The Disastrous Road of Hope

It is perhaps only coincidence that swine flu’s history is linked to the US Army and that President Obama was exposed to swine flu on his recent visit to Mexico and that Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense, was chairman of Gilead, the company that developed Tamiflu, the antidote to swine flu. Will Donald Rumsfeld and Gilead profit from a swine flu pandemic as did Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company, from the Iraq war?

Central Banking: The Franchise of Paper Money

The collapse of the global economy is the result of historic levels of defaulting debt that cannot be reversed by more credit. While hope is understandable in such dire circumstances, it will not prevent what is happening. A global economic collapse is now inevitable; after which real economic change will then be possible.

Only a total systemic collapse can lead to substantive change, a collapse that is now under way. The success of central banking led to the belief that economic well-being is the result of central bank credit. That belief will be discarded only when the consequence of central bank credit- defaulting debt-results in a global catastrophic depression.

Until that occurs, the world will persist in the belief that central bank credit is good and more central bank credit is better. The idea that central bank credit-based paper money could solve mankind’s problems was irresistible to both conservative and liberal politicians, hence its global spread, a spread accompanied by Gresham’s Law wherein bad money drives out good.

Now that the entire world is on the thin ice of central bank fiat money, the ice is rapidly melting and when it does, everyone will be affected. Previously, currency crises happened in specific countries. The next currency crisis will be global.

Switzerland was the last nation to succumb to central bank paper money and it is now paying the price for so doing. Unfortunately for the Swiss and for everyone else, the full price has yet to be paid; and, when it is, the world will be reduced to a shadow of its presently credit-bloated self.

The Loss of Hope Will Lead to Change

Out of the collapse of the present system, a new system will emerge, a process that has been repeated throughout history. That it has come again in our time may be unfortunate; but, it is unavoidable.

Since apparently everything in America is going into the toilet except the public’s faith in Barack Obama, it seems that the way to fix everything in America is to entrust it to Barack Obama. — Derek Thompson, The Atlantic Magazine, April 25, 2009.

Barack Obama’s election is, in fact, the necessary precursor of the fundamental economic change that is about to occur. The election platform of hope will lead to the realization that hope, in and of it self, is no solution at all and until that realization comes, substantive change will not.

Until we understand that central bank credit is the problem, not the solution, nothing will change economically; and, because President Obama’s policies are so intertwined with the interests of Wall Street bankers and the Fed, only after Obama’s hoped-based initiatives fail will we then seek an alternative.

Death Knells Death Throes

The attempts to prop up the collapsing system of central banking must not be underestimated. Central banking is a franchise which benefits both banks and governments alike and the power and wealth of both is at stake.

That past attempts to curtail the growth of government and profits of bankers have proved futile is not cause for despair; for the end of central banking and centralized government will not come from without, but from within. Their end will be a result of their own doing, not of others.

We are at the end of an epoch and such times are marked by crises and turmoil. Some are caused by the failure of present systems to solve new problems. Others are caused by the present system’s attempts to stay in power. As the power of current power structures wane, such attempts will increase.

Obama’s Hot Seat and the Reappearance of Swine Flu

Although President Obama has not yet challenged Wall Street, other powerful interest groups see the President as a threat; and, the unexpected reappearance of swine flu may, in fact, be the result of a failed attempt to eliminate Obama and his mandate of change.

On April 25, Bloomberg reported: “Mexico’s Calderon Declares Emergency Amid Swine Flu Outbreak: …The first case was seen in Mexico on April 13. The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico City on April 16.” “Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu,” Reforma newspaper reported.

To understand the possibility that the reappearance of swine flu in Mexico may have resulted from a botched attempt to assassinate President Obama, it is first necessary to understand the origins of swine flu and its curious connection to the US Army.

The following is excerpted from an article “1976: Fear Of A Great Plague” by Paul Mickle published in The Trentonian in 1999:

On the cold afternoon of February 5, 1976, an Army recruit told his drill instructor at Fort Dix that he felt tired and weak but not sick enough to see military medics or skip a big training hike.

Within 24 hours, 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis of Ashley Falls, Mass., was dead, killed by an influenza not seen since the plague of 1918-19, which took 500,000 American lives and 20 million worldwide.

Two weeks after the recruit’s death, health officials disclosed to America that something called “swine flu” had killed Lewis and hospitalized four of his fellow soldiers at the Army base in Burlington County.

The ominous name of the flu alone was enough to touch off civilian fear of an epidemic. And government doctors knew from tests hastily conducted at Dix after Lewis’ death that 500 soldiers had caught swine flu without falling ill.

On the basis of one soldier’s death at Fort Dix in 1976, the hospitalization of four others and tests allegedly showing that 500 had contracted the virus but had not fallen ill, the US government then decided to vaccinate the entire US population. The attempted mass vaccination resulted in several deaths and widespread reports of neurological damage and had to be terminated.

… To understand the fear of the time you have to know something about the plague American soldiers seemed to bring home with them after fighting in Europe during World War I.

The Great Plague, as it came to be called, rivaled the horrid Black Death of medieval times in its ability to strike suddenly and take lives swiftly. In addition to the half million in America, it killed 20 million people around the world.

It got its name because it was a brand of flu usually found in domestic pigs and wild swine. It was long thought to have come, like so many flus, out of the Chinese farm country, where people and domestic pigs live closely together.

Recent research has shown, however, that the post-WWI flu was brought to Europe by American troops who had been based in the South before they went to war. Medical detectives, still working on the case in the 1990s, determined that a small group of our soldiers took swine flu to Europe and that it spread to the world from there.

How the swine flu got to Fort Dix in 1976 still hasn’t been tracked down. At the time, Dix military doctors knew only that a killer flu had made it to the base and that they were lucky more men hadn’t died or been sickened seriously.

That the history of swine flu is intertwined with the US Army may not be coincidental. Military historians have reported that swine flu played a critical role in the defeat of Germany in World War I.

Some, in fact, believe that swine flu was the first deliberate use of a biological weapon in modern warfare. It also should be noted that swine flu attacks healthy young adults instead of the elderly and the very young as do other strains of influenza.

When I read the above story I hadn’t been aware of the connection between the Great Plague, swine flu, and its circuitous route from a southern army base in the US to Europe and from there to the rest of the world, nor of the role swine flu played in the victory over German forces in WWI or its isolated and curious reappearance at Fort Dix, a US army base, in 1976.

It is perhaps only coincidence that swine flu’s history is linked to the US Army and that President Obama was exposed to swine flu on his recent visit to Mexico and that Donald Rumsfeld, former US Secretary of Defense, was chairman of Gilead, the company that developed Tamiflu, the antidote to swine flu.

Question #1: When does coincidence become a pattern?

Question #2: Will Donald Rumsfeld and Gilead profit from a swine flu pandemic as did Halliburton, Dick Cheney’s former company, from the Iraq war?

Hope and Faith

The sudden threat of swine flu is but another sign that we are in a time of crisis. Today, grain supplies are dangerously low as drought conditions affect China, Texas, and California. That a flu pandemic now threatens the world as does starvation and another Great Depression is no coincidence.

Buckminster Fuller wrote in 1981 that mankind was entering a period of extraordinary crisis:

Humanity is moving ever deeper into crisis — a crisis without precedent.

First, it is a crisis brought about by cosmic evolution, irrevocably intent upon completely transforming omnidisintegrated humanity from a complex of around-the-world, remotely deployed-from-one-another, differently colored, differently credoed, differently cultured, differently communicating, and differently competing entities into a complete integrated, comprehensively interconsiderate, harmonious whole.

Second, we are in an unprecedented crisis because cosmic evolution is also irrevocably intent upon making omni-integrated humanity omnisuccessful, able to live sustainingly at an unprecedentedly higher standard of living for all Earthians than has ever been experienced by any;

… that humanity now — for the first time in history — has the realistic opportunity to help evolution do what it is inexorably intent on doing — converting all humanity into one harmonious world family and making that family sustainingly, economically successful.

The world we see today is not the world of cooperation and harmony Fuller predicted. There is a great distance between that world and our present world, a distance that would perhaps disappear under the extreme duress of an unprecedented global crisis.

Although a man of a great many words, Bucky chose his words carefully, as tools to convey exactly what he meant. When he chose the word unprecedented to describe the crisis mankind would face, he meant exactly what that word conveys.

We are in an era of great change, a time when the universal polarities of east and west, male and female, and yin and yang are being forced together in order to survive what each alone cannot.

Hope will not get us through this crisis. Only faith has capacity to do so.