>Judge orders Soros-backed prosecutor to hand over records to Just the News
>How much do you guys think Jim Carrey got paid to dress up as Biden and fall up the stairs?
Jim Carrey?
>The memo included eleven Canadian Forces aircraft callsigns and flight number ranges requested to be filtered out — including HUNTER, MOLSON, ODIN, PATHFINDER, SONIC, VIMY and BUBBLY used by RCAF squadrons.
release the polio
>"Golden Billion"
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Golden billion
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The golden billion (Russian: золотой миллиард, tr. zolotoy milliard) is the theory that indefinite elites pull strings to amass wealth and destroy regular people’s lives.[1] It is popular in the Russian-speaking world.[2]
Explanation
According to Sergey Kara-Murza, the golden billion (population of developed countries) consumes the lion's share of all resources on the planet. If at least half of the global population begins to consume resources to the same extent, these resources wouldn't be sufficient.[3] This is partly based on the ideas of Thomas Malthus, in that emphasis is placed on the scarcity of natural resources. However, whereas Malthus was mostly concerned with finite global crop yields, anti-globalists that advocate the idea of a "golden billion" are mostly concerned with finite natural resources such as fossil fuels and metal. According to Kara-Murza, the developed countries, while preserving for their nationals a high level of consumption, endorse political, military and economic measures designed to keep the rest of the world in an industrially undeveloped state and as a raw-material appendage area for the dumping of hazardous waste and as a source of cheap labor.[4]
The theory, which holds that the wealth of the West, including that of the lower classes, is mostly based on exploitation of the former colonies in the third world, is not new in Russia, where it was first popularized by Vladimir Lenin, in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Lenin described the relationship between capitalism and imperialism, wherein the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capital. The final, imperialist stage of capitalism, originates in the financial function of generating greater profits than the home market can yield; thus, business exports (excess) capital, which, in due course, leads to the economic division of the world among international business monopolies, and imperial European states colonising large portions of the world to generate investment profits.
Whereas Lenin and other Marxist anti-imperialists such as Immanuel Wallerstein called for an end to the domination of developed nations through international communism, Kara-Murza and his contemporaries in Russia believe that a restriction of free trade (especially with the West), and various methods of state intervention in the economy is the best solution. This economic rationale for protectionism dates back to the early United States and is known as the infant industry argument. The crux of the argument is that nascent industries often do not have the economies of scale that their older competitors from other countries may have, and thus need to be protected until they can attain similar economies of scale. The argument was first explicated by Alexander Hamilton in his 1790 Report on Manufactures, was systematically developed by Daniel Raymond, and was later picked up by Friedrich List in his 1841 work The National System of Political Economy, following his exposure to the idea during his residence in the United States in the 1820s.
The differences in incomes in first-world countries and third-world countries cannot be explained by differences in individual productivity. For example, the Caterpillar (CAT) factory in Tosno, Russia has the highest productivity of all CAT factories in Europe, but the workers are paid about an order of magnitude less. The difference is even more startling when comparing the wages of textile workers in United States factories and in China sweatshops. This means that the multinational corporations appropriate a disproportionally high share of the surplus value in "developing" countries. The argument usually holds that the continuation of this exploitation retards the development and prosperity of the developing nations. Hence, globalization and modern capitalism benefit mostly the golden billion, while people in the so-called "developing" countries are getting the short end of the stick.
muh conspiracy theory russian style
History
The term was coined by A. Kuzmich (Anatoly Tsikunov) in his 1990 bookThe Plot of World Government: Russia and the Golden Billionand used in his articles. The main idea behind this term was taken from Limits to Growth – that there are enough resources for only one billion wealthy people on Earth. The term was quickly popularized by Russian writer Sergey Kara-Murza and has become a staple of contemporary Russian conspiratorial thought.[5]
Censurers were studying the use of the concept "golden billion" for the analysis of a state of the world and prospects of the development. They specified that the problem of possible imbalance of growth of the population with limited resource of Earth was considered in the past repeatedly. The early Christian theologian Tertullian, who lived in 1st–2nd centuries AD gave the alarm about it: "The strongest witness is the vast population of the earth to which we are a burden and she scarcely can provide for our needs; as our demands grow greater, our complaints against Nature's inadequacy are heard by all. The scourges of pestilence, famine, wars and earthquakes have come to be regarded as a blessing to overcrowded nations, since they serve to prune away the luxuriant growth of the human race."[6]
During Russia's 2022 war with Ukraine, the concept was used by leading Russian politicians to justify Russian policy and accuse thе West of elitist colonialism. In May 2022, Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the Security Council, accused "Anglo-Saxons" of "hiding their actions behind the human rights, freedom and democracy rhetoric," while pushing ahead "with the ‘golden billion’ doctrine, which implies that only select few are entitled to prosperity in this world."[7] In June 2022, speaking at the International Economic Forum, Vladimir Putin "reiterated his position that the Kremlin was 'forced' to initiate the invasion of Ukraine […] 'Our colleagues do not simply deny reality,' Putin added. 'They are trying to resist the course of history. They think in terms of the last century. They are in captivity of their own delusions about countries outside of the so-called golden billion, they see everything else as the periphery, their backyard, they treat these places as their colonies, and they treat the peoples living there as second-class citizens, because they consider themselves to be exceptional.'”[8]
Opponents of the concept
Opponents of the concept often invoke market efficiency to argue that free trade and capitalism will make everybody wealthy eventually.[9] Proponents counter that the ongoing process of multinational corporations channeling wealth from poorer countries to richer ones dictates that the gap will not diminish.
Available data indicates convergence of income for many developing countries.[10] Some economists think that using latest data it is possible to conclude that the world now is in state of unconditional economic convergence.[11]
In his book The Ultimate Resource, Julian Simon offers the view that scarcity of physical resources can be overcome by the human mind. For example, the argument of scarcity of oil could be overcome by some of energy development strategies, such as use of synthetic fuels.
Modern estimations indicate that mineral shortages will not become a threat for many centuries [12]
Concerning exploitation of the former colonies, Gregory Clark notes: "Yet generations of research by economic historians – David Landes, Deirdre McCloskey, and Joel Mokyr, among others – show that the wealth of the West was homegrown, the result of a stream of Western technological advances since the Industrial Revolution."[13]
The use of term
One article about the role of libraries in helping people realize community potential references the concept:[14]
>"Golden Billion"
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CREATIVE NONFICTION
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The Golden Billion: Russia, COVID, Murderous Global Elites
Xenia Cherkaev
First published: 16 May 2022
https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12386
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SUMMARY
This essay tells the story of the hot, brooding summer that preceded Russia’s “special military operation” attack on Ukraine: an attack that could not legally be called a war and that many people in Russia supported even while they neither trusted the media nor cared to talk about politics. Rallying support for this undeclared war, Russian state rhetoric drew on images of WWII fascism, NATO expansion, and morally rotten transnational elites: themes resonant with long-standing feelings of hurt national pride and personal abandonment in the face of spiraling social stratification. To many of its supporters, “the war seemed a relief after many years of stagnation,” wrote the Moscow-based journalist Shura Burtin (2022). “Like a fire in prison: at least there’ll be some commotion.” This essay describes a high point of this pregnant stagnation. Written in August 2021, it draws on over a decade of ethnographic fieldwork in North-Western Russia to examine the idea that a “Golden Billion” of the world’s most powerful people governs to exterminate the rest of us—at a moment when this idea seemed eminently reasonable.
The summer of 2010 was abnormally hot. Temperatures in St. Petersburg hovered around thirty degrees Celsius, and everything burned: forests, villages, peat bogs. But the price of crude oil also hovered feverishly high, and while some people saw Russia becoming an authoritarian police state, it was hard to take them seriously. The year before, an odd mixture of liberal intelligentsia and Natsbol punks had begun unsanctioned street protests in defense of the Constitution’s Article 31, which back then still guaranteed the right of peaceful assembly (Horvath 2015). Every thirty-first calendar day, they came out to exercise this constitutional right, and the police beat them up. This was regrettable, certainly, but I don’t remember it seriously affecting those apolitically carefree oil-happy days. As the authoritarian bolts turned slowly to tighten, most of the people around me neither paid much attention nor cared. And the idea that a Golden Billion of the wealthiest people alive intends to exterminate the rest of us with things like flu vaccines seemed as ludicrous to me back then as the “Flat Earth” movement does now, some decade later: part joke, part conspiracy theory, part t-shirt franchise.
I’m still in Russia today, eleven years later, working on a different ethnographic project and teaching. And over this time, I’ve noticed that theories of the Golden Billion have shifted. From the conspiratorial fringe, the image of a murderous global elite increasingly enters popular explanations of life under Russian neoliberalism. I now hear my most rational friends surmise idly that world leaders are actively trying to kill them, and I can no longer easily dismiss the idea.
As a conspiracy theory, the Golden Billion is fairly run-of-the-mill, at home easily among the Georgia Guidestones and the Elders and Zion(Gulyas 2016: 150; Bronner 2000): a story of saponaceous elites pulling strings to amass wealth and destroy regular people’s lives. I noticed it in 2010 only because I started an ethnographic project in Russia that year and the intense social openness ethnography demands made me attentive to conversations I might otherwise not have had reason to notice.
> https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anhu.12386
I first heard about the Golden Billion from a man I’ll call Konstantin. A former Soviet geologist turned Buddhist healer, he was about sixty at the time: virile, powerful, well-connected. His young wife described him as a man “patriarchal in character,” and his life of material luxury seemed to support his claim to have clients in top Kremlin circles. As Konstantin told it, the Golden Billion was somewhere between the Judeo-Masons and the New World Order, between old Soviet fears of “bio-energy” mind-control and new fears of vaccines and cancer-inducing GMOs. These theories were not out of place in his large central Moscow apartment, where patented magnetic devices protected us from “electro-magnetic smog” while we watched YouTube clips narrated by that computer-generated voice that unmistakably marks internet conspiracy videos. His clients subscribed to it, too: an old woman who claimed to have been a spy in Afghanistan and her daughter who claimed to be the wife of Moscow’s top Rabbi. The two of them had come for a course of Buddhist healing. The mother said that she used to work for the KGB in Kabul, that her father was a general, and that she was from Azerbaijan, and that’s why they sent her; but the Arabs are horrible, backstabbers, they’ll say one thing and do another. She believes in GOD, she told me. She told me that the world would end in 2012. She described in some detail how she helped steal the elections for the United Russia Party. She said that her grandson’s nanny abuses him. Her stories were riveting, and I did not think of testing their truth claims.
But now, as I write this, I am less interested in the conspiratorial core of this theory than I am in its workaday fringe. As the years pass, I notice more and more people accept as axiomatic that the governing forces that structure society might be seeking their deaths. They joke about it, half-believing, in horror and apathy. These people do not claim to have been spies in Afghanistan. They claim only that the COVID-related deaths of their parents are a great boon to the pension fund. They are neither punks nor members of the self-avowed intelligentsia. Many of them voted for Putin—and many voted against. They talk of their towns’ ongoing post-Soviet decay and attrition in the face of Moscow’s aggressive colonial centralization: of how the few enterprises that managed to survive the Soviet collapse didn’t survive the 2014 Crimean crisis, while those that survived Crimea didn’t survive COVID, how major construction projects employ only out of town shift-workers, how all new stores are chain stores, how not even the train crews are local.
Distrust and hatred of international corporationsmerge in these narratives with hatred of high Russian bureaucrats, who have sold out the country and have turned a nice profit doing it, who vacation in the Swiss Alps and on the French Riviera while their fellow citizens are abandoned to poverty and early death. Such “New World Order” conspiracy theories have proliferated worldwide in the past several decades, in tandem with the expansion of global capitalism, and many of them are framed in explicitly nationalist terms (West and Sanders 2003; Rakopoulos 2018). But the Golden Billion is a New World Order theory of class. Poor people everywhere stand to beexterminated, regardless of ethnos (Kara-Murza 1999). Its accusatory logic is bottomless. While “pro-Kremlin intellectuals rapidly transformed the idea of the New World Order, which originated in the U.S.A., to criticize the U.S.A.” (Yablokov 2020: 589), this same idea is also commonly used to criticize the Kremlin itself.