Showing posts with label Covid as financial crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Covid as financial crime. Show all posts

Monday, March 25, 2024

"Lockdown’s Fourth Birthday" by Kit Knightly

 

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Source: OffGuardian

Lockdown’s Fourth Birthday

Kit Knightly

Today marks four years to the day since the UK went into “lockdown” for the first time.

What an exciting time that was, right? With the pan-banging and the curve-flattening and the Spirit of the Blitz living on. Good times.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s team decided to honour the occasion by slapping themselves on the back:

Needless to say, this is revisionism of the highest order. To quote my favourite reply, it’s the “gaslightiest gaslight I’ve ever been gaslit by”.

The furlough system did not “save the economy”. The economy was not saved. Rather, it was laid out on a stone table and slowly flayed with a sharpened flint.

We are all still living with the consequences of lockdown, not just in the UK but globally. The world over, hundreds of millions of people have been plunged into extreme poverty by so-called “anti-Covid measures”.

Billions more are worse off, paying more for almost every product and service, and struggling in general.

It’s important to remember this was the point.

As we wrote in our piece addressing Covid revisionism last year:

The poverty, the depression, despair. The shuttered stores and closed hospitals and bankrupt businesses. They were all predictable, and all deliberate. They knew that’s what would happen…that’s what it was for. That’s why “Covid” was invented. Lockdown was not a policy mistake, it was a policy success.

Lockdowns killed more people than they saved. Lockdowns doubled global child poverty.

Lockdown doesn’t work, it never worked and it wasn’t supposed to work.

And the only thing more nauseating than the anti-human trolls pushing it at the time, are the same anti-human trolls re-writing history since, claiming lockdowns were a mistake or a panic reaction, or that no one could have known how much damage they would do.

As we wrote in our piece marking Lockdown’s first birthday:

Too often soft language in the media talks about “misjudgments” or “mistakes” or “incompetence”. Supposed critics claim the government “panicked” or “over-reacted”. That is nonsense. The easiest, cheesiest excuse that has ever existed.

“Whoops”, they say, with an emphatic shrug and shit-eating grin “I guess we done messed up!”. Unflattering, but better than the truth.

Because the truth is that the government isn’t mistaken or scared or stupid…they are malign. And dishonest. And cruel.

All the suffering of lockdown was entirely predictable and deliberately imposed. For reasons that have nothing to do with helping people and everything to do with controlling them.

It’s been more than apparent for most of the last fifty-two weeks that the agenda of lockdown was not public health, but laying the groundwork for the “new normal” and “the great reset”.

A series of programmes designed to completely undercut civil liberties all across the world, reversing decades (if not centuries) of social progress. A re-feudalisation of society, with the 99% cheerfully taking up their peasant smocks “to protect the vulnerable”, whilst the elite proselytise about the worth of rules they happily admit do not apply to them.

Lockdown was not a policy mistake it was murder.

This revisionism isn’t just about protecting reputations or saving face, of course, but about establishing a couple of important new “truths”:

  1. Lockdowns are responsible for post-Covid excess deaths, NOT the experimental “vaccines”.
  2. Lockdowns were so bad that we need to do anything we can to avoid using them for the next pandemic, including vaccine mandates and quarantine camps.

In the future we may see another lockdown – for terrorism or climate or “disease X” – but we might not. It might be we never see another lockdown again.

Either way, it’s a policy which realised its goal.

Massive unemployment. Massive misery. Massive state-overreach. Normalizing Orwellian police raids for private actions on private property, increasing snitch culture, and promoting fear and resentment of your neighbours.

Drugs, depression, suicide up. Prosperity happiness and freedom down.

And most importantly, they now know they can get away with it. They wanted to see what we would do, and for the most part the answer was “nothing”.

It was a test, and most people failed.

As I wrote two days before lockdown was announced in 2020:

“Special powers” don’t go away. They are not temporary, they won’t be surrendered. Everything we give the government our permission to do, they will do. For the foreseeable.

And now CBDCs and edible insects and 15 minute cities are on the way. They will continue to do what they want, because they think we’ll continue to let them.

Hopefully, next time, we’ll prove them wrong.

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

"Grand Theft Corona" by Mark Oshinskie

 

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GRAND THEFT CORONA


In 1983, I had an apartment on Martin Luther King Blvd. in Newark, New Jersey’s Central Ward. I looked out of place in the neighborhood. But the rent was affordable and I worked within walking distance.


Though in that “Brick City” of 325,000 there were at that time zero grocery stores, there was a bodega half a block from my steep stone stoop. I used to go there to buy milk and those tasty, cellophane-wrapped FrozFruit coconut ice pops. I became friendly with the store’s owner, an amiable, diminutive, mustachioed Puerto Rican gentleman in his forties who often wore a Guayabera shirt.


When I approached the counter one summer Saturday morning, the owner seemed uncharacteristically glum. I said, “Hey, what’s up? Is something bothering you.”


He frowned and said, “Last night, when I was closing, I put all my money for the week, $7,000, in the backseat of my car. But I couldn’t remember if I switched on my burglar alarm, so I went back inside to check. When I came back out, my cash box was gone. It took two minutes.”


Stunned, I offered, “Maybe they’ll catch the guys and you’ll get the money back.”


He frowned at my naive optimism. (I didn’t actually believe what I had said. I was just trying to cheer him up). He replied, with dismissive resignation, “Nah, it’s like you, brother. When you’re gone, you’re gone and you ain’t coming back.”


When one experiences theft directly—even if it’s just the contents of one’s purse or wallet—s/he feels indignation and anger and thinks that those who robbed them deserve punishment. People feel the same, strongly negative emotion when someone deceives them in a business transaction. The amount of money involved doesn’t even have to be very high.


Over 10 trillion dollars were foolishly spent on the Corona overreaction. Extremely out of his depth, both scientifically and economically, Trump irresponsibly sponsored six-trillion-dollars of CARES Act giveaways. His terrible judgment during this period, and his continuing vaxx promotion, must never be forgotten.


Biden & Company stacked four trillion more dollars of debt/contrived money on top of that, plus he mandated the jabs. Neither he nor Trump should ever again hold public office.


But most people didn’t think twice about these potlatches. They were too busy washing their hands, ordering DoorDash, buying masks and waiting in lines for 40 cycle PCR tests. To many, the government’s panicked and politically-motivated spending sprees didn’t register; they seemed unreal and diffuse. The funds were created and distributed electronically. Besides, most of us got, and many were mollified and distracted by, seemingly free money via “stimulus checks.”


Nearly 90% of the $800 billion of PPP “loans” were never repaid; nor were these vast sums ever expected to be. Additionally, at least $600 billion of “Covid relief” money was stolen via fraud or embezzlement. Most of those who sneakily dipped their buckets into this Amazon-at-flood-stage river of dollars will never be caught or prosecuted. Like the Newark merchant’s cash box, the missing money won’t ever be recovered.


The giveaways continue. For example, there’s still a widely-advertised tax credit for Covid employee retention. This scheme, which was estimated, in March, 2020, to cost the US Treasury $50 billion, had, by May, 2023, already cost $152 billion. And counting. Almost no one knows this is happening; they only notice when their own taxes increase.


All of the “Covid Relief” numbers are far too big to understand unless one has a good numbers sense and sits quietly in a room with some blank paper and does some ciphering. People thought it was a good idea to spend limitlessly and futilely on Grandma without considering the costs to her adult children and grandkids. Hey, Grandma used to make us cookies; she’s worth whatever we’ve got. And even what we don’t got. Even if we can’t, through the full range of “mitigation,” keep her alive for another two months in a nursing home, where she’s seldom visited. If she has to live in isolation and die alone to “stop the spread,” so be it.


But the effects of these giveaways are real, profound and lasting. Some entities and people made nearly incomprehensible sums. Forbes reported that a record 493 new billionaires were created in 2020-21. Despite being semi-mothballed for an extended period, hospitals made record profits of $20 billion from Covid relief. Pharma companies have made at least $100 billion from the failed vaxxes. And Gates-owned Gilead, which made the Remdesivir that many blame for hospital deaths, cashed in big-time. So did Zoom, Amazon and Netflix et al. Over 40 new shot, mask or test makers became billionaires, even though the masks and tests were scams and the shots flopped and killed or injured many.


The government’s issuance of all that fiat money has made you significantly poorer. There are five times as many dollars in the money supply now than there were in January, 2020. Thus, you’re paying 18% more for the things you buy today than you did in March, 2020. It’s also harder than ever to buy a first home. Those who can afford a down payment will pay far more mortgage interest for decades. They’ll/you’ll also pay more in taxes, in perpetuity. And if you didn’t already own an inflation hedge, such as real estate, stocks or metals—the prices of which have increased because all of that printed money had to go somewhere—you’ve missed out on a wave of profit-taking that better-capitalized people have caught. Inflation has devalued trillions of dollars of aggregate household savings. The relatively few rich got richer and the more numerous un-rich became noticeably poorer.


Inflation has a ratchet effect; once it occurs, it can’t be reversed. The Fed won’t sponsor deflationary measures. But the government spending/printing all of this inflationary money bothered people less than if somebody had slashed their car tire. Oblivious to cause and effect, most people—and their elected representatives—strongly supported policies that caused this inflation. They gullibly concluded Covid was an unprecedented health crisis that justified locking down a society and trashing an economy, even though humans had never before taken such measures.


While demagogues conned people about grandma, those impoverished by the massive Covid spending binge will have to work many more hours over many years to pay their bills. Consequently, some will live less long.


Studies show what should have been obvious, in March 2020, to anyone who could think: there were functionally no differences in health outcomes between the nations and states that went all-in on lockdowns, masks, tests and shots, and those that didn’t. By supporting “Covid Relief,” people got robbed far worse than they ever have. They effectively welcomed the bandits into their bank accounts and homes.


Most Americans believe that any bad outcome can be overridden or somehow redeemed. While this notion has emotional appeal, it seems unfounded. Not everything that’s broken can be put back together.


Aside from the widespread loss of wealth and the attendant social stratification, the experiences that young people could have had: the new friendships, the school bands and plays, athletics, proms, parties and graduations; and for adults, meetings of life partners, the unstarted families and gatherings, voyages and other uncreated memories were stolen from billions of people.


Gone.


And that time, those experiences and those resources are like you, brothers and sisters: they’re not coming back.

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