By Isaac Davis

By many economic indicators, the world is seeing an unprecedented boom right now. While this may seem like great news in generalized terms, there are some foreboding anomalies developing which foreshadow very difficult times ahead for the vast majority of the world’s people.

People love a great success story, though, and the numbers on the most recent numbers on global wealth, recently published by UBS, show just how good the world’s billionaires are doing right now. Their wealth is increasing at astronomical rates.

Billionaires increased their combined global wealth by almost a fifth last year to a record $6tn (£4.5tn) – more than twice the GDP of the UK. There are now 1,542 dollar billionaires across the world, after 145 multi-millionaires saw their wealth tick over into nine-zero fortunes last year, according to the UBS / PwC Billionaires report. [Source]

The UBS Billionaire’s Report 2017 is an indication that we are entering a new and very unique time in history. Not since the Gilded Age of the early 1900s have we seen such a dramatic rise in the wealth of a small handful of people. This was during the rise of the industrial era, where a small handful of individuals and families were able to reshape entire cultures to work in their favor, ultimately ending in serious backlash from the general public.

Josef Stadler, lead author of the UBS report comments on the widening gap between the super rich and everyone else.

We are now two years into the peak of the second Gilded Age… We’re at an inflection point… Wealth concentration is as high as in 1905, this is something billionaires are concerned about. The problem is the power of interest on interest – that makes big money bigger and, the question is to what extent is that sustainable and at what point will society intervene and strike back?

Will there be similarities in the way society reacts to this gilded age? Will the second age end or will it proceed? ~Josef Stadler

A recent report by Oxfam International highlights the dramatic rise in income equality by noting that the combined wealth of the world’s top 8 individual billionaires is more than the lower half of the world’s population, some 3.6 billion people. The intention of the report was to bring awareness to the unfairness and injustice inherent in our global economic system.

It calls for a fundamental change in the way we manage our economies so that they work for all people, and not just a fortunate few. [Oxfam]

Interestingly, as Waking Times reported in January of 2017, estimates of Rothschild family wealth are in the neighborhood of $2 trillion, when you include holdings of a number of members of this one family. This fact sheds additional light on how the concentration of wealth actually works, demonstrating that depending on how you slice up the numbers, the number of wealth controllers in our world keeps shrinking.

This is truly a new gilded age, and the question is, how much more accumulation and concentration of wealth will be tolerated by a vast majority of people who are working under a system of laws, regulations, taxation and inflation which gives extraordinary advantages to those already living like kings.

Meanwhile, global debt is also growing at an astronomical pace, with the United States alone owing an estimated $20 trillion to who knows who? So, the numbers reflect more than just the wealth in equality, they also speak to the debt inequality, as generations of people to come are born into a system of debt servitude.

The following video presentation sheds light on just how out of balance wealth inequality is in America.

Read more articles from Isaac Davis.

Isaac Davis is a staff writer for WakingTimes.com and OffgridOutpost.com Survival Tips blog. He is an outspoken advocate of liberty and of a voluntary society. He is an avid reader of history and passionate about becoming self-sufficient to break free of the control matrix. Follow him on Facebook, here.

This article (Combined Wealth of World’s Billionaires Now Tops $6 Trillion, and Rising Fast) was originally created and published by Waking Times and is published here under a Creative Commons license with attribution to Isaac Davis and WakingTimes.com. It may be re-posted freely with proper attribution, author bio, and this copyright statement.

(activistpost.com)

By Jay Syrmopoulos

For decades after a French village was struck by mass insanity and hallucinations in 1951, it was widely believed that a local bakery’s flour had become contaminated by ergot, a poisonous fungus that occurs naturally on rye and causes hallucinations. However, a discovery by an investigative journalist doing research for a book about the incident uncovered damning evidence that the village’s food was intentionally contaminated with LSD as part of a secret CIA mind control experiment.

On August 16, 1951, numerous locals were suddenly stricken with horrifying hallucinations of fire, dragons, and snakes, with dozens being committed to asylums and hundreds left with varying degrees of madness. The incident was known locally as the mystery of Le Pain Maudit (Cursed Bread).

Time magazine wrote at the time:

Among the stricken, delirium rose: patients thrashed wildly on their beds, screaming that red flowers were blossoming from their bodies, that their heads had turned to molten lead.

A local postman at the time, Leon Armunier, was doing his rounds in the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit when he was suddenly overcome by a feeling of nausea and wild hallucinations.

“It was terrible. I had the sensation of shrinking and shrinking, and the fire and the serpents coiling around my arms,” he told the BBC.

Armunier, now 87, fell off his bike and was taken to the hospital in Avignon.

He recalls being put in a straitjacket and sharing a room with three teenagers who had been chained to their beds to keep them under control.

“Some of my friends tried to get out of the window. They were thrashing wildly… screaming, and the sound of the metal beds and the jumping up and down… the noise was terrible.

“I’d prefer to die rather than go through that again,” Armunier said.

According to H.P. Albarelli Jr., who published a book about the experiment, the incident had nothing to do with ergot-contaminated bread, and instead was part of a top-secret mind control experiment conducted by the CIA.

Albarelli’s findings are based upon a CIA documents he uncovered while investigating the incident entitled:

“Re: Pont-Saint-Esprit and F.Olson Files. SO Span/France Operation file, inclusive Olson. Intel files. Hand carry to Belin – tell him to see to it that these are buried.”

The Telegraph reports:

Mr Albarelli came across CIA documents while investigating the suspicious suicide of Frank Olson, a biochemist working for the SOD who fell from a 13th floor window two years after the Cursed Bread incident. One note transcribes a conversation between a CIA agent and a Sandoz official who mentions the “secret of Pont-Saint-Esprit” and explains that it was not “at all” caused by mould but by diethylamide, the D in LSD.

Further research revealed that F. Olson, according to the BBC, was Frank Olson – a scientist that had spearheaded research into LSD for the CIA, while Belin was a reference to David Belin, who was executive director of the Rockefeller Commission created by the White House in 1975 to investigate abuses carried out worldwide by the CIA.

The Pont-Saint-Esprit and F. Olson Files, mentioned in the document, would show – if they had not been “buried” – that the CIA was experimenting on the townspeople, by dosing them with LSD, according to Albarelli.

According to a BBC report:

It is well known that biological warfare scientists around the world, including some in Britain, were experimenting with LSD in the early 1950s – a time of conflict in Korea and an escalation of Cold War tensions.

Albarelli says he has found a top secret report issued in 1949 by the research director of the Edgewood Arsenal, where many US government LSD experiments were carried out, which states that the army should do everything possible to launch “field experiments” using the drug.

Using Freedom of Information legislation, he also got hold of another CIA report from 1954.

In it an agent reported his conversation with a representative of the Sandoz Chemical company in Switzerland.

Sandoz’s base, which is just a few hundred kilometres from Pont-Saint-Esprit, was the only place where LSD was being produced at that time.

The agent reports that after several drinks, the Sandoz representative abruptly stated: “The Pont-Saint-Esprit ‘secret’ is that it was not the bread at all… It was not grain ergot.”

In his book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, Albarelli explains that he had spoken to the former coworkers of Frank Olson who had told him that the Pont-Saint-Esprit incident was just a part of a variety of mind control experiments that had been carried out by the CIA.

One mystery that remains, according to Albarelli, is whether French authorities were aware of the actual cause of the incident.

Whether the French government was aware or not, those affected by the CIA experiment have a right to know what actually happened, and why they were used as test subjects for an experiment of this nature — without consent.

Please share this harrowing story of innocent civilians being used as unwitting test subjects!

This article first appeared at The Free Thought Project.

(activistpost.com)