Heads they win, tails you lose

Wednesday, 13 August 2020

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are upon us. The Trump-Biden ticket, the cultural civil war, COVID 1984, and the slow motion economic collapse have all kicked off in earnest, each feeding off the other like a multi-headed ouroboros. The controlled opposition that is underway to address these crises is designed to attenuate the transformative energy of those seeking to address the massive inequalities that exist in this country. Taking each phenomenon in turn, one can see they represent sigils of a transition to an entirely new mode of political, economic, and social organization on a global level.

Trump-Biden 2020

Two credibly accused rapists in cognitive decline are currently vying for arguably the most powerful political position in the world. Rhetoric aside, what separates them on a de facto level in terms of what actions they have taken and are likely to take in the future? Trump is a great deal more complex as a study in presidential prerogative than Biden. A significant portion of Trump’s political instincts vis-à-vis interventionism and policy preferences regarding infrastructure spending were actively massaged into their opposite by his executive team and Congress, while his other impulses were pursued with dangerous abandon. Biden, on the other hand, has a rich and storied record from which to examine the question of what policies he would most likely pursue.

The prerogative of the National Security State has clearly been adhered to by both men, with Biden’s record being thoroughly consistent on this point. Trump’s situation has been an interesting case study in the concept of political warfare not being entirely ideological, or it has at least demonstrated the notion that political parties are not ideological, in that they will employ whatever ideological rhetoric that suits the moment. The Left in the age of Trump has become the pro-war, McCarthyite party; while the Right has quietly acquiesced, at least rhetorically, to all the verbal outrages Trump engages in, while supporting the policies they wish to see promoted which have remained mostly unchanged since the 1980s. The media is a bit more schizophrenic, however, as they loathe Trump ideologically, but love him as a vehicle to further the growth of their audience. He is the best product they have had since the trial of OJ Simpson. The media is in a pickle, because they are rhetorically anti-Trump, but their current business model is wholly constructed around Trump being in the White House. Trump is good for business, and if Biden wins, The Republican Never-Trumpers will be in the position of spending 4 years defending Biden, which may not be a problem for them if he pursues neoliberal policies both here and abroad, which is certainly a reasonable expectation. Additionally, the Right will tolerate the rhetorical hat tip to the SJW crowd because once again, it will help everyone from the far right to the populist right, and their media representatives to raise money. Everybody wins, except us.

Whenever Trump spoke of withdrawal of U.S. troops overseas, the Left openly shit its pants, and the Right quietly undermined his efforts behind the scenes, and the media applauded the cooler hands of the generals whenever military action was pursued. Indeed, the only time the media has framed Trump’s actions as being “presidential” is when he ordered the bombing of other countries, aka ordering the murder of people outside of the United States, which is how American presidents ultimately make their bones to establish their legitimacy as leaders (yes, even Carter – remember Operation Cyclone). Lamentations of the liberal internationalists that the era of the strongman is upon us as Trump pilots the U.S. ship of state into the side of a mountain implies an obvious path forward for Biden should he win: reassert American leadership abroad (the Obama playbook after Bush II). If Biden’s foreign policy proclivities are pursued, this will mean the Balkanization of every country deemed a threat to U.S. interests. Additionally, this will mean covert support of democracy movements in countries that desperately need it (resource-rich countries with leaders not interested in opening up their markets to the West). The whole of Latin America has been a tragic case study in the effects of just this kind of U.S. support.

The July 4^th issue of The Economist asks about Biden on its cover: “Retro or radical?” A more apt question might be: “Vehicle or vessel?” The answer to that question is demonstrably the latter, which will make the corporate class and military industrial complex happy, while the vast majority of Americans will remain one paycheck or one medical emergency away from catastrophe. Over this election cycle, at least to date, Biden has engaged in some historical revisionism of the kind that does not seek to correct the record, but to re-write it to suit the current political winds. He is now anti-war, pro working class, and progressive on criminal justice reform, just like his VP pick. Again, in practice, both he and Harris are the opposite. Biden appears poised to offer the far Left a rhetorical victory, replete with all the street and building name changes, all the while giving away the store to the corporate class, i.e., the Obama playbook. And Biden’s instincts are far more in line with those of the National Security State because he has a penchant for supporting Balkanization, as opposed to non-interventionism, Trump’s political instinct. Those who view Harris as a positive move for the future of the Democratic Party are not aware of her record or her personal history – long bus rides aside.

Biden’s freshly knighted pony soldier Kamala Harris is a continuation of neoliberal identity politics, the Obama legacy, and the tokenization of the Democratic Party, for which it has become known. Case in point: Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin’s One West Bank committed massive fraud, causing the foreclosure of homes during the financial crisis, which Harris’s office had ample evidence to prosecute. Result: No prosecution and Mnuchin later donated to her political campaign. Harris represents the bridge that Biden explicitly stated he wanted to create for the younger leaders within the party, but the bridge he is attempting to build leads to the past, not the future. One thing is relatively certain, however, and that is that a Biden win would trigger a civil war within the Democratic Party between the far left and the rest of the party, and between the Sanders left and the woke left (the perennial class vs. race debate). The class and culture wars will rage into the foreseeable future, with the largest causalities coming in the form of irrationality and confirmation bias at the expense of critical thinking.

Cultural Civil War

In a recent RT interview, Angela Davis characterized her view of the meaning and importance of this year’s presidential election: “I don’t see this election as being about choosing a candidate who will be able to lead us in the right direction. It will be about choosing a candidate who can be most effectively pressured into allowing more space for the evolving anti-racist movement. Biden is very problematic in many ways. He is, not only in terms of his past and the role that he played in pushing toward mass incarceration, but he has indicated that he is opposed to disbanding the police and this is definitely what we need. We need to reconceptualize the very notion of public safety.” Harris’s presence on the ticket is designed to cosmetically and rhetorically address Davis’s concern. But Davis is ironically articulating a larger problem that first took hold in the academy about 20 years ago which has transmogrified into today’s revolutionary woke Left.

The spirit of Robespierre has taken hold of this country and many parts of the world, with fire burning in the minds of men, women, and the non-binary, calling for the end of law and order, the heads of the establishment, and all the non-believers who do not fit the new definition of “ally”. This millennial delusion that has embraced ideas flirted with in college and brought them into the mainstream currents of culture and American values has cast a spell on popular culture which is now gripped in a kind of mania. But what will the BLM movement get for all its efforts under a Biden administration? Left rhetoric and corporate economic policy. They will get to break things and remove symbols, but little else. To borrow a concept from the New Left, they will undergo repressive desublimation at the hands of the Left. The protest movements sweeping America and the world have served to support a cultural zeitgeist based entirely on identity politics via a kind of Darwinian determinism, and seek to create a monoculture that will only serve to polarize intellectual discourse, such as it is, and narrow the boundaries of allowable discourse both in the university and the public square. The looters and rioters, intentionally or not, are functioning as agent provocateurs, as they will effectively create a law-and-order backlash among the vast majority of voters, whose support they would conceivably need in order to pursue a political movement based on economic justice.

We are in the midst of an identitarian moment of the Left, replete with corporate virtue signaling and a repentant Karen who has been to the mountaintop and has written a book about the wisdom she has gained from the experience. And what is that wisdom for which she has received popular acclaim? White supremacy is a ubiquitous and unchanging phenomenon among white people. And denying such an assertion only serves to demonstrate the depth of a person’s subconscious racism. “Whiteness” possesses an a priori racist quality for which there is no cure, only regular treatment by, say, a corporate consultant well versed in such maladies of the soul. One can never exercise the demon; only pacify it temporarily by regular communion with representatives of the anointed. This prophet (profit) has been rewarded by the woke and the guilty white masses wanting to be seen as allies with gesticulations and testimonies to their moral turpitude, and promises to be better, to do better. This has resulted in an expansion of corporate anti-racist trainings in the boardrooms, and administrative and teacher trainings within educational institutions at all levels. These efforts will act in furtherance of the true purpose of social unrest of this kind, at least from the perspective of the central planners: attrit, undermine, and divide populist movements that call for class solidarity and economic justice. The rest, as they say, is just window dressing. As long as class interests remain effectively mired in the swamp of identity politics, political change will remain impossible.

COVID 1984

There is one thing about which one can be fairly certain, and that is in the event of a Biden victory in November of 2020, the COVID 1984 pandemic will likely take a miraculous turnaround, or at least that is what the media will report. There are however, much bigger issues surrounding what has been called a new virus, unknown to humanity until now. If Event 201 was the feasibility study, COVID 1984 lockdowns and mask protocols are the compliance test phase of this grand social engineering experiment. But how do we know if there is an effort underway to re-engineer society? We know this because at the very outset, the statistical data used to make predictions about the virus’s danger was shown to be fraudulent; the subsequent collection of statistical data to understand the number of people affected by the virus has been shown to be fraudulent; effective and inexpensive treatments have been intentionally made unavailable to doctors and patients; fraudulent medical research has been published by mainstream medical journals to discredit effective treatments; billions of dollars have been given to vaccine developers (enter Sputnik V and Moderna) in the midst of efforts to prevent sick people from receiving effective treatment; and perhaps most clearly, the government has ignored successful strategies used to address the crisis like those used in Sweden, instead attempting to discredit Swedish medical officials and lie about the effectiveness of their health policies. At every turn, officials within the pharmaceutical industry and the government agencies they control have steered this crisis in the direction of enriching themselves rather than healing sick people. Profit-motive alone can explain most of the incentives for the murderous chicanery we have been witnessing, but there are overlapping political and economic interests at play that obfuscate the full picture of what is unfolding.

Economic Collapse

The pandemic is being used as a Trojan Horse to help to facilitate the Federal Reserve’s inflation of its balance sheet as the world slowly moves towards de-dollarization. We know this because Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell asserted that the policy moves they made in response to the pandemic were in fact initiated well before the pandemic began. This was the same kind of fraud revealed during the 9/11 Commission hearings when Condoleezza Rice explained that the plan to invade Afghanistan was in place before 9/11. The policy moves that are being referred to here are the largest bailouts in the history of money made by the U.S. Government to the tune of trillions of dollars. Because the vast majority of the world functions economically through the use of fiat currency, a first in recorded history, and in the absence of a nationalized stop-gap measure that pays the salary and provides the healthcare for people that will be without either in the event the entire country grinds to a halt, it is fully understood even by the undergraduate economics student that this will explode the Gini Coefficient, leading to a massive redistribution of wealth upwards. For example, there are about 50 million people that have filed for unemployment since the pandemic began. There are about 160 million workers in the U.S., which means nearly a third of all workers have filed for unemployment; which is also unsurprisingly about the same percentage of people that have not been able to pay rent nationally.

Because these effects are well understood, it is reasonable to conclude that those in a position to control such policies have pursued those exact policies they knew would result in the current outcomes, as well as the outcomes yet to happen, which are also known. Those include large scale home foreclosures, evictions, and homelessness, all amidst unoccupied homes and apartments, giving elites the ability to purchase homes and businesses at pennies on the dollar once the fire sale begins. The financial class has intentionally created the coming economic collapse that is slowly unfolding, and did so under the cover of the pandemic. The controlled demolition of the U.S. economy will help to usher in the new digital currency platforms that have been in development for a decade, and it has the added propaganda benefit of being properly socially distanced. Bill Gates and the rest of the technocrats and eugenicists have continued throughout the years to promote their solutions to the world’s problems, which from their perspective starts with overpopulation and climate change. It is a tired agenda to be sure, written about often among the elites as they wax poetic about a world free of poverty, hunger, disease, and war. It all sounds reasonable until you discover that they view you as an obstacle to that utopia. You are part of the problem. The precise mechanisms that are being employed for this transition are not fully known, but the agenda has been well articulated for those who wish to see and hear. As this transition unfolds, just as it did in 2007, the planners will play the game using their own set of rules, fraudulent or not, and if they play their cards just right, the people will clamor for just the kind of solutions they are offering to fix the crises they created. Voters have a clear choice in November: Do they want a rapid or gradual collapse of American society. The real question for this country that can only be answered by the people is if our country can be made fair by the electoral system as it stands, or is it beyond repair?

“The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
~ A. Gary Shilling