Regular Fare:
Get Ready for
the Return of Secular Stagnation
Narratives around the reflation trade and asset prices are currently
pointing towards a full recovery and a period of extended growth as the world
exits lockdowns. In this interview with Real Vision managing editor Ed
Harrison, Daniel Lacalle, chief economist and CIO at Tressis, argues that this
is being fueled by nothing more than hope and that, although this is a
recovery, the world will return to the same state of secular stagnation and low
growth that existed pre-COVID. Lacalle explains why fiscal and monetary
policies, which have not generated inflation, will only make this situation
worse, why he thinks there is only a few months left in the reflation trade,
and the resulting asset allocation based on his outlook.
The Full Case
Against Ultra Low and Negative Interest Rates. By William White
The Long Term Damage
of Economic Downturns
What the last ten years has shown is that business investment growth has
slowed as the profitability of productive capital has fallen in the US.
According to Bloomberg, In the US, almost 200 big corporations have joined the ranks of so-called zombie firms since the onset of the pandemic and now account for 20% of top 3000 largest publicly-traded companies. With debts of $1.36 trillion. That’s 527 of the 3000 companies didn’t earn enough to meet their interest payments!
…The profitability of capital is near all-time lows and even a recovery
in 2021 and 2022 will not put levels back to that before 1997 or 2006. And corporate debt has never been higher
historically.
Why Americans
May Have Stimulus Check Garnished By Debt Collectors
What Interest
Rate Triggers The Next Crisis?
If Ten-year UST yields increase to 2.0% (currently 1.60%) by May, the
proxy will increase to 5.25%, well above the 4.0% that popped the dot com and
housing bubbles. The proxy interest expense model is far from perfect, but it
provides evidence the threshold of pain to withstand higher rates is small.
If the Ten-year UST rate increases to 1.75% by April, the proxy interest
expense will exceed all peak levels since 1990.
However, this time, massive fiscal stimulus, monetary operations, and
economic reopening may mask the rise in rates for a little while, allowing them
to rise further. Like every other time rates rose “too much,” a crisis will
occur if rates keep increasing.
Inflation-Cagematch:
Guggenheim Battles Bridgewater Over Bond Moves From Here
The world and their pet rabbit is short bonds right now on growth and
inflationary consensus opinions...
But not everyone agrees, as BofA previously explained, having priced in a
dramatic rebound in inflation in coming months on the back of anticipated
surges in spending, the market may be disappointed as the "fiscal liquidity
trap" proves to have a far stronger gravity than most pundits and
politicians expect. It would also mean that inflation - after an initial burst
higher in mid-2021 - will collapse, and is why BofA expects that year-end core
CPI will be just 1.7% as the upcoming June CPI spike fades. Here are some other
reasons why Woodard believes that the market is in for a major disinflationary
shock in the second half of 2021.
… All of which make sense, but the largest hedge fund in the world
disagrees. Bridgewater's Greg Jensen told Bloomberg today that the world is on
the verge of a new inflationary wave that could force the Federal Reserve to
raise rates earlier than planned.
... Guggenheim's Brian Smedley and Matt Bush take the opposite view, that
this is not a secular change, forecasting that inflation will generally remain
subdued in coming years
As the chart below illustrates, the typical post-recession weakness in
the most cyclically-sensitive components of core PCE inflation is just
beginning. The full impact on core inflation from last year’s sharp decline in
activity will take several more quarters to be felt, given the historical
tendency for core inflation to lag real GDP growth by 18 months.
TGA & RRP,
Bills Fed Up (why the Fed may not be able to prevent Tbill yields
from going negative and staying there.)
The greatest
debt crisis in history is upon us
The debt burden crushing poor countries will not be alleviated until
creditors in rich countries are made to give up some of their wealth
Cory Doctorow:
Full Employment
Remediating climate change will involve unimaginably labor-intensive
tasks, like relocating every coastal city in the world kilometers inland,
building high-speed rail links to replace aviation links, caring for hundreds
of millions of traumatized, displaced people, and treating runaway zoontoic and
insectborne pandemics.
These tasks will absorb more than 100% of any labor freed up by
automation. Every person whose job is obsolete because of automation will have
ten jobs waiting for them, for the entire foreseeable future.
…
The pandemic crisis has taught us two critical things:
·
Blind adherence to government austerity
destroys capacity – it doesn’t build it.
o
…
·
Sovereign currency issuers do not experience
cash shortfalls during crises – they experience capacity shortfalls.
The American
Rescue Plan as Economic Theory
What Interest
Rate Triggers The Next Crisis?
Looking back over the last 40 years reveals a troubling problem. Every
time interest rates reach the upper end of its downward trend, a financial
crisis of sorts occurred.
given crises frequently occur when rates rise sharply, we should contemplate how high rates can rise before the next crisis. Notice, as time goes on it takes less and less of a rate increase to generate a problem. The reason, as highlighted earlier, is the growth of debt outpaces the ability to pay for it.
Bubble Fare:
Hussman: How to Spot a Bubble.
The defining feature of a bubble is inconsistency between expected
returns based on price behavior and expected returns based on valuations.
… During speculative segments of the market cycle, there’s nothing that
forces investors to recognize that higher valuations imply lower returns, or to
change their expectation of high returns as far as the eye can see. That, of
course, is why we use measures of market internals to gauge the inclination of
investors toward speculation or risk-aversion. Valuation provides an enormous
amount of information about likely long-term returns and potential market
losses over the complete cycle. But valuation isn’t a timing tool. In recent
years, it hasn’t even imposed a limit on speculative recklessness. Still, with
each price advance, the actual long-term return implied by future cash flows –
what investors will ultimately realize as those cash flows are delivered –
collapses further, even while investors act on their delusion that long-term
returns have nothing to do with price.
Another Way To Look At Long-Term Bubble Cycles
Historically, all market crashes have been the result of things unrelated
to valuation levels. Issues such as liquidity, government actions, monetary
policy mistakes, recessions, or inflationary spikes are the culprits that
trigger the “reversion in sentiment.”Notably, the “bubbles” and “busts” are
never the same.
BMO Strategist
Finds Market Signs That "Only Develop Ahead Of Major Corrections"
in a more ominous observation, the BMO chartist cautions that one issue
that bears watching is that "the recent breakout in the S&P 500 was
not confirmed by new cyclical highs in any of our market based measures of
economic activity"…
Stock Market
Leverage Spikes in Historic Manner: Another WTF Chart of a Zoo that Has Gone
Nuts
Quote of the Week:
Neil Irwin: The job now is to persuade
the world that it really will leave the punch bowl out long enough, and spiked
adequately – that it will be a party worth attending. They insist punch bowl removal will be based on actual realized
inebriation of the guests, not on forecasts of potential future problematic
levels of drunkenness.
(not just) for the ESG crowd:
Financial world
greenwashing the public with deadly distraction in sustainable investing
practices
Wall Street is greenwashing the financial world, making sustainable
investing merely PR, which is a distraction from the problem of climate change.
Net-zero emissions targets are vague: three ways to
fix
U.S. Joins India
And China In Ramping Coal Usage To Pre-Pandemic Levels
Met Office:
Atmospheric CO2 now hitting 50% higher than pre-industrial levels
How microbes in permafrost could trigger a massive carbon bomb
The Inevitable
Policy Response 2021: Policy Forecasts
Tweets of the Week:
John Hussman: Wall Street: "We are
all driving prices up now, in anticipation of someone driving prices up later,
in response to strong economic data that all of us expect, and every single one
of us is already positioned for."
Albert Edwards: Hard-core CPI ‘inflation’ is dead in the US (despite rampant asset price and commodity inflation due to QE). After a March/April base effect pop in the yoy rates, an inevitable post-recession slide will occur taking the core CPI rate towards zero... and bond yields with them.
COVID Fare:
COVID-19 is here
to stay. Now we must redesign our economies around it
It’s possible to imagine a world where vaccines are distributed fairly
and the disease is eradicated everywhere. But that is not the world we live in.
We need to revise our time horizons, too, and plan for a longer period of
transition towards a more stable situation with the disease, looking beyond
immediate crisis responses. The UK government has floated an “endemic recovery
plan” of five to ten years’ duration, and this is the kind of timescale we
should all be thinking on given what we now know about the disease. But if that
is the case, it is too long a period to plausibly suspend social life for, or
to lurch between lockdowns and releases. Instead, we need to think of the ways
in which we can fairly adapt how we live and work in order that we can maintain
what we most enjoy about life. If the primary aim remains, for the foreseeable
future, to bring down the number of social contacts we have, priority should be
given to the contact we appreciate most – meeting friends and family, attending
public events – and limiting what we tend to dislike – work and commuting. If
the duration of the pandemic is extended, this should be treated as a design
issue, rather than a policing problem.
We May Be Living
in a Moment of Misplaced Optimism
Analysis:
COVID-19 variant threat grows amid more school closures
An interactive visualization of the exponential spread
of COVID-19
Previous week’s map:
Last week’s map:
Efficacy of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 Covid-19 Vaccine
against the B.1.351 Variant
Conclusion: A two-dose regimen of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 vaccine did not
show protection against mild-to-moderate Covid-19 due to the B.1.351 variant.
New Study of
Coronavirus Variants Predicts Virus Evolving to Escape Current Vaccines,
Treatments
"Our study and the new clinical trial data show that the virus is
traveling in a direction that is causing it to escape from our current vaccines
and therapies that are directed against the viral spike,” … “If the rampant
spread of the virus continues and more critical mutations accumulate, then we
may be condemned to chasing after the evolving SARS-CoV-2 continually, as we
have long done for influenza virus,”
Other Fare:
How a building block of life got created in a flash
Humans Evolved to be the Water-Saving Ape.
New study suggests humans evolved to run on less water than our closest
primate relatives.
Photos of the Week:
Photographer Spends 12 Years, 1250 Hours, Exposing Photo of Milky Way
EXTRA [controversial
or non-market-related] FARE:
ESG Fare:
We NEED Climate
Operation Warp Speed: We’re close to a Terrestrial Biosphere Tipping Point
Plummeting sperm
counts, shrinking penises: toxic chemicals threaten humanity. Erin Brockovich
The chemicals to blame for
our reproductive crisis are found everywhere and in everything
The Canadian oil giant
Enbridge is "funding and incentivizing" Minnesota police to crack
down on its (mostly female) opponents. Here's what it looks like.
Jane Fonda’s trip to
Minnesota has not gone exactly as planned. She expected attention from the
media. She did not expect attention from the police.
3 Million Masks
a Minute: The Next Plastic Problem?
Studies estimate worldwide
humans are using 129 billion face masks each month. Most masks are disposable,
made from plastic microfibers that are not biodegradable and may fragment into
smaller plastic particles polluting ecosystems.
Climate-driven
shift in deep Lake Michigan water temps signal loss of winter
ESG Tweet of the Week:
GlobalEcoGuy: Do big-time proponents of carbon removal tech realize that, even in their *best case* scenarios, it's a relatively small player in what we need to do to stay under 2˚C? Let alone 1.5˚C. Here's a quick illustration, adopting the Carbon Law framework for the Paris 2˚C target.
COVID Fare:
Pandemic
Blunder: Fauci and Public Health Blocked Early Home COVID Treatment
A huge amount of data and
information not covered by mainstream media are in Pandemic Blunder that tells
the story of how over 300,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 unnecessarily
because the government has blocked early home treatment and prevention.
With 500,000 COVID deaths,
learning about safe and effective early home treatment/prevention more
important than ever.
About the Book: Pandemic Blunder contains considerable
medical information and data to support a number of proven safe, cheap generic
medicines and protocols that knock out the coronavirus when given early. Read
about the pioneering, courageous doctors who have been using innovative
approaches to prevent their COVID patients from needing hospital care and
facing death.
The book includes many
expert opinions from doctors who support the view that 70 to 80 percent of
COVID deaths could have been prevented—and still can be. Don’t be victimized by
disinformation and propaganda from leftist media. Learn how corrupt forces are
aiming to make billions of dollars from expensive medicines and vaccines, and
how hundreds of thousands of deaths could have—and should have—been prevented!
Pandemic blunder is defined as the failure of the United States public health
system and federal agencies to support and promote early home/outpatient
treatment for the COVID-19 pandemic disease.
Considerable medical
information and data convincingly show that when given early a number of proven
safe, cheap generic medicines and protocols knock out the coronavirus. Early
means within the first few days of getting symptoms or a positive test. Some
pioneering and courageous doctors have been using innovative approaches to
prevent their covid patients from needing hospital care and facing death. Many
expert views of doctors support the view that 70 percent to 80 percent of covid
deaths could have been prevented – and still can for future victims of the
disease. Learn how hundreds of thousands
of deaths could have and should have been prevented.
This book does more than
describe the pandemic blunder, particularly in terms of the influence of Dr.
Anthony Fauci. It can help Americans protect their lives by not being
victimized by disinformation and propaganda from leftist media. Pandemic management has failed because of
corrupt forces aiming to make billions of dollars from expensive medicines and
vaccines. There has been a widespread dereliction of duty on the part of many
local, state, and federal government officials.
The fifth meaning of
Covid-19 is that it isn’t over yet.
The horse has long since
left the barn. I hope all the cute little Chinese ACE2 mice are set free, too.
But our little crowned demon doesn’t need its mutant lab-mice anymore.
The coronavirus is now
mutating itself in many millions of bodies worldwide. As more of these bodies
are vaccinated, the unique opportunities available to any mutation of its
little spiky spikes, which happen to make it not shaped like our antibodies,
which obviously are shaped like its old spiky spikes, grows exponentially. As
more and more doses are given—the selective advantage of any vaccine-escape
variant increases. In a virus that is copying itself, right now, a trillion
times a second.
And as soon as this
full-escape variant is born, the clock starts all over again.
Yves here. Biden repeatedly
promised to “follow the science” in developing Covid policies. But as has
become the norm in American medicine, the science has instead been distorted in
the interest of profits and political expedience. This post provides a
devastating takedown of the Biden plan to reopen schools with little in the way
of additional protections for teachers and students, particularly more
ventilation (how about the simple expedient of opening windows?). It explains
why Covid cases among children have been severely undercounted and where
population-wide surveys were made, children were vastly more likely to
introduce Covid into a household than adults. It also shreds the CDC’s
astonishing assertion that distancing as little as three feet would be OK.
On the one hand, parents and
children are suffering due to the lack of in-person instruction. Keeping
schools closed is politically risky for Team Dem, particularly since it is seen
as a staunch ally of the (formerly) powerful teachers unions. But simply
pretending that schools can implement hand-wave level measures and everything
will be hunky-dory is the sort of wishful thinking that is guaranteed to
produce problems down the road, just like our insufficient test capacity and
unwillingness to enforce quarantines and mask mandates.
About a year ago, the world
realized about three months too late that travel is a luxury. Since we have
learned nothing about how to govern ourselves, we are doing it again.
Humanity is still in a race
with SARS-CoV-2. We are teaching our immune systems what Covid looks like—by
getting either the vaccine, or the disease. And it is teaching itself to look
like something different—while still doing its same little spiky thing.
At present, since our 1950s
decision-making processes have not changed, taking a full year to teach the
human immune system a new lesson is “warp speed.” Also, the summer of 2020,
with only one major strain of virus spreading worldwide, was the perfect
environment for vaccine testing. The next round might even be harder. So… how
long does it take the virus to evolve a new escape variant?
But as more people get
vaccinated, the advantage of escape variants increases. As the number of active
cases decreases, the evolutionary power of the system decreases. To beat the
disease, we need to get on the right side of this curve and ride it down to
zero.
We could still win in this
round. It does not seem obvious that we will. And while the outcome is in
doubt, there is no reason for the whole world to share viruses. Treating the
planet as a single evolutionary gene pool gives SARS-CoV-2 a leg up it doesn’t
need—in a race we feel like we’re winning right now. We felt that way last June,
too.
Pfizer Sees
‘Significant Opportunity’ After Pandemic to Hike Prices 900% for Annual COVID-19
Shots.
Orwellian Fare:
Greenwald: How Do Big Media
Outlets So Often "Independently Confirm" Each Other's Falsehoods?
That the entire Russiagate
storyline itself was a fraud and a farce is conclusively demonstrated
It’s time that people
understand Joe Biden is an entirely scripted actor. Not well-scripted, and not
a good actor, but still. His comments about Putin being a “killer with no soul”
are insane, they scrape the bottom of the bottom of the barrel of diplomacy,
they insult not just Putin, and thereby all of Russia, and threaten world
peace, but they’re not his. They were written for him. Biden keeps reminding me
of Max Headroom, an early MTV thing. Cartoon character. Scripted.
…
But this is not about truth
anymore. It‘s about how endless repetition makes lies “believable” to gullible
people – of which America has a seemingly endless supply.
…
Joe Biden only has a veneer,
a semblance, of credibility, and that’s only because US media never ask him any
serious questions.
…
Putin’s weak point is he
would like to retire, but can’t find anyone he trusts to take over. And the CIA
is ready to pounce as soon as he leaves. Biden is no problem for him, but
finding a successor as smart as himself, is.
Biden Is the
Establishment’s Man
Biden has the seal of
approval from the American Establishment.
His minions are fomenting animosity with the Chinese as Biden slings mud
at the Russians. The higher tensions thus
produced are good for armament orders and the well being of the
military/security complex.
Biden’s tax increase plan is
designed to wipe out the remainder of the middle class.
Want To Serve
The Empire? Help Circulate Its Propaganda Narratives!
Hey kids! Wanna do your ol’
Uncle Sam a big honkin’ favor? Wanna serve the US empire like a good little
lickspittle? Wanna help kill other people’s kids in far off lands for fun and
profit? You do?? Well bust my britches, that’s just swell!
It’s actually really easy.
You don’t even need to be smart to do it — heck, it’s actually a whole lot
easier if you’re not. Just shut off that pesky little lightbulb inside your
noggin and listen up.
All you have to do to help
ol’ Uncle Sam spark off them shiny lil’ Tomahawk missiles and incinerate those
goofy foreigners for geostrategic control and Raytheon shareholder profits is
this: just go around repeating the same stuff your buddies at the US State
Department say about governments we don’t like.
…
Y’see kids, it’s like this:
Before we launch missiles, we launch narratives. Before we drop bombs, we drop
stories. Before we invade, we propagandize.
Captain America
– The Man with Two Brains
These behavior patterns are
not difficult to understand if we assume that Americans really do have two
unconnected brains, not physically but mentally. Like all schizophrenics, most
Americans exhibit what researchers call a ‘splitting of mental functions’, a
mental disorder characterised by a failure to recognize what is real, the most
common symptom being false beliefs. This derived schizophrenia appears to share
the stage with a variation of what is called a ‘multiple personality disorder’,
“a mental defect characterised by two distinct but dissociated personality
states that alternately control a person’s behavior, accompanied by memory
impairment not explained by ordinary forgetfulness.” This combination
summarises to a people (a) holding totally false beliefs, unable to distinguish
fiction from reality, (b) displaying two distinct but dissociated and opposite
mental states, and (c) exhibiting little if any memory overlap between these
two states. Odd as all this may seem, this describes Americans too perfectly to
be an irrelevant coincidence. I should note here that both these mental
disorders are diagnosed more frequently in the US than in any other nation.
Americans have been
overwhelmed with utopian propaganda from infancy, an insidious New Testament
heavily loaded with religion and emotion, indoctrinating them with a belief in
their own moral superiority endowed upon them by their god, resulting in the
Propaganda Mask where they can no longer recognise the vast discrepancy between
their ideals and their actions (or the actions of their government). Their
evangelical brand of Christianity endows them with the conviction that they are
“good” and that all their actions, however evil, are also “good”. It then
follows that they compare themselves not to the real world of their actions but
only to their programmed utopian ideals. It is logical that Americans appear
blind to this stark discrepancy
…
No other nation in the world
has been exposed to political-religious brainwashing propaganda on such a
massive scale. Patriotism in America is neither natural nor spontaneous; it has
been planned, programmed and instilled in all Americans from birth, at least
all white Americans. It is often so foolish as to be comical and open to
ridicule, but simultaneously rather frightening.
…
But Americans have nothing
valuable of their own, not in themselves, nor in their national identity,
history or culture, so they compensate by denigrating those who do have. This
is why they so vigorously blind themselves to their own faults, crimes and
atrocities, and focus only on the sins of others – even if they have to create
imaginary ones. This is in part why hypocrisy has become a defining adjective
of Americans: they cannot permit their national identity to collapse from a
revelation of their current faults and historical crimes. When overlaid with
their malignant Christianity, this combines to produce their imaginary and
marvelously-warped self-image of moral superiority. The end result is a nation
with little intrinsic self-worth and few genuine human values, unable to see itself
as it really is: empty, superficial, vacuous, ignorant, mean-spirited,
hysterical, envious, aggressive, self-obsessed, and hypocritical.
Brandon Smith: The Illegal
Immigration Crisis: It’s All About New Covid Lockdowns
In multiple articles I have
published recently I outlined why an attempt at a new national covid lockdown
in the US is inevitable. In my article ‘The Real Reasons Why Millions Of
Americans Will Defy Covid Mandates And Vaccines’, I examined new polling
numbers which show that a vast portion of the US population is refusing to
comply with medical controls. The bottom line is this: Covid is a non-threat to
99.7% of the public, and the citizenry is getting wise to this fact.
However, there are certain
people that NEED the pandemic lockdowns to continue regardless of what the
public wants.
The Biden Administration and
its globalist handlers have BIG plans for the next few years, and all of it
relies on pandemic fears and totalitarian restrictions.
The “Great Reset”, as Klaus
Schwab and the World Economic Forum calls it, is never going to happen unless
global populations are locked down and placed under control.
…
The only option the
globalists have at this stage is to barrel forward with the pandemic narrative
despite the fact that Covid has turned out to be a hollow issue with a death
rate of 0.26% outside of nursing home patients. At least half the country is
ready to revolt over the mandates, and almost half the country is refusing to
take the vaccines or accept medical passports. That is millions of people that
are laughing in the face of the Reset agenda.
Edward Curtin: Media
Pseudo-Debates and the Silence of Leftist Critics The Incompetent, Negligent,
Mishandling, Miscalculating Elite Blunderers
The U.S. rulers have their
defenders. Most are corporate mainstream
journalists whose jobs are to defend the ruling elites of both political
parties. They will criticize across the
political divides depending on their organizations’ political leanings at the
moment. But they will never attack the fundamentals of the oligarchic war
system since they are part of it. Their jobs depend on it. So CNN and The New York Times will obsessively
attack Trump while Fox News will do the same to Obama or Biden. This is a game.
These days such massive
media conglomerates are seemingly starkly divided and basically serve as
adjuncts of one political party or the other.
They are essentially political propagandists for either the Democrats or
the Republicans and have abandoned any pretense to be anything else.
…
I think most readers would
agree that the two seismic events of the last twenty years are the current
COVID- 19 issue and the September 11, 2001 attacks. The latter, not only because of all the
victims that died that day, but for how it led to so much death and destruction
around the world, the endless war on terror, the invasions of Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc., the ensuing loss of basic liberties and privacy via
the Patriot Act, etc. The former for obvious current reasons of death and
further loss of basic liberties under the lockdowns as governments throughout
the world institute unprecedented
measures of control, etc. Clearly
these two events stand out over the decades. They bookend twenty years of
massive U.S. war crimes, the growth of the national security complex, an
obscene increase in wealth for the wealthiest, and the loss of privacy and
civil liberties for all.
And as everyone knows,
September 11th and COVID-19 have resulted in great controversies and much
debate because of their serious implications and the obvious questions about
the official story lines raised by many respectable writers and researchers of
varying political perspectives. At the
very least, one would expect that leftist/liberal critics of the so-called Deep
State and the machinations of the elite’s wars and propaganda would have
engaged in these discussions about these two seminal events or written analytic
articles about them.
But for a core group of
prominent left/liberal critics, these two subjects have been avoided like they
are of no importance. No debates, no discussions, no analyses – simply silence,
as if they didn’t happen and there was nothing to discuss. Cases closed: the
government has spoken.
…
So we have pseudo debates on
one hand and silence on the other when what is required is not self-censorship
but open critical dialogue on these fundamental matters. “There comes a time
when silence is betrayal,” said Martin Luther King
Socio-Political Fare:
Jonathan Turley: Father Arrested After Continuing To Call His Child “She” After Court-Ordered Gender Transition Treatments.
Big Thoughts:
We stand for the children, the natural world, the not yet born
We do not shirk our responsibility to put our minds, bodies, and
intelligence against this machine of tech-no-logic.
Who could have known it would be biometric passports?
QR codes?
E-carceration bracelets?
Robot police dogs?
We knew the age of surveillance capitalism was dawning, but none of us
anticipated this trigger event that turned our world upside down last March.
Yet those of us with eyes to see and ears to hear and open hearts have
been called to step forward with the gifts given to us by the creator and work
to transmute this profanity into something sacred, a non-cybernetic future.
That future is not one where we live in a planetary computer or as
characters in a virtual simulation.
That world is not one of bar-coded life.
That world does not run on cyborg avatar capitalism.
We see the choice between the two paths, one green and
one scorched.
We know the choice we make, the stand we take today,
will determine not just the course of our lives, but the lives of all other
beings on this planet and those not yet born.
So I stand here now with you beautiful people in
spirited resistance to the Great Reset, the Fourth Industrial Revolution,
stakeholder capitalism, globalization 4.0, and impact investing.
The technocratic vision of society hatched at the Columbia school of
Industrial Engineering in the 1930s will not come to pass.
Nor will the e-government “digital nation” solutionism birthed out of
NYU’s GovLab and Harvard Kennedy School.
Nope.
We see you, you neoliberal policy wonks and Google data analysts who aim
to steal our civic agency in the name of “what works” government.
Our vibrant cities will not be reduced to an indifferent networked
panopticon, a biosecurity Operating System masquerading as government.
Their soulless smartness is no match for our symphonies, songs, dance,
poetry, cuisine, street art, laughing children, and warm embraces.
Michael Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones
and the rest of the hedge fund crowd have no right to predictively profile us,
put us on social-prescribing self-improvement pathways, track our compliance
with wearable tech, and use that data to run pay for success finance deals
profiting off misery.
Who do they think they are to impose digital identities and package us as
asset backed securities; tranches of impact investments; human capital data
commodities to be tracked as domesticated livestock with smart contracts
through the spatial web of mixed reality?
The Davos elite have no right to foreclose the futures of children.
I call out the toxic alliance of the United Nations and
Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum for the faux-progressive, gas-lighting
cabal that it is.
Global poverty cannot be a profit center.
Our physical and mental health cannot be profit centers.
Hands off our education choices and our food choices, too.
Nature is not theirs to blanket in sensors and track for impact on data
dashboards.
Our destinies are too magnificent to fit on puny blockchain ledgers.
Our life force belongs not to ESG portfolios but woven into complex
tapestries of life that bind us to one another, to the land, and all beings
enriching our lives from tiny microbes to spreading cottonwoods.
Our freedom struggle is for the preservation of natural, non-synthetic,
life on mother earth.
With such freedom comes responsibility, to mend the immense hurts and
deep wounds inflicted on society and nature over centuries.
We have arrived at a moment of supreme reckoning, where through an
alchemy of love and faith we might manifest a future of healing and right
relationship, where reciprocity is restored.
This is the work.
Look around, this is your community.
We build it together.
Let us stand united in faith, shared power, and love and strive to become
ancestors worth claiming.
Quotes of the Week:
Johnstone: I don’t “equate” the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. I don’t equate Sauron and Saruman either; they are two separate and distinct characters. But they damn sure work together.
CaitOz again: If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re the sort of person who would have taken a stand against the Nazis in Germany, the answer is that you would have behaved however you’re behaving toward the murderous imperialist power of today, namely the United States government.
Ian Welsh: Putin’s a stone killer, sure, but the idea that Biden, or Obama, or Clinton or Trump aren’t is laughable. Every American President, pretty much, is a mass murdering piece of human garbage.
Satirical Fare:
Biden Begs Migrants Not To Come To U.S. Until There Enough Cells To Imprison Everyone
Tweets of the Week:
This is a guilty man dancing
around the question... #IBelieveTaraReade.
“Will you hike if yields rise?”
“We will not hike if yields rise.
We will not catch you by surprise.
We will not hike on Phillips Curve.
We will not hike if prices swerve.
Not when inflation gets to 2,
Not when U3 hits NAIRU.
Do not ask me any more!
Full employment, not before!”
Pic of the Week:
Bonus:
