P FOR PANDEMIC
Politics / Pandemic Apr 01, 2020 - 11:41 AM GMTBy: James_Quinn
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.” – Alan Moore – V for Vendetta
“Authority, when first detecting chaos at its heels, will entertain the vilest schemes to save its orderly facade.” – Alan Moore – V for Vendetta
I wrote an article called V for Vendetta – 2011 just over nine years ago on the day after the Tucson shooting where congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others were shot by a psychologically disturbed lunatic, with six dying. At the time, I thought of the scene from the V for Vendetta movie where someone did something stupid and all hell broke loose. I expected a similar result from this act, but those in control of our society were successfully able to put a cork in the bottle, preserving their façade of order.
We learned shortly thereafter, through the patriotic efforts of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, how the government was using the vilest of schemes to surveil every American through their abuse of the Patriot Act. The government has become and enemy of the people.
It is interesting to go back and view my conclusion from nine years ago and assess its accuracy as of today:
“This country has not reached the level of control and fear seen in Orwell’s 1984 and V for Vendetta, yet. We are moving relentlessly in that direction. Surveillance, monitoring, spying, censorship, secret prisons, predator drones, and conforming to state rules and regulations put citizens further under the thumb of an all-powerful state. The freedom to dissent, the freedom to be left alone, the freedom to speak out against injustice, the freedom to disagree with your government, and the freedom to present your ideas without fear of retribution or penalty are essential in a democratic society.
The next phase of this Fourth Turning will surely include another downward spiral in financial markets as un-payable debts accumulate to a tipping point level. When ATM machines stop spitting out twenties, food shelves are bare and gas stations are shuttered, social chaos will ensue. The government will react with further command and control measures. In V For Vendetta, the government creates a terrorist incident in order to gain unquestioned control over the population. Americans will need to be more vigilant than they have been over the last ten years in keeping an eye on their government.”
In light of what has happened in 2020 thus far, I’d say my fears have been realized, with more downside to come. I was deeply concerned about the surveillance state, on par with Orwell’s 1984, two years before Snowden made his revelations public. The country has been in a downward spiral since the government used the 9/11 fear and panic to ram through a 300-page pre-written piece of legislation to further take away our Constitutional rights and put vastly more power and control into the hands of uncontrolled psychopaths operating in the shadows of government halls.
Those in charge never let a crisis go to waste. 9/11 was used to pass the Patriot Act and initiate nineteen years of declared and undeclared wars in the Middle East to create chaos, empower Israel, and abscond with the oil of sovereign countries.
The 2008/2009 crisis, created by the Fed and their Wall Street banker proprietors, was used by the powers that be to abscond with trillions in national wealth, while further enslaving senior citizens in poverty and forcing the working middle class further into debt servitude. Bernanke, Yellen, Geithner and a myriad of other banker flunkies have been richly rewarded for their traitorous actions by their Wall Street brethren, with tens of millions in compensation for their duty and honor to the cabal.
The men who created the 2008/2009 global financial collapse through their mortgage fraud scheme, used fear and panic in the markets to force the feckless pathetic bought off congress apparatchiks to pass TARP and dozens of other ridiculous “bailout bankers” schemes to provide a façade of recovery. There was never a recovery. The unpayable debt was papered over with trillions more of unpayable debt, until something snapped in September 2019.
The first half of this twenty year, or so, Fourth Turning was ushered in by the 2008/2009 financial collapse and the subsequent disastrous solutions implemented by the ruling class in order to preserve their wealth, power and control. The taxpayer bailout of Wall Street should have been called NO BANKER LEFT BEHIND. The mind-boggling amount of debt issued over the last decade in order to rectify a problem created by issuing a previously mind-boggling amount of unpayable debt over the previous decade has become so large, the average person can’t comprehend the implications or consequences.
The masses have been indoctrinated through government schools and propagandized by the captured corporate media to such an extent, they have been convinced abnormality and pillaging by the ruling class are both normal and acceptable. The world added $90 trillion of debt between 2000 and 2008, over a 100% increase. Bernanke, Yellen, Powell and their other central bank co-conspirators said hold my beer and added another $90 trillion since the first debt created crisis. The Himalayan mountain of debt now stands at $253 trillion, or 322% of global GDP. Rogoff and Reinhart proved countries whose debt surpass 90% of GDP always proceed towards crisis and currency debasement.
Even John Maynard Keynes knew countries should run surpluses during good times, so they could run deficits during the bad times. Our glorious financial and political leaders seemed to have skipped that chapter in their economics textbooks. So, under the tutelage of Bernanke, Yellen, Powell, Bush, Obama, and Trump the country has added $12 trillion to the national debt, $3 trillion of corporate (junk) debt to buy back stock, a few trillion in credit card, auto, mortgage and student loan debt, all while the Fed was feeding the Wall Street parasites with zero interest rates and buying $4 trillion of their worthless assets (aka QE). This was all done while we were supposedly experiencing the longest economic boom in history and the stock market confirmed the boom by rising 400% to all-time highs in February of 2020. All’s well that ends well. Right?
It seems debt can’t buy happiness in the long run. This economy and stock market have been bugs in search of a windshield for a long time. Longer than I ever thought possible. But, as some bright financial minds have said, that which is unsustainable will not be sustained. The critical thinking financial people I trust knew something went screwy deep in the recesses of the opaque banking system sometime in September when the overnight repo rates soared to 10%.
I know 99.99% of Americans have no idea what an overnight repo is, let alone care about them. But Wall Street bankers and connected billionaire hedge fund managers cared, because Powell and his flunkies bailed them out every night from their bad trades and extreme risk taking. As we entered the fateful year of 2020, years of poisonous sludge was clogging the gears, and another financial collapse was imminent. What a fortuitous time for a global pandemic.
This is when things began to get interesting. There have been so many earth shattering events in the last two months it’s almost impossible to assess the current situation with any semblance of certitude. I believe I’m being lied to by virtually everyone. I know for a fact I’m being lied to by the Fed, Wall Street billionaire titans, the fake news media, corrupt politicians, the Chinese dictator, most people on social media and the blithering idiot talking heads on CNBC.
If almost everyone is lying, how can someone decipher the truth? The best way to untangle falsehood from truth is to follow the money. Just as the monied interests and Deep State didn’t let a crisis go to waste after 9/11 and the 2008/2009 Wall Street created collapse, they are again taking advantage of the distress and panic caused by the Chinese coronavirus to once again plunder the American public while assuring them it’s in their best interest.
“When the institutions of money rule the world, it is perhaps inevitable that the interests of money will take precedence over the interests of people. What we are experiencing might best be described as a case of money colonizing life. To accept this absurd distortion of human institutions and purpose should be considered nothing less than an act of collective, suicidal insanity.” – David Korten
Collective suicidal insanity is the perfect description for what has happened in the last two weeks. There is no doubt the world is experiencing a health crisis not seen since the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. It is estimated 20 to 50 million people died during that pandemic, with approximately 600,000 succumbing in the U.S., or .57% of the population. A similar death rate from this pandemic would total 1.9 million people in the U.S.
As of today, there have been 140,000 confirmed cases and approximately 2,400 deaths. Over the coming weeks there will be hundreds of thousands more cases and thousands of additional deaths. That is a depressing and sorrowful fact. But the death count is going to be drastically lower than the 1918 total, during which the country continued to function and slog forward.
A judicious thinking individual might wonder why the Swine Flu epidemic of 2009, which is estimated to have infected 61 million Americans and killed 12,000 to 18,000, did not require a countrywide lockdown resulting in a second Great Depression. Maybe it was because the ruling class already had the ongoing financial crisis as their logic to use panic and fear in achieving their plundering objectives. Did anyone really notice we experienced a global pandemic in 2009?
Our very own CDC “experts” tell us the country has already experienced 38 to 54 million flu infections since October, with a half million hospitalizations, and at least 24,000 deaths, so why weren’t our hospitals overwhelmed? I know this is a serious virus, but the scare tactics being utilized by our overseers, corrupt politicians and their corporate media propaganda outlets is beyond excessive, and reveals a far more nefarious purpose.
Did we need to purposely create a global depression in order to defeat this virus? Will the benefits outweigh the cost? Is this health crisis being used by the monied interest swine to again gorge themselves at the taxpayer trough, robbing the public, while persuading them it’s for their advantage? The “conspiracy theorists” among us, who have been proven correct time after time over the last decade, know the answers to these questions. This is a controlled demolition by the powers that be as cover for their fraud, criminal schemes, and looting of the national treasure.
“To rob the public, we must first deceive it. The trick consists in persuading the public that the theft is for its advantage; and by this means inducing it to accept, in exchange for its property, services which are fictitious, and often worse.” – Frederic Bastiat
Only in a suicide cult, which our country has become, would the majority support and cheer for a corporate lobbyist written $2.2 trillion 873-page windfall to bankers, connected mega-corporations, and every special interest imaginable. This doesn’t even account for the $4 trillion of secret payoffs and behind the scenes shenanigans of the Federal Reserve, as they do their part to support their banker owners once again. And just to make sure none of their despicable acts will see the light of day, the ruling class slipped in little clause titled:
SEC. 4009. TEMPORARY GOVERNMENT IN THE SUNSHINE ACT RELIEF.
The provision authorizes the Federal Reserve Board and other such officials to meet in secret without any oversight constraints. Who needs transparency from the privately owned organization who controls our currency, interest rates, banking regulation and is most responsible for the third financial collapse in the last two decades? And why should we worry that Goldman alum Mnuchin was given a $500 billion slush fund to use as he wishes? I’m sure he’s going to use it to help the local restaurant owner down the block.
I’m outraged we’ve let this happen again. All they needed to do was crash the stock market by 32% in a few weeks, while having their propaganda machine media predicting millions of deaths, and scaring the nation into shuttering our entire economy. The oppressors once again have succeeded in convincing us they know best and are working for our best interests.
We’ve shirked responsibility for our own lives by believing the very same people who didn’t see the crisis coming, weren’t prepared, and have failed miserably to centrally control the situation. We’ve given them the power over our lives and we are being led towards the slaughterhouse. It was our choice. We let fear overcome reason and courage.
“Since mankind’s dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We’ve seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.” ― Alan Moore, V for Vendetta
The egotism and hubris of the ruling class has no limits, as they quarantine themselves in one of their six mansions or on one of their yachts, eating caviar and drinking champagne, paying their lobbyists to ensure they get a big hunk of the $2.2 trillion stimulus pie, while the average Joe and Jane get a couple thousand bucks to pay one month’s rent and buy some ramen noodles to sustain themselves through the coming military lockdown.
Don’t look now but you’ve been screwed again. The Wall Street bankers are again able to borrow at 0%, while charging you 17% on your ever-increasing credit card balance. Why aren’t these scumbag bankers announcing a three-month moratorium on credit card and mortgage payments, with no interest accruing? Because their goal is to further enslave you in debt, while enriching themselves. They will run patriotic commercials, while sticking you with the bill once again.
In Part Twoof this article I will examine the parallels between our current situation and the favorite anarchist/libertarian film V for Vendetta. I address both the disturbing aspects and the hopeful aspects of the film in relation to what the future holds.
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By James Quinn
James Quinn is a senior director of strategic planning for a major university. James has held financial positions with a retailer, homebuilder and university in his 22-year career. Those positions included treasurer, controller, and head of strategic planning. He is married with three boys and is writing these articles because he cares about their future. He earned a BS in accounting from Drexel University and an MBA from Villanova University. He is a certified public accountant and a certified cash manager.
These articles reflect the personal views of James Quinn. They do not necessarily represent the views of his employer, and are not sponsored or endorsed by his employer.
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