by Francis Lee for the Saker Blog

It speaks volumes about the gravity of the current political and economic situation that the leading US investment bank Goldman-Sachs has seen fit to issue a sombre warning.

‘’Goldman Sachs Group Inc. put a spotlight on the suddenly growing concern over inflation in the U.S. by issuing a bold warning on Tuesday that the dollar is in danger of losing its status as the world’s reserve currency. With Congress closing in on another round of fiscal stimulus to shore up the pandemic-ravaged economy, and the Federal Reserve having already swelled its balance sheet by about $2.8 trillion this year, Goldman strategists cautioned that U.S. policy is triggering currency “debasement fears” that could end the dollar’s reign as the dominant force in global foreign-exchange markets …

There are many factors pushing the gold price higher, including fear of increasing political uncertainty, rising concerns involving another spike in COVID-19 infections in the country, increasing government debt, rising inflation, and concerns that the US dollar is seeing a new downtrend to the Chinese Yuan.’’ (1)

The fact that gold is being spoken about by the financial cognoscenti is in itself significant. Gold bugs (like me!) have long been regarded by orthodox academic economists and business financiers as being beyond the pale in terms of their relevance to current economic and financial issues. But, as with everything, times change, fashion changes, paradigm shifts take place – such is the way of the world.

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John Stuart Mill once commented in this respect.

‘’The ordinary progress of a society which increases in wealth, is at all times tending to augment the incomes of landlords; to give them both a greater amount and a greater proportion of the wealth of the community, independently of any trouble or outlay incurred by themselves. They grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing. What claim have they, on the general principle of social justice, to this accession of riches? In what would they have been wronged if society had, from the beginning, reserved the right of taxing the spontaneous increase of rent, to the highest amount required by financial exigencies’’ (3)

Capital movements into and out of existing assets was not necessarily productive investment but mainly pure speculation. And speculation itself was driven by increasing levels of cheap debt, both sovereign and private. This process may be observed in the Fed’s force-feeding new monies into the economy at which corporations use this largesse to buy-back their own stock thus enhancing their market price. Insofar as it might be produced it becomes clear that finance led growth is based upon trickle-up economics in which the gains of the wealthy come directly at the expense of ordinary people. Financialization involves the extraction of economic rent from the circulation (of capital) process, as well as patents, copyrights and land/property.

https://thesaker.is/the-twilight-of-neo-liberalism/

Robin DiAngelo
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism
Beacon Press, 2018.

White guilt, in itself, is certainly an act of psychological diminishment, but the message of DiAngelo’s text is fundamentally that this psychological diminishment has not led to a desired correlation in material or structural diminishment. Whites merely feeling sorry for themselves (?) isn’t enough for their competitors, if it isn’t accompanied by a wholesale transfer of power, land, and other resources. In this context, “White Fragility” is an indictment and insult levelled at White progressives merely frozen by fear of racism accusations and White guilt. In short, White Fragility is a horrifying call for Whites not simply to be paralyzed by White guilt, but to become active participants in their decline, and willing accomplices in their political and demographic destruction.

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/08/02/review-of-robin-diangelos-white-fragility/

[Yet there is absolute silence from the news media, politicians, and so-called government watchdog groups with regard to the root cause of this economic devastation, i.e., the bio-engineered, weaponized SARS COV2 virus that came out of Wuhan, China.  As with the nuclear meltdown at the TEPCO nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan — the mainstream media goes silent and the governments of the world ignore these catastrophic disasters as if nothing needs to be changed to avoid future repeats of these man made horrors.  Close down all bio-weapons laboratories now! — S. Byron Gassaway]

by Michael Snyder
TheEconomicCollapseBlog.com
July 30, 2020

For a very long time we have been warned that a U.S. economic collapse was inevitably coming, and now it is here. Fear of COVID-19 and unprecedented civil unrest in our major cities have combined to plunge us into a historic economic downturn, and nobody is exactly sure what is going to happen next. On Thursday, we learned that U.S. GDP was down 32.9 percent on an annualized basis last quarter. That officially makes last quarter the worst quarter in all of U.S. history, and many people believe that this new economic depression is just getting started. But of course not all areas of the country are being affected equally. According to USA Today, states such as Hawaii, Nevada, Michigan and New York were hit particularly hard last quarter…

http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/we-are-seeing-economic-devastation-on-a-scale-that-america-has-never-seen-before

Selling shoes must be Nike’s aim, because the alternative is twice as bizarre.

That alternative is that Nike, a global megacorporation whose pockets are lined with the profits of slave labor, has appointed itself chief propagandist for a movement to dismantle the power structure of America on behalf of the ‘oppressed’ women, blacks and Muslims of the world.

It’s that Nike, a company that donates to Republican candidates every election cycle, supports an anti-police organization founded by “trained Marxists,” whose stated aim is to destroy “capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism.” It’s chipped in $40 million dollars to this organization and those like it.

It must be about the shoes, right?

https://www.rt.com/op-ed/496872-nike-woke-advertisement-video/

Here’s what was captured of day 60 of Portland “protests”.  [They are rioters and insurrectionists]

https://youtu.be/pCwU1Lg6Wsg

According to the Portland Police, which did not engage with demonstrators, the crowd lit several fires, including a large bonfire in the middle of the street in front of the federal courthouse. One video shows protesters feeding a small fire with Bibles, which were engulfed in flames:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/08/01/portland-protesters-burn-bibles-american-flags-in-the-streets/

I don’t know what burning the Bible has to do with protesting against police brutality.

Do not be under the illusion that these protests and riots are anything but an attempt to dismantle all of Western Civilization and upend centuries of tradition and freedom of religion.

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 1, 2020

Antifa protesters in downtown Portland have started burning American flags in the street. They are also burning Bibles.

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 1, 2020

Other videos show American flags consumed by fire:

‘F*ck Trump!’ | Bible and US flag set alight on 65th night of protests in #Portland pic.twitter.com/3c60egqEa3

Robert Bridge

A lawsuit put forward by the ACLU on behalf of aggrieved protesters described the situations as follows: “They are intentional acts by a lawless president, who has sent his paramilitary forces to shoot up the streets of Portland, choke downtown in a haze of toxic chemical fumes, and generate reelection soundbites – in blatant disdain of public safety, the rule of law, and the most fundamental principles of our Constitution.”

BREAKING: ACLU seeks contempt findings, sanctions against federal officers who have fired impact munitions at journalists, legal observers https://t.co/Q76jdQB4zd

— Maxine Bernstein (@maxoregonian) July 28, 2020

Now that is certainly rich considering it was the White House struggling to enforce the “rule of law” in an American city where rioters, looters and vandals have taken control of the streets. We already saw the results of such unbridled freedom in the Republican of CHAZ in downtown Seattle, which was forced to cancel its short-lived ‘summer of love’ due to an unfortunate climb in homicide rates, which tends to happen when mental health workers instead of police officers respond to emergency calls.

They are trying to retake CHAZ https://t.co/ANLVsft2pl

— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) July 26, 2020

In light of all this unmitigated mayhem, certainly the mayor of Portland supports Trump’s offer of federal intervention. Think again. Not only did Mayor Ted Wheeler order his police to stand down against the rioters, he was actually in the very center of the mob that had gathered at the Mark O. Hatfield United States Courthouse. Then there are the so-called ‘Wall of Moms,’ a group of ‘concerned mothers’ that suspiciously sprung to life just as Trump was warning he would be forced to intervene if local authorities failed to do their jobs.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/07/31/are-the-democrats-plotting-a-maidan-trap-for-trump-at-peaceful-portland-protests/

The darkening of our screens and stages and its part in the theft of our past and future

by Jack Antonio

YOU FLY into London on a British Airways plane on which you are shown an animated film about safety. It stars a cartoon Black man with his cartoon White wife and their cartoon mixed-race child. You pass through immigration control and are poked and probed by Brown people wearing hijabs and turbans who jabber at you in an unintelligible version of the English language. Heading for the tube you pass a poster that shows a Black woman dressed in Elizabethan garb beckoning you to the Globe Theatre.

On the ride into town you see posters for the latest West End plays. There are productions of Shakespeare’s Richard II and Henry V starring Black women in the title roles. (The critics rave that these classic plays finally make sense.) There is also an Asian actor playing David Copperfield and Christmas pantos starring Blacks and Asians as Cinderella, Dick Whittington, and Snow White. Next to the entertainment ads are those for mortgages and mattresses all featuring Black men with White women. And, they are almost always blonde women.

You get home, put your feet up in front of the TV and notice that there are an unusually large number of Brown people on the streets of Victorian London as depicted in the BBC’s latest version of A Christmas Carol. And the villages of Midsomer are teeming with more people-of-color than your local benefits office. Even Doctor Who is suddenly a Black woman! You channel surf and are confronted by Black vikings, Black centurions, Black Tudors and an Asian King Arthur!

The news is read by a Brown person. The weather is given to you by a Brown person. Your favorite gardening program is presented by a Brown person. The Brown person presenting your favorite wildlife program explains without a trace of irony the danger of extinction faced by native fauna and flora due to the invasion of alien species.

https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2020/07/31/fade-to-black/