by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker blog I’m only three years from being a Millennial myself but, wow! They sure have had a much rougher go of it: Most of them were teenagers when the “victory” of the “leader of the free world” came crashing down on 9/11. Jingoistic hysteria against (fictitious, always Pentagon-supported) Islamic radicalism was followed by the Great Recession. The alleged “economic recovery” was always limited to
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 Denis A. Conroy for The Saker Blog A ‘thing’ is a ‘thing’ because it’s not something else. The ‘thing’ we are presently preoccupied with is the coronavirus, a thing that has become the scourge that presently eclipses every other scourge, even the Western Worlds’ penchant for continuous warfare. The self-incarcerated multitude…of which I am one…might well wonder (at this time) what lies around the next corner. Some of us in
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 Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog I found out today We’re going wrong. – Cream – We’re Going Wrong – 1967 album Disraeli Gears Shortly after reading about the latest 7 million Americans who made unemployment claims this week that song shuffled on my iPod. It’s a haunting and even frightening song, and while that makes it sound like some lame emo band we must remember that it’s being
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 Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog According to Gallup’s samplings and calculations, the actual number of Americans who had the Coronovirus-19 infection on April 3rd was certainly not the 239,279 which was reported, but instead was probably at least 730,000. However, three neoconservatives — such as Matthew Pottinger, the top advisor to U.S. President Donald Trump regarding China policy — fed to the neoconservative Michael Bloomberg’s neoconservative Bloomberg News
by Eric Zuesse for The Saker Blog News has only gradually seeped out that the Minsk II agreement, to find a peaceful way to end the war between Ukraine and its breakaway far eastern Donbass region, collapsed on March 26th. It was an agreement which Francois Hollande of France and Angela Merkel of Germany had established with Vladimir Putin of Russia, on 11 February 2015, in Minsk, Belarus. U.S. President
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 Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog Why do people not grasp that economic math is as relentless as epidemiology math? Of course the US doesn’t have a curve but just a line going straight up: they are obese, have terrible health care, weakened resistance capabilities due to constant terror over physical/judicial/fiscal/employer harm, etc. These are things which needed to be fixed prior to the coronavirus but weren’t – however,
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 Jimmie Moglia for The Saker Blog As the following content may be controversial, I do not pretend to truth, even to the truth of him whose thought and findings I report. My basic knowledge rests on the understanding that the property of rain is to wet and of fire to burn, and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun. Furthermore, given the current rapidity
