Highway to Hell
Highway to Hell
Why and How the Digital-Financial Complex Had to Create the Great Reset to Maintain their own Dominance
The reigning "elites" in finance and politics are leveraging the Corona crisis to rebuild capitalism. By maintaining the state of emergency and denying citizens their rights, they are destroying small and medium-sized enterprises, robbing them, and demolishing Western parliamentary democracies. The authorities' goal is to create digital-financial monopolies in which only the largest players have a say. Politics as a social shaping force is gone for good.
The Corona scandal demonstrated that politicians only serve the interests of the powerful. As a result, the rulers are extending the staged catastrophe over numerous lockdowns to usher humanity into the new reality of the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" via the "Great Reset" in accordance with the World Economic Forum’s playbook.
The year 2020 will be remembered because no planned state of emergency has ever impacted the world as dramatically as the Corona crisis.
COVID-19 is the first disease to be combated with such extreme tactics. Lockdowns, assembly prohibitions, and travel restrictions were implemented for the first time, and healthy people were forced to wear face masks under the guise of preventing the spread of a virus. Never has there been such a conspicuous disparity between effort and outcome as in the instance of COVID-19: Despite all the state's precautions, the virus was able to spread nearly unabated across the globe. At no other time in human history have official measures designed to protect the population's health had such devastating social consequences: according to the International Labor Organization (ILO), they have lowered the standard of living of 1.6 billion people and condemned 130 million people to starvation in 2020 alone.
Never has the fight against a pandemic caused such widespread economic damage, disrupting supply chains around the world, paralyzing production facilities, bankrupting hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, and largely destroying entire sectors of the economy such as logistics, culture, hospitality, and tourism. Governments have never given out "bailout money" in such large numbers or on such a large scale as in 2020. While they injected hundreds of billions into the system during the 2007/08 and euro crises, they were pumping trillions by 2020.
As always, only a select few have benefited from severe recessions. However, there has never been such an upward tendency in the financial markets during a recession as there was in 2020. While global GDP fell by more than 4%, the stock, bond, and real estate markets all reached new highs. The ultra-wealth rich's has never expanded so quickly in a single year as it did in 2020.
The world's billionaires have added $3.9 trillion. In no other year has the stock market valuation of the top digital firms increased as much as in 2020. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, increased by 31%, Microsoft by 43%, Netflix by 67%, Amazon by 76%, Apple by 82%, and Tesla by 743%. The largest asset management firms saw the most rapid growth in their history in 2020. BlackRock and Vanguard alone experienced more than $2 trillion in increase.
Never have citizens' fundamental rights been suspended in such a broad fashion as in 2020. Meanwhile, the globe witnessed a new form of division of labor: while politicians severely restricted the right to travel and the right to assemble, private firms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter restricted freedom of expression.
The comprehensive global operation to instill dread, horror, and panic in 2020 surpasses all prior records. Never in human history has the majority of the world's population been placed in such a state of shock. At no time in history has corporate and public media provided such a platform to scientists who have previously discredited themselves by scaremongering and incorrect forecasts. The gap between official health policy, with its continual warnings of medical threats, and actual health policy, with its destructive recommendations, privatizations, and constant cuts, including hospital and intensive care unit closures, has never been greater.
When one considers the health consequences of the measures—the weakening of millions of people's immune systems, the increase in depression and suicides, the avoidance of medical examinations for fear of infection, the traumatization of children, or the increase in domestic violence—only one conclusion can be reached: The argument that the regulations were designed to protect people's health from serious sickness is nonsense. There must be another objective at work behind the scenes.
Which one, though? And how come so many forces support and agree with it so wholeheartedly? Why have politicians and the media all around the world issued the same slogans and pursued, and continue to pursue, a nearly similar strategy? The answer is that there is abundant evidence of an entirely different agenda. But it has been determined by a force far stronger than politics, one that has usurped more power in recent decades than any other force in human history: the digital-financial complex.
WHO IS THE DIGITAL-FINANCIAL COMPLEX?
At the top of this mega-power block are the largest IT corporations of our time: Google parent Alphabet, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Facebook.
Furthermore, the main Wall Street banks and the world's top asset managers, such as BlackRock and Vanguard. These firms, together with a few others, dominate the two lifelines of modern global society: data and money. The major international financial organizations, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), on the one hand, and central banks, which have grown increasingly prominent since the 2007/08 crisis, on the other, are among their most essential helpers.
Additionally, the digital-financial complex engages in continual lobbying and gives financial assistance to various United Nations specialized entities. As a result, it has a substantial impact on WHO (World Health Organization), UNESCO (Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization), and ILO (International Labor Organization) policies, among others. It also commands a massive network of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) and public-private partnerships, such as the Better Than Cash Alliance to eradicate cash and the GAVI vaccine alliance.
With a financial volume of about $50 billion, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is by far the most prominent of the digital-financial complex's organizations for tax avoidance. Dozens of think tanks backed or financed by the digital-financial complex and university-affiliated research organizations offer a steady supply of future analyses and strategies, as well as regular interchange and tight cooperation at the highest levels of business and government. Organizations such as the Group of Thirty (G30)—a Washington-based private lobbying organization founded in 1978 by the Rockefeller Foundation—, the Bilderberg Conference, and the World Economic Forum (WEF) facilitate continual networking between the most prominent leaders of the digital-financial complex and international politics.
Finally, the digital-financial complex controls the majority of the world's media and can use it to influence public opinion in any direction and, as we learned in 2020, easily block critical voices on social media.
As a major global power, the digital-financial complex can bring a country to its knees in a very short period of time by controlling the flow of money, data, and information, remove any sitting government, and ideologically manipulate all the world's populations in any desired direction.
HOW DID THE DIGITAL-FINANCIAL COMPLEX GET THAT INFLUENTIAL?
Monetization, economic digitalization, and the "Fourth Industrial Revolution" are three factors that have allowed the digital-financial complex to acquire its historically unique privileged position.
1. Monetization
In the mid-1970s, monetization began. Following the 25-year postwar boom, economic development slowed. This particularly irritated the banks, which had been expanding in power through lending for nearly a quarter-century. As a result, they put pressure on politicians to create new avenues for them to generate money. Politicians yielded to pressure and proceeded to deregulate the banking sector by gradually removing restrictive constraints. The removal of the separate banking system1, first in the UK and then in the US, the establishment of hedge funds, and the introduction of progressively lenient laws for the approval of new financial products were the most significant milestones in this development.
The demise of the separate banking system resulted in a surge in the business of investment banks, which were permitted to assume significantly bigger risks than traditional commercial banks. Furthermore, the licensing of hedge funds opened up a whole new world of finance by allowing them to function like banks but without being subject to their laws. Because no one could stop normal banks from establishing their own hedge funds and therefore conducting the identical business they were previously forbidden from doing, this area exploded as well.
The development of new financial instruments resulted in a veritable multiplication of derivatives. Derivatives are simply bets on growing or declining interest rates, prices, or rates of return. Their expansion quickly led to the banking system resembling a casino. Furthermore, the major players' investments became increasingly "leveraged," i.e., speculating was increasingly carried out with borrowed money. As a result of this evolution, the system became increasingly weak and was on the edge of collapse in 1998, only to be spared by the participation of several big banks, which had to raise a total of four billion US dollars.
Because investment banks and hedge funds had grown so powerful in the 1990s that policymakers could no longer make decisions against their will, officials did not take any consequences of the near-collapse, but instead deregulated even further. As a result, the second near-crash occurred in 2007/08. Financial institutions compelled governments to make taxpayers pay for the damage they inflicted this time. Under the phrase "too big to fail," massive holes were ripped in government finances at the time, leading to the "austerity policy" and plunging entire population groups into suffering and poverty. The near-crash resulted in a further shift of financial power. Asset management companies began to outflank or acquire hedge funds.
Larry Fink started BlackRock—one of the main WEF partners—in 1988, and it has grown to play an important (if not the most important) role. The corporation not only manages approximately nine trillion US dollars, but it also boasts an unequaled data analysis system in the shape of its Aladdin mainframe computer, which has scanned the world's markets in great detail day after day for more than 30 years. Furthermore, following the near-crash of 2007/08, BlackRock has advised governments and central banks worldwide, including the United States Federal Reserve (FED) and the European Central Bank (ECB). This symbiotic relationship between BlackRock and the world's main central banks is going to eclipse anything humanity has experienced in terms of financial sector power concentration. The world's greatest private financial institution may efficiently serve itself by directly influencing the channels into which freshly scooped money flows.
2. Digitization
Parallel to monetization, the second movement that is currently altering our world began in the 1970s: digitization. Microsoft and Apple, two of the largest firms, were created in 1975 and 1976, respectively, and began a triumphant march that was followed by Amazon in 1994, Google in 1998, and Facebook in 2004. And still, we are being led to believe that all of this was the result of a few people’s ‘visionary mind’. All of these companies’ roots can be traced back to Pentagon programs.
While corporations first focused on developing and manufacturing computers, the use of the Internet in the 1990s and the beginning of the new millennium ushered in a novel era that enabled the digital economy to attain unprecedented growth rates. As early as 1993, the Internet accounted for only around 1% of global telecoms' information exchange, but by 2000, it had increased to 51%, and by 2007, it had increased to 97%.
As the digital industry quickly grew across all sectors of the economy, it created tremendous demand. Furthermore, software businesses obtained an equally historically unique view into all the data streams of the companies they digitized, giving them a competitive advantage in the information market. Additionally, a new type of economy emerged: the platform economy. Amazon, which began as an online book mail order company, had a game-changing impact and grew to become the world's largest online mail order company as the Internet proliferated. Platform companies, on the other hand, have popped up like mushrooms in every other sector of the economy.
Whether it's Uber in the transportation industry, booking.com in the hotel industry, deliveroo in the restaurant industry, or Airbnb in apartment rentals, these companies are now present in practically every industry. Despite this, their business model remains consistent: they broker services and things rather than manufacturing them directly. They gain money in this manner without incurring huge human costs or taking any major risks themselves. At the same time, they make medium-sized businesses hopelessly dependent on them, or even drive them bankrupt, as Uber has done with major swaths of the taxi industry.
Above all, this business is distinguished by the fact that individual players attempt to eliminate all competitors as rapidly as possible to become worldwide market leaders. The potential of a global monopoly and extraordinarily high profits draws many significant financial supporters from the financial industry, leading to individual companies, such as Uber, being willing to tolerate gigantic losses for years to end up as victors, i.e., global monopolists. It is simple to see how the interests of digital businesses are progressively converging with those of the financial industry, and how a force has arisen in this way that is driving the trend toward unprecedented concentration of power and wealth.
3. The Fourth Industrial Revolution
A fairly recent development will further increase the power of the already world-dominating and change our future in previously unimaginable ways: “The Fourth Industrial Revolution” has begun. Whereas the third industrial revolution began in 1970 with the advent of computer technology and continued into the 1990s with data transfer over the Internet, the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” is largely concerned with the management and automation of manufacturing processes. Work robots will take over human labor to a large extent, thanks to artificial intelligence (AI). The broad adoption of 3D printers will enable location-independent mobile products manufacture, rendering logistics mostly obsolete. The Internet of Things will enable the networking of real and virtual things and their collaboration via information and communication technologies.
Thus, the digital-financial complex is the first entity in human history to have dominated practically all critical areas of society, including the manufacturing and distribution of goods, as well as the flows of money and data. However, this would have a catastrophic influence on the most crucial area of the economy for the bulk of the global population, the labor market: before the Corona crisis, the McKinsey Global Institute anticipated that up to 800 million jobs worldwide will be lost as a result of automation by 2030. According to a 2013 study published by the University of Oxford, around 47 percent of all jobs will be lost.
Even if only half of these predictions were correct, the repercussions for the future of our current economic system would be disastrous. After all, it is a consumer-driven industry that could not withstand the loss of so many customers. However, that is not the only issue it is now dealing with.
THE DIGITAL-FINANCIAL COMPLEX'S HISTORICAL PROBLEM
Although the digital-financial complex has achieved unprecedented dominance in human history, it, too, has limits. It is subject to certain rules over which it has no influence, just as we are all subject to gravity. These regularities, reduced to the smallest denominator, read:
In a finite world, limitless growth is not feasible.
Permanent money creation causes currency depreciation.
Debt accumulation cannot continue indefinitely without causing people to lose faith in the monetary system.
Eventually, negative interest rates and cash cannot coexist.
The ever-increasing concentration of money and power in fewer and fewer hands cannot be reconciled with parliamentary democracy.
Growing social disparity causes social upheaval.
These are the issues that have slowly worsened in the years since the near-crash of 2007-08. We are witnessing unparalleled money creation, the biggest mountain of debt, the lowest interest rates, unprecedented power consolidation, and rising social inequality. If individuals in authority wish to keep their positions, they must address and resolve these issues. But this is where the problem arises: The digital-financial complex has already attempted and failed.
This is best exemplified by the FED, the world's largest and most powerful central bank: As part of its attempts to fight the crisis, it cut the key interest rate to as low as 0.25 percent in December 2008. Because those in charge understood, if they maintained their loose monetary policy, they would soon find themselves in the domain of systemic risk. They turned the tide in December 2015, raising the interest rate again and driving it up in nine increments to 2.5 percent by December 2018—with disastrous repercussions. Stock markets throughout the world dropped harder and quicker than ever before within days of the latest rate hike. To avoid a greater crash, Janet Yellen, the FED's then-President, went public and committed not to raise interest rates any higher. As a result, the situation briefly stabilized.
Despite Yellen's commitment to decrease interest rates by 0.25 percent twice in 2019, the US repo market collapsed on a historically unparalleled magnitude in September of that year. The repo market in the United States is where large Wall Street banks get new money overnight. To keep the banking system from collapsing, the FED slashed interest rates again and intervened with hundreds of billions of dollars over a period of months. At the same time, an even bigger crisis was brewing in the background: a worldwide recession was impending in the fall of 2019, which, after twelve years of steady monetary injections and interest rate reduction, was projected to be more damaging than any previous recession.
THE DIGITAL-FINANCIAL COMPLEX'S STRATEGY: THE GREAT RESET
By the turn of the year 2019/20, the digital-financial complex was thus certain: the biggest global recession in history could no longer be avoided. In other words, the global financial system could not be preserved in its current shape or through conventional means. So, the critical question was, what should be done if the current technique no longer worked?
Clearly, the leaders of the digital-financial complex agreed to fully demolish the previous system in the first stage, and then, in the second step, to establish a new system on its ruins under the slogan "The Great Reset” (“Build Back Better”) with one goal in mind above all: to maintain their own dominance. There is no alternative explanation for the events of 2020.
When the financial markets experienced a recession in March 2020, interest rates were driven to zero or near zero across the globe, and billion-dollar bailout packages were distributed to key investors. A global lockdown unmatched in human history was also imposed, deliberately bringing the whole global economy to the brink of collapse. At the same time, the digital-financial complex launched a public relations campaign the world had never seen before, telling people all over the world that the measures taken were not about looting the system for the benefit of a tiny elite, but about fighting a virus whose danger was being hysterically dramatized by the triumvirate of media, politics, and science.
Even its creators must have been surprised by the success of this campaign because in a matter of weeks, they were able to frighten large segments of humanity to the point where they were not only unable to recognize the system's looting, but also accepted any justification, no matter how absurd, for the destruction of their livelihoods and the progressive restriction of their fundamental rights.
NEW MONEY AND A UNIVERSAL BASIC INCOME
It is exactly because of this shock-induced rigidity that the digital-financial complex has been able to begin the development of a new monetary system that the majority of people would not have adopted voluntarily under normal conditions. This is nothing more than the end of the traditional banking system as we have known it since the 13th century, and the advent of a digital currency in which central banks are solely responsible for money creation. Because, for one thing, it can only be issued thanks to the major digital corporations, and, for another, the world's major central banks are already being advised by BlackRock, the world's largest asset management firm, and will not make any decision without their approval, this new central bank digital currency (CBDC) could finally subjugate all of humanity to the digital-financial complex.
The new money would imply utter surrender to the state and a few giant corporations for working people. These would be able to monitor every payment transaction, control all deposits and withdrawals, charge negative interest rates, levy penalties, limit the usage of the currency in time or location, or completely isolate individual account holders from all money flows. Essentially, the adoption of central bank digital currency would be nothing less than the formation of authoritarian corporatism, therefore realizing Benito Mussolini's fascist lifetime aim.
In any event, it is clear that the digital-financial complex has learned from its mistakes: While Mussolini and his ilk eventually had to resort to violence and succumbed to it, the world's present rulers have devised a far more sophisticated method. They have blamed a virus for the global economic collapse and will wait until the world has devolved into anarchy of unemployment, homelessness, hunger, and violence before offering a miracle cure: universal basic income (UBI). This will probably be linked to a digital central bank account, which the account user will have access to via a wallet in his or her cell phone. Furthermore, it can be linked to the account holder's biometric data, which he or she carries as a tattoo or by vaccination under the skin—therefore the proposed mandatory vaccination.
A SYSTEM WITHOUT FUTURE
Whether the digital-financial complex achieves its purpose and genuinely achieves the dominance it seeks through CBDC is entirely dependent on the reaction of the world's people in the coming months and years. If it continues to be intellectually influenced and is unable to break free from fear, nothing will stand in the way of the formation of the monetary dictatorship.
Even so, the digital-financial complex would face the same destiny as all prior dictatorships. In reality, CBDC already contains the seeds of its demise: as we lose more and more jobs to 3D printers and work robots in the future years, an increasing number of people will become fully reliant on government payments. But this means that ever-increasing payments will be required, all of which will go directly into consumption, ensuring perpetually rising prices and an inevitable inflationary spiral. What happens next is unclear. But one thing is certain: the digital-financial complex's long-term strategy to assume world dominance by leveraging a digital currency is bound to fail, even if it succeeds in the short term.
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The separation banking system, in contrast to the universal banking system, divides banks into those that are allowed to take higher risks (for example, investment banks) and those that must avoid such risks (commercial banks). ↩︎
Very nice article. Good history. This is why they are waging war on Bitcoin. It's decentralized nature is an anathema to them. Get some and keep it off centralized exchanges. Stay away from WEF-endorsed ethereum.
"The reigning "elites" in finance and politics are leveraging the Corona crisis to rebuild capitalism."
"Capitalism" is voluntary cooperation among peaceful adults. While the world does have some capitalistic tendencies, it's mixed with so much government-corporate partnerships and control that today it is closer to fascism.
So it would be more accurate to say that the elites want the economic system to "evolve" toward fascism, and away from capitalism.