Coronavirus Is A Poor Person's Virus

vanityfair |  “All these rich people can’t stop themselves,” one person who is close to a number of wealthy tech CEOs and venture capitalists told me. “They just can’t stop themselves from throwing parties and going on their jets and socializing as if everything was normal.”

In many respects, to them, things are better than normal. Those on the top billionaire lists have only grown richer over the past five months, as tech has soared on the S&P and NASDAQ, helping push the markets back to their pre-COVID numbers, and adding double-digit billions to some tech CEOs’ personal net worths in a single day. Look no further than Apple or Amazon as a prime example. While 16.3 million Americans are unemployed, Apple is now nearing a $2 trillion market cap and Amazon just posted record profits of $5.2 billion in the last quarter—double last year’s goal.

So what are these elite tech founders doing with their wealth? Mostly living life as they did before coronavirus. I’ve spoken to numerous people who’ve described countless billionaires hitting the road, flying around the country to wherever case numbers are lowest. One investor worth several billion who has several homes told a friend—who then parlayed the information to me in tones of shock and awe and more than a tinge of jealousy—that he was in Miami when the numbers were lowest at the start of the pandemic; hopped over to Los Angeles when Florida got a bit dicey; and now that California is a hotbed, is in New York enjoying the season’s outdoor dining. Another billionaire in Los Angeles has been hosting lavish dinner parties (no social media allowed) where an on-site nurse administers 15-minute coronavirus tests outside as guests drink cocktails, and allows them in to dine once their test comes back negative. And yet another investor told me about some of his colleagues who chipped in for a massive $50,000-a-month compound in Palm Springs that’s being used as a group party house. (I’ve heard about similar setups in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.)

For those who don’t want to be in America (and let’s be frank, who really wants to be in America right now?), there’s an easy solution. A report last week found that the superrich are paying as much as $2.6 million for international citizenships, then zipping out to said country on their private jets. Not everyone owns their own jet, or “P.J.,” as they’re called. As a result, jet rentals are skyrocketing. A spokeswoman for NetJets, a private-jet rental company, told me that inquiries for flights shot up from the previous year, and have only continued to grow as the pandemic has stretched on. In April, for example, calls to NetJets was up 60% for the year prior, as of June, it was 195%, the spokeswoman said.

The Golden Rule Is Capitalism's Intrinsic Incompatibility With Democracy

alternet |  The capitalist economic system has always had a big problem with politics in societies with universal suffrage. Anticipating that, most capitalists opposed and long resisted extending suffrage beyond the rich who possessed capital. Only mass pressures from below forced repeated extensions of voting rights until universal suffrage was achieved—at least legally. To this day, capitalists develop and apply all sorts of legal and illegal mechanisms to limit and constrain suffrage. Among those committed to conserving capitalism, fear of universal suffrage runs deep. Trump and his Republicans exemplify and act on that fear as the 2020 election looms.

The problem arises from capitalism’s basic nature. The capitalists who own and operate business enterprises—employers as a group—comprise a small social minority. In contrast, employees and their families are the social majority. The employer minority clearly dominates the micro-economy inside each enterprise. In capitalist corporations, the major shareholders and the board of directors they select make all the key decisions including distribution of the enterprise’s net revenues.

Their decisions allocate large portions of those net revenues to themselves as shareholders’ dividends and top managers’ executive pay packages. Their incomes and wealth thus accumulate faster than the social averages. In privately held capitalist enterprises their owners and top managers behave similarly and enjoy a similar set of privileges. Unequally distributed income and wealth in modern societies flow chiefly from the internal organization of capitalist enterprises. The owners and their top managers then use their disproportionate wealth to shape and control the macro-economy and the politics interwoven with it.

However, universal suffrage makes it possible for employees to undo capitalism’s underlying economic inequalities by political means when, for example, majorities win elections. Employees can elect politicians whose legislative, executive, and judicial decisions effectively reverse capitalism’s economic results. Tax, minimum wage, and government spending laws can redistribute income and wealth in many different ways. If redistribution is not how majorities choose to end unacceptable levels of inequality, they can take other steps. Majorities might, for example, vote to transition enterprises’ internal organizations from capitalist hierarchies to democratic cooperatives. Enterprises’ net revenues would then be distributed not by the minorities atop capitalist hierarchies but instead by democratic decisions of all employees, each with one vote. The multiple levels of inequality typical of capitalism would disappear.

Capitalism’s ongoing political problem has been how best to prevent employees from forming just such political majorities. During its recurring times of special difficulty (periodic crashes, wars, conflicts between monopolized and competitive industries, pandemics), capitalism’s political problem intensifies and broadens. It becomes how best to prevent employees’ political majorities from ending capitalism altogether and moving society to an alternative economic system.

To solve capitalism’s political problem, capitalists as a small social minority must craft alliances with other social groups. Those alliances must be strong enough to defuse, deter, or destroy any and all emerging employee majorities that might threaten capitalists’ interests or their systems’ survival. The smaller or weaker the capitalist minorities are, the more the key alliance they form and rely upon is with the military. In many parts of the world, capitalism is secured by a military dictatorship that targets and destroys emerging movements for anti-capitalist change among employees or among non-capitalist sectors. Even where capitalists are a relatively large, well-established minority, if their social dominance is threatened, say by a large anti-capitalist movement from below, alliance with a military dictatorship may be a last resort survival mechanism. When such alliances culminate in mergers of capitalists and the state apparatus, fascism has arrived.

During capitalism’s non-extreme moments, when not threatened by imminent social explosions, its basic political problem remains. Capitalists must block employee majorities from undoing the workings and results of the capitalist economic system and especially its characteristic distributions of income, wealth, power, and culture. To that end capitalists seek portions of the employee class to ally with, to disconnect from other, fellow employees. They usually work with and use political parties to form and sustain such alliances.

In the words of the great Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, the capitalists use their allied political party to form a “political bloc” with portions of the employee class and possible others outside the capitalist economy. That bloc must be strong enough to thwart the anti-capitalist goals of movements among the employee class. Ideally, for capitalists, their bloc should rule the society—be the hegemonic power—by controlling mass media, winning elections, producing parliamentary majorities, and disseminating an ideology in schools and beyond that justifies capitalism. Capitalist hegemony would then keep anti-capitalist impulses disorganized or unable to build a social movement into a counter-hegemonic bloc strong enough to challenge capitalism’s hegemony.

I Had No Idea Peter Strzok's Wife Melissa Hodgman Was The SEC's Insider Trading Point Man....,

CTH |  Most people who are not in the securities industry would NOT understand how this works. But Trump certainly does and Mnuchin definitely does. Bannon for sure understands this.

If you are a big trader – like Soros, Gates, Goldman Sachs, or a major bank – having inside information is a freebie – no risk – goldmine.

If you are a greedy political family like Pelosi, Clinton, Bushes, Feinstein, Burr, McCain, Obama; Biden Family – inside information is a freebie no risk goldmine for the entire family.

I guess if you are John Brennan or a foreign intelligence service, and you want to finance a nefarious off the books black op operation FOR FREE, outside of your normal budget, you can use inside information and stock trades to finance your operations.

What kind of inside information can be freely gleened from the NSA database? Correspondence between PUBLIC COMPANY CEO’s who are looking to do a merger, acquisition or spinoff of another public company; confidential audits of a company that may be in discussions to be acquired by a public company; confidential emails, phonecalls, texts between CEO’s, their accountants, their lawyers, their bankers, their competitors; their R & D department; their patent department.

Once the secret NSA information is obtained, stock trades are placed (by the ELITES and their families/cohorts) to capitalize and monetize the information. On any stock exchange anywhere in the world.

It would be great to have a securities lawyer or an outstanding journalist – who is familiar with insider securities trading – write an ariticle on this topic. So far, I have not seen anything. Everyone is too focused on the big distractions: russia, impeachment, racism, covid, election.

But my instincts tell me this is a BIG DEAL COVER UP. per Hillary, “If revealed, they will all hang.” They’s why the elites want Trump out so badly. This is about money & theft on a GRAND GLOBAL SCALE.

Pablo Escobar Was Empowered By The U.S. And U.K.Militaries For Their Own Purposes

columbiareports |  The Medellin Police Department and Colombia’s 4th Army Brigade played a key role in the Medellin Cartel and the formation of what is now known as the Oficina de Envigado.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, when Colombian marijuana was in fashion in the United States, the so-called “gentlemen of drugs” as narcos like Pablo Escobar, were considered respectable businessmen who received support from the local police department and the 4th Brigade.

The gentlemen from Medellin provided the Caribbean mafia with pot from the surrounding Antioquia province and even as far south as Cauca.

Medellin’s current crime syndicate, the Oficina de Envigado, originates from the Security and Control Department (DSC) and the Civilian Order Department (DOC).

The DSC from Envigado and the DOC from Medellin were formed in 1968, and gained force under Escobar with the support of police and mayors in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.

The ties between the narcos, the local gangs, the Medellin Police Department and the 4th Brigade got even stronger in 1981 when they found a common enemy, the M-19 guerrilla group.

After these guerrillas kidnapped Martha Ochoa, the sister of two founding members of the Medellin Cartel and a personal friend of Uribe, Escobar and his associates founded Death to Kidnappers (MAS), a paramilitary group that would later become the Medellin Cartel.

The “gentlemen” lost their social status in Bogota after Escobar got kicked out of Congress in 1983, the cartel assassinated Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara in 1984, and the US demanded their extradition.

The terrorism used in opposition to an extradition pact with the US government was mainly a problem for innocent civilians, politicians and the National Police in Bogota.

In Medellin, the cartel could still find loyal allies in the local elite, the Medellin Police Department and the 4th Brigade.

The cartel’s 1989 bombing of Avianca flight 203 that killed 107 people, for example, would not have been possible without former Army mayor Oscar Echandía and Medellin Cartel founder Gonzalo Rodriguez, a.k.a. “El Mexicano,” who in flew in 11 British mercenaries to give explosives lessons to cartel members and paramilitaries.

Why Did A Leading Member Of The Rockefeller Dynasty Devote His Last Few Decades To "UFO Truth?"

strategic-culture |  It was never a secret that the post-1971 globalized world order championed by the likes of Sir Henry Kissinger, David and Laurence Rockefeller and other Malthusians throughout the 20^th century was always designed to collapse. With the mass shock therapy that such a collapse would impose upon the world, it was believed that a deconstruction of the Abrahamic traditions that governed western society for 2000 years could be accomplished and a new society could be socially engineered in the image of the Brave New (depopulated) World that would live like happy sheep forever under the grip of a hereditary alpha class and their technocratic managers. The story of the Tavistock-led attack on scientific progress is told brilliantly in the 2010 Lpac film The Destruction of NASA.

The only problem these social engineers have encountered in recent years is the re-emergence of actual statesmen who are unwilling to sacrifice their people and traditions on the altar of a new global Gaia cult. Such defenders of humanity’s better traditions have launched the multipolar alliance and have driven a policy of long-term growth and advance scientific and technological progress which is embodied brilliantly by the New Silk Road, and its extensions to the Arctic. The most exciting aspect of this New Silk Road/Multipolar Paradigm is the leap into space exploration as the new frontier of human self-development which has not been seen since the days of President Kennedy.

With China and Russia signing a pact to jointly develop lunar bases and the NASA Artemis Accords calling for international cooperation on Lunar and Mars resource development/industrialization, the age of unlimited growth that was lost with the LSD-driven mass psychosis of 1968’s “live in the now” paradigm shift may finally be recaptured. Programs designed to put humanity’s focus on real objective threats like Asteroid collisions, and solar-induced new ice ages are seriously being discussed by leaders of Russia, China and the USA.

There are billions of suns and potentially billions of galaxies, and chances are there is indeed life on many of the planets orbiting some of the stars within our growing, creative universe… and there is also a fair chance that cognitive life has also emerged on some of those planets. The best way to find out is not to sit at home while the world economic system collapses under a controlled disintegration thinking about Rockefeller-funded conspiracy theories, but rather to fight to revive humanity’s open system destiny starting with a cooperative space program to extend human culture and economy to the Moon and Mars, and then onto other planetary bodies followed by missions to deep space.

If other civilizations exist, maybe it is our duty to take up the torch left to us by JFK and go find them.

A Striking Symbol Of A City Built On Racial Inequality

currentaffairs |  On a Saturday in early March, an exclusive private all-girls academy in St. Louis, Missouri held its annual daddy-daughter dance. Unknown to guests or the Ritz-Carlton staff, a father-daughter pair broke quarantine to attend after being exposed to COVID-19 for days. 

The deadly virus had, up until that point, only existed in the news for the St. Louis region. The elder sister of the girl who attended the dance was the area’s first confirmed COVID-19 case; she had just returned from studying abroad in Italy, at a time when the U.S. media was saturated with apocalyptic images of an Italian healthcare system under enormous strain. Videos of Italian nighttime balcony singing, replete with accordions and tambourines, became the bright point of quarantine solidarity, and everyone knew the virus was headed for Missouri since it had already hit New York, and was developing in Chicago. At first, local gatherings over 1,000 were canceled, then 100, then 10. Much of the Midwest held on to a sliver of hope that our lower-density region might fare better than the big cities. Maybe we could pull up the drawbridges, as St. Louis did during the 1918 Spanish influenza, and isolate from the rest of the world; maybe our rusty, hollowed-out downtown would form a rampart against the wave.

Asymptomatic, the elder sister landed in Chicago and boarded an Amtrak train to St. Louis. She quickly began to show symptoms, and on Thursday, two days before the dance, she “went to Mercy Hospital and was evaluated before being sent home to quarantine with her parents, who were not showing any signs of sickness.” She was tested, her Amtrak train was taken out of service to be cleaned, and a quarantine request from St. Louis County was, reportedly, issued that Thursday, March 5^th. Her “presumed positive” case was widely reported on Friday. 

Panic set in on Sunday, March 8^th, as attendees of the dance—some of the richest families in St. Louis—were ordered by the County Executive to quarantine inside their $800,000 estates. The Ritz-Carlton shut down to sterilize its ballroom, bathrooms, and kitchen. Before the dance, the father was rumored to have visited Deer Creek Coffee near their house in Ladue—locally referred to as La-douche, one of the wealthiest zip codes in Missouri. The coffee shop was forced to publicly deny having served the father. St. Louis County Executive Dr. Sam Page, MD, held a press conference that underplayed the point: “From everything we can gather, the patient had conducted herself responsibly and maturely and she is to be commended for complying with the health department’s instructions.” He added,  “The patient’s father did not act consistently with the health department’s instructions.”

The family’s attorney, Neil Bruntrager, materialized to dispute every detail: “These poor people are being pilloried and vilified,” he said. “They were being proactive. They were trying to deal with this problem.” Bruntrager, incidentally, was a well-paid legal representative of both STL Police Officer Jason Stockley, who murdered twenty-four-year-old Anthony Lamar Smith, and Officer Darren Wilson, who murdered Michael Brown. 

Starting with St. Louis’ white upper class, COVID-19 spread quickly to the working-class communities. So far, a disproportionate number of cases and deaths have been—much like the victims of police brutality—working-class Black St. Louisians.

Don't Side With The Powerful Against The Disempowered. Just Don't!!!

caitlinjohnstone |  Learning to distinguish between empowered parties and disempowered parties can be a little tricky, even for relatively awake people, because nobody likes to think of themselves as siding with the powerful against the weak. It’s something we all know intuitively to be wrong, so we’ll often find clever ways of using an incomplete analysis of the power dynamics at play which allows us to feel as though we’re fighting the power when we’re really doing the exact opposite.

And propagandists are of course all too eager to help us do this.

Israel is a perfect example. You can squint at it in such a way that lets you feel as though you’re defending a disempowered religious minority with an extensive history of persecution that is surrounded by enemies, but really it has nuclear weapons and the full might of the US empire on its side. In reality the Palestinians are the down-power ones, but people who want to believe the Israeli government is a poor widdle victim will do mental gymnastics to contort the power dynamics.

These compartmentalizations ignore where the actual power is at on a global scale and just zoom in to a local analysis which ignores all else.

Whenever you see the western mass media and their propagandized followers talking about “The people of [insert targeted nation here]”, they’re cheerleading a US empire-backed movement against a weaker government which has resisted absorption into that empire. But they’re posing as supporters of the little guy.

• Juan Guaido is the brave rebel fighting the powerful Maduro regime! No, he’s backed by the US-centralized empire which is trying to stage a coup in the nation with the largest proven oil reserves on the planet.
• Yay, the freedom fighters in Syria are fighting the tyranny of their oppressive ruler! No they’re not, they’re jihadist extremists who were backed by the US and its allies with the goal of toppling Damascus in order to seize control of a crucial geostrategic region.
• Yay, the brave people of Hong Kong are liberating themselves from the tyranny of Beijing! Well really China is far less powerful than the US-centralized power alliance and the US government is unquestionably intervening in the HK protests. But people make believe it’s just the people vs the big bad Chinese government.

This impulse to pretend you’re fighting the power instead of fighting for power is so pervasive I’ve seen people do ridiculous things like say Julian Assange is actually the power because WikiLeaks is influential. He’s one guy!

That’s also what you’re seeing when people try to spin these US protests as a Deep State color revolution backed by George Soros and “the Chicoms”. No it’s not, you just don’t want to admit that you support the government and its armed goon squad against people who are sick of the brutal US police state, so you’re doing ridiculous mental gymnastics to make it feel like you’re actually punching up.

Online forums are full of self-described “anarchists” who constantly wind up on the same side as the CIA and the US State Department on foreign policy because they act like every “revolution” in every nation is the people vs power while ignoring a global-scale analysis of real power. If your “anti-authoritarian” worldview frequently leads you to supporting agendas which make the biggest power structure on the planet more powerful, then you’re not anti-authoritarian, you just want to feel like you are. You’re no different than any other MSM-brainwashed tool.

Learn to see clearly where the power is, and refuse to side with it. Expunge the “What did you expect?” mind virus from your system and you’ll be doing all of humanity a big favor.

The Global Capitalist Rulng Class Is Attempting A Color Revolution In The U.S.

consentfactory |  No, credit where credit is due to GloboCap. At this point, not only the United States, but countries throughout the global capitalist empire, are in such a state of mass hysteria, and so hopelessly politically polarized, that hardly anyone can see the textbook color revolution that is being executed, openly, right in front of our faces.

Or … OK, actually, most Trump supporters see it, but most of them, like Trump himself, have mistaken Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and the Democratic Party and their voters for the enemy, when they are merely pawns in GloboCap’s game. Most liberals and leftists cannot see it at all … literally, as in they cannot perceive it. Like Dolores in the HBO Westworld series, “it doesn’t look like anything” to them. They actually believe they are fighting fascism, that Donald Trump, a narcissistic, word-salad-spewing, former game show host, is literally the Return of Adolf Hitler, and that somehow (presumably with the help of Putin) he has staged the current civil unrest, like the Nazis staged the Reichstag fire! (The New York Times will never tire of that one, nor will their liberal and leftist readers, who have been doing battle with an endless series of imaginary Hitlers since … well, since Hitler.)

I’ve been repeating it my columns for the last four years, and I’m going to repeat it once again. What we are experiencing is not the “return of fascism.” It is the global capitalist empire restoring order, putting down the populist insurgency that took them by surprise in 2016. The White Black Nationalist Color Revolution, the fake apocalyptic plague, all the insanity of 2020 … it has been in the pipeline all along. It has been since the moment Trump won the election. No, it is not about Trump, the man. It has never been about Trump, the man, no more than the Obama presidency was ever about Obama, the man. GloboCap needs to crush Donald Trump (and moreover, to make an example of him) not because he is a threat to the empire (he isn’t), but because he became a symbol of populist resistance to global capitalism and its increasingly aggressive “woke” ideology. It is this populist resistance to its ideology that GloboCap is determined to crush, no matter how much social chaos and destruction it unleashes in the process.

In one of my essays from last October, Trumpenstein Must Be Destroyed, I made this prediction about the year ahead:

“2020 is for all the marbles. The global capitalist ruling classes either crush this ongoing populist insurgency or God knows where we go from here. Try to see it through their eyes for a moment. Picture four more years of Trump … second-term Trump … Trump unleashed. Do you really believe they’re going to let that happen, that they are going to permit this populist insurgency to continue for another four years? They are not. What they are going to do is use all their power to destroy the monster, not Trump the man, but Trump the symbol. They are going to drown us in impeachment minutiae, drip, drip, drip, for the next twelve months. The liberal corporate media are going to go full-Goebbels. They are going to whip up so much mass hysteria that people won’t be able to think. They are going to pit us one against the other, and force us onto one or the other side of a simulated conflict (Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis) to keep us from perceiving the actual conflict (Global Capitalism versus Populism). They are going to bring us to the brink of civil war …”

OK, I didn’t see the fake plague coming, but, otherwise, how’s my prediction holding up?

Global Elites Are Actively Undermining Trust In Sovereign Nation States

tomdispatch |  Let’s say you live in a country where the government responded quickly and competently to Covid-19. Let’s say that your government established a reliable testing, contact tracing, and quarantine system. It either closed down the economy for a painful but short period or its system of testing was so good that it didn’t even need to shut everything down. Right now, your life is returning to some semblance of normal.

Lucky you.

The rest of us live in the United States. Or Brazil. Or Russia. Or India. In these countries, the governments have proven incapable of fulfilling the most important function of the state: protecting the lives of their citizens. While most of Europe and much of East Asia have suppressed the pandemic sufficiently to restart their economies, Covid-19 continues to rage out of control in those parts of the world that, not coincidentally, are also headed by democratically elected right-wing autocrats.

In these incompetently run countries, citizens have very good reason to mistrust their governments. In the United States, for instance, the Trump administration botched testing, failed to coordinate lockdowns, removed oversight from the bailouts, and pushed to reopen the economy over the objections of public-health experts. In the latest sign of early-onset dementia for the Trump administration, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany declared this month that “science should not stand in the way” of reopening schools in the fall.

Voters, of course, could boot Trump out in November and, assuming he actually leaves the White House, restore some measure of sanity to public affairs. But the pandemic is contributing to an already overwhelming erosion of confidence in national institutions. Even before the virus struck, in its 2018 Trust Barometer the public relations firm Edelman registered an unprecedented drop in public trust connected to... what else?... the election of Trump. “The collapse of trust in the U.S. is driven by a staggering lack of faith in government, which fell 14 points to 33% among the general population,” the report noted. “The remaining institutions of business, media, and NGOs also experienced declines of 10 to 20 points.”

And you won’t be surprised to learn that the situation hadn’t shown signs of improvement by 2020, with American citizens even more mistrustful of their country’s institutions than their counterparts in Brazil, Italy, and India.

That institutional loss of faith reflects a longer-term trend. According to Gallup’s latest survey, only 11% of Americans now trust Congress, 23% big business and newspapers, 24% the criminal justice system, 29% the public school system, 36% the medical system, and 38% the presidency. The only institution a significant majority of Americans trust -- and consider this an irony, given America’s endless twenty-first-century wars -- is the military (73%). The truly scary part is that those numbers have held steady, with minor variations, for the last decade across two very different administrations.

How low does a country’s trust index have to go before it ceases being a country? Commentators have already spent a decade discussing the polarization of the American electorate. Much ink has been spilled over the impact of social media in creating political echo chambers. It’s been 25 years since political scientist Robert Putnam observed that Americans were “bowling alone” (that is, no longer participating in group activities or community affairs in the way previous generations did).

The coronavirus has generally proven a major force multiplier of such trends by making spontaneous meetings of unlike-minded people ever less likely. I suspect I’m typical. I’m giving a wide berth to pedestrians, bicyclists, and other joggers when I go out for my runs. I’m not visiting cafes. I’m not talking to people in line at the supermarket. Sure, I’m on Zoom a lot, but it’s almost always with people I already know and agree with.

Under these circumstances, how will we overcome the enormous gaps of perception now evident in this country to achieve anything like the deeper basic understandings that a nation-state requires? Or will Americans lose faith entirely in elections, newspaper stories, hospitals, and public transportation, and so cease being a citizenry altogether?

Trust is the fuel that makes such institutions run. And it looks as though we passed Peak Trust long ago and may be on a Covid-19 sled heading downhill fast.

The Lockstep Scenario And The Clairvoyant Ruling Class

wrongkindofgreen |  (wrong kind of green dollar-dollar-bill-y'all is just entirely too clever)

“The ruling class exists, it’s not a conspiracy theory. They operate as a class, too. They share the same values, the same sensibility and in Europe and North America they are white. They act in accordance with their interests, which are very largely identical. The failure to understand this is the single greatest problem and defect in left discourse today.”

— John Steppling, Author, Playwright


“This report is crucial reading for anyone interested in creatively considering the multiple, divergent ways in which our world could evolve.”

— Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation

torytelling. Dystopian scenarios. Not Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury or Brunner.

Scenario planning for corporate strategy was pioneered by Royal Dutch Shell in the 1970s. [Further reading on scenario planning: The Art of the Long View]The following excerpts are highlights from the May 2010 “Scenarios for the Future of Technology & International Development” report produced by The Rockefeller Foundation & Global Business Network. Not just the more known “Lock Step” scenario, but all four scenarios.

Following “Event 201” (Oct 18, 2019), we must concede that the ruling class has been gifted with phenomenal and prophetic intuitions and insights. (They truly are the chosen ones.) Thus it is worthwhile, even mandatory, to study their scenario exercises and simulations.

“We believe that scenario planning has great potential for use in philanthropy to identify unique interventions… scenario planning allows us to achieve impact more effectively.” [p 4]

“The results of our first scenario planning exercise demonstrate a provocative and engaging exploration of the role of technology and the future of globalization.” [p 4]

“This report is crucial reading for anyone interested in creatively considering the multiple, divergent ways in which our world could evolve.” [p 4]

“*I offer a special thanks to Peter Schwartz, Andrew Blau, and the entire team at Global Business Network, who have helped guide us through this stimulating and energizing process.” [*Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation] [p 4]

“*I hope this publication makes clear exactly why my colleagues and I are so excited about the promise of using scenario planning to develop robust strategies.” [*Judith Rodin, President of the Rockefeller Foundation][p 5]

Peter Schwartz is an American futurist, innovator and co-founder of the Global Business Network (GBN), a corporate strategy firm, specializing in future-think & scenario planning. Founded in 1987, GBN was “a membership organization comprising executives from many of the world’s leading companies alongside individual members from business, science, the arts, and academia.” The proprietary list of GBN’s corporate members included “more than 100 of the world’s leading companies, drawn from virtually every industry and continent.” Members paid an annual subscription fee of $35,000. [Source] Following an acquisition by Monitor in 2000, GBN then specialized in scenario-based consulting and training. GBN ceased to be active following the acquisition of the Monitor Group by Deloitte in 2013.

“Perhaps most importantly, scenarios give us a new, shared language that deepens our conversations about the future and how we can help to shape it.” [p 7]

“How can we best position ourselves not just to identify technologies that improve the lives of poor communities but also to help scale and spread those that emerge?” [p 8]

The Four Scenarios

“Once crossed, these axes create a matrix of four very different futures:

LOCK STEP – A world of tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian eadership, with limited innovation and growing citizen pushback

CLEVER TOGETHER – A world in which highly coordinated and successful strategies emerge for addressing both urgent and entrenched worldwide issues

HACK ATTACK – An economically unstable and shock-prone world in which governments weaken, criminals thrive, and dangerous  innovations emerge

SMART SCRAMBLE – An economically depressed world in which individuals and communities develop localized, makeshift solutions to a growing set of problems”

“Each scenario tells a story of how the world, and in particular the developing world, might progress over the next 15 to 20 years,… Accompanying each scenario is a range of elements that aspire to further illuminate life, technology, and philanthropy in that world.” [p 17]

Scenario #1: LOCK STEP

“In 2012, the pandemic that the world had been anticipating for years finally hit. Unlike 2009’s H1N1, this new influenza strain — originating from wild geese — was extremely virulent and deadly. Even the most pandemic-prepared nations were quickly overwhelmed when the virus streaked around the world, infecting nearly 20 percent of the global population and killing 8 million in just seven months, the majority of them healthy young adults. The pandemic also had a deadly effect on economies: international mobility of both people and goods screeched to a halt, debilitating industries like tourism and breaking global supply chains. Even locally, normally bustling shops and office buildings sat empty for months, devoid of both employees and customers.” [p 18]

“The pandemic blanketed the planet — though disproportionate numbers died in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Central America, where the virus spread like wildfire in the absence of official containment protocols. But even in developed countries, containment was a challenge. The United States’s initial policy of “strongly discouraging” citizens from flying proved deadly in its leniency, accelerating the spread of the virus not just within the U.S. but across borders. However, a few countries did fare better — China in particular. The Chinese government’s quick imposition and enforcement of mandatory quarantine for all citizens, as well as its instant and near-hermetic sealing off of all borders, saved millions of lives, stopping the spread of the virus far earlier than in other countries and enabling a swifter postpandemic
recovery. [p 18]

Population-Consumption-Climate-Control - The .00001%'s No Lives Matter Movement

realworldeconomicsreview |  Ten years ago, the rich and powerful Rockefeller Foundation played through and favorably described a scenario in which a pandemic would lead to autocratic forms of government with total surveillance and control of citizens. Now it has published a pandemic plan to make this scenario a reality.

According to the preamble by the President of the Foundation, it took two weeks to set up and edit this plan, implicating a large number of “experts and decision-makers from academia, business, politics and government – across industries and political ideologies” and publish it in glossy on April 21, 2020, under the title “National Covid-19 Testing Action Plan: Pragmatic steps to reopen our workplaces and our communities”.

I became aware of this plan through a German translation of an article by Dux Morales in the Italian newspaper il manifesto about it. As I read through this my breath stood still. 

Two weeks seems a very short time for such a comprehensive work with allegedly many contributors and about 25 signers. However, the Foundation had ten years to prepare for this moment. So it wasn’t a hollow phrase in the 2010 publication, which already included the “Lock-Step” pandemic response scenario, telling decision-makers in foundations: ” Scenarios are designed to stretch our thinking about both the opportunities and obstacles that the future might hold; they explore, through narrative, events and dynamics that might alter, inhibit, or enhance current trends, often in surprising ways.”.

In the current brochure, the Rockefeller Foundation proposes, along with other recommendations, to form a Pandemic Testing Board, modelled on the War Production Board, which was an agency of the US to supervise and plan war production during World War II. This new powerful technocratic council is designed to consist of nine representatives from business, government, acadimia, universities and labor, and the order seems not to be random. Microsoft and Google are probably at the top of the list of candidates for this council.

The name of one of the four authors of the proposal caught my eye immediately: E. Glen Weyl, techno-libertarian market radical, Microsoft research manager and long-time campaigner for the legalisation and reintroduction of debt bondage, precisely for migrants.

Another author is Ganesh Sitaraman, professor of law at Vanderbilt University and former researcher at the “Counterinsurgency Training Centre” in Afghanistan. The third is Julius Krein, former hedge fund manager and head of the right-wing nationalist journal American Affairs, which emerged from the Journal of American Greatness. The renowned ethics professor Danielle Allen is allowed to dilute a bit this toxic cocktail of authors.

In wartime, anything goes

As in wartime, the Pandemic Board should have the power to confiscate and order the production of whatever is needed to achieve testing capacity in a short time, a capacity to test so many people a day that the majority of Americans, and possibly the entire world population, can be tested for Covid-19 on a weekly basis. This, it is said, is necessary to get the economy back on track.

Congruously, the state should guarantee test providers a fair price, “e.g. $100” per test. Where companies invest, governments are to relieve them from any risk for their great profit prospect by a guarantee to order tests.

A pandemic corps of 300,000 testers and contact tracers will have to perform police-like tasks towards a reluctant population – even if the latter is not stated explicitly in the brochure -, because “the infection status must be known for people to participate in many societal functions “. In other words: Those who cannot prove that they are corona-free will not be allowed to go to work and even less to participate in social life.

In order to “enable more complete contact tracing”, apps and tracking software should be used as extensively as possible, recording and reporting who is close to whom.

The foundation innocently writes that laws must be passed to prevent dismissal due to infection. As if that had even the slightest chance of happening in a country where in many states you can be dismissed for any reason with two weeks’ notice, including when you are being called up for jury duty.

The global unique ID under a new name

The brochure also promotes the plan to introduce a globally unique identification number for everyone, which the Rockefeller Foundation has already been busy pushing forward with the ID2020 total surveillance project, but now under the name “unique patient identification number”. Everyone is declared a patient here.

This unique “patient” number will provide information on the viral status, antibody status and finally the vaccination status of each citizen. But not only that. The database is to be a hyper database that will be linked to pretty much any other database with personal information, from attendance lists in schools, passenger lists of any kind of transport, or ticket sales at events. Of course, privacy is to be preserved. What else?

In order to identify populations at risk and to achieve performant contact tracing and decision support, powerful analytical tools must operate across any such platform of data. Existing obstacles in accessing and collating data by such analysis instruments (i.e. artificial intelligence) need urgently be removed. Recent progress towards this goal through new regulation is praised.

The Great Reset Is "What They're Doing" - Question Is, What're You Going To Do?

bloomberg |  A major new study of the relationship between carbon dioxide and global warming lowers the odds on worst-case climate change scenarios while also ruling out the most optimistic estimates nations have been counting on as they attempt to implement the Paris Agreement.

A group of 25 leading scientists now conclude that catastrophic warming is almost inevitable if emissions continue at their current rate, even if there’s less reason to anticipate a totally uninhabitable Earth in coming centuries. The research, published Wednesday in the journal Reviews of Geophysics, narrows the answer to a question that’s as old as climate science itself: How much would the planet warm if humanity doubled the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere?

That number, known as “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” is typically expressed as a range. The scientists behind this new study have narrowed the climate-sensitivity window to between 2.6° Celsius and 3.9°C.

That’s smaller than the current range accepted by  the United Nations-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has for almost a decade used a spread between 1.5°C to 4.5°C—a reading of climate sensitivity that has changed little since the first major U.S. climate science assessment in 1979. Improving these estimates is “sort of the holy grail of climate science,” says Zeke Hausfather, director of climate and energy at the Breakthrough Institute and one of the study’s authors.

Climate sensitivity is one of the most iconic numbers in climate science, but it’s not necessarily intuitive. The range isn’t a projection; it’s more like a speed limit that influences projections. “It informs all the other things—like 2100 warming projections, for example—that depend on the sensitivity of our models, and our scenarios,” Hausfather says.

What gave the authors confidence is that three independent lines of evidence—the modern temperature record, geological evidence, and the latest Earth systems models—all agreed on the same answer. Kate Marvel, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University’s applied math and physics department, also contributed to the new paper. She answered questions for Bloomberg Green about the scope and meaning of the new work.

What is “equilibrium climate sensitivity,” and why is it so important?

It's basically answering this question: How hot is it going to get? People are sometimes really surprised. They’re like, “You guys have one job like, why do you not know this?”

The number one determinant in how hot it's going to get is what people are going to do. If we gleefully burn all the fossil fuels in the ground, it's going to get very hot. If we get extremely serious about mitigating climate change—cutting our emissions, moving off fossil fuels, changing a lot about our way of life—that will have a different impact on the climate. As a physical scientist, “What are we going to do?” is totally above my pay grade.

Karens TRULY Have No Idea How Awful It'll Be Just Around That Signpost Up Ahead...,

ourfiniteworld |  It seems like a reset of an economy should work like a reset of your computer: Turn it off and turn it back on again; most problems should be fixed. However, it doesn’t really work that way. Let’s look at a few of the misunderstandings that lead people to believe that the world economy can move to a Green Energy future.

[1] The economy isn’t really like a computer that can be switched on and off; it is more comparable to a human body that is dead, once it is switched off.

A computer is something that is made by humans. There is a beginning and an end to the process of making it. The computer works because energy in the form of electrical current flows through it. We can turn the electricity off and back on again. Somehow, almost like magic, software issues are resolved, and the system works better after the reset than before.

Even though the economy looks like something made by humans, it really is extremely different. In physics terms, it is a “dissipative structure.” It is able to “grow” only because of energy consumption, such as oil to power trucks and electricity to power machines.



The system is self-organizing in the sense that new businesses are formed based on the resources available and the apparent market for products made using these resources. Old businesses disappear when their products are no longer needed. Customers make decisions regarding what to buy based on their incomes, the amount of debt available to them, and the choice of goods available in the marketplace.

There are many other dissipative structures. Hurricanes and tornadoes are dissipative structures. So are stars. Plants and animals are dissipative structures. Ecosystems of all kinds are dissipative structures. All of these things grow for a time and eventually collapse. If their energy source is taken away, they fail quite quickly. The energy source for humans is food of various types; for plants it is generally sunlight.

Thinking that we can switch the economy off and on again comes close to assuming that we can resurrect human beings after they die. Perhaps this is possible in a religious sense. But assuming that we can do this with an economy requires a huge leap of faith.

Man DD Him Say: In Investing It's Better To Be Wrong Than Early

Wizards at War VII - January 10, 2008 - I interpreted the current livestock manangement process now underway through a rather simplistic and brutal lens:

Population cull resulting from large scale thermonuclear war (Joseph George Caldwell)

Can America Survive;

The thesis of this book is that when fossil-fuel reserves deplete in a few years, the global human population of Earth will drop to about 500 million people or less -- a small fraction of the current six billion. The future is one of global ethnic war and the end of the modern industrialized world. The book examines a "minimal regret" population strategy that shows promise as a sustainable, environmentally sound basis for world population. This population consists of a single industrialized nation of five million people and a hunter-gatherer population of five million.

If I simply compare the level of investment and preparation dedicated to a zero-sum, minimal regret population scenario for resolving the earth's ecological crisis vs. the systematic crash aversion strategy outlined by Lester Brown - it appears that exponentially more has been invested in the former than in the latter......, (and levels of additional investment continue unabated)

Can America Survive -May 9, 2014 - my view/interpretation of the exact same material had shifted somewhat, but still nothing remotely approaching the sophistication with which we observe the intentional and systemic deflation of global human civilization by a small minority of global elites.

foundationwebsite | The answer, quite simply, is no – not in its current form for very long, and perhaps not in any form at all for very long.  This book describes why pending changes in energy availability, cultural changes brought about by recent massive immigration, the global population explosion, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons, technology and materials will combine to bring an end to the United States as we currently know it – soon.

In the past four centuries, the world human population has skyrocketed, from about half a billion people to six billion at the present time.  Population projections from various sources suggest that, barring a major change of some kind, the population will continue to soar, to nine billion or more by the year 2050.   In the past half-century – less than a lifetime -- the population of the US has exploded from about 150 million to over 270 million.  This explosive growth occurred despite the fact that fertility rates in the US dropped to low levels – it is the result of uncontrolled immigration.

The tremendous global population increase has been brought about by the development of technology to utilize the energy stored in fossil fuels, such as petroleum, natural gas, and coal.  Petroleum and gas reserves will be exhausted, however, by about 2050, and coal reserves will not last much beyond that date if industrial development continues to expand worldwide.

Look around you.  If you live in the US or other economically developed country, every man-made thing you see or see happening is a product of the expenditure of energy, and most of that energy is derived from fossil fuels.  To establish and maintain our present lifestyle requires prodigious amounts of energy – an amount equivalent to about 8,000 kilograms of oil annually for each man, woman, and child living in the country.  Pre-agricultural man lived “off the land,” consuming only the bounty of nature.  Agricultural man could produce about 10 calories of energy with the expenditure of about one calorie of energy.  Industrial man, it has been estimated, uses over ten calories of energy to produce a single calorie of food!  The present system is not only exquisitely wasteful, but it is completely unsustainable.  Most of what you see in the industrial world is a transitory illusion made possible by a one-time windfall supply of energy from fossil fuels that were accumulated over millions of years.  When the fossil fuel reserves deplete in about 50 years, the modern world will simply disappear along with them.

Whatever age you are, if you were raised in a town or a small city, go back to where you lived as a child and observe what has happened to the nearest natural field you played in.  Chances are it is now urban sprawl – pavement, concrete, and steel.  For each immigrant admitted to the US – legal or illegal – about an acre of natural land is permanently destroyed, by roads, buildings, parking lots, houses, schools, and other structures that take the land out of production – both for wildlife and for agriculture.  Last year the US admitted 1.2 million more immigrants.  That represents the complete destruction of another .6 million acres of farmland, forest, and pastureland.  Who cares?  Certainly not the people in charge – they want more people because it makes more money, and they are not particularly concerned with the concomitant destruction of the environment!

Industrial activity at the massive scale of the present is causing substantial changes to Earth’s environment. By now, everyone knows that the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and other gases produced by industrial activity is increasing substantially every year, and that the planet’s climate and weather are controlled by these concentrations.  Large-scale industrial activity is causing substantial changes to the planet’s environment – land, air, water, and ecology.  In view of the established relationship of the planet’s climate and ecosystem to these concentrations, it is possible that man’s industrial activity could cause dramatic changes in the sea level, and trigger another ice age or create a lifeless “hothouse.”  And for what good reason?  What is the good purpose of burning all the planet’s fossil fuels as fast as possible, when it risks the destruction not only of mankind but of much other life on the planet as well?  The answer is “None.”  This activity cannot continue at current levels without risking dire consequences, even apart from the issue of depletion of fossil fuel reserves and other nonrenewable resources.  To continue to do so is the height of folly.

This book describes the current situation and its predicted course.  For the US – and any other overpopulated, multicultural, high-energy-use country -- the future is one of war, social fragmentation, and dramatic population reductions.  Power will consolidate in a single dominant ethnic group; others will be eliminated or reduced to slavery or serfdom.

This book is not “just another book” on the human population “problem.”  Thousands of books have been written on the problems of human population, energy and the environment.  The real “problem” is that everyone is talking about the problem and no one is doing anything about it.  Proposed solutions to date have either failed or been ignored.  Environmentalists and ecologists continue to wring their hands while the planet croaks.  This book identifies a radically new approach to the problem – one that offers the promise of reducing the risk of ecological destruction to a low level.  It identifies an approach to population policy analysis and a course of action that will bring an end to the massive environmental destruction being caused by human industrial activity and significantly increase the likelihood of the survival of the human and other species.

The author of this book has a career that includes both military defense analysis and economic development.  He worked for about fifteen years in defense applications and about fifteen years in social and economic applications.  His work in military applications includes ballistic missile warfare, nuclear weapons effects, satellite ocean surveillance, naval general-purpose forces, tactical air warfare, air/land battle tactics, strategy, civil defense, military communications-electronics, and electronic warfare.  His work in social and economic development applications includes tax policy analysis, agricultural policy analysis, trade policy analysis, health, human resource development, demography, development of systems for planning, monitoring and evaluation of social and economic programs, and educational management information systems.  He has lived and worked in countries around the world.  He holds a PhD degree in mathematical statistics and is an expert in mathematical game theory, statistics, operations research, and systems and software engineering.  The analysis presented in this book is derived from years of experience related to, and years of analysis of, the population problem.

The organization of this book follows a logical progression, starting with a description of the current state of the planet and human population.  Current trends in human population growth are identified.  The relationship of human welfare to energy availability is described, and the future availability of energy is discussed.  The role of economics to population growth is examined.  Policies for determining what the human population size should be are identified.  A new approach to population policy is introduced; it is called the “minimal-regret” approach.  The likelihood of nuclear war is considered, and the damage that would result from a limited nuclear war is estimated.  The impact of this war is assessed for the United States, Canada, and other countries.  An assessment is made of the likelihood that the United States and various other countries will prevail after a nuclear war.  The relationship of the minimal-regret approach to nuclear war strategies and the postattack environment is discussed in detail.

The main text of the book is generally nontechnical – as much as it can be for subjects (population growth, economics, energy, nuclear war) that are technical in nature.  Technical discussions are presented in appendices.  The appendices include graphs and tables in support of the arguments presented in the text.

The research underlying the population policy approach introduced in this book was conducted over a four-year period.  During the course of doing the research, a large number of books and articles were reviewed and analyzed.  The bibliography includes a list of about 600 books that were reviewed.  To keep the message of this book as succinct as possible, little description is given of the content of these books.  Instead, the most relevant publications are simply listed. Little space is allocated to describing the state of the environment or other population policies – just enough to provide a context for the new material presented.

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Rationalizing The Great Reset: Is There More At Work Than Absolute Capitalism?

thelocal.se |  Published every two years, the WWF Living Planet Report documents the state of the Earth, including its biodiversity, ecosystems, the demand on natural resources and what that means for humans and wildlife.

And the 2016 edition shows that Swedes are currently living lifestyles that would require the equivalent of four Earths to sustain – 4.2 to be precise.

Sweden ranks alongside the likes of the USA, UAE and Canada as one of the worst countries in the report when it comes to its consumption footprint, which the WWF defines as the area used to support a defined population's consumption.

The footprint, measured in global hectares, includes the area needed to produce the materials a country consumes, and the area needed to absorb its carbon dioxide emissions.

According to the study, Sweden consumes the equivalent of 7.3 global hectares per capita. For perspective, nearby Germany consumes 5.3, Tanzania consumes 1.3, and the USA consumes 8.2.

The WWF highlighted Sweden as being a big importer of consumer goods produced by fossil fuels, particularly from China. The Nordic nation has high indirect carbon dioxide emissions as a result.

“Sweden and Swedes are very good at many things and we have come far in our conversion of energy production even if there is still a lot left to do. We have advanced technology, knowledge and understanding of sustainability issues, but we don't speak a lot about the impact of consumption of items which are produced in an unsustainable way,” Swedish WWF CEO Håkan Wirtén told news agency TT.

In order to improve its sustainability, the WWF recommended that the Swedish government should bring in a target to reduce consumption-based emissions, work out a strategy to halve Sweden's meat consumption, and ban the sale of newly produced cars which run on fossil fuels by 2025 if possible.

“A big part of the Swedish footprint comes from transport. The government should set a target for consumption-based emissions so that we can actually start to measure the emissions we cause in other ways through our imports,” the WWF's Wirtén said.

According to the WWF, Sweden's consumption footprint can be broken down as 32 percent on food, 29 percent on travel, 18 percent on goods, 12 percent on accommodation and nine percent on services.

The Great Reset Is An Engineered Genocide: The Amerindian Shows How That Works Out...,

technologyreview |  “The traditional forms of living a good life were going to be destroyed,” writes Lear. “But there was spiritual backing for the thought that new good forms of living would arise for the Crow, if only they would adhere to the virtues of the chickadee.”

Today the Crow—just like the Sioux, the Navajo, the Potawatomi, and numerous other native peoples— live in communities that struggle with poverty, suicide, and unemployment. But these communities are also home to poets, historians, singers, dancers, and thinkers committed to indigenous cultural flourishing. The point here is not to glamorize indigenous closeness to “nature,” or to indulge a naive longing for lost hunter-warrior values, but to ask what we might learn from courageous and intelligent people who survived cultural and ecological catastrophe.

Like Plenty Coups, we face the destruction of our conceptual reality. Catastrophic levels of global warming are practically inevitable at this point, and one way or another this will bring about the end of life as we know it.

So we have to confront two distinct challenges. The first is whether we might curtail the worst possibilities of climate change and stave off human extinction by limiting greenhouse-gas emissions and decreasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The second is whether we will be able to transition to a new way of life in the world we’ve made. Meeting the latter challenge demands mourning what we have already lost, learning from history, finding a realistic way forward, and committing to an idea of human flourishing beyond any hope of knowing what form that flourishing will take. “This is a daunting form of commitment,” Lear writes, for it is a commitment “to a goodness in the world that transcends one’s current ability to grasp what it is.”

It is not clear that we moderns possess the psychological and spiritual resources to meet this challenge. Coming to terms with the situation as it stands has already proved the struggle of a generation, and the outcome still remains obscure. Successfully answering this existential challenge may not even matter at all unless we immediately see substantial reductions in global carbon emissions: recent research suggests that at atmospheric carbon dioxide levels around 1,200 parts per million, which we are on track to hit sometime in the next century, changes in atmospheric turbulence may dissipate clouds that reflect sunlight from the subtropics, adding as much as 8 °C warming on top of the more than 4 °C warming already expected by that point. That much warming, that quickly—12 °C within a hundred years—would be such an abrupt and radical environmental shift that it’s difficult to imagine a large, warm-blooded mammalian apex predator like Homo sapiens surviving in significant numbers. Such a crisis could create a population bottleneck like other, prehistoric bottlenecks, as many billions of people die, or it could mean the end of our species. There’s no real way to know what will happen except by looking at roughly similar catastrophes in the past, which have left the Earth a graveyard of failed species. We burn some of them to drive our cars.

Nevertheless, the fact that our situation offers no good prospects does not absolve us of the obligation to find a way forward. Our apocalypse is happening day by day, and our greatest challenge is learning to live with this truth while remaining committed to some as-yet-unimaginable form of future human flourishing—to live with radical hope. Despite decades of failure, a disheartening track record, ongoing paralysis, a social order geared toward consumption and distraction, and the strong possibility that our great-grandchildren may be the last generation of humans ever to live on planet Earth, we must go on. We have no choice.

Pimp-Procuress Tried To Create Global "Community" (Male-Bonding Via Two Piece And A Biscuit Snacks?)

influencewatch  |  The Project’s mission was to raise awareness for ocean conservation efforts. Maxwell spoke at a 2014 Council on Foreign Relations event about the issue. ^[8] She also spoke at events at the United Nations in 2013 and 2014. ^[9][10] She also gave a TED Talk. ^[11][12]

These high-profile events dovetailed with Maxwell’s and the Project’s high-profile partnerships. The Project’s effort to hold the United Nations to sustainable promises made regarding the ocean were praised and backed by the Clinton Global Initiative. ^[13][14]

Maxwell authored a 2015 op-ed for the Project’s newsletter, “The Daily Catch,” which theorized the moment the oceans “failed” due to environmental harm. ^[15] Archives of The Daily Catch were live as of August 17, 2019. TerraMar Project’s director of development Brian Yurasitis’ LinkedIn profile shows that the Project had several projects as part of its mission. ^[16] One project was the “How I sea” campaign, which collected stories from environmentalists and others who took photos of the ocean around the world. ^[17]

The #NoMoreButts initiative was the Project’s effort to create more opportunities for smokers to dispose of cigarette butts in an environmentally friendly fashion. ^[18]

Ghislaine Maxwell

Maxwell is the daughter of controversial British media magnate Robert Maxwell, who was implicated in mishandling the pension fund of the Daily Mirror after his death in 1991. ^[19]

After Ghislaine Maxwell moved to New York following her father’s death, she became widely known for her high-end social connections with U.S. Presidents Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, ex-boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, British royalty, and others. ^[20][21] She attended Chelsea Clinton’s wedding. ^[22]

Despite decades in the public eye, she became a very private person in 2016. That year, she sold her $15 million home and largely disappeared from the public. ^[23]

After Epstein’s death, Maxwell became a notable figure amid allegations that she was involved in Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking scheme. A federal court ordered the release of 2,000 pages of documents related to a 2015 lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s accusers; the woman alleged that Maxwell had solicited her to perform sex acts for Epstein as a 16-year-old. Maxwell denied the allegations and has not been criminally charged for these alleged acts as of early July 2020. ^[24] Maxwell reportedly has settled lawsuits with two women who claimed she was involved in Epstein’s exploitation without admitting guilt. ^[25][26]

Maxwell has been involved in many public projects and efforts. She co-hosted a launch party for the publishing platform Ideapod in 2013. ^[27][28]

In July 2020, federal prosecutors secured an indictment of Maxwell on charges related to conspiracy in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls; she was arrested and faced trial as of early July.^[29]