SAVANNAH, GEORGIA – The third largest container port in the United States is currently experiencing a backlog ranging from four to five days, according to Gryff Lynch, Executive Director of the Georgia Ports Authority (GPA). “No one has gone through what we’re dealing with ever before”, Lynch stated in an interview with New York Times podcast, The Daily, adding that the situation was so unprecedented, that they were literally “inventing this as we go along”.
By “this”, Lynch was talking about dealing with the logistical challenges of accommodating the relentless stream of shipping containers arriving from all over the world carrying everything from clothing to pharmaceuticals, furniture, appliances and food. The twenty-two cargo ships anchored 17 miles off the Atlantic awaiting port clearance is a sight also seen on the West coast, where NASA imagery from last week revealed as many as 60 ships floating in “drift zones” off the coast of the other two largest ports in America in Southern California.
Ports in Texas, New York and New Jersey are dealing with backlog problems of their own. The same goes for ports in China and Southeast Asia as what NYT correspondent Peter Goodman is calling the “great supply chain disruption” unfolds. Predictably, Goodman ascribes the root cause to Covid-19-related issues, but “wild weather” is also turning up as a factor in the media as the pandemic and climate change narratives increasingly merge and the encroaching biosecurity state dovetails with the enforcement of the UN’s sustainable development goals (SDG).
Four days ago, the World Health Organization (WHO) published the COP26 Special Report on Climate Change and Health, which offers “10 recommendations” for governments and policy makers to tackle both issues with “urgency” through the implementation of social justice programs, the promotion of “healthy urban design” projects (smart cities), “climate interventions” and, specifically, aiming to create “sustainable food supply chains and diets for climate and health outcomes”, which comes in at number eight on the list.
Simultaneously, a group claiming to represent two-thirds of the global medical establishment – 45 million medical professionals, mostly from the UK, USA, Canada and Australia – released an open letter calling for “climate action” from world leaders and COP26 members, in which medical and environmental terms are blended together to create the impression that human disease, social ills and ecological imbalance are all within the purview of the emerging techno-scientific establishment.
The WHO’s report came on the 60th anniversary of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), an organization comprised of so-called developing nations, which also happen to be crucial sources of raw materials at the very base of global supply chains, such as Africa, most of Asia and parts of Central and South America. It was no coincidence that the NAM leadership, a body which is coordinated by the United Nations, joined in the exhortations for “climate justice” in a recent plenum to celebrate its sixth decade as the largely marginalized group is recast for a new role amid the pandemic.
A New Social Contract
Suspicions that the ongoing delays to the supply chain are manufactured have proliferated, mostly on social media, where narratives are splintered off in multiple directions to cater to subsets of worldviews and opinions. In most cases, such claims come down to interpretation of the facts, with mainstream sources downplaying or simply rejecting inconvenient conclusions drawn by independent media outlets or individuals.
A recent ‘fact-checking’ piece published on the California State University’s public service radio website tries to debunk claims of a deliberate blockage of shipping cargo with “experts” chiming in on the real reasons the supply chain backlogs are taking place, which they suggest are the result of “labor shortages”, novel holiday buying patterns and “other COVID-19 related issues”.
Almost two years of considerable economic curtailment by way of lockdowns and onerous public health mandates have clearly contributed to all of the reasons cited. It is not exactly controversial to assert that the measures taken in response to the pandemic, particularly in the United States, are directly tied to the existing labor shortages and that stay-at-home orders are a logical corollary to the growth of online shopping. But, none of these are necessarily proof of a deliberate stoppage in the global supply chain in order to induce worldwide economic stress.
However, such conclusions become harder to escape once we start to notice the veritable clairvoyance of some notable individuals and organizations, which latched on to the global public health emergency narrative from the very start to push these very ideas forward – namely, a deep global economic crisis and the need to seize the terrible circumstances to bring about a new social contract.
Barley a month and two weeks into the officially-declared pandemic, the World Economic Forum (WEF), published a blog post titled Universal Basic Income is the Answer to the Inequalities Exposed By COVID-19. Ostensibly written by the Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations and United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Chief Economist for Asia and the Pacific, the article predicted “unbearably high” social costs and a “flare-up of social tensions” that would result from the incipient outbreak and prescribed heavy handed wealth redistribution as a solution.
Not to be outdone, Economist Berlin bureau chief, Andreas Kluth, penned a strikingly alarmist Op-Ed in Bloomberg around the same time explicitly titled “This Pandemic Will Lead to Social Revolutions”, warning that the loss of hundreds of millions of jobs world-wide would conspire “to make each neighborhood its own sociological and epidemiological petri dish”.
If you’re starting to notice a pattern of oddly-placed medical or scientific terminology to describe very broad and complicated matters that relate to how people choose to organize their societies and their relationship to the environment, it is because it is really there and is being used to create the perception that we are sick and need theirhelp.
Social Vaccine Hesitancy
In 2015, blogger and renowned UBI proponent Scott Santens wrote a piece titled Universal Basic Income as the Social Vaccine of the 21st Century [emphasis added], where he equates the claimed economic benefits of the smallpox vaccine to the potential of UBI to eradicate misery around the world.
This metaphor has recently resurfaced in a Scottish daily, where efforts to implement UBI schemes are quite advanced despite controversy, and Santens himself has continued to promulgate the idea in an interview earlier this year with The Times of India.
The variola virus, as it is technically termed, was central to the rise of the World Health Organization (WHO), which launched its first abortive mass inoculation campaign against smallpox ten years after its creation by the UN in 1948. In 1966, the WHO embarked on its second initiative to rid the world of the mysterious disease, which had nevertheless already disappeared from North America and Europe.
Controversies over the role played in human life expectancy by improved sanitation, water treatment plants and nutrition versus vaccinations aside, there is no denying that the burgeoning biosecurity apparatus and the dystopian health passports on offer link back directly to this first salvo. Smallpox also served as the linchpin for the parallel development of the biowarfare establishment in the United States led by Big Pharma and its agents, which has merged with the nation’s federal health and scientific institutions and covered at length by this author early last year.
As the global health emergency is prolonged by the appearance of presumably new virus strains, the spasmodic applications of lockdowns and quarantines across the world are gradually giving way to more systemic interruptions. A sustained freeze of global supply chains is a step beyond that has the potential to raise the pressure on people, businesses and governments to exponential levels.
The Unopposed Opposition
Combined with mass layoffs due to vaccine hesitancy or corporate downsizing, a prolonged halt to supply chain flows will mean a significant hit to the GDP of dozens, if not hundreds of nations, which will in turn, open the door for governments – and the political interests that run them – to relinquish more sovereignty in exchange for ways to keep their populations from revolting.
International, Western-controlled institutions like the UN (on the policy side) and the WEF (on the private sector side) are poised to step in when the burdens become too heavy for nation states to bear. Social and viral inoculations in hand, they will present governments with a new “social contract” and any country that wants to solve the problems caused by labor displacement and supply chain issues will have to sign on the dotted line.
At this point, the superficiality that has characterized the UBI debate between political camps will be made to dissipate as the proper conditions and technological requirements to execute a universal basic income model that can’t escape the clutches of an Anglo-American global financial system is on the verge of coming to fruition.
Opposite branches on the UBI philosophical tree, like that represented by leading light of Libertarian economic theory, Friedrich Hayek, who strongly advocated for a guaranteed minimum income “for everyone“, will be melded with more ‘left-wing’ variations, like Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend“.
Meanwhile, Big Tech is waiting in the wings and fanning the flames inside the sociological petri dish. Jack Dorsey is just one of the many tech entrepreneurs funneling millions of Silicon Valley money into social justice organizations and UBI through an unincorporated philanthropic project called Start Small, which finances the operations of dozens of socially and politically disruptive concerns, while simultaneously bankrolling experiments and studies for the implementation of a universal basic income.
