A New
World Is Being Born:
What Will It Be?
By Paul
Craig Roberts
April
09, 2020 "Information
Clearing House"
- We are hearing from many that
the world after Covid-19 will be different.
The question is:
Different in what way?
Will it be better or worse?
Elites are working to make it better for them,
and worse for the rest of us.
About that the evidence is clear.
The Big Boys are being bailed out and
their debts covered.
Everyone else, except those already
marginalized and without a recent work record
and fixed address, got a month’s rent and
extended unemployment benefits.
Big
Pharma sees massive profits in the virus,
Government sees more power to control
But the disparity in economic benefits is only a
part of it.
Powerful vested interests, such as Bill
Gates and Big Pharma, are determined to
vaccinate us all, and to control our movements
with an internal passport called “vaccinated,
health cleared” or other words to that effect.
New tracking procedures and technologies
are to be put in operation reminiscent of the
“mark of the beast” to police the access of
varous categories of people to various areas and
benefits.
Experts point out that just as we cannot be
vaccinated against the common cold, except
perhaps for the past year’s version we cannot be
vaccinated against Covid-19 and other mutating
viruses, but the experts are already being
shouted down. No expert opinion is to be
permitted to stand in the way of vaccination
profits.
Neither will nutrition and vitamin advocates be
allowed to get in the way.
Bill Sardi predicts that orchestrated
scares generated by mandatory recalls of “toxic”
vitamins await us (
https://knowledgeofhealth.com/modern-medicine-laid-bare/
). Big Pharma is determined to acquire control
over vitamins and homeopathic remedies, and the
FDA is Big Pharma’s likely pawn.
Vaccination has been elevated above cure, as Big
Pharma and its shills such as CNN shout down the
positive experience doctors report of successful
treatments with Hydroxychloroquine and
Azithromycin, and the effectiveness of Vitamin
C, Vitamin D3, and Zinc in strengthening the
ability of immune systems to fight off the
virus.
Big Pharma-influenced medical orthodoxy
cannot get out of the box it has been put into.
When new thinking and experimentation are
needed, those capable of thought are hasseled
and even blocked by FDA regulations and
dogmatism.
The
permanent government and its security agencies
see in the population’s fear and confusion
opportunities to put into place more tyrannical
measures, more set-asides of Constitutional
Rights, more impairments on free speech.
The ability of freedom to resist
oppression is ever diminished.
Various descriptions of the expected dystopia
are offered on the Internet.
But it does not have to turn out this
way.
It is up to us. Demoralized and fearful,
we can accept more government power as we did
after 9/11.
Instead, we can collectively recognize
the massive failure everywhere of Western
leadership and construct a more livable and
sustainable society.
The
failure of leadership is an opportunity for real
change
CNN, the New York Times, and the rest of the
controlled media tell us every day that
President Trump represents the failure of
leadership.
But the failure of leadership goes beyond
all the leaders of the last 30 years and resides
in the system itself.
Global, “self-regulating,” greed-driven,
financialized, soulless capitalism cannot unite
people into a sustainable community.
The
failure of leadership resides in the long-term
failure of leadership that made Western
societies vulnerable by moving
high-productivity, high-valued jobs offshore in
order to raise corporate profits at the expense
of domestic consumer incomes.
It means the movement offshore of the
ability to produce medicines, N95 masks, and
other needed resources for national survival.
It means dependency on foreign powers.
It means the inability to function
without massive imports.
However you look at it, globalism is a
death sentence.
Its only advantage is to the rich, and
the advantage comes to them in the form of cheap
labor that swells their profits while it shrinks
domestic incomes and the purchasing power of the
population.
Without
incomes to drive the economy, the elites
provided loans and expanded credit in order to
provide spending power based in personal debt to
absorb the offshored production brought home to
sell in American markets. The cost of college
education soared as its quality declined.
Education subsidies were cut and student
debt substituted in its place.
Inflation was understated in order to
deny Social Security pensioners cost-of-living
increases. Medicare payments to health care
providers were squeezed down.
The social safety net was ripped again
and again. More and more people fell out, and
homeless populations grew providing fertile
breeding grounds for Covid-19.
The
income and wealth distribution in the US went
from fair to extremely unequal in a short time
as the rich profited from the Federal Reserve
pumping trillions of dollars into the prices of
financial assets and from corporations buying
back their own stock, thus decapitalizing the
corporation while taking the company into debt,
all for the temporary benefit of higher bonuses
for executives and more capital gains for
shareholders.
The elites killed the economy for
short-run benefits to themselves.
These
destructive polices were the work of
greed-driven short-term thinkers—people whose
only vision was “I want even more.”
And it is these unworthy people, not
their victims, that Uncle Sam is now rescuing.
The massive unpayable debt bubble that
already overhung the economy is being blown
larger.
The Federal Reserve and the US Treasury
are in the process of destroying the US dollar
in futile efforts to save the super-rich from
their own greed-driven misbehavior.
In
place of this insane approach to the economic
crisis, there is a sane approach.
The bailed out corporations and banks are
in effect being purchased by the government.
Therefore, they should be treated as the
nationalized corporations that they are.
Once nationalized, the government, unlike
the corporations, can create the money to pay
the salaries and health premiums. The predicted
30 or 40 percent unemployment can be avoided.
It is better to pay salaries than to pay
unemployment benefits.
The psychological difference alone is
worth a vast amount.
The inability of the high-cost American private
health care system to cope with the present
medical crisis is apparent.
A profit-driven health care system is the
highest cost system to have.
Profit is built in at every level, which raises
costs to levels that private insurance and
Medicare refuse to reimburse.
The result is shrinkage, not expansion of
the system.
Just look, for example, at the number of
hospitals, especially in rural areas, that have
recently closed.
Moreover, the coverage of a private system—and
Medicare itself—has massive gaps.
The resistance to a nationalized health
service is ridiculous, especially as a
nationalized service can coexist with a
privatized one.
Two are clearly better than one.
Nationalization has numerous benefits.
It permits the large unwieldly
enterprises, created, for example, by the
mergers of giant banks like Chase Manhattan and
J.P. Morgan, to be broken up and to reestablish
the separation of commercial from investment
banking.
The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act and
the suspension of enforcement of the anti-trust
laws were ignorant policymaking at its worse.
Nationalization permits the government to bring
home the offshored production of global US
corporations and to put the US workforce back to
work in middle class jobs.
It is win-win for the American people.
Once the giant monopoly corporations are broken
up, they can be privatized and returned to
private ownership on a fair value basis, not on
the giveaway basis of a pennies on the dollar
sale. The money the government receives from
their sale can be used to retire government
debt.
For individuals, the life- and
economy-suffocating heavy debts should be
written down to levels that can be serviced by
their incomes.
Michael Hudson and I proposed a “debt
jubilee” as a solution:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2020/03/25/a-brady-bond-solution-for-americas-unpayable-corporate-debt/
Others have taken up our call:
https://truthout.org/articles/1200-only-goes-so-far-its-time-to-abolish-debt/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=98cb6aac-8ef8-4e0e-b80e-24a1d1f92ef6
Currently the Federal Reserve is socializing
debt without writing it down.
This is
nonsensical as it bails out debt by expanding
it.
In the
US there is so much dogmatic prejudice against
anything that has a tint of socialism, even as a
temporary expedient measure, that thought and
sensible action face strong barriers.
If we cannot overcome these barriers, we
are destined for far more difficult times.
Can
community be restored or will nationality
degenerate into the clans and tribalism of
Identity Politics?
The greatest challenge we face is to restore the
concept of community.
There was a time when
the United States was a community, a
unique one as it consisted of a multitude of
ethnicities. As each wave of ethnic immigrants
arrived, they passed a test on the Constitution,
learned the national language, and became
assimilated into the American community.
This community has been destroyed by a variety
of forces, the latest being Identity Politics.
Identity Politics prohibits community by
breaking down the population into mutually
hostile groups by gender, sexual preference,
race, and whatever classification can be
invented or imagined.
The result is a Tower of Babel.
A Tower of Babel is not a community.
Instead of community, the US is a place where
hatreds are cultivated with those claiming the
status of victims doing the most hating and
those assigned the status of victimizer being
most hated.
Initially, white hetereosexual males were
the primary hate objects, but lately we have the
transgendered hating the feminists who say that
a woman is a woman, not a man who claims to be a
woman.
The transgendered attacks on well-known
feminist leaders are violent in their language
and are likely to progress into violent deeds.
Various unassimilated immigrant groups
battle each other over who controls disputed
territory.
Israel’s inhumane treatment of
Palestinians has enraged Muslim immigrants
against Jews.
Violent racial attacks on white people
are becoming more common.
For
decades Women’s Studies have taught hatred of
men, and Black Studies have taught hatred of
Whites.
This taught hatred is now supplemented by
the New York Times 1619 Project.
In place of assimilation, we now have
mutual hatreds.
How do we escape from this?
Perhaps the challenge from Covid-19 will force
us to come together again in order to prevail
over the virus, which in mutated versions might
be with us forever.
A coming together would be helped by an
economic bailout perceived as fair rather than
as the one-sided approach that has been taken. A
debt jubilee provides the necessary fairness.
The elites by thinking only of their interests
are in the way of the opportunity that crisis
provides to bring people together.
If we can’t be brought back together, we
can forget about unity beyond the boundaries of
our own victim or identity group.
In place of community, we will be
organized in clans of seperate identities.
The absence of unity at home will make us
a sitting duck for enemies abroad.
We know what the Dystopian Wish List is.
Can we come together with an
anti-dystopian wish list as a mutually
supportive community or have the elites
succeeded in atomizing us into disparate tribal
hate groups?
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns
have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West,
How America Was Lost,
and
The Neoconservative Threat to
World Order.
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The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.