Letter to Trish Wood

Episode 172 of the Trish Wood Is Critical (https://www.trishwoodpodcast.com/ ) featured a long discussion with CJ Hopkins which shines a light of global power politics.

Hi Trish,

I enjoyed your discussion with CJ Hopkins greatly, but I question the comments he made stating that there is only one dominant politico-economic zeitgeist in the world today. He claimed that Marxism has been defeated and only Global Capitalism remains, controlled and perpetrated by a hard-to-identify and amorphous “global elite”. 

If CJ means that Capitalism and Marxism have merged into a form of Global Cronyism or Global Fascism, I would largely agree with him. Here’s why. 

Fascism in Mussolini’s day (1930s Italy) was an arrangement between “Big Government” and “Big Business’ - a collusion that benefited both parties. The businesses got access to privileges and gifts from the government “honey pot’(i.e. money and legislation) while El Duce got political support and full compliance from corporate executives to direct their businesses’ manufacturing and distribution resources to serve government priorities and “the war effort”. Most people today associate “fascism” with violence because El Duce had to resort to this to quell dissenters - mainly the working “tired, poor and hungry”.

Today’s economy is an evolved form of fascism but has another name, Cronyism. 

We have all heard the term Crony-Capitalism, but Cronyism has three faceswhich must all be identified clearly to understand the international scope of Global Cronyism to which CJ refers. Crony-Socialism and Crony-Statism are the two “faces” that CJ has not acknowledged and where he will find Marxist thought to be thriving. 

I wrote this short Substack (https://open.substack.com/pub/gbalfour/p/cronyism-3-forms-explained?r=16emgc&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web) last year about this topic. CJ might wish to consider it.

What distinguishes each form of Cronyism is the source of funding for their organization’s operations:

Capitalism ==> profits 

Statism ==> taxation and public debt

Socialism ==> government and corporate subsidies

It is easy to distinguish the type of Cronyism. For example, CJ said the Big Pharma has twice as many lobbyists in Washington as the next largest lobby group. This tells you that Crony-Capitalism is at play. 

Climate Change NGOs, part of the Crony-Socialist socio-economic matrix, don’t sell products or services (except for activism and lobbying). Instead, they depend on their patrons for subsidies (“corporate welfare”).

Government departments, agencies and research institutes employ people who depend on salaries, benefits, pensions, grants and their job security. These Crony-Statists collectively represent a huge voting block that “won’t bite the hand that feeds them”. They can be counted upon to readily support pressure from their unions and others to vote for more government programs promised mainly by the Liberal, NDP and Green political parties (Conservatives to a lesser extent; Libertarians never). 

Dr. Mattias Desmet’s mass formation psychosis is a good model to understand the modern socio-political-economic culture in Canada. The majority of our citizens have been conditioned to expect the government to take responsibility for all issues in society. Perpetual, anxiety-inducing messaging from the combined legacy media and Trudeau/Singh government has served to maintain an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty in our populations. This is a manifestation of Crony-Capitalism in which the CBC, Toronto Star, et al were given subsides, grants, and employment guarantees in exchange for favourable press for the government. This corrupting dynamic has kept the current government in power long enough to pass their highest priority parliamentary bills in a push to fulfill its political/globalist (WEF, UN, IPCC, IMF) agenda. If the CPC forms the next government under Pierre Poilievre in 2024, I expect him to encounter a few “booby traps” in much of the legislature passed since 2016. 

Keep up the great work Trish. You continue to be one of my and Cynthia’s top three “go to” podcasters. 

Sincerely

Gene Balfour 

PS. Tonight I am hosting a ZOOM presentation by Shawn Buckley and Michelle Leduc-Catlin to our Kawartha Lakes “freedom group”. I would never have known about these treasured citizens in not for your show.