A Very Prescient Video From The 1930s

Watch it for yourselves on Rumble.  You really need to sit down when watching it:

Link is here.

Don't Do "The Volcker" Again!

As the FERAL Reserve is committed to raising interest rates no matter the cost, even if it means deliberately engineering a recession, in an attempt to quash the worst inflation in 40 years, we would like to warn them as follows:

Stand. Down. NOW.  And prepare to reverse course a full 180 degrees, and soon.

And the same goes for their Quantitative Tightening (QT) as well, which of course amplifies the effect of raising interest rates by literally sucking money out of the economy, thus shrinking the money supply.  And it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that, since there is exponentially more debt in the overall economy in 2022 compared with 1982, even a fairly modest increase in interest rates can have a much larger adverse effect now compared to back then.

Paul Volcker, former Fed chairman, (in)famously raised interest rates as high as 20% in the early 1980s, and it technically "worked" to quash inflation.  But it came at a terrible price:  not only a pair of really bad recessions with millions of jobs lost, but the resulting damage also inflicted serious sequelae upon the broader working class that persist to this day as well, both in the USA as well as abroad.  The first time, one could say it was naive at best.  Doing "The Volcker" a second time, however, would be downright stupid, if not utterly malicious, narcissistic, and even sadistic.

And the USA was actually one of the luckier countries.  Canada, for example, set interest rates even higher still, and kept them higher for longer than the USA, and they got even higher and more persistent unemployment as result, and inflation persisted longer as well.  It was a complete lose-lose proposition for them.  So don't do it again!

As the old adage goes, when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.  And this particular tool is like swatting a fly with a sledgehammer, or burning down the house to roast a pig.  And worse, it is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job.  Most inflations, including this one especially, are caused by shortages of goods and services.  The only real cure is to solve the shortages, something higher interest rates simply cannot do no matter HOW high they are (at best it reduces demand and squeezes "inflationary psychology" out the system, and at worst it simply exacerbates the "cost-push" side of inflation when kept too high for too long).

And Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes that governments can easily solve shortages by purchasing at a premium whatever goods or services happen to be in short supply, which incentives production, and then re-selling them (or giving them away) at a loss.  Higher interest rates do absolutely zilch for that.

Of course, we would not have gotten into this situation had our "leaders" not imposed  lockdowns in a futile attempt to control an airborne respiratory virus, and then tried to paper over the inevitable and predictable consequences by printing ludicrous and unprecedented amounts of money that overwhelmingly went toward further enriching the already ultra-rich.  Had we instead adopted the time-tested "flu strategy" from the get-go, with or without a more moderate stimulus package for We the People, we would not have gotten in this predicament in the first place.  Yes, there may have been some leftover problems in the bond markets and especially the repo market from 2019, and the virus would have been somewhat disruptive to the economy, (like the 1957 and 1968 flu pandemics), but nothing even in the same league as what happened with lockdowns.  And from what we have learned the hard way, death rates would have been about the same or even lower.

(No really, cumulative excess all-cause death rates for countries, states, and communities that largely ignored the virus, or at least eschewed lockdowns and more-restrictive NPIs, were actually within error bounds or even lower than for their much stricter neighbors or national/regional averages.)

When you try to "burn the village to save it", eventually the village will return the favor.  It is simply the law of cause and effect, also known as karma.  Sooner or later, you always reap what you sow.  And as the saying goes, hindsight is quite literally 2020.  Will the Fed answer the "clue phone"?

UPDATE:  The Brownstone Institute has an excellent article discussing how the combination of lockdowns and the aftermath (forced massive supply crunch) + stimulus (massive demand boost), followed by the Russia-Ukraine war and sanctions, unleashed the worst inflation in 40 years.  You mean you can't just paper over a massive supply crunch with more demand?  And that war and sanctions are both negative-sum games in which everyone loses to one degree or another?  Gee, who woulda thunk it?

The money supply has been shrinking at a record pace in recent months, thanks to the FERAL Reserve's Quantitative Tightening.  Usually a shrinking money supply portends recession, historically speaking. 

Of course, the other elephant in the room is corporate greed.  They ultra-rich and mega-corporations are taking in record profits, so it is not simply that they are passing higher costs of doing business onto the customers.  An excess profits tax would be the best way to curtail this sort of inflation, as would a one-off wealth tax on like richest folks, much like several countries did after WWII.  Keep in mind that Trump himself actually proposed such a wealth tax back in 1999, and not a trivial one either, so the MAGA crowd would be truly hypocritical to oppose it.

Have We Been Too Harsh On The Degrowth Movement?

In a recent previous article, we discussed the potential perils and pitfalls of the degrowth movement, and then at the end added an update.  We may have been a tad too harsh on some of the degrowth advocates as such, particularly Jason Hickel, by lumping them all together.  While our roadmaps for how to get there may diverge, our ultimate goals at least seems to be more or less the same as Hickel's (though that's not necessarily true of some of the other degrowth advocates out there).  Ditto for Charles Eisenstein and Kate Raworth, as well as Herman Daly, Joe Millwald-Hopkins and Yarnick Oswald.  They are some very insightful folks.

The TSAP still sees our own plan as being a more feasible roadmap towards that goal, as counterintuitive as that may sound.  Abundance is the one thing capitalism cannot survive for long, while forced austerity will not kill the beast, but rather merely weaken it a bit before it mutates further into a new variant of some sort due to selective pressure.

The system is the underlying problem here.  We essentially have three choices: 1) allow it to catastrophically fail in the future via business as usual, 2) force it to catastrophically fail sooner via austerity, or 3) humanely euthanize it via abundance ASAP.  And it's obvious which one we should choose.

So what exactly will post-capitalism ultimately look like when the dust finally settles?  The TSAP doesn't claim to know the details.  But eventually it will very likely organically evolve into something like a gift economy to one degree or another, as well as a steady-state economy of course.

One thing is absolutely certain, though:  if we are to create an economy that no longer has to "grow or die", we must first phase out and eventually abolish usury entirely.  That means that interest and all other kinds of fees for the mere use of money will need to be officially capped at ZERO, period.  To avoid seizing up the financial markets and crashing the economy, set a "sinking lid" at, say, ten percent APR, and then gradually lower the cap each year until zero is reached.  Usury has ultimately led to the financialization of the economy, inflation, worsening inequality, and just about every other social problem that has a name.  There is a reason why it used to be considered such a sin.  Let's make it history.

Also, as the late, great Buckminster Fuller famously noted all the way back in 1970:

We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living.

The glorified form of OCD that calls itself the Protestant Work Ethic (TM) will need to desist along with that other outmoded 19th century relic, conspicuous consumption, as they are both ultimately two sides of the same coin.  That means we will need a Universal Basic Income (UBI) with no strings attached as a prerequisite and precondition for any serious attempt at degrowth or post-growth.

Oh, and by the way:  unless the population also shrinks as well at least as fast as the economy does, degrowth is, ipso facto, fundamentally an exercise in futility.  That is true both from an economic perspective as well as an ecological perspective.  Fortunately, that can be done ethically and effectively via female empowerment and poverty reduction, as well as readily available access to birth control.  No coercion required.  The outmoded "everybody must procreate" myth needs to end yesterday as well.

And finally, before we can even consider degrowth in earnest, we would first need to get out of the destructive rut we are currently in.  Just like we needed to get out of the previous protracted rut of the Great Recession a decade ago.  The so-called "Green New Deal" is really only a lighter shade of brown as opposed to truly green, but it is nonetheless a decent way to get out of a rut while redesigning the economy for degrowth towards a steady-state economy.

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  It should go without saying that the TSAP does NOT support anything even remotely resembling a lockdown, including, but not limited to, a "climate lockdown".  That is evil and illiberal to the max, and not only that, it wouldn't even work in the long run.  Thus, in no uncertain terms, we will support degrowth if and only if the individual rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights are fully guaranteed, and the disastrous response to the pandemic is not even remotely considered as a model.

2023 UPDATE:  A new article points out that capitalism and degrowth are NOT at all mutually exclusive, and the former can easily co-opt and even thrive under the latter.  So those who love the idea of degrowth but loathe capitalism may be in for a very rude awakening to say the least. 

See also here as well for why degrowth is currently "a slogan in search of a program", as the late Herman Daly would say, and why we will still need to have some flavor of a Green New Deal either way.

Are The Kids OK? We Already Know The Answer

One year after the novel experimental gene therapies that "self-identify" as "vaccines" were "authorized" for children under 12, it looks like our suspicion was indeed correct that it was a big mistake to do so, and history will NOT be kind at all to those who did it.

The ever-insightful Dr. Peter McCullough got permanently banned from Twitter recently for daring to expose the unvarnished truth about what these jabs were doing to kids (and adults too, but especially kids).  Steve Kirsch, who also got banned long ago, posted on his Substack an excellent article about exactly what it was in his final tweet that got McCullough banned forever.  It was a link to a video on Rumble by the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation.  And it was apparently such an eye-opener that the powers that be felt it had to be forcibly silenced and memory-holed.  

But the funny thing about the truth is, it can't stay hidden and memory-holed forever.  Sooner or later, it always comes out.  Sunlight is the best disinfectant. 

"Financialization" Of The Economy Is Simply Usury By Another Name

The TSAP in a previous article wrote how the root cause of virtually all of the social and economic ills of the past half-century are a result of the "financialization" of the economy.  That is, when the financial sector (often known colloquially by the synecdoche of "Wall Street" or "The Banksters") takes on a massively outsized share of the economy and effectively becomes its master rather than its servant.  This occurred since 1971 when our "leaders" in Washington basically sold out to the 0.01% financial oligarchy, and made the conscious decision to have the lion's share of all newly created post-gold standard dollars flow directly from the printing press (or more accurately, keyboard) to Wall Street rather than to We the People.  The financial sector then used such massive excess money as leverage to further consolidate their power and control over the rest of us, and as they say, the rest is history.

But of course, it actually goes much deeper than that.  Professor Richard Westra had actually written a whole book back in 2016 about the deeper root causes of all of this financialization and the extreme inequality that has resulted.  And it turns out, there really is nothing new under the sun, but rather it is simply a newly-unleashed (and somewhat more sophisticated) reincarnation of the very ancient practice of usury.  He does not mince words here:

Usury laid medieval society to waste. Western civilization was saved by the rise of capitalism, which tamed the activities of money lending, and endowed them with socially redeeming value, tethering finance to expanding production of material goods and increased social wealth. Now, as the 21st century begins, bloating tides of money with no possibility of ever being converted into real capital wash over the world. Finance again has turned to its dark side, using money to make money with no socially redeeming purpose. Such is the endgame of economies managed by capitalists without capitalism. As Marx foresaw, capitalist society, like all others, is destined to be outpaced by history as the conditions of its existence decompose and become a drag on the human future. Either we will succeed in bringing about new politico-economic structures—or civilization will collapse into barbarism, just as usury broke it down in the past.

In other words, usury (broadly defined as the charging of any sort of fees for the mere use of money, thus using money to make money) has paradoxically both saved Western Civilization from itself once, but is now devouring that very same civilization.  In fact, Westra's book is titled, Unleashing Usury: How Finance Opened the Door to Capitalism Then Swallowed It Whole.  It is not even really capitalism anymore, as this financialization has fundamentally changed the rules of the game, turning it into "casino capitalism".  It explains not only the ever-increasing inequality that characterizes the postmodern era, but also debt slavery, wage slavery, inflation, and even the inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell which eventually kills its host.  After all, without economic growth, there can be no interest payments, thus the "grow or die" paradigm reigns supreme.  All for the benefit of the oligarchs at the top.  Ellen Brown had also made similar observations as well in her book, Web of Debt, as has the American Monetary Institute as well.

Even Aristotle himself talked about it back then, and not favorably at all.  Can you say, ipse dixit?

Contrary to its proponents, usury does NOT create wealth, because it does not actually create anything of value.  Rather, it literally does nothing more than milk existing wealth, much like a casino does.  Thus, it is inherently a zero-sum game at best.  Worse, in the long run, it acts as a slow poison and ultimately becomes a wealth-destroying negative-sum game, cannibalizing the real economy over time.

After all, while banks do create the principal of a loan out of thin air every day, they don't create the interest that must be paid back, which has to come from somewhere.  And that "somewhere" is, of course, the real physical economy.  Thus results a cascade of perpetual debt, artificial scarcity, and an ever-yawning chasm between the haves and have-nots, which then gets blamed on anything and everything but its actual root cause.  But "pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain", say the mainstream economists.  Move along, nothing to see here folks....

There is thus a very good reason why the practice was banned or restricted throughout a large chunk of history, and why practically all major religions have at some point or another considered it to be a sin to one degree or another (and some still do to this day).  And only in the past half-century or so has it been allowed to proceed with almost no restrictions at all.  In 1978, for example, the federal usury cap on interest rates was lifted, followed by further deregulation of Wall Street, and again, as they say, the rest is history.

Thus, it would behoove America (and the world) to ultimately phase out the practice of usury.  Set a binding cap on all interest rates and similar financial fees that are charged to individual borrowers (but crucially, no limit on the reverse, such as savings accounts and government bonds, as that would not really be usury), say 10%, and make it a "sinking lid" that gradually drops each year until it ultimately reaches zero.  Also, phase out the practice of fractional-reserve banking in favor of full-reserve banking, by gradually raising the reserve ratio each year until it reaches 100%. Make the FERAL Reserve truly FEDERAL instead.  Bring back the ancient practice of debt jubilees as well.  And of course, reverse the deregulation of Wall Street that has occurred since the 1970s.  And finally, make it so any newly-created money goes first to We the People before it even reaches the big banks at all.

Additionally, the global scam of poorer countries being forced to borrow at interest (usually in a foreign currency, which makes it that much worse for them) from the oligarchs in rich countries, trapped in perpetual debt and thus manipulated for their resources, also needs to end as well.  Yesterday, full stop. World Bank and IMF, we're looking at YOU.

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  The ever-insightful Jared A. Brock has an excellent article about the inherent unsustainability of usury (and rent-seeking in general) here as well.

Yet Another Study Confirms Lockdowns Did More Harm Than Good

We already know that lockdowns were the worst public health policy failure since, well, ever.  Or at least in the past couple of centuries or so.  The pro-lockdown narrative has been completely laid waste long ago, and can never be even remotely rehabilitated by even the most intellectually dishonest cranks and intellectual poseurs in the future.  History will NOT be kind to the lockdown zealots at all!

And just when you thought we have already seen the most unflattering studies of all, a new one comes along that makes lockdowns look even worse still.  This new study looked at differences in all-cause death rates among various pairs of neighboring US states in which one state imposed a mandatory stay-at-home order in the spring of 2020 and the other did not.  (For completeness, the authors also looked at lockdown states that did not share a border with non-lockdown states as well.)  In using all-cause mortality data, they sidestep the biggest possible source of bias, namely differences in how Covid deaths are counted, and also capture at least some of the collateral damage of lockdowns as well.  There were in fact a total of ten non-lockdown states, so that gives us plenty of comparisons for how lockdowns or lack thereof worked in practice in an American context.

After adjusting for a host of potential health and demographic confounders, the results were more likely to favor the non-lockdown states.  That is, on average, the lockdown states actually had higher death rates than the ten non-lockdown states.  Thus, one can firmly conclude that the lockdowns did more harm than good, effectively killing more people than they saved.  Read that again, let it sink in, and remember that deaths are just the tip of a very large iceberg of collateral damage.

Oh, and by the way, the authors found that this was true regardless of whether they restricted their analysis to 1) the first Covid wave only, 2) the lockdown period only, or 3) the entire period from March 2020 up to and including January 2022.

As William Farr (of Farr's Law fame) famously said, "the death rate is a fact, anything beyond this is an inference".  And the inferences we can draw from this study about these worse-than-useless policies are quite damning indeed.  The lockdown zealots really have blood on their hands, it seems, likely to the tune of 110,000 excess deaths according to this study.

And that's just for the lockdowns proper.  How about masks?  Well, there's that pesky Foegen Effect, impaired gas exchange, microplastic fibers, bacteria and mold growth, and of course the killing of our oceans when billions of them are disposed of.  Plus, they don't really work.  School closures?  Also more harm than good, at least in the long run.  Forced business closures?  Self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good (and also subsumed under lockdowns as well).  Forced restrictions of healthcare?  Again, also self-explanatory, and self-evidently more harm than good.  "Flattening the curve" is literally nothing more than prolonging the worst of the pandemic, any way you slice it.  

And the jabs?  Well, those on balance also seem to be worse than useless as well for most people, and especially for kids.  Locking down and otherwise imposing restrictions while we waited for them to arrive was clearly NOT worth it at all.  And while we may never know exactly how many excess deaths were due to exactly which cause, be it the virus, the lockdowns and NPIs, or adverse reactions to the jabs, the latter are highly unlikely to be trivial either.

On that fateful day in March 2020, the hard-won wisdom of the ages, based on over a century of research, was summarily thrown out the window like so much garbage by people who really should have known better.  The official pandemic playbooks of several countries such as the USA, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, among other countries, and even the WHO as recently as 2019, not only did NOT promote the use of mass quarantines, let alone full lockdowns, but actually advised against doing so.  And while such time-tested advice was mainly geared toward influenza pandemics, at least some of the national playbooks (especially for the UK) explicitly applied this same reasoning to a potential "SARS-like coronavirus" pandemic as well.  Thus, this can be considered a classic example of a Chesterton's Fence:  before you remove a fence, be sure you know why it was put up in the first place.  Second-order thinking was clearly NOT being done here at all, it seems.

And even that is being charitable, assuming that the lockdown zealots were simply good people who made bad decisions because they panicked, when clearly some if not most of them had less-than-lofty ulterior motives that later became readily apparent once the initial "fog of war" had largely lifted.

The biggest question now is, will future generations ever forgive us?  Because that will be a pretty tall order for them indeed, as the regrettable consequences of the past two and a half years will continue to reverberate for decades to come.  And those who pushed for these worse-than-useless policies, doubling down and refusing to listen to reason, have an indelible stain on their honor.

UPDATE:  See the latest analysis from the ever-insightful Joel Smalley here as well.  It seems that the jabs are also responsible for a good chunk of both Covid and non-Covid excess deaths as well, particularly among younger folks.  After all, jab deaths and virus deaths are not mutually exclusive, as negative efficacy and host compromising can represent a collision of both factors together.

Degrowth Is A Nonstarter And Won't Work. Here's What Will Instead

From ecological overshoot to all of its attendant crises, including climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and mass extinction, along with the current global energy crisis, the idea of "degrowth" (i.e. a deliberate and planned shrinking of the economy) may seem like an appealing alternative in some circles.  However, not only is it a political nonstarter, but the level of central planning and austerity required would ultimately do more harm than good, get us permanently stuck in a bad place, and we would still end up destroying the Earth in the end (albeit a bit more slowly, compared to business as usual).  It would "flatten the curve", of course, but really just drag it out and prolong the pain without solving the problem.  In other words, it would basically be like Covid lockdown, only permanently, though hopefully minus all of the antisocial distancing and ocean-killing masks.  And we saw what a disaster that was, with the Global South faring the very worst in terms of collateral damage.

And that's before we get into the sort of extremely high and confiscatory tax rates (on both income and wealth) that would be required on not only the rich, but also on the middle class and working class, and even the working poor of the Global North.  Which the oligarchs would so artfully dodge with ease of course, leaving the rest of us holding the bag.  Though to be fair, not all degrowthers necessarily agree with that idea, and many prefer Pigouvian taxes on pollution and resource depletion (most notably carbon taxes), and perhaps also taxing advertising revenue as well, instead of income and wealth.

Some excellent articles casting doubt on degrowth can be found here and here, truly food for thought indeed.

Of course, we clearly need to end our inane and insane addiction to growth for the sake of growth, the ideology of the cancer cell (as Edward Abbey famously said) which ultimately kills its host.  We need an economy that is no longer dependent on growth and can still provide prosperity for all with or without growth.  We need to stop obsessing over the fundamentally flawed metric of GDP, which really ultimately stands for God Damn Profits nowadays.  Rent-seeking, usury, artificial scarcity, cronyism, speculation, and other forms of parasitism and economic manipulation from the top down are the ultimate reasons why our current economic system is so hooked on growth for the sake of growth.

As the futurist Walter Ignatius Baltzley noted back in 2015, the only way to end this system of cannibalism (sorry, "capitalism") is to give it the ONE thing that it absolutely cannot survive:  ABUNDANCE.  That's right, capitalism needs scarcity to function, which is why it has to create so much artificial scarcity nowadays to prop itself up.  Capitalism will thus fatally overdose on capital, in other words.  Abundance is of course the polar opposite of the sort of eco-austerity of degrowth.  With enough abundance, we can humanely euthanize this dreadfully toxic system for good, and easily transition to post-capitalism, and ultimately a post-growth and post-carbon economy. 

For example, Baltzley in another article applies this idea directly to Big Oil.  How do you win a tug-of-war against a much stronger opponent?  By simply letting go of the rope, and letting them fall on their butt.  Thus, as crazy as it sounds, get out of the way and simply give the fossil fuel fat cats what they say they want so much.  Yes, you read that right.  Let 'em "drill, baby, drill", and "frack, baby, frack"!  The government can even buy their oil (and natural gas) at a premium and then turn around and re-sell it at a loss.  The resulting massive surplus of cheap energy would flood the market, bringing down the cost of living in general, and by doing so....will also bring down the cost of renewable energy alternatives like wind and solar that will ultimately replace fossil fuels, while oil and natural gas become less profitable over time.  In the very short run, it would be quite a boon for Big Oil, but in the long run it would be giving them the very rope with which to hang themselves.  (Fortunately for us, Big Oil is extremely shortsighted.)

Yes, it's quite the Hail Mary pass indeed.  But when both Plan A and Plan B have been ruled out as impractical and/or politically impossible, and time is running out, that ultimately leaves us with Plan C.

So what are we waiting for?  Prime that pump, and prime it good!  Let Big Oil and the oligarchs enjoy their utterly foolish pride before the fall.  Remember, the bigger they are, the harder they fall.

Oh, by the way, wanna hear a joke?  Peak Oil.  That's the joke.  Yes, oil production will inevitably peak at some point.  Duh!  And hopefully demand will peak before supply does.  But we still have more than enough to deep-fry the planet many times over.

Quite frankly, the biggest supply constraint of all right now is NOT geology, but rather geopolitics, as Europe is currently learning the hard way with Russia weaponizing its natural gas against them. And the aforementioned plan would solve that as well.  Canada alone could supply more than enough (liquefied) natural gas to Europe to be free from Russian energy dominance, but they won't, because they never developed the export facilities to do so in time.  That leaves the USA to fill in the gap, of course.

UPDATE:  So what exactly will post-capitalism ultimately look like when the dust finally settles?  The TSAP doesn't claim to know the details.  But eventually it will very likely organically evolve into something like a gift economy to one degree or another, as well as a steady-state economy of course.

One thing is absolutely certain, though:  if we are to create an economy that no longer has to "grow or die", we must first phase out and eventually abolish usury entirely.  That means that interest and all other kinds of fees for the mere use of money will need to be officially capped at ZERO, period.  To avoid seizing up the financial markets and crashing the economy, set a "sinking lid" at, say, ten percent APR, and then gradually lower the cap each year until zero is reached.  Usury has ultimately led to the financialization of the economy, inflation, worsening inequality, and just about every other social problem that has a name.  There is a reason why it used to be considered such a sin.  Let's make it history.

Oh, and by the way:  unless the population also shrinks as well at least as fast as the economy does, degrowth is, ipso facto, fundamentally an exercise in futility.  That is true both from an economic perspective as well as an ecological perspective.

FINAL THOUGHT:  We may have been a tad too harsh on some of the degrowth advocates, particularly Jason Hickel, by lumping them all together.  While our roadmaps for how to get there may diverge, our ultimate goals at least seems to be more or less the same as Hickel's (though that's not necessarily true of some of the other degrowth advocates out there).  Ditto for Charles Eisenstein and Kate Raworth as well.

See here as well.

The Ultimate Death Blow To The Already Collapsed Narrative

The "vaccine" narrative, along with the rest of the official Covid narrative, has collapsed faster than formerly healthy young athletes on the field after being jabbed with novel experimental gene therapies misnamed "vaccines".  But like a zombie, it just won't seem to fully die already...until this new study of the unjabbed, that is.  The effective control group for this massive experiment are the unjabbed, and this new international cohort study's results are finally in:

• Over 70% of the unjabbed cohort relied on natural remedies (largely vitamins and minerals, like C, D, zinc, and a bit of quercetin here and there) and/or off-label generic drugs (largely HCQ and IVM) against the virus.
• Only about 0.4% of them were ever hospitalized for Covid at all, either as inpatients OR outpatients.  So much for a "pandemic of the unvaccinated" gumming up hospitals, right?
• Most had faced some level of discrimination in society, and many were fired from their jobs, due to their unjabbed status, which was of course harmful to their mental health.
• Otherwise, they seemed to be healthy overall.
• There was practically no confounding from flu vaccines or any other vaccines, as only a tiny sliver of the cohort expressed any intent to receive any at the time of the study, especially for flu vaccines specifically.
• And the real kicker:  people who said that they never wore masks had the lowest incidence of suspected or confirmed Covid of all of the subgroups in the study.  Reread that again and let that sink in for a moment.

Thus, not only does the "vaccine" narrative get thoroughly laid waste by this study, the mask narrative does as well, a fortiori.  Two zombie lies were thus killed with one stone.

The Alliance for Natural Health put out an excellent commentary about this study as well.

No wonder the powers that be wanted to get rid of the control group before the truth finally came out.  The perceived benefits of the jabs are shrinking, while evidence of the risks keeps on mounting every day.

Oh, and as for the other major component of the official narrative, namely lockdowns, well, that has also been thoroughly laid waste as well.  The delusional beliefs of the lockdown zealots have been revealed time and again to be, well, delusional.

Dear FERAL Reserve: Stop Hiking Interest Rates!

We at the TSAP have of course been advocating raising interest rates a while ago.  But now the FERAL Reserve seems to be overdoing it, to the point of further scaring already-jittery investors, and they need to tone it down a notch or ten, or they will risk creating a very nasty recession (or worse, stagflation or even a depression).  Inflation is still high but cooling off now, and keeping interest rates too high to for too long will ultimately do more harm than good.  Interest rates are a razor-sharp, double-edged sword, and to fight inflation any hikes need to be short, sharp, and early to be effective.  But they delayed it too long, didn't do it enough when it was needed, and now that the economy is in a technical recession, they want to keep hiking rates even more, in addition to quantitative tightening as well.

As Rodger Malcolm Mitchell notes, raising interest rates to cure inflation is often times the wrong medicine for the job.  Case in point, right now in fact.  Inflations are ultimately caused by shortages, and governments need to address the shortages to get to the root of the problem.  Neither taxes nor spending cuts nor interest rate hikes will do the trick.  Ironically, as Mitchell notes, solving shortages can often require MORE federal government spending to specifically incentivize more production of the things in short supply (oil, natural gas, energy in general, foodstuffs, computer chips, labor, etc.).  The government can purchase those things at a premium, and then sell or give those things away at a loss.  Two birds, one stone.  Problem solved.  Next.

Meanwhile, the Fed really needs to stop hiking interest rates, stop threatening to do so, taper off their quantitative tightening, and actually be ready to start cutting interest rates soon as well.

So what are we waiting for?

(NOTE:  Endorsement of some of Rodger Malcolm Mitchell's ideas, or the ideas of any third party for that matter, does not automatically imply endorsement of all of his ideas.)

Dear Elon Musk: Stop Denying Overpopulation!

Elon Musk is a real man of genius, a real-life Tony Stark in fact.  He is also, at least in theory, environmentally conscious as well.  He knows that climate change is a real and urgent problem, while fossil fuels need to be phased out in favor of renewable energy.  And he has long opposed lockdowns before it was cool to do so, and also supports freedom of speech as well.  So far, so good.  

But like many geniuses, he does unfortunately have a massive and glaring blind spot as well.  Not only does he deny the fact that world overpopulation (of humans) is a problem at all, but he literally thinks the biggest problem the world will face is...too FEW people.  Or at least, too few people to realize his ultimate dream of...wait for it...colonizing Mars.  Yes, he actually went on the record saying that.  

This idea is egregiously wrong on SO many levels:

• The Earth is FINITE, and only a fool or an economist (same difference) would believe that infinite growth on a finite world is possible or desirable.
• Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, as Edward Abbey famously said.  Which eventually kills its host, by the way.
• We are already LONG past any reasonable measure of sustainability, and in severe overshoot in terms of carrying capacity and ecological footprint. 
• If everyone in the world lived like the average European, we would need 2 to 3 Earths worth of resources in the long term.  If everyone lived like the average American, we would need a whopping 6 or 7 Earths.  And if everyone lived like Elon Musk, with his five six kids, 120 hour workweeks, and centibillionaire lifestyle, we would probably need at least a thousand Earths!
• Even if everyone lived in an ecovillage, we would still need at least 1.5 Earths, if not more.
• Even with the very best technological breakthroughs that one could ever possibly imagine, that is still not a free lunch in terms of resources and material throughput.  Sooner or later, something's gotta give.
• Thus, if we want everyone on Earth to have anything even remotely close to a decent standard of living (since, you know, condemning billions of people to extreme poverty, suffering, and premature death would be cruel and inhumane), we need to SHRINK the population, or else Mother Nature will brutally shrink it for us.  Not just stop growing, but actually SHRINK down to no more than 2 to 3 billion people (and 150-200 million Americans).  
• Rightsizing the world population is the most truly pro-life thing one could do.
• And last but not least, before we even THINK about colonizing other planets, let's stop messing up the one we currently have!  There really is no "Planet B" for the foreseeable future, if ever.

Fortunately, we can shrink the population ethically and voluntarily using the two most effective methods: 1) female empowerment, and 2) poverty reduction.  Those goals are good for their own sake as well.  And make birth control freely and readily available as well.  No coercion needed.  Problem solved.

But first, we need to completely dispense with the histrionic fears of population decline and the utterly specious, outmoded, and outdated notion that "everybody must procreate".  It is truly maladaptive and insane to maintain this idea any longer.  Honestly, overpopulation deniers are worse than the climate change deniers, and innumeracy is worse than illiteracy.  Denying at least one of the root causes of a problem (along with many other problems too) is by definition worse than denying the consequences.

Jared A. Brock wrote an excellent article about this topic, and you can read it here.

Let the planetary healing begin!

P.S.  If Musk or any other billionaires are still worried that the peasants aren't procreating to their liking, maybe they should literally put their money where their mouth is.  These days, it now costs a whopping $300,000 (up from $250,000 just a couple years ago) to raise even just ONE child from birth to age 18, and that sizeable sum doesn't even begin to include college costs or anything beyond that either.  If they still insist, millions of Millennial and Generation Z current and prospective parents would be glad to send them the bill for that.  Noblesse oblige, right?

About That Lancet Study

The latest Lancet study that supposedly found a modestly increased risk of dementia, psychosis, and other neurological and psychiatric disorders up to two years after a Covid diagnosis is all over the news now.  But as with most mainstream Covid studies, there is much less than meets the eye here yet again.

For starters, the study only compared people who had Covid listed in their medical record with those who had other respiratory infections instead, which would inherently exclude the vast majority of infections that were either asymptomatic or too mild to even see a doctor about.  Especially for Omicron and its subvariants, as another study found that most people who were infected with Omicron (i.e. confirmed by antibody testing later) weren't even aware that they had it at all.  Which honestly is not even the least bit surprising for a variant that typically does not exceed the "I have a cold" threshold in terms of symptoms.  And if anything, the antibody testing is underinclusive, not overinclusive.

Additionally, most of the effect sizes found in the Lancet study for most of the neuropsychiatric sequelae studied were either transient and/or not radically different than for other respiratory infections, especially for children but also for adults as well.  And confidence intervals were fairly wide for many of the endpoints studied as well.

Finally, as much as the mainstream media likes to claim it does, it does NOT really exonerate the gene therapy injections misnamed "vaccines" either.  At best, not nearly enough time has gone by to do so.  Meanwhile, evidence the risks and lack of durable benefits of the jabs continues to mount as we speak.

See also here, here, and here as well for further evidence that Long Covid is typically not radically worse than Long Flu, and why Long Lockdown and Long Jab Injury are far worse things to fear.  And as we noted previously, the masks probably don't help matters much either, and likely make things worse.

Thus, there is literally no valid scientific reason to treat Covid any differently than the flu now, if there ever really was.  It is endemic now, and for practical purposes it really is no worse now. Case closed.

China's On The Dark Side Of The Moon, And Not In A Good Way

The People's Republic of China, aka Communist China or simply China, is skating on extremely thin ice now, and numerous cracks and fissures are forming all over the place.  From the Covid pandemic that they had unleashed on the world, to their failed but never-ending Zero Covid strategy and its rolling lockdowns, to their (not coincidentally) ultra-low and still plummeting birthrates, to their utterly tarnished world image now, to their massive Evergrande debt crisis, housing bubble crisis, and thus incipient financial crisis that would make 2008 look like a walk in the park, their once-buoyant but now sclerotic and increasingly moribund economy (if not society too) now stands on the precipice of truly epic collapse.  The ruling CCP is quickly losing clout each day, and civil unrest is only growing.  Meanwhile, their biggest ally, Russia, is now a pariah state bogged down in the quagmire of their own making in Ukraine, and North Korea is, well, North Korea.  If they did decide to foolishly invade Taiwan, that would of course only accelerate their collapse.  But even if they don't, they are still bound to collapse soon.  First gradually, then suddenly, as Ernest Hemingway would say. 

See you on the dark side of the moon....

Of course, being the second largest economy in the world, when China sneezes, the rest of the world catches much more than a cold.  Thus, a global financial crisis looks likely.  Hopefully the contagion will only be metaphorical this time around.

With Little Fanfare, The Pandemic Is Officially Over In America

As reported recently, as of August 11, 2022, after two and a half years, the pandemic is now officially over in terms of its social end.  The CDC, quietly and subtly of course so as to retain what's left of what little credibility they still have, changed their of official guidelines in regards to the now-endemic Covid to be much closer to treating it like the common flu:

And most notably of all, their new guidance no longer differentiates at all between vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals anymore.  They must have finally and very belatedly realized that the whole narrative has collapsed faster than formerly healthy young athletes on the field after being injected with the jabs.  Great, now if only the feds would also finally lift the bizarrely still-existing ban on unvaccinated people from entering the country, and let the legendary Novak "No-vax" Djokovic play over here.

Of course, their latest guidelines are not entirely the same as they are for common flu yet, in that they still unscientifically recommend that any known exposed individuals and those who test positive wear a mask for ten days to ostensibly protect others, but otherwise they had taken the very largest step yet towards true 2019 normal.  No more quarantines of exposed individuals, no more antisocial distancing in general, no more obsessive mass testing, no more contact tracing in general, and no more differentiation based on vaccination status.  Thus, any further steps towards that goal will therefore be that much easier to take from now on as a result. 

Regardless of anything though, no matter how much they try to gaslight and hoover us all about what happened, we must NEVER forget.  Seriously, we must NEVER, EVER allow the horrors of the past two and a half years to happen again.  Like, ever.

UPDATE:  A deeper dive into this stunning reversal of the CDC can be found here, courtesy of the Brownstone Institute.  Certainly worth a read.  The CDC's MMWR of August 11, 2022 apparently really "buried the lede" in regards to their about-face.

When "#DisbandTheCDC" is now trending on Twitter and elsewhere, it's pretty obvious that the Overton window has now finally snapped back with a vengeance after being forced too far under false pretenses in the direction of totalitarianism and Lysenkoism.  Action, meet equal and opposite reaction.  The technocrats are now clearly recognized as being on the wrong side of history, their recent and futile face-saving attempts notwithstanding.

SEPTEMBER UPDATE:  On September 18, 2022, President Biden officially announced that the pandemic is over.  Can you say, "ipse dixit"?

Latest Mask Study Reaches A New Low (Which We Didn't Even Think Was Possible At This Point)

Just when you thought that The Science (TM) couldn't get any lower, it reached a new low today.  The latest pro-mask study, a preprint which has yet to even be peer-reviewed (though will probably be pal-reviewed at some point), is a classic example of cherry-picked junk science not even worth the paper it is printed on.

The ever-insightful Ian Miller of Unmasked does an excellent job of taking it down here.  In a nutshell, the so-called "systematic review" study took 1732 mask studies, and only looked at a whopping....13 of them.  That is less than 1% of all of the studies done to date, so why did they disregard over 99% of the evidence that they found?  Probably because it wasn't exactly flattering to the pro-mask side, that's why.  And the 13 studies they did include, with a combined sample size of only 243 people, of course yielded implausibly (and laughably) high estimates of mask effectiveness.  This clearly has "cherry picking" written all over it.

And that's before we even get into the obvious fatal flaws in at least some if not all of those 13 studies (lack of generalizability, not done in real world conditions, no comparison group, and of course small sample size).  Also, all studies after July 2020 (!) were arbitrarily excluded, because reasons.  This is apparently what passes for The Science (TM) these days, and it has gotten increasingly desperate now as the narrative has thoroughly collapsed by now.  We are now seeing naked Lysenkoism without so much as even the pretense of scientific integrity anymore.

We recently noted how the same Ian Miller so thoroughly debunks, debones, slices, dices, and juliennes the pro-mask arguments, and lays waste to their utterly scorched remains for good.  And check out the latest new study from Josh Stevenson about masks for kids as well, likely the very best one yet.  Spoiler alert:  masks STILL don't work.

A recent Australian study confirmed via experiment that surgical masks (and by extension, cloth masks as well) are utterly useless against aerosolized viruses, as are even N95s unless they are properly fit-tested and NO mistakes are made.  The latter, of course, does NOT apply to the general population, as Germany unfortunately learned the hard way when their general N95 mandate failed so spectacularly to contain or control their Covid outbreak.

Masks didn't work in 1918, and they clearly didn't work in 2020 or 2021 either.  So anyone who thinks they will somehow work in 2022 or beyond, clearly has their head in an anatomically impossible position.  Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results is a functional definition of either insanity or Lysenkoism (same difference).

UPDATE:  Looks like masks may be even worse than we thought.  From the Foegen Effect to the various questionable chemicals and microplastics in the masks (as well as in the Covid tests and disinfectants too), these things may very well be exacerbating, perpetuating, or even causing Long Covid as well (to say nothing of the jabs).  Plus there is also the issue of bacteria and mold growing on the masks, as well as impaired O2/CO2 exchange.  An excellent article that makes such a case can be found here.  For all of the times that the TSAP had ever foolishly advocated masks to any extent back in 2020 before belatedly changing our stance, we certainly do apologize.

2023 UPDATE:  Still further evidence against masks, especially for kids, can be found here as well.

What To Do Now? Hindsight is 2020

As the fearmongers are trying to dial up the fear factor over Covid once again, this time over the new BA.5 Omicron subvariant, most sane people two and a half years in would be tempted to respond to all this with a resounding (yawn).  But clearly we must still remain on guard--against tyranny, that is.  That may sound like we are boxing ghosts or strawmen, but we must never, EVER forget just how the easily March 2020 madness started, and how easily it is to slip back into it if we so foolishly allow it.  We simply cannot meet tyranny or insanity in the middle, and if we give them an inch they take a mile every time.  We must oppose them from the very first new or reimposed restriction, mandate, or the slightest attempt at coercion, period.  And we must counteract fearmongering with honesty and truth.

One restriction clearly leads to another, until We the People finally push back.  In March 2020, under the influence of 24/7 fearmongering, it started with "reasonable" sounding restrictions, which quickly got tighter by the day.  Lockdowns, closures, and the milder versions thereof that precededed it, led to mask mandates ostensibly as a way to avoid having to go back to lockdown.  But the places that imposed mask mandates were in fact the places that were MORE likely to return to second and even third lockdowns later.  And both mask mandates and the threat of lockdowns and closures independently and synergistically led to the vaccine mandates and passports that followed.  And all of it was for naught, as many studies and even the most casual glance at excess death rates have shown globally.

In fact, a very strong case can be made that doing nothing, or rather adopting the time-honored "flu strategy," would have been better than what was done.  At best, all that the restrictions did (or could do) was delay the inevitable, drag it out, and make it far more painful than it had to be, at very great social, economic, and health cost.  Once the virus was already "in the wild" in early 2020 in much of the world, if not even earlier, the "therapeutic window" for restrictive NPIs was permanently closed.  Notably, many countries, including the USA, UK, Australia, NZ, and others, all had pandemic playbooks that explicitly did NOT include and even discouraged these sorts of largely unprecedented restrictions, even if we were to face another "Category 5" pandemic like the infamous 1918 one.  Such playbooks were actually based on hard science, that is, what we have learned empirically (often the hard way) over the past couple of centuries.  But then suddenly in mid-March 2020, the powers that be had panicked and threw the wisdom of the ages out the window like so much garbage, and as they say, the rest is history.

Fortunately, most people simply don't have the appetite for more restrictions now.  Not only are people tired of it all, but also they see things like inflation, crime, the economy, etc. as being far more salient concerns than the virus today.  But that is not something we can automatically take for granted either.  Hindsight is 2020, in more ways than one.

P.S.  Apparently "flurona", or co-infection of flu and coronavirus, doesn't exactly seem to be the threat the fearmongers claim it is either.  New research finds that an influenza virus infection actually somewhat mitigates a Covid infection if the flu infection occurs first, and co-infection with both viruses does not seem to make the combo worse.  So as our old frenemy inevitably returns, that is one less thing to fear.

Oh, and you're probably wondering why the phrase "protect the vulnerable" was not anywhere in this article.  That is because that once-noble phrase, which would normally go without saying in a civilized society, has sadly become a meaningless platitude once it had been thoroughly appropriated by the lockdown and mask zealots, who twisted it into making the perfect the enemy of the (reasonably) good.  And it had become a very handy excuse for not only draconian restrictions, but also cruelty and callousness towards the very same vulnerable people they claimed to "protect", often at the expense of other vulnerable people in other ways as well.

Ruh Roh. What Hath The Technocrats Wrought? (Children of Men Edition)

You may want to sit down and take a deep breath before reading this.  Seriously.

As the ever-insightful Igor Chudov has recently reported, in several diverse countries from Hungary to Taiwan to Germany to Switzerland to the UK to Sweden to Japan and many others, including some US states too, birthrates plummeted by double-digit percentages in the first quarter (or two) of 2022 relative to the same time last year.  This is not a trend, this is an event!  And that unusually steep drop in births did not begin until about nine months after those novel experimental gene therapy jabs misnamed "vaccines" were rolled out en masse to young people of childbearing age.  Funny how that works.  But I'm sure it is all just a "coincidence", right?  Move along, nothing to see here folks....

Riiiiiiiight.

Was it the lockdowns that caused it?  No, since there was no similar drop in 2020 or 2021, and notably Sweden experienced the same drop without any lockdowns.  Was it the virus itself, or its sequelae?  No, since Taiwan was practically free of the virus for the most part until April 2022, and yet they still saw birthrates drop as well.  Was it 5G, maybe?  No, since Taiwan and many other countries have been using 5G for years now, again with no sudden drop in births until 2022.  Was it climate change, perhaps?  Global warming is by definition global, so why does this trend only really seem to be noticeable in highly-jabbed areas rather than everywhere in the world?

And indeed, while birthrates have been gradually declining for years or even decades now in most of the world, this is a much, much steeper drop that cannot be explained by any of the usual suspects.

Looks like all of those VAERS reports of menstrual irregularities and even fetal abnormalities (!) correlating with the jabs were quite real after all, and the tip of a much larger iceberg.  And fellas beware, the reproductive effects are most likely NOT confined to only one gender either.  When many people last year would half-jokingly say, "clean sperm is the new Bitcoin" or something to that effect, that may not have been very far off from the truth, unfortunately.  (The recent epic Bitcoin crash notwithstanding, of course.)

Let's hope that this is just a short-term blip, because if it's not, this is literally Children of Men territory, and it will NOT end well for humanity at all.  Yes, we know the Earth is overpopulated and in severe ecological overshoot.  But if this current disturbing trend lacks an "off" button, and continues irreversibly, it will clearly do far more harm than good in the long run.

Moral of the story:  Mother Nature apparently does NOT like to be effed with!  Too bad people end up having to learn that the hard way sometimes.

UPDATE:  The Swiss Doctor offers an alternative explanation, namely that marriage rates plummeted in many countries in 2020 (and even into 2021) due to Covid and the restrictions on gatherings (since even Sweden had restrictions on large gatherings), and thus a large number of (mainly first) births may have simply been postponed as a result of weddings being postponed.  Let's hope that is the case.  However, the Swiss Doctor also cautions that this does not necessarily explain all of the observed drop in births.  Thus, the jabs are not really exonerated just yet.

In fact, as Igor Chudov reports later, in ultra-jabbed Germany, not only births, but even abortions are down too.  That means that even accidental pregnancies are down as well as purposeful ones, so it's not simply due to people choosing to delay or avoid procreation.  Really makes you wonder!

SEPTEMBER UPDATE:  The drop in births seems to be persisting per the latest data, at least in England.  Why don't we just call it what it is--infertility.

In A World Of Lysenkos, Be A Zelenko

We at the TSAP are saddened to hear that the legendary Dr. Vladimir Zev Zelenko has passed away from his four year battle with cancer today, at the age of 48.  He was truly a beacon of light shining in a world of darkness during the pandemic.  A real mensch indeed if there ever was one.

Dr. Zelenko famously devised an early treatment protocol, which later evolved into prophylaxis as well, against Covid all the way back in March 2020.  Originally consisting of zinc, HCQ, and azithromycin, this treatment really seemed to work wonders for one high-risk patient after another, keeping them alive and out of the hospital.  Later he added a recommendation for Ivermectin to the protocol as well, and he also devised an OTC nutritional supplement for general use called Z-Stack consisting of zinc, quercetin, Vitamin C, and Vitamin D, that is GMP and Kosher certified.  There is even a children's version now, and also a new detox version apparently designed with the jabbed in mind.

It bears repeating:  MARCH 2020.  April at the very latest.  Read that again.  Let that sink in.

If the powers that be had actually heeded his advice, instead of ignoring, censoring, and vilifying him, countless lives would have been saved (hundreds of thousands in the USA alone), hospitals would not have gotten anywhere even remotely close to overwhelmed, and even the slightest hint of lockdowns, closures, mask mandates, and related restrictions would have been summarily laughed out of existence as the utterly harebrained ideas that they were.  As for those novel experimental gene therapies misnamed "vaccines" that the powers that be have been pushing on the masses?   Well, Zelenko himself had some rather choice and colorful words to say about those!  He was certainly no fan.  And with the successful Zelenko protocol in place, the jabs would most likely have not so much have even gotten off the ground, being rejected as superfluous at best and far too risky to chance.  (And a fortiori for children!)

In fact, true natural herd immunity would have been reached much sooner, and much more safely as well if such sage advice was actually followed.  As it clearly had in Zelenko's very own hometown of Kiryas Joel, NY, who famously did everything "wrong" per the "experts".  Instead of the infamous lockdowns, high excess deaths, and then followed by the seemingly endless cycle of boosters, variants, and reinfections that continue to plague heavily-jabbed communities, states and countries to this day.

But NO, the powers that be not only censored and even banned the centerpiece of the Zelenko protocol in some places, they even had the GALL to try to fallaciously taint it in people's minds as "guilt by association" with Trump.  Never mind that the jabs that those same powers later came to obsess over, especially Moderna, were also developed under that very same president as well (Operation Warp Speed, anyone?).  And they knew that if anyone tried to seriously debate Zelenko himself, they would lose, so as time went on the mainstream media wouldn't even mention him at all, and would immediately pivot to Trump whenever the subject of HCQ came up.

Note as well that another legend, Dr. Dmitry Kats, independently devised his own Niacin-based protocol around the very same time.  Either way, hindsight is quite literally 2020.  March 2020, to be precise.

In a world of Lysenkos, be a Zelenko.  May he rest in peace.

Roe v. Wade Has Fallen

Well, after nearly half a century, it actually happened:  the landmark Roe v. Wade decision has officially fallen.  Today the US Supreme Court struck it down completely.  Forced-birther Republicans are thus now emboldened to further ban or restrict abortion at the state level, as several states have already done recently.  That is, women's hard-won reproductive rights are now in grave danger, and this goes WAY beyond abortion.  Undoubtedly, birth control and things like that will be next on the chopping block, and so on, and thus we are just a few steps away from Margaret Atwood's worst nightmare.  In fact, Clarence Thomas himself implied as much, actually saying the quiet part out loud.

Add to this the fact that the recent lockdown-induced "recession" (more like depression) has actually hit women harder than men and set back women's progress by decades by dumping even more unpaid work on them at home, and the future looks even worse still.

Democrats in Congress are still looking to pass a bill that would codify Roe v. Wade into federal law, superseding the abortion bans in any state that attempts such bans.  But alas, success in that regard is far from guaranteed.

We at the TSAP are pro-choice, and hereby condemn this travesty in the strongest possible terms. 

The Root Cause Of All Economic Woes Of The Past Half-Century: "Financialization" Of The Economy

The year was 1971, just over half a century ago.  The utterly costly (in both lives and money) and protracted Vietnam War was gradually winding down but still raging, inflation was getting out of control, and the Bretton-Woods system of an international (fool's) gold standard and fixed currency exchange rates was rapidly collapsing on itself due to rampant cheating and attrition.  On August 15, 1971, President Richard M. Nixon decided to effectively suspend the gold standard, first temporarily, though it would soon become permanent by 1973.  And by 1975, any nominal and vestigial links between gold and the dollar had been severed completely.   

Since this "Nixon Shock" of 1971, the money creation capability of the federal government and the Federal Reserve were no longer constrained by gold or anything else (except the remaining arcane and archaic rules of Congress left over from the defunct gold standard, and thus no longer make any sense).  Thus, Congress could really create as much money as they wanted from then on, and the Fed could create as much as Congress would allow them to.   The money supply had clearly exploded exponentially since then, and a fortiori after 2008 and 2020.  

So where did nearly all of those newly-created dollars go?

Wall Street, of course.  The result?  A perpetually yawning chasm between the financial sector (which grew exponentially along with the money supply) relative to the real, physical economy (which has basically stagnated and hollowed-out ever since).  That absolute and relative advantage was then weaponized against the bottom 99% of Americans, as the financial sector is dominated by the top 1% and especially the top 0.01%.  Extreme inequality and very much harm followed.  Decades of utterly remarkable progress against poverty stalled and even reversed somewhat.  And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the real root of all economic woes of the past half-century.

Prior to 1971, the financial sector moved largely in lockstep with the rest of the economy.  And not coincidentally, prior to 1973, wages grew largely in lockstep with labor productivity as well.  But ever since then, both have seen an ever-widening divergence, to the detriment of the greater working class.  While the oligarchs literally laughed all the way to the bank.  And that was clearly no accident, but rather by design.

Imagine if even a fraction of all that newly created-out-of-thin-air money since 1971 was rained down upon We the People directly instead of Wall Street and the big banks.  How different would America, and indeed the world, be today?  If that doesn't make you feel RIPPED OFF, check your pulse 'cause you might be dead!

The cure for this disease is indeed very, very simple.  All it takes is a simple Act of Congress to 1) scrap the remaining arcane and archaic rules that prevent Overt Congressional Financing, 2) implement Overt Congressional Financing, and then 3) use it to benefit We the People instead of the oligarchy.  UBI, Medicare For All, expanded Social Security, free college, debt cancellation, Green New Deal, oh my! Basically, the entire progressive economic agenda and more can be paid by the federal government for without any borrowing or taxes unless Congress wants to.  

That is the real logical conclusion of Monetary Sovereignty:  when a government issues it's own currency, by definition it has infinite money, which is constrained only by the laws that the government passes.  Time to end the Big Lie and act like it for once.

(And no, going back on the gold standard now would be a dumb idea, as that would only lead to artificial scarcity of money.)

As for inflation, that can be cured by 1) raising interest rates (in the short term), and 2) counterintuitive as it sounds, increased federal spending to cure shortages by incentivizing increased production of goods and services that are experiencing shortages (food, energy, labor, computer chips, etc.) in the longer-term.  Problem solved.  Next.

(And of course, stop creating shortages via supply chain problems due to lockdowns!)

So what are we waiting for?

UPDATE:  We would be remiss if we did not also enumerate the more proximal causes in addition the more distal root cause of financialization.  Those include:  

• Legalization of usury (lifting of federal 12% usury cap on interest rates) (1978)
• Union-busting re-legitimized by Reagan against the PATCO strike, which made an example of them for the private sector going forward (1981)
• Legalization of stock buybacks (1982)
• General deregulation and tax cuts for the ultra-rich and corporations (1980s)
• General deregulation of big banks and Wall Street (1980s)
• Shrinking the social safety net by stealth, letting it lag behind inflation (1970s through 1990s))
• NAFTA (1994)
• Shrinking the social safety net again via welfare deform (1996)
• Repeal of Glass-Steagall Act, the firewall between commercial banks and investment banks (1999)
• China joining the WTO as a "most favored nation" (2001)
• More tax cuts for the rich (2001-2003)
• NOT learning the lessons of 2008, particularly the moral hazard created by the Wall Street bailouts (2008-2009)
• Offshoring/outsourcing of manufacturing jobs (ongoing)
• Pandemic relief money disproportionately going to, and benefitting, Wall Street much more than Main Street (2020-2021)
• And of course, the lockdowns which, when combined with the above, constituted the largest wealth transfer in history, from the poor and middle class to the ultra-rich and Wall Street, both nationally and globally (2020-2021)

Shout It From The Rooftops: LOCKDOWNS KILL!

LOCKDOWNS KILL.  We have always known from the get-go that collateral damage, up to and including excess deaths, would occur from lockdowns.  From delayed and denied medical treatment to missed cancer screenings to poverty and hunger to suicides to drug overdoses to violence to simply dying of loneliness and isolation, and so on, these brute-force blunt instruments are known to intrinsically inflict serious harm by design, and cannot ever be made "safe" in any meaningful sense no matter HOW many trillions of dollars (or pounds, euros, yuan, yen, rupees, bitcoin, etc.) you happen to throw at these problems.  Of course, poorer and/or more unequal societies generally experience the very worst outcomes of all, but even the very wealthiest and relatively equal societies still cannot be completely spared such consequences for very long either.

But now for the first time we can actually roughly quantify the magnitude of the short- and medium-term collateral deaths that occur.  In the USA, a new study the National Bureau of Economic Research found that lockdowns and related restrictions killed at LEAST a whopping 170,000 Americans, based on the number of non-Covid deaths among younger Americans in 2020-2021.  The Economist puts the number even higher at just under 200,000 deaths, and the NBER finds proportionally similar numbers in stricter European countries as well (but notably NOT Sweden, who famously eschewed lockdowns and most types of mandates).  And having already established long ago that lockdowns don't really save any significant number of lives in the long run, this makes lockdowns all pain and no gain.  And the zealots who pushed these tyrannical policies, especially those who did so persistently in the face of mounting harm, have a LOT of blood on their hands!

Of course, those excess deaths include an unknown number of jab injury deaths as well from 2021 onwards.  But either way, the numbers are NOT flattering to the lockdown zealots OR the jab zealots for that matter.  And longer-term effects still remain unclear, though they are most likely NOT good at all.

And just like the Covid zealots themselves luurrrve to remind us all ad nauseam, deaths are merely the tip of a very large iceberg of overall harm.

And keep in mind that even "soft" or "organic" lockdowns (and ubiquitous masking) via social pressure are far from harmless either, at least when they drag on long enough.  Just ask Japan.  Their suicide rate, after two decades of impressive progress in reducing it, unfortunately spiked once again in 2020 and remained elevated through 2021.  Looks like antisocial distancing is still, well, antisocial, even when it is not formally mandated by the state.  That said, Japan's all-cause excess death rate was still ultimately better on balance than nearly every single "hard" lockdown country in the world.

Seriously, this was all a grave mistake that must NEVER, EVER be repeated.  Like, ever.

UPDATE:  Now even the UN admits that lockdowns killed hundreds of thousands of children globally.  Yes, really.  Let that sink in.  Lockdowns clearly took far more lives (and especially life years) then they saved on balance.  And it goes way beyond deaths too, as children's education, mental health, physical fitness, and overall development have also deteriorated as well, with associated long-term consequences that we will all have to reckon with at some point.  All this to very temporarily delay the inevitable at best.  In other words, we effectively destroyed a generation for nothing.  Will that generation, and future generations, ever forgive us?

Oh, and just in case you thought that lockdowns were still needed to prevent hospitals from being overrun in the short term, not only is there no hard evidence of lockdowns having had any such benefit in that regard compared to the Swedish no-lockdown strategy, but we also see that artificial scarcity from state-imposed policies was the real problem all along.

And next time someone says the "kids are resilient" platitude, be sure to show them this.