Guest Post by Paul Craig Roberts
We are hearing from many that the world after Covid-19 will be different. The question is: Different in what way? Will it be better or worse?
Elites are working to make it better for them, and worse for the rest of us. About that the evidence is clear. The Big Boys are being bailed out and their debts covered. Everyone else, except those already marginalized and without a recent work record and fixed address, got a month’s rent and extended unemployment benefits.
Big Pharma sees massive profits in the virus, Government sees more power to control
But the disparity in economic benefits is only a part of it. Powerful vested interests, such as Bill Gates and Big Pharma, are determined to vaccinate us all, and to control our movements with an internal passport called “vaccinated, health cleared” or other words to that effect. New tracking procedures and technologies are to be put in operation reminiscent of the “mark of the beast” to police the access of varous categories of people to various areas and benefits.
Experts point out that just as we cannot be vaccinated against the common cold, except perhaps for the past year’s version we cannot be vaccinated against Covid-19 and other mutating viruses, but the experts are already being shouted down. No expert opinion is to be permitted to stand in the way of vaccination profits.
Neither will nutrition and vitamin advocates be allowed to get in the way. Bill Sardi predicts that orchestrated scares generated by mandatory recalls of “toxic” vitamins await us ( https://knowledgeofhealth.com/modern-medicine-laid-bare/ ). Big Pharma is determined to acquire control over vitamins and homeopathic remedies, and the FDA is Big Pharma’s likely pawn.
Vaccination has been elevated above cure, as Big Pharma and its shills such as CNN shout down the positive experience doctors report of successful treatments with Hydroxychloroquine and Azithromycin, and the effectiveness of Vitamin C, Vitamin D3, and Zinc in strengthening the ability of immune systems to fight off the virus. Big Pharma-influenced medical orthodoxy cannot get out of the box it has been put into. When new thinking and experimentation are needed, those capable of thought are hasseled and even blocked by FDA regulations and dogmatism.
The permanent government and its security agencies see in the population’s fear and confusion opportunities to put into place more tyrannical measures, more set-asides of Constitutional Rights, more impairments on free speech. The ability of freedom to resist oppression is ever diminished.
Various descriptions of the expected dystopia are offered on the Internet. But it does not have to turn out this way. It is up to us. Demoralized and fearful, we can accept more government power as we did after 9/11. Instead, we can collectively recognize the massive failure everywhere of Western leadership and construct a more liveable and sustainable society.
The failure of leadership is an opportunity for real change
CNN, the New York Times, and the rest of the controlled media tell us every day that President Trump represents the failure of leadership. But the failure of leadership goes beyond all the leaders of the last 30 years and resides in the system itself. Global, “self-regulating,” greed-driven, financialized, soulless capitalism cannot unite people into a sustainable community.
The failure of leadership resides in the long-term failure of leadership that made Western societies vulnerable by moving high-productivity, high-valued jobs offshore in order to raise corporate profits at the expense of domestic consumer incomes. It means the movement offshore of the ability to produce medicines, N95 masks, and other needed resources for national survival. It means dependency on foreign powers. It means the inability to function without massive imports. However you look at it, globalism is a death sentence. Its only advantage is to the rich, and the advantage comes to them in the form of cheap labor that swells their profits while it shrinks domestic incomes and the purchasing power of the population.
Without incomes to drive the economy, the elites provided loans and expanded credit in order to provide spending power based in personal debt to absorb the offshored production brought home to sell in American markets. The cost of college education soared as its quality declined. Education subsidies were cut and student debt substituted in its place. Inflation was understated in order to deny Social Security pensioners cost-of-living increases. Medicare payments to health care providers were squeezed down. The social safety net was ripped again and again. More and more people fell out, and homeless populations grew providing fertile breeding grounds for Covid-19.
The income and wealth distribution in the US went from fair to extremely unequal in a short time as the rich profited from the Federal Reserve pumping trillions of dollars into the prices of financial assets and from corporations buying back their own stock, thus decapitalizing the corporation while taking the company into debt, all for the temporary benefit of higher bonuses for executives and more capital gains for shareholders. The elites killed the economy for short-run benefits to themselves.
These destructive polices were the work of greed-driven short-term thinkers—people whose only vision was “I want even more.” And it is these unworthy people, not their victims, that Uncle Sam is now rescuing. The massive unpayable debt bubble that already overhung the economy is being blown larger. The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury are in the process of destroying the US dollar in futile efforts to save the super-rich from their own greed-driven misbehavior.
In place of this insane approach to the economic crisis, there is a sane approach. The bailed out corporations and banks are in effect being purchased by the government. Therefore, they should be treated as the nationalized corporations that they are. Once nationalized, the government, unlike the corporations, can create the money to pay the salaries and health premiums. The predicted 30 or 40 percent unemployment can be avoided. It is better to pay salaries than to pay unemployment benefits. The psychological difference alone is worth a vast amount.
The inability of the high-cost American private health care system to cope with the present medical crisis is apparent. A profit-driven health care system is the highest cost system to have.
Profit is built in at every level, which raises costs to levels that private insurance and Medicare refuse to reimburse. The result is shrinkage, not expansion of the system. Just look, for example, at the number of hospitals, especially in rural areas, that have recently closed.
Moreover, the coverage of a private system—and Medicare itself—has massive gaps. The resistance to a nationalized health service is ridiculous, especially as a nationalized service can coexist with a privatized one. Two are clearly better than one.
Nationalization has numerous benefits. It permits the large unwieldly enterprises, created, for example, by the mergers of giant banks like Chase Manhattan and J.P. Morgan, to be broken up and to reestablish the separation of commercial from investment banking. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and the suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust laws were ignorant policymaking at its worse. Nationalization permits the government to bring home the offshored production of global US corporations and to put the US workforce back to work in middle class jobs. It is win-win for the American people.
Once the giant monopoly corporations are broken up, they can be privatized and returned to private ownership on a fair value basis, not on the giveaway basis of a pennies on the dollar sale. The money the government receives from their sale can be used to retire government debt.
For individuals, the life- and economy-suffocating heavy debts should be written down to levels that can be serviced by their incomes. Michael Hudson and I proposed a “debt jubilee” as a solution: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/03/25/a-brady-bond-solution-for-americas-unpayable-corporate-debt/ Others have taken up our call: https://truthout.org/articles/1200-only-goes-so-far-its-time-to-abolish-debt/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=98cb6aac-8ef8-4e0e-b80e-24a1d1f92ef6
Currently the Federal Reserve is socializing debt without writing it down. This is nonsensical as it bails out debt by expanding it.
In the US there is so much dogmatic prejudice against anything that has a tint of socialism, even as a temporary expedient measure, that thought and sensible action face strong barriers. If we cannot overcome these barriers, we are destined for far more difficult times.
Can community be restored or will nationality degenerate into the clans and tribalism of Identity Politics?
The greatest challenge we face is to restore the concept of community. There was a time when the United States was a community, a unique one as it consisted of a multitude of ethnicities. As each wave of ethnic immigrants arrived, they passed a test on the Constitution, learned the national language, and became assimilated into the American community.
This community has been destroyed by a variety of forces, the latest being Identity Politics. Identity Politics prohibits community by breaking down the population into mutually hostile groups by gender, sexual preference, race, and whatever classification can be invented or imagined. The result is a Tower of Babel. A Tower of Babel is not a community.
Instead of community, the US is a place where hatreds are cultivated with those claiming the status of victims doing the most hating and those assigned the status of victimizer being most hated. Initially, white hetereosexual males were the primary hate objects, but lately we have the transgendered hating the feminists who say that a woman is a woman, not a man who claims to be a woman. The transgendered attacks on well-known feminist leaders are violent in their language and are likely to progress into violent deeds. Various unassimilated immigrant groups battle each other over who controls disputed territory. Israel’s inhumane treatment of Palestinians has enraged Muslim immigrants against Jews. Violent racial attacks on white people are becoming more common.
For decades Women’s Studies have taught hatred of men, and Black Studies have taught hatred of Whites. This taught hatred is now supplemented by the New York Times 1619 Project. In place of assimilation, we now have mutual hatreds. How do we escape from this?
Perhaps the challenge from Covid-19 will force us to come together again in order to prevail over the virus, which in mutated versions might be with us forever. A coming together would be helped by an economic bailout perceived as fair rather than as the one-sided approach that has been taken. A debt jubilee provides the necessary fairness.
The elites by thinking only of their interests are in the way of the opportunity that crisis provides to bring people together. If we can’t be brought back together, we can forget about unity beyond the boundaries of our own victim or identity group. In place of community, we will be organized in clans of seperate identities. The absence of unity at home will make us a sitting duck for enemies abroad.
We know what the Dystopian Wish List is. Can we come together with an anti-dystopian wish list as a mutually supportive community or have the elites succeeded in atomizing us into disparate tribal hate groups?
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal
-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)
New World Order will start at the beginning of the forth coming of the 7 year tribulation…..be prepared………..
There is no Rapture or 7-year Tribulation. You’ve been Darby-ized and Scofield-ized like the rest of Judeo-Zionist Churchianity that has perverted the true Gospel of Yahweh/Yahshua and crippled this nation, spiritually. Do your homework on Margaret McDonald, Rabbi Ben Ezra (aka: the Jesuit Emanual Lacunza, John Darby and C.I. Scofield – those who paved the way for the false teachings of “The Rapture of the Saints,” and the perverted Scofield KJV Bible.
“There is not a Bible teacher nor anyone else living in the world today who has found a secret rapture in the Bible by his own independent study itself. These teachers all come to the Bible with cut-and-dried theories which they have learnt elsewhere, and twist and torture texts to fit the theory. If the spiritual pedigree of these Futurist Bible teachers could be traced back, they would all be found to spring from one source- Lacunza-the Jesuit.” — Rev. Duncan McDougall. From the book, The Rapture of the Saints.”
All Scofield King James Bible versions should be piled high into the sky and burnt, the smoke of which would resemble a mushroom cloud similar to an atomic bomb!
IPNW.
Right. Samuel Untermyer and the NYC Zionist Jews bankrolled that whole operation and placed those heretical abominations of printed matter in every seminary and bible college in America.
YOU’RE NEXT WHITEY!!!
The American Right will lose the coming Jew financed civil war unless they organize now.
http://www.russiainsider.com/en/politics/american-right-will-be-crushed-civil-war-unless-it-organizes-now/ri28185
Article by Gregory Conte on RI 1/21/2020.
Let’s start with a mass protest and non consent for forced vaccines and digital ID implants. Then let’s proceed from there.
Revelation 13:17 KJB… “And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.”
So many still remain unconvinced of the absolute truth of these words and all the implications which follow. All here are awake to our immediate situation. All here need to wake up to the warnings and solutions written long ago.
“Vulture capitalism” can be defined as the owners of businesses and industries that collude with each other, also in collusion with the “money types” (banksters) depressing wages solely to increase their stockholder “profits” at the top while impoverishing those who actually WORK, producing their products.
Wall street sees “labor” as being a necessary evil, its true value to be minimized at all cost while valuing the CEOs and “stockholders” above and beyond their true worth.
This even applies to CEOs who run their corporations into the ground while still receiving massive “rewards” for their “expertise”.
Let’s not forget the corporate vultures (a la Mitt Romney) that specialize in parting out viable businesses in order to maximize their “profits”
Henry Ford “got it right” when he CREATED a market for his cars by making them inexpensive while paying his workforce a decent wage. He realized that a well-paid workforce would be able to buy his products, among other things. It could be safely argued that Ford, CREATED the middle class.
Automobiles, once “playthings for the rich” were made affordable for the “ordinary common man”.
Henry Ford KNEW who the banksters and vulture capitalists were and made no bones about calling them out and naming them, Father Charles Coughlin did the same thing and was ostracized by the Catholic Church for pointing out the TRUTH about our vulture capitalist society.
All one has to do is look at today’s CEOs, even in failing companies, being paid exorbitant salaries, along with stock options and other “perks” while pleading poverty, pushing down wages for their employees.
Today’s capitalist “mantra” is that labor costs must be as cheap as possible while the “value” (profit) to the stockholder must be as great as possible. Sacrificing labor on the altar of “maximum profits” NEVER works in the long term.
Of course, in the short term, with cheap Chinese goods flooding the market, the economy looks, good, but without CONSUMERS who hold jobs that pay reasonably well, all bets are off. There needs to be a balance between profits and labor.
Presently, labor is looked upon as a “necessary evil” to be minimized at all costs. The problem arises-without labor there are no consumers. As I previously stated, a “balance” must be maintained. Labor is not evil, but a necessary component of capitalism.
Pre-WW2 Germany’s economic successes and the rapid rise of the German economy was predicated on labor being assigned “value”and monetized-something that is (and has been) missing in capitalist societies today.
If labor costs need to be trimmed to assure “profit” at the top, something is seriously wrong. In fact, in the well-paid American automobile industry, labor costs account only for approximately 10% of total costs.
Offshoring production results in consumers (customers) being “lost”.
As to “tariffs”, the American country ran on tariffs from its inception until 1913, when the “income tax” and “federal reserve” was established.
The American economy is being propped up by the “social safety net” which obscures the TRUE economic situation in the U S .
“Sacrificing labor on the altar of ‘maximum profits’ NEVER works in the long term.”
doesn’t how “long term” is defined play a role in that?
Like PCR, you’re railing against a straw man. Any resemblance between laissez-faire capitalism and the crony fascist fake-money regime we have now is purely coincidental.
Common sense is in short supply in our world. The wisdom of the past is discounted and disregarded as being irreverent in our new world. The truth is, there is nothing new about our world, it is simply a rehashing of what has come before.
Nothing progresses in a linear fashion. Everything has a cycle. A pendulum can only swing so far in one direction, before it must reverse its course and thereby seeks balance. Debts can only be extended so far before they must be reconciled. Government can only grow so large before it collapses under the weight of its incompetence and corruption.
If you want to know where we are going, simply look to the past. It is a cycle and we continually repeat the past as we never seem to learn from it.
‘But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation – and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of a summer.’ Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)
I had no idea you were such a socialist. While I agree that the current crony capitalist system is broken, I vehemently disagree that adding more govt to the equation via nationalization, will fix it. The illicit marriage of govt and business is what has created the oligarchy we presently enjoy. Govt has been and continues to be, the problem. A divorce and removal of govt from all business is the only solution. A nationalization will give you, effectively, a Soviet style of govt where people may have jobs but productivity is all but non-existent because of the crushing of innovation, which is essential to driving a flagship economy. Innovation only comes through a profit driven system. I am completely shocked by much of what you have proposed here. I hope your current insanity it’s temporary and a level head is in your near future.
Fuckin’ Fauci has probably already signed his book deal and trademarked America’s Savior or some bullshit like that.
I’m reading today that the trendline for states that didn’t impose lockdowns is the same as those that did. Would any of the dipshits in the press care to ask these assholes holding daily press conferences about that?
For those of you who actually still care, it’s time for massive civil disobedience. All the lefties love civil disobedience, right? Dissent is patriotic, right?
Form flash mobs, every hour of the day, around the country. You and 500 of your newest friends walk right around the cops as they try to block you from going to the beach, or to the state park, or what have you. Film it all.
Go about your life and by your actions tell these fuckers to piss off.
Almost through the “Fourth Turning” book and according to Strauss and Howe, we’re pretty much smack-dab in the middle of the “turning” which should resolve in about 4 or 5 years, one way or another.
I think Mr. Roberts makes some excellent points. Why not nationalize these companies rather than making we taxpayers on the hook for the bailout with no equity?
And I really like the “jubilee” idea.
Roberts has come up with another crazy fucken idea on how to construct society when what is needed is not new ideas but old ones adopted. We must have competing governments. One size does not fit all, especially an oversized one like we now have. Let people vote with their feet. People who want to live in a way consistent with free association, free markets, voluntary exchange, and all the rest that has been described for a free people for lo these many years should have a government and all those like Roberts or Gates or Soros, or Merkel or any other fucking socialist moron should have a government. Let them compete for citizens. The hard part is not thinking up new ideas on how things ought to be organized and “led.” The hard part is freedom minded people grabbing a spot of land and holding it.
Eastern Washington, northern Idaho, eastern Oregon, and maybe northern California would do. And if there is no Jefferson around, maybe someone around here (Admin) would like to begin to organize a “movement” to that effect. We don’t need strong leaders, we need small government with a big stick to keep the immigrants from changing the structure of what works.
Debt should not be “forgiven”, it should be repudiated! No one is doing anyone any “favors” that way and the legitimacy of the debt does not go unchallenged.
PCR makes many good points in this piece and does so with an admirable insouciance, not using that word even once. Seems from afar that the USA is long past the age of innocence that once characterized much of it. It will be hard to undo more than a half century of deracination and decay. Pushing that snowball back up the hill is not likely to be the solution of choice if things begin truly falling apart on a day-to-day basis. Until we see how things unfold a bit more, all bets are off on how things will go from there.
The other day here, there was a video of a caucasian woman yelling at some caucasian kids for not acting like good little quaranteenagers . In the post, the woman was dubbed a “Karen”. I thought that was kind of funny. In my head, I heard “Karen” in the way Ray Liotta’s character yelled at his wife (played by Lorraine Bracco) toward the end of the movie “Goodfellas”.
But, then, today I read an article entitled: “The Difference Between a ‘Karen’ and a ‘Becky,’ Explained” which defined a “Karen” as a white woman who purposely “weaponizes” her “privilege”.
It’s so damn boring and predictable when things always get politicized into identity politics. Change the channel. Next.
Shoot, why didn’t someone think of socialism before as a means of solving all our problems? I mean, the only thing better than big pharma running the government is big government running big pharma. Right?
They hate certain people but love the tax and skillset those hated people provide. If the hated would John Galt the system for just 30 days it would make this lockdown look like first grade…..