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Follow the money; control and power over people connect our World Wars, the Great Depressions, the murders of JFK and his brother, Martin Luther King, Jr., and many others, along with seventy-two orchestrated upheavals of other countries, 9/11, the invasions of Iraqi and Lebanon, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the sub-prime mortgage theft, twenty-one trillion dollars missing, unprecedented chronic illness of our children, and much more. The political and economic crisis called COVID is no different. Behind all of these, a common-core of forces stands in the shadows, slightly offstage. In 1983 Ashley Montagu wrote:

An invisible dis-ease, an affliction of the spirit, which has been ravaging humanity in recent times without surcease (without end) and virtually without resistance, which has now reached epidemic proportions in the Western World… this sickness of the soul might be called the “Fifty Horseman of the Apocalypse.” Its more conventional name, of course, is dehumanization… The realm of ideas and the world of affairs are joined in continuous and reciprocal interaction, and neither can be understood without reference to the other.

Montagu described how, in 1870, Emerson observed; “Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes the web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you.” Ashley continued;

The victory of the mechanical equation over the organic principle was only the start of the modern process of dehumanization… The last refuge of the secret self, the deepest hidden recess of spontaneity and freedom must be infiltrated, subjugated and recycled, into conformity with the technological society. Man in effect had to be emptied out of essential humanity – in order to be restocked with artificial needs and scientifically conditioned reflexes. The dehumanization of man, initiated from without, would be finally accomplished with the individual accepting his fate and completing the process from within, by a voluntary act of compliance and conversion.

Ashley Montagu
The Dehumanization of Man

Déjà vu. We have been here before but don’t care, or can’t remember. Jacques-Yves Cousteau observed, “We protect the things we love.” But, machines don’t love, nor can a human body and mind that has been converted and conditioned to behave like machines, dehumanized, which is the deep root of our social and environmental catastrophe.

We continue to educate the young for the most part as if there were no planetary emergency. It is widely assumed that environmental problems will be solved by technology of one sort or another. Better technology can certainly help, but the crisis is not, first and foremost, one of technology. Rather, it is a crisis within the minds that develop and use technology. The disordering of ecological systems and of the great bio­geochemical cycles of the earth reflects a prior disorder in the thought, perception, imagination, intellectual priorities, and loyalties inherent in the industrial mind. Ultimately, then, the ecological crisis concerns how we think and the institutions that purport to shape and refine the capacity to think.

The truth is that many things on which our future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and bio­ logical diversity… It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. Rather, it is largely the results of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel once made the same point, noting that the designers and perpetrators of Auschwitz, Dachau, and Buchenwald-the Holocaust-were the heirs of Kant and Goethe, widely thought to be the best-educated people on earth. But their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity.

Education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival-the issues now looming so large before us in the twenty-first century. It is not education, but education of a certain kind, that will save us.

David Orr
Earth in Mind, On Education, the Environment and the Human Prospect, 1994

What’s missing in education, and all phases of human development is a fundamental understanding of the nature of human thought and imagination. Thought and imagination have always created an abstracted virtual reality, leading to humanity’s original sin, which is our failure to fully grasp this simple fact. Misunderstanding the true nature of this most powerful capacity renders us lost in a video-game-reality that is severed, disembodied from who and what we really are, our organic innate intelligence. Throughout the centuries rare few have lifted their consciousness out of the dream intellect creates and having done so, they turned back, waving their arms, shouting their warnings. But the dream state of conformity converts and incorporates their prophecies into yet another abstract dream. Dreaming that we are awake is not the same as being awake, so nothing changes.

Grasping the continuity of this inner-outer dynamic is, therefore, slippery. Attempting to understand the global crisis we all now bear focuses first on dramatic biological inconsistencies conveniently labeled “pandemic.” The screaming drone of the corporate-state is pervasive, deafening. All one can do is hold tight to something, anything, leaving little or no attention to ask the big questions, before another image of jet planes crash into another skyscraper, another stock image of bodies wheeled on a gurney, or other weapons of mass distraction beat us down again. Slowly, a few clear voices with historical perspectives are heard through the smoke, mirrors, and fears, liberating a sliver of attention to wonder about the patterns. Haven’t we been here before?

Like light pushing through darkness, the age-old axiom stands, like Stanley Kubrick’s monolith in 2001; follow the money, and the paradigm shifts. It took a year to swim through the sludge, mind-fields, and twisted logic. We are not witnessing an explosion of spontaneous events, as the media stage suggests. Zoom-out and current events become the body of a snake winding back in time decades, even centuries; JFK’s and his brother’s murder, Martin Luther King Jr., 9/11, World Wars, the Holocaust, the invasion of Iraqi, the war on terror, the war on drugs, the Patriot Act, and so much more are all connected. Follow the money.

Since April, we’ve seen global billionaires increase their net worth by twenty-seven percent. It’s economic totalitarianism. We’re essentially bringing in a new transaction system that will be all digital and the end currencies as we know them. What they are trying to do involves all the money on the planet. It’s big; it’s complicated; it’s messy! The challenge they have is how do you market a system that, if people understood it, nobody would want? And, of course, the way you do that is with a healthcare crisis. It’s a control system, like credit at the company store. If every central bank comes out with a digital central bank currency, they have the ability to turn your money on and off. If you don’t behave, that’s it.

Catherine Austin Fitts

You are on the front lines of the most important battle in history. It is a battle to save democracy, and freedom, liberty, and human dignity from this totalitarian cartel that is trying to rob every nation in the world simultaneously.

The real power behind the curtain is a conglomeration of corporations — coal, oil, chemical, steel, and pharmaceutical, recently joined by telecom, Big Tech/Big Data –– all bound, in a web of corruption, to our global military-intelligence apparatus. It is this collaboration of modern Robber Barons that is making war on democracy, civil rights, and the lower classes while driving our country down the road to plutocracy and environmental apocalypse. This conglomeration has declared war on America’s democracy and freedoms.

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Habit and attitude training is imposed by the structure. This is what mass schooling is really all about… Darwin was a big influence, but it’s not the Darwin that is sold in school textbooks. It’s not the fellow curious about nature. It’s a fellow absolutely certain that animal trainers and plant breeders had discovered the operational truth of human life. That the overwhelming majority of human biology is fatally corrupted.

In 1820 we have Darwin saying that people are biologically fixed in classes and there’s nothing you can do about it. Every one of these people (John Calvin 1550, Spinoza in 1670, Johann Fichte 1807) is saying that what we call education isn’t even possible. Darwin said we were insane to try to invest people with inferior IQ’s with positions of responsibility. We’re not talking about a fringe intellectual position. This was the dominant map for how to run a society in the early 19th century. Once you know this – you view the form and content of public education differently. ‘Follow the money.’ This is still the best way to begin. By looking, not only at the immediate architect of a school plan but looking at the grandparents, the great grandparents, as far back as you can trace, you can follow the continuity of ideas.

John Taylor Gatto
Author of Dumbing Us Down

In truth, the asylum and the detention center (whatever may be said for the elementary school) are ipso facto agencies of social control – of the management of deviance and the maintenance of order – a function which they hold in common with prisons. They are in simple fact the primordial modifiers of behavior; they exist for the purpose of shaping the conduct of their wards, and “good behavior” is the officially desired and rewarded outcome.

Ashley Montagu
The Dehumanization of Man

What we’re really talking about is a deliberate and massive retardation of normal human growth processes and the monopolistic assumption of responsibility and decision making so the challenge of reducing inferior breeding can be conferred on a managerial group.

What’s being done is a trade of security and stability for liberty. You have to cash in your liberty, your individuality, your freedom to get that. Since people won’t willingly do that, all the insights about crowd management that have accumulated throughout human history are now put into play in the form of social structures.

John Taylor Gatto
Author of Dumbing Us Down

The absolute control of human behavior has long been the dream of tyrants… More accurately, of course, it has been the dream of some scientists and pundits, while it has been the nightmare of others.

The central issue of Western thought and civilization is the issue of freedom vs. power. For the first time in human history the means of noncorrosive control over individuals and collective behavior, to a degree approaching the absolute, are presently at hand.

Brave New World, Aldous Huxley, 1946, centered on the transformation of a whole society from independent, reflective and critical citizens into docile and willing slaves. The aim of the rulers in his far off dystopia was not really destructive or even megalomaniac: “they are not madmen, and their aim is not anarchy but social stability.”

He predicted an increasing rapid centralization of power in nations that would make them all essentially totalitarian; but significantly, he did not envision that total power manifesting in the traditional forms of overt oppression and terror but rather through subtler devices of conditioning, persuasion, and distraction. “The most important Manhattan Projects of the future,” he anticipated, “will be vast government-sponsored inquiries with the politicians and the participating scientists into what we will call, “the problem of happiness,’ in other words, the problem of making people love their servitude… The love of servitude cannot be established except as a result of a deep personal revolution in human minds and bodies.”

Ashley Montagu
The Dehumanization of Man

Public health is being used as cover to push medicalized therapeutics on healthy people that will lead to a cybernetic existence where non-modified life [by technology] is inexorably erased from the planet. Those in positions of power are reimagining us as captive consumers of digital items, “players” on a hexagonally tiled board of GPS coordinates governed by behavioral economics and coded nudges [tokens that reward and punish].

We’re being “thingified,” pushed into a mixed reality simulation. Their life, managed in a militarized cloud architecture, can continue to be squeezed in ways that profit the denizens of Davos (the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum). It is a supremely anti-life effort where beingness has come under the threat of mass virtualization.

Moving forward, the plan is to use sensor networks and wearable and implantable technologies to apply layers of information to the PHYSICAL world, including people, with which we interact. These cyber-physical “smart” environments are augmented with data, but not everyone will have permission to interact with ALL the data. Much of it will be “permissioned.” In this game, each player’s interactions will be mediated through nested digital smart contracts…  Everyone has a custom “game of life” board that reflects the particular quest of “self-improvement” they’ve been assigned by social impact investors. Each path – training, wellness, mental fitness, rehabilitation – aligns the players towards good “global citizenship” as determined by the game designers who work for the billionaire class.

Allison McDowell

The science of behavior generates a technology of control. That Technology is in place; it is there to be used, on every stage of human action and in every arena of power – from the prison and the kindergarten to the culture of a nation.

B. F. Skinner, 1971

It was the mental hospital that Skinnerians first developed the special technique of reward and punishment – the token economy – that was to become popularly associated with behavior modification and to find wide application in other institutions such as prisons and schools.

Ashley Montagu
The Dehumanization of Man

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in a democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country... In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Edward L. Bernays
Propaganda, 1928

The true power of blockchain is the underlying ledger designed to track digital assets. Those assets include you, a character, within the confines of the billionaires’ game. In the future, it will be not so much about “currency,” but rather earning scrip, digital rights, and privileges. Complete a task in the game and earn “tokens” that endow you with special powers. All of it tracked in the ledger. In the mixed reality game world, a character and how they experience “reality” will be determined by the tokens in their possession at any given time.

Income sharing agreements (ISAs) are central to the elite’s plans to finance (and profit from) the reskilling of lockdown-displaced workers into Fourth Industrial Revolution gig work… Players in the game will be expected to self-finance not only their training but their social services, too. At the beginning of the game, players seek arrangements with an investor or group of investors who contract with them to receive return payment based on future garnished wages. This contracting arrangement is logged on blockchain and monitored as the game progresses. Once logged, that debt can be securitized, packaged, and made available for trading on global markets. That is where the real money is to be made, and the hedge funds know it. They’re the ones who backed the creation of the whole gaming enterprise.

Allison McDowell

This is Chicago mafia, 1920s. We now have a situation where justice isn’t being served because a government-controlled by pharmaceuticals has no incentive to address this problem. Anthony Fauci’s behavior is racketeering. He controls the means of production. He allocates the market beneficiaries. He picks the winners and losers. That’s illegal. That’s antitrust. That’s a criminal conspiracy. To add insult to injury, he’s fixing the price. There’s no public interest being served. This is a violation of his standard practice as a federal officer because he’s actually not acting in good faith. He is price-fixing.

You have the interlocking directorate problem, which sounds sophisticated, but it isn’t. He runs the shop on the organizations that declare the problem. Mysteriously he always has the solution in hand. He controls the pathogen, he controls the means of detection, and the means of therapy, and then he controls the price, and he gets paid every step along the way. The whole medical countermeasure approach to the declaration of a state of emergency, and then the fast-tracking of therapies to try to address those states of emergency, all have conflicted financial interests.

This violates the 21 Code of Federal Regulations that actually gives the FDA the authorization to do this, but to do it, the process has to be reviewed and approved by an independent institutional review board and ethics committee that has no financial interest in the outcome. Otherwise, you cannot do what they’re doing. They’re violating the provisions of the emergency use authorization. This whole racket has been architected by people who actually have allocated the market, have interlocked their directorates, and ultimately price fixed. This is a criminal operation.

David Martin

We began by describing how the political and economic crisis called COVID is not a spontaneous or independent event, rather a snake that winds back for decades, if not centuries. Thousands of international experts challenge the alleged “science” behind the dubious numbers used to justify global lockdowns, unprecedented censorship, suspension of the US Constitution, and our civil liberties. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with David Martin described above some of the systemic criminal activities at play. They and others expose how those who challenge the mainstream script are routinely harassed, censored, discredited, fired, physically threatened, or worse, using the same “dirty tricks” the CIA and intelligence agencies have been perfecting for decades.

Layered upon this context, since 1989 Catherine Austin Fitts has been documenting and reporting on the same systemic corruption and ‘dirty tricks' in the world of global and government finance. Confusion lifts. The back door, Chicago mafia in the 1920s style, money drain appears to be highly contagious. Just one example;

This is a criminal operation. It has been, it continues to be. Not surprisingly, where’s Gilead (a COVID pharmaceutical company)? None other than one of the big donors to governor Gavin Newsom. Why is Gavin so insistent on making sure that the state of California feels the pain of this virus? He’s getting paid by the people who are getting paid for him keeping the virus going.

David Martin

I have unwittingly ruined my country… We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated governments in the civilized world, no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men.

Woodrow Wilson
On the formation of the Federal Reserve in 1913

We must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial [coal, oil, chemical, steel, and pharmaceutical, and recently joined by telecom, Big Tech/Big Data] complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.

Dwight D. Eisenhower
Farewell Address, January 17, 1961

The snake is alive and well, and indeed, it has a very long tail.

$21 Trillion dollars is missing from the US government [confirmed]. That is $65,000 per person - as much as the national debt! What's going on? Where is the money? How could this happen? How much has really gone missing? The Fed and their member banks are transacting government money outside the law. So are the corporate contractors that run the payment systems. So are the Wall Street firms that are selling government securities without full disclosure, HUD, the Department of Defense, Intelligence, the CIA, and surveillance organizations.

This is the reason that there is such a strong push to change or tear up the US Constitution. This is why members of the establishment say it is "old," "outdated!" This is why there is such a push for gun control. We can use the Constitution to get our money and our government back. It is time to enforce the US Constitution.

Catherine Austin Fitts

Form is content. Behind all of these, a common core of forces stands in the shadows, slightly offstage where the scripts that we see on corporate-controlled media are written. Individuals may come and go. The impact these forces have on the lives of humanity and life on earth is implicit in the structure.

In technological societies, the structure of all human life and its systems of organizations reflect the logic of the machine... The corporation is not subject to human control as most people believe; rather, it is an autonomous technical structure that behaves by a system of logic uniquely well suited to its primary function: to give birth and impetus to profitable new technological forms and to spread techno-logic around the globe...Seeing corporate behavior as rooted in the people who work within them is like believing that the problems of television are attributed solely to its programming. With corporations, as with television, computers, and sophisticated machine learning systems, the basic problems are actually structural. They are problems inherent in the forms and rules by which these entities are compelled to operate... Form determines content. Corporations are machines.

The essential issue of The Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, 1978, was the homogenization and domination of consciousness and experience by the corporate machine, consciousness, and the resulting political and environmental consequences implied in that consciousness.

The focus of In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations, 1992, was the role of technology plays in separating people from other sources of awareness and knowledge, aside from television. We talk about how computers serve a similar function. We describe how the current corporate structure is a technology. We talk about biotechnology redesigning the genetic structure of life, robotics eliminating the need for people. Through these examples, the autonomous nature of technology is revealed. All that is compared with native people, to whom this hasn’t fully happened, people who have a relationship to a source, which we have lost - a relationship to the earth and to the spiritual guidance implicit in nature. And we describe how corporations, advertising, and mass media are destroying these people and their precious relationship to the earth.

Jerry Mander
Interview with Michael Mendizza

I believe natural life will only remain viable if we collectively step out of the game and forge a path towards healing ourselves and the earth.

Allison McDowell

This opting-out, shared by all the voices above, is both an inner realization of the critical nature of the uniquely human qualities we share with all life, and it is the active negation of the implicit dehumanization technology inflects. Human thought is, by and large, a mechanical process, an associative machine. Organic intelligence, with its empathic appropriateness, its entangled relationship to our source, which we have lost - our relationship and identification with the earth and to the spiritual guidance implicit in nature, is a completely different order.

We each must now choose. When intellect and organic intelligence is balanced, as nature designed, wholeness and wellness of all life are easy. Without this balance, look around, life becomes a hideous affair.

Opting-out means waking up from the myth that compulsory schooling is synonymous with learning. It means not banking with Chase or investing with Goldman Sachs, rather investing in a local bank or credit union. It means eating organic and shopping at the local farmer’s market. It means not using Google or posting Facebook or Instagram, which are all the same. (I am in the process of delegating my personal and Touch the Futures Facebook accounts.) It means limiting or eliminating Wi-Fi exposure and other invasive forms of electromagnetic radiation. It means finding sources of pure, naturally energized structured water. It means not turning into or believing corporate media. It means asking your own big questions, reading books, and doing your own research. It means connecting with your local community, participating in small gatherings of people who share your interests, needs, and concerns. It means not complying with and informing others when unproven policies, such as social distancing, masks, and business closures deny or limit civil liberties. It means demanding that local, state, and national government officials respect and enforce the US Constitution.

Even more deeply, opting-out involves the negation of the cultural identity we falsely believe in and project on others, especially our children; nationalism and flag-waving patriotism, and rediscovering that we are intimately entangled with all of life, the source as Jerry described above, as a direct experience, not simply another concept. From that sustainable identity, a sustainable human society unfolds naturally. Without it, we are little more than machines.

Machinery is aggressive. The weaver becomes the web, the machinist a machine. If you do not use the tools, they use you.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1870