As the geniuses running the western financial bubble sometimes called an “economy” continue to double down on their obsession to pump a dead financial system with ever more trillions in stimulus spending, arguments are raging among brainwashed economists living in denial over the oncoming systemic collapse. The thought of engineers on the Titanic passionately arguing over whether they should accelerate or decelerate the speed of the boat whose hull has long been torn to shreds by an iceberg comes to mind.

On one side of the debate, figures like U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Fed Chair Jerome Powell champion an emerging new wave of high interests as “a plus for society’s point of view” in order to counteract the increasing rates of inflation sweeping across every sector of the economy. This camp asserts that this spike in interest rates should not be done immediately however, and only begin in 2023, and until then interest rates should be kept at near zero percent.

On the other side of the debate, economists among Germany’s largest bank scream that waiting until 2023 is deadly. Not a second should be lost before increasing interest rates now in order to stop a “time bomb” from destroying both the USA and the world. On June 7, Deutsche Bank Chief Economist David Folkerts-Landau wrote passionately that Washington’s decision to wait until 2023 before raising interest rates “could create a significant recession and set off a chain of financial distresses around the world” leading to “a time bomb” waiting to explode… unless interest rates were hiked up to 20% just as they had been done in 1980 by then Fed Chairman Paul Volcker which saw interest rates collapse from 12.5% in 1980 to 3.8% in 1982.

Both sides however, are either completely ignorant or outright liars trying to distract citizens and policy makers from the real systemic nature of the oncoming meltdown that can only be dealt with if certain fundamental facts of recent history are kept in mind.

Why is Inflation going to Skyrocket?

Since a pandemic induced nations to lockdown their economies, rescue packages and unlimited money printing to keep people from literally starving, and banks from collapsing has become a new normal. $24 trillion dollars in COVID related debts have been generated internationally, while U.S. Federal Reserve balance sheets have doubled over the same period to $8 trillion with increasing rates of liquidity injections flushed into the Too Big to Fail banks since September 2019. So far, consumer price inflation has risen by 4.2% in 12 months, but based on the obvious reality of $28 trillion of totally unpayable U.S. debt, sustaining a $1.2 quadrillion derivatives bubble time bomb alongside the breakdown of supply chains and a dysfunctional green infrastructure program pushed by Biden, the runaway threat of inflation and even hyperinflation is firmly (or should be) on everyone’s mind.

Now if Deutsche Bank’s Folkerts-Landau was talking about the insane money printing disassociated from any systemic restructuring of the over-bloated Too Big to Fail zombie banks or serious recovery program, then he should be applauded for raising the spectre of unbounded inflation. His nation did after all have a direct experience with this disastrous policy back in 1923 when hyperinflation tore the German economy to shreds and set the stage for the rise of Nazism shortly thereafter. (1)

Sadly, both Folkerts-Landau and Yellen are instead pushing policies that will not only accelerate hyperinflation a century after Weimar, but usher in a new central bankers’ dictatorship that had only been subverted in 1933 due to the fortuitous intervention of U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt.

So What Did Volcker Do?

Since economists are told repeatedly that Volcker’s interest rate hikes of 1979-1982 saved the U.S. economy, let’s look at what really happened and why Volcker described his philosophy as a “controlled disintegration”.

While inflation did indeed spread across the USA in the 1970s, it is worth asking: why did this actually happen and did Volcker’s reforms have anything to do with solving that problem? Or did both the problem and its nominal solution drive a singular agenda of controlled destruction of the USA now playing out four decades later?

For one, the shift away from industrial long term development with the 1971 floating of the U.S. dollar off of the gold reserve standard went a long way to turning a once-forward thinking productive, manufacturing-driven economy into a consumer cult, post-industrial waste. This “post industrial” age was characterized by outsourced industries relying ever more on increased rates of imports of things the USA once made for itself. A FIRE economy (of Finance, Insurance and Real Estate speculation) increasingly took over the once powerful manufacturing sector.

Agro-Industrial production was replaced by service sector jobs as the USA became ever more reliant on cheap imports made from China, Mexico and other poor nations who were expected to remain labor intensive sweat shops for eternity.

This detachment of the “valuation” of the dollar from all physical measurable standards went a long way to killing the buying power and raising inflation as monetary circulation increased ever more by speculation on oil, currencies or other goods that often had no connection with reality. Investment rates into cutting edge science both in the atomic realm of fusion and the macro realm of space exploration were cut off drastically (see graphs) as general vital infrastructure maintenance and improvement collapsed drastically across all OECD nations trapped in the “new post-industrial normal”.

Non-military related science R & D also saw a collapse during this period from 2.5% of GDP in 1971 to a mere 0.4% of GDP in 2020 (see graph).

Deregulation and market liberalization castrated the role of the sovereign nation state ever more from 1971 onward, as “laissez faire” policies dominated a once-protectionist landscape. Rather than continuing the successful practice of “parity pricing” which defined the real growth of western nations during the 25 post-WW2 years, the markets run by speculators looking only towards maximizing profit defined the prices of goods.

Last but not least, oil price increases of 400% during the 1973 OPEC crisis is admitted to have played a big role driving the 1973-79 inflation, but as researcher William Engdahl demonstrated in his 1992 Century of Oil, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had more of a role in manufacturing this crisis from scratch by keeping hundreds of tankers replete with petrol from being unloaded in the USA and facilitating the 400% increase with the assistance of several high level oil ministers in the Middle East beholden to Kissinger. In recent years, Saudi Arabia’s former OPEC minister at the time corroborated Engdahl’s research stating:

“I am 100 per cent sure that the Americans were behind the increase in the price of oil. The oil companies were in in real trouble at that time, they had borrowed a lot of money and they needed a high oil price to save them.”

Putting the Trilateral Commission into Perspective

This shift of the U.S. economy from its former role as an industrial producer economy to a consumer cult of speculation and monetarism was accompanied by a broader international shift then being orchestrated by a cabal of misanthropic technocrats managing an organization known as the Trilateral Commission founded in 1973 by Chase Manhattan President David Rockefeller III and a sociopathic grand strategist named Zbigniew Brzsinski.

The aim of the Trilateral Commission was to destroy the sovereign manufacturing base of both the USA and international developing sector alike.

For anyone who might consider this paranoid “conspiracy theorizing”, it is useful to be reminded that among the highest echelons of the U.S. executive branch under President Carter included members such as Brzezinski, Walter Mondale (Vice President), Harold Brown (Defense Secretary), Cyrus Vance (Secretary of State), Michael Blumenthal (Treasury Secretary), James Schlesinger (Energy Czar) and Paul Volcker himself as Fed Chair. Henry Kissinger was also a leading member of this group.

Among the many goals of the Trilateral Commission laid out Brzezinski in his 1970 Manifesto “Between Two Ages” was the need to drive the transition of society towards what Brzezinski referred to as the “technetronic era” saying:

“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

During a 1975 Trilateral Commission study called Crisis in Democracy, overseen by Zbigniew, Clash of Civilizations ideologue Samuel Huntington wrote: “we have come to recognize that there are potential desirable limits to economic growth. There are also potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of democracy… a government which lack authority will have little ability to impose on its people the sacrifices that will be necessary”.

So what sort of sacrifices did these Trilateral Commission technocrats think necessary in a healthy society liberated from its foolish belief in scientific and technological progress that animated the policy outlook of such rifraf as Franklin Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, Charles De Gaulle or Bobby Kennedy?

This is where Volcker steps in.

The Meaning of ‘Controlled Disintegration’

In 1978, faced with unbounded inflation, Paul Volcker spoke at a conference at Warwick University London stating that “a controlled disintegration in the world economy is a legitimate object in the 1980s”.

Upon ascending to the chair of the Fed a year later, he wasted no time in applying this program. Not only did he render available credit impossible for many small and medium enterprises by raising interest rates to 20%, Volcker also ensured that third world nations then being sucked back into a neocolonial debt slavery under the IMF and World Bank economic hitmen, would be sucked into ever greater rates of unpayable debts as a new form of slavery. Between 1979-1982, third world debt skyrocketed from 40-70% across the board leading to a major debt crisis.

During this period U.S. agricultural output collapsed, metal cutting machine tools fell by 45%, automobile production fell by 44.3% and steel production fell by 49.4% as bankruptcies skyrocketed leaving only mega-corporations strong enough to pay the draconian rates while absorbing small bankrupted companies and farms like a modern day Borg consuming ever greater rates of cheap labor and cheap resources from poor nations.

To understand how these countries remained poor and exploitable, one need only visit the Malthusian State Department/CIA Report authored by Henry Kissinger in 1974 called NSSM-200 that called for a total depopulation program targeting 14 poor nations then desirous of industrial growth. Those targeted included India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines, Turkey, Nigeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil. Kissinger’s logic was simple: If these nations develop, their populations will grow. If their populations grow they will use their resources. BUT since it is in the strategic interests of the USA to use those resources, these nations must be kept down.

Nationalist leaders among those target nations who had a different idea were targeted for assassination or regime change throughout the 1980s.

Back in the USA, Paul Volcker additionally took aim at commercial banks by forcing vast increases in reserve requirements making lending additionally difficult (although speculation in investment banks were facilitated with the Garn-St. Germaine Act of 1982). This act and accompanying financial de-regulation during this period of “Reaganomics” led the way to the new age of universal banking beginning with Thatcher’s Big Bang in 1986, the end of Canada’s Four Pillars that same year and finally the killing of Glass-Steagall in 1999. The dream of social Darwinists of an unregulated world of each against all where only the strongest and fittest and most sociopathic survive was now real. In the Soviet Union, this process of nation stripping and deregulation that took decades to wreck havoc on western economies was accelerated in the space of a decade of shock therapy. In China, where agents of Soros and the CIA like Zhao Ziyang (Prime Minister and CCP General Secretary from 1987-89) attempted to impose liberalizing reforms like a Chinese Gorbachev, the rape was luckily stopped before a Russian model could be imposed.

With Glass-Steagall out of the way, commercial and investment banks could unite to form “the ultimate, all-powerful, many-headed financial conglomerate” as outlined by Lord Jacob Rothschild in 1983 (2).

In 2001, as Zbigniew Brzezinski’s Islamicist monstrosity created to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan had been incubated throughout the 1990s, a new program of never-ending wars in the Middle East was launched. While the Middle East was turned inside out under a new age of war, the financial services sector avoided several near blowouts in 1997, 1998 and 2000 (with the collapse of the dot com/Y2K bubble). This was done by deregulating over-the-counter derivatives which turned a $70 trillion time bomb (in 2001) into a $650 trillion time bomb in 2008 when the housing market collapsed.

While opportunities then existed to impose Glass-Steagall and break up the banks as had been done earlier by FDR in 1933, hyperinflationary money printed was chosen instead resulting in another 12 years of insanity as the bubble continued to expand and the physical economic productive base continued to atrophy.

Today, we sit on not one bubble concentrated in housing prices, or oil, or currencies, but rather a multitude of bubbles in literally everything from commodities, bitcoin, housing, commercial real estate, bundled student debts, automotive loans, and the over-valued U.S. currency itself.

The COVID Pandemic did not “cause” the current systemic crisis as many fools have parroted for over a year, but has merely served as cover to obscure the real systemic causes of the long-awaited collapse and accelerate the controlled disintegration of the system as the world is prepared to transition into a “new technetronic age” which has come to be dubbed a “Great Reset” or “Fourth Industrial Revolution”.

We are told by the likes of Klaus Schwab, or World Economic Forum trustees Mark Carney, Christine Lagarde, and Chrystia Freeland that the age of free market capitalism which reined from 1971-2020 has come to an end, and that a new epoch of “green finance” under a decarbonizing world is upon us. Under this new world order of “stakeholder capitalism” citizens will learn to own nothing and be happy, while polluting companies who commit climate sins will be choked of all credit.

As former Bank of England head Mark Carney recently wrote of the new age of “net zero” in his new book Values Building a Better World for All, (which many of recognized as a precursor to his replacement for Canada’s Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister):

“It could be generations before the gains of the fourth industrial revolution are widely shared. In the interim, there could be a long period of technological unemployment sharply rising inequalities and intensifying social unrest”.

Klaus Schwab has publicly fantasized of this new age of human-machine merging of microchipped brains interfacing with the global net, and Tony Blair has giddily said that “vaccination is, in the end, going to be your route to liberty”.

So, while that story might sound a tad bleak, there remains only tiny obstacle to the successful implementation of this anti-human program.

This obstacle is located in the Greater Eurasian Partnership led by Russia and China and joined by 135 nations of the world that have signed onto the Belt and Road Initiative. These are nations who would rather have a multipolar future vectored around large scale industrial growth than be sacrificed on the alter of Gaia by a technocratic neo-Malthusian priesthood. This multipolar paradigm operates under a financial and geopolitical philosophy at total odds with the closed, entropic obsession of the forces associated with Kissinger, Blair, Carney or Schwab, and that is a very good thing not only for the Eurasian world, but for nationalist forces within the west as well.

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com 

(1) In June 1922, 300 marks exchanged $1 US and in November 1923, it took 42 trillion marks to get $1 US! Images are still available of Germans pushing wheel barrows of cash down the street, just to buy a stick of butter and bread (1Kg of Bread sold for $428 billion marks in 1923). With the currency’s loss of value, industrial output fell by 50%, unemployment rose to over 30% and food intake collapsed by over half of pre-war levels.
(2) In his 1983 speech, Lord Jacob Rothschild stated: “two broad types of giant institutions, the worldwide financial service company and the international commercial bank with a global trading competence, may converge to form the ultimate, all-powerful, many-headed financial conglomerate.”

The Pew surveys have found the same thing: In almost all countries surveyed, other than Poland, public approval of America’s leadership plunged when Trump replaced Obama, and that low approval stayed down throughout Trump’s Presidency.

However, also on December 17th, the great investigative journalist David Sirota headlined at his “The Daily Poster” blog, “End The Austerity Loop”, and he documented that President Obama’s response to George W. Bush’s policies that had crashed the U.S. economy (and actually the entire world’s economy) had actually been to institute a bailout of the megabanks (“broker-dealers”), and — as soon as it was passed by Congress — Obama’s Administration refused to help the people who had been evicted from their homes as a result of what Wall Street had done. Obama said instead that all of the federal money had already been spent and he wouldn’t authorize increasing the federal debt even more than he already had authorized in order to bail out Wall Street.

Of course, Congress was also culpable in all of these Robin-Hood-in-reverse policies (protecting Wall Street while abandoning Main Street), but the ultimate leadership was at the top, and it was a policy of sheer hypocrisy. Trump has merely been hypocritical in a different way, and espousing a different set of excuses for his failures.

The article in the Spring 2011 Review of Banking & Financial Law, by Tae Yeon Kim, “Pay It Back (TARP Developments)”, described the situation as follows:

The purpose of Title XIII (“Pay it Back Act”) of the DoddFrank Act, according to Senator Michael Bennett, was to “rebuild the credibility of our financial system, save taxpayers billions of dollars, and finally move to end the TARP”12 by “prevent[ing] further government spending, recaptur[ing] taxpayers’ investment in financial institutions, and ensur[ing] that repaid funds are used for deficit reduction.”13 Under Title XIII, TARP funding authorized under the EESA was reduced from $700 billion to $475 billion.14 Also, no additional TARP funds can be spent on any program initiated after June 25, 2010; any money repaid to the TARP fund must be used for deficit reduction only.15 Title XIII amends the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008. The Treasury must allocate the sale of obligations and securities, as well as fees paid by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Federal Home Loan Banks to the General Fund of the Treasury (“General Fund”).16 The funds must be “dedicated for the sole purpose of deficit reduction” and “prohibited from use as an offset for other spending increases or revenue reductions.”17 Similarly, TARP funds provided to a state under ARRA and rejected by the Governor or by the State legislature, or funds withdrawn or recaptured by the head of an executive agency not obligated by a State or local government, will be rescinded and deposited in the General Fund.18 Once in the General Fund, the money will be “dedicated for the sole purpose of deficit reduction” and “prohibited from use as an offset for other spending increases or revenue reductions.”19 Section 1306 further provides that discretionary ARRA appropriations that have not been obligated as of December 31, 2010 shall also be rescinded and deposited in the General Fund for the sole purpose of deficit reduction.

On 18 February 2011, National Public Radio headlined “TARP Watchdog Says Foreclosure Plan Is Failing” and reported that

Neil Barofsky, the special inspector general for the massive federal bank bailout program, or TARP, is stepping down from his post in March. He says the Obama administration’s program to prevent foreclosures is broken, and that many of the people it’s supposed to be helping are now “in a far worse place than they would have been had this program not existed.”

The megabanks had gotten their federal help, but foreclosures and boarded-up windows and storefronts were appearing everywhere and were lowering the surrounding property-values, so that both lower and middle-class real estate were getting progressively worse and more run-down. The TARP Bailout Program saved the megabanks but not their victims; and here is why, as explained even by a conservative, pro-corporate, source:

The Problem With the TARP Program for Homeowners

Why didn’t more people take advantage of the HAMP and HARP programs? This would have pumped billions into the economy and helped millions of homeowners avoid foreclosure.

The problem was the banks. They cherry-picked applicants and refused to consider those with lower equity. Banks were too wary of risk to allow the programs to work.

These were the same banks, who just a few years before, were giving out loans to anyone because they were making money on the investments that were created from the loans.

There was no risk to the banks, as all these loans were guaranteed by Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Banks didn’t want to be bothered with the paperwork involved with homeowners who had mortgage insurance.

On 25 July 2016, a mortgage-industry website headlined “Obama administration presents a look at life after HAMP” and acknowledged “that there’s more work to be done.” (That was putting it mildly.)

The Obama Administration did nothing whatsoever to reduce those foreclosures. In fact, there was even less prosecution of financial and other white-collar crimes than there had been under Bush.

The admirers of President Trump are equally deceived — no less deceived than the admirers of Obama had been. Trump promised to “drain the swamp” and did none of that.

In foreign policies, Trump continued Obama’s wars (including aggressive sanctions), such as against Syria, and against Russia, and against Iraq, and intensified Obama’s war against China and against Iran and against Venezuela — all of these being against countries that had never threatened to invade the U.S., and so all of them were (and are) actually wars of aggression, not of defense.

Americans are profoundly deceived to accept such people as leaders, instead of to reject them as liars and as traitors.

Most Americans — and many people throughout the world — prefer one or the other of those two American Presidents on the basis only of political prejudices, but the actual differences between Obama and Trump were more stylistic than substantive.

President Trump, at the end of his Presidency, is polling, among the American public, both as one of the worst Presidents ever and as one of the best Presidents ever, and this is a reflection of the astoundingly sharp partisan divide now between Democrats and Republicans. Pathetically few Americans recognize that both of the two Parties represent only the billionaires — not the American people. This pervasive miscomprehension, by the public, results because the billionaires control not only the Government, they also control the press — they shape the population’s perceptions, so as to make this aristocracy (America’s billionaires) acceptable to the public, directing the public’s rage to be against the opposite Party, instead of against the billionaires themselves, who actually control the country.

Consequently, Democratic Party voters think that that Party is their  Party, and Republican Party voters think that that Party is their  Party. However, in reality, both Parties are controlled by America’s hundreds of billionaires — not  by the Party’s voters. Obama represented the Democratic Party’s billionaires, and Trump represented the Republican Party’s billionaires (other than the ones who, in 2020, disliked Trump so much that they donated instead to the Biden campaign or to one of its PACs). This is a Government of the people, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. It’s no democracy, whatsoever, and the U.S. Constitution has been covered-over, by the U.S. aristocracy’s Supreme Court’s rulings, to become, by now, merely a parchment document, which ‘means’ whatever the (majority of) the U.S. aristocracy’s Supreme Court say  that it means. Although those jurists are paid by the public, they don’t represent America’s Founders, and they don’t represent the American people. They represent — and protect the interests of — America’s billionaires. They were chosen because that is what they had been doing before they had been chosen. If they hadn’t been doing this, they wouldn’t have been chosen. That’s today’s American reality.

Since the world was taken off the gold reserve system way back in 1971, a new age of “post-industrialism” was unleashed onto a globalized world. Humanity was given a new type of system which presumed that both our nature and the cause of value itself were located in the act of consuming. The old idea that our nature was creative, and that our wealth was tied to producing, was assumed to be an obsolete thing of the past… a relic of a dirty old industrial age.

Under the new post-1971 operating system, we were told that the world would now be divided among producers and consumers.

The “have-not producers” would provide the cheap labor which first world consumers would increasingly rely on for the creation of goods they used to make for themselves. “First world” nations were told that according to the new post-industrial rules of de-regulation and market economics, that they should export their heavy industry, machine tools and other productive sectors abroad as they transitioned into “white collar” post-industrial consumer societies. The longer this outsourcing of industries went on, the less western nations found themselves capable of sustaining their own citizenries, building their own infrastructure or determining their own economic destinies.

In place of full spectrum economies that once saw over 40% of North America’s labor force employed in manufacturing, a new addiction to “buying cheap stuff” began, and a “service economies” took over like a cancer.

To make matters worse, the many newly independent nations struggling to liberate themselves from colonialism were told that they would have to abandon their dreams of development since those goals would render the formula of a producer-consumer stratified society impossible to create. Those leaders resisting this edict would face assassination or CIA overthrow. Those leaders who adapted to the new rules would become peons of the new age of “Economic Hitmen”.

As the great president William McKinley had observed long ago (1), nations who develop full spectrum economies also have higher quality, educated citizens using advanced technology which causes more costly goods… meaning no dollar stores and no sweat shops.

The Case of China: Producer for the World

When Henry Kissinger negotiated the opening up of China in the 1970s, the intention was much less benevolent than the story projected.

By the time Deng Xiaoping announced the “opening up” of China in 1978, Kissinger had already managed the economic paradigm shift of 1971, the artificial “oil shock therapy” of 1973 and authored his 1974 NSSM 200 Report which transformed U.S. Foreign Policy from a pro-development orientation towards a new policy of depopulation targeting the poor nations of the global south under the logic that the resources under their soil were the lawful possession of the USA.

Kissinger, and the hives of Trilateral Commission/CFR operatives to which he was beholden never looked on China as a true ally, but merely as a zone of abundant cheap labor which would feed cheap goods to the now post-industrial west under their new dystopic producer-consumer world order. It was in that same year that Kissinger’s fellow Trilateral Commission cohort Paul Volcker announced a “controlled disintegration of western society” which was begun in full with the Federal Reserve’s interest rate hikes to 20% that ensured a vast destruction of small and medium businesses across the board.

Believing China (then still largely an impoverished third world country) to be desperate enough to accept money and short-term salvation after years of trauma induced by the Cultural Revolution. Under Kissinger’s logic, China would receive just enough money to sustain a static existence but would never be able to stand on its own two feet.

Unbeknownst to Kissinger, China’s leaders under the direction of Zhou Enlai, and his disciple Deng Xiaoping had a much longer-term strategic perspective than their western partners imagined.

Deng Xiaoping and Zhou Enlai in 1962

While receiving much needed revenue from foreign exports, China began to slowly create the foundations for a genuine renaissance which would be made possible by slowly learning the skills, leapfrogging technologies and acquiring means of production which the west had once pioneered. Zhou Enlai had first enunciated this visionary program as early as 1963 under his Four Modernizations mandate (Industrial, agricultural, national defense and science and technology) and then restated this program in January 1976 weeks before his death.

This program manifested itself in the July 6, 1978 State Council Forum on the “Principles to Guide the Four Modernizations” informed by the findings of international exploratory missions conducted by economist Gu Mu’s delegations around various advanced world economies (Japan, Hong Kong, Western Europe). The findings of Gu Mu’s reports laid out the concrete pathways for full spectrum economic sovereignty with a focus on cultivating the cognitive creative powers of a new generation of scientists that would drive the non linear breakthroughs needed for China to ultimately break free of the rules of closed-system economics which technocrats like Kissinger wished the world adhere to.

Deng Xiaoping broke from the radical Marxism prevalent among the intelligentsia by redefining “labor” from purely material constraints and elevating the concept rightfully to the higher domain of mind saying:

“We should select several thousand of our most qualified personnel within the scientific and technological establishment and create conditions that will allow them to devote their undivided attention to research. Those who have financial difficulties should be given allowances and subsidies… we must create within the party an atmosphere of respect for knowledge and respect for trained personnel. The erroneous attitude of not respecting intellectuals must be opposed. All work. Be it mental or manual, is labor.”

Over the course of the coming decades, China learned, and like any student, copied, reverse engineered and reconstructed western techniques as it slowly generated capacities that ultimately allowed them press on the limits of human knowledge outpacing all western models.

Scientific and technological progress became the driving force of its entire economy and by 1986, the “863 Project for Research and Development” was announced which focused on areas of space, lasers, energy, biotechnology, new materials, automation and information technology. This project became the driver for creative innovation guided by the National Science Foundation and was upgraded to the 973 Basic Research Program in 2009 to: “1) support multidisciplinary and fundamental research of relevance to national development; 2) Promote frontline basic research; 3) Support the cultivation of scientific talent capable of original research; and 4) Build high-quality interdisciplinary research centers.”

Although China is often accused of intellectual theft, the reality is that it has begun to clearly outpace western nations becoming a pioneer on every level of science and technology. China now registers more patents than the USA, has become the cutting edge leader of high speed rail engineering with over 30 000 km, bridge building, tunneling, as well as water management, quantum computing, AI, 5G telecommunications, and even space science becoming the first nation to ever land on the far side of the moon with an intent to mine Helium 3 and develop permanent bases on the Moon in the coming decade.

All of these cutting edge fields of science and engineering are being organized by the ever-growing Belt and Road Initiative which has taken on global proportions and integrated itself into a deep alliance with Russia, Iran and over 135 nations who have signed onto the BRI Framework stretching from Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, Asia, and Europe.

This is the system which the USA and other western nations could have joined on multiple occasions, but which has instead been targeted as a global threat to western hegemony. According to the logic of those western utopians who refuse to let go of their old outdated 1971 script for a new world order, China’s New Silk Road must be subverted at all costs since it is very well understood that it would become the basis for a new world system as the old globalized paradigm comes crashing down faster than the Hindenburg.

So what can be done?

Amidst this anti-China war policy has emerged another policy which began as a “Trade War” and escalated to a potential “decoupling” of the USA from China under President Trump.

This decoupling would involve cutting off reliance on using China as a cheap labor exporter, and even industrial production source as well. Obviously, friendship and collaboration between the USA and China is vitally important for the long-term survival of civilization, but is this decoupling an intrinsically bad thing in the short term?

Maybe not.

If the USA is to survive the oncoming collapse and break free of its apocalyptic war agenda, then certain realities WILL have to occur. These realities include (but are not limited to):

1) Regaining its lost industrial potential, with an emphasis on the machine tool sector which the west once enjoyed as a world leader

2) Regaining the lost scientific and technological capacities which the USA once had when it still valued productive thinking under the days of JFK and NASA

3) Regaining a grasp of education which values productive citizens over consumer subjects

4) Regaining control over national credit under federal banking, dirigisme and other long-term investment practices that rely on regulating Wall Street speculation and other unproductive forms of banking.

How might these vital capacities be regained?

For one thing, protectionism will be necessary. China has used protectionist measures to a great effect, and every nation has the right, if not the duty, to apply protective tariffs in the defense of their economic sovereignty in order to ensure that it is more profitable to purchase locally than abroad. In fact, it was only by employing protective tariffs in the pre-Globalized past that the USA (or any other nation for that matter) built up their industrial capacities in the first place while these capacities were always lost whenever free trade, de-regulation policies were imposed.

Parity Pricing is vital if the USA is to rebuild the small and medium agro-industrial enterprises that once generated the vitality of society decades ago. Parity pricing was a common practice among western governments between 1945-1970 which imposed certain constraints on price variability of certain goods to ensure that prices never dropped so low that the manufacturers could afford to stay in business or rise so high that consumers cannot afford to buy said goods. Today’s agricultural crisis in the USA could only be reversed were such policies implemented quickly (2).

National banking is another vital pre-condition to a recovery. Under the period of 1791-1836, during the 1862-1869 greenback system, or during FDR’s 1933-45 use of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, national credit was generated by acts of purchasing bonds via the Treasury and emitting loans directly to companies which would be mandated to carry out the jobs needed to build great infrastructure megaprojects (Erie Canal, transcontinental railway, or Tennessee Valley authority). Similar practices have been revived under China’s state banking system today which provides the majority of the loans to companies building the New Silk Road either in China itself or abroad.

While detractors call these sorts of policies “trade war” or “offenses to the laws of the World Trade Organization”, as I laid out in a 2018 lecture, they are exactly what is needed for any sort of recovery to occur.

Before the USA could ever possibly work as a reliable partner on the Belt and Road Initiative or any nation of the emerging multipolar alliance, it must learn to stand once again on its own two feet.

This transitionary process may have painful aspects to it, much like a drug addict trying to wean themselves off of heroine, but if the intent is genuine, and the means lawful, then it is certainly possible, even at this late date.

As the USA weans itself off of its addiction to China’s cheap goods, China will be better prepared to produce ever more high quality goods on a “fair trade basis” for markets which are also committed to full spectrum economic goals whether in Asia, Africa, or beyond.

Everything hinges on the upcoming U.S. elections

President Trump has outlined a series of measures that reflect a pro-industrial orientation which the mainstream media has worked very hard to cover up.

Over his first term, Trump not only rejected the precepts of laissez faire economics by cancelling the anti-China Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) but renegotiated the nation-killing NAFTA giving nation states of North America the right to intervene into their economic destinies for the first time since 1994. He also broke with a 50 year anti-space tradition by giving full backing to a renewal of the space program with the Artemis Program and outlined a global cooperative space platform with the Artemis Accords. Just as JFK’s Apollo program generated over $10 for ever $1 invested in non-linear ways, so too will the current goal of creating a permanent lunar base and launch pad to Mars generate similar effects as new discoveries and inventions with immense industrial applications will come online. This was renewed in a GOP policy tweet of Oct. 23:

Trump has also called for a national re-industrialization program designed to bring back vital heavy industries to rust belt dead zones of America that have fallen into dark age conditions over the past 4 decades and in his current platform has called for a continental high speed rail system. For the Arctic, Trump has given federal endorsement to the Alaska-Canada railway which itself brings the long-overdue Bering Strait rail tunnel endorsed by both Russia and China ever closer to reality. This policy represents a total break from the Pentagon’s Arctic war policy also active in Alaska.

On economic diplomacy, Trump has broken from the anti-growth program launched by Obama’s technocrats by ending the moratorium on nuclear power investments by green lighting the International Development Finance Corporation’s investment into 2500 mW of nuclear energy for South Africa and another nuclear plant for Poland (which currently relies on 70% coal power and wants 9 GW of nuclear by 2040). This change in policy brings the USA into harmony with the modus operandi of both Russia and China who are the only other nations seriously investing in nuclear power within their own nations or Africa.

Similarly, Trump has won the ire of many regime changers by defunding CIA-front democracy movements like NED in Hong Kong, Ukraine and Belarus while introducing economic win-win diplomacy in helping to resolve the Serbia-Kosovo crisis via investments into rail, roads and infrastructure. This approach also complements the restoration of a non-interventionist defense strategy that began with Trump’s collaboration with Russia in Syria and continues with his withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria over recent months.

In every category economic, military, diplomatic, space and beyond, two obvious paradigms are clashing represented by two opposing Americas.

If Trump is able to maintain control of the presidency over the coming weeks and months of storms (don’t fool yourself. It is unlikely that the results of the election will be finalized in November or even December) then there is a chance that the USA may find the moral fitness to survive by regenerating its lost industrial base and changing its behaviour in conformity with natural law.

Should this be done, then the USA will be able to re-acquire its claim of “independence” for the first time in decades. With that independence, will come the slow reconstruction of its decrepit infrastructure, intellectual and cultural decay and achieve the basis for a full spectrum sovereign economy. This hoped-for USA would be a very different creature from the one the world has known since the murder of JFK in 1963 and this would be a nation that could be trusted to act in its own true self interest as a partner to other like minded nations working for their own true self interests under the umbrella of international projects that benefit all participants.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Notes

(1) Promoting the McKinley tariff, the martyred President said: “They say ‘everything would be so cheap,’ if we only had free trade. Well, everything would be cheap and everybody would be cheap. I do not prize the word `cheap.’ It is not a word of hope; it is not a word of comfort; it is not a word of cheer; it is not a word of inspiration! It is the badge of poverty; it is the signal of distress; and there is not a man in the audience, not a white-haired man, who, if he will let his memory go back, will not recall, then when things were the cheapest, men were the poorest…. Cheap? Why, cheap merchandise means cheap men, and cheap men mean a cheap country; and that is not the kind of Government our fathers founded, and it is not the kind their sons mean to maintain. If you want cheap things, go where you can get them…. We want labor to be well paid.”
(2) Time Magazine recently stated that the USA “lost 100,000 farms between 2011 and 2018; 12,000 of those between 2017 and 2018 alone.”

The stark fact is that Gulf stability rests on selling enough energy to buy-off internal discontents, and to pay for supersized surveillance and security set-ups.

For the moment, times are hard, but the States’ financial ‘cushions’ are just about holding-up (albeit only for the big three: Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and Qatar). For others the situation is dire. The question is, will this present status quo persist? This is where the warnings of shifts in certain global tectonic plates becomes salient.

The Kuwaiti succession struggle is emblematic of the Gulf rift: One candidate for Emir, (the brother), stands with Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi-led ‘war’ on Sunni Islamists (the Muslim Brotherhood). Whereas the other, (the eldest son), is actively backed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Qatar and Turkey. Thus, Kuwait sits on firmly on the Gulf abyss – a region with significant, but disempowered Shi’a minorities, and a Sunni camp divided and ‘at war’ with itself over support for the Muslim Brotherhood; or what is (politely called) ‘autocratic secular stability’.

Interesting though this is, is this really still so relevant?

The Gulf, perhaps more significantly, is held hostage to two huge financial bubbles. The real risk to these States may prove to come from these bubbles, which are the very devil to prick-down into any gentle, expelling of gas. They are sustained by mass psychology – which can pivot on a dime – and usually end catastrophically in a market ‘tantrum’, or a ‘bust’ – and with consequent risk of depression, should Central Banks ever try to lift the foot off the monetary accelerator.

The U.S. ubiquitous ‘asset bubble’ is famous. Central Bankers have been worrying about it for years. And the Fed is throwing money at it – with abandon – to keep it from popping. But as indicated earlier, such bubbles are highly vulnerable to psychology – and that may be turning, as the celebrated V-shaped, expected economic recovery recedes into the virus-induced distance. But for now, investors believe that the Fed daren’t let it implode – that the Fed has absolutely no option but go on throwing more and more money at it (at least until November elections … & then what?).

Less visible is that other vast ‘asset bubble’: The Chinese domestic property market. With its closed capital account, China has a huge sum (some $40 trillion) sloshing around in collective bank accounts. That money can’t go abroad (at least legally), so it rotates around between three asset markets: apartments, stocks, and commodities somewhat whimsically. But investing in apartments is absolutely king! 96% of urban Chinese own more than one: 75% of private wealth is represented by investments in condos – albeit with 21% standing empty in urban China, for lack of a tenant.

Long story, short, the Chinese massively chase property valuations. Indeed, as the WSJ has noted “the central problem in China is that buyers have figured out the government doesn’t appear to be willing to let the market fall. If home prices did drop significantly, it would wipe out most citizens’ primary source of wealth, and potentially trigger unrest”. Even during the pandemic – or, perhaps because of it as the Chinese piled-in – prices rose 4.9% in June, year on year. The total value of Chinese homes and developers’ inventory hit $52 trillion in 2019, according to Goldman Sachs; i.e. twice the size of the U.S. residential market, and outstripping even the entire U.S. bond market.

If it sounds just like America’s QE-inflated asset markets, that’s because it is. As things stand, both the Chinese residential and the U.S. equity bubbles are unstable. Which might fracture fist? Who knows … but bubbles are also vulnerable to pop on geo-political events (such as a U.S. naval landing on one of China’s disputed South Sea islands, to which China is promising, absolutely, a military response).

No one has any idea how Chinese officials can manage the property bubble, without destabilizing the broader economy. And even should the market stay strong, it creates headaches for policy makers, who have had to hold off on more aggressive economic stimulus this year – which some analysts say is needed, partly because of fears it will inflate housing further.

Ah … there it is: Out in plain view – the risk. The condo-trade has hijacked the entire Chinese economy, tying officials’ hands. This, at the moment when Trump’s trade war has turned into a new ideological cold war targeting the Chinese Communist Party. What if the Chinese economy, under further U.S. sanctions, slides further, or if Covid 19 resurges (as it is in Hong Kong)? Will then the housing market break, causing recession or depression? It is, after all, China and Asia that buy the bulk of Gulf energy: Demand shrinks, and price falls. The fate of the Gulf States’ economies – and stability – is tied to these mega-bubbles not popping.

Bubbles are one factor, but there are also signs of the tectonic plates drifting apart in a different way, but no less threatening. Bankers Goldman Sachs sits at the very heart of the western financial system – and incidentally staffs much of Team Trump, as well as the Federal Reserve.

And Goldman wrote something this week that one might not expect from such a system stalwart: Its commodity strategist Jeffrey Currie, wrote that “real concerns around the longevity of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency have started to emerge”.

What? Goldman says the dollar might lose its reserve currency status. Unthinkable? Well that would be the standard view. Dollar hegemony and sanctions have long been seen as Washington’s stranglehold on the world through which to preserve U.S. primacy. America’s ‘hidden war’, as it were. Trump clearly views the dollar as the bludgeon that can make America Great Again. Furthermore, as Trump and Mnuchin – and now Congress – have taken control of the Treasury arsenal, the roll-out of new sanctions bludgeoning has turned into a deluge.

But there has also been within certain U.S. circles, a contrarian view. Which is that the U.S. needs to ‘re-boot’ its economic model with a Tech-led, ‘supply-side’ miracle to end growth stagnation. Too much debt suffocates an economy, and populates it with zombie enterprises.

In 2014, Jared Bernstein, Obama’s former chief economist said that the U.S. Dollar must lose its reserve status, if such a re-boot were to be done. He explained why, in a New York Times op-ed:

“There are few truisms about the world economy, but for decades, one has been the role of the United States dollar as the world’s reserve currency. It’s a core principle of American economic policy. After all, who wouldn’t want their currency to be the one that foreign banks and governments want to hold in reserve?

“But new research reveals that what was once a privilege is now a burden, undermining job growth, pumping up budget and trade deficits and inflating financial bubbles. To get the American economy on track, the government needs to drop its commitment to maintaining the dollar’s reserve-currency status.”

In essence, this is the Davos Great Reset line. Christine Lagarde, in the same year, called too for a ‘reset’ (or re-boot) of monetary policy (in the face of “bubbles growing here and there) – and to deal with stagnant growth and unemployment. And this week, the U.S. Council on Foreign Relations issued a paper entitled: It is Time to Abandon Dollar Hegemony.

That, we repeat, is the globalist line. The CFR has been a progenitor of both the European and Davos projects. It is not Trump’s. He is fighting to keep America as the seat of western power, and not to accede that role to Merkel’s European project – or to China.

So why would Goldman Sachs say such a thing? Attend carefully to Goldman’s framing: It is not the Davos line. Instead, Currie writes that the soaring disconnect between spiking gold price and a weakening dollar “is being driven by a potential shift in the U.S. Fed towards an inflationary bias, against a backdrop of rising geopolitical tensions, elevated U.S. domestic political and social uncertainty, and a growing second wave of covid-19 related infections”.

Translation: It is about U.S. explosive debt accumulation, on account of the Coronavirus lockdown. In a world where there is already over $100 trillion in dollar-denominated debt, on which the U.S. cannot default; nor will it ever be repaid. It can therefore only be inflated away. That is to say the debt can only be managed through debasing the currency. (Debt jubilees are viewed as beyond the pale.)

That is to say, Goldman’s man says dollar debasement is firmly on the Fed agenda. And that means that “real concerns around the longevity of the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency, have started to emerge”.

It is a nuanced message: It hints that the monetary experiment, which began in 1971, is ending. Currie is telling U.S. that the U.S. is no longer able to manage an economy with this much debt – simply by printing new currency, and with its hands tied on other options. The debt situation already is unprecedented – and the pandemic is accelerating the process.

In short, things are starting to spin out of control, which is not the same as advocating a re-boot. And the debasement of money is inevitable. That’s why Currie points to the disconnect between the gold price (which usually governments like to repress), and a weakening dollar. If it is out of the Fed’s control, it is ultimately (post-November) out of Trump’s hands, too.

Should confidence in the dollar begin to evaporate, all fiat currencies will sink in tandem – as G20 Central Banks are bound by the same policies as the U.S.. China’s situation is complicated. It would in one way be harmed by dollar debasement, but in another way, a general debasement of fiat currency would offer China and Russia the crisis (i.e. the opportunity), to escape the dollar’s knee pressed onto their throats.

And for Gulf States? The slump in oil prices this year already has prompted some investors to bet against Gulf nations’ currencies, putting longstanding currency pegs with the dollar under pressure. GCC states have kept their currencies glued to the dollar since the 1970s, but low oil demand, combined with dollar weakness would exacerbate the threat to Gulf ‘pegs’, as their trade deficits blow out. Were a peg to break, it is not clear there would be any obvious floor to that currency, in present circumstances.

Against such a backdrop, the royal successions underway in Gulf States might perhaps be regarded a sideshow.

As economist Mark Thornton put it in a Q&A published at the Mises Wire, America now has this President and a generation in power that has no concept of monetary restraint, and as a result, has no heed for government policy restraint – either domestically or externally. While the Fed’s policy is unprecedented and even outlandish, other G7 central banks are going to even greater extremes. By colluding in a monetary race to the bottom – each state debasing their currencies jointly and collectively – these ‘Vichy’ Central Bankers both conceal the dollar de-basement, whilst piling fuel onto the illusion of ‘no consequences; no accountability and no limit’ to the dollar’s fire-power.

So the U.S. government feels empowered to sanction China over human rights in Xinjiang, over its visa policy in Tibet, over Huawei actions, over Hong Kong – and even thinks to travel-ban the entire CCP. China’s crime? It didn’t become ‘like U.S.’ (as we had anticipated). Non-compliant Russia, like Iran, is already sanctioned up to its eyes, and in the Middle East, U.S. officials have relished the prospect of starving and financially bludgeoning Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan and Iran into line. Gulf States too – even Israel in respect to China – are required to collude in financial siege-war of one sort or another – or face having their ‘security umbrella’ cancelled.

There are many in Washington who regard this as America ‘winning’ – and good election tactics, too. There is however, old wisdom about such pursuit of a dismembered world. It is the story of Osiris. The ‘world’ then, was Egypt. Osiris had inherited the fertile Nile Delta, and his younger brother, Seth, had received only a lesser, more arid portion.

Mean-spirited and destructive, Seth aspired to ‘grasp the world’. He murdered Osiris, and hid his body; but Osiris’ wife/sister, Isis, after endless search, finally found it. Osiris was outraged and angry at her: he again seized the body. He dismembered it into parts. And had the parts hid, and spread far around distant regions. Yet Isis did it again: She ‘came back’. She found Osiris’ ‘bits’, re-assembled him, and had Apollo blow life into him. They had a son: Horus.

There are many messages in this story, but a principal one was that Seth’s dismemberment of Osiris brought only violence, instability and calamity to Egypt. Horus fought for decades against Seth. But neither ultimately were able to prevail. The fighting brought only strife and ruin – and Egyptians came to detest Seth as the symbol of a destruction that tainted everything. Eventually the council of gods decided that Seth be expelled and exiled from Egypt, for all the tensions and turmoil he had caused.

Seth was understood by Egyptians to represent a capsized human; a one-sidedness of character that had failed to accomplish wholeness – was incomplete, and inadequate. Significantly, it was only by the intervention of the opposite pole, the female Isis, in alchemical marriage to Osiris, who brought back fecundity – in all its meanings – and harmony to Egypt.

If we look back to the ancient concept of the ‘two lands’ of Egypt – the fertile Black Lands of the Nile and the barren Red Lands of the surrounding desert – we get an inkling of how the waxing and waning of one polarity, yielding ultimately to the rise of its ‘opposite’ value, was understood in earlier times. Everything is in flux: polarities swap places, as in a formal dance, and potencies of the invisible world jostle and shove against the ebb and flow of human activity.

The ‘Two Lands’ of Egypt represents something more than some mere geographical distinction. In ancient Egypt, the physical landscape had a metaphysical resonance of which the ancient Egyptians were keenly aware: The Two Lands were comprehended as the two contending, yet mutually interpenetrating, realms of life and death.

The combined landscape of the Two Lands is one of ‘paradise’ and ‘hell’, at war with one another, yet united in precarious balance and reciprocity. ‘Horus’ thus symbolises the harmonious, creative unity of cultivation in the valley; and ‘Seth’ that of in-coherence, of chaos and death in the desert areas.

But even Seth, who in so many respects symbolises a destructive, voracious negativity, embodies too a certain duality. He was never perceived as intrinsically bad or evil, but as a necessary component of the Cosmos: aridity, desiccation and death. His ambivalence is experienced in the Egyptian desert: mercilessly hot, with nowhere to shelter from the sun; but in this landscape of rock and silence, where no bird flies and no animal, save the desert viper moves, there is too, a deep stillness which the Valley cannot give.

Seth may, in one sense, personify the force of life-sapping, decay and death, but his dramatic polarity lies precisely in his very necessity to renewal. Ancient Egyptians saw themselves held in this balance and interplay of polarities: life and death, abundance and scarcity, light and dark – the very landscape teaches the principle of oscillating polarities. Maintaining balance was a succession of destructions and renaissances; allowing Seth’s insidious, sapping barrenness to be overcome by Horus’s subsequent reviving inundations, was the central preoccupation of the Egyptian King. Seth and Horus were thus to be held in equilibrium.

We might understand this double movement – compounded in aspects that are always in polar tension, but yet a co-constituent to each other – as being somehow a reflection, an analogy, and a consequence of a deep inner life-rhythm: the systole and diastole of human creativity itself.

Later historians such as Plutarch (Greek writer, d. CE 120) observed that Seth is said to have wandered the region where he fathered sons – whom, fuelled by their resentment at Egypt’s treatment of them, chose to redeem the mortal enmity of Egypt, by precisely identifying themselves with a vengeful, ambitious – but now exclusive deity – Seth. In short, Plutarch is saying that the Sethian impulse and polarity was perpetuated (i.e. that it descended down through the human condition).

The U.S. may believe that dismembering and scattering the institutional limbs of its perceived nemeses – China, Russia and Iran – will Make America Great Again; but this ancient wisdom tells U.S. that it will fail, precisely because of its one-sidedness, and lack of the feminine faculty of empathy – and not because a weaponized reserve currency is no potent tool.

The region faces – like ancient Egypt – a period of travail, as neither the U.S., nor its nemeses, initially will prevail; but ultimately, America will be, like Seth, forced into exile to taste its own bile at the failure of its exceptionalist mission (and deity).

The upside here is that this crisis holds the promise to discredit the mainstream illusion that there exists, and there needs be, therefore, no limits – and no accountability – to using the Fed’s dollar printing press, and threats of exclusion from the dollar sphere, to impoverish lives in much of the rest of the world. And that this action is consequence free – that it portends no come-back.

I would love to see human civilization strike a balance with nature and at the risk of sounding like a naïve idealist, I sincerely do believe that this is ultimately our destiny as a species.

My personal experience has led me to the conclusion that we have only failed to achieve this paradigm as a species due to the system (and cultural influence) of oligarchism which has managed to stubbornly sink its claws parasitically onto its host for a few too many generations- corrupting and perverting everything that it dominates.

Due to the pervasiveness of oligarchism, mass exploitation, wars and pollution have lain waste to ecosystems and countless human lives alike, and as the neo-liberal order continues to careen towards the inevitable breakdown of a 2 quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble which our un-repentant decades of decadence has caused, very serious choices will need to be made.

False Remedies to the Oncoming Meltdown

Many false solutions will be presented as society wakes up to the burning building it is trapped in, and unless our minds have become aware of those false solutions, (not to mention those arsonists managing this fire from the top), then many well-intentioned souls from all walks of life may sign onto their own death warrants and accidentally usher in a solution far worse than the disease they sought to remedy.

Before you, dear reader, accuse me of being overly dramatic in my claims, let me bring your attention to a June 3^rd event sponsored by the World Economic Forum (WEF) entitled The Great Reset featuring impassioned calls by leaders of the IMF, World Bank, UK, USA, corporate and banking sector to take advantage of COVID-19 to shut down and “reset” the world economy under a new operating system entitled the Green New Deal.

WEF founder and Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab said “the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions… Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

Schwab’s message was amplified by Prince Charles who gushed over the this golden opportunity to radically modify human behaviour in ways that decades of environmentalism have failed to accomplish when he said: “We have a golden opportunity to seize something good from this [COVID-19] crisis. Its unprecedented shockwaves may well make people more receptive to big visions of change,”

While the World Economic Forum is usually known as a forum of global corporate elites, this organization branched out in recent years to become a leader in global pandemic coordination as a co-sponsor of the creepy October 2019 Event 201 and has embraced leaders of typically “anti-capitalist” resistance groups like Greenpeace who now speak regularly at their events.

Jennifer Morgan (current head of Greenpeace) stated at the event “We set up a new world order after World War II… We’re now in a different world than we were then. We need to ask, what can we be doing differently? The World Economic Forum has a big responsibility in that as well—to be pushing the reset button and looking at how to create well-being for people and for the Earth.”

So is this definition of international wellbeing truly what it appears? Or does something more nefarious lurk under the surface? How can we know?

Those who are ignorant to their history will easily believe the cover story they are being fed by the players managing the World Economic Forum. The cover story is as follows: A new system was shaped during a two week conference in Bretton Woods New Hampshire 1944 under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt and this was designed to export the New Deal program which reconstructed America after the Great Depression to the rest of the world. Since our current crisis demands a new system in a similar manner as the world needed a reset in 1932 and again in 1945, so too must we do so again.

On the surface this is all true. But here’s the rub…

FDR’s New Deal was premised around: 1) Stopping a bankers’ dictatorship in 1933 when he singlehandedly torpedoed the Bank of England/League of Nations’ London Conference, 2) imposing mass regulation on Wall Street speculators under Glass-Steagall laws and the broad bank acts that broke up megabanks, created the SEC, protected legitimate savings and put hundreds of elite bankers on trial under the Pecora Commission, 3) launched vast infrastructure projects under the Tennessee Valley Authority, Rural Electrification projects, Grand Coulee Dam, Hoover Dams etc which increased the national productive powers of labor turning America into a FULL SPECTRUM agro-industrial economy capable of constant growth, and 4) fought valiantly to guarantee those same capabilities to all nations of the world in total opposition to the British Empire.

Today’s Green New Dealers use the form and name of FDR’s historic precedents but are totally committed to the opposing goals.

Under the global response mechanisms being proposed by the oligarchs running the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset strategy, green energy grids designed to lower the world temperature by two degrees within 30 years by de-carbonizing society will have the effect of reducing the productive powers of labor of all nations rather than increasing those powers as the original New Deal had done.

Meanwhile Cap and Trade/Carbon pricing mechanisms designed by the Bank of England and the Carney/Bloomberg Task Force on Climate Related Financial Disclosures promise to create financial incentives to reduce the world population potential by deconstructing the industrial economic order needed to sustain the nearly 8 billion souls on the surface of earth currently. In a recent speech to the City of London the former head of the Bank of England who now leads Boris Johnson’s Climate Finance team said:

“Achieving net zero emissions will require a whole economy transition – every company, every bank, every insurer and investor will have to adjust their business models. This could turn an existential risk into the greatest commercial opportunity of our time.”

Carney, who also happens to be the architect of the Central Bankers Climate Compact has previously threatened destruction on all businesses that refuse to conform to the new green standards which he and his controllers wish be imposed upon the world saying: “the firms that anticipate these developments will be rewarded handsomely. Those that don’t will cease to exist”.

While the new reset green system promises to feature more regulations onto finance, will those regulations be controlled by sovereign nation states in the interests of the general welfare of their people or by private central banks in the interests of an oligarchical elite obsessed with control, balance, and keeping nations gullible, confused, divided, depopulated and impoverished?

I think you can figure this out for yourself.

The only form of a legitimate Great Reset that will protect people, nations and reduce the influence of the financial oligarchy WHILE actually protecting the environment in the long-run is tied to the modern International New Deal known as the Belt and Road Initiative. By creating a new system of finance tied to long-term development, agro-industrial growth of full spectrum economies across the world, China and its allies have taken up the torch which was dropped by Franklin Roosevelt’s early death on April 12, 1945. Any arrangement for a new economic reset would have to adhere to the proven principles of anti-fascist political economy that have been proven to work in the past and continue to work in the present.

A powerful start to this reset would involve President Trump agreeing to an emergency summit of Russia-China and the USA followed by a five-nation summit featuring the UK and France under the guidelines set forth by President Putin in January 2020 and reiterated again weeks ago.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Yet as becomes more clear every day, far from maintaining the current global structure, created by U.S. bankers and diplomats and dictated to the rest of the world back in 1944, all these efforts are just accelerating the disintegration of the Old Order.

There is a supreme irony to this, for the most important creator of the Old World Economic and Financial Order – the one that is now disintegrating as we watch – was none other than the patron saint of liberalism – a man who has become a non-person in the United States in the past 40 year “Age of Reagan” (as I explain in my 2015 book “Cycles of Change“) – legendary 32nd President of the United States President Franklin Roosevelt.

It is fascinating to watch Democratic Party leaders today as they desperately try to conjure up the great appeal and success of the only man ever to win four U.S. presidential held up Roosevelt’s leadership through World War II as a model of leadership for today.

That should be entirely true, But neither current (and sinking fast) putative party nominee Joe Biden nor his always-collapses-at-the-crucial-moment Senator Bernie Sanders haven’t a clue what they are talking about.

Two factors were central to Franklin Roosevelt’s extraordinary success as a war leader – and Sanders and Biden are both pathetically blind to both of them:

The first was Roosevelt’s unhesitating and consistent support for his allies, especially the unprecedented flow of Lend Lease aid in food, trucks and other equipment to the Soviet Union which was carrying the main burden of the combat war against Nazi Germany almost single-handedly.

The second was the remarkable fiscal prudence and caution Roosevelt showed throughout his presidency, especially in his creation of the landmark Social Security program.

Roosevelt was vastly more cautious and even cynical in developing this program to give financial support for the first time in history to aging Americans.

Although the landmark congressional legislation was passed in 1935 and became law on August 14 of that year as part of the so-called “Second New Deal,” financial contributions out of the pay checks of all legally working Americans only started to be withdrawn in 1937. Even then, it was still another three years before the first U.S. citizen ever to receive a check from Social Security picked it up: That was 76-year-old Ida Fuller of Vermont on January 17, 1940. Her first check came to the generous sum of $41.30.

From 1935, when the legislation was passed to vast popular acclaim, it was another six years at the height of the Great Depression, when more Americans were starving and dying of poverty and related hardships than ever before or since in the nation’s history before a single individual actually got any benefit from it.

The actuarial calculations on which Roosevelt designed Social Security were even more cynical and ruthless.

Social Security was to be paid to retirees after the age of 65. But at the time, the median age of Americans was 61. Only a tiny privileged minority survived to the age of 65 or beyond.

Roosevelt practiced exceptional caution to keep the U.S. economy and currency stable during the New Deal and the Great Depression. Contrary to popular (Republican) myth, he was adamantly opposed to bankrupting the country either in his own time or in that of his grandchildren. “It is almost dishonest to build up an accumulated deficit for the Congress of the United States to meet in 1980,” he famously said. “We can’t do that. We can’t sell the United States short in 1980 any more than in 1935.”

Roosevelt’s exceptional caution contrasts with the wild spending both Republicans and Democrats from Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump have been practicing, driving their country into final bankruptcy during the current coronavirus crisis.

Comments financial analyst and former London merchant banker Martin Hutchinson in his May 4 “Bear’s Lair” column, “the CBO (Congressional Budget Office)’s estimate of budget deficits of 18% of GDP in 2020 and 10% of GDP in 2021 are truly frightening. …they bring the likely bankruptcy of the U.S. government much closer than seemed likely previously, probably to around 2030.”

Indeed, given the terrifying vulnerability of the U.S. financial system to the collapse of the $2 trillion junk bond market used to financial the collapsing fracking energy sector, projecting a meltdown U.S. financial crisis a balmy ten years ahead seems wildly optimistic.

In fact, the road from Franklin Roosevelt’s cautious callousness in designing Social Security so that it would not pay a penny to those who needed it for another five years (until, indeed, the Great Depression was already over!) to the “spend endlessly, spend now” crazed panic of both Republicans and Democrats is a very clear one:

It is the road of palliative Western liberalism, open borders and global Free Trade: It is a road that inevitably leads to ever huger debt burdens, ever-declining standards of living and inevitable ruin.

By contrast, the extremely fiscally cautious, highly conservative financial policies that Russian President Vladimir Putin continues to follow get no respect from the spendthrift, zero interest rate maniacs on Wall Street. Yet it is Russia that is currently in a far stronger position to ride out the global financial as well as pandemic crises than the United States.

In statecraft and economics as in architecture, the most important issue is not how high you build but how well you build and how deep you build – How good your foundations are.

The storm of pandemic is already heralding the storm of financial crisis. That crisis can indeed be solved, but only by abandoning the old shibboleths, the old false gods that, as Dostoyevsky predicted at the very beginning of our modern industrialized, interconnected Age, would inevitably bring us to our ruin, unless reined in and reversed in time.

We stand by hoping that it will work to reflate markets collapsing from a catastrophic mispricing of assets. At least some of us do. I don’t.

I hope it fails and it’s because those inflated prices fuel the very global political order that is anathema to human advancement.

President Trump is finally happy with his FOMC chair, Jerome Powell, after he opened the door to unlimited quantitative easing, nearly unlimited liquidity injections via the repo markets, and taking interest rates to the zero-bound.

It’s clear that the Keynesians at the Fed and the U.S. Treasury Dept. have no answers to the problems in front of them. They are simply doing what they always do when a crisis hits. Print money and hope someone still believes the new money is worth buying.

The sudden supply and demand side shock to the global economy thanks to the COVID-19 coronavirus is outside of their frame of reference.

To best understand what we’re dealing with here you have to understand how these people think. Modern economic theory, based on John Maynard Keynes’ General Theory of 1936, imagines the economy as a bathtub.

And that bathtub is constantly draining as credit is destroyed. Money flowing out of the economy has to be replaced with a constant stream of new money, in the form of new credit, or the bathtub drains. The velocity of new money has to keep up with old money or the system drains.

When the credit markets through the transmission of new money through central bank policy cannot keep the bathtub full, governments are supposed to step up with fiscal spending in the form of deficits to make up the difference.

This is then supposed to stimulate aggregate demand and, in turn, the credit markets to keep everything running. This is done to chase an ever-larger global gross product as measured by total spending.

I’m not here to argue as to why this is patent nonsense. I’m going to state that it is. And I state this without reservation. Because it places zero value on the cost of stealing time from the productive portion of the society to reinforce the unproductive.

That’s why all money printing is fundamentally immoral. It’s thievery, transferring wealth from the holders of money, savers, to the holders of the new money.

That deflation the Keynesians are so afraid of is the cure to the malinvestment of capital resources incurred because of the last time the government intervened to refill the bathtub.

This system is ultimately a Ponzi scheme piling credit on top of credit until there are no more greater fools to sell the new debt to.

That’s the system we have. And it is collapsing precisely because the world is situated at the point where there is little more productive capacity to monetize and pull that capital from the future to fund the new debt.

It won’t matter if we replace this system with pure helicopter money without debt as the Modern Monetary Theory proponents argue. We’re already doing a version of this by having the central banks buy debt they never intend to sell on the open market. So, the debt itself is without value. The money printed from those bonds is as much scrip as if the bond had never been issued.

But the time lost by people in pursuit of uneconomic ends by mispricing risk and servicing debt they are legally obligated to service is real.

So, ultimately, the difference at this point between what we’re seeing from the central banks now and MMT is a matter of accounting and definitions. But it doesn’t solve the basic problem that prices for things want to adjust downward.

And I remind you that Russian President Vladimir Putin understood all of this when he said no to OPEC+ and lower oil production. This pricked the so-called “Everything Bubble” and now the world is realizing just how important it is for capital markets to reflect the actual goods and services produced by the global economy not a financialized multiple of that value thereof.

It’s important to make this distinction now because as a hard money advocate and Austro-libertarian thinker it is my duty to counter the rising cries for someone to save us from the evil monster of deflation.

Those most vulnerable to this deflation of asset prices are the very people who own most of those assets and use them as cudgels to beat down those who oppose them — think Iran, Venezuela and, most openly, Russia.

The good news is that they can’t stop the deflation. Quantitative easing is, in the real world, deflationary because it signals to markets that the central banks are so scared of the future that it cannot be trusted to market forces. This feeds the fear and causes people to hoard money they feel is undervalued, thereby exacerbating the cycle.

And today those monies are the U.S. dollar, gold and, to a lesser extent, Bitcoin.

So, the Fed fired its bazooka. Congress fought for a couple of days in deciding how it would provide its support through government means (fiscal policy) and refill the bathtub.

The rest is now a question as to whether anyone still believes this makes any sense anymore.

The ECB has yet to truly act other than to intervene in the sovereign debt markets to keep rates from exploding to the upside. The Fed has the floor right now, the ECB is waiting in the wings. It will have to act soon as Italy’s economy goes into freefall and its insolvent banking system has to find a way to survive.

Because the reality is that what is really on trial here is the idea that any of these people in charge have, collectively, one single clue as to what to do to stave off a complete collapse in confidence.

I would like to think that they do, that they know in their heart of hearts that I am right and allowing asset prices to deflate is the cure and the inflation of prices has been the real disease we should be fighting alongside COVID-19.

And the main reason they will not allow that deflation is because it directly threatens their personal power base and the fundamentally unfair system they have profited from through the extraction of unearned wealth at the world’s expense.

I believe some of them understand this dynamic. The true vultures, like George Soros and Paul Singer, I’m sure do. But the vast majority of these people in charge in both Europe and the U.S. believe what they were taught about the economy in college and today execute plans based on what they have been miseducated in.

And that actually scares me far more than if they were doing this out of pure malice.

Incompetence honestly applied is far more dangerous than honest evil disingenuously applied. Because in the former environment the purely malicious can operate with few if any controls.

The world is changing before our eyes while we hide out in our homes hoping not to catch a virus that won’t do more than inconvenience most of us. But we are still at a crossroads. Putin set us on the path to choose deflation, he understood the problem as I am presenting it here.

Now will we take the opportunity handed to us and tighten our belts, demand debt liquidation, corporate bankruptcies and a complete reshuffling of the global capital order?

Or will we choose to be complicit in debasing our ourselves through access to the printing press, actively devaluing our time and labor by accepting digits added to our bank balances which no one sweated or worked to produce?

Bankruptcies or bailouts? That’s the question you should be asking yourself. You can’t bail out Main St. without bailing out Wall St. To bankrupt Wall. St. and all that it funds a lot of us will have to be bankrupted as well.

Are you willing to take that pain to stop the money machine that funds the death and destruction? If not then you aren’t serious about wanting it to end.

And that’s the real crossroads we have come to, the one where we realize there is no such thing as a free lunch and our inaction to this point makes us culpable for what has been done.

Decades of this modern religion have resulted in an incredibly tragic situation: a disproportionate wealth distribution in the hands of the 0.1%, an over-bloated services/consumer driven economy, increased rates of poverty and despair internationally as well as a dismal loss of vital skills, and productive capacity once enjoyed by advanced industrial nations just four decades ago. Vital infrastructure built up during the 1930s-1960s has been permitted to decay through simple neglect while un-payable debts have reached record highs.

Then like a thief in the night, the illusion was ripped away.

The Confused Response to the Crisis

This ripping away took the form of an international pandemic which has resulted in western nations’ economies grinding to a halt with a new $2 Trillion government emergency spending bill unveiled on March 24. The Washington Post reports that this bill will authorize “hundreds of billions of dollars sent to Americans in the form of checks as a way to flood the country with money in an effort to blunt the dramatic pullback of spending that has resulted from the coronavirus outbreak.”

Governments across the Trans-Atlantic have also announced national interventions into banks and private industry in order to force production quotas of vital equipment like ventilators, masks and other medical necessities to meet the increased demand. Banks in Spain have been nationalized (albeit only “temporarily”) to force finance to act in accordance with the needs of society. In America, the Defense Authorization Act and broader War Powers Act passed by President Trump gives the executive broad powers to take over vital industries if needed in order to mobilize the nation to respond to the crisis.

This renewal of national sovereign powers breaks all of the monetary “laws of the neoliberal order” and with that defiance of globalization, a genuine positive potential for a paradigm shift is visible… but something vital is still missing.

This “missing something” is clearly demonstrated by the continued obsession with money as new bailouts of the collapsing speculative banks have now risen to a $1 trillion/day overnight repo loan to collapsing banks which is added to the $1 Trillion 14 week loans offered every week that will dramatically increase the $9 trillion already emitted since helicopter money began in earnest in September 2019. With the mass panic and economic shutdown instigated by COVID-19, markets have lost over 30% of their value and fears of a new great depression have spread far and wide. Rather than impose serious bank regulation like Glass-Steagall to break up the commercial from speculative banks as was done in 1933, the American government has merely unleashed unlimited money printing. This bipolar response is akin to trying to stop a raging fire with a combination of water and gasoline.

We thus find that the greatest crisis facing humanity is not caused by the market crisis, or even the coronavirus per se, but rather society’s profound inability to understand the source of real from fictitious value.

What is REAL Value? Lincoln and FDR Revisited

“The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government’s greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges. The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matters of practical administration. The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.”

These words were uttered by none other than America’s 16th president Abraham Lincoln as he fought to take federal control of credit vis a vis the “greenbacks” that not only allowed him to win the war of secession but also construct the greatest infrastructure and industrialization programs of history driven by the trans continental railway. The dramatic success of Lincoln’s “American System” not only saved the union, but spread successfully across the world from Japan’s Meiji restoration, Russia’s trans Siberian rail development, Bismarck’s Zollverein in Germany and Sadi Carnot’s France. This powerful spread of what German economist Friedrich List called “the American System of Political Economy” nearly annihilated the money-worshipping system of Adam Smith’s Free Trade doctrine from the earth and only failed in this task via a plenitude of London-directed assassinations, and a couple of imperially-orchestrated wars and revolutions along the way [1].

The world spun out of control between the murder of the “last Lincoln republican” William Mckinley in 1901 [2] and the orchestrated meltdown of the U.S. economy known as the great depression of 1929.

Amidst this dark period, Franklin Roosevelt called for the Democrats to claim the legacy of Lincoln from the corrupt republican party and faced a Wall Street-backed coup d’etat, survived a freemasonic assassination attempt and subverted a City of London-orchestrated bankers’ dictatorship… all in his first year in office. During his March 4, 1933 inaugural address, the president rallied the american people saying:

“I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken nation in the midst of a stricken world may require. These measures, or such other measures as the Congress may build out of its experience and wisdom, I shall seek, within my constitutional authority, to bring to speedy adoption.”

As I have outlined in my recent paper How to Crush a Bankers’ Dictatorship, FDR took control of credit in a similar manner as Lincoln by forcing the Federal Reserve to obey a national mandate for the first time since the private bank was set up in 1913. He did so by imposing his ally Mariner Eccles into the position of Chairman who understood that money had to create infrastructure and industrial growth in order to acquire any claim to having actual “value”. This was a stark break from the “hands off/laissez-faire” policy of President Hoover and his JP Morgan-run cabinet. FDR also emitted Lincoln-styled productive credit through the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC) to fuel the New Deal. The RFC issued over $33 billion in low-interest loans by the end of the war (more than all private banks combined).

Describing his moral philosophy of political economy, FDR stated:

“We seek not merely to make government a mechanical implement, but to give it the vibrant personal character that is the very embodiment of human charity. We are poor indeed if this nation cannot afford to lift from every recess of American life the dread fear of the unemployed that they are not needed in the world. We cannot afford to accumulate a deficit in the books of human fortitude.”

What is missing today

Today’s America is confronting an existential crisis similar to that which both Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt battled in their time. Just as the proto-deep state of 1865 ran Lincoln’s assassination from Montreal Canada, and took over the White House minutes after FDR’s untimely death in 1945, today’s deep state has attempted in vain to overthrow President Trump while successfully undermining the political viability of other “outsiders” like Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard.

The difference is that today’s crisis combines elements of all previous crises of 1861-1865, 1929-1933 and 1938-1945: the very real new threat of chaos and civil war within, NATO-led wars with China and Russia without and economic collapse across the entire trans-Atlantic bubble economy. The other difference is located in the current presidency’s inability to FOCUS with a clear mind on principled solutions to this multi-faceted crisis while instead finding itself trapped within contradictory impulses.

While FDR and Lincoln understood that VALUE was located the physically productive forces of labor which sustained and improved the lives of people and gave the constitution’s pre-amble a real living character, today’s American leadership has displayed a far greater ignorance to this basic fact of life. The vital difference between “need” vs “want” which has been obscured by decades of free market ideology has resulted in a loss of moral judgment necessary to properly put out the fires threatening to unleashing civil war, chaos and fascist global government “solutions” across the Trans Atlantic today.

The new multipolar alliance led by Russia and China have demonstrated what modern day New Deal policies can do. The Belt and Road Initiative as well as the Strategic Eurasian Partnership, Polar Silk Road and bold space exploration projects all reflect the type of principles of win-win cooperation and long term planning that characterized both FDR and Lincoln earlier. The Health Silk Road announced earlier this week by President Xi Jinping provides a brilliant maneuver to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic under a non-Malthusian worldview. This Multipolar Alliance exists as a form of a life raft for anyone wishing to escape the fate of the Titanic and embark on a new epoch of growth and cooperation.

The question is: Do western powers have the ability to act according to a scientific (and moral) standard of value by aligning with this multipolar alliance or will they choose to remain in Orwell’s dystopic cage and succumb to a fate which Lincoln, FDR and other great leaders gave their lives to prevent?

Footnotes

[1] Before his assassination, McKinely attacked the neo-liberals of his day saying “Then they say `everything would be so cheap,’ if we only had free trade. Well, everything would be cheap and everybody would be cheap. I do not prize the word `cheap.’ It is not a word of hope; it is not a word of comfort; it is not a word of cheer; it is not a word of inspiration! It is the badge of poverty; it is the signal of distress; and there is not a man in the audience, not a white-haired man, who, if he will let his memory go back, will not recall, then when things were the cheapest, men were the poorest…. Cheap? Why, cheap merchandise means cheap men, and cheap men mean a cheap country; and that is not the kind of Government our fathers founded, and it is not the kind their sons mean to maintain. If you want cheap things, go where you can get them…. We want labor to be well paid.”

[2] Some of the most notable murders of the day included Czar Alexander II (1880), U.S. President Garfield (1880), France’s President Sadi Carnot (1895), Prime Minister Castillo of Spain (1897) and even though Bismarck avoided assassination, his 1891 ouster from chancellorship firmly set Germany onto the slow course of self-destruction known as WWI and WWII. The full story is told in the 2008 film 1932: Speak not of Parties.

I think this story exemplifies the self-cannibalization of the deep state over the past several years quite nicely.

It appeared for quite some time that the oligarchy managing the world’s financial system and military-intelligence community from above was able to do magic. If they wanted a nation overthrown, or a troublesome elected official killed, a mere snap of the fingers was all it took. Gold from straw? They could do that too! Just look at the mass of $1.5 quadrillion dollars of derivatives claims which appeared as though out of thin air in the mere space of 30 years! Seriously, back in 1990, these fictitious assets (forms of bets on insurance on securitized debts) amounted to little more than $2 trillion and 10 years before that, had barely any existence whatsoever. NOW… they amount to over twenty times the world’s GDP! How was this possible when the real economy (agro-industrial/infrastructure capital which supports real life) was permitted to atrophy during that same space of time? Magic!

Such are the powers of today’s Rumpelstiltskin.

There were no shortage of idiot kings in our modern story either. A cleptocracy rose to prominence in the west in a scale unseen in human history. Billionaire speculators, hedge fund managers and other useless nouveau rich devoid of any actual productive skill rose to positions of power and prestige under this new system of globalization and used their wealth and influence to become enforces of the system that gave them their money and status. The Bloombergs of this world were more than happy to unquestioningly accept the idea that they “earned” their billions, and happily became thugs and mini tyrants for the machine. It was all magic… mixed with a good dose of arrogance of course.

But then one day, the magic stopped working.

The banking system started rupturing and the magic wands had to be used more often. More bailouts, more overnight repo loans for bankrupt speculators (today clocking in at $100 billion/night), more money printing out of thin air and more debt to carry over till next quarter with no thought of paying it off. Soon after the straw stopped turning into gold, the god-like powers of regime change also stopped working. Libya worked fine of course when it was magically thrown back into the stone age joining Iraq and Afghanistan… but Ukraine was harder, and Syria followed by Venezuela were harder still. Why did the magic formula stop working?

The answer in short: Russia and China both guessed the name.

Once the name was said aloud, the empire was increasingly exposed for all to see as the bluff masquerading as a God which it always was. Calling the name of the empire was like a spiritual ointment for many who feared the unknown, un-nameable creatures of the dark shadows. Like any shadow confronted with the light, this imp ceased to exert the influence it wished to hold onto the minds and hearts of its victims… and the image of omnipotence it worked so hard to project onto the world turned out to be just that… a projection and nothing more.

President Putin demonstrated how it is possible with one tenth of the expenses of the US military to destroy ISIS in Syria by the simple application of an intention to actually do it. This intention was always absent from the minds of western geopoliticians who actually preferred to have a growing network of terrorists spread across the Middle East and Africa. Terrorists not only destabilized troublesome nation states as a form of asymmetric warfare, but also provided a convenient excuse to bomb governments targeted for regime change.

China followed suit by investing massively into the development sector- just as the west had done for years- but with one very big difference: INTENTION. China animated its investments into Africa, Asia, the Middle East and beyond with the intention to actually create prosperity, infrastructure and economic independence in those countries receiving loans. They didn’t use this with magic, but simply by ensuring their money would be invested into genuine nation building projects disconnected from any usurious conditionalities.

With the important ingredient of intention to actually end terrorism, hunger, disease and poverty infused into global policy-making by Russia and China, the Rumpelstilskins lost more of their power. The empire always relied on the illusion of noble ends but never the substance or means to carry them out. This substance is located entirely in the domain of intention.

In the west, the shadow creature was given a name (deep state), and with that name, an identity, and modus operandi was identified.

With that identification, a resistance began to organically emerge as nations found the courage to take a stand- preferring to work with honest partners like Russia, China and the Belt and Road Initiative rather than cling onto the Titanic of the sinking western system.

Within America, Rumpelstiltskin spasmed in rage and moved in desperation to defend himself when a leader surprisingly came to power extolling friendly relations with Russia and China. This was done first with the sloppy manufacture of Russia-Gate and then the sloppier manufacture of Ukraine-gate… but that also didn’t work. Whether it took the form of left wing socialists or capitalist orange nationalists, the magic once used to easily destroy such troublesome expressions of patriotism in America stopped working as fast as had their bailout powers, or regime change hocus pocus.

When you watch today’s democratic primary debates and laugh at the fanatic sloppiness of Rumpelstiltskin’s left wing champions cannibalize each other (and themselves) in the process, or as you listen to right wing Rumpelstilskins froth in rage at China’s tyrannical Belt and Road Initiative “empire”, keep in mind that the game, as they say, is really up. The name has been called out, the imp is busy tearing himself to pieces and to the surprise of many who had lost all hope just a few years ago, this story may actually have a happy ending after all.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com