up game of soccer.

Tunisian army use helicopter to end football match that violated countrywide lockdown (Video: Hamza_Zhiou). pic.twitter.com/xyX44lsdam

— Breaking Aviation News (@breakingavnews) April 12, 2020

Despite Tunisia currently only having 685 confirmed COVID-19 cases, including 28 deaths – perhaps due to early drastic strict lockdown measures – the country has maintained a state essentially close to martial law.

Tunisia’s President Kais Saied as early as March 23rd ordered the army into the streets to curb the spread of coronavirus, Reuters reported previously.

Esquire Middle East reported Sunday while featuring the new video: “However, despite the measures, some people have not been taking it seriously enough. According to a journalist based in Tunisia, a big crowd of people playing football together were in for a rude awakening.” 

How to enforce social distancing with a helicopter: in Tunisia, authorities used a helicopter to unceremoniously end a football match that violated a countrywide lockdown.  pic.twitter.com/s4iz7Gd7pw

— Samer Al-Atrush (@SameralAtrush) April 11, 2020

“Dramatic footage shows authorities using a military helicopter to shut down a football match taking place in violation of the rules,” the online magazine reported. 

According to freelance journalist Samer al-Atrush, who reports from inside Tunisia, the army was literally using the chopper to enforce social distancing.

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

After years of being maligned, millennials and Gen Z members are stepping forward in a way that creates their own “greatest” generational story.

This is not an easy Passover and Easter for the people celebrating those holidays in the midst of a pandemic. My family celebrates both given our mixed Jewish Catholic marriage. At both dinners, one chair will be empty. Our eldest son Benjamin is a premedicine student at George Washington University and working at the only psychiatric hospital in the district as a psychiatric counselor. With the coronavirus raging in the area, and many patients coming from the homeless population, Benjamin does not want to risk transmission to the family, so we have not seen him for weeks.

It is a scene being played out across the country. But it also serves as a reminder of a generation shift worthy of note. Those people on the front lines of this pandemic are members of the much maligned generations of millennials and Gen Z. They have been stepping forward by the thousands to answer a call in what may be their finest moment. However, when Bruce Aylward, a senior adviser at the World Health Organization, was asked of his greatest concerns, two groups were highlighted for two very different reasons. First were older individuals who remain the primary vulnerable victims of the coronavirus. Second were “millennials” often blamed for spreading the disease or failing to take the threat more seriously.

It is a widely stated view, often using sweeping references to the multiple generations as millennials. A Fox News medical expert objected to “these millennials and these younger generations” spreading the disease. Even Deborah Birx of the White House Coronavirus Task Force herself called on this group to stop “socializing in large groups” to curb the infection. It is during a crisis that generations can be deified or demonized. World War Two defined what Tom Brokaw called the Greatest Generation in his 1998 book of the same name. He not only explained why that cohort was our Greatest Generation but noted that a “common lament of the World War Two generation is the absence today of personal responsibility.”

As my students often love to point out, “millennial” is a term that is widely misused by my generation. By standard definitions, many millennials are now entering their 30s and 40s. They are not those kids on spring break blissfully ignoring public health warnings while blatantly proclaiming, “If I get corona, I get corona.” The fact is that even the younger generations are being misrepresented by an errant few. Many young people had read the reports that they were not at high risk of lethality, which remains the case right now. Most did not see the risk to their parents or grandparents, a danger that became far more clear as spring break was ending.

Indeed, the Greatest Generation was a title bestowed with hindsight. After all, while it is true they prevailed in World War Two, other members of that cohort started World War Two. Yet if you look at the faces of courageous hospital workers, first responders, and others in the news today, you are looking at the faces of millennials who have not only showed “personal responsibility” but assumed public responsibility for others in this fight against a deadly invisible enemy. Many did so without proper protective equipment, and many have already gotten sick in the process. Once they are done battling the pandemic, they will be left to deal with trillions of dollars in debt, climate change, and rising international instability.

Obviously, on a holiday like Passover that celebrates the sparing of a first born son, there is added meaning at a time when thousands of our own children are working in essential public health and safety sectors during this pandemic. Our pride in the decision of our son Benjamin to continue to work with psychiatric patients is mixed with continued anxiety about his situation. The reality is that the Greatest Generation is being attended to by members of millennials, Gen X, and even Gen Z. These people are glued to hospital monitors, not Game Boys or Nintendo Switches.

So could they be the new Greatest Generation? Rather than playing beer pong on South Padre Island, these young people are showing up to the front lines, some wearing garbage bags rather than personal protective equipment, to hold the line against one of the most contagious diseases in history. I wish Baby Boomers could take credit for raising them so well. However, I have my doubts. These are the kids we protected against every challenge that traditionally makes for a great generation. We gave them all trophies and declared them all to be brilliant. We removed every obstacle as we hovered above them like helicopter parents. It is astonishing they could even leave the house when many of us were done with them.

To make matters worse, we then cleared a path of accommodation for them in the workplace. In both government and business, older workers were trained how to deal with millennials. This is what is called “reverse mentoring” in which older workers are shadowed by a millennial to teach them how to speak and interact with younger workers. One professional friend was corrected by her mentoring millennial because she failed to compliment a younger worker who brought her document copies.

I asked my class about this image of millennials as very sensitive, trophy demanding, and high maintenance. Certainly, these reverse mentoring programs often seem to be essentially anthropological in character, like training explorers to deal with some inscrutable remote tribe. One of my students responded to my question by asking, “What generation do you think gave us all those participating trophies?” My students universally expressed contempt for the clear insistence of Baby Boomers on making everyone a winner and giving awards for simply showing up. They said it destroyed any value of working hard toward victory. They said they threw out those trophies. Now these same millennials are showing up despite the risk to their own lives, ventilating and feeding my generation.

I was born in 1961, the year President Kennedy famously declared during his inaugural address, “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” Baby Boomers have always adored that image of their generation. But we now have recognized that, perhaps despite our best efforts, a new generation has come of age, tempered by adversity and being disciplined by a hard and bitter pandemic. There is no trophy for that. Just thousands of Baby Boomers kept alive thanks to them.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said on Sunday it’s closely monitoring the potential reemergence of Ebola in central Africa, after two Ebola deaths were recorded there within just a matter of days. 

Health officials thought they had witnessed the end of the second-deadliest outbreak of the virus on record there, after not a single case had appeared in nearly seven weeks.

The WHO has since 2018 considered the DRC at hotspot for the deadly disease, potentially threatening surrounding countries and the rest of Africa. Ebola has killed over 2,200 since an outbreak began in August 2018. The country has been struggling since to get a handle on it.

Reuters reports of the new Ebola deaths: 

The latest victim was an 11-month-old girl, who was treated at the same health center as the previous case, a 26-year-old electrician, said Boubacar Diallo, deputy incident manager for the WHO’s Ebola response.

It is not yet clear how the electrician contracted Ebola. He had no known contacts with other Ebola patients and was not a survivor of the virus who could have relapsed, the government said on Friday.

Health officials say they are close tracking some 200 people who may have been exposed to the electrician.

It was over this weekend starting on Saturday that the Ebola outbreak in the DRC had been declared to the ‘over’. Sunday was officially supposed to mark the end of the final waiting period in which no new cases emerged. But the joy and relief was very short-lived.

“The World Health Organization (WHO) is set to declare the outbreak over on April 12 – the date marking double the disease’s 21-day incubation period since the departure of the last patient – if no other cases emerge,” Al-Jazeera reported Saturday.

The country has already been under emergency lockdown orders since late March due to the threat of coronavirus. DR Congo has at least 234 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 20 deaths.

Authored by Finian Cunningham via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Despite its charter proclaiming mutual defense and security, the NATO military alliance is showing a rather unbecoming dog-eat-dog individualistic reaction in coping with the coronavirus pandemic.

The United States, the top dog in the 30-member pack of nations, is accused of “modern piracy” after it nabbed consignments of face masks which were bound for allies Canada, France and Germany to help those nations fight against soaring epidemics of the disease.

To think too that only last year, NATO celebrated the 70th anniversary of its founding in 1949 with lots of fanfare and vain self-congratulations of how noble the alliance is. Skeptics, though, see the bloc as a Cold War relic whose security claims are but empty Orwellian excuses for warmongering and propping up obscenely wasteful corporate militarism.

The latest incident involved the alleged commandeering of 200,000 anti-infection surgical masks by the US which had been originally ordered by German authorities for police officers in Berlin. The shipment was intercepted in Thailand and directed to the US instead.

It appears that the US firm, 3M, which sources the facial masks in China, was mandated by the Trump administration to increase its exports to the US due to the emergency circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic, thereby over-riding the transaction with Germany.

However, Berlin state minister Andreas Geisel condemned the US intervention as “modern day piracy”.

There have been similar reports of medical equipment bound for Canada and France also being intercepted by US authorities. Last week, a planeload of masks about to take off from Shanghai for France was bought up by American officials who turned up at the airport at the last minute wielding wads of cash.

Washington has denied the American actions are underhand. Well, maybe not underhand, but the Wild West-style capitalism of outbidding others with bigger bucks over life-saving medical material certainly seems unethical. And what about all that jive about mutual defense and security? Where’s the fraternal coordination in a crisis?

It’s not just the US which is seen as saving its own skin in a panic. Germany and France have also imposed export bans on their companies sending medical supplies to other European countries. That has led to grievances voiced by Serbian leader Alexander Vucic and others complaining that there is no European solidarity.

Even European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen was obliged to rebuke EU states for not displaying sufficient solidarity and for closing off borders and supplies to others in need from the pandemic.

In Italy and Spain, where deaths have soared above 10,000 in recent weeks, there has been popular outrage over the lack of collective response from European and NATO allies.

Given the rapidly growing threat to public health from the Covid-19 pandemic it is understandable that nations are taking desperate measures. From an initial indifference towards the disease in the US, the authorities there are now increasingly fearful that the infections and death toll may spiral out of control.

Last week, the global infection number surpassed one million with more than a quarter of those being in the US. The American death toll may peak at multiples of what we have seen in China or Europe. This is especially because of the deprived social conditions of American workers and due to under-resourced for-profit public health services.

Coming in an election year, President Trump is seeing his reelection hopes potentially going up in smoke along with the economy hit by coronavirus. That no doubt compels his administration to pull out all the stops to contain the pandemic, which would explain the snatching of vital medical equipment from allies.

No doubt too that was why Trump gratefully accepted medical aid sent from Russia last week. The US has also received supplies from China. Which puts into perspective how tawdry are American sanctions on Moscow and Trump’s trade-war wrangling with Beijing is.

Russia and China have both despatched medical aid to Italy to help it cope with the crisis. The Italian government and public have acknowleged the show of solidarity with gratitude.

Ironically, and cheaply, some US media outlets and European parliamentarians have accused Russia and China of exploiting the pandemic for alleged propaganda purposes. It is claimed that Russian and Chinese media are spreading disinformation over Covid-19 with the objective of undermining NATO and the European Union. That’s just another iteration of the usual anti-Russia mentality which is fixated on the notion of a supposed Kremlin plot to “destroy Western democracies”.

NATO and the EU are doing a pretty fine job of undermining themselves, never mind purported input from Russia or China.

The only time NATO seems to show “solidarity” is when its member-nations attack and destroy weaker foreign countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Somalia – at the behest of top-dog USA. When the chips are down, however, and survival instincts kick in, then it’s dog-eat-dog with a snarling “Screw You!”

The saga of stealing masks from one another is surely truth-by-parody.

Authored by Joaquin Flores via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

The coronavirus pandemic has shown that the twin processes of globalization and planned obsolescence are deficient and moribund. Globalization was predicated on a number of assumptions including the perpetuity of consumerism, and the withering away of national boundaries as transnational corporations so required.

What we see instead is not a globalization process, but instead a process of rising multipolarity and a rethinking of consumerism itself.

Normally a total market crash and unemployment crisis would usher in a period of militant labor activity, strikes, walk-outs and community-labor campaigns. We’ve seen some of this already. But the ‘medical state of emergency’ we are in, has effectively worked like a ‘lock-out’. The elites have effectively flipped-the-script. Instead of workers now demanding a restoration of wages, hours, and work-place rights, they are clamoring for any chance to work at all, under any conditions handed down. Elites can ‘afford’ to do this because they’ve been given trillions of dollars to do so. See how that works?

All our lives we’ve been misinformed over what a growing economy means, what it looks like, how we identify it. All our lives we’ve been lied to about what technical improvement literally means.

A growing economy in fact means that all goods and services become less expensive. That cuts against inflation. Rather all prices should be deflating – less money ought to buy the same (or the same money ought to buy more). Technical innovation means that goods should last longer, not be planned for obsolescence with shorter lifespans.

Unemployment is good if it parallels price deflation. If both reached a zero-point, the problems we believe we have would be solved.

In a revealing April 2nd article that featured on the BBC’s website, Will coronavirus reverse globalisation? it is proposed that the pandemic exposes the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of a global supply-chain and manufacturing system, and that this in combination with the over-arching US-China trade war would see a general tendency towards ‘re-shoring’ of activities. These are fair points.

But the article misses the point of the underlying problem facing economics in general: the declining rate of profit necessitated by automation, with the increasingly irrational policies, in all spheres, being pursued to salvage the ultimately unsalvageable.

The Karmic Wheel of Production-Consumption

The shut-downs – which seem unnecessary in the numerous widely esteemed experts in virology and epidemiology – appear to be aimed at stopping the production-consumption cycle. When we look at the wanton creation of new ‘money’, to bailout the banks, we are told that this will not cause inflation/debasement so long as the velocity of money is kept to a minimum. In other words – so long as there is not a chain reaction of transactions, and the money ‘stays still’ – this won’t cause inflation. It’s a specious claim, but one which justifies the quarantine/lock-down policy which today destroys thousands of small businesses every day. In the U.S. alone, unemployment claims will pass 30 million by mid April.

Likewise, this money appears real, it sits digitally as new liquidity on the computer screens of tran-Atlantic banks – but it cannot be spent, or it tanks the system with hyper-inflation. More to the point, the BBC piece erroneously continues to assume the necessity of the production-consumption cycle, spinning wheat into gold forever.

The elites were not wrong to shut-down the cycle per se. The problem is that they cannot offer the correct hardware in its place – for it puts an end to the very way that they make money. It is this, which in turn is a major source for the maintenance of their dopamine equilibrium and narcissist supply.

This is not an economic problem faced by ‘the 1%’ (the 0.03%) . It is an existential crisis facing the meaning of their lives, where satisfaction can only be found in ever greater levels of wealth and control, real or imagined – chasing that dragon, in search of that ever-elusive high.

So naturally, their solutions are population reduction and other such quasi-genocidal neo-Malthusian plans. Destruction of humanity – the number one productive-potential force – resets the hands of time, back to a period where profit levels were higher. The algorithmically favored coronavirus Instagram campaign of seeing city centers without people and declaring these ‘beautiful’ and ‘peaceful’ is an example of this misanthropic principle at play.

That the elites have chosen to shut-down the western economy is telling of an historic point we have reached. And while we are told that production and consumption will return somewhat ‘after quarantine’, we also hear from the newly-emerged unelected tsars – Bill Gates et al – that things will never return to normal.

What we need to end is the entire theory and practice of globalization itself, including UN Agenda 21 and the dangerous role of ‘book-talking’ philanthropists like Gates and his grossly unbalanced degree of power over policy formation in the Western sphere.

In place of waning globalization, we are seeing the reality of rising multipolarity and inter-nationalism. With this, the end of the production-consumption cycle, based upon off-shore production and international assembly, and at the root of it all: planned obsolescence towards long-term profitability.

The Problem of Globalization Theory

Without a doubt, globalization theory satisfied aspects of descriptive power. But as time marched forward, its predictive power weakened. Alternate theories began to emerge – chief among these, multipolarity theory.

The promotion of globalization theory also raises ethical problems. Like a criminologist ‘describing’ a crime-wave while being invested in new prison construction, globalization theory was as much theory as it was a policy forced upon the world by the same institutions behind its popularization in academia and in policy formation. Therefore we should not be surprised with the rise of solutions like those of Gates. These involve patentable ‘vaccines’ by for-profit firms at the expense of buttressing natural human immunities, or using drugs which other countries are using with effectiveness.

The truth? Globalization is really just a rebrand of the Washington Consensus – neo-liberal think-tanks and the presumed eternal dominance of institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which in turn are thinly disguised conglomerates of the largest trans-Atlantic banking institutions.

So while globalization was often given a humanist veneer that promised global development, modernization, the end of ‘nation-states’ which presumably are the source of war; in reality globalization was premised on continuing and increasing concentration of capital towards the 19th century zones – New York, London, Berlin, and Paris.

‘Internationalism’ was once rooted in the existence of nations which in turn are only possible with the existence of culture and peoples, but was hi-jacked by the trans-Atlanticist project. Before long, the new-left ‘internationalists’ became champions of the very same process of imperialism that their forbearers had vehemently opposed. Call it ‘globalization’ and show how it’s destroying ‘toxic nationalism’ and creating ‘microfinance solutions for women and girls’ – trot out Malala – and it was bought; hook, line and sinker.

This was not the new era of ‘globalization’, but rather the usual suspects going back to the 19th century; a ‘feel-good’ rebranding of the very same 19th century imperialism as described in J.A Hobson’s seminal work from 1902, Imperialism. Its touted ‘inevitability’ rested not on the impossibility of alternate models, but on the authority that flows forth from gunboat diplomacy. But sea power has given way to land power.

In many ways it aligned with the era of de-colonialization and post-colonialism. New nations could wave their own flags and make their own laws, so long as the traditionally imperialist western banking institutions controlled the money supply.

But what is emerging is not Washington Consensus ‘globalization’, but a multipolar model based in civilizational sovereignty and difference, building products to last – for their usefulness and not their repeatable retail potential. This cuts against the claims that global homogenization in all spheres (moral, cultural, economic, political, etc.) was inevitable, as a consequence of mercantile specialization.

Therefore, inter-nationalism hyphenated as such, reminds us that nations – civilizations, sovereignty, and their differences – make us stronger as a human species. Like against viruses, some have stronger natural immunity than others. If people were identical, one virus could wipe-out all of humanity.

Likewise, an overly-integrated global economy leads to global melt-down and depression when one node collapses. Rather than independent pillars that could aid each other, the interdependence is its greatest weakness.

Multipolarity is Reality

This new reality – multipolarity – involves processes which aspects of globalization theory also suggest and predict for, so there are some honest reasons why experts could misdiagnose multipolarity as globalization. Overlooked was that the concentration of capital nodes in various and globally diverse regions by continent, were not exclusively trans-Atlantic regions as in the standard globalization model of Alpha ++ or Alpha+ cities. This capital concentration along continental lines was occurring alongside regional economic development and rising living standards which tended to promote the efficiency of local transportation as opposed to ocean-travel in the production process. As regional nodes by continent had increasingly diversified their own domestic production, a general tendency for transportation costs to increase as individual per capita usage increased, worked against the viability of an over-reliance on global transit lines.

But among many problems in globalization theory was that the US would always be the primary consumer of the world’s goods, and with it, the trans-Atlantic financial sector. It was also contingent on the idea that mercantilist conceptions of specialization (by nation or by region) would always trump autarkic models and ISI (income substitution industrialization). Again, if middle-class consumer bases are rising in all the world’s inhabited continents as multipolarity explains and predicts, then a global production regimen rationalized towards a trans-Atlantic consumer base as globalization theory predicts isn’t quite as apt.

Because the present system is premised on a production-consumption and financial model, the solutions to crises are presented as population reduction and what even appears, at least in the case of Europe, as population replacement. As cliché as this may seem, this also appeared to be the policy of the Third Reich when capitalism faced its last major crises culminating in WWII.

Breaking the Wheel

The shutdown reveals the karmic wheel of production-consumption is in truth already broken. We have already passed the zenith point of what the old paradigm had to offer, and it has long since entered into a period of decay, economic and moral destruction.

Like the Christ who brings forth a new covenant or the Buddha who emerges to break the wheel of karma, the new world to be built on the ruins of modernity is a world that liberates the productive forces, realizing their full potential, and with it the liberation of man from the machine of the production-consumption cycle.

Planned obsolescence and consumerism (marketing) are the twin evils that have worked towards the simultaneous time-wasting enslavement of ‘living to work’, and have built globalization based on global assembly and global mono-culture.

What is important for people and their quality of life is the time to live life, not be stuck in the grind. We hear politicians and economists talking about ‘everyone having a job’, as if what people want is to be away from their families, friends, passions, or hobbies. What’s more – people cannot invent, innovate, or address the greater questions of life and death – if their nose is to the grindstone.

Now that we are living under an overt system of control, a ‘medical state of emergency’ with a frozen economy, we can see that another world is possible. The truth is that most things which are produced are intentionally made to break at a specific time, so that a re-purchase is predictable and profits are guaranteed. This compels global supply chains and justifies artificially induced crashes aimed at upward redistribution and mass expropriations.

Instead of allowing Bill Gates to tour the world to tout a police-state cum population reduction scheme right after a global virus pandemic struck, one which many believe he owns the patent for, we can instead address the issues of multipolarity, civilizational sovereignty, and ending planned obsolescence and the global supply chain, as well as the off-shoring it necessitates – which the BBC rightly notes, is in question anyhow.

Earlier this week when we reported that JPMorgan has quietly halted all non-Paycheck Protection Program based loan issuance for the foreseeable future, we said that we didn’t buy the stated reason namely – the bank was drowning in (government-backstopped) applications and would be willing to forego millions in easy, recurring net interest income and that instead the real reason why JPMorgan would “temporarily suspend” all non-government backstopped loans such as PPP, is if the bank expects a default tsunami to hit, coupled with a full-blown depression that wipes out the value of assets pledged to collateralize the loans. We went on:

Furthermore, why issue loans that will default in months if not weeks, just as bankruptcy courts fill up with millions of cases (assuming the coronavirus clears out by then, as the alternative is simply unthinkable – a default tsunami without any functioning Chapter 11 or Chapter 7 process) when JPM can simply stick to the 100% risk-free issuance of government-guaranteed small-business loans which pay a handsome 1% interest, especially if it makes JPM look patriotic by doing its duty to bail out America.

Over the weekend our skepticism was confirmed when Reuters reported that JPMorgan, the country’s largest lender by assets and which will kick off earnings season tomorrow, will raise borrowing standards this week for most new home loans as the bank “moves to mitigate lending risk stemming from the novel coronavirus disruption.”

Starting Tuesday, customers applying for a new mortgage will need a credit score of at least 700, and will be required to make a down payment equal to 20% of the home’s value (something which we thought was the norm after the last financial crisis, but apparently lending conditions had eased quite a bit in the past decade).

“Due to the economic uncertainty, we are making temporary changes that will allow us to more closely focus on serving our existing customers,” Amy Bonitatibus, chief marketing officer for JPMorgan Chase’s home lending business, told Reuters.

According to Reuters, “the change highlights how banks are quickly shifting gears to respond to the darkening U.S. economic outlook and stress in the housing market, after measures to contain the virus put 16 million people out of work and plunged the country into recession.”

What the change really highlights is that after halting its exposure to plain vanilla, non-government guaranteed loans, JPMorgan is now quietly pulling out of that other market where it makes the bulk of its revenues – mortgages – ahead of a tsunami of mortgage defaults, which last week we dubbed  “The Next Crisis” as “Up To 30% Of All Mortgages Will Default In “Biggest Wave Of Delinquencies In History.”

Sure enough, JPMorgan – the fourth largest U.S. mortgage lender in 2019 – not only agrees with this dour assessment, but is taking proactive measures to mitigate its exposure to this wave of defaults but minimizing its exposure as soon as it can. And with JPM setting the stage, it is only a matter of days before all other banks follow and lock out tens of million of even credit-worthy Americans with less than prime credit scores, out of the housing market for years.

Of course, just like in the PPP case, the bank did not dwell on the true cause for this action, but instead said the change will “free up staff to handle a surge in mortgage refinance requests, which are taking longer to process due to staff working from home and non-essential businesses being closed.”  While that is certainly a factor, the biggest reason behind these changes is to help JPMorgan reduce its exposure to borrowers who unexpectedly lose their job, suffer a decline in wages, or whose homes lose value.

In short, JPMorgan wants no part of the shitstorm that is about to be unleashed on middle America.

While JPMorgan would not disclose the current minimum requirements for its various mortgage products, the average down payment across the housing market is around 10%, according to the MBA. Furthermore, the new credit standards do not apply to JPMorgan’s roughly four million existing mortgage customers, or to low and moderate income borrowers who qualify for its “DreaMaker” product, which requires a minimum 3% down payment and 620 credit score.

The U.S. housing market had been on a steady footing earlier this year, but all hell broke loose as a result of the economic paralysis and deepening depression resulting from the Coronavirus pandemic. And with would-be home buyers unable to view properties or close purchases due to social distancing measures, the health crisis now threatens to derail the sector, especially as banks are going to make it next to impossible to get a new mortgage.

To be sure, as we reported last week the residential mortgage market is already freefalling after borrower requests to delay mortgage payments exploded by 1,896% in the second half of March. And unfortunately, this is just the beginning: last week, Moody’s Analytics predicted that as much as 30% of homeowners – about 15 million households – could stop paying their mortgages if the U.S. economy remains closed through the summer or beyond. Bloomberg called this the “biggest wave of delinquencies in history.”

This would result in a housing market depression and would lead to tens of billions in losses for mortgage servicers and originators such as JPMorgan.

Authored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Chairman, Children’s Health Defense,

Vaccines, for Bill Gates, are a strategic philanthropy that feed his many vaccine-related businesses (including Microsoft’s ambition to control a global vaccination ID enterprise) and give him dictatorial control of global health policy.

Gates’ obsession with vaccines seems to be fueled by a conviction to save the world with technology.

Promising his share of $450 million of $1.2 billion to eradicate Polio, Gates took control of India’s National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization (NTAGI) which mandated up to 50 doses (Table 1) of polio vaccines through overlapping immunization programs to children before the age of five. Indian doctors blame the Gates campaign for a devastating non-polio acute flaccid paralysis (NPAFP) epidemic that paralyzed 490,000 children beyond expected rates between 2000 and 2017. In 2017, the Indian government dialed back Gates’ vaccine regimen and asked Gates and his vaccine policies to leave India. NPAFP rates dropped precipitously.

In 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) reluctantly admitted that the global explosion in polio is predominantly vaccine strain. The most frightening epidemics in Congo, Afghanistan, and the Philippines, are all linked to vaccines. In fact, by 2018, 70% of global polio cases were vaccine strain.

[ZH: The CDC has a large financial interest in pushing untested vaccines on the public and WHO is even more under the control of Big Pharma. The organization is corrupt beyond the meaning of the word. “The WHO is a sock puppet for the pharmaceutical industry.” — Robert F. Kennedy Jr.]

During Gates’ 2002 MenAfriVac campaign in Sub-Saharan Africa, Gates’ operatives forcibly vaccinated thousands of African children against meningitis. Approximately 50 of the 500 children vaccinated developed paralysis.

South African newspapers complained, “We are guinea pigs for the drug makers.” Nelson Mandela’s former Senior Economist, Professor Patrick Bond, describes Gates’ philanthropic practices as “ruthless and immoral.”

In 2010, the Gates Foundation funded a phase 3 trial of GSK’s experimental malaria vaccine, killing 151 African infants and causing serious adverse effects including paralysis, seizure, and febrile convulsions to 1,048 of the 5,949 children.

In 2010, Gates committed $10 billion to the WHO saying, “We must make this the decade of vaccines.”

A month later, Gates said in a Ted Talk that new vaccines “could reduce population”.

In 2014, Kenya’s Catholic Doctors Association accused the WHO of chemically sterilizing millions of unwilling Kenyan women with a  “tetanus” vaccine campaign. Independent labs found a sterility formula in every vaccine tested. After denying the charges, WHO finally admitted it had been developing the sterility vaccines for over a decade.  Similar accusations came from Tanzania, Nicaragua, Mexico, and the Philippines.

In 2014, the Gates Foundation funded tests of experimental HPV vaccines, developed by Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK) and Merck, on 23,000 young girls in remote Indian provinces. Approximately 1,200 suffered severe side effects, including autoimmune and fertility disorders. Seven died. Indian government investigations charged that Gates-funded researchers committed pervasive ethical violations: pressuring vulnerable village girls into the trial, bullying parents, forging consent forms, and refusing medical care to the injured girls. The case is now in the country’s Supreme Court.

A 2017 study (Morgenson et. al. 2017) showed that WHO’s popular DTP vaccine is killing more African children than the diseases it prevents. DTP-vaccinated girls suffered 10x the death rate of children who had not yet received the vaccine. WHO has refused to recall the lethal vaccine which it forces upon tens of millions of African children annually.

Global public health advocates around the world accuse Gates of steering WHO’s agenda away from the projects that are proven to curb infectious diseases: clean water, hygiene, nutrition, and economic development.

The Gates Foundation only spends about $650 million of its $5 billion dollar budget on these areas. 

They say he has diverted agency resources to serve his personal philosophy that good health only comes in a syringe.

In addition to using his philanthropy to control WHO, UNICEF, GAVI, and PATH, Gates funds a private pharmaceutical company that manufactures vaccines, and additionally is donating $50 million to 12 pharmaceutical companies to speed up development of a coronavirus vaccine.

In his recent media appearances, Gates appears confident that the Covid-19 crisis will now give him the opportunity to force his dictatorial vaccine programs on American children.