The Double Helix of Entwined Pandemic and Economic Strategy
by Alastair Crooke via Strategic Culture Foundation
The corollary to the collapse of the technocratic initiative to liquify the over-leveraged economy might well be recession, Alastair Crooke writes.
Three years ago, I said to an American Professor from the US Army War College in Washington, in respect to the campaign to return American lost Blue Collar jobs to Asia, that these jobs would never return. They were gone for good.
He retorted that that was precisely so, but I was missing the point, he said. America did not expect, or want, the majority of those humdrum manufacturing jobs back. They should stay in Asia. The Élites, he said, wanted only the commanding heights of Tech. They wanted the intellectual property, the protocols, the metrics, the regulatory framework that would allow America to define and expand across the next two decades of global technological evolution.
The real dilemma however, he said was, “What is to be done with the 20% of the American workforce that would be no longer needed: that was no longer necessary to the functioning of a tech-led US economy?”
In fact, what the Professor said was but one facet of a fundamental economic dilemma. From the seventies and eighties onwards, US corporations were busy offshoring their labour costs to Asia. Partly, this was to cut costs and increase profitability (which it did) — but it also represented something deeper.
From the outset, the US has been an expansionary empire ever digesting new lands, new peoples, and their human and material resources. Forward motion, the continuous military, commercial, and cultural expansion became the lifeblood of Wall Street and of its foreign polity. For, absent this relentless expansion, the civic bonds of American unity fall into question. An America not in motion is not America. This forms the very essence of US leitkultur.
Yet it only added further to the dilemma highlighted by my friend above. The expansion was accompanied by a flood of Wall Street credit expansion across the globe. The debt burden exploded, and has become top heavy, balancing unsteadily on a pinhead of genuine underlying collateral.
It is only now – for the first time since WW2 – that this relentless US strategic expansionary impulse has been challenged by the Russia-China axis. They have declared ‘enough’.
Yet, there was always another side to this dynamic of western structural transition. Its foundations, as the Professor suggested, no longer lay with the socially necessary labour contained in manufacturing drab products such as cars, telephones, or toothpaste. But rather, the core of it largely has come to reside in highly flammable debt-leveraged speculations on financial assets like stocks, bonds, futures, and especially derivatives, whose value is securitised indefinitely. In this context, the 20% (or more likely 40%) of the workforce, simply becomes redundant to this highly complex, hyper-financialised, networked economy.
So, here we have the second dilemma: Whilst the structural shrinking of the work-based economy inflates the financial sector, the latter’s complex volatility can only be contained through a logic of perpetual monetary doping (perpetual liquidity injections), justified by global emergencies, requiring ever greater stimulus.
How to face this dilemma? Well, there’s no going back. That’s not an option.
In this context, the Pandemic regimen becomes symptom of a world so far removed from any real economic self-sufficiency – adequate to sustain its existing workforce – that the dilemma may only be resolved (in the view of the élites) through facilitating the continuing attenuation of the old economy, whilst financial assets must be replenished with regular additions of liquidity.
How to manage it? With the gradual abolishing of the traditional labour content to commodities (either from automation, or off-shoring), corporations have used the woke ideology to reinvent themselves. No longer do they produce just ‘things’ – they manufacture social output. They are stakeholders in society, ‘manufacturing’ socially desirable outcomes: diversity, social inclusivity, gender balance and climate responsible governance. Already, this transition has produced a cornucopia of new ESG liquidity flowing through calcified economic arteries.
And the Pandemic, of course, justifies the monetary stimulus, whilst the follow-on climate ‘health’ emergency is prepared in order to legitimise further debt expansion, for the future.
Financial analyst Mauro Bottarelli summarised the logic of this as follows: “A state of semi-permanent health emergency is preferable to a vertical market crash that would turn the memory of 2008 into a walk in the park.”
Professor of Critical Theory and Italian at Cardiff University, Fabio Vighi, has noted too the “Incurability” of what he calls “the Central Banker’s Long-Covid” condition” — that the injection of such a huge monetary stimulus as we have seen, was only possible by turning the engine of Main Street ‘off’, as such a cascade of liquidity ($6 Trillion) could not be allowed to flow willy-nilly into the Main Street economy (in the view of the Central Bankers), as this would cause an inflationary tsunami à la Weimar Republic. Rather, its’ main thrust has served to further inflate the virtual world of ever more complex financial instruments.
Inevitably however, coupled with supply-chain bottlenecks, the gush of liquidity has caused Main Street inflation to rise, and hence imposed further hurt on the ground. The aim of managing the manufacturing attenuation on the one hand (small business ‘lockdown’), whilst liquidity flowed freely to the financialised sphere (to postpone a market crash) has failed. Inflation is accelerating, interest rates will rise, and this will bring adverse social and political consequences in its wake: i.e. anger, rather than compliance.
At the heart of the predicament for those who run the system is that, should they to lose control of liquidity creation – either as a result of interest rate rises, or from increasing political dissent – the ensuing recession would take-down the entire socio-economic fabric below.
And any severe recession would likely wreak havoc on the western political leadership, too.
They have opted therefore instead, to sacrifice the democratic framework, in order to roll out a monetary regime rooted in a cult of corporate-owned science & technology, media propaganda, and disaster narratives – as the means to progress towards a technocratic ‘aristocratic’ takeover over the heads of the people. (Yes, in certain ‘circles’, it is thought of as a newly rising aristocracy of money).
Professor Vighi again:
“The consequences of emergency capitalism are emphatically biopolitical. They concern the administration of a human surplus that is growing superfluous for a largely automated, highly financialised, and implosive reproductive model. This is why Virus, Vaccine and Covid Pass are the Holy Trinity of social engineering.
‘Virus passports’ are meant to train the multitudes in the use of electronic wallets controlling access to public services and personal livelihood. The dispossessed and redundant masses, together with the non-compliant, are the first in line to be disciplined by digitalised poverty management systems directly overseen by monopoly capital. The plan is to tokenise human behaviour and place it on blockchain ledgers run by algorithms. And the spreading of global fear is the perfect ideological stick to herd us toward this outcome”.
Professor Vighi’s point is clear. The vaccine campaign and the Green Pass system are no stand-alone health disciplines. They are not about ‘the Science’, nor are they intended to make sense. They are primordially connected to the élites’ economic dilemma, and serve as a political tool too, by which a new monetary dispensation can displace democracy. President Macron spoke the unstated out loud, when he said: “As for the non-vaccinated, I really want to piss them off. And we will continue to do this, to the end. This is the strategy”.
Italian PM Draghi similarly has escalated attacks on the unvaxxed, making vaccines mandatory for all the over 50s, and imposing significant restrictions on anyone over 12. Again, though ‘following the science’ is the mantra, these measures make no sense: the Omicron variant predominantly infects the double vaxxed, not the unvaxxed.
Two days ago, a leading Nobel Prize winning Virologist, Dr Montagnier and a colleague, confirmed this “obsolete” aspect of vaccine mandates. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, they write:
” … mandating a vaccine to stop the spread of a disease requires evidence that the vaccines will prevent infection or transmission (rather than efficacy against severe outcomes like hospitalization or death). As the World Health Organization puts it, “if mandatory vaccination is considered necessary to interrupt transmission chains and prevent harm to others, there should be sufficient evidence that the vaccine is efficacious in preventing serious infection and/or transmission.” For Omicron, there is as yet no such evidence.
The little data we have suggest the opposite. One preprint study found that after 30 days the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines no longer had any statistically significant positive effect against Omicron infection, and after 90 days, their effect went negative—i.e., vaccinated people were more susceptible to Omicron infection. Confirming this negative efficacy finding, data from Denmark and the Canadian province of Ontario indicate that vaccinated people have higher rates of Omicron infection than unvaccinated people”.
This is rarely, if ever, admitted. Both Macron and Draghi are desperate: They need to ‘liquify’ their economies – and soon.
Indeed, Dr Malone, leading US the father of the mRNA vaccines, wrote of those who point out such inconsistencies and illogicalities – just two months before his Twitter account was suspended – in a rather prophetic Twitter post:
“I am going to speak bluntly,” he wrote.
“Physicians who speak out are being actively hunted via medical boards and the press. They are trying to delegitimize us and pick us off, one by one.”
He finished by warning that this is “not a conspiracy theory” but “a fact.” He urged us all to “wake up.”
As the Telegraph has noted, British Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was “unethical” and “totalitarian”. The scientists warned in March 2021 that ministers in the UK needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid-19, because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”. Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism”.
Another SPI-B member said: “You could call [it] psychology ‘mind control’. That’s what we do … clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past”. Another colleague cautioned that “people use the pandemic to grab power, and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise … We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in”.
The problem goes deeper than a little ‘nudge psychology’ however. In 2019, the BBC established the Trusted News Initiative (TNI), a partnership that now includes many main-stream media. TNI was ostensibly designed to counter foreign narrative influence during election times, but it has expanded to synchronise all elements of messaging, and to eliminate deviation across the broad realm of media and tech platforms.
These synchronised ‘talking-points’ are more powerful (and insidious) than any ideology, as it functions not as a belief system or ethos, but rather, as objective ‘science’. You cannot argue with, or oppose, Science (with a capital ‘S’). Science has no political opponents. Those who challenge it are labelled “conspiracy theorists,” “anti-vaxxers,” “Covid deniers,” “extremists,” etc. And, thus the pathologized New Normal narrative also pathologizes its political opponents: stripping them of all political legitimacy. The aim obviously, is their forced compliance. Macron made that plain.
Separating the population on the basis of vaccination status is an epoch-making event. If resistance is quashed, a compulsory digital ID can be introduced to record the ‘correctness’ of our behaviour and regulate access to society. Covid was the ideal Trojan horse for this breakthrough. A global system of digital identification based on blockchain technology has long been planned by the ID2020 Alliance, backed by such giants as Accenture, Microsoft, the Rockefeller Foundation, MasterCard, IBM, Facebook, and Bill Gates’ ubiquitous GAVI. From here, the transition to monetary control is likely to be relatively smooth. CBDCs would allow central bankers not only to track every transaction, but especially to turn off access to liquidity, for any reason deemed legitimate.
The Achilles’ heel to all this however, is the evidence of genuine popular resistance to the suppression by the tech platforms of all dissenting opinion (however well-qualified its source); by the refusal to allow people informed choice about their medical treatment; and by arbitrary restrictions that may involve loss of livelihood being imposed by decree, and underpinned by emergency laws, restricting popular protest.
But more significantly and paradoxically, the Omricon variant may cut the legs from under those political leaders intent on doubling-down. It is quite possible that this mild (barely lethal), yet highly contagious variant, may prove to be Nature’s ‘vaccine’, giving us a wide measure of immunity – ostensibly better than that offered by the ‘vaccines’ from Science!
Already, we observe European states are confused and at odds with each other – taking diametrically opposed policy lines: some ending restrictions, and some decreeing more and more. Other countries, like Israel, are reducing restrictions and shifting to a herd immunity policy.
Of course, the corollary to the collapse of the technocratic initiative to liquify the over-leveraged economy might well be recession. That unfortunately, is the logic of the situation.
Reprinted with permission from Strategic Culture Foundation.