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““Cellphone location data shows where people are leaving home and coming near other people.””

“We’re DOOMed.”

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Well, perhaps not from that... But it can suck being playthings for THESE Guys:
(More from “Over There”...)
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Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich by
Chrystia Freeland – review

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/01/plutocrats-super-rich-freeland-review

Who is the richest person to have lived?
Given the impossibility of comparing chariots with private
jets, this is an absurd question. But it is still one
economists have sought to answer, with perhaps the best
measure – as defined by Adam Smith – based on annual income
as a multiple of the average wage of fellow citizens.

Their answer is not Marcus Crassus, whose fortune was the
same size as the entire government treasury of the Roman
Empire. His annual return was paltry for a plutocrat,
equating to the average yearly income of 32,000 Romans. Nor
was it those robber barons of the Gilded Age – Andrew
Carnegie, whose wealth peaked in 1901, took home the same as
48,000 typical Americans while John D Rockefeller’s vast
riches yielded an annual income equal to 116,000 of his
countrymen.

The wealth of these figures from history pales in comparison
with the strutting financiers of Wall Street, the geeky
billionaires of Silicon Valley and the grisly oligarchs who
plundered Russia. Trumping them all is Carlos Slim, the
telecoms tycoon whose £53bn fortune is equal to that of an
incredible 400,000 of his fellow Mexicans.

There has always been a gap between rich and poor but this
is just one sign of how the gulf has widened into a chasm
over the past few decades. Creaming off more and more wealth
is a new elite, a transglobal class of mainly self-made men
carving out unimaginable fortunes. They are the subject of
this timely and absorbing analysis by former Financial Times
deputy editor Chrystia Freeland.

Forget the 1% targeted by the Occupy mob. Freeland is
talking about the 0.1 per centers who look down with disdain
at the paupers scrabbling around on a few million a year.
She quotes another shocking sign of our times: three decades
ago the average American chief executive made 42 times as
much as the average worker; today this ratio is an obscene
380. And bear in mind the richer you are, the smaller
proportion of your income you tend to pay in tax, levels
diminishing even at the very top of the tree.

(The author is currently the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada)

Would You Recognize a Plutocracy If You Saw One?

A handy guide for understanding when a democracy ceases to
be particularly democratic.

https://inequality.org/great-divide/would-you-recognize-a-plutocracy-if-you-saw-one/

How can we tell when a democracy, or rule by the people,
evolves into a plutocracy, the reign of the rich?
Easy. We have a democracy when a political system can and
does make a good-faith effort to address the problems
average people face.

In a plutocracy, on the other hand, the political system
pays no more than lip-service to average people’s problems
and works diligently instead at protecting — and growing —
the wealth of the already wealthy.

By this simple standard, we Americans today unquestionably
live in a plutocracy. Our freshest slam-dunk evidence: the
record of the decade since the Wall Street financial crash
ushered in the Great Recession.

Almost exactly ten years ago, in late summer 2008, the
tremors that had been roiling the U.S. economy ever since
the housing bubble popped the year before turned into an
economic earthquake. The giant Lehman Brothers investment
bank fell into one yawning fissure. The giant insurer AIG
stumbled toward another.

“Citigroup appeared poised to go down next, with General
Motors and Chrysler to follow,” remembers the New Yorker’s
George Packer. “Everything solid in the American economy
turned out to be built on sand.”

No American born after the 1929 crash had ever since
anything like this. In quick order, about 9 million workers
lost their jobs. About the same number of families lost
their homes.

What happened next? Plutocracy happened next. The American
political system came rushing to the rescue of the same
elites whose frauds and financial manipulations had greased
the skids for the crisis.

Earlier this week, a triumphant Wall Street celebrated that
rescue, on the day the stock market reached a historic
milestone: 3,453 days of bull market, arguably, the New York
Times noted, the longest bull market in American financial
history.

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~Easy

THE PLUTOCRACY CARTEL

AN ENTRENCHED GLOBAL ELITE OF VAST WEALTH HAS SPREAD ITS
TENTACLES OVER THE EARTH WIELDING EXTRAORDINARY POWER OVER
WORLD AFFAIRS

http://www.plutocracycartel.net/

A wealthy and powerful oligarchy of banks, corporations, and
dynastic families and institutions, runs the world. This
elite group exercises control through interlocking boards of
directors and stock ownership, acting through private clubs,
societies and institutions, dominating national governments,
both democratic and authoritarian.

Behind a facade of wealth and privilege, the octopus arms of
the Plutocracy Cartel embrace every region of the globe,
generating obscene profits from its activities, including
weapons trafficking, funding wars and controlling the global
trade in drugs. And, as they accumulate more and more wealth
and power, they undermine democracy, exploit the weak and
vulnerable, ruin lives, and kill hope for millions.

The endgame of this plutocracy is global financial
domination and world government.

This website seeks to expose this hegemonic global shadow
government that dictates to presidents and prime ministers,
directs economic and foreign policies, controls the value of
money, oversees drug trafficking, and funds wars.

THE PLUTOCRACY CARTEL’S GLOBAL NETWORK

DYNASTIC FAMILIES AND INSTITUTIONS

“There is a shadowy group of Plutocrats running
multinational corporations, controlling the media narrative,
manipulating the money supply, influencing governments,
generating chaos, and provoking wars in order to further
their agendas.

These people are very real and extremely dangerous. They
operate in the shadows, safely out of the light of public
scrutiny. They manage by proxy, using cut-outs to do their
bidding, never allowing themselves to get their hands dirty?

Politicians are used and discarded, giving the illusion that
they are the ones in control. The controllers’ identities
are hidden through a corporate shell game of holding
companies and secret banking tax havens, in places like the
Cayman Islands and Luxemburg.

A thirst for publicity and a lust for the spotlight are
liabilities if you want to excel in this endeavor. Better to
rule from the shadows where your identity and intentions are
unknown.

… The people running the show are mostly driven,
professional, sociopaths with no discernible traces of
compassion.

… Some of our best-known leaders and public figures are
actually psychopaths, and what makes a psychopath most
effective is their overall lack of empathy. They simply do
not have the ability to imagine or feel someone else’s pain,
and this frees them up to cross boundaries that the rest of
us would never dream of crossing. They can operate without
limits, giving them an advantage over everyone else. They
are professional liars and damn proud of it.

… You do not make it to the top of the food chain by being
nice, honest and fair; you get there by force, deception,
and influence. You get there through violence, if necessary.
You get there through blackmail and extortion. It takes
planning and funding, patience and practice, and a mastery
of how to use fear to control other people. Those running
the world are playing a much different game than the rest of
us, and the way they see it, there are no rules. Or at least
the rules do not apply to them.

… Their plan is to change society in every country in a way
that provides them a reason to impose a world government.
The creation of a world central bank and an electronic world
currency, in conjunction with the elimination of cash, would
allow them complete control to dictate financial policy
around the globe. Their policies would be enforced by their
world army, and a micro-chipped population would live in
fear of having their electronic currency deleted if they
ever crossed the world government.”

Charlie Robinson, in his book “The Octopus of Global Control”, 2017

“At the center of the international financial system are the
banks, asset management firms, oligarchs and financial
dynasties that together control the network - or cartel - of
the Global Financial Mafia. A network of roughly 150 of the
world’s largest financial institutions collectively control
each other and a significant percentage of the network of
the world’s largest 47,000 transnational corporations. This
unprecedented global financial power concentrated in a
relatively small list of banks, insurance companies and
asset management firms is itself controlled by rich and
powerful individuals and families: the core constituency of
the world of Global Financial Governance.”

Andrew Gavin Marshall

“During the past two centuries when the peoples of the world
were gradually winning their political freedom from the
dynastic monarchies, the major banking families of Europe
and America were actually reversing the trend by setting up
new dynasties of political control through the formation of
international financial combines. These banking dynasties
had learned that all governments must have sources of
revenue from which to borrow in times of emergency. They had
also learned that by providing such funds from their own
private resources, they could make both kings and democratic
leaders tremendously subservient to their will.”

Carroll Quigley in his book “Tragedy and Hope”

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~Easy