Politics – uncoy https://uncoy.com (many) winters in vienna. theatre, dance, poetry. and some politics. Fri, 29 Nov 2024 08:02:27 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.1 https://uncoy.com/images/2017/07/cropped-uncoy-logo-nomargin-1-32x32.png Politics – uncoy https://uncoy.com 32 32 Is China’s economy about to crash hard? https://uncoy.com/2024/11/china-economy-crash.html https://uncoy.com/2024/11/china-economy-crash.html#respond Fri, 08 Nov 2024 21:26:53 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=6064 Is China’s economy about to crash hard?

The crash in China's economy has been a long time coming. Headlines from 1990 to 2024.

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You may have heard about the coming hard crash in the Chinese economy. Here’s a headline from The Economist editors in September 2024:

The real problem with China’s economy The country risks making some of the mistakes the Soviet Union did

The crash in China’s economy has been a long time coming. Shenzou points oput what western magazines have been saying about China since 1990:

1990. The Economist: China's economy has come to a halt.
1996. The Economist: China's economy will face a hard landing.
1998. The Economist: China's economy entering a dangerous period of sluggish growth.
1999. Bank of Canada: Likelihood of a hard landing for the Chinese economy.
2000. Chicago Tribune: China currency move nails hard landing risk coffin.
2001. Wilbanks, Smith & Thomas: A hard landing in China.
2002. Westchester University: China Anxiously Seeks a Soft Economic Landing.
2003. New York Times: Banking crisis imperils China.
2004. The Economist: The great fall of China?
2005. Nouriel Roubini: The Risk of a Hard Landing in China.
2006. International Economy: Can China Achieve a Soft Landing?
2007. TIME: Is China's Economy Overheating? Can China avoid a hard landing?
2008. Forbes: Hard Landing In China?
2009. Fortune: China's hard landing. China must find a way to recover.
2010: Nouriel Roubini: Hard landing coming in China.
2011: Business Insider: A Chinese Hard Landing May Be Closer Than You Think.
2012: American Interest: Dismal Economic News from China: A Hard Landing.
2013: Zero Hedge: A Hard Landing In China.
2014. CNBC: A hard landing in China.
2015. Forbes: Congratulations, You Got Yourself A Chinese Hard Landing.
2016. The Economist: Hard landing looms for China.
2017. National Interest: Is China's Economy Going To Crash.
2018. The Daily Reckoning: China's Coming Financial Meltdown.
2019. BBC: China's Economic Slowdown: How worried should we be?
2020. New York Times: Coronavirus Could End China's Decades-Long Economic Growth Streak.
2021. Bloomberg: Chinese economy risks deeper slowdown than markets realize.
2022. Bloomberg: China Surprise Data Could Spell RECESSION.
2023. Bloomberg: No word should be off-limits to describe China's faltering economy.

… Yet it’s already 2024 and China’s economy is still going strong.

The first couple of minutes of this video1 features economist Dr. Keyu Jin, a professor at the London School of Economics, who makes the point China is a hero not a villain in most of the world:

Ninety percent of the people in today’s world still live in developing countries, and they have a very different view and perspective on China compared to the more hawkish military perspective that we often hear in the West. Chinese technologies are eminently practical, cheaper, and either of the same quality or higher quality. They are intended to address the issues faced by developing countries.

A commenter on the video from Sudan reinforces Jin’s point:

Ask me and every Sudanese citizen you can find and they will tell you the same thing. The US crippled us with economic sanctions to make us comply to thier whims, while China assisted us in every possible way and respected our right to govern ourselves the way we want.

It’s high time we in the West started to cooperate with lower income countries and stopped trying to rob them to support our extravagant, spoiled and unproductive lifestyle.2


  1. The rest of the video belabours the point and doesn’t offer much deep insight. It’s not Janssen’s best work. To Janssen’s credit, he’s lived and worked in China and speaks fluent Chinese. 

  2. If you work in the financial industry FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate), you may be generating income but you are not creating any products or consumable services. Most of us do, or at least in industries supporting FIRE. Historically about half of my own work time has been working to support FIRE industries. 

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US Election Mail-in ballots 2020 vs 2024 https://uncoy.com/2024/11/us-mail-in-ballots.html https://uncoy.com/2024/11/us-mail-in-ballots.html#respond Fri, 08 Nov 2024 11:30:37 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=6052 US Election Mail-in ballots 2020 vs 2024

An examination of the mechanics of ballot stuffing in swing states, 2020 vs 2024, with numbers.

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More Canadians suffer from TDS than any other country in the world. Their symptoms are deeper and more bitter than I’ve heard anywhere. Most of the world doesn’t care much, one way or the other, about Trump.3 On 7 November after Trump’s resounding victory in the US Presidential election, the question Canadians are asking themselves is how Trump could win in 2024 with about the same number of votes as in 2020.

Vote count in 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections
Vote count in 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections
Vote count in 2020 and 2024 US presidential elections

Great question. The answer is the absence of ballot stuffing in 2024. Republican and clean voting activists did yeoman work cleaning the electoral register and vetting incoming postal ballots.

Wackford Squeers wrote a concise summary.

Some lib asked “18 million ballots were rejected and purged HOW?

Via the good people at StopBogusBallots.com and Common Sense Elections.  Thank you, Austin, Texas-based ballot security expert Jay Valentine! 

What Common Sense Elections discovered in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin: 

—Across these states, 660,290 mail-in ballots are tied to registered voters who permanently moved to other states. These absentees number 68,983 in Georgia (far exceeding Joe Biden’s 2020 margin of victory: 11,779 votes); 262,488 in Pennsylvania (which Biden won by 80,555); and 42,043 in Wisconsin (Biden’s by 20,682).

—Voters who moved to other in-state counties total 457,310. These include 65,857 relocated voters in Michigan (which Trump won in 2016 by 10,704 votes) and 169,083 in Pennsylvania (which Trump secured in 2016 with 44,292 votes).

Voters who moved and left no forwarding residence total 146,160.

—Those linked to invalid addresses total 663,514. Pennsylvania is home to 346,505 such “voters.”

—Voters recorded as residing at commercial sites: 4,914. These reflect, among others, “voters” at Las Vegas’ Harry Reid International Airport and a vacant lot at 9145 Mann St., Las Vegas.

—A staggering 916,100 voters are enrolled with missing or incorrect apartment numbers. This boosts the odds that postal workers will leave unclaimed ballots in lobbies or mailrooms, where harvesters can retrieve and abuse them.

—All told, these screwy ballots total 2,848,288—in just these six states and involving only these six anomalies shown here. Deeper and wider scrutiny has yielded graver worries.

The good news is that Common Sense Elections’ technology identifies these suspicious destinations. It then asks county clerks not to send them mail-in ballots.

CSE also monitors ballots that are filled in and returned. It flags those that arrive from fishy addresses and advises election officials not to count them.

Mail-in and expatriate ballots have become the most popular election fraud method. The way to stop it is to only allow in-person voting with paper ballots which can be recounted. If someone cannot be bothered to show up with official ID to vote, that person does not deserve to have a vote. If this means a certain number of seniors cannot vote, so be it. It’s an open question that whether people who are so elderly that they cannot move or follow the news are qualified voters.4 Having a pulse should not be the only requirement to cast a vote.5

Would it have been better for the United States to have had Donald Trump as president for two consecutive terms or with an interrupted second term is a question for which we’ll never have an answer. In principle, for the deep changes Trump and his supporters (including Elon Musk, Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr) would like to implement, today is a more propitious time than in the middle of the mock pandemic.

That the USA has figured out how to defuse mail-in ballot fraud is good news for the rest of the world. Let’s hope the trend continues. If our goal is democracy, there’s literally no point in holding dishonest elections.


  1. And for good reason. The policies of the two state parties have been so similar for the last thirty years. Under the uniparty system it doesn’t make much difference who is the US president. 

  2. An exception should be made for people who are genuine invalids but otherwise of sound mind. This exception would not apply to mental illness but only to physical limitations.] 

  3. In many societies, to have the right to a vote required a person to own property. The requirement was put in to ensure that those voting had a stake in society and its long term prosperity. It makes some sense that this threshold was removed to ensure that property owners could not conspire against the working class.

    On the other hand, giving the vote to everyone risks mob rule. The solution is to ensure that almost everyone in society has a stake in its prosperity. If the underclass is very small, mob rule is not a threat. If a society destroys its middle class and leaves only a 1% with an underclass which is about half of society, the decisive role in any election belongs to the underclass.

    Effectively democracy becomes impossible as that class will continue to vote themselves benefits until society collapses. 

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How MBA management destroyed Boeing https://uncoy.com/2024/11/management-destroyed-boeing.html https://uncoy.com/2024/11/management-destroyed-boeing.html#respond Tue, 05 Nov 2024 22:45:29 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=6048 How MBA management destroyed Boeing

If your goal is to plunder a company while destroying it, then Boeing is a shining example of exactly what to do and how to do it.

Continue reading How MBA management destroyed Boeing at uncoy.

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Boeing through hook and by crook had become the world’s only major passenger plane manufacturer. Their order books was years deep, with tens of billions of orders waiting to be fulfilled. Somehow they’ve managed to sink into near insolvency. How did it happen?

Boeing spent tens of billions of dollars over years and years buying up their own stock. They refused to invest in new designs, they refused to invest in their workers, they refused to invest in their process, their tooling, their research and development, and instead played financial games designed to boost their stock price while ignoring the fundamentals of their business. This is what happens when MBA’s take over a company, and Boeing has become a shining example of what not to do with a major company if you care about it surviving, growing, and prospering over the long run.

If, however, your goal is to “bust out” the company and snap up the wealth while destroying it, then Boeing is a shining example of exactly what to do and how to do it. Who knew “Mafia 101” would become a major part of the MBA curriculum? Then again, with hypercapitalism and all, maybe Mafia 101 is the new and improved ultimate goal. 

> “When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” – Frederic Bastiat, “The Law”_

Again, it’s the idea that a corporation is responsible to make as much money for its shareholders as possible. The issue is with timeline. As much money as possible in the next six months, or as much money as possible in the next six years, or to generate as much value as possible in the next sixty years.

Henry Ford thought in terms of decades. The current crop of business people appear to be crooks in suit, devoid of both patriotism and common decency. When these are the values one promolgates in one’s cinema, in one’s press and in one’s universities, these are the values one will see both among bootblacks and among one’s elite.

Financialisation is the gutting of an economy. Each agent of financialisation who takes an unearned piece of the pie leaves less on the plate for those who do contribute to society, with their services, their labour or their goods.

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Blackrock’s Trojan Horse in Europe: Italy’s Giorgia Meloni https://uncoy.com/2024/10/blackrock-italy-giorgia-meloni.html https://uncoy.com/2024/10/blackrock-italy-giorgia-meloni.html#respond Tue, 22 Oct 2024 18:37:23 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=6046 Blackrock’s Trojan Horse in Europe: Italy’s Giorgia Meloni

Why do Europe's leaders want to turn our beautiful lands into a giant military camp cum prison colony, administered by bankers?

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As a European, this article on how Meloni is preparing to sell out Italy and then Europe cheap to Blackrock and private American capital, is extremely important. Via Niccolo Soldo who shared Thomas Fazzi’s original reporting on his substack.

Why do Europe’s leaders want to turn our beautiful lands into a giant military camp cum prison colony, administered by printing press bankers? The trade is almost as bad as the one the Lenape made, trading the island of Manhattan for glass beads.

Giorgia Meloni and Elon Musk together in New York on Monday night.
FILIPPO ATTILI/US PALAZZO CHIGI PRESS OFFICE HANDOUT

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni was feted recently at a swanky event in New York City held by the Atlantic Council.

I couldn’t get the lingering smell of rotting fish out of my nostrils for a few days after that. The Atlantic Council is the “NGO” par excellence when it comes to US foreign policy. According to the US Library of Congress, the Atlantic Council is:

> “…..a think tank in the field of international affairs. Founded in 1961, it provides a forum for international political, business, and intellectual leaders. It manages ten regional centers and functional programs related to international security and global economic prosperity. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C. It is a member of the Atlantic Treaty Association.”

It’s a very serious operation, and its funders read like a who’s who of very powerful global interests. Here is a small sample of their donors:

  • British Foreign and Commonwealth Office
  • Embassy of the United Arab Emirates
  • Facebook
  • Goldman Sachs & Co.
  • The Rockefeller Foundation
  • Abu Dhabi National Oil Company
  • Airbus
  • Chevron Corporation
  • Google
  • HSBC Holdings P.L.C.
  • JPMorgan Chase Foundation
  • Palantir
  • Raytheon Company (now, Raytheon Technologies)
  • US State Department
  • Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs
  • Army Future Studies Group
  • Blackstone
  • Burisma
  • Embassy of Bahrain to the United States
  • Embassy of Japan to the United States
  • Eni SpA
  • Lockheed Martin Corporation
  • NATO Public Diplomacy Division
  • NATO StratCom Center of Excellence
  • Open Society Foundations
  • etc.

Big Oil, Big Finance, Big Tech, weapons manufacturers, various governments and various government entities….they are all represented in this so-called “non-governmental organization” that is devoted to Atlanticism (read: continued US global hegemony).

Some of you may be thinking “so what? Italy is firmly within the Atlanticist orbit, and Meloni, as Premier of Italy, needs to represent her country at these events”.

Fair enough. On the other hand, many of you will recall that the Atlantic Council played a central role in the censorship regime forced onto/aided by Big Tech in the run up to the 2020 US Presidential Election, effectively tipping the scale in favour of Joe Biden’s candidacy. In 2018, the Atlantic Council partnered up with Facebook’s parent company Meta to create what is known as the Digital Forensic Research Lab. All of you here are aware that the US Government during Joe Biden’s administration funded efforts that resulted in government-backed calls for social media bans for certain American citizens, with many of the requests succeeding. You also already know the role that the USGov played in shaping the narratives around COVID-19, efforts that were assisted by the Digital Forensic Research Lab.

All of you should be aware that this outfit worked on behalf of government to monitor and censor online speech:

> The SIO’s role in monitoring and censoring online speech has garnered widespread political and legal scrutiny for stifling protected speech in conjunction with the federal government. The SIO-led so-called Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), composed of the University of Washington, Graphika Inc., and the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab (DFRLab), silenced anti-mainstream narratives at the height of the 2020 presidential race in blatant disregard of the First Amendment. > > Emails from the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) reveal that the federal agency secretly collaborated with the EIP to censor vast amounts of speech deemed “threatening” and “dangerous” to its agenda. Journalist Matt Taibbi’s reporting detailed Stanford’s abandonment of free expression, open discourse, and intellectual diversity as it aided CISA in an unprecedented crackdown against political topics damaging to Democrats and the pro-lockdown left.

By now, some of you may be wondering why X owner Elon Musk would attend an event hosted by an organization that runs counter to his stated principles at X. I don’t have an answer to this, as Musk’s motivations are his own, and super billionaires reside in a different universe than us mere mortals. In my opinion, it’s not a good look….but my opinion does not appear on Elon’s radar.

My concerns here are focused on Giorgia Meloni, a populist who heads a party founded by neo-fascists, but who is now being celebrated by the powers-that-be, including those who seek to censor information on subjects such as mass migration, an issue where Meloni is supposed to be at complete odds with Atlanticism. What exactly is she trying to achieve here? Her flirtations with Brussels (the EU is firmly aligned with the Atlantic Council) resulted in her being spurned and publicly humiliated. So what gives?****

Thomas Fazi

**approaches the subject from the view of economics and Italy’s dissipating national sovereignty**:

> Taken together, then, you get the sense that Meloni gambled her political survival on shedding her populist image and rushing in the opposite direction, becoming more pro-European and more pro-American than your average European centrist. Now, however, the liberal media is aflame once more. Chatter about Meloni’s political journey started in September, when she was presented with a “Global Citizen Award” at the Atlantic Council in New York. Beyond the think tank’s Atlanticist flavour, what really got politicos talking was who gave Meloni her prize: one Elon Musk. This has fuelled speculation about a potential political (re)alignment with Trump on Meloni’s part. Given the mercurial South African’s financial and political support for Trump’s presidential run — and the (denied) allegations of a burgeoning romance between the businessman and the Prime Minister — these claims don’t feel completely fanciful.

Okay, no big deal so far. Not playing favourites in a foreign election is common sense.

Here’s where Fazi gets to his core argument:

> So could Meloni’s recent moves be signalling a return to her radical roots? I think not. At its core, rather, this story is less about policy — and more about cold hard cash, both in Italy itself and further afield. That’s clear enough if you put aside the trees, Meloni and Musk, and instead focus on the woods: the Atlantic Council that offered Meloni her prize. The think tank euphemistically describes itself as a nonpartisan organisation that “galvanises” US global leadership and encourages engagement with its friends and allies. In plain English, that means that the Atlantic Council exists to promote the interests of US corporations — and American imperial interests more generally. Founded in the Sixties, to boost political support for Nato, today it remains active on transatlantic security issues. 

The meat:

> Nor is Musk the only US investor ingratiating himself with Meloni. After returning from her bash in New York, she also met with Larry Fink, chairman and CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment company. With assets worth $10 trillion, the firm boasts the equivalent of Germany and Japan’s combined GDP. In Italy itself, BlackRock is comfortably the largest foreign institutional investor on the Milan Stock Exchange, owning substantial stakes in some of the country’s largest listed companies. The firm is bolstering its Italian presence elsewhere too. Earlier this year, for instance, Meloni oversaw the sale of Tim’s entire fixed-line network to KKR, a US fund that boasts BlackRock among its main institutional investors.  > > Beyond the fact that the network represents a strategic national asset, with its sensitive user data now effectively under foreign control, these varied moves represent the culmination of a long sequence of privatisations and selling-off of Italian public and private assets beginning back in the Nineties. Once you dovetail that with BlackRock’s future plans — among other things, it hopes to snatch up Italy’s highway and railway networks, currently under public or semi-public control — the country looks set to become little more than an outpost of American capital, losing what little is left of its economic sovereignty. 

Fazi makes the point that by Meloni selling off Italy’s economic crown jewels to US corporate, security, and financial interests, she is reducing her own country to the state of an economic dependency of the USA. Smart Europeans are worried about the continent’s economic decline, and there are strong calls for a strategy to create “European giants” in all economic sectors. By selling off such assets to the Americans, these efforts are instantly handicapped.

Italy as the USA’s “economic Trojan Horse”:

> That this should be happening under a nominally “sovereigntist” prime minister is remarkable enough — but what really matters is the way US investors, notably BlackRock, are using Italy as a Trojan horse to expand their influence right across Europe. Consider the example of Germany. Unlike other countries, companies in Munich or Hamburg largely remain in the hands of the families that founded them. Local investors have substantial influence too, as does KFW, the public bank dedicated to supporting the Federal Republic’s industrial development. > > In practice, that means the penetration of BlackRock and other US mega-funds in the German economy remains relatively marginal. That’s an anomaly that US capital now seems intent on fixing, using Italy as its battering ram. Last month, for instance, Milan’s UniCredit bank announced a surprise hostile takeover of Commerzbank, effectively becoming the Frankfurt outfit’s largest shareholder. Though this caused some patriotic fervour among Italian commentators — an Italian bank taking over a German rival! — the reality is that the move was likely spearheaded by BlackRock itself, which executed the move with the help of other Anglo-American funds, all to consolidate its control of Germany’s financial system. No wonder Larry Fink welcomed the move. “Europe,” he said, “needs a stronger capital markets system and a more unified banking system.” 

For obvious reasons, I don’t find the following quote by Todd to be entirely correct, but the gist of it certainly holds true:

> What we are witnessing, in short, is the economic cannibalisation of Europe by US capital. Not that we should be surprised. As Emmanuel Todd, a French historian, writes in his latest book: “As its power diminishes worldwide, the American system ultimately ends up burdening its protectorates more and more, as they remain the last bases of its power.” With European industry crucial to US interests, Todd continues, we should expect more “systemic exploitation” of Rome and Berlin from the imperial centre in Washington. The fact that this is happening under the auspices of a self-described “patriot” like Meloni only highlights the grotesque weakness of European politics.

No matter who moves into the White House in January of next year, Europe is going to be negatively affected by policies emanating from the ravenous US of A.

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Modern Journalism under the loupe https://uncoy.com/2024/09/modern-journalism.html https://uncoy.com/2024/09/modern-journalism.html#respond Tue, 03 Sep 2024 14:03:42 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=6034 Modern Journalism under the loupe

Te high Masters of Journalism are struggling to avoid replacement by college interns and to out-write AI software.

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When I was considering carrying on in journalism, one reason I didn’t do so is because journalists didn’t do* anything. The journalist’s job is either to report on his/her fellow humans, or to complain about the world. Journalists and critics don’t go out and change the world. It’s easier to complain than do.

I wanted to be that change and not just report it. Sometimes I’ve succeeded, sometimes I have not. Elizabeth Nickson, another renegade former journalist and Canadian (her career include stints as an editor at Time and Life magazine) describes acerbically the delusions of the contemporary press corps. For some reason, modern journalists consider themselves to be the peers of their subjects:

Average journalism-school graduates watched their fellow undergrads go on to wealth in finance, innovation in technology, or power in politics. Meanwhile, the high Masters of Journalism are struggling to avoid replacement by college interns and to out-write AI software. After years in expensive schools cozying up to the right people, they believe that an equal professional respect is due. The trouble is, they’ve done little to earn it.

The media follows a socialism of status, demanding cultural equity with the newsmakers they cover. The members of the media don’t realize that the elites consider them with as little regard as does their dwindling audience. Striving for acceptance into the right social circles makes them all the more desperate to parrot the conventional wisdom of the ruling class. See, I’m on your team, the reporter thinks, as the Vice Undersecretary for the Department of Agriculture (Tropical Fruit Division) glances across the room to find someone worthy of his notice….

Perhaps journalists could improve…by not catastrophizing every issue that has plagued humanity since ancient Sumer. But one crisis left unnoticed has doomed journalism to dwindling audiences, rising irrelevance, and public contempt. Newsrooms from Washington to San Francisco, New York to London, suffer from a humility crisis. What makes this odd is that journalists have so much to be humble about.

This is part of her essay contributed to Michael Walsh’s new book Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You (2024).

I’m far from certain I could bear to read 448 pages about the contemporary press but for those who care about fourth estate, it looks like obligatory reading.

On a serious note, what’s gone wrong with journalism is the tendency for publications to no longer pay their reporters properly and no profits from the press. Journalists need a side gig. Side gigs depend on being considered “easy to work with” and “cooperative. Almost all newspapers and magazines are money losers now, and their future existence depends not on their readers, but on their advertisers and their corporate sponsors.

Courage has left the building, and modern mainstream journalists have become PR hacks instead of investigative/critical journalists.

Substack and independent websites provide the vast majority of serious reporting these days. The decline started with the rise of the internet. Journalists slowly became toothless from as far back as the year 2000.


* I wrote regularly for The Economist, The Moscow Times, Dance International; produced news spots for ABC Television and short documentaries for Radio-Canada.

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Corruption and venality: is it worse today? https://uncoy.com/2024/08/historicperspective.html https://uncoy.com/2024/08/historicperspective.html#respond Thu, 29 Aug 2024 13:05:52 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=6030 Corruption and venality: is it worse today?

The ubiquity of evil in the past does not excuse us from fighting evil where we find it in the present.

Continue reading Corruption and venality: is it worse today? at uncoy.

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Many of my recent posts have been quite dystopian. Watching the bombs fall on Gaza and listening to the war criminals from Israel speak on television and travel unhindered to the USA and the UK makes a man wonder about human nature.

Sometimes honest observers take a too idealistic view of the past.

I’ve recently read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872) set in 1829-1832. The financial sector in England was nearly as corrupt then as in today’s USA. Society and public opinion nearly as stupid and parochial as the US media. At this time, the Triangular Trade in human slaves was just coming to an end. In fairness to England, they were among the first to outlaw slavery in modern times (1834) and even allotted a fleet to the west coast of Africa to hinder the slave trade. Yet the expropriation of the natives continued apace, in both the Dominion of Canada and the United States of America. Simultaneously India was despoiled by the British, as they prepared for the Opium Wars to cripple China (1839-1842, 1856-1860).

Tonight I just happened to read a bit of Percy Shelley, “Song to the Men of England” (1839). Here’s the most moving stanzas:

Men of England, wherefore plough
For the lords who lay ye low?
Wherefore weave with toil and care
The rich robes your tyrants wear?

Wherefore feed and clothe and save
From the cradle to the grave
Those ungrateful drones who would
Drain your sweat—nay, drink your blood?...

The seed ye sow, another reaps;
The wealth ye find, another keeps;
The robes ye weave, another wears;
The arms ye forge, another bears.

The American militiaman and worker effectively lives today as Englishmen did 185 years ago. Not Percy Shelley, not Juan Cole, not Philip Weiss, not Richard Medhurst, not Bernhard Horstmann, not Ron Unz and certainly not Alec Kinnear have been able to put a stop to it. Those who would enslave, expropriate and war carry on making the human condition worse as quickly as technology will enable it and the laws allow them.

The ubiquity of evil in the past does not excuse us from fighting evil where we find it in the present. In recent times, Julian Assange and Edward Snowden did manage to put a small dent in evil doing by exposing it to light. Collateral damage will never as effective a euphemism (Assange), while conspiracy theory has become conspiracy reality (Snowden), thanks to their efforts.

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Average Wealth vs Median Wealth: A Slow Slide to Neo-Feudalism https://uncoy.com/2024/08/average-vs-median-wealth.html https://uncoy.com/2024/08/average-vs-median-wealth.html#respond Thu, 29 Aug 2024 11:20:08 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=6023 Average Wealth vs Median Wealth: A Slow Slide to Neo-Feudalism

The US economy has become oligarchical, a small coterie of well-heeled multi-millionaires and billionaires riding rough shod over everyone else.

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Today I saw a graphic from Kayla Zhu, which shows the top 10 countries by average and median wealth.

It’s well worth a look. Here it is.Countries-with-the-Highest-Wealt.jpg

Canada makes the list on both sides. Canadians are number ten in both average and median wealth. The difference between average and median wealth astonishes me. In Canada, average wealth is $375K but median wealth is just $142K. That’s a ratio of about 2.5 to 1. I wondered about the inequality in Canada, as Denmark shows $449K and $194K, significantly closer to 2:1. Australia does reach a disparity of just 2:1.

But the situation in the US situation is far worse, their median wealth doesn’t even make the chart, despite being 4th with avarage wealth of $565K, well-ahead of Canada.

The US economy has basically become oligarchical, with a small coterie of well-heeled multi-millionaires and billionaires riding rough shod over everyone else.

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Are people instrinsically evil? https://uncoy.com/2024/07/intrinsically-evil.html https://uncoy.com/2024/07/intrinsically-evil.html#respond Sat, 13 Jul 2024 12:31:30 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=6015 Are people instrinsically evil?

We should not let ourselves off the hook. Under democracy, leaders like this are *our* responsibility.

Continue reading Are people instrinsically evil? at uncoy.

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Twenty five million people are starving to death in the Sudan, Israelis are murdering and starving 1.5 million women and children in Gaza and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian men die in a senseless war for US hegemony.

Faced with these horrors, many wonder if humans are intrinsically evil? One commenter observed that the corn fuel burned in organic fuel could have fed a lot of starving Sudanese.

In the comments to A Time Of Famine, And A Time Of War… TR3BPilot notes:

I would posit that humans some humans are intrinsically good but most humans are:

  1. just downright stupid
  2. easily manipulated
  3. conforming
  4. non-thinking sheeple.

Every atrocity in history may have been led by one or a few socio/psycho-paths but it was masses of non-thinking sheeple who did the dirty deeds. The“re are always millions who will say “just doing my job” and “just following orders”.

One can blame the zionist-globalist cabals but billions of sheeple are responsible for committing evil acts in their name. One can blame the Jekyll Island oligarchs for the Fed but its hundred thousand some employees bear the responsibility for ruining the USD.

One can blame big pharma for their poisons but millions of imbecilic sheeple in their collective stupidity acquired Mass Formation Psychosis in unison.

It never occurs to sheeple that maybe they should think for themselves and quit following the herd.

We should not let ourselves off the hook. If we have leaders like this and we claim to be democracies, those leaders are our responsibility.

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What are Carbon Credits? Who benefits? https://uncoy.com/2024/06/carbon-credits.html https://uncoy.com/2024/06/carbon-credits.html#respond Fri, 14 Jun 2024 18:45:44 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=5987 What are Carbon Credits? Who benefits?

Effectively carbon credits are the same vouchers, with which a globalist financial class attempted to expropriate Russia.

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In “Climate Change” is a $100 Trillion Wealth Transfer from the Poor to the Rich, Elizabeth Nickson lays out clearly what has been behind all this noise about carbon credits for years:

At the same time, in our vast swaths of upland forests, the UN organization Transitions is slowly accreting that land. For who? We don’t really know. Transitions is everywhere, in the US, in Canada, in every country in Europe.  It is where you live. It is one of the many prongs of Agenda 2030. Everywhere, it invades local governments and acts to suppress economic activity.

Transitions also trades carbon credits. For who? Who do you think?

Therefore Transitions, which has a rainbow-colored smiley PR face, is in that business. Buying land to transfer it to international organizations and mega-rich families so they can make money on our forests. But not us. We can’t.  We can’t even thin them to prevent catastrophic forest fire.

Those contracts must be interesting, not that anyone can see them. The first thing they do is act as whacking big first-time tax deductions. The second thing they do is act as an annual tax deduction because those trees are eating CO2. Very clever. International interests buy our land (and yours) and use it to not pay taxes. While banking some of the most valuable assets on the planet.

In the 1990’s, a Russian Prime Minister under Boris Yeltsin, the very greedy Yegor Gaidar, together with his Komsomol friends, created a program called the Voucher Program. Each Russian, young and old, was given a ten unit voucher (roughly the equivalent of a $100, though only tradable for cash at about $10). These vouchers as single vouchers were completely useless. But packaged together by the thousand, allowed the owners to trade them for valuable state enterprises. This included not just factories, but mining concessions and oil companies.

Vouchers made a parasite and predatory class rich in Russia, and disinherited the people. That is until Vladimir Putin showed up and re-nationalised a fair number of these concessions, and/or demanded back taxes from the voucher carpetbaggers, now known as oligarchs.

Basically carbon credits are the same vouchers, with which a globalist financial class attempted to expropriate Russia. Except now these carbon credits are being used to bankrupt small farmers and small companies in favour of those who can afford to buy vouchers en masse.

All of Nickson’s original essay is worth reading. Nickson is a veteran MSM star journalist, with stints at Time, the Guardian, The Financial Times as well as the former European Editor for Life Magazine. She is an old-school investigative reporter who knows the system from the inside.

First they came for the third-world, then they came for the farmers, then they came for the businesses, then they came for your car, finally they came for your house. You can’t say you haven’t been warned.

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Imperial Strategy: Nuclear Proliferation and Regional Conflict https://uncoy.com/2024/05/imperial-strategy-nuclear-proliferation.html https://uncoy.com/2024/05/imperial-strategy-nuclear-proliferation.html#respond Fri, 24 May 2024 12:46:55 +0000 https://uncoy.com/?p=5969 Imperial Strategy: Nuclear Proliferation and Regional Conflict

To spread nuclear weapons and fan regional conflicts simultaneously is the most cynical and diabolical strategy yet from US imperialism.

Continue reading Imperial Strategy: Nuclear Proliferation and Regional Conflict at uncoy.

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In the comments to the same article, Harry D. advocated for the new US imperial strategy.

“We should not count on friends or neutrals to save our civilization.” Hear that Taiwan, Japan and South Korea? You must build your own nuclear deterrent immediately.

USA must restart or civil defense program to teach the population how to survive nuclear attack. Many lives can be saved with some basic knowledge, reinforced in the schools, like we did in the 1950s. See: The Good News About Nuclear Destruction (goodnewsnuke.com)

This madman unmasks what is a diabolical gambit, the new US paradigm of war:

Arm all its satrapies around the world with nuclear weapons and encourage “local” nuclear wars.

Clean hands USA avoids the action. Its enemies and its competitors (even friendly) are eliminated. Last one left standing. We can see this strategy in action in the Ukraine where the United States created a crisis, before midwifing a violent coup in 2014. The US Front person was the repugnant Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland but ultimately even Nuland is just a face, if an ugly one, with her biolabs and hatred.

Ten years of state terrorism slowly built up the conditions for war. Now that war has started and the Ukraine has lots its doomed war, the United States pushes its European vassals forward, as the next man up in confrontation with Russia.

Fortunately, even Poland is not that foolish. The US has to rely on the mad or bought like Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, who puts a pretty face on hate and serves as the point woman for the Fourth Reich, much as Lina and Reinhard Heydrich did for the Third Reich.

Bundesarchiv Bild 146 1972 039 24 Reinhard Heydrich mit Frau crop

Spreading nuclear weapons around the world will result in their use. Every significant regional power, including states like Poland, should dread nuclear proliferation. Those arms will be used in local conflicts which will result in their own elimination. Damage to their larger neighbours will be significant but it’s small nations which will disappear completely in such exchanges.

It’s no coincidence that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping announced at their joint public statement in May, “Everyone loses in a nuclear war.”

Simultaneously to spread nuclear weapons and fan regional conflicts, is the most cynical and diabolical strategy yet from US imperialism.

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