The Free

UK Capitalism melts Down! – New Year’s Message from Anarchist Communists –

1st Jan 2023 Anarchist Communist Group shared via thefreeonline

The year 2023 promises to be a very interesting one. The UK government has been forced to borrow more than during the worst financial crisis since 1929 and the worst pandemic since 1918-1920. Government borrowing rose to a record £22 billion in November 2022. This is three times more than the previous year’s £8.1 billion. This is the highest monthly figure for November since records began thirty years ago.

Inflation is capitalism in meltdown. Here’s what we should do

This rise was caused by a 50% rise in interest payments on government debt due to inflation and an increase in spending due to factors like £1.9 billion in energy bill support payments.

With the rise in borrowing and a recession developing, public borrowing is predicted to rise to £175 billion in 2022/23, £50 billion more than in 2021/22. The Government is now spending more than it is bringing in despite an increase in taxation. With the most of the costs from the government’s energy price support in 2022/23 still to come through, this is why public borrowing will rise to the £175 billion quoted above, 7% of GDP.

This will mean that the Chancellor of the Exchequer will keep an even tighter grip on public finances.

UCU strike: the stitch-up melts down | Cautiously pessimistic

Seven in ten adults expect the coming year to bring worsening .0economic conditions according to an Ipsos survey. This followed an announcement from the Bank of England that the UK was facing a recession that could last two years.

Alongside this has been the huge rise in energy costs with 75% of businesses seeing operating costs rise sharply.

The Office for Budget Responsibility has stated that household disposable incomes will drop by 4.3% in the current financial year and by 2.8% in 2023/24, the biggest drop since records started in the 1950s. This is having a big effect on the retail sector, with big firms like Joules and Made.com going into administration.

Climate change strike: Tens of thousands of children…

The cost of living crisis has meant that one in eight people behind on their energy bills have attempted suicide, according to a report by Money and Mental Health Institute. In addition one in six adults surveyed said that they had experienced suicidal thoughts over the last nine months.

The Day the Music Died: “You’ll own nothing, and be happy.” Ha ha ha.

by Todd Hayen from off-guardian.org via thefreeonline

“You’ll own nothing, and be happy.” I wonder if Schwab regrets saying that.

Photo by Nicholas Nguyen on Unsplash

**Actually the phrase originated in 2016 from Danish MP Ida Auken’s essay “Welcome to 2030: I Own Nothing, Have No Privacy, and Life has Never Been Better” written for the World Economic Forum.**

Not sure why the WEF would embrace such a seemingly derogatory message. But they did (although it is no longer found on their website).

The phrase caught on and Schwab has been inextricably linked to the expression. Sounds like something just about any of those WEF Cretans would say.

I am pretty certain Schwab’s Best Boy Harari adores the concept. You can obviously see how demented anyone who seriously utters this is. You would have to be demented if you are thinking people would nod their head and exclaim “can’t wait!”

Schwab must think it is something people are excited about. A man totally out of touch with the people he wants to enslave. He probably honestly thinks he is a nice grandpa to his people, or maybe, as this statement suggests, he couldn’t care less what the useless eaters think.

Of course most of the world couldn’t care less what Klaus Schwab thinks. Most of the world doesn’t even know who he is, or what the WEF have planned for all of us. Many people in less optimum settings are too busy trying to feed their starving children or finding a roof to put over their heads. Look at the continent of Africa, almost entirely vaccine free.

What are they thinking? I doubt if it has much to do with “not owning anything”—they already don’t own anything, most of them at least. Are they happy?—many of them are probably happier than a lot of people who have a lot more.

Unless they have been exploited by the West mining for lithium, or sucking the oil out of their soil and souls, or destroying their land with other versions of rape, or whatever. They might be happier in their simple, non-materialist, ways. Let’s hope somebody is.

It is interesting that Schwab would claim this statement. Doing so he makes an assumption that everyone will even want to own things. That is a pretty materialist assumption. Of course everyone wants to own things, people want to own everything, right?

Schwab thinks they just want to have everything, not actually own anything. Owning things is a hassle. He is planning on taking care of that for people. Nice guy.

The WEF put out a video at some time based on Auken’s essay. Follow this link or see below to take a look at it. You’ve probably already seen it. Isn’t it lovely? Oh, what a beautiful world! Can’t wait.

Once again these ideas are presented as “good things.” I really do not know if I understand things correctly about the WEF touting Auken’s article, because she doesn’t present the future dystopia as all that yummy, although she ends up saying it is best, or at least better than the world we live in now. At any rate, the video, to my eyes, is rather chilling.

I would bet money that many of the people I know personally who are on that compliance side of the fence would view this video and then rave about the wonderful brave new world that awaited us in the future…no pollution, no war, no meat, fun trips to Mars, computer printed organs if our God given ones go kaput…what fun.

2023: Facebook as Fact, Government as Truth, Big Pharma as God

by Colin Todhunter at off-guardian.org on Dec 29, 2022 via thefreeonline

Of Economic Crises and Pandemics: Facebook as Fact, Government as Truth, Big Pharma as God

If events since March 2020 have shown us anything, it is that fear is a powerful weapon for securing hegemony. Any government can manipulate fear about certain things while conveniently ignoring real dangers that a population faces.

Author and researcher Robert J Burrowes says:

Californians queue up for a food bank, socially distanced and masked of course.

…if we were seriously concerned about our world, the gravest and longest-standing health crisis on the planet is the one that starves to death 100,000 people each day. No panic about that, of course.”

No panic because the controlling interests of the global food system have long profited from a ‘stuffed and starved’ strategy that ensures people unnecessarily go hungry when corporate profit rather than need dictates policies.

US social commentator Walter Lippmann once said that ‘responsible men’ make decisions and must be protected from the ‘bewildered herd’ – the public. He added that the public should be subdued, obedient and distracted from what is really happening. Screaming patriotic slogans and fearing for their lives, they should be admiring with awe leaders who save them from destruction.

During COVID, Prime Minister of New Zealand Jacinda Ardern urged citizens to trust the government and its agencies for all information and stated:

Otherwise, dismiss anything else. We will continue to be your single source of truth.”

In the US, Fauci presented himself as ‘the science’. In New Zealand, Ardern was ‘the truth’. It was similar in countries across the world – different figures but the same approach.

Like other political leaders, Ardern clamped down on civil liberties with the full force of state violence on hand to ensure compliance with ‘the truth’. Those who questioned the COVID narrative – including world-renowned scientists – were smeared, shut down and censored.

It was an internationally orchestrated campaign involving governments, the big tech companies, media and the WHO, among others.

The EU Times reported on 17 December 2022 that the US Centers for Disease Control worked with social media to censor facts and information about COVID that ran afoul of official narratives.

The organisation America First Legal noted in a press release that the fourth set of documents it released – obtained from litigation against the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) – revealed:

…further concrete evidence of collusion between the CDC and social media companies to censor free speech and silence the public square under the government’s label of ‘misinformation’.”

Twitter ran a ‘Partner Support Portal’ for government employees and other ‘stakeholders’ to submit posts that it would remove or flag as ‘misinformation’ on its platform.

Armageddon Avoided: Thanks to this Naval Officer,Vasily Arkhipov, you and your loved ones are alive today

_{Originally published: CovertAction Magazine on December 15, 2022}

by Jeremy Kuzmarov via thefreeonline

On October 27, 1962, Soviet naval officer Vasily Arkhipov helped prevent the outbreak of World War III and saved humanity from nuclear catastrophe.

**Vasily Arkhipov** .thanks for saving our lives![Source: warhistoryonline.com]

A minesweeper during the Pacific War, Arkhipov was the commander of a diesel submarine that had been sent by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to escort merchant ships bound for Cuba, which were equipped with a torpedo boat armed with a nuclear warhead.

On October 14, 1962, a U.S. spy plane flying over Cuba had revealed that the Soviet Union was building ramps for the installation of missiles with nuclear warheads, in retaliation for the United States deploying missiles with nuclear warheads capable of striking the Soviet Union in Italy, at Gioia del Colle (Apulia in southern Italy), and in Turkey.

President Kennedy’s imposition of a naval blockade after the spy plane discovery triggered the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis, during which time the submarine that Arkhipov commanded was being pursued by U.S. destroyers which, using depth charges, were trying to force Arkhipov’s submarine to the surface.

President Kennedy with the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. [Source: freedomrockradio.co]

After the Soviet sub’s ventilation system broke down and communication was cut, the captain of the Soviet submarine group, Valentin Grigoryevich Savitsky, was convinced that war had broken out.

Not wanting to sink without a fight, he decided to launch a nuclear warhead at the aircraft carrier pursuing his sub.

The political officer, Ivan Semyonovich Maslennikov, agreed with the captain, but on the flagship B-59, Arkhipov’s consent was also needed, and he objected, convincing Savitsky ultimately to do the same.¹

Arkhipov’s persuasion averted a nuclear war, whose consequences would have been horrific. After surfacing, Arkhipov’s sub was fired on by Americans but was able to return to the Soviet Union safely.

The Soviet B-59 nuclear submarine forced to surface off the coast of Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis. [Source: beyondnuclearinternational.org]

Spooked about how the world had come so close to the nuclear brink, President Kennedy gave a speech at American University in June 1963, five months before his assassination, calling for a “reexamin[ation of the U.S.] attitude towards the Soviet Union” and “Cold War” and for the U.S. and Soviets to work together for a “just and genuine peace” and to “halt the arms race.”

“Confident and unafraid,” Kennedy concluded,

we must labor on—not towards a strategy of annihilation but towards a strategy of peace… 5 months later he was murdered.

Another Grave Moment of Danger

Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara was not mincing his words when he said years after the events that “We came very, very close [to nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis,] closer than we knew at the time.”

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., characterized the period of the Cuban Missile Crisis as “not only the most dangerous moment of the Cold War [but] the most dangerous moment in human history.”

That moment of danger unfortunately appears just as sharp today.