Ultra-Imperialism: Who Owns the World...

[Dusty Track]

"Since the mid-1970s, two corporations — Vanguard and Blackrock — have gobbled up most companies in the world, effectively destroying the competitive market on which America’s strength has rested, leaving only false appearances behind."

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2021/10/joseph-mercola/who-owns-the-world/

Who Owns the World?
By Joseph Mercola
Mercola.com
October 30, 2021
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Until recently, it appeared economic competition had been driving the rise and fall of small and large companies across the U.S. Supposedly, PepsiCo is Coca Cola’s competitor, Apple and Android vie for your loyalty and drug companies battle for your health care dollars. However, all of that turns out to be an illusion.

Since the mid-1970s, two corporations — Vanguard and Blackrock — have gobbled up most companies in the world, effectively destroying the competitive market on which America’s strength has rested, leaving only false appearances behind.

Indeed, the global economy may be the greatest illusionary trick ever pulled over the eyes of people around the world. To understand what’s really going on, watch Tim Gielen’s hour-long documentary, “MONOPOLY: Who Owns the World?” above.

Corporate Domination

As noted by Gielen, who narrates the film, a handful of mega corporations — private investment companies — dominate every aspect of our lives; everything we eat, drink, wear or use in one way or another. These investment firms are so enormous, they control the money flow worldwide. So, how does this scheme work?

While there appear to be hundreds of competing brands on the market, like Russian nesting dolls, larger parent companies own multiple smaller brands. In reality, all packaged food brands, for example, are owned by a dozen or so larger parent companies.

Pepsi Co. owns a long list of food, beverage and snack brands, as does Coca-Cola, Nestle, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Unilever, Mars, Kraft Heinz, Mondelez, Danone and Associated British Foods. Together, these parent companies monopolize the packaged food industry, as virtually every food brand available belongs to one of them.

These companies are publicly traded and are run by boards, where the largest shareholders have power over the decision making. This is where it gets interesting, because when you look up who the largest shareholders are, you find yet another monopoly.

While the topmost shareholders can change from time to time, based on shares bought and sold, two companies are consistently listed among the top institutional holders of these parent companies: The Vanguard Group Inc. and Blackrock Inc.

Pepsi and Coca-Cola — An Example

For example, while there are more than 3,000 shareholders in Pepsi Co., Vanguard and Blackrock’s holdings account for nearly one-third of all shares. Of the top 10 shareholders in Pepsi Co., the top three, Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation, own more shares than the remaining seven.

Now, let’s look at Coca-Cola Co., Pepsi’s top competitor. Who owns Coke? As with Pepsi, the majority of the company shares are held by institutional investors, which number 3,155 (as of the making of the documentary).

As shown in the film, three of the top four institutional shareholders of Coca-Cola are identical with that of Pepsi: Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation. The No. 1 shareholder of Coca-Cola is Berkshire Hathaway Inc.

These four — Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street and Berkshire Hathaway — are the four largest investment firms on the planet. “So, Pepsi and Coca-Cola are anything but competitors,” Gielen says. And the same goes for the other packaged food companies. All are owned by the same small group of institutional shareholders.

Big Tech Monopoly

The monopoly of these investment firms isn’t relegated to the packaged food industry. You find them dominating virtually all other industries as well. Take Big Tech, for example. Among the top 10 largest tech companies we find Apple, Samsung, Alphabet (parent company of Google), Microsoft, Huawei, Dell, IBM and Sony.

Here, we find the same Russian nesting doll setup. For example, Facebook owns Whatsapp and Instagram. Alphabet owns Google and all Google-related businesses, including YouTube and Gmail. It’s also the biggest developer of Android, the main competitor to Apple. Microsoft owns Windows and Xbox. In all, four parent companies produce the software used by virtually all computers, tablets and smartphones in the world. Who, then, owns them? Here’s a sampling:

Facebook — More than 80% of Facebook shares are held by institutional investors, and the top institutional holders are the same as those found in the food industry: Vanguard and Blackrock being the top two, as of the end of March 2021. State Street Corporation is the fifth biggest shareholder
Apple — The top four institutional investors are Vanguard, Blackrock, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street Corporation
Microsoft — The top three institutional shareholders are Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation
You can continue going through the list of tech brands — companies that build computers, smart phones, electronics and household appliances — and you’ll repeatedly find Vanguard, Blackrock, Berkshire Hathaway and State Street Corporation among the top shareholders.

Same Small Group Owns Everything Else Too

The same ownership trend exists in all other industries. Gielen offers yet another example to prove this statement is not an exaggeration:

“Let’s say we want to plan a vacation. On our computer or smart phone, we look for a cheap flight to the sun through websites like Skyscanner and Expedia, both of which are owned by the same group of institutional investors [Vanguard, Blackrock and State Street Corporation].

We fly with one of the many airlines [American Airlines, Air France, KLM, United Airlines, Delta and Transavia] of which the majority of the shares are often owned by the same investors …

The airline we fly [on] is in most cases a Boeing or an Airbus. Again, we see the same [institutional shareholders]. We look for a hotel or an apartment through Bookings.com or AirBnB.com. Once we arrive at our destination, we go out to dinner and we write a review on Trip Advisor. The same investors are at the basis of every aspect of our journey.

And their power goes even much further, because even the kerosene that fuels the plane comes from one of their many oil companies and refineries. Just like the steel that the plane is made of comes from one of their many mining companies.

This small club of investment companies, banks and mutual funds, are also the largest shareholders in the primary industries, where our raw materials come from.”

The same goes for the agricultural industry that the global food industry depends on, and any other major industry. These institutional investors own Bayer, the world’s largest seed producer; they own the largest textile manufacturers and many of the largest clothing companies.

They own the oil refineries, the largest solar panel producers and the automobile, aircraft and arms industries. They own all the major tobacco companies, and all the major drug companies and scientific institutes too. They also own the big department stores and the online marketplaces like eBay, Amazon and AliExpress.

They even own the payment methods we use, from credit card companies to digital payment platforms, as well as insurance companies, banks, construction companies, telephone companies, restaurant chains, personal care brands and cosmetic brands.

No matter what industry you look at, the top shareholders, and therefore decision makers, are the same: Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street and/or Berkshire Hathaway. In virtually every major company, you find these names among the top 10 institutional investors.

Who Owns the Investment Firms of the World?

Diving deeper, we find that these major investment firms are in turn owned by their own set of shareholders. One of the most amazing things about this scheme is that the institutional investors — and there are many more than the primary four we’ve focused on here — also own each other. They’re all shareholders in each other’s companies.

At the top of the pyramid — the largest Russian doll of all — we find Vanguard and Blackrock.
“Together, they form an immense network that we can compare to a pyramid,” Gielen says. Smaller institutional investors, such as Citibank, ING and T. Rowe Price, are owned by larger investment firms such as Northern Trust, Capital Group, 3G Capital and KKR.

Those investors in turn are owned by even larger investment firms, like Goldman Sachs and Wellington Market, which are owned by larger firms yet, such as Berkshire Hathaway and State Street. At the top of the pyramid — the largest Russian doll of all — we find Vanguard and Blackrock.

“The power of these two companies is something we can barely imagine,” Gielen says. “Not only are they the largest institutional investors of every major company on earth, they also own the other institutional investors of those companies, giving them a complete monopoly.”

Gielen cites data from Bloomberg, showing that by 2028, Vanguard and BlackRock are expected to collectively manage $20 trillion-worth of investments. In the process, they will own almost everything on planet Earth.

BlackRock — The Fourth Branch of Government

Bloomberg has also referred to BlackRock as the “fourth branch of government,” due to its close relationship with the central banks. BlackRock actually lends money to the central bank, the federal reserve, and is their principal adviser.

Dozens of BlackRock employees have held senior positions in the White House under the Bush, Obama and Biden administrations. BlackRock also developed the computer system that the central banks use.

Who Owns BlackRock?

While Larry Fink is the figurehead of BlackRock, being its founder, chairman and chief executive officer, he’s not the sole decision maker, as BlackRock too is owned by shareholders. Here we find yet another curiosity, as the largest shareholder of BlackRock is Vanguard.

“This is where it gets dark,” Gielen says. Vanguard has a unique structure that blocks us from seeing who the actual shareholders are. “The elite who own Vanguard don’t want anyone to know they are the owners of the most powerful company on earth.” Still, if you dig deep enough, you can find clues as to who these owners are.

The owners of the wealthiest, most powerful company on Earth can be expected to be among the wealthiest individuals on earth. In 2016, Oxfam reported that the combined wealth of the richest 1% in the world was equal to the wealth of the remaining 99%. In 2018, it was reported that the world’s richest people get 82% of all the money earned around the world in 2017.

In reality, we can assume that the owners of Vanguard are among the 0.001% richest people on the planet. According to Forbes, there were 2,075 billionaires in the world as of March 2020. Gielen cites Oxfam data showing that two-thirds of billionaires obtained their fortunes via inheritance, monopoly and/or cronyism.

“This means that Vanguard is in the hands of the richest families on earth,” Gielen says. Among them we find the Rothschilds, the DuPont family, the Rockefellers, the Bush family and the Morgan family, just to name a few.

Many belong to royal bloodlines and are the founders of our central banking system, the United Nations and just about every industry on the planet. Gielen goes even further in his documentary, so I highly recommend watching it in its entirety. I’ve only summarized a small piece of the whole film here.

A Financial Coup D’etat

Speaking of the central bankers, I recently interviewed finance guru Catherine Austin Fitts, and she believes it’s the central bankers that are at the heart of the global takeover we’re currently seeing. She also believes they are the ones pressuring private companies to implement the clearly illegal COVID jab mandates. Their control is so great, few companies have the ability to take a stand against them.

“I think [the central bankers] are really depending on the smart grid and creepy technology to help them go to the last steps of financial control, which is what I think they’re pushing for,” she said.

“What we’ve seen is a tremendous effort to bankrupt the population and the governments so that it’s much easier for the central bankers to take control. That’s what I’ve been writing about since 1998, that this is a financial coup d’etat.

Now the financial coup d’etat is being consolidated, where the central bankers just serve jurisdiction over the treasury and the tax money. And if they can get the [vaccine] passports in with the CBDC [central bank digital currency], then it will be able to take taxes out of our accounts and take our assets. So, this is a real coup d’etat.”

The Spartacus Letter

Again, I urge you to watch the documentary at the top of this article, and keep an eye out for my interview with Austin Fitts, which will be published in the near future. In closing, I want to highlight a mysterious letter posted by an anonymous individual who goes by the name “Spartacus.”

“COVID-19 — The Spartacus Letter” was originally posted on docdroid.net, but has since been deleted. Another copy can be found on mega.nz.1 The Automatic Earth2 and ZeroHedge3 have also published the letter in full. The letter starts out saying, “My name is Spartacus, and I’ve had enough”:

“We are watching the medical establishment inject literal poison into millions of our fellow Americans without so much as a fight. We have been told that we will be fired and denied our livelihoods if we refuse to vaccinate. This was the last straw.”

What follows is a compilation of data showing the COVID pandemic was a biowarfare attack that has been kept going using sophisticated psychological warfare tactics. It also reviews the dangers of the COVID shots, noting that the virus and the “vaccines” were made by the same entities.

A summary of Spartacus’ findings is as follows. Each summary point is elaborated upon in later sections of the letter, which you can read in any of the three references provided.

COVID-19 is a blood and blood vessel disease. SARS-CoV-2 infects the lining of human blood vessels, causing them to leak into the lungs.
Current treatment protocols (e.g. invasive ventilation) are actively harmful to patients, accelerating oxidative stress and causing severe VILI (ventilator-induced lung injuries). The continued use of ventilators in the absence of any proven medical benefit constitutes mass murder.
Existing countermeasures are inadequate to slow the spread of what is an aerosolized and potentially wastewater-borne virus, and constitute a form of medical theater.
Various non-vaccine interventions have been suppressed by both the media and the medical establishment in favor of vaccines and expensive patented drugs.
The authorities have denied the usefulness of natural immunity against COVID-19, despite the fact that natural immunity confers protection against all of the virus’s proteins, and not just one.
Vaccines will do more harm than good. The antigen that these vaccines are based on, SARS-CoV-2 Spike, is a toxic protein. SARS-CoV-2 may have ADE, or antibody-dependent enhancement; current antibodies may not neutralize future strains, but instead help them infect immune cells. Also, vaccinating during a pandemic with a leaky vaccine removes the evolutionary pressure for a virus to become less lethal.
There is a vast and appalling criminal conspiracy that directly links both Anthony Fauci and Moderna to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
COVID-19 vaccine researchers are directly linked to scientists involved in brain-computer interface (‘neural lace’) tech, one of whom was indicted for taking grant money from China.
Independent researchers have discovered mysterious nanoparticles inside the vaccines that are not supposed to be present.
The entire pandemic is being used as an excuse for a vast political and economic transformation of Western society that will enrich the already rich and turn the rest of us into serfs and untouchables.
A Criminal Conspiracy

It’s a long letter, so I won’t reproduce the whole thing here. However, the following sections are of particular interest, with regard to a criminal elite that is orchestrating the destruction of life as we know it, in an effort to usher in a technocracy-led system of global governance and control:4

“In November of 2019, three technicians at the Wuhan Institute of Virology developed symptoms consistent with a flu-like illness. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, and Ralph Baric knew at once what had happened, because back channels exist between this laboratory and our scientists and officials.

December 12th, 2019, Ralph Baric signed a Material Transfer Agreement (essentially, an NDA) to receive Coronavirus mRNA vaccine-related materials co-owned by Moderna and NIH.

It wasn’t until a whole month later, on January 11th, 2020, that China allegedly sent us the sequence to what would become known as SARS-CoV-2. Moderna claims, rather absurdly, that they developed a working vaccine from this sequence in under 48 hours.

Stephane Bancel, the current CEO of Moderna, was formerly the CEO of bioMerieux, a French multinational corporation specializing in medical diagnostic tech, founded by one Alain Merieux. Alain Merieux was one of the individuals who was instrumental in the construction of the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s P4 lab.

The sequence given as the closest relative to SARS-CoV-2, RaTG13, is not a real virus. It is a forgery. It was made by entering a gene sequence by hand into a database, to create a cover story for the existence of SARS-CoV-2, which is very likely a gain-of-function chimera produced at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and was either leaked by accident or intentionally released. The animal reservoir of SARS-CoV-2 has never been found.

This is not a conspiracy ‘theory.’ It is an actual criminal conspiracy, in which people connected to the development of Moderna’s mRNA-1273 are directly connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology and their gain-of-function research by very few degrees of separation, if any. The paper trail is well- established.

The lab-leak theory has been suppressed because pulling that thread leads one to inevitably conclude that there is enough circumstantial evidence to link Moderna, the NIH, the WIV, and both the vaccine and the virus’s creation together.

In a sane country, this would have immediately led to the world’s biggest RICO and mass murder case. Anthony Fauci, Peter Daszak, Ralph Baric, Shi Zhengli, and Stephane Bancel, and their accomplices, would have been indicted and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Instead, billions of our tax dollars were awarded to the perpetrators.

The FBI raided Allure Medical in Shelby Township north of Detroit for billing insurance for ‘fraudulent COVID-19 cures.’ The treatment they were using? Intravenous Vitamin C. An antioxidant. Which, as described above, is an entirely valid treatment for COVID-19-induced sepsis, and indeed, is now part of the MATH+ protocol advanced by Dr. Paul E. Marik.

The FDA banned ranitidine (Zantac) due to supposed NDMA (N-nitrosodimethylamine) contamination. Ranitidine is not only an H2 blocker used as antacid, but also has a powerful antioxidant effect, scavenging hydroxyl radicals. This gives it utility in treating COVID-19.

The FDA also attempted to take N-acetylcysteine, a harmless amino acid supplement and antioxidant, off the shelves, compelling Amazon to remove it from their online storefront. This leaves us with a chilling question: did the FDA knowingly suppress antioxidants useful for treating COVID-19 sepsis as part of a criminal conspiracy against the American public?

The establishment is cooperating with, and facilitating, the worst criminals in human history, and are actively suppressing non-vaccine treatments and therapies in order to compel us to inject these criminals’ products into our bodies …

Conclusions: The current pandemic was produced and perpetuated by the establishment, through the use of a virus engineered in a PLA-connected Chinese biowarfare laboratory, with the aid of American taxpayer dollars and French expertise …

Either through a leak or an intentional release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a deadly SARS strain is now endemic across the globe, after the WHO and CDC and public officials first downplayed the risks, and then intentionally incited a panic and lockdowns that jeopardized people’s health and their livelihoods.

This was then used by the utterly depraved and psychopathic aristocratic class who rule over us as an excuse to coerce people into accepting an injected poison which may be a depopulation agent, a mind control/pacification agent in the form of injectable ‘smart dust,’ or both …

They believe they can get away with this by weaponizing the social stigma of vaccine refusal. They are incorrect. Their motives are clear and obvious to anyone who has been paying attention.

These megalomaniacs have raided the pension funds of the free world. Wall Street is insolvent and has had an ongoing liquidity crisis since the end of 2019. The aim now is to exert total, full-spectrum physical, mental, and financial control over humanity before we realize just how badly we’ve been extorted by these maniacs. The pandemic and its response served multiple purposes for the Elite:

Concealing a depression brought on by the usurious plunder of our economies conducted by rentier-capitalists and absentee owners who produce absolutely nothing of any value to society whatsoever …
Destroying small businesses and eroding the middle class.
Transferring trillions of dollars of wealth from the American public and into the pockets of billionaires and special interests.
Engaging in insider trading, buying stock in biotech companies and shorting brick-and-mortar businesses and travel companies, with the aim of collapsing face-to-face commerce and tourism and replacing it with e-commerce and servitization.
Creating a casus belli for war with China, encouraging us to attack them, wasting American lives and treasure and driving us to the brink of nuclear Armageddon.
Establishing technological and biosecurity frameworks for population control and technocratic- socialist ‘smart cities’ where everyone’s movements are despotically tracked, all in anticipation of widespread automation, joblessness, and food shortages, by using the false guise of a vaccine to compel cooperation.
… The Elites are trying to pull up the ladder, erase upward mobility for large segments of the population, cull political opponents and other ‘undesirables,’ and put the remainder of humanity on a tight leash, rationing our access to certain goods and services that they have deemed ‘high-impact,’ such as automobile use, tourism, meat consumption, and so on.

Naturally, they will continue to have their own luxuries, as part of a strict caste system akin to feudalism. Why are they doing this? Simple. The Elites are Neo-Malthusians and believe that we are overpopulated and that resource depletion will collapse civilization in a matter of a few short decades.

They are not necessarily incorrect in this belief. We are overpopulated, and we are consuming too many resources. However, orchestrating such a gruesome and murderous power grab in response to a looming crisis demonstrates that they have nothing but the utmost contempt for their fellow man.

To those who are participating in this disgusting farce without any understanding of what they are doing, we have one word for you. Stop. You are causing irreparable harm to your country and to your fellow citizens.

To those who may be reading this warning and have full knowledge and understanding of what they are doing and how it will unjustly harm millions of innocent people, we have a few more words. Damn you to hell. You will not destroy America and the Free World, and you will not have your New World Order. We will make certain of that.”

Sources and References

1, 4 Mega.nz The Spartacus Letter
2 The Automatic Earth September 26, 2021
3 ZeroHedge September 27, 2021

[Dusty Track]

Well. in a sense Lenin was right and wrong at the same time. "Wrong" in that the "corrective" mechanism of "socialist revolution" all failed including the home of it all - loaded with contradictions - and far more - also failed. The tendencies noted in the earlier (para) "astute petty bourgeois commentators on this - DT: the tendency for Finance Capital and its monopolistic arms to expand into some kind of thing like Ultra-Imperialism - as we face today - - (DT: see Lenin on - the correctness of this - in the pamphlet "imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism" ).

All the rest I have documented - unaided as an old man - on this site.

That's what we confront today. Most of the Jews, like their Zionist brethren - have cynically dropped the project of their parents - which was Zionist-subversive anyway - they were never Universalists - i.e. sincerely putting forward a program for all humanity - as they claimed. Just ghetto AshkeNAZI Jews at heart. When Finance Capital got America by the balls and spread their Tribal favors to the lower Tribal pack, they cut and ran. IOW, lying Tribalists, carpet salesmen - people who put truth well below the need to sell - and at a hyper-inflated price, mega rent-seekers...none of the bastards are worth a - political - dime.

Of course, collateral damage in all of this was the politics of the "Communist" Parties that made a project of denying the ascendant role of Finance (big Jew dominated) Capital and its cloaked allies...which, from the 1930's on (often with folksy Mick willing "leaders" - like Cannon, Foster, etc, Sharkey - put out lying trash publications denying the truth and laying dominance onto "Presbyterians (!)" and so on)... and this shit are still in the same groove to this very day, not least in the Far Left (hahhahah) and Democrat Party!!!!! The Mick is indeed a "willing executioner". Worthless whinging trash that are incapable of defending their - real - homeland - indeed of ever making much of it at all. Shabbos goy is what they are...'tis whot deh are...'tis whot deh are...

And the Greeks - in some kind of parallel universe - though on a far higher plane - opposite in many ways - not least historico-geographically (being on the borders of the East) - had better lift their game or else they will follow this worthless social trash into the dustbin of history, because there are critical elements in common.

[Dusty Track]

Even Varoufakis and Zizek aren't totally asleep...

Yanis Varoufakis & Slavoj Zizek | Indigo Festival 2021

But just how much does the Global Ultra-Imperialist cartel dispense with the profit motive?

@The Alarmist
When told by a consulting firm in the early days of Amazon how they could help make it profitable, Jeff Bezos replied, “Profits are for pussies.” Indeed. He no longer needs profits: He and his ilk just need a slave labour force to convert raw materials into material comfort with minimal sharing of the wealth.

DT: "But wealth can increase and labor power is required to do that, albeit the cheaper the better…though purchasing power is also needed. Monopolizing productive resources – and forming a kind of Global cartel – means total control over prices but doesn’t dispense with the need – advantages gained in -expanding markets and creating NEW wealth.

What the new system does is turn “democratic government” into their tool and – along with new technologies – make it possible to produce a totally complaint population which is unable to challenge their position."

[Vngelis]

There have been two global attempts at uniting finance capital ie WW1 and WW2. They achieved it by the 1970's.
The rise of the transnational corporation and the limits of globalism forced the hedge funds into DIRECT control as opposed to indirect.

When on top of the pyramid the only was is down. On the other hand they have to erase 7billion people off the planet. Do they have the capacity and capability?
Put it another way. During WW1 for three summers workers killed each other just by going over the parapet. Did they know they were going to die? Initially no. After a while it was common knowledge...

When the Russians voted with their feet the war was over. This is the 2nd year of Covid. How long can they play the same old same old story, take a jab to be saved whilst dying from worklessness, sickness from the chemical cosh, depression from the isolation etc? 3-4 years?

If capitalism is negating the value of labour and its creation profit, then it is entering another hyperinflation phase like the previous two periods in history.
This time round its obviously attempting to weaken the populace to make it unable to react/resist.

The problem with history repeating itself works both ways. Reaction breeds resistance. What forms that resistance takes and how long everyone complies is still up for grabs. The only thing certain is the Left in all its forms is over.

VN

[Dusty Track]

Post by Vngelis
There have been two global attempts at uniting finance capital ie WW1 and WW2. They achieved it by the 1970's.
The rise of the transnational corporation and the limits of globalism forced the hedge funds into DIRECT control as opposed to indirect.
When on top of the pyramid the only was is down. On the other hand they have to erase 7billion people off the planet. Do they have the capacity and capability?
Put it another way. During WW1 for three summers workers killed each other just by going over the parapet. Did they know they were going to die? Initially no. After a while it was common knowledge...
When the Russians voted with their feet the war was over. This is the 2nd year of Covid. How long can they play the same old same old story, take a jab to be saved whilst dying from worklessness, sickness from the chemical cosh, depression from the isolation etc? 3-4 years?
If capitalism is negating the value of labour and its creation profit, then it is entering another hyperinflation phase like the previous two periods in history.
This time round its obviously attempting to weaken the populace to make it unable to react/resist.
The problem with history repeating itself works both ways. Reaction breeds resistance. What forms that resistance takes and how long everyone complies is still up for grabs. The only thing certain is the Left in all its forms is over.
VN

Though this is a secondary question to your main point, I think it is possible to over-estimate the role of the Russian Revolution (and the Russian peacemaking and agitation that followed) in ending the war. What it did initially was to allow German and allied forces to concentrate in the Western front, but this was more than balanced by the late entry of the USA into the war which, not only prolonged the war, but was decisive in defeating Germany, which by this number of years of highly intense warfare, exhausted. But the main reason for the success of the agitation within Germany among the soldiers and workers was the PROLONGED nature of the war, made so, not by Russian peace moves but by late entry of the USA to the war.
I cannot see how - the NEED and DRIVE - for profit is negated (and with it the exploitation of its source, labor power). I made this point in the post I made above yours in response to someone at another site - and this covered the rather shallowly based though at least creative point made by Varoufakis (I mean he comes off ONE episode on the London Exchange!). Am I totally missing some point here?
It seems to me that the prolonged issuance of money, separated from the production of use values - ALONE, without any "fundamental" separation from the need for the exploitation of labor power. is a recipe for inflation. But the spikes we have seen so far may merely be adjustments arising from the Lockdowns (albeit unnecessarily, but deliberately, engineered).
I think what is required is a historical study of the elements that make up the transition in the world economy - and the changing instruments subordinated to Finance Capital - of the type we both see as having happened.
I think the left - as "left" IS over for the - ostensible - purposes for which it arose. But it is far from having completed its handiwork for Finance Capital. This view isn't unique to us, but is widespread among those on the periphery of the Left who do recognise at least some of the implications and "anomalies" in the present "Pandemic operation" and are shocked at the responses of - even - the "Far Left" to it. That worthless unctuous, pompous, pretentious, yapping, cunt "North" (!!!) is a prime example.

On reflection, I have to say I appreciate the originality of your suggestion of the existence of an historical analogy between the “servitude” that followed the “Covid Crisis and in the “Great War”, when, starting as an adventure which would, provided the right measures were taken” would “soon be over” to a realization that service on the Front was a likely death sentence. The latter ended in national ruin, revolution and in some nations…hyper-inflation! The present events are yet to run their full course.

[Dusty Track]

Melbourne, What they WON'T show you - HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS

Despite 100's of 000's. some are saying that a new approach will be needed...and, in light of the weight of the situation, the unprecedented repression and the total intransigence of the hunchback's 'Labour' government that it would be justified...


00Aroha
3 days ago
And they say he’s going to get in for a third term ....🙄🙄 that doesn’t look like it to me. Well done Melbourne 🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻

ace68 00
3 days ago
Tell him he's dreaming.

Henry Trenter
3 days ago
pretty sure the polls will be rigged in his favour or another sellout will take his place.. You can't solve the problem by voting, people need to overpower the police/government with force. Where are all the men at?


00Aroha
3 days ago
@Henry Trenter yeh you probably right but whoever it is can’t be as bad as him 😂


creative me
3 days ago
Only Dans bots think that lol



Edna Hemming
2 days ago
He is an evil insane bastard, and he was spruking off today on the news about the protesters being violent. He must be dreaming. What about the violence he committed on the Tradie's protest with his bullies of cops shooting people with rubber bullets, etc. And why is he still even around after being served with papers for Treason. By law he should be locked up.

[Vngelis]

Post by Dusty Track

Post by Vngelis
There have been two global attempts at uniting finance capital ie WW1 and WW2. They achieved it by the 1970's.
The rise of the transnational corporation and the limits of globalism forced the hedge funds into DIRECT control as opposed to indirect.
When on top of the pyramid the only was is down. On the other hand they have to erase 7billion people off the planet. Do they have the capacity and capability?
Put it another way. During WW1 for three summers workers killed each other just by going over the parapet. Did they know they were going to die? Initially no. After a while it was common knowledge...
When the Russians voted with their feet the war was over. This is the 2nd year of Covid. How long can they play the same old same old story, take a jab to be saved whilst dying from worklessness, sickness from the chemical cosh, depression from the isolation etc? 3-4 years?
If capitalism is negating the value of labour and its creation profit, then it is entering another hyperinflation phase like the previous two periods in history.
This time round its obviously attempting to weaken the populace to make it unable to react/resist.
The problem with history repeating itself works both ways. Reaction breeds resistance. What forms that resistance takes and how long everyone complies is still up for grabs. The only thing certain is the Left in all its forms is over.
VN

Though this is a secondary question to your main point, I think it is possible to over-estimate the role of the Russian Revolution (and the Russian peacemaking and agitation that followed) in ending the war. What it did initially was to allow German and allied forces to concentrate in the Western front, but this was more than balanced by the late entry of the USA into the war which, not only prolonged the war, but was decisive in defeating Germany, which by this number of years of highly intense warfare, exhausted. But the main reason for the success of the agitation within Germany among the soldiers and workers was the PROLONGED nature of the war, made so, not by Russian peace moves but by late entry of the USA to the war.
I cannot see how - the NEED and DRIVE - for profit is negated (and with it the exploitation of its source, labor power). I made this point in the post I made above yours in response to someone at another site - and this covered the rather shallowly based though at least creative point made by Varoufakis (I mean he comes off ONE episode on the London Exchange!). Am I totally missing some point here?
It seems to me that the prolonged issuance of money, separated from the production of use values - ALONE, without any "fundamental" separation from the need for the exploitation of labor power. is a recipe for inflation. But the spikes we have seen so far may merely be adjustments arising from the Lockdowns (albeit unnecessarily, but deliberately, engineered).
I think what is required is a historical study of the elements that make up the transition in the world economy - and the changing instruments subordinated to Finance Capital - of the type we both see as having happened.
I think the left - as "left" IS over for the - ostensible - purposes for which it arose. But it is far from having completed its handiwork for Finance Capital. This view isn't unique to us, but is widespread among those on the periphery of the Left who do recognise at least some of the implications and "anomalies" in the present "Pandemic operation" and are shocked at the responses of - even - the "Far Left" to it. That worthless unctuous, pompous, pretentious, yapping, cunt "North" (!!!) is a prime example.

On reflection, I have to say I appreciate the originality of your suggestion of the existence of an historical analogy between the “servitude” that followed the “Covid Crisis and in the “Great War”, when, starting as an adventure which would, provided the right measures were taken” would “soon be over” to a realization that service on the Front was a likely death sentence. The latter ended in national ruin, revolution and in some nations…hyper-inflation! The present events are yet to run their full course.

We will be by April 2022 two years into the Scamdemic. From what I understand the problem is not enough have taken the jabs and they cant move across to mass culling until they get the overwhelming amount of people on board.... as timing is everything... and time isn't on their side.... America being the last full blown nation state hasn't been able to impose mandatory vaccines and that is key.

[Dusty Track]

Post by Vngelis
We will be by April 2022 two years into the Scamdemic. From what I understand the problem is not enough have taken the jabs and they cant move across to mass culling until they get the overwhelming amount of people on board.... as timing is everything... and time isn't on their side.... America being the last full blown nation state hasn't been able to impose mandatory vaccines and that is key.

"From what I understand the problem is not enough have taken the jabs and they cant move across to mass culling until they get the overwhelming amount of people on board..."

Is that because they need to destroy all the baseline "non-vaxxed" so that comparison would then be impossible and so mass deaths couldn't be due to Covid? Or why?

But what is the motive? Do you see "immigrants" as being equally involved? Or is this mainly confined to Europeans? What of the Israeli protest movement?

[Dusty Track]

A perspective on some of the core issues...

GREAT AMERICA
Clarity in Trump’s Wake
The United States of America is now a classic oligarchy. The clarity that it has brought to our situation by recognizing this fact is its only virtue.
By Angelo Codevilla

January 19, 2021
"Either the Constitution matters and must be followed . . . or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives."
— Texas v. Pennsylvania et al.

Texas v. Pennsylvania et al. did not deny setting rules for the 2020 election contrary to the Constitution. On December 10, 2020, the Supreme Court discounted that. By refusing to interfere as America’s ruling oligarchy serves itself, the court archived what remained of the American republic’s system of equal justice. That much is clear.

In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans’ movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.

Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment. Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience, and they punish.

Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s lived under less ruling class pressure than do today’s Americans. And their rulers were smart enough not to insult them, their country, or their race.

In 2015, Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life’s rules flow from the people through their representatives. In 2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared experts’ claims of infallibility that dwarf baroque kings’ pretensions.

In that self-referential sense, the United States of America is now a classic oligarchy.

The following explains how this change happened. The clarity that it has brought to our predicament is its only virtue.

Oligarchy had long been growing within America’s republican forms. The 2016 election posed the choice of whether its rise should consolidate, or not. Consolidation was very much “in the cards.” But how that election and its aftermath led to the fast, thorough, revolution of American life depended on how Donald Trump acted as the catalyst who clarified, energized, and empowered our burgeoning oligarchy’s peculiarities. These, along with the manner in which the oligarchy seized power between November 2016 and November 2020, ensure that its reign will be ruinous and likely short. The prospect that the republic’s way of life may thrive among those who wish it to depends on the manner in which they manage the civil conflict that is now inevitable.

From Ruling Class to Oligarchy

By the 21st century’s first decade, little but formality was left of the American republic. In 1942, Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy described the logic by which government and big business tend to coalesce into socialism in theory, oligarchy in practice. But by then, that logic had already imposed itself on the Western world. Italy’s 1926 Law of Corporations—fascism’s charter—inaugurated not so much the regulation of business by government as the coalescence of the twain. Over the ensuing decade, it was more or less copied throughout the West.

In America, the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act’s authors had erected barriers against private oligopolies and monopolies. By maintaining competition between big business, they hoped to preserve private freedoms and limit government’s role. But the Great Depression’s pressures and temptations led to the New Deal’s rules that differed little from Italy’s. No matter that, as the Supreme Court pointed out in Schechter Poultry v. U.S., public-private amalgamation does not fit in the Constitution. It grew nevertheless alongside the notion that good government proceeds from the experts’ judgment rather than from the voters’ choices. The miracles of production that America brought forth in World War II seemed to validate the point.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had come to understand large organizations that feed on government power and dispense vast private benefits, was not shy in warning about the danger they pose to the republic. His warning about the “military-industrial complex” that he knew so well is often misunderstood as a mere caution against militarism. But Ike was making a broader point: Amalgams of public and private power tend to prioritize their corporate interests over the country’s.

That is why Eisenhower cautioned against the power of government-funded expertise. “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever-present and is gravely to be regarded,” he said, because “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Government money can accredit a self-regarding elite. Because “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity,” government experts can end up substituting their power for truth.

The expansion of government power throughout the 1960s and ’70s in pursuit of improving education, eradicating poverty, and uplifting blacks created complexes of public-private power throughout America that surpassed the military-industrial complex in size, and above all in influence.

Consider education. Post-secondary education increased fourfold, from 9 percent of Americans holding four-year degrees in 1965 to 36 percent in 2015. College towns became islands of wealth and political power. From them came endless “studies” that purported to be arbiters of truth and wisdom, as well as a growing class of graduates increasingly less educated but ever so much more socio-politically uniform.

In the lower grades, per-pupil expenditure (in constant dollars) went from $3,200 in 1960 to $13,400 in 2015. That money fueled an even more vast and powerful complex—one that includes book publishers, administrators, and labor unions and that has monopolized the minds of at least two generations. As it grew, the education establishment also detached itself from the voters’ control: In the 1950s, there were some 83,000 public school districts in America. By 2015, only around 13,000 remained for a population twice as large. Today’s parents have many times less influence over their children’s education than did their grandparents.

Analogous things happened in every field of life. Medicine came to be dominated by the government’s relationship with drug companies and hospital associations. When Americans went to buy cars, or even light bulbs and shower nozzles, they found their choices limited by deals between government, industry, and insurance companies. These entities regarded each other as “stakeholders” in an oligarchic system. But they had ever less need to take account of mere citizens in what was becoming a republic in name only. As the 20eth century was drawing to a close, wherever citizens looked, they saw a government and government-empowered entities over which they had ever less say, which ruled ever more unaccountably, and whose attitude toward them was ever less friendly.

The formalities were the last to go. Ever since the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215 A.D., the rulers’ dependence on popular assent to expenditures has been the essence of limited government. Article I, section 9 of the U.S. Constitution enshrines that principle. Congressional practice embodied it. Details of bills and expenditures were subject to public hearings and votes in subcommittees, committees, and the floors of both Houses. But beginning in the early 1980s and culminating in 2007, the U.S government abandoned the appropriations process.

Until 1981, Congress had used “continuing resolutions” to continue funding government operations unchanged until regular appropriations could be made. Thereafter, as congressional leaders learned how easy it is to use this vehicle to avoid exposing what they are doing to public scrutiny, they legislated and appropriated ever less in public, and increasingly put Congress’ output into continuing resolutions or omnibus bills, amounting to trillions of dollars and thousands of pages, impossible for representatives and senators to read, and presented to them as the only alternative to “shutting down the government.” This—now the U.S government standard operating procedure—enables the oligarchy’s “stakeholders” to negotiate their internal arrangements free from responsibility to citizens. It is the practical abolition of Article I section 9—and of the Magna Carta itself.

In the 21st century, the American people’s trust in government plummeted as they—on the political Left as well as on the Right—realized that those in power care little for them. As they watched corporate and non-profit officials trade places with public officials and politicians while getting much richer, they felt impoverished and disempowered. Since the ruling class embraced Republicans and Democrats, elections seemed irrelevant. The presidential elections of 2008 and 2012 underlined that whoever won, the same people would be in charge and that the parceling out of wealth and power among stakeholders would continue.

Americans on the Right were especially aggrieved because the oligarchy had become culturally united in disdain for Western civilization in general and for themselves in particular. The cultural warfare it waged on the rest of America inflamed opposition. But it also diluted its own focus on solidifying profitable arrangements.

By 2016, America was already well into the classic cycles of revolution. The atrophy of institutions, the waning of republican habits, and the increasing, reciprocal disrespect between classes that have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another, than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners precluded returning to traditional republican life. The election would determine whether the oligarchy could consolidate itself. More important, it would affect the speed by which the revolutionary vortex would carry the country, and the amount of violence this would involve.

The Trump Catalyst

By 2015, the right side of America’s challenge to the budding oligarchy was inevitable. Trump was not inevitable. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had begun posing a thorough challenge to the “stakeholders” most Americans disrespected. Candidate Trump was the more gripping showman. His popularity came from his willingness to disrespect them, loudly. Because the other 16 Republican candidates ran on different bases, none ever had a chance. Inevitably, victory in a field so crowded depended on when which minor candidate did or did not withdraw. There never was a head-to-head choice between Trump and Cruz.

Trump’s candidacy drew the ferocious opposition it did primarily because the entire ruling class recognized that, unlike McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, he really was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which the ruling class live, move, and have their being. Since Cruz’s candidacy represented the same threat, it almost certainly would have drawn no less intense self-righteous anger. Nasty narratives could have been made up about him out of whole cloth as easily as about Trump.

But Trump’s actual peculiarities made it possible for the oligarchy to give the impression that its campaign was about his person, his public flouting of conventional norms, rather than about the preservation of their own power and wealth. The principal consequence of the ruling class’ opposition to candidate Trump was to convince itself, and then its followers, that defeating him was so important that it legitimized, indeed dictated, setting aside all laws, and truth itself.

Particular individuals had never been the oligarchy’s worry. In 2008, as Barack Obama was running against Hillary Clinton and John McCain—far cries from Trump—he pointed to those Americans who “cling to God and guns” as the problem’s root. Clinton’s 2016 remark that Trump’s supporters were “a basket of deplorables,”—racists, sexists, homophobes, etc.—merely voiced what had long been the oligarchy’s consensus judgment of most Americans. For them, pushing these Americans as far away as possible from the levers of power, treating them as less than citizens, had already come to define justice and right.

Donald Trump—his bombastic, hyperbolic style, his tendency to play fast and loose with truth, even to lie as he insulted his targets—fit perfectly the oligarchy’s image of his supporters, and lent a color of legitimacy to the utterly illegitimate collusion between the oligarchy’s members in government and those in the Democratic Party running against Trump.

Thus did the FBI and CIA, in league with the major media and the Democratic Party, spy on candidate Trump, concocting and spreading all manner of synthetic dirt about him. Nevertheless, to universal surprise, he won, or rather the oligarchy lost, the 2016 election.

The oligarchy’s disparate members had already set aside laws, truth, etc. in opposition to Trump. The realization that the presidency’s awesome powers now rested in his hands fostered a full-court-press #Resistance. Trump’s peculiarities helped make it far more successful than anyone could have imagined.

“Dogs That Bark Do Not Bite”

Applying this observation to candidate Trump’s hyperbole suggested that President Trump might suffer from what Theodore Roosevelt called the most self-destructive of habits, combining “the unbridled tongue with the unready hand.” And, in fact, President Trump neither fired and referred for prosecution James Comey or the other intelligence officials who had run the surveillance of his campaign. He praised them, and let himself be persuaded to fire General Michael Flynn, his national security advisor, who stood in the way of the intelligence agencies’ plans against him. Nor did he declassify and make public all the documents associated with their illegalities.

Four years later, he left office with those documents still under seal. He criticized officials over whom he had absolute power, notably CIA’s Gina Haspel who likely committed a crime spying on his candidacy, but left them in office. Days after his own inauguration, he suffered the CIA’s removal of clearances from one of his appointees because he was a critic of the Agency. Any president worthy of his office would have fired the entire chain of officials who had made that decision. Instead, he appointed to these agencies people loyal to them and hostile to himself.

He acted similarly with other agencies. His first secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security advisor mocked him publicly. At their behest, in August 2017, he gave a nationally televised speech in which he effectively thanked them for showing him that he had been wrong in opposing ongoing war in the Middle East. He railed against Wall Street but left untouched the tax code’s “carried interest” provision that is the source of much unearned wealth. He railed against the legal loophole that lets Google, Facebook, and Twitter censor content without retribution, but did nothing to close it. Already by the end of January 2017, it was clear that no one in Washington needed to fear Trump. By the time he left office, Washington was laughing at him.

Nor did Trump protect his supporters. For example, he shared their resentment of being ordered to attend workplace sessions about their “racism.” But not until his last months in office did he ban the practice within the federal government. Never did he ban contracts with companies that require such sessions.

Thus, as the oligarchy set about negating the 2016 electorate’s attempt to stop its consolidation of power, Trump had assured them that they would neither be impeded as they did so nor pay a price. Donald Trump is not responsible for the oligarchy’s power. But he was indispensable to it.

#TheResistance rallied every part of the ruling class to mutually supporting efforts. Nothing encourages, amplifies, or seemingly justifies extreme sentiments as does being part of a unanimous chorus, a crowd, a mob—especially when all can be sure they are acting safely, gratuitously. Success supercharges them. #TheResistance fostered the sense in the ruling class’ members that they are more right, more superior, and more entitled than they had ever imagined. It made millions of people feel bigger and better about themselves than they ever had.

Logic and Dysfunction

Disdain for the “deplorables” united and energized parts of American society that, apart from their profitable material connections to government, have nothing in common and often have diverging interests. That hate, that determination to feel superior to the “deplorables” by treading upon them, is the “intersectionality,” the glue that binds, say, Wall Street coupon-clippers, folks in the media, officials of public service unions, gender studies professors, all manner of administrators, radical feminists, race and ethnic activists, and so on. #TheResistance grew by awakening these groups to the powers and privileges to which they imagine their superior worth entitles them, to their hate for anyone who does not submit preemptively.

Ruling-class judges sustained every bureaucratic act of opposition to the Trump Administration. Thousands of identical voices in major media echoed every charge, every insinuation, non-stop and unquestioned. #TheResistance made it ruling-class policy that Trump’s and his voters’ racism and a host of other wrongdoing made them, personally, illegitimate. In any confrontation, the ruling class deemed these presumed white supremacists in the wrong, systemically. By 2018, the ruling class had effectively placed the “deplorables” outside the protection of the laws. By 2020, they could be fired for a trifle, set upon in the streets, prosecuted on suspicion of bad attitudes, and even for defending themselves.

Because each and every part of the ruling coalition’s sense of what may assuage its grievances evolves without natural limit, this logic is as insatiable as it is powerful. It is also inherently destructive of oligarchy.

Enjoyment of power’s material perquisites is classic oligarchy’s defining purpose. Having conquered power over the people, successful oligarchies foster environments in which they can live in peace, productively. Oligarchy, like all regimes, cannot survive if it works at cross-purposes. But the oligarchy that seized power in America between 2016 and 2020 is engaged in a never-ending seizure of ever more power and the infliction of ever more punishment—in a war against the people without imaginable end. Clearly, that is contrary to what the Wall Street magnates or the corps of bureaucrats or the university administrators or senior professors want. But that is what the people want who wield the “intersectional” passions that put the oligarchy in power.

As the oligarchy’s every part, every organ, raged against everything Trump, it made itself less attractive to the public even as Trump’s various encouragements of economic activity were contributing to palpable increases in prosperity. Hence, by 2019’s end, Trump was likely to win reelection. Then came COVID-19.

The COVID Fortuna

The COVID-19 virus is no plague. Though quite contagious, its infection/fatality rate (IFR), about 0.01 percent, is that of the average flu, and its effects are generally so mild that most whom it infects never know it.

Like all infections, it is deadly to those weakened severely by other causes. It did not transform American life by killing people, but by the fears about it that our oligarchy packaged and purveyed. Fortuna, as Machiavelli reminds us, is inherently submissive to whoever bends her to his wishes. The fears and the strictures they enabled were not about health—if only because those who purveyed and imposed them did not apply them to themselves. They were about power over others.

COVID’s politicization began in February 2020 with the adoption by the World Health Organization—which is headed by an Ethiopian bureaucrat beholden to China—and upon recommendation of non-scientist Bill Gates, of a non-peer-reviewed test for the infection. The test’s chief characteristic is that its rate of positives to negatives depends on the number of cycles through which the sample is run. More cycles, more positives. Hence, every test result is a “soft” number. Second, the WHO and associated national organizations like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control reported COVID’s spread by another “soft” number: “confirmed cases.” That is, sick persons who tested positive for the virus.

When this number is related to that of such persons who then die, the ratio—somewhat north of 5 percent—suggests that COVID kills one out of 20 people it touches. But that is an even softer number since these deaths include those who die with COVID rather than of it, as well as those who may have had COVID. Pyramiding such soft numbers, mathematical modelers projected millions of deaths. Scary for the unwary, but pure fantasy.

For example, the U.S. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which modeled the authoritative predictions on which the U.S. lockdowns were based, also predicted COVID-19 deaths for Sweden, which did not lock down. On May 3, the IHME predicted that Sweden would suffer 2,800 COVID deaths a day within the next two weeks. The actual number was 38. Reporting on COVID has never ceased to consist of numbers as scary as they are soft.

Literate persons know that, once an infectious disease enters a population, nothing can prevent it from infecting all of it, until a majority has developed antibodies after contracting it—so-called community immunity or herd immunity. But fear leads people to empower those who promise safety, regardless of how empty the promises. The media pressed governments to do something. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan screamed: “don’t panic is terrible advice.” The pharmaceutical industry and its Wall Street backers salivated at the prospect of billions of government money for new drugs and vaccines. Never mind the little sense it makes for millions of people to accept a vaccine’s non-trivial risk to protect against a virus with trivial consequences for themselves. All manner of officials yearned to wield unaccountable power.

Because the power to crush the general population’s resistance to itself is the oligarchy’s single-minded focus, it was able to bend fears of COVID to that purpose. Thus, it gathered more power with more consequences than the oligarchs could have imagined.

But only President Trump’s complaisance made this possible. His message to the American people had been not to panic, be mindful of the scientific facts—you can’t stop it, and it’s not that bad—while mitigating its effects on vulnerable populations. But on March 15, Trump bent, and agreed to counsel people to suspend normal life for two weeks to “slow the spread,” so that hospitals would not be overwhelmed. Two weeks later, the New York Times crowed that Trump, having been told “hundreds of thousands of Americans could face death if the country reopened too soon,” had been stampeded into “abandoning his goal of reopening the country by Easter.” He agreed to support the “experts’” definition of what “soon” might mean. By accrediting the complex of government, industry, and media’s good faith and expertise, Trump validated their plans to use COVID as a vehicle for enhancing their power.

Having seized powers, the oligarchs used them as weapons to disrupt and disaggregate the parts of American society they could not control.

The economic effects of lockdowns and social distancing caused obvious pain. Tens of millions of small businesses were forced to close or radically to reduce activity. More than 40 million Americans filed claims for unemployment assistance. Uncountable millions of farmers and professionals had their products and activities devalued. Millions of careers, dreams that had been realized by lifetimes of work, were wrecked. Big business and government took over their functions. Within nine months, COVID-19 had produced 28 new billionaires.

Surplus and scarcity of food resulted simultaneously because the lockdowns closed most restaurants and hotels. As demand shifted in ways that made it impossible for distribution networks and processing plants to adjust seamlessly, millions of gallons of milk were poured down drains, millions of chickens, billions of eggs, and tens of thousands of hogs and cattle were destroyed, acres of vegetables and tons of fruit were plowed under. Prices in the markets rose. Persons deprived of work with less money with which to pay higher prices struggled to feed their families. This reduced countless self-supporting citizens to supplicants. By intentionally reducing the supply of food available to the population, the U.S. government joined the rare ranks of such as Stalin’s Soviet Union and Castro’s Cuba.

But none of these had ever shut down a whole nation’s entire medical care except for one disease. Hospitals stood nearly empty, having cleared the decks for the (ignorantly) expected COVID flood. Emergency rooms were closed to the poor people who get routine care there. Forget about dentistry. Most Americans were left essentially without medical care for most of a year. Human bodies’ troubles not having taken a corresponding holiday, it is impossible to estimate how much suffering and death this lack of medical care has caused and will cause yet.

The oligarchy’s division of all activity into “essential”—meaning permitted—and “nonessential”—to be throttled at will—had less obvious but more destructive effects. Private clubs, as well as any and all gatherings of more than five or 10 people, were banned. Churches were forbidden to have worship services or to continue social activities. The “social distancing” and mask mandates enforced in public buildings and stores, and often on the streets, made it well-nigh impossible for people to communicate casually. Thus, was that part of American society that the oligarchy did not control directly disarticulated, and its members left alone to face unaccountable powers on which they had to depend.

Meanwhile, the media became the oligarchy’s public relations department. Very much including ordinary commercial advertising, it hammered home the oligarchy’s line that COVID restrictions are good, even cool. These restrictions reduced the ideas available to the American people to what the mass media purveyed and the social media allowed. Already by April 2020, these used what had become near-monopoly power over interpersonal communications to censor such communications as they disapproved. Political enforcers took it upon themselves even to cancel statements by eminent physicians about COVID that they judged to be “misleading.” Of course, this betrayed the tech giants’ initial promise of universal access. It is also unconstitutional. (In Marsh v. Alabama, decided in 1946, the Supreme Court barred private parties from acting as de facto governments). Since these companies did it in unison, they also violated the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. But the ruling class that had become an oligarchy applauded their disabling whatever might be conducive to conservatives’ interests and inconvenient to their own candidates.

Private entities wielding public powers in coordination with each other without having to observe any of government’s constitutional constraints is as good a definition of oligarchy as there is. Oligarchy had increasingly taken power in the buildup to the 2020 election. In its aftermath, it would try to suffocate America.

Sovereignty of the Vote Counters

The oligarchy’s proximate objective, preventing the 2020 presidential election from validating the previous one’s results, overrode all others. The powers it had seized under COVID’s cover, added to the plethora that it had exercised since the 2016 campaign’s beginning, had surely cowered some opposition. But as November 2020 loomed, no one could be sure how much it also had energized.

Few people were happy to be locked down. It was a safe bet that not a few were unhappy at being called systemically racist. The oligarchy, its powers notwithstanding, could not be sure how people would vote. That is why it acted to take the presidential election’s outcome out of the hands of those who would cast the votes and to place it as much as possible in the hands of its members who would count the votes.

Intentionally, traditional procedures for voting leave no discretion to those who count the votes. Individuals obtain and cast ballots into a physical or electronic box only after showing identification that matches their registration. Ballot boxes are opened and their contents counted by persons representing the election’s opposing parties. Persons registered to vote might qualify to vote-by-mail by requesting a ballot, the issuance and receipt of which is checked against their registration. Their ballots are counted in the same bipartisan manner.

The Democratic Party had long pressed to substitute universal voting by mail—meaning that ballots would be sent to all registered voters, in some states to anyone with a driver’s license whether they asked for them or not and regardless of whether these persons still lived at the address on the rolls or were even alive. The ballots eventually would arrive at the counting centers, either through the mail, from drop boxes, or through “harvesters” who would pick them up from the voters who fill them out, and who may even help them to fill them out. Security, if any, would consist of machine-matching signatures on the ballot and on the envelope in which it had come. The machine’s software can be dialed to greater or lesser sensitivity.

But doing away with scrutiny of ballots counted by representatives of the election’s contenders removes the last possibility of ensuring the ballot had come from a real person whose will it is supposed to represent. Once the link between the ballot and the qualified person is broken, nothing prevents those in charge of the electoral process from excluding and including masses of ballots as they choose. The counters become the arbiters.

Attorney General William Barr pointed out the obvious: Anyone, in America or abroad, can print up any number of ballots, mark them, and deliver them for counting to whoever is willing to accept them and run them through their machines. Since the counters usually dispose of the envelopes in which ballots arrive—thus obviating any possibility of tracing the ballot’s connection to a voter—they may even dispense of the fiction that there had ever been any signed envelopes. That is especially true of late-found ballots. Who knows where they came from? Who cares to find out?

Only in a few one-party Democratic states was universal vote-by-mail established by law. Elsewhere, especially in the states sure to be battlegrounds in the presidential election, mail-in voting was introduced by various kinds of executive or judicial actions. Questions of right and wrong aside, the Constitution’s Article II section 1’s words—“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”—makes such actions unconstitutional on their face. Moreover, in these states—Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—the counting of votes in the most populous counties is firmly in the hands of Democratic Party bosses with a well-documented history of fraud.

To no one’s surprise, the 2020 presidential election was decided by super-majorities for the Democratic candidate precisely from these counties in these states. Yes, Trump’s percentage of the vote fell in certain suburbs. But Trump received some 11 million more votes in 2020 than four years earlier, and nearly doubled the share of votes he received from blacks. The Democrats’ gain of some 15 million votes came exclusively from mail-in ballots, and their victory in the Electoral College came exclusively from the supermajorities piled up in these corrupt counties—the only places where Trump’s share of the black vote was cut by three-quarters. Did people there really think so differently?

This is not the place to recount the list of affidavits sworn under penalty of perjury by persons who observed ballot stuffing, nor the statistical anomaly of successive batches of votes that favored Biden over Trump by precisely the same amounts, of un-creased (i.e., never mailed) ballots fed into counting machines, nor the Georgia video of suitcases of ballots being taken from under tables and inserted into counting machines after Republican observers had been ousted. Suffice it to note that references to these events have been scrubbed from the Internet. It is more important to keep in mind that, in America prior to 2020, sworn affidavits that crimes have been committed had invariably been probable cause for judicial, prosecutorial, or legislative investigations. But for the first time in America, the ruling class dismissed them with: “You have no proof!” A judge (the sister of Georgia’s Stacey Abrams) ruled that even when someone tells the U.S. Postal Service they have moved, their old address is still a lawful basis for them to cast a ballot. Certainly, proof of crime is impossible with such judges and without testimony under oath, or powers of subpoena.

Just as important, Republicans in general and the Trump White House in particular bear heavy responsibility for failing to challenge the patent illegality of the executive actions and consent decrees that enabled inherently insecure mail-in procedures in real-time, as they were being perpetrated in key states. No facts were at issue. Only law. The constitutional violations were undeniable.

Pennsylvania et. al. answered Texas’s late lawsuit by arguing it demanded the invalidation of votes that had been cast in good faith. True. But Texas argued that letting stand the results of an election carried out contrary to the Constitution devalued the votes cast in states such as Texas that had held the election in a constitutional manner. Also true. Without comment, the Supreme Court chose to privilege the set of voters on the oligarchy’s side over those of their opponents. Had the lawsuit come well before the election, no such choice would have existed. Typically, the Trump Administration substituted bluster for action.

The Oligarchy Rides its Tigers

Winning the 2020 election had been the objective behind which the oligarchy had coalesced during the previous five years. In 2021, waging socio-political war on the rest of America is what the oligarchy is all about.

The logic of hate and disdain of ordinary Americans is not only what binds the oligarchy together. It is the only substitute it has for any moral-ethical-intellectual point of reference. Donald Trump’s impotent, inglorious reaction to his defeat offered irresistible temptations to the oligarchy’s several sectors to celebrate victory by vying to hurt whoever had supported the president. But permanent war against some 74 million fellow citizens is a foredoomed approach to governing.

The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis—in short, as some kind of criminals—to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for prosecuting them. Neither Congress nor any state’s legislature legislated any of this. Rather, the several parts of America’s economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this war, uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously.

Perhaps most important, they do so without thought of how a war against at least some 74 million fellow citizens might end. The people in the oligarchy’s corporate components seem to want only to adorn unchallenged power with a reputation for “wokeness.” For them, causing pain to their opponents is a pleasure incidental to enjoying power’s perquisites. The Biden family’s self-enrichment by renting access to influence is this oligarchy’s standard.

But the people who dispense that reputation—not just the professional revolutionaries of Antifa and Black Lives Matter, but “mainstream” racial and gender activists and self-appointed virtue-crats, have appetites as variable as they are insatiable. For them, rubbing conservative America’s faces in excrement is what it’s all about. A Twitter video viewed by 2.6 million people urges them to form “an army of citizen detectives” to ferret out conservatives from among teachers, doctors, police officers, and “report them to the authorities.” No doubt, encouraged by President Biden’s characterization of opponents as “domestic terrorists,” any number of “authorities” as well as private persons will find opportunities to lord it over persons not to their taste. This guarantees endless clashes, and spiraling violence.

Joseph Biden, Kamala Harris, and the people they appoint to positions of official responsibility are apparatchiks, habituated to currying favor and pulling rank. They have neither the inclination nor the capacity to persuade the oligarchy’s several parts to agree to a common good or at least to a modus vivendi among themselves, never mind with conservative America. This guarantees that they will ride tigers that they won’t even try to dismount.

At this moment, the oligarchy wields an awesome complex of official and unofficial powers to exclude whomever it chooses from society’s mainstream. Necessarily, however, exclusions cut both ways. Invariably, to banish another is to banish one’s self as well. Google, Facebook, and Twitter let it be known that they would exclude anything with which they disagree from what had become the near-universal means of communication. They bolstered that by colluding to destroy their competitor, Parler. Did they imagine that 74 million Americans could find no means of communicating otherwise? Simon and Schuster canceled a book by Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) critical of communications monopolies. Did its officials imagine that they would thereby do other than increase the book’s eventual sales, and transfer some of their customers to Hawley’s new publisher? The media effectively suppressed inconvenient news. Did they imagine that this would prevent photos of Black Lives Matter professionals in the forefront of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol from reaching the public?

In sum, intending to relegate conservative America to society’s servile sidelines, the oligarchy’s members drew a clear, sharp line between themselves and that America. By telling conservative Americans “these institutions and corporations, are ours, not yours,” they freed conservative America of moral obligations toward them and themselves. By abandoning conservative America, they oblige conservative America to abandon them and seek its own way.

Clarity, Leadership, and Separation

To think of conservative America’s predicament as an opportunity is as hyperbolic as it was for Machiavelli to begin the conclusion of The Prince by observing that “in order to know Moses’ virtue it was necessary that the people of Israel be slaves in Egypt, and to know the greatness of Cyrus’s spirit that the Persians be oppressed by the Medes, and to know the excellence of Theseus, that the Athenian people be dispersed, so at the present, in order to know the virtue of an Italian spirit it was necessary that Italy reduce herself to the conditions in which she is at present . . .”

Machiavelli’s lesson is that the clarity of situations such as he mentions, and such as is conservative America’s following the 2020 election, is itself valuable. Clarity makes illusions of compromise untenable and points to self-reliant action as the only reasonable path. The people might or might not be, as he wrote, “all ready and disposed to follow the flag if only someone were to pick it up.” But surely, someone picking up the flag is the only alternative to servitude.

What, in conservative America’s current predicament, might it mean to “pick up the flag?” Electoral politics remains open to talented, courageous, ambitious leadership. In Florida and South Dakota, Governors Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem have used their powers to make room for ways of life different from and more attractive than that in places wholly dominated by the oligarchy. Texas and Idaho as well attract refugees from such as California and New York by virtue of such differences with life there as their elected officials have been able to maintain. Governmental and corporate pressures on such states to conform to the oligarchy’s standards, sure to increase, are opportunities for their officials to lead their people’s refusal to conform by explaining why doing this is good, and by personally standing in the way. They may be sure that President Kamala Harris would not order federal troops to shoot at state officials for closing abortion clinics or for excluding men from women’s bathrooms.

For more than a generation, a majority of Americans have expressed growing distrust of, and alienation from, the establishment. The establishment, not Donald Trump, made this happen. That disparate majority, in many ways at cross purposes with itself, demands leadership. Pollster Patrick Caddell’s in-depth study of the American electorate, which he titled “We Need Smith,” showed how the themes that made it possible for the hero of the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” to prevail against the establishment then are even more gripping now and appeal to a bigger majority. Trump was a bad copy of Mr. Smith.

More than ever, an audience beyond the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump hungers for leadership. The oligarchy came together by ever more vigorously denigrating and suppressing these deplorables. Already before the 20th century’s turn, the FBI and some elements in the Army and the Justice Department had concluded that they are somehow criminal, and that preparations should be made to treat them as such. The official position of the administration taking power after the 2020 election is that domestic terrorism from legions of “white supremacists” is the primary threat facing America. No wonder those so designated for outlawry demand protection.

The path to electoral leadership is straightforward. Whoever would lead the deplorables-plus must explain their cause to friend and foe, make it his own, and grow it by leading successful acts of resistance.

Increasingly, conservative Americans live as if under occupation by a hostile power. Whoever would lead them should emulate Charles de Gaulle’s 1941 basic rule for la résistance: refrain from individual or spontaneous acts or expressions that produce only martyrs. But join with thousands in what amount to battles to defeat the enemy’s initiatives, weaken his grip on power, and prepare his defeat. Thus, an aspirant to the presidency in 2024, in the course of debunking the narrative by which the oligarchy seized so much power over America, might lead millions to violate restrictions placed on those who refuse to wear masks. Or, as he pursues legislative and judicial measures to abolish the compulsory racial and gender sensitivity training sessions to which public and private employees are subjected, he might organize employees in a given sector unanimously to stay away from them in protest. They can’t all be fired or held back.

Such a persuasive prospective president, or president, could finish the process that, beginning circa 2010, initiated the process of reshaping the Republican Party into something like Caddell’s Mr. Smith would have personified.

Electoral politics, however, is the easy part. Major corporations, private and semi-private institutions such as schools, publishing houses, and media, are the oligarchy’s deepest foundations. These having become hostile, conservative Americans have no choice but to populate their own. This is far from impossible.

Sorting ourselves out into congenial groups has been part of America’s DNA since 1630, when Roger Williams led his followers out of Massachusetts to found Providence Plantations. In the 19th century, the Mormons left unfriendly environments to establish their own settlements. Since 1973, Americans who believe in unborn children’s humanity have largely ceased to intermarry with those who do not. Nobody decided this should happen. It is in the logic of diverging cultures.

As American primary and secondary education’s dysfunction became painfully apparent, parents of all races have fled the public schools as fast as they could. Businesses have been fleeing the Rust Belt for the Sun Belt for generations. When Democratic governors and mayors used COVID to make life difficult in their jurisdictions, people moved out of them. When Twitter’s censorship of conservatives became undeniable, Parler added customers by the hundreds of thousands each day. Facebook and Twitter’s stock lost $50 billion in a week. Much more separation follows from the American people’s diverging cultures.

As conservative America sorts itself out from oligarchy’s social bases, it may be able to restore something like what had existed under the republic. Effectively, two regimes would have to learn to coexist within our present boundaries. But that may be the best, freest, arrangement possible now for the United States.

Angelo M. Codevilla is a distinguished fellow of the Center for American Greatness. He is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and the author of To Make And Keep Peace (Hoover Institution Press, 2014).

©2013 - 2021 American Greatness. All rights reserved.
https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/19/clarity-in-trumps-wake/

[Dusty Track]

Another brilliant exposure of the Global Cartel

@Monoculture in https://www.unz.com/article/the-extreme-center-how-the-neocons-went-woke/#comment-5944349

The “FRG” is a shell company of American Jews. The Jews also co-govern all the big “German” companies. This applies above all, but not only, to companies of “strategic relevance”, like defense contractor. For example, 9 of the top 10 Rheinmetall shareholders are based in the US, in this order: Harris Associates, Wellington, Capital World, Fidelity, LSV, Vanguard, BlackRock, Dimensional, BKF.

But they have also been highly active in buying up renowned medium-sized companies for years. In the meantime, more than 3,000 medium-sized companies from Germany alone are making larger sales in the U.S. than at their place of origin. BlackRock & Co quietly became the largest apartment owners in Germany. In all the largest housing groups (Vonovia, Deutsche Wohnen, LEG) in Germany, they are the main owners. They drive up rents and utility costs.

For example, BlackRock hides its 8.47 percent Vonovia shares in 158 shell companies in a dozen suitably selected financial havens. The fake structures are called, for example, BlackRock Delaware Holdings Inc, BlackRock Holdco 6 LLC, BlackRock Luxembourg Holdings S.a.r.l., BlackRock Asset Management Schweiz AG. And the “EU Commission” and the German Finance Ministers look on or rather look away.

From the beginning of the 2000s, “private equity” investors Blackstone, KKR, Cerberus, Carlyle & Co bought about 10,000 well-performing medium-sized companies in Germany alone until 2018, burdened them with loans, took profits, imposed wage freezes and layoffs, expelled works councils, sold off company real estate and, after two to a maximum of 8 years, sold the “slimmed-down” companies on to the next investors at a profit, with some succeeding in the even more lucrative IPO.

The transatlantic ownership nexus has never been as high as it is today and so dominated by U.S. capital organizers. In between, there are only individual investors from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Norway and China. BlackRock & Co are the dominant players in most of the EU’s leading banks and corporations.

BlackRock & Co collude with each other and form the dominant shareholder bloc. This is also facilitated by the fact that the next largest investors, such as Vanguard, State Street and Norges, are also shareholders in BlackRock. BlackRock & Co sell risk and market analysis to their companies and also own the U.S. rating agencies from which companies must buy their ratings for a few million each year.

BlackRock was tasked by Obama with handling the financial crisis, advising the Fed, as well as the ECB and major Western central banks. BlackRock is a co-owner of 17,000 companies, including Deutsche Bank, Commerzbank, Daimler, Siemens, VW, Rheinmetall, BAE Systems, RWE, Eon, etc., making it the biggest insider in the Western financial and economic world – no financial regulator or antitrust agency can match it.

BlackRock & Co don’t give a damn about national antitrust and stock corporation law in the EU. They don’t even waste their time on supervisory board positions. No important decisions are made in these rubber-stamper boards with the few well-behaved trade unionists. But the boards have to report regularly to Wall Street. “They’re making us show up,” Eon CEO Teyssen confided to Handelsblatt. BlackRock & Co never say anything at shareholder meetings. They remain invisible. They clear everything up in advance. “We can achieve more if we hold talks away from the public throughout the year,” Lawrence Fink told Handelsblatt.

The U.S. judiciary rules directly into (Western) European corporations. For years, they have to install high-ranking U.S. teams on the board of directors at their own expense and grant access to all internal information. In Germany, this applies to Commerzbank, Deutsche Bank, HypoVereinsbank, VW, Siemens, Bilfinger and Daimler.

At Daimler, the reason is to monitor all employees, including their salary accounts, for terrorism links. The U.S. investigators, who are paid by the company, can threaten Daimler employees with termination if they do not sufficiently comply with the duty to provide information. The state government of Baden-Württemberg and IG Metall also agreed.

At VW, the chief legal advisor to Pepsi Cola and ex-US Deputy Attorney General, Negro Larry Thompson, has headed a multi-member group of investigators at the Wolfsburg headquarters since 2017. VW pays “tens of millions of euros” per year for this, as the business press uncritically reports. The investigators will monitor the car company worldwide until 2020. All 30,000 employees in the USA were also interrogated. The reason for this was the “emissions fraud” in the US.

When General Electric wanted to buy the power plant division of the French Alstom Group, board member Frédéric Pierucci opposed it. With the help of an accusation that he had bribed a politician in Indonesia, he was arrested at New York airport in 2013, interrogated, not charged, but held hostage for two years in various U.S. prisons; prisoners were sent after him as FBI informers. After General Electric bought Alstom, Pierucci was released, on condition that he not be employed by Alstom. The European Commission approved the sale.

Pierucci summarizes: Since 2008, the U.S. has destabilized 14 Western European corporations, including 5 French ones, under fake pretexts to give advantages to U.S. corporations. By the way, Pierucci’s book “Le Piège Américain” (The American Trap) was not published in German, although – or because – it, written by a top manager, meticulously documents one of the US forms of domination over the EU, including the use of the NSA secret service.

Fake-“Germany” is the most densely occupied state in the world by a foreign power. About one and a half dozen U.S. military bases with worldwide networking into all U.S. theaters of war, mediation stations for drone assassinations. Revealing: The scientific service of the Bundestag stated: “We cannot say with certainty how many military bases the USA maintains in Germany, our inquiries in Washington remained unanswered.”

And the 10 U.S. military bases in Italy are not enough either: Kosovo was separated from Serbia in violation of international law so that the U.S. base Bondsteel, surrounded by poverty, is protected. And in addition to NATO, the U.S. operates some 16 U.S. military bases in the other EU states of Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Spain, Hungary. For all the rhetoric for “European self-reliance” – the US occupation of the EU is not up for discussion.

The U.S. corporate consultants McKinsey & Co, the Big Four of U.S. business “auditors” with Price Waterhouse Coopers & Co, the U.S. business law firms Freshfields & Co, the Big Three of the U.S. rating agencies Standard & Poor’s & Co – they are all traditionally lobbyists for the corporations, and they have also become permanent state advisors in the EU, in Brussels and in Germany. They co-govern.

Accenture, with 400,000 highly paid academics the world’s largest consulting group, together with McKinsey trims the employment agency and the job centers so that the humiliated unemployed remain the largest obedient reserve army for the temporary employment industry, which in turn is led by the largest temporary employment agencies Adecco and Manpower, which of course, it has become so boring, are owned by BlackRock & Co.

The U.S. economy and industry are shrinking, and the majority of the population is impoverished. The moral standing of the superpower has diminished worldwide. But U.S. investors, military, intelligence and advisers are present in the European Union, more than ever. And governments and the leading media are complicit – especially in Germany.

Deregulation under Clinton had legalized new financial products and new Wall Street financial players such as hedge funds and private equity funds, and had also opened up a new area of operation for the very large capital organizers such as BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street: they did not found companies, but now bought and are buying up existing companies, exploiting them, merging them or splitting them up, slimming them down, destroying jobs, hiding private profits. They prefer not to pay taxes – in the USA they have their headquarters in the financial oasis of Delaware, and the EU has expanded the financial oasis of Ireland for them and offered the financial oases of Luxembourg and the Netherlands in bite-sized portions.