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More End Games of Modern Civilization: factional fractures in ruling elite policy

By Karl North | December 16, 2021

Historical studies of civilizational collapse reveal a pattern that occurs at some point in the collapse process[1] – ruling elites begin to lose control, and policy disagreements arise. In this essay I will explore evidence that faultlines in pre-existing factions in the US ruling elite, once kept in the background, are emerging into the public view as conflicting policy choices across diverse areas of governance.

First, I will summarize key signposts of collapse and drivers of revolt that have elites concerned to the point of disagreement over policies of social control, as follows:

1. In August 2019, in a financial environment where the prime rate is near zero, the overnight loan rate, essential to keep global dollar transactions flowing, shot up to 10%. To meet this crisis, the Fed had to begin constantly dumping large amounts of new money (actually debt – formerly known as quantitative easing) into the money supply, and has been quietly doing so ever since. This can have only two outcomes. Because the money creation has far outstripped the production of real wealth, debts based on it will ultimately default, crashing the global economy starting in the Western world, the most highly leveraged economy. Or, money creation will eventually cause hyperinflation, thus reducing everyone’s bank account to zero.

2. A looming energy shortage has been forestalled by tight oil production, which temporarily made the US the swing producer and granting some control over oil price. US shale never grossed over $700 billion for about $1 trillion investment, so the nonviability of the industry at an oil price that allows the industrial economy to survive is now evident to ruling elites. The cost of oil has doubled in the last year to over $80/bbl (as of October 2021) despite an already depressed US economy, and will continue upward   until it collapses the economy sufficiently to depress demand and price. Price depression will briefly revive the economy slightly, causing another price rise. This fluctuation will continue, each time causing wave of permanent shrinkage in the economy.

3. To meet the looming energy shortage, global elites have played a virus (whether intentionally so designed or not) in a way to shut down parts of the Western economies to bring energy consumption in line with declining production. Despite sharply different policies – say, in Sweden vs UK – the results have been similar across Europe, and apart from some specific complications, the overall death rates from the virus itself not significantly higher than the normal flu season. Hence, the “media pandemic” story is no longer viable (especially in Europe, less among the more submissive US population). The “dangerous new variant story” is not working well, so unless rulers can invent a new disaster, the coming energy shortage and the acceleration of the collapse process will make itself felt in many ways, and the path is clear toward hyperinflation and revolt. In the US, the Democratic Party has been used to weaponize the pandemic narrative to destroy the Trump presidential campaign.

4. “The Great Reset” is a way of getting people ready for hyperinflation that will wipe out current levels of production and consumption. Digital currency makes redenomination of currency easy. It facilitates control of prices and income, replacing lost income with a food stamp type of guaranteed minimum income in what becomes an austere, low-level economy. Combined with the existing surveillance technology, a digital currency paves the way for the roll out of a totalitarian state, which will be necessary to conserve diminishing resources and reallocate them to sustain an affluent elite and their managerial minions .

5. The digital revolution has made people docile and heavily reliant on their smart phones. Cut off the internet, or simply censor its alternate sources of information (as is now occurring), and people are helpless.

In reaction to this situation, ruling elites have split into factions promoting different policies in the following areas: foreign policy, the pandemic story, the use of political parties as a tool of divide-and-rule polarization, and the resource depletion that is bringing industrial civilization to a halt.

Foreign Policy

Suddenly, with the arrival of the Biden administration, signs are appearing that at least one faction of the ruling elites is reconsidering its aggressive foreign policy of hybrid war against Russia. One of the reasons is obviously a matter of domestic politics – the desire to take down the Trump presidency with a range of fraudulent claims linking Trump to Russian influence was no longer necessary. But a potentially more important reason is that hybrid war all along the border of the Russian federation (including its soft Islamic underbelly) has not been working well, and even backfiring. Here are some of its failures:

1. CIA color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine using political extremists as a spearhead created regimes led by corrupt oligarchs (and in the Ukraine a neo-Nazi police state) who persecuted Russian populations in these former Soviet republics. Those populations declared independence and, with help from Russia, defeated Western supported attempts at reconquest, leaving those states in a mess that is an embarrassment to their Western backers. Attempts at color revolution in Belarus and Venezuela have failed at the outset.

2. The US invasion and occupation under cover of a Western “coalition of the willing” of Afghanistan and Iraq, and Syria, Libya and Somalia using Islamic extremist mercenary proxies, never achieved its goals of imperial control, and left partially destroyed, failing states. The official acknowledgement of defeat in Afghanistan and the ignominious retreat at the eleventh hour is but the latest in a long string of failures that have emboldened nations subject to US imperial control to reassert sovereignty. Another result is Arab hatred of the West that is leading even the medieval monarchies in the region who were reliant on US protection to reconsider that relationship.

3. The rise of a sovereigntist group of oligarchs in Russia led by V. Putin stalled the penetration of Russia by transnational capital that had been partly achieved in the decade of the 1990s. The “sanctions” strategy of economic warfare not only failed, but backfired as Russia seized on the opportunity to rebuild its domestic economy and strengthen its sovereignty. Moreover, Russia’s totally state controlled military industrial complex has achieved technological superiority (at one tenth the cost) over a US one that corruption and private control has reduced to a capitalist cash cow. The result, as the Pentagon admitted in its report to Congress, is that the US can no longer fight a major war.

A number of geopolitical analysts are describing the Putin-Biden summit, leading to a joint statement on strategic stability on June 16th, 2021 as the acknowledgement of the above regional defeats, a new configuration of power in the region, and thus the emergence to predominance of a ‘faction of caution’ (see here, here, here, and here). Thus, according to geopolitical military analyst The Saker,

Yet, what Biden did and said was quite clearly very deliberate and prepared. This is not the case of a senile President losing his focus and just spewing (defeatist) nonsense. Therefore, we must conclude that there are also those in the current US (real) power configuration who decided that Biden must follow a new, different, course or, at the very least, change rhetoric. I don’t know who/what this segment of the US power configuration is, but I submit that something has happened which forced at least a part of the US ruling class to decide that Obama’s war on Russia had failed and that a different approach was needed. At least that is the optimistic view.

Hence the request of a face-saving summit served to acknowledge all this and back off, at least for a while.

However, many continuing US contradictory words and actions against Russia and its geopolitical interests reveal that the faction fight inside transnational ruling elites is not in remission. Why did Biden personally attack the Russian president just before the summit, if he truly wanted more stable relations? Why the provocation of sending a warship into Russian waters off Crimea? Why two new US air strikes in Syria and Iraq recently – acts of war according to international law? Why did the deep state’s attack dogs in the US mainstream media denounce Biden’s diplomatic change of tone in the summit? International investigative journalist Maram Susli has revealed $350 million in Pentagon contracts to US companies to buy Eastern European made weapons, which cannot be used by US troops, just as PBS Frontline brought Al Qaeda terrorist head Al-Joulani on its show to give him a makeover as leader of the “good guys”. Is this all just for domestic consumption as The Saker suggests, or is it evidence of the hegemonist faction angling to retain skin in the game? Obedient to their deep state coaches, many in the mass media have crucified the Biden administration for the decision to end the war and occupation of Afghanistan. Now even Democratic Party leaders are calling for a package of sweeping new sanctions against Russia that undermines the spirit of improving relations that Biden attempted at the Geneva summit with Putin.

On the other hand, the US appears to have given up completely on its Ukraine color revolution, which has become a Nazi-occupied economic and political disaster. The coup de grace was to dump the Ukrainian debacle on Germany in a deal that included some vague German commitments to Ukrainian reconstruction.

Finally, a multitude of domestic crises and an increasingly polarized and contentious domestic population may be shifting Washington’s attention away from foreign hegemonist programs to suppression of domestic revolt.

Extreme polarization of party politics

For millennia, elites have successfully used the strategy of divide-and-rule to control their societies. In the modern age Western elites have accomplished this by creating a stage show they call “democracy” in which different political parties compete for the allegiance of the electorate with programs claiming to serve the public interest, but which rarely stop them from serving the interests of the ruling class, which is the main function of government.

In the US today, ruling elites seeking to divert attention from their role in collapse have encouraged the two parties to engage in such extreme measures against each other that they are gradually discrediting themselves into political impotence. One might ask: What good is a stage show that no longer fools anyone? In any case, the occasion for this more radical strategy was the appearance of a loose cannon presidential candidate, one who recognized that he could win by voicing verities and countering official narratives in a way that no president had done since John F. Kennedy:

Deep state agents of the ruling class easily prevented the politically inexperienced president from achieving any of his program, but the rhetorical damage he caused to the official narrative endangered the social order and had to be neutralized. The chosen instruments were the Democratic Party, which in an election year was happy to oblige, in alliance with a corporate controlled mass media that gave up any pretense of journalistic integrity. Assisted by agents of the deep state, these institutions launched a campaign to destroy an elected sitting president by any means, however fraudulent and even treasonous, as it turned out.

What ensued? First, a campaign of identity politics starring BLM/Antifa attacks on police in cities across the nation, weaponized by corporate funds and supported by Dem Party mayors and governors, causing violence that destroyed whole neighborhoods, which the mass media called “peaceful demonstrations”.

The second part of the campaign to neutralize the Trump administration, again embraced by the Democratic Party, was an attempt to link it to alleged Russian interference in US politics, now exposed as fraudulent and involving the intel establishment and the FBI in criminal activity.

The third part of the campaign was to elevate a manageable virus into a purported pandemic, again heartily embraced by the Democratic Party. The official pandemic narrative, long subjected to massive protest in Europe, is now unravelling even in the US, further discrediting the Democratic Party.

The results?

The above list is far from complete, but must give pause to ruling elites as they see the very institutions, they count on to maintain the social order losing credibility and traction.

Revolt against the pandemic story and its lockdown agenda

Thousands of courageous medical professionals around the world[2] have united in organizations to expose the lies in the Covid narrative, as follows:

1. All the cheap therapies banned by authorities in the West and especially in the US, but used effectively in thirty other countries[3] have been proven to prevent or reduce the disease to a situation far less perilous than a pandemic, when used in a timely fashion. Despite the lies from the authorities and media, the therapies are completely safe and have been used effectively on many health problems for many decades. Used as both a preventive and a therapy in various cocktails, these cheap treatments almost eliminate the need for hospitalization in the very small at-risk population that can get sick from infection.

2. This virus does not, and did not cause a pandemic. Deliberate exaggeration of case counts using a test that as used in many countries according to WHO instructions generates at least 50% false positives. Although the test cannot diagnose disease, medical authorities such as Johns Hopkins are feeding the results to the media as counts of cases of Covid 19 disease. These greatly inflated case counts are used to scare and deceive the public. Moreover, fatality counts are rigged to count deaths by all sorts of causes. Most people under seventy infected or not, do not get sick, or get an easily treated mild version. Medical authorities like Fauci, CDC, NIH and WHO quietly admit that fatalities are no greater than the annual flu season, contradicting the scare message that they are trumpeting to the media. The official suppression of effective treatments and a media campaign to falsely claim that a vaccine is the only solution did cause a medical crisis, mainly in countries like the US with a large low-income at-risk population who get poor health care. NYC with its large population of inner-city poor thus becomes a hot spot, magnified in the media to scare the whole nation. These hot spot crises occur every year in the flu season due to poor health care systems.

3. In these ways authorities have stampeded the public into accepting draconian lockdown policies that are not only unnecessary but cause more suffering than the virus. Most of the lockdown policies have proven not only ineffective, but are not necessary, given all of the above. The collateral damage of the lockdown policies has caused more suffering than the virus.

4. The so-called vaccine available in the West is not a vaccine, it is a gene therapy. A long string of US patents over twenty years reveals the creation, mostly in US research laboratories, of a genetically engineered virus, not a natural mutation of a virus from an animal like a bat or a pangolin. In tandem with this virus, patents divulge the creation of a customized designer “vaccine”, This experimental, high-risk product that authorities and media are trying to scare everyone into injecting is totally unnecessary, given all of the above revelations. Moreover, the injection is producing adverse events that are orders of magnitude above those of any previous vaccine. Peer reviewed studies of its use in highly injected populations like Israel and the United Kingdom disclose a pattern of recurrence of the disease among the injected, which shows 1) that it was never designed to confer immunity, unlike a real vaccination, and 2) that booster shots don’t provide immunity either.

The above-described revelations are percolating into the collective consciousness, especially in Europe, despite almost complete suppression in the corporate media, censorship in the alternate online media and harsh condemnation of critics of the official “pandemic” narrative. In the US, the pandemic story has lost more credibility in politically conservative populations, partly because liberals politicized the issue by embracing the official narrative aggressively as a way to destroy the Trump administration. Attempts by authorities to pressure people into accepting injections, and stigmatizing the “unvaxxed” and punishing them with “vaccine passport” requirements have sparked references to parallels with the classification in Nazi Germany of a whole class of society as subhuman “Untermenschen”, and polarized society further.

As awareness spread of the false rationale for most of the elements of the lockdown policies, authorities began flipflopping in their support for the most unpopular, such as mask wearing, keeping social distance, and quarantining school children at home, thus suggesting a split in the ruling elites as to how to continue the “pandemic” as a scare campaign. The New York Times, after spreading the “pandemic of fear”[4] official policy narrative as certainties for over a year, is now running cover stories such as “Covid is a Mystery”, admitting sotto voce that most of those certainties may be untrue. The WHO has now admitted that its directive to use the PCR test – which became the tool for the scare campaign – was a mistake. The profit motives of the vaccine industry require fear mongering, but some authorities may be regarding the growing polarization and revolt as self-defeating. The Democratic Party and most political liberals, having embraced the pandemic story now unravelling as mass deception and lockdown policies now exposed as ineffective, are now saddled with a failing fear campaign.

Hence, as the fall 2021 college football season heats up, evidence appears among the young that the Covid scare story is unravelling in places and holding strong in others. In schools around the country, especially big ten schools, lockdown protocols are lax and stadiums are packed with maskless fans. In others, like SUNY Binghamton for example, injection is the rule if you want to go to school, and masks are required in classrooms.  This is evidence in the college generation of how polarized and politicized the pandemic narrative has become.  The fact that deep state controlled mass media like the New York Times are reporting on the mounting opposition to lockdown protocols suggests concern in at least some quarters of the ruling class that the Covid gambit may have been overplayed and that political polarization is getting out of hand..

Resource Depletion

Underlying all the convergent crises and attempted solutions already discussed is global resource depletion and its symptom – the long-term growth in the cost of everything as long as business continues as usual. Hence, elites are planning degrowth for us that preserves growth and prosperity for them. Evidence that at least one faction of transnational capital and national ruling elites realize the implications of inevitable degrowth and the need for an elite-orchestrated version is the “Great reset” narratives promoted in Davos meetings of the World Economic Forum. These narratives hide technocratic totalitarian degrowth plans behind propaganda that promotes the ‘reset’ as green and socially just. So far, this propaganda is aimed at political liberals who have tended to accept the totalitarian aspects as a necessary ‘war economy’. Conservatives, suspicious of anything promoted as liberal, are actually more sensitive to the ‘big government’/fascist nature of elite plans.

[1] See Dmitry Orlov’s Five Stages of Collapse

[2] https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/math-plus-protocol/

https://covid19criticalcare.com/covid-19-protocols/i-mask-plus-protocol/

German Corona Investigative Committee

[3] https://americasfrontlinedoctors.org/

[4] https://de.rt.com/international/128471-yale-epidemiologe-corona-krise-ist-von-behoerden-erzeugte-pandemie-der-angst/

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