Posts From amarynth
By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog High-finance-dissident site ZeroHedge retweeted this: “Everything that is wrong with America, in one image.” Indeed, but it’s old news: not adding strings to Quantitative Easing totally untethered Western stocks from market fundamentals. That certainly shouldn’t be old news to The New York Times, who addressed this same issue with Everything Is Awful. So Why Is the Stock Market Booming? They incredibly concluded their
By Pepe Escobar – posted with permission Compare hundreds of millions of Asians’ serene response to the coroavirus crisis with the West’s fear, panic and hysteria As the Raging Twenties unleash a radical reconfiguration of the planet, coronavirus (literally “crowned poison”) has for all practical purposes served a poisoned chalice of fear and panic to myriad, mostly Western, latitudes. Berlin-based, South Korean-born philosopher Byung-Chul Han has forcefully argued the victors are the
By Ramin Mazaheri for the Saker Blog In just 24 hours the UK saw nearly a half-million people volunteer to deliver food and medicine to the nation’s 1.5 million elderly and vulnerable people. Nearly 750,000 signed up, so many that they had to turn people away. In the US the situation is the opposite: there are no shortage of stories such as NPR’s, Coronavirus Drives Away Volunteers Just As They’re
by G.H Eliason for the Saker Blog This article will unequivocally prove the Russian government and Julian Assange was innocent in relation to the DNC hacks of 2016 beyond a shadow of a doubt. Doing so has involved the laborious work detailing events occurring from 2015-2016 that are completely separate from the DNC LEAK VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) investigated. In the beginning, it became clear we were investigating
by Pepe Escobar – posted with permission Covid-19 driven collapse of global supply chains, demand and mobility will painfully spawn next great tech-led economic models Nobody, anywhere, could have predicted what we are now witnessing: in a matter of only a few weeks the accumulated collapse of global supply chains, aggregate demand, consumption, investment, exports, mobility. Nobody is betting on an L-shaped recovery anymore – not to mention a V-shaped
By Pepe Escobar and crossposted with Consortium News You don’t need to read Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand that neoliberalism – in deep crisis since at least 2008 – is a control/governing technique in which surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded. But now, with the world-system collapsing at breathtaking speed, neoliberalism is at a loss to deal with the next stage of dystopia, ever present in our hyper-connected angst:
By Eric Zuesse for the Saker Blog At of the start of the day on April 9th, the United States, which has 4.2% of the world’s population, had 28.7% of the world’s known Covid-19 (or “coronavirus-19”) cases. This infection-rate tends to be higher in cities than in rural areas. 82% of America’s population is urban. 55% of the world’s population is urban. The most-urbanized nations (100% urban), and their respective
by Pepe Escobar – posted with permission. How Heraclitus, the Riddler, may teach us to fight Covid-19 He was known as “the Riddler.” Even “the Dark.” Heraclitus of Ephesus was one of a kind. In his heart of hearts a contemptuous aristocrat, this master of paradox despised all so-called wise men and the mobs that adored them. Heraclitus was the definitive precursor of social distancing. We, unfortunately, owe the “pre-Socratic” reductionist
By Pepe Escobar and crossposted with Strategic Culture Foundation As much as Covid-19 is a circuit breaker, a time bomb and an actual weapon of mass destruction (WMD), a fierce debate is raging worldwide on the wisdom of mass quarantine applied to entire cities, states and nations. Those against it argue Planet Lockdown not only is not stopping the spread of Covid-19 but also has landed the global economy into
By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog It’s an unusual prediction, but the coronavirus may kill the “neoliberal Trotskyist” projects of the Eurozone and the European Union because the pan-European project has, sadly, always cared more for itself than for the well-being of its constituents. Briefly: the major theoretical contribution of “Daddy Stalin” (to quote Che) to socialism was to insist that nations can indeed go their own way and
By G H Eliason for The Saker Blog You’ve heard the US Surgeon General saying, “We should be acting as if we have the virus” to flatten the curve? How is this simple statement hugely relevant to protecting your loved ones and other people, helping medical staff in Malaysia and other countries desperately short of necessary protective equipment, doctors forming Facebook groups on social media to exchange advice on how
by Pepe Escobar – Posted with permission In the Belt and Road framework, China is supplying much of the world including virus-hit Europe with medicine and healthcare items When President Xi Jinping was on a phone call in mid-March with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conti, before the arrival of a China Eastern flight from Shanghai to Milan full of medical help, the key takeaway was the Chinese pledge to develop
By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog It’s the film which captures what 2020’s zeitgeist should become, given that the rabidly anti-socialist West has chosen to economically self-implode Everything Bubble 2 into a possible Great Depression 2 over the coronavirus. It’s based on a great idea: what if Superman’s spaceship had not crashed in rural Kansas but in the rural USSR? His catchphrase would have surely changed to, “Truth, justice
By Ramin Mazaheri – for The Saker Blog Looking back, why was there such a huge, swift economic collapse after 9/11? Doesn’t it seem to have been totally unjustified? After all, there was no drastic global reordering, no Armageddon, no World War III. The biggest consequence was the legalisation of the 21st century Western security state, which dwarfs anything the KGB could have waged, but from an economic point of
by Gary Littlejohn for The Saker Blog The recent rapid decline in oil prices may now be coming to a halt as Trump and Putin agreed in a recent phone call that their oil industry ministers should talk to each other about the oil standoff that began when Russia refused to agree to participate in a cut in oil output proposed by OPEC. This proposed cut was then effectively reversed
By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog While the concept of class warfare is verboten and greeted with expressions of bewilderment and fear in the West, at least now everyone is familiar with the 99% versus the 1%. However, this is really too facile an analysis. It would be more accurate to talk of the “not-so-talented, toadying” 10% versus the 90%. But while this can prove quite accurate for neo-imperial
By Stephen Karganovic for The Saker Blog The corona virus controversy has hit Serbia particularly hard. Les pauvres Serbs, as once, during World War I, they were called by their compassionate French allies, are now harvesting the bitter fruits of their political immaturity. The rogue regime that was fraudulently installed to finish them off, upon which they never conferred the mantle of legitimacy but which they have irresponsibly tolerated by
By Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog Germany and their moral poses… a century of Europe cries, “Enough!” It’s hard for those living outside of Europe to understand the resentment towards Germany; Germans themselves often seem totally oblivious – the “German professor” only ever sees bad, unruly students, after all. When I first moved to Paris in 2009 I remarked how all the Germans I met were so very nice.
By GH Eliason for The Saker Blog Recently, I had a chance to meet one of my favorite journalists in Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR), Christelle Neant. Of all the English speaking journalists in the conflict, she consistently stands out for her courage and dedication to facts and evidence-based journalism. Originally, this was meant to be a written article with video follow-up questions, but due to technical difficulties (always blame the
By Pepe Escobar – Posted with permission Like a shot ricocheting at Heaven’s Door, Bob Dylan has released a masterpiece dissecting JFK’s assassination What spectacular timing. Like a shot ricocheting at Heaven’s Door as a virus pandemic rages and Planet Lockdown is the new normal, Bob Dylan has produced a stunning 17-minute masterpiece dissecting the November 22, 1963, assassination of JFK – releasing it at midnight US Eastern Standard Time on Thursday.
