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IDN: The greatest transfer of wealth in human history took place during COVID-19 lockdowns with COVID masks and Personal Protection Equipment. The rest of the world was impoverished.i Thus Oxfam released a report on the economic costs and global impacts of COVID-19 titled ‘Inequality Kills’ in time for the IMF’s spring meetings last month.
There has been, however, little analysis of the economic costs of COVID-19 lockdowns and other policies and their causality vis-à-vis the current International Sovereign Bond (ISB) Debt trap and economic meltdown in Sri Lanka, which have resulted in the predicted pivot to the Washington Consensus and IMF.
Analyses of the compounding economic crisis in Sri Lanka have mainly focused on lost State revenue due to ill-advised tax cuts implemented in the wake of the mysterious ISIS claimed 2019 Easter Sunday attacks that targeted luxury hotels and the tourism dependent economy, rather than COVID-19 lockdowns and related policies to explain the current economic crisis in this strategic Indian Ocean island.
Back in 2020 discerning medical economists like Dr. Jayantha Bhattacharya of Stanford University and national leaders like Pakistan Prime Minister Imran Khan stated that in poor countries more people would die of hunger, malnutrition and starvation due to COVID-19 lockdowns and their economic fallout, than due to the virus.
PM Khan who wisely refused to lockdown Pakistanis was removed through a ‘regime change’ operation earlier this year amid staged Arab Spring protests, but his statement rings true in Sri Lanka as people die in food, fuel and petrol queues at this time. In the context, a study of the full impacts and economic costs of WHO-recommended COVID-19 lockdown policies (including on livelihoods and small and medium enterprises), leading to the current economic crisis in Sri Lanka would be relevant, also to seek a debt jubilee and eventual debt cancellation as IMF talks loom this week under Emergency Law.
Globally, the tipping point is here now: Two years of COVID ‘panicdemic’ and World Health Organization (WHO) staged ‘Permanent Emergency’ media narrative now followed by the war in Ukraine has shown us that ‘the Emperor has no clothes’, comprehensively.
In the ‘West’ versus the ‘Rest’ face-off, which the COVID-masked new hybrid Cold War looks like, the Rest has come out on top—having bested the West. The Euro-American Empire is almost done and dusted; its legitimacy shattered as the truth leaks out: The Gain of Function (GoF) research-based, COVID virus and vaccine bio-warfare project (partly subcontracted to Wuhan labs), to digitalise, govern the world, its wealth, populations and migration with a CV-Mask, while taking down ‘emerging economies’ and China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is coming apart at the seams.
By now, it is not a secret that Moderna’s mRNA injection was a United States (US) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) program to manufacture ‘vaccines’ at ‘warped speed’. Nor is it a secret that Moderna had patent applied and obtained patents on certain SARS-COV2 sequences, subsequently named COVID-19.
A First World virus?
All the data shows that COVID-19 was mild in the Global South, particularly Asia and Africa, which has beaten the virus without ‘vaccines’ despite poverty and poor healthcare systems.
Rather, COVID-19 appears to have decimated and divided the ‘First World’ despite and arguably because of its advanced biotechnology and Big Data-dependent health systems and mRNA injections and global human genome maps. Not to mention over-consuming, co-morbidities-intensive, hyper-digital lifestyles.
The Global South has outperformed the so-called ‘advanced’ techno-cyborgs of the West on COVID-19. So too it seems the other emergency, CoP-26, a.k.a. Climate ‘Emergency’ and Anthropocene discourse (Agenda 21), meant to bend the rest to the corporate agri-business and energy agenda of the West, to enable ‘Green-washing’ of big and dirty oil companies and their rebranding as captains of clean, green renewable (LNG) energy technology as part of climate catastrophe ‘Disaster Capitalism’.
Meanwhile, in a landmark decision the Supreme Court of the largest democracy in the world, India, ruled unambiguously last week, that no one could be forced to be vaccinated and that that there was NO data to show more risk from unvaccinated persons. The court said the Centre and states did not place any scientific evidence or data to indicate that the risk of transmission of the virus from unvaccinated individuals is more than from vaccinated persons to justify the discriminatory treatment of unvaccinated persons.
India’s apex court also asked the Centre to make public data on the possible adverse effects of the COVID injections, as had the US court calling for release of Pfizer vaccine trail data.
The boot is now on the other foot! The West will have to eat humble pie and learn how to fight for democracy and against COVID-19 from the ‘Rest’—the colonised and denigrated Third World—Africa and Asia, with its teeming masses. COVID-19 has also deeply divided ‘First World’ societies and economies (Euro-America and its NATO, QUAD and AUKUS allies), where democracy seems increasingly a farce for the rich and connected to perform. The COVID-19 ‘panicdemic’ increasingly looks like a disease of the ‘First World’ although it was supposed to target ‘minorities’ everywhere.
In Africa fewer than 30% are ‘vaccinated’ but COVID deaths are few, and so too, in much of Asia with its huge populations. This, despite the Hunger Virus unleashed by the World Health Organization’s (WHO), criminal lockdown policy recommendations that have caused mass impoverishment.
Indeed, it increasingly appears that the mass rollout of inadequately tested and trialled Pfizer and Moderna mRNA injections have done much of the damage to Euro-American populations as the numbers of Vaccine Adverse Events (VAE), Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (AED) cases mount. COVID-proofing with leaky gene-therapies simply has not worked in the rich West. The next pandemic would be of the ‘vaccine’ injured.
Simultaneously, democratic rights and freedoms are being stripped fast and loose with the COVID-19 mask at hand in so-called ‘advanced’ Western democracies, as vaccine mandates and passports kick in amidst massive protests on the streets and in the Courts.
The US and Europe with their vaccine cards, bio-politics and digital surveillance are hardly beacons of democratic rights, liberty and freedoms these days, and certainly cannot lecture anyone on social and economic justice, rights or equality. Just remember Julien Assange languishing in Belmarsh Prison for exposing the war crimes of the Empire.
Vaccine and mask mandates have taken ‘Divide and Rule’ to a whole new level.
Clearly, the COVID-19 narrative to legitimate snooping on one’s own citizens and cover-up ‘digital colonialism’ under the guise of protecting society and community while destroying our ‘community, religious and social life’ and digitally hacking our brains and bodies with lockdowns and injections is not working.
‘Society must be Defended’ was how the brilliant philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault, who died of AIDS, which he also knew was invented in a lab (just like the Fall Army Worm that destroyed crops and food security in Africa and Asia not so long ago), ironically glossed the Orwellian bio-warfare program. Indeed, it is quite clear that ‘society’ and communities as social scientists know them had to be destroyed and digitalised in order to be defended, masked, surveilled and controlled by Big Brother. This irony has however been lost on a great majority of acquiescent social scientists as pop psychology and therapy has displaced social and communal life and indigenous healing systems such as Ayurveda, Siddha, or Unani.
Wither the imploding empire that won’t go ‘quietly into the night?
Postmodernist and social theorist Jean Baudrillard argued that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. We have lived two years of COVID hyper-reality.
Of course, Pax Americana and its NATO-AUKUS imperialism is not dead yet and evidently refuses to go ‘quietly into the night’ as Asia led by China and ASEAN rises once again as the global growth centre. Rather, Joe Biden is on the warpath with America’s old Cold War rival, Russia, while stoking a New Cold War with China, having concocted AUKUS to encircle both while egging on the EU part of NATO to fight Putin in Ukraine!
The Pax Americana was always a Hot War; partaking of coups, assassinations, staged terrorist attacks and riots as regime change operations like the ‘Jakarta Method’, and proxy wars in the Global South, while a Cold War prevailed in the Global North. It is in this context, that strategic Sri Lanka perched in the middle of the Indian Ocean, governed by dual American citizens of the Rajapaksa family, is an outlier in the Global South with almost 70% of its population vaccinated.
Sri Lanka sits at a chokepoint among Indian Ocean Sea Lanes of Communication (SLOC) and is in the crosshairs of the new Cold War’s vaccine geopolitics. The US citizens who rule this post/colony are desperate (like India’s Modi) for a vaccine victory following self-inflicted economically devastating lockdowns and attendant millionaire migration and brain-drain to the West amid the pandemic of corruption.
Simultaneously, South Asian ethnoreligious diaspora networks in AUKUS countries have been weaponised to advance the economic and security interests of the deep state and against the interests of those of us actually living and working in the Global South at this time.
Digital colonialism and disaster capitalism
The West is still pushing the COVID-19 and CoP 26 Climate Catastrophe narrative to enable what Naomi Klein termed ‘Disaster Capitalism’ in her book ‘Shock Doctrine’ and ensure Global Governance through Digital Colonialism: Euro-American Corporate Captains and Hedge Funds like BlackRock that got huge chunks of the 9 trillion US Government COVID 19 ‘bailout’ continue to asset strip the Global South.
Booming stock markets are an indicator of the asset stripping and massive wealth transfers going on everywhere as people are impoverished. The current surge in the stock market amid mass impoverishment and what Oxfam terms the ‘Hunger Virus’ amid spiralling inequality look like something out of Ripley’s Believe It or Not—a ‘phantom market,’ as a Colombo Stock Exchange analyst put it.
What is increasingly clear is that the Euro-American Global Reset project is headquartered between Geneva (where the DAVOS/WEF clique and various UN agencies like the WHO and ILO that funds and controls trade unions that have been promoting COVID-19 lockdowns hold sway), and Washington with its military business intelligence, research, and media industrial complex that President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously warned US citizens about in his farewell address in 1961.
Novak Djokovic is the latest celebrity victim of the Global Governance dream project of the deep state military business industrial complex in tow with the DAVOS clique. Djokovic was rendered a spectacle by Australia’s judicial system and puppet Prime Minister who had earlier rushed to dis France (which is competing with and waging a high stakes battle for its share of the Indian Ocean with the Anglo-Old Commonwealth’s Pakkha Sahibs), for AUKUS.
After all, Djokovic’s defiance of Australian vaccine mandates advertised on pacifying global sports media channels cannot be tolerated in vaccine-card carrying COVID democracies!
Life in a cyber-simulacrum of protests
It is not a secret that the world’s top 10 wealthiest doubled their wealth last year.
US digital giants, known as GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft), aside from Big Pharma are the biggest beneficiaries of the COVID-19 global wealth transfers and re-set: Indeed, Big Pharma funded WHO’s COVID-19 pandemic would not have been possible without digital colonialism, which it has in turn deepened.
‘Digital nomads’ along with BPO or Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) have also enabled business-intelligence agents’ game global and local (social) media narratives around the world while promoting the ‘Permanent Emergency’ to destabilise, distract and digitalise communities. Online the message is surveilled and controlled, while the reality is encased the COVID-19 ‘Infodemic’ and numbers game.
Concealed in this cyber simulacrum is truth and the big picture. The permanent COVID and climate ‘emergencies’ have enabled a pandemic of corruption, digital colonialism, hacking of national data, institutions, policy-making processes and information systems like the National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) Data Wipe on the Sri Lanka Government Cloud and unprecedented division of societies and communities. Divide and rule amid digitalisation.
Simultaneously, many are so distracted with mask-policing of their neighbours and now with protests directed by Pied Pipers on social media platforms that the looting of national wealth by corrupt politicians and digital corporates passes unnoticed.
In the context, a systematic analysis of two years of COVID-19 panicdemic narratives and lockdowns on industry also given lost production and livelihoods for small and medium enterprises, as well as, the COVID-19 policy response including money printing in Sri Lanka seems overdue.
After all, almost 40% of the national budget was diverted to the health sector for purchase of expensive COVID-19 injections, Pfizer boosters, endless PCR tests, oximeters, fleets of ambulances, etc. Indeed, the health sector procurement policy may warrant systematic analysis and investigation also in the context of a constant refrain regarding ‘medicine shortages’.
Aside from GAFAM Big Pharmaceutical companies benefited most from the COVID panicdemic and they often fund many national health sector events, research, conferences and organisations such as the Sri Lanka Medical Association (SLMA), and GMOA and other trade unions which called for economically-devastating lockdowns.
A study of the full impacts and economic costs of WHO-recommended COVID-19 lockdown policies, their causality and continuity with the Easter 2019 hybrid economic war-style attacks on the tourism-dependent island economy leading to the current economic crisis in Sri Lanka would be relevant. Such a report may enable seeking an ISB debt jubilee and eventual debt cancellation in this geostrategic island perpetually in the cross-hairs of great power rivalry?!
Remarkably, three years of investigations into the mysterious Islamic State (ISIS), claimed 2019 Easter attacks on economy and society have revealed that they were directed by a mysterious Pier Piper named Sonic-Sonic via the internet, who also seems to be directing many of the on-going anonymously-led ‘Arab Spring’ protests organised via social media platforms. These are compounding and distracting from a systematic root causes analysis of this strategic Indian Ocean Island’s economic crisis, even as asset stripping and sale of national transport, electro-magnetic frequencies, communication and energy infrastructure to hedge funds that would further compound the problem are increasingly trotted out as ‘solutions’.
Hollow Independence: COVID and the abrogation of self-determination
The COVID-19 project, an Over the Horizon (OTH) operation for Full Spectrum Dominance (FSD) and re-colonisation of the Global South which would provide cheap migrant labour and raw materials for the West after the Great Re-set, while simultaneously promoting de-globalisation and hyper-globalisation via digital colonialism appears to have turned core principles of the United Nationals System, as well as, the natural and social sciences on their heads.
Article 2.7 of the United Nation’s Charter explicitly states: ‘Nothing contained in the present Charter shall authorise the United Nations to intervene in matters that are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of States’. However national policy autonomy seemed to be in abeyance as global emergency narratives and COVID-19 lockdown prescriptions and ‘vaccine’ mandates caused great harm by unleashing the ‘Hunger Virus’ as Jeffrey Sacks and a host of distinguished economists have shown.
So too, founding principles of the UN and International State System, particularly the principle of the Right to Self-Determination of colonised peoples, national sovereignty, territorial integrity and policy autonomy in national ownership in policy-making has been abrogated with the ‘COVID-19 Emergency’ and ‘Climate Catastrophe’ narrative.
No longer is it possible for people and goods to travel freely around the world as the current phase of globalisation grinds to a halt with the COVID-19 masked cyber and maritime trade wars and ‘vaccine’ mandates and passports, while finance capital moves around the world with increasing speed transferring wealth to the global corporate elite.
This is evident particularly in the social sectors (health, education, culture), as the right to self-determination for peoples in the post/colonial countries that includes policy autonomy have been attenuated with the so-called global COVID emergency and climate emergency narrative, and the push to digitalisation amidst heightening cyber-wars.
So too have core principles in social science research and analysis, such as, the fact that ‘local context’ and regional and country-specific qualitative and quantitative data and analysis matter for appropriate policy-making have been ignored by local and global experts under the WHO’s and other UN agencies and Washington Consensus, Global Crisis, Pandemic and Climate Emergency narratives. Meanwhile, global biotechnology and pharmaceutical corporations and GAFAM profit from marketing of their products including PCR tests that are now obsolete and expiring COVID-19 injections with WHO’s Emergency Use Listing (EUL).
In the final analysis ‘All that’s solid melts in the air’: The paper money castles of Euro-American Hedge Funds like Black Rock which backs India’s Adani and Ambani may disappear no sooner the Undersea Data Cables (UDC) are clipped or taxed to end the inequality pandemic and financial wealth transfers, that keep stock markets hi. After all, we cannot eat or breathe data, even in this era of data fetishism in the Information Economy!
Finally, since the US has printed $ 9 trillion as ‘COVID bailouts’ in the past two years and is the most indebted country on the planet, the Trillion Yuan question now is: how long will it take for the US dollar to crash as the chickens come home to roost and the masks come off?
[IDN-InDepthNews – 28 January 2022]
Footnote:
iThe Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure: https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/
(The writer is a Sociocultural and Medical Anthropologist based in Colombo. Her latest publication is ‘Multi-religiosity on Contemporary Sri Lanka: Innovation, Shared Spaces, Contestation’. (Routledge 2022).)
Clearly, the COVID-19 narrative to legitimate snooping on one’s own citizens and cover-up ‘digital colonialism’ under the guise of protecting society and community while destroying our ‘community, religious and social life’ and digitally hacking our brains and bodies with lockdowns and injections is not working