The Year The World Ended

Like Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, we seem to be living in a virtual realm. A world of avatars. A world lived increasingly online. A world where a virus of no more real-world consequence than a common flu has nonetheless rent society asunder. A world of flexed deltoids and narcissistic selfies proudly proclaiming I got my #clotshot and anyone who hasn’t ought to be ashamed. A world unhinged from reality. Perhaps we’re in that godawful Wittowski film, but in reverse. Instead of waking up from the matrix, we’ve awoken inside it. We’ve gone from the material to the virtual. The simulacra has changed places with the real.

Apart from very mundane activities, eating, drinking, ones daily ablutions, everything else seems to take place in the virtual world, including our retail therapy and our daily ‘programming’. Our avatars are increasingly perfected whilst our physical lives have become like pictures hung in a dusty attic. It’s not hard to imagine that in some not too distant future organic life might cease to exist at all. Perhaps that is the purpose of the graphene nanotech injections – to ultimately make us all part of ‘the cloud’. Surely this is the stuff of deranged conspiracy theories. For now at least.

It’s hard to pinpoint the moment we left reality. The point at which we became totally derailed. Whimsically one might wonder if the invention of the Gutenberg printing press was where it all went wrong. In more recent memory tho, I’d suggest it was the Great Recession of 2007-2008, when, faced with the collapse of an unregulated housing bubble, Wall Street bankers held the US congress to ransom. Having caused the largest bankruptcy in US history, and armed with the threat of unleashing an economic tsunami, they turned to congress and demanded unconditional bail outs. With their boy in the white house, congress gave way with little ado, and so instead of biting the bullet and allowing a necessary and painful market correction to happen, they kicked the can down the road, ensuring that the next meltdown would be greater by an order of magnitude. And here we are, right in the middle of it, with scarcely a mention of it in the news which is focused solely on a pandemic with a 99.9% survival rate.

“The justification of private profit is private risk”, said President Franklin Roosevelt in 1938. Not so today when banking has become a risk-free enterprise. Indeed, instead of the bankers going to prison as they should have in 2007, it is the gen pop which now finds itself under house arrest. This is the crucial context for understanding how we got to where we are, and how the pandemic has been used as cover for a global crime. All that remains is to fill in the blanks and connect the dots, which Fabio Vighi does brilliantly in this piece. Here I’d like to tease out one of the key arguments from Vighi’s article - namely that we are in the midst of a financial crisis, masquerading as a health crisis.

While the gen pop may be living in a fantasy world, I can assure you the global capitalists and their teams of social engineers are not. Matters economic, military and political, whether at a national or global level, are not left to happenstance. The Davos constellation, consisting of organisations like the BIS, WEF, and IMF are if nothing if not well resourced, and tireless in their efforts. The next inevitable downturn had been foreseen for the last decade, and the planners have have not been sleeping on the job. This is the context in which the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Lockstep Scenario need to be understood; not so much as failed coups, but rather trial runs for stage managing the next financial collapse.

In August 15 2019 BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, issued a white paper titled Dealing With The Next Downturn, which called upon the US Federal Reserve to inject liquidity directly into the financial system to prevent a catastrophic meltdown. It stated: “An unprecedented response is needed when monetary policy is exhausted and fiscal policy alone is not enough. That response will likely involve ‘going direct’”. The titular downturn came on 16 September 2019 when interest rates on overnight repurchase agreements ("repos") experienced a sudden and unexpected spike reaching as high as 10.5%. In response to this the banks were quietly bailed out, without congressional debate. This did little to abate the crisis and by March 2020 BlackRock had been hired by the FED to help stabilise the government bond market. By this time the FED was making $1 trillion per day available in overnight loans.

Let’s be clear here – The global economy ran off a cliff in 2007, and nothing was done to fix the problem. The current money printing spree is not about supporting the real economy. It is not about jobs, education or healthcare. It is not about creating the type of massive public works programs that lifted the US out of the great depression. This money is not meant to be used for spending and investment at all. This is about injecting liquidity into short term markets to cover financial speculation. This is what Marx called fictitious capital - "money that is thrown into circulation as capital without any material basis in commodities or productive activity".

If you’re not registering the level of criminal insanity at play here, you’re not seeing the picture in its entirety. We are past the point where this kind of money printing can happen without leading to too much money chasing too few goods, causing hyperinflation, as seen in Zimbabwe or the Wiemar Republic. So instead the real economy has been put into an induced coma. This is not just about bailing out the shadow financial market. It’s about preventing any spillover into the brick and mortar economy. It’s about quarantining the real economy from the effects of the bailout to avoid it overheating. For this chicanery to work, a scapegoat was needed. Enter the pandemic.

The various summits, white papers, executive orders and preparedness exercises which took place in the lead up to the pandemic have been covered in depth by other researchers. The salient point here is that most of these events happened around September-October of 2019, well before the first case of Covid 19 was reported in the international media. We also have the seemingly prophetic statement made by Fauci on 11 Jan 2017 in which he told us that “No doubt” Trump would be confronted with a surprise infectious disease outbreak during his presidency.

Cutting to the chase, by 11 March 2020 the coronavirus outbreak had been labeled a pandemic by the World Health Organization. Next, governments acted in lockstep to implement the agenda handed down by the WHO, imposing at first travel restrictions, then lockdowns, then systematic shutdowns of key sectors of the economy including hospitality, entertainment, and building and construction. The resulting suspension of business transactions allowed for trillions to be injected into financial markets without causing hyperinflation, a solution which has left the real economy held hostage to the financial sector, with wealth transferred upwards all the way up the food chain, including some $2 trillion going directly into the pockets of the world’s 2000 wealthiest individuals.

Which brings us to our picture in the attic, a reference to the Oscar Wilde novel if you didn’t catch it the first time. This is the reason we are not able to return to normal. As I’ve said repeatedly, there is no normal to go back to. This is why we will continue to live with travel restrictions. This is why coming out of lockdown will be contingent on vaccines and vaccine passports, and I believe ‘vaccine hesitancy’ has also been factored in as a means to impose further austerity on small businesses, who are now being required on pain of hefty penalties to refuse service to the unvaccinated. In the same insane way we’ve been locking up the healthy to supposedly protect health system, so the real economy must be quarantined from the contagion of monetary stimulus. Taking the brake off at this point would certainly lead to runaway inflation, so the process of opening up will be slow and incremental, leaving plenty of time to implement the WEFs wish list. Virtual cash and negative interest rates (bail-ins). Digital passports. Personal carbon quotas etc.

The pandemic emergency psy-op, originally predicted to run until March 31, 2025, will be extended as long as necessary, and with the mass vaccination campaign creating mutations as far as the eye can see, this could potentially be forever. In the meantime the cosplaying Schwab gets to act out his Great Reset fantasy, which the masses, now conditioned to their Pavlovian chains, will be just as eager to swallow. Vighi puts it brilliantly in his article: “Entire populations exposed to heavy media bombardment surrender through self-discipline, adhering with grotesque enthusiasm to forms of ‘civic responsibility’ in which coercion morphs into altruism.”

Thus the whole dystopic nightmare becomes normalised, with nary a mention of the financial crisis at its core, and when it finally lands in our lap with all its attendant immiseration, falling wages, massive unemployment and food shortages; when we find ourselves living as serfs, with our once inalienable freedoms handed back to us as rewards for compliant behaviour, it will all be blamed on the pandemic.

Well played, Mr Global, well played.

It brings to mind a popular meme. To paraphrase, “Yes we ended civilisation, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.”