Politics Of The Left Behind: Submit Or Retaliate

thenation  |  Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.

Hell’s Angels concludes when the Angels ally with the John Birch Society and write to President Lyndon Johnson to offer their services to fight communism, much to the befuddlement of the anti-Vietnam elites who assumed the Angels were on the side of “counterculture.” The Angels and their retaliatory militarism were, Thompson warned, the harbingers of a darker time to come. That time has arrived.  

Fifty years after Thompson published his book, a lot of Americans have come to feel like motorcycle guys. At a time when so many of us are trying to understand what happened in the election, there are few better resources than Hell’s Angels. That’s not because Thompson was the only American writer to warn coastal, left-liberal elites about their disconnection from poor and working-class white voters. Plenty of people issued such warnings: journalists like Thomas Edsall, who for decades has been documenting the rise of “red America,” and scholars like Christopher Lasch, who saw as early as the 1980s that the elite embrace of technological advancement and individual liberation looked like a “revolt” to the mass of Americans, most of whom have been on the losing end of enough “innovations” to be skeptical about the dogmas of progress.

But though Thompson’s depiction of an alienated, white, masculine working-class culture—one that is fundamentally misunderstood by intellectuals—is not the only one out there, it was the first. And in some ways, it is still the best psychological study of those Americans often dismissed as “white trash” or “deplorables.”

Lockdowns Are Politics Masquerading As "Science" And "Morality"

unz  |  Nearly one year into the COVID pandemic, even a modicum of critical thinking should tell us that lockdown politics as practiced in the United States is an unmitigated disaster, and with no end in sight. The reference here to lockdown politics is meant to signify a particularly assaultive, tyrannical set of government policies that in less than a year have brought severe harm to millions, more likely tens of millions of Americans and others across the world. Sadly, a Joe Biden presidency is only bound to aggravate this already intolerable repression and misery.

One grievous problem with the lockdown mania is that by obsessively fixating on the virus, a power-mad elite has ignored what must drive any public intervention: the need for a comprehensive, detailed cost-benefit analysis informing social policy. Stale rhetoric about “following the science” turns out to be not only one dimensional and useless, yet it remains a justification for continuing mass shutdowns, in state after state. The worst consequences include millions of lost jobs and businesses, escalating poverty, record numbers of bankruptcies, educational chaos, new health crises, a sharp rise in addictions and myriad psychological problems.

Meanwhile, it has become abundantly clear that lockdown rules – the very rules overlooked at times of street demonstrations and upheavals – apply only to Trump supporters, the great “super-spreaders”, wherever they gather. Those arbitrary directives have been cynically used by Democratic governors, mayors, and their health czars as a dictatorial political weapon – in part to bolster their own power, in part to subvert Trump’s second presidential run. For them, the pandemic is welcomed as a godsend, to be leveraged for a “global reset” on the road to maximum power, an incipient fascism. What we have here is what C. Wright Mills long ago called the “higher immorality” in his classic The Power Elite.

Entirely predictable fallouts from months of destructive lockdowns were recently acknowledged by even the staid World Health Organization, which urged a worldwide end to the shutdowns – a message, however, never processed by an insular political/medical/media establishment in the U.S. The WHO projects a future of intensified global poverty, food insecurity, disease spread, and other health crises so long as the lockdown remains in place. Food-supply chains have already been harshly disrupted from the combined effects of COVID and harmful government controls. What leading Democrats such as Berkeley professor Robert Reich and California Governor Gavin Newsom commonly (and senselessly) refer to as an “inconvenience” will, as WHO leaders stress, bring added impoverishment to possibly hundreds of millions of people in lesser-developed nations already trapped in endless cycles of social misery. Such damage scarcely registers across the corporate media, where the horrors are casually written off as “collateral damage”.

The WHO warning has been reaffirmed by thousands of medical professionals and scientists aligned with the “Great Barrington Declaration” – a well-grounded denunciation of the lockdown politics that retains a dogmatic hold on Biden and the Dems. The “Declaration” was orchestrated by three world-respected scientists: Jay Bhatticharya of Stanford, Martin Kulldorf of Harvard, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford. Their message, drawn from a painstaking assemblage of international research, is clear and urgent – end draconian restrictions in favor of “focused protection”, which sensibly allows those (the vast majority) at minimum risk of extreme sickness to return to normal social lives. Those least threatened (under age 50) have a 99.98 likelihood of surviving any bout with COVID – less risky than the ordinary flu. The “Barrington” scientists urge a shift toward what in fact has been the historical norm for virus-mitigation: policies taking into account the full range of economic and social as well as medical factors, logically necessary to curtail the amount of total harm.

The nonstop political/media fearmongering behind mass shutdowns assumes, wrongly, that this particular virus (unlike most others) can somehow be banished from human existence, never to return. They further believe, against all logic and experience, that lockdowns must be imposed until a vaccine is discovered and administered (by mandate?) to entire populations, the ostensible goal being some type of general immunity. Generally forgotten is the poor efficacy of so many vaccines that are promoted as uniform remedies. In fact a vaccine has long been available for influenza, yet the success rate hovers between 20 and 60 percent while hundreds of thousands of people die yearly (roughly 650,000 on average) across the world from that stubborn virus.

The lofty medical experts have little to say, moreover, about the state of public health in general. In the U.S., deaths for 2018 totaled nearly three million, with heart disease (655,000) and cancer (600,000) topping the list. What particularly stands out, however, are the mortality levels for all respiratory diseases, including influenza and pneumonia (both viral and bacterial): roughly 220,000, close to the yearly average and little more than the current COVID death toll. Never in 2018 nor at any time in the past has any government, health, or media figure called for mass lockdowns to either “flatten the curve” or “destroy the virus” in response to such health challenges. Not even a murmur in that direction, much less moral panic.

We Have The United States Of America, The Rest Of You Are Just Visiting...,

tabletmag  |  Shedding its specifically Northern mainline Protestant cultural attributes, a version of Social Gospel Protestantism has mutated into the secular religion of wokeness, the orthodoxy of the universities and the increasingly important nonprofit sector. Its converts include many of the affluent white secular children and grandchildren of members of mainline Protestant denominations like the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Methodists, which are hemorrhaging membership to the category of religious “nones.”

By evolving from an ethnoregional culture into a crusading secular creed disseminated by the universities, the public school system, the corporate media, and corporate HR departments, post-Protestant wokeness is capable of assimilating anyone, of any race or ethnicity, native-born or immigrant, who is willing to conform to its weird rituals and snobbish etiquette. The Long Island lockjaw accent has been replaced by the constantly updated “woke” dialect of the emerging American elite as a status marker. You may have an Asian or Spanish surname, but if you know what “nonbinary” means and say “Latinx” (a term rejected by the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American origin) then you are potentially eligible for membership in the new national ruling class.

The recent conversion to wokeness of the legacy media and big business can be attributed to the increasing reliance of both sectors on a few prestige universities to recruit their top staff. In living memory, if you wanted a job in a prestigious law firm or company in Dallas or Atlanta, you would do well to attend the local state or elite private university, to make connections with the offspring of the local gentry; being an Ivy League graduate, far from being a plus, might well be held against you. The nationalization and globalization of American business, however, has produced a new, increasingly homogeneous managerial elite filtered through a small number of Ivy League schools and high-status public universities, which serve as finishing schools for the woke overclass.

Although the woke managerial culture in the United States has lost most of the vestiges of its Yankee mainline Protestant origins, the emerging American national oligarchy has the same enemies as the old New England-Midwestern WASP oligarchy: white Southerners, Catholic white ethnics and observant Jews. This became clear in the summer of 2020. The woke left not only demanded the removal of statues of Confederate traitors—a perfectly reasonable demand—but also targeted Columbus, the icon of Italian Americans, and Spanish Catholic saints and conquistadors. Democratic liberals warned, in the tones of 19th-century Yankee Protestant nativists, that papists were taking over the Supreme Court. At the same time, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, Italian American by ancestry but woke by culture, exhibited a striking double standard when it came to public gatherings by left-wing protesters on the one hand and, on the other, Orthodox and Hasidic Jews.

The increasingly powerful and intolerant woke national overclass justifies its cultural iconoclasm in the name of oppressed minorities. But this is just an excuse for a top-down program of cultural imperialism by mostly white, affluent, college-educated managers and professionals and rentiers. Woke attitudes are much less common among Black Americans and Hispanic Americans than among the white college-educated elite.

What we are witnessing is a power grab carried out chiefly by some white Americans against other white Americans. The goal of the new woke national establishment, the successor to the old Northeastern mainline Protestant establishment that was temporarily displaced by the neo-Jacksonian New Deal Democratic coalition, is to stigmatize, humiliate and disempower recalcitrant Southern, Catholic, and Jewish whites, along with members of ethnic and racial minorities who refuse to be assimilated into the new national orthodoxy disseminated from New York, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and the prestigious private universities of New England. Properly understood, the Great Awokening is the revenge of the Yankees.

What Role Does The Establishment Play In "Protecting" Citizens From Themselves?

mises |   America’s political environment has become so polarized and hostile that you have many elected officials in positions of influence who openly despise large swaths of the American population. For example, Arizona’s secretary of state—the woman in charge of election integrity in the state—described Trump’s base as “neo-Nazis” in 2017. Given her public statements, why would any Trump supporters have any faith in a governing body she influences to count votes? Meanwhile, the secretary of state in Michigan was a former employee of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a left-wing hate group.

It would, of course, be wrong to suggest that the elites of the American left are alone in their hatred of their political enemies. While the Left has tended to be more violent in recent years, there are many Republican voters who consider the political left immoral, un-American, and a threat to their families. The difference is that, outside of a few levers of federal power held by the Republican Party, the American right does not have nearly the same institutional support that the Left does currently.

It appears that 2020 may be the year that finally proves that the façade of democracy is not enough to maintain a unified political body. The election process does not inevitably lead to compromise and tolerance, but rather ends in those in power and those who are politically vanquished. When the losers of elections do not view their loss as a genuine reflection of democratic will, but rather an illegitimate coup, it is difficult to maintain governance over a population. Joe Biden appointing John Kasich–type Republicans will do little to soothe and reassure those who view a Biden presidency as little different than an occupational force.

This is why Ludwig von Mises viewed political decentralization and secession as a necessary component of liberal democracy. The proper objective of the democratic process was the peaceful transfer of power reflecting changes in the political will—political self-determination—rather than some form of civil worship of the will of the majority. When political differences become irreconcilable, true political decentralization allows for the breaking of political unions.

Will that end up being the ultimate result of the position of Trump's legal team? Who knows. Trump and a few lawyers will certainly not be enough to overturn the official results or to successfully spur a Trump secession movement. What will be interesting is how the institution of the Republican Party will respond to the escalating rhetoric of the president.

Under President Obama, the Republican Party remained civil and submissive while its Tea Party base discussed ideas like nullification and a convention of states. The sterility of the traditional GOP is likely a major reason why Donald Trump was able to take over the party. How much of the modern GOP will continue to follow the forty-fifth president, and how many will end up being perfectly content with being partners with Joe Biden?

What we can be sure of is that it will be much harder for Biden to win over many of the 70+ million Americans who voted for Donald Trump earlier this month.

Salvador Cienfuegos: Crime For Thee - Not For Me - I Am Free....,

mexiconewsdaily |  It is said that a “brotherhood” within the army called “El Sindicato” (The Syndicate) can in fact take the credit for Cienfuegos’ return as a free man.

Emeequis said that it was told by army sources that just a few hours after news broke of the former army chief’s arrest, a representative of El Sindicato – mainly made up of active and retired four-star generals – knocked on the door of the office of current Defense Minister Luis Cresencio Sandoval.

The representative, according to the sources, was a general who has experience combating drug cartels in the north of Mexico and a longstanding friendship with Sandoval.

One source told Emeequis that the message to the defense minister was: “The high-ranking commanders of the army were not going to remain with their arms crossed while a foreign government tore their credibility to shreds.”

The general told Sandoval to pass the message on to President López Obrador, making it clear that the high-ranking members of El Sindicato were not happy about the federal government not going to bat for their former colleague.

Emeequis said that in addition to generals, lieutenants and colonels began complaining that López Obrador appeared to be siding more with the United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) than the powerful “brotherhood,” which according to the report “pulls strings” on crucial issues for the federal government, such as the deployment of the National Guard, the construction of the new Santa Lucía airport and the construction of the new refinery on the Tabasco coast.

When Cienfuegos was transferred to a prison in New York from Los Angeles, even the most patient army officials – people who had been calling for the president to be given more time to negotiate with U.S. authorities – were infuriated, the report said.

El Sindicato consequently increased its pressure on the government. Several more representatives of the organization visited Sandoval or spoke to him over the telephone to tell him to tell López Obrador that there was a risk that the discontent in the army could cause problems for the government.

The president then reportedly ordered Foreign Minister Ebrard to harden his tone in complaining to the United States about arresting Cienfuegos without informing the Mexican government, and told him to insist on having the former defense minister returned to Mexico given that he allegedly committed crimes here rather than in the U.S.

Ebrard told reporters on October 29 that Mexico had expressed its “profound discontent” to the United States over not being informed.

To support their demand that the former defense minister be sent back to Mexico, the FGR and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the United States that the federal government would reevaluate its future collaboration with the DEA, Emeequis said.

The Washington Post reported that prosecutors in the U.S. attorney’s office for the Eastern District of New York attributed the decision to drop charges against Cienfuegos to the Mexican government’s threats to limit the role of the DEA in Mexico.

 

Why Aren't Red States Grateful For Elite Coastal/Financial Strip Mining Of Our Economies?

These are segments from Rising featuring exemplary stretches of elite, straight-hate for the benighted peasants out here where I live. What jumps out of this cloud of misdirection is the framing of “Red“ state Trump supporters as welfare parasites, extracting our essentially unearned stipends from the productive largesse of the coastal cognitive elites. We addle-brained deplorables are ungrateful for vulture capitalists, hedge funds, military industrial technological complex that has strip mined wealth from us on the regular for generations.

Because these talking heads represent our cognitive elites, Russiagate is is not a hoax. BLM and the woke DNC minions are going to effect real criminal justice and law enforcement reform. Their accusations of treason, red baiting, and smears with one unsourced claim after another - never correcting the record when they were shown to be wrong - are the new normal. The mainstream narrative has told you authoritatively that Russia has more effect on our elections than Israel, Saudi Arabia, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and our own military industrial technological complex. 

Didn't you witness the way that they swept the Biden Crime Family information under the rug like it didn't even exist?

In my humble opinion, there is no way the PMC will allow the depth of its subversive control over everything including our elections to be revealed.  At this point, I suspect that Trump is negotiating for his post-presidential life - and that of his family. He is trying to drive a hard bargain. He will push the potential of a reveal up to the point where they will give him what he needs and a little of what he wants. 

Trump is looking to secure his family's continued ability to do business and be financially successful. In exchange, he will cease to seek a second term and will not tell too much about certain details or people in his upcoming book deal. That's it. 

Trump has learned the hard way that the deep state is too well entrenched to be defeated; that he cannot use the system that screwed him (and us) to unscrew us.  If the deep state has the power to fix a US presidential election and have the media pre-set on their side for the aftermath - then it is a fool's errand to think that one could use the very same system to set things right legally. 

I absolutely love the way Trump has trolled these pompous, oxygen-thieving parasites. He has done yoeman's work toward the valuable goal of getting us to pay attention to the man behind the curtain. That was a necessary first step toward a warrior taking the stage and begining the armed journey toward a fight to the death.

Trump is not this warrior.

There would have to be investigations and arrests of perpetrators. Careers will be ruined. Glad handing money making networks will be disrupted on a huge scale. In fact, the entire democrat party, especially as run by an old school machine politician like Biden, is a massive money making cartel. That cartel will take a big hit. The PMC will fight more viciously than ever now to prevent any of this from happening. 

The anti-Trump rhetoric will increase to hyperbolic levels exceeding even what we have seen over the past four years. True believers/ideologues will be in a frenzy. There will be continuous riots in the streets. probably targeted assassinations of Trump supporters and conservative politicians. Some of that will be spontaneous and some will be directed and funded by the anti-Trump "resistance". Blue governors will defy policy directives out of Washington DC.

There will be a whole new round of sabotage from the PMC that will surpass the Panicdemic, Russia collusion, lying about troop levels deployed to war zones, leaking to the press, fake news, impeachment and all of that nonsense.

The warrior will have to be autocratic, even 100% dictatorial, in his leadership style.

I don't see Trump as willing or able to do that job.

France Has Broken The Back Of The Gilet Jaune Protest Movement

jacobin |  In addition to police brutality, the state moved in to curtail the movement with mass arrests of thousands, judicial harassment, and illegal tactics. Simpere speaks of “very repressive laws that allow almost anyone, including peaceful demonstrators, to be arrested, often ‘preventatively.'” More specifically, she points out the use of two vaguely defined laws that she considers contrary to international law: one punishing the “preparation of group violence,” under which many people with protective gear like goggles have faced judicial persecution; and one forbidding “contempt toward police forces,” used more than twenty thousand times in 2019 alone. She cites the case of protesters in Narbonne prosecuted for this offense, simply because they had a banner denouncing the severe injuries caused by flash-balls.

In early December 2018, the authorities started to widely disregard their own laws. Alimi calls it “state illegality,” a concept he plans to elaborate in an upcoming book: “The state itself becomes criminal,” he explains, “as its representatives decide to deliberately violate the law to prevent the expression of civil liberties.” In addition to mass preventive arrests and illegal searches, he names the case of a state prosecutor calling on his substitutes to keep people in custody for the maximum length in order to prevent them from demonstrating, despite having no evidence against them. “France shifted from a justice system that punishes actions to a justice system that punishes intentions,” he says.

This judicial repression has led to unprecedented numbers of arrests, with more than eleven thousand detained and more than three thousand convicted. “The courts were working like a production line,” recalls Gassiot, “with speedy trials on Mondays for those arrested on Saturdays.” Alimi counts about seven hundred to eight hundred gilets jaunes currently in jail — and he has himself defended many of those arrested. “They have been victims of an incomparable judicial violence and discrimination; they’ve been treated like animals,” he says. Unusually for France, even people with no criminal records were sentenced to jail time. “They were lower-middle-class people endangered by poverty; they were simply trying to keep their head above water, but they were pushed down — and drowned.”

his swift and merciless justice against the gilets jaunes contrasted with the lack of judicial reaction to police brutality. Despite the thousands of acts of violence against protesters — many of them proven by solid video evidence — the available information reveals that only seven police officers have been convicted. All of them received suspended sentences, with no discharge. Simpere describes the cases as “largely symbolic,” expressing her “serious doubt that there will be sentences corresponding to the seriousness of injuries.” Alimi is less diplomatic, calling the few convictions “crumbs thrown to the people to calm popular anger.”

During the first months of the crisis, as blood was being spilled every week, the government maintained a hard line in denying the existence of police violence, even refusing to use the word. Challenged on the issue by a citizen during a debate in March 2019, President Emmanuel Macron snapped back: “Do not talk about repression and police violence — those words are unacceptable in a state with the rule of law!” According to widely respected French daily Le Monde, citing insider sources, this unshakable political support for repression came from a genuine fear in December 2018 that rank-and-file police might abandon their post — and let the uprising prevail.

While the climate of police impunity might be linked to the high political stakes, my interviewees note that this lack of accountability has been pervasive for decades. The “police of the police” — the infamous Inspection Générale de la Police Nationale (IGPN) — is widely derided as a “whitewashing machine,” systematically clearing up on behalf of its colleagues. Simpere points out that “there is a clear conflict of interests when police officers have to monitor other police officers, and also when magistrates who are working in close collaboration with the police are the ones who are supposed to lead investigations against the police.”

Alimi goes further, stressing the whole systemic structure enabling police impunity in France. He says it starts with police officers and their hierarchy “who never acknowledge any act of violence and put into place a set of dissimulation measures every time there is any violence, including the systematic faking of official reports.” He then goes on to point out the lack of judicial independence in France, where “prosecutors are under the authority of the Justice Ministry, and see themselves as protecting public order, which leads them to protect the police.” This translates into prosecutors lying and blocking inquiries, among other things, by reacting more than thirty days after events, once footage from public cameras has already been erased.

Despite facing this “judicial wall,” Alimi says that amateur videos are changing the game. His team has imported techniques from groups like Black Lives Matter, making online calls for videos and witnesses. “Those videos have shattered the administration’s lies and have revealed dissimulation techniques.” As for judges, Alimi also points out that some are starting to recognize the need for real investigations into police work, but he says that it is too early to make an honest appraisal of investigations into police violence against the gilets jaunes. “We will know in two to three years,” he says, “then we can make a final assessment of those investigations, and maybe even talk about a transformation of the approach to police violence.”

 

Why Do You Suppose The French Establishment Tolerates Muslims?

BBC  | French President Emmanuel Macron has asked Muslim leaders to agree a "charter of republican values" as part of a broad clampdown on radical Islam.

On Wednesday he gave the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM) 15 days to work with the interior ministry.

The CFCM has agreed to create a National Council of Imams, which will reportedly issue imams with official accreditation which could be withdrawn.

It follows three suspected Islamist attacks in little more than a month.

The charter will state that Islam is a religion and not a political movement, while also prohibiting "foreign interference" in Muslim groups.

Mr Macron has strongly defended French secularism in the wake of the attacks, which included the beheading of a teacher who showed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad during a class discussion last month.

Late on Wednesday, the president and his interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, met eight CFCM leaders at the Élysée palace.

"Two principles will be inscribed in black and white [in the charter]: the rejection of political Islam and any foreign interference," one source told the Le Parisien newspaper after the meeting.

The formation of the National Council of Imams was also agreed upon.

If Sidney Powell Is Lying Sue Her Ass For Defamation!

jonathanturley  |  The press conference held by the Trump legal team was not for the faint of heart.  The team alleged a global, Communist-backed conspiracy to “inject” and “change” votes through the use of the Dominion computer system. It was exhausting and breathtaking. I was critical of the press conference as being long on heated rhetoric and short on hard evidence. Dominion issued a statement categorically denying the allegations. The question is whether Dominion itself will now sue.  The company denied the allegations but I often measure such denials by whether anyone actually sues.  Dominion could do so and force the Trump team to reveal the evidence supporting their allegations or face potentially significant liability. I assume that counsel like Sidney Powell would not make such allegations without proof, but the press conference did not make such evidence public. But these are not just colorful but criminal allegations against named companies and by implication corporate officials and political allies.

Trump campaign counsel repeatedly accused Dominion and its officers of criminal conduct and business improprieties. Those are categories of “per se defamation” under the common law. No special damages must be shown in such per se cases. Individual officers could bring defamation claims and the company itself could bring a business disparagement action.

Businesses can be defamed like individuals if the false statement injures the business character of the corporation or its prestige and standing in the industry. In Dun & Bradstreet, Inc. v. Greenmoss Builders, Inc., 472 U.S. 749 (1985) the Supreme Court allowed a business to sue a credit reporting agency for defamation where the agency mistakenly reported that the business had filed for bankruptcy.

 

 

Do As You're Told While We Construct A System For Legally Discriminating Against The Non-Compliant

alt-market  |  With the presidential election highly contested and the mainstream media hyping the rising infection numbers, the public is now facing important questions regarding the future of the pandemic response. Some states have decided to unilaterally introduce “executive orders” to restrict citizen movements, business openings and public activities.

Anthony Fauci is on the news constantly, calling for families to cancel Thanksgiving and Christmas and telling Americans to just “do what we are told”. The media is generally trying to drum up fear in the minds of the populace and paint images of plague and death everywhere. If Biden does actually end up in the White House, a federalized and national high level lockdown is on the table starting in January.

In April of this year I published an article titled ‘Waves Of Mutilation: Medical Tyranny And The Cashless Society’, which outlined a social engineering model put forward by globalists at MIT and the Imperial College of London which I called “wave theory”. The model essentially works like this:

Governments must use the pandemic as a rationale for “waves” of restrictive lockdowns, followed by controlled re-openings of the economy and of normal human activity. Globalists claim that this will “slow” the spread of the coronavirus and save lives. However, they also openly admit that these cycles of closures and openings have other uses.

Over time, the citizenry becomes acclimated to governmental intrusion in their everyday lives, and they get used to the idea of bureaucracy telling them what they are not allowed to do when it comes to the simplest activities. The system thus bottlenecks all human interactions to the point that we are constantly asking for permission. We become slaves to the Covid response.

As globalist Gideon Lichfield from MIT stated in his article ‘We’re Not Going Back To Normal’:

“Ultimately, however, I predict that we’ll restore the ability to socialize safely by developing more sophisticated ways to identify who is a disease risk and who isn’t, and discriminating—legally—against those who are.

…one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains.”

Note that Lichfield suggested that in order to participate in the normal economy you might need to show verification that you have been “vaccinated against the latest virus strains”. In other words, the elites expect there to be many more viral events or mutations AFTER Covid 19 has run its course, and the restrictions and controls we see today are meant to continue, possibly FOREVER.

The reality is that the wave model is not a very practical plan for stopping viral spread, but it is a perfect method for conditioning people to submit to a high level of control over their personal lives that they never would have accepted otherwise. The Covid response has also been heralded by elites at the World Economic Forum as a perfect “opportunity” to initiate what they call the “Great Reset”. The reset is a plan to deconstruct what’s left of the free market capitalist system, introduce carbon controls in the name of the global warming fraud, institute a global cashless monetary system, and finally, move humanity into what they call a “shared economy” in which the average person is no longer allowed to own private property of any kind and is completely dependent on the system for their basic necessities.

Of course, such a complex system of “solutions” (dominance) over every individual would need to be managed in a highly centralized way. Meaning, global governance by the elitist establishment would be the end result. Naturally….the globalists would reluctantly take the reins of power for “the greater good”.

The Covid Data Is Now As Tainted As The 2020 Presidential Election Results

Dr. Roger Hodkinson The doctor said that nothing could be done to stop the spread of the virus besides protecting older more vulnerable people and that the whole situation represented “politics playing medicine, and that’s a very dangerous game.”

 

Hodkinson remarked that “social distancing is useless because COVID is spread by aerosols which travel 30 meters or so before landing,” as he called for society to be re-opened immediately to prevent the debilitating damage being caused by lockdowns.

 

Hodkinson also slammed mandatory mask mandates as completely pointless.

“Masks are utterly useless. There is no evidence base for their effectiveness whatsoever,” he said.

 

“Paper masks and fabric masks are simply virtue signalling. They’re not even worn effectively most of the time. It’s utterly ridiculous. Seeing these unfortunate, uneducated people – I’m not saying that in a pejorative sense – seeing these people walking around like lemmings obeying without any knowledge base to put the mask on their face.”

 

Hodkinson’s credentials are beyond question, with the MedMalDoctors website affirming his credibility.

“He received his general medical degrees from Cambridge University in the UK (M.A., M.B., B. Chir.) where he was a scholar at Corpus Christi College. Following a residency at the University of British Columbia he became a Royal College certified general pathologist (FRCPC) and also a Fellow of the College of American Pathologists (FCAP).”

“He is in good Standing with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta, and has been recognized by the Court of Queen’s Bench in Alberta as an expert in pathology.”

 

At This Stage 80 Million Americans Know We Were Cheated

How do we know we were cheated?

MSM – Four years of hysterical lies about how our man was controlled by The Kremlin. The entire press corps was allied in unified opposition to the elected president. Good luck arguing this one.
Polls – Blatantly rigged to favor the other side and discourage Trump voters. Given the results good luck arguing this one.
Cyber – Blanket one-sided censorship, Blue Checking, search result games, and deplatforming. Case closed.
Primaries – Show me a single democratic thing about how Bernie was knifed or how the sneering IdPol queen who received zero primary delegates was elevated to vice president.
People – Q: Did former president Obama label Trump voters “racists” in his new book? A: Yes. Q: Did his wife say all Trump voters voted for “lies, hate, and chaos”? A: Yes.
Voting – Q: Can a Secretary of State legally change State laws in a Federal election (GA)? A: No. Q: Can a governor legally change State laws in a Federal election (PA)? A: No. Was the Smartmatic/Dominion software designed from the outset to allow external parties to remotely change vote tallies? A: Yes. Q: Was the software used to change the vote results in places like Venezuela? A: Yes. Q: Did Liz Warren, Amy Klobuchar, and Ron Wyden send a letter from Congress expressing deep concerns about Smartmatic/Dominion software security in Dec 2019? A: Yes. Is Smartmatic chairman Peter Neffinger on Biden’s transition team? A: Yes.

Good luck extracting legitimacy from all this. It will not be the fault of Trump voters when you can’t.

 

“In November 2020, Neffenger was named a volunteer member of the Joe Biden presidential transition Agency Review Team to support transition efforts related to the Department of Homeland Security.[10]

Neffinger is Chairman of the Board of Directors of Smartmatic, a multinational company that specializes in building and implementing electronic voting systems.[11]”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_V._Neffenger

• The year 2000: Smartmatic was founded by three engineers from Venezuela and officially incorporated in Delaware in 2000 after the hanging chad controversy in the 2000 US presidential election. Smartmatic established its headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida.

• The Year 2004: Smartmatic expanded rapidly between 2000 and 2004 with offices in Venezuela, London, Florida, and California. Litigations of its connections with the Chávez regime never ended.

• Smartmatic bought Bizta, in which both Smartmatic and the Venezuelan government had large stakes. “The Miami Herald revealing that the Venezuelan government owned 28 percent of Bizta – a company operated by two of the same people who own Smartmatic. Bizta bought back those shares after the article appeared, and Smartmatic now characterizes the deal as a loan.

• “Bizta and Smartmatic had partnered with Venezuelan telephone giant CANTV to win a $91 million contract to supply electronic voting machines for Venezuelan elections, including the controversial 2004 referendum Chavez won. Smartmatic categorically denies any link to the Chavez regime.”

(Source: https://votingmachines.procon.org/additional-resources/sequoia-alleged-to-have-ties-to-venezuelas-chavez/ )

• “Smartmatic was a little-known firm with no experience in voting technology before it was chosen by the Venezuelan authorities to replace the country’s elections machinery ahead of a contentious referendum that confirmed Mr. Chavez as president in August 2004…“

(Source: “U.S. Investigates Voting Machines’ Venezuela Ties,” New York Times – Oct. 29, 2006 https://votingmachines.procon.org/additional-resources/sequoia-alleged-to-have-ties-to-venezuelas-chavez/)

• The Year 2005: Smartmatic purchased Sequoia Voting Systems, one of the leading US companies in automated voting products.

• The Year 2006: Sequoia provided technical assistance in the elections held in Chicago and Cook County by sending a number of Venezuelan nationals to support the machines manufactured by Sequoia.

(Source: ABC Local, 7 April 2006, Alderman: Election Day troubles could be part of ‘international conspiracy’)

“Meanwhile, a Carnegie Mellon University computer science professor recently concluded after two days of testing that vote totals on a Sequoia model, different from those used here, could be manipulated. That prompted Pennsylvania’s Allegheny County to scrap plans to buy the machines.”

(Source: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2006-04-08-0604080149-story.html)

• “The federal government is investigating the takeover last year of a leading American manufacturer of electronic voting systems by a small software company that has been linked to the leftist Venezuelan government of President Hugo Chavez… “

(source: https://votingmachines.procon.org/additional-resources/sequoia-alleged-to-have-ties-to-venezuelas-chavez/)

• Smartmatic Corp sold its U.S. subsidiary Sequoia to end a review by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. into whether Smartmatic is partially owned by the Venezuelan government.

(Source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB116674617078557263)

• Bain Capital purchased Sequoia (Smartmatic-US).

(https://seeingtheforest.com/why-did-romney-associates-buy-a-big-voting-machine-company/)

• The Year 2011: Dominion Voting Systems, a previously little-known Canadian company engaged in manufacturing electronic voting hardware and optical scanners, acquired Sequoia Voting Systems

The Year 2014: Sequoia filed a bankruptcy petition under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code.

 

• Smartmatic buys Sequoia. Then Romney Associates buys Sequoia. Then Dominion buys Sequoia. Dominion made “donations” to the Clinton “Foundation” in 2014. Nancy Pelosi’s former Chief of Staff Nadeam Elshami works for Dominion.

On Election Corruption MSM Self-Hoists By Its Own Narrative Petard

cbsnews  |  The CEO of the voting technology company Smartmatic said Wednesday that results of Venezuela's election for an all-powerful constituent assembly were off by at least 1 million votes.

Antonio Mugica said results recorded by his systems and those reported by Venezuela's National Electoral Council indicate "without any doubt" that official turnout figures were inflated.

• U.S. slams "Maduro dictatorship" as Venezuelan dissidents arrested
  

Smartmatic was created by Venezuelans and began providing electronic voting machines in 2004 during the presidency of the late Hugo Chavez.

"Even in moments of deep political conflict and division we have been satisfied with the voting process and the count has been completely accurate," Mugica told reporters in London. "It is, therefore, with the deepest regret that we have to report that the turnout figures on Sunday, 30 July, for the Constituent Assembly in Venezuela were tampered with."

President Nicolas Maduro's government announced late Sunday that more than 8 million Venezuelans had participated in the election for constituent assembly that will be granted virtually unlimited powers. His count was put into question by at least one independent exit poll, showing turnout was less than half that number.

The claim is certain to fuel further discord over the assembly, which Maduro has vowed to utilize to target his foes. Opposition leaders boycotted the election, arguing voting terms were rigged to favor the ruling socialist party. Nearly 7.6 million people voted in a symbolic referendum rejecting the assembly two weeks before the vote.

The assembly is expected to be sworn into office Thursday and the opposition is calling on Venezuelans to protest.

 

Hardly Anybody Knows The Election Was "Fixed"

off-guardian |  The echo asks: Do you live inside America’s doll house where a vast tapestry of lies, bad faith, and cheap grace keep you caged in comfort, as you repeat the habits that have been drilled into you?

In this doll’s house of propaganda into which America has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.

Americans who voted for either Trump or Biden in the 2020 election are like Torvald clones.  They refuse to open that door so they might close it behind them. 

They live in the doll’s house – all 146+ million of them. Like Torvald, they are comforted. They are programmed and propagandized, embracing the illusion that the electoral system is not structured and controlled to make sure no significant change can occur, no matter who is president. It is a sad reality promoted as democracy.

They will prattle on and give all sorts of reasons why they voted, and for whom, and how if you don’t vote you have no right to bitch, and how it’s this sacred right to vote that makes democracy great, blah blah blah. It’s all sheer nonsense. For the U.S.A. is not a democracy; it is an oligarchy run by the wealthy for the wealthy.

This is not a big secret.  Everybody knows this is true; knows the electoral system is sheer show business with the presidential extravaganza drawing the big money from corporate lobbyists, investment bankers, credit card companies, lawyers, business and hedge fund executives, Silicon Valley honchos, think tanks, Wall Street gamblers, millionaires, billionaires, et. al.  Biden and Trump spent over 3 billion dollars on the election. They are owned by the money people.

Both are old men with long, shameful  histories. A quick inquiry will show how the rich have profited immensely from their tenures in office.  There is not one hint that they could change and have a miraculous conversion while in future office, like JFK.  Neither has the guts or the intelligence.  They are nowhere men who fear the fate that John Kennedy faced squarely when he turned against the CIA and the war machine.  They join the craven company of Johnson, Ford, Carter, Reagan G.H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama.  They all got the message that was sent from the streets of Dallas in 1963: You don’t want to die, do you?

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, its vast intelligence apparatus, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious.

It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why.

All the while, the doll’s house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful. It is now essentially an electronic prison that is being “Built Back Better.” The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population through their corporate mass-media stenographers. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other.

Folks Been Warning About These Voting Machines For A Minute Now...,

hackingdemocracy |  "Hacking Democracy" has been broadcast many times on HBO, exposing the dangers of the voting machines used in America's mid-term and presidential elections. Electronic voting machines count almost 100% of America's votes in county, state and federal elections. The Diebold voting machines and their hackable software are still used today in twenty eight states. The security holes and complete lack of transparency still pose an extraordinary risk to US elections.

Filmed over three years this daring exposé follows tenacious investigator, Bev Harris, and her team of citizen activists and hackers as they take on the electronic voting industry, targeting the Diebold corporation.

 "Hacking Democracy" uncovers incendiary evidence from the trash cans of Texas to the ballot boxes of Ohio, exposing secrecy, votes in the trash, hackable software and election officials rigging the presidential recount.

"Hacking Democracy" takes a clear eyed, non partisan look at the secrecy, cronyism and privatisation of elections in America as it captures a citizen's movement intent on taking back elections, and democracy itself.

Ultimately proving our votes can be stolen without a trace "Hacking Democracy" culminates in the famous 'Hursti Hack'; a duel between the Diebold voting machines and a computer hacker from Finland – with America's democracy at stake.

"Hacking Democracy" was Executive Produced by Sarah Teale & Sian Edwards of Teale-Edwards Productions LLC

THE HACK

Our expert hacker, Harri Hursti, shocked the nation when he successfully hacked the entire Diebold voting system, in Leon County, Florida. He did it using just one memory card and he changed all the votes, virtually undetectably.

The memory cards are America's electronic ballot boxes – they contain the votes. Diebold Election Systems went on the record, making the claim that there is "no executable program" in their memory cards. Harri Hursti suspected that their claim was false, and we set out to prove it.

Florida's courageous Election Supervisor, Ion Sancho, gave us permission to prove that Diebold was lying about their machine's security. A mini election was held, with our hacker excluded from the county's computer room. Not only did Harri change all the votes, he even made the machine print out a false 'Zero Tape' – the paper safeguard that is supposed to show that there are no votes pre-loaded inside the voting machine.

Following our hack California's Secretary of State ordered an investigation by the top computer scientists at UC Berkeley. Their report confirms that, "Mr Hursti's attack on the AV-OS is definitely real."

Watch Hacking Democracy and see how the 'Hursti Hack' was done.

Sidney Powell For President - Accept No Substitutes....,

In case you missed it...

My favorite person in this fight for America, @SidneyPowell1, was on the @RealRLimbaugh show today hosted by @MarkSteynOnline.

If you didn't hear it live, I've broken down the audio and copied out some highlights just for you.

THREAD 👇🏻

The total interview was just over 15 min. With Twitter's video length limit, I cut it into 2:00 chunks.

Time stamps in the comments are based on the total audio length. 

find threads are easier to get through than video, so hope this is helpful to someone.

Q :15 – What’s the problem with Dominion Voting Systems?

@SidneyPowell1
A :20 – “The system was specifically created and designed by Venezuelan money and interests to rig elections for Hugo Chavez.”

:40 – “It has been used to rig this election to make it appear the votes were for Mr. Biden when Donald Trump won overwhelmingly, and I am in the process of collecting evidence through a firehose, to the point it feels like a tsunami now.”

1:11 - “100 Dominion employees have even taken any affiliation with Dominion off their LinkedIn account, and Dominion is scrubbing the names of people like crazy.”

1:40 - This all came out because their math experts identified the algorithm that was being run. It was changed to run 67% for Biden – votes were injected by that number in the hundreds of thousands.

2:09 - The exact same number of Biden votes were injected 3 times in Wisconsin and 2 times in Michigan (or vice versa) about 20 minutes apart.

2:21 The people who say that there’s no evidence of fraud are the people who want to cover up the fraud for their own interests.

2:28 Evidence is coming in showing that people who bought these Dominion systems for their state got special benefits on the side.

Once Upon A Time American Elites Understood The Importance Of Culture And Conviviality

Curbed |   Dense cities like New York offer many residents a deal: Live in tight, possibly semi-squalid conditions in exchange for a cornucopia of communal experiences. In recent years, developers even turned that exchange into a selling point, offering dorm-like digs and shared amenities like dog spas and in-house breweries. But the bargain goes back far enough to have been woven into the city’s character and architecture. In the early 20th century, the wealthy and powerful understood that if the poor and powerless were going to participate in the city’s civic life, they needed to do it somewhere that wasn’t a tenement or a factory floor. New York filled the city with limestone libraries, airy train stations, religious institutions, parks, and grand public buildings. The Depression (and Robert Moses) brought playgrounds and swimming pools. Fortunes and years were spent shoring up the promise of urban life: that even the most deprived New Yorkers were welcome to join the throngs and partake in the city’s grandeur.

We’re still living off that largesse, just as we continue to rely on the foresight of the past every time we ride the subway or cross a bridge. These days, though, all those third-place locations sit dark, while we stay home and draw on different kinds of reserves: money, memory, and social capital. Isolation makes it hard to make friends, start romances, or have new experiences. Instead, we shut out the whine of wind and sirens and roll the recollections of old trips and meals around in our minds, while a freer future remains an abstraction.

The indoor season will tempt us to cheat — to negotiate with disease in ever more legalistic ways. A few weeks ago, a neighbor stepped onto an already full elevator in my building, ignoring the posted maximum of three passengers at a time. The other elevator was broken, she explained. She’d been waiting a long time. We were all wearing masks. The virus, I pointed out, doesn’t care.

Both Political Parties Ignore The Needs Of The American Precariat

newsclick |  In sharp contrast, Trump may have appeared indifferent to the gravity of the coronavirus, but his persistent calls to reopen the economy addressed the precarity issue, as they appealed to many workers whose livelihoods were being destroyed by the pandemically induced government restrictions placed on economic activity.

Public health care authorities understandably directed their policy responses toward pandemic mitigation, and the Democrats largely embraced their recommendations. But they remained insensitive to the anxieties of tens of millions of Americans, whose jobs were being destroyed for good, whose household debts—rent, mortgage, and utility arrears, as well as interest on education and car loans—were rising inexorably, even allowing for the temporary expedient of stimulus checks from the government until this past August.

Yet the inability of Congress to secure extensions on relief packages did not appear to unduly penalise Republicans, if one is to judge from the congressional results. Equally significantly, it didn’t help the Democrats either. This suggests that lingering fears about COVID-19 are being matched by economic anxiety from the many millions of American workers who are coming to realise that their jobs are simply not essential.

The struggle for the precariat vote will define the transformation of both parties in the next four years, and that’s an excellent thing, as it will force both parties to offer competing policies that begin to address their concerns. Until this group’s longstanding economic grievances—jobs, health, safety, pollution, the public purpose, and above all, relative stability and employment security over long periods of time—are addressed, the United States will remain a profoundly divided and divisive country at war with itself.

Sidney Powell Doesn't Strike Me As A Woman Prone To Empty Conversation....,

americanthinker |  We are learning more by the day about corrupt voting machines and software, and a scheme, as Trump attorney Sidney Powell describes, “organized and conducted with the help of Silicon Valley people, the big tech companies, the social media and even the media companies.”

It was less than a year ago that Senators Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden were concerned about these voting machines, yet today this is all “conspiracy theory.” Was there foreign interference in the election via corrupted voting machines? Were U.S. votes routed through servers in Spain and Germany? Election interference was of great interest to congressional Democrats during Trump’s first term, yet they seem to have no interest in such interference today.

Where are the Republicans? Where are so-called conservatives? Where is the outrage? Where are Trump’s friends? Does he have any these days?

How ironic that George W. Bush was quick to congratulate “president-elect” Joe Biden. Bush barely 'won" his election in 2000, while his opponent Al Gore fought for 37 days before the U.S. Supreme Court forced his concession. But Bush felt it reasonable to fight dimpled and hanging chads in one single state, yet scoffs at Trump fighting multi-state fraud?

Failed former Republican primary candidate Chris Christie suggests it may soon be time for Trump to “move on.” What a show of support. No wonder his candidacy failed.

Another loser, Mitt Romney, joined the chorus. I would not be a bit surprised if Romney had the 2012 election stolen from him in the same way as is happening to Trump today. Yet like most establishment Republicans, Romney prefers to give a “statesman-like” concession speech rather than soil his wingtips in a street fight to claim what is legitimately his. Interestingly, the Romney family has financial ties to voting machines.

World leaders have been quick to call and congratulate the assumed president-elect, the café-au-lait crowd happy to see the America-first president sent packing in exchange for another sap in the White House willing to pay the credit card bills of their freeloading nations. Trump is learning who is friends are.

There are a few exceptions. Leaders from Russia, Brazil, Mexico, Slovenia, and North Korea have not offered Biden their congratulations, prudently waiting to see how this plays out. Perhaps they know more about a recent U.S. raid on a voting machine server facility in Frankfurt, Germany that might reveal an international conspiracy to switch votes in our recent election. Perhaps, as in the case of Mexico's leader, they know the smell of a stolen election when they see it

Great Reset Already Happened: Peasant Consolation Prize WMD Used As A Giant Billboard

charleshughsmith |   The global elites' techno-fantasy of a completely centralized future, The Great Reset, is addressed as a future project. Too bad it already happened in 2008-09. The lackeys and toadies tasked with spewing the PR are 12 years too late, and so are the critics listening to the PR with foreboding.

Simply put, events outran our understanding of them. The future already manifested while we were trying to cram the present arrangement into an obsolete conceptual framework.

In broad-brush, the post-World War II era ended around 1970. The legitimate prosperity of 1946-1970 was based on cheap oil controlled by the U.S. and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar. Everything else was merely decoration.

The Original Sin to hard-money advocates was America's abandonment of the gold standard in 1971, but this was the only way to maintain hegemony. Maintaining the reserve currency is tricky, as the nation issuing the reserve currency has to supply the global economy with enough of the currency to grease commerce and stock central bank reserves around the world.

As the global economy expanded, the only way the U.S. could send enough dollars overseas was to run trade deficits, which in a gold standard meant the gold reserves would go to zero as trading partners holding dollars would exchange the currency for gold.

So the choice was: give up the reserve currency and the hegemony of the U.S. dollar by jacking up the dollar's value so high that imports would collapse, or accept that hegemony was no longer compatible with the gold standard. It wasn't a difficult decision: who would give up global hegemony, and for what?

Many other dynamics changed around the same time: social, cultural, political. These charts reflect the end of the postwar era and the ushering in of a new era.

Again in broad-brush, the key economic dynamic was the decline of labor's share of the economy in favor of capital. Those who had only their labor to sell lost purchasing power, while those who could borrow or access capital benefited enormously. The charts below tell the story: labor's share of the national income has stairstepped lower for 50 years (since 1970) while the super-wealthy's share has outpaced everyone else 15-fold.

The dominance of financial capital is visible in the third chart, as private-sector financial assets are now 6 times the nation's GDP, double the percentage of the postwar era.