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The Real Great Reset

November 28, 2020

The Real Great Reset

In the more conspiratorial corners of the Internet, the “Great Reset” is a sinister public face of an elite plan to enslave humanity by creating a global authoritarian surveillance super-state, compete with re-education camps for those who suffer from wrongthink, and Soylent Green-style euthanasia camps for addressing the twin problems of overpopulation and an aging society.  Tracing its origins via Agenda 21, the Project for the New American Century back to the unpleasant recommendations from the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth project in the early 1970s, the Great Reset is about securing the power and privilege of the technocratic elite in the devastating aftermath of the global pandemic.

It doesn’t help that Klaus Schwab, the co-author of the book Covid-19: The Great Reset, needs only a white cat on his lap to look for all the world like the villain in the next Bond movie.  In reality though, Schwab is a mediocre German social democrat (i.e. neoliberal) who has little understanding of the crisis unfolding around him, and who – along with the rest of the Davos crowd – is simply whistling in the dark to mask his own fears.

Far from being a masterplan for subjugating humanity, Covid-19: The Great Reset simply builds upon Schwab’s earlier and equally detached The Fourth Industrial Revolution.  As I wrote in response to that book four years ago:

“The courtiers of the modern corporate elite also danced in their version of Versailles at Davos in Switzerland.  Initially, they were emotionally deflated.  None knew why stock markets were tumbling, oil and commodity prices were crashing, the Chinese engine of growth was seized, and zero percent interest rates and quantitative easing had failed.  For a brief moment, they peered into the abyss of their own destruction.  Within the week, however, the courtiers regained their energy and confidence… technology was going to save the day after all.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Droit du Seigneur and the Neofeudal Privileges of Class in America

September 26, 2018

Droit du Seigneur and the Neofeudal Privileges of Class in America

Want to understand the full scope of neofeudalism in America? Follow the money and the power and privilege it buys.

The repugnant reality of class privilege in America is captured by the phrasedate rape: the violence of forced, non-consensual sex is abhorrent rape when committed by commoner criminals, but implicitly excusable date rape when committed by a member of America’s privileged elite.

Compare the effectiveness of excuses offered by privileged elites (we were both drinking, I didn’t hear her say no, etc.) when offered in court by less privileged males on trial for rape. The privileged elite is acquitted or given a wrist-slap while the commoner gets 20 years in prison.

This implicit privilege to non-consensual sex was known as Droit du Seigneur(right of the lord) in feudal Europe. While scholars debate whether the right of lords to have their way with female subjects was institutionalized, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the lack of recourse unmarried female serfs had if summoned to the lord’s lair.

The “right” to non-consensual sex is simply one facet of class privilege in America. One need only examine the histories of Harvey Weinstein and Bill Clinton to see how Droit du Seigneur works in America: from the perverse perspective of the privileged, the female “owes” the “lord” sex as “payment” for his interest in her, or (even more offensively, if that’s possible) the female is “fortunate” to have attracted the violent sexual gratification of the “lord.”

While the standard presumption of sexual assault / date-rape is that it’s all about sex, the much more disturbing reality is that it’s a crime of violence.Force and violence are also privileges of the New Aristocracy, both the direct violence of sexual assault and indirect violence threatened or manifested by the innumerable thugs that surround the New Aristocracy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

It’s Time to Retire “Capitalism”

January 19, 2018

It’s Time to Retire “Capitalism”

Our current socio-economic system is nothing but the application of force on the many to enforce the skims, scams and privileges of the self-serving few.

I’ve placed the word capitalism in quotation marks to reflect the reality that this word now covers a wide spectrum of economic activities, very little of which is actually capitalism as classically defined. As I have explained here for over a decade, the U.S. economy is dominated by cartels and quasi-monopolies that are enforced by the Central State, a state-cartel system of financialized rentier skims that has no overlap with Adam Smith’s free market, free enterprise concept,i.e. classical capitalism.

This is what passes for “capitalism” in modern-day America: the super-rich get super-richer, a thin slice of technocrats, speculators and entrepreneurs advance their wealth and the vast majority lose ground or stagnate:

Here’s another snapshot of state-financier “capitalism” in modern-day America: the centralized organs of the state (the quasi-public Federal Reserve) creates trillions of dollars and hands the nearly free money to financiers, insiders and speculators, all of whom benefit immensely as this flood of cash pushes stocks into the stratosphere:

There are other versions of “capitalism” that are equally rapacious, all of which are iterations of crony-capitalism: gangster-capitalism, theocratic-capitalism, colonial-capitalism, and so on.

The key feature of these forms of organized pillage that mask their predatory nature by claiming to be “capitalist” is they ruthlessly suppress the three core dynamics of classical capitalism:

1. Competition

2. Open/free markets

3. Free flow of capital in all its forms (financial, social, intellectual, etc.)

The only way the few can pillage the many is if the many are denied access to competition, open markets and freely flowing capital.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Our Shoggoths, Ourselves

October 5, 2017

Our Shoggoths, Ourselves

There are many ways I could talk about the point I want to make in this week’s post, but when it comes to the really difficult issues—and yes, we’re going to be talking about one of those—the indirect routes are generally the most useful. For that reason, I want to start out with a seeming irrelevancy, and talk a bit about shoggoths.

Some of my readers already know about shoggoths. For the benefit of those who don’t, I’ll note that they’re one of the many species of imaginary critters that slithered out of the perfervid brain of iconic American fantasy-horror author H.P. Lovecraft. Shoggoths look a bit like huge hungry masses of iridescent black soap bubbles, fitted out with a random scattering of phosphorescent green eyes that ooze to the surface and then sink again. They’re big, they’re strong, they’re nightmarishly fast, and like most of the other critters in the Lovecraftian universe, their entire purpose in existence is to give investigators something to run away from as quickly as possible, screaming in terror all the while.

That sort of thing is a staple of bad horror fiction, but Lovecraft was doing something at once highly subtle and unpleasantly familiar with it. Central to his worldview was the belief that the eight-inch-long lump of meat called the human brain is completely out of its league when it tries to make sense of the cosmos in which we live, and can all too easily go stark staring crazy if it makes the attempt. His monstrous beings and tentacled devil-gods get most of their power over the reader from their sheer incomprehensibility. In his very best stories—“The Color Out Of Space” is perhaps the finest example—that theme takes center stage, and lives are destroyed and minds shattered by a force without malice and without meaning, irrupting from an impersonal cosmos serenely indifferent to the pretensions of our species.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Where On The Titanic Would You Like Your Deck Chair, Ma’am?

April 28, 2016

Where On The Titanic Would You Like Your Deck Chair, Ma’am?

Last week I had the enticing experience of being denounced as a racist on one blog and castigated as a social justice warrior on another. As my regular readers know, such entertainments have been anything but rare since I launched The Archdruid Report just under ten years ago. The odd belief that there are only two possible ways to think about any issue pervades modern American society; contradict that habit of thought, break with the conventional wisdom, and propose a third alternative, and you can count on both sides insisting that you belong to whichever point of view they like least.

If this week’s post fields a similar response, I won’t be surprised. Over the last month, we’ve been talking about the convoluted landscape of privilege in American society, and the way that the preferred rhetoric of both ends of the acceptable political spectrum falsifies the actual complexities of privilege that exist in contemporary American life. Some of my readers have wondered aloud, though, what that theme has to do with the broader issues at the heart of this blog’s project—the increasingly bleak future that modern industrial society is building for itself, the particular shape that future is taking in the United States, and the possibilities for constructive action that are still available this late in the day.

In this week’s post, I propose to start tying those threads back together.

One of the things that’s determined by privilege, after all, is which members of a society have a voice in making that society’s collective decisions. When George W. Bush sent American troops surging over the Iraqi border in 2003 and plunged the Middle East into its current state of chaos, for example, that decision was not made by all Americans equally.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Lesson of Empires: Once Privilege Limits Social Mobility, Collapse Is Inevitable

April 18, 2016

The Lesson of Empires: Once Privilege Limits Social Mobility, Collapse Is Inevitable

The next few years will strip away the illusions of “growth” and reveal which dominates our society and economy: privilege or social mobility.

Among the many lessons of empires is one shared by virtually every empire:once the privileged few limit the rise of those from humble origins (i.e. social mobility), the empire is doomed to rising instability and collapse.

Just as a reminder of how wealth and income are increasingly concentrated in the top of the wealth/power pyramid:

The greater the concentration of wealth and power, the lower the social mobility; the lower the social mobility, the greater the odds that the system will collapse when faced with a crisis that it would have easily handled in more egalitarian times.

When the economy is expanding faster than the population and the tide is lifting all ships large and small, the majority of people feel their chances of getting ahead are positive (even if the actual chances remain low).

But when the economy is stagnating, and they see those at the apex of the pyramid still amassing monumental gains, the majority realizes their chances of securing a better life are declining.

The natural result is frustration, anger and a disavowal of the corrupt status quo: in other words, precisely what the U.S. is experiencing in this election cycle.

People are waking up the reality that the status quo exists to protect the privileged, period. When the serfs do all the right things–get a university degree, work hard, serve their masters well, etc.–they find that “getting ahead” has been redefined as “running in place to keep from falling behind” (i.e. the Red Queen’s Race).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

An Almost Perfect Storm of Incompetence and Felony

November 11, 2015

An Almost Perfect Storm of Incompetence and Felony

“People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage. Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.

But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.”
John Kenneth Galbraith, Age of Uncertainty

“Misdeeds, once exposed, have no refuge but in audacity. And they have accomplices in those who are fearful in their complicity.”
Tacitus, Annals

I was discussing the markets this morning with my friends Dave and Bill Murphy as we generally do.  This is what I just wrote back in response to a question from Bill.

I read his columns at LeMetropoleCafe.com every day.  His is an amazing crossroads for discussion of things that are interesting about precious metals.  I have been a subscriber since 2000. Dave has a new site at Investment Research Dynamics that is quite good and different since he has a very different background in the heart of darkness as a NYC bond trader from mine as a Bell Lab rat and Silicon Valley roustabout.

We just saw a very historically significant decline in the precious metals in terms of days lower without relief. And we have seen a remarkable rise in the US dollar index against the Euro and the Swiss franc that cannot possibly be good for the real economy of the US, when every other developed nation is trying to devalue their currencies to stimulate their exports and inhibit imports.
I believe that a portion of the gold selling in particular is an effort to knock down the open interest in gold for December. If there was any serious attempt for holders of those contracts to stand for delivery, even JPM, which has been obviously building up its stores of gold to act as the ‘fixer’ in that market, would not be able to cover the demand.

JPM was consistently taking delivery for their house account in gold, and just transferred 70,000+ ounces over from Nova Scotia’s warehouse, from whom they had been taking delivery.

As we know, in the last big delivery month, JPM stepped up with an enormous amount of their gold, 400,000+ ounces, to provide enough real bullion to satisfy the contracts standing for delivery. Even now their inventories remain somewhat depleted.

The dollar has also been soaring, because the Fed is trying to pretend that the US is recovering so that they can raise rates.  A strong dollar and higher rates are very harmful to what is almost undoubtedly a fragile economic recovery in the US.

And it is fantasy to think that the US can somehow go it alone, and continue to improve while the rest of the world is cutting rates because their economies are slowing.

The Fed wants to raise rates for their own policy purposes, so they can cut them, without going overtly negative, when their latest financial bubble starts to collapse, which it may already be doing. They cannot really raise rates in a Presidential election year past June, so they will push ahead, to serve their own purposes, even as they harm the real economy.

There will be another financial crisis as the IMF warned today. There will be a serious dislocation in several financial markets, including the precious metals and the bonds at some point, that will rock the current system to its foundations.

It is a portion of the credibility trap which inhibits any meaningful remedy and reform.

It is an almost perfect storm of incompetence and felony.

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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