Competition is for Losers.

Monopoly Corporations use PPP (Public-Private-Partnerships)

„Competition is for Losers“ is a satire novel, written by Walter Schoenthaler

KI-Picture: Shutterstock 2657583899

Competition is for Losers – Part 1 of 4

Preface to „Competition is for Losers“

Writing a satirical novel in the post-corona era is a challenge, because since the year zero A.D. (After Corona), the narratives about „our reality“ have tried to eliminate our own experiences.

What does narrative, a new favorite word of politicians, political experts and the media, actually mean? A narrative is a story that conveys values and influences the world view of a culture. In recent years, we have received plenty of such narratives via the leading media. The co-founder of modern propaganda (now called public relations), Edward Bernays, a nephew of the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, described his view of liberal democracy as follows: „The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.“ [1]

Even the most imaginative author could not have dreamed up what has happened since March 2020: due to an infectious disease, people have been locked down no fewer than four times and healthy people, the so-called unvaccinated, even five times – in a lockdown for the unvaccinated. For all those who have spent the past three years on an island outside civilization: This is not a bizarre invention by the author. It really happened. In the Republic of Austria.

And nowhere else in the world were as many epidemic tests carried out as in Austria – using unvalidated tests, which their inventor, Kary Mullis, himself declared could find pretty much anything in anyone. „Anyone can test positive for practically anything with a PCR test, if you run it long enough with PCR if you do it well, you can find almost anything in anybody. It doesn’t tell you that you’re sick(2).“ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSVy1b-RyVM

Tens of thousands of people were treated using a new technology to combat the virus, but not with a substance that had been developed, tested and proven over many years, but on the basis of a „conditional approval“. It was only two years after the start of mass vaccination that the manufacturer of a vaccine publicly admitted that the mRNA substance, which had already been injected millions of times, had not been tested at the time of the introduction of the mRNA vaccine to determine whether it could have prevented the transmission of the disease, i.e. infection, at all.[3]

This not insignificant news was not disseminated by the news agencies; according to the mantra „What the agency doesn’t report doesn’t happen“, as the DPA, the German press agency, stated in all clarity. [4]

Preventing the transmission of the disease by injection, the so-called „pandemic of the unvaccinated[5]was the foundation on which governments and the majority of the media divided the population into the vaccinated and unvaccinated and restricted fundamental and constitutional rights, especially during lockdowns, through regulations: the right to free exercise of profession, the right to freedom of assembly and association by banning demonstrations, the right to non-discrimination against the unvaccinated, the freedom to travel, the right to education and free science, including for unvaccinated healthy people, data protection, the right to respect for privacy.

As if that were not enough, a law was passed after the coronavirus lockdowns that taxes the air or a component of the air and whose tax rate is constantly being increased.[6] If anyone had seriously claimed before the coronavirus crisis that it would be possible to tax a component of the air we breathe, namely CO₂, a key element of photosynthesis that occurs just four times in ten thousand parts, many editors of the quality media would have shaken with laughter. Recently, ideas have even emerged from politicians who want to bury CO₂ in the ground.[7] But without CO₂ there is no photosynthesis. All life depends on photosynthesis: It converts the sun’s radiant energy into chemical energy, which is stored in plants in the form of carbohydrates. CO₂ is therefore a gas that creates life. Without photosynthesis, there would be no plants, we would live in a stony desert, but the climate would be „protected“? [8] All green withers and then turns brown.

These experts cannot even reliably predict the weather for the next two weeks and want to change the climate, although even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits the major error in climate models. „In climate research and modelling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled, non-linear, chaotic system. Therefore, long-term predictions about climate development are not possible“.[9]

Excuse me, but no author can invent something like that! Bad times for novel writers. Competition is for Losers.

The social transformation that has taken place worldwide since 2020, the permanent fear that has been generated and the so-called Great Reset, named after the book COVID-19: The Great Reset,[11] which Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), published together with analyst Thierry Malleret in July 2020, just a few weeks after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the pandemic,[12]

I have never denied that „Corona“ is a disease that can be dangerous for many people. But it seemed strange to me that the WHO subsequently changed the way it counted people who had died from coronavirus at the beginning of August 2020, taking into account not only those who had died FROM coronavirus, but also those who had died after a non-validated positive PCR test.[13] I already thought about this out loud in a video[14] at the beginning of May 2020 and published it on a platform, which degraded me to a conspiracy theorist with one of my friends. Was geschah am 5. August 2020? Ein kritischer Blick

What is The opposite of a Conspiracy Theorist?

„I am the opposite of a conspiracy theorist,“ my friend Karl wrote to me in his e-mail.

Okay, I thought to myself. But what is the opposite of a conspiracy theorist? And I set off on a search:

Terms have an opposite word that expresses its opposite. An opposite word [also: „counterword, opposition word, antonym“] is a word whose meaning is the exact opposite of another word. For example: „hot“ is the opposite of „cold“ – something can be either hot or cold, both states at the same time are not possible. Therefore, logically, there must also be an opposite word to the word „conspiracy theory“.

So what is the opposite of „conspiracy theory“? The term „conspiracy theory“ is a noun made up of two parts: the terms „conspiracy“ and „theory“.

The opposite of „theory“ is easy to find, it is „PRACTICE“.

An antonym to the first part of the word, „conspiracy“, is harder to find. However, many articles and analyses that deal with „conspiracy“ on the Internet refer to the loss of TRUST as the cause.

Judging by these posts, the opposite word to „CONSPIRACY“ would therefore be „TRUST“. People who trust someone else do not accuse the person they trust of conspiracy. With the suspicion that someone is planning a conspiracy, trust in the potential „conspirator“ also dwindles. So as long as there is trust, theories about conspiracies do not grow. The two terms TRUST vs. CONSPIRACY are mutually exclusive and thus form opposing concepts.

If you put the terms „trust“ and „practice“ together, the opposite of conspiracy theory would be „CONFIDENCE PRACTICE“.

It follows from this: Anyone who trusts a person or an organization (company, authority, government) in their daily attitude, i.e. through the PRACTICE OF THEIR TRUST, in their „practice of trust“, has no reason to be a conspiracy theorist. However, the practice of trust only exists as long as the trust of those who trust is not shaken by the actions of those who are trusted.

The importance of „trust“ in the work of a government during the coronavirus crisis can be assessed, for example, by entering the search terms „trust AND government“ in the Google search engine: This term currently appears around 20 million times in German-speaking countries alone. There are numerous surveys on this topic, such as OGM’s trust index .[15] The frequency and intensity with which this topic is dealt with by governments and the media also suggests that „trust“ is an essential issue in democracy.

In any case, trust is based to a very large extent on reciprocity. Because we know from our own relationships: You can only trust someone who trusts you.

In Austria, the government apparently had little or no trust in the people who elected it. New ordinances were constantly being issued that were difficult to implement or were subsequently found to be unlawful and overturned by the Constitutional Court, such as the ordinance on exit restrictions.[16] For most people who think and work independently, the constantly changing, sometimes contradictory and contradictory regulations and the infantile nudging images of corona traffic lights and baby elephants in expensive government advertisements, which are financed from tax revenues generated BY the target group FOR the target group, border on nudging or mental torture.

Since coronavirus, I’ve noticed that many people in my circle of acquaintances don’t fall into either extreme. Competition is for Losers.

As an economist operating in real economy, I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, but in innovative business models and business plans. These exist in many sectors of the economy, such as the pharmaceutical industry, the digital economy, the financial industry, the defense industry, online retail and the entire virtual economy. In fact, after half a century of working in the real economy, I am personally convinced that concrete business plans are much more powerful than naive conspiracy theories. Just think of the destructive short selling, the bets on falling share prices during the financial crisis in 2008, which would have almost caused the global financial system to collapse if it had not been rescued by government budgets – i.e actuelly, as unsiual, by the taxpayers.[17]

I don’t believe in „coincidences“ in politics either. In this respect, I tend to agree with former US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who is said to have said that hardly anything that happens in politics is based on chance. Roosevelt’s original quote reads like this: „In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.“ [18] After this statement, you can ask yourself the following question: Would this American president – according to today’s framing and reading – be a radical, crude conspiracy theorist? Or is it less important today WHAT is said, but rather WHO says something?

And what did the media say about the C-crisis? Apart from a few exceptions the leading media behaved like the questioners in the Archduke Game, a favorite pastime of the Viennese coffee house literati.

The Archduke Game – Competition is for Losers

According to the writer Friedrich Torberg[19] , this game works with the following roles and according to the following rules: The Archduke – representative of the power and the „elite“ – may be questioned by knowledgeable people in the form of an examination, whereby he always gives unspeakable, wrong answers to easy, indeed self-explanatory questions. The challenge of the game for the questioners is now to declare the Archduke’s wrong answers correct by eliminating logic. Torberg explained the procedure in a simple example:

Subject: „Your Imperial Highness. How long did the Thirty Years‘ War last?“

The Archduke’s answer: „Seven years!“

Subject: „That’s right, Your Imperial Highness. If you deduct the nights when there was no fighting, the public holidays, the periods of truce negotiations and other breaks, the Thirty Years‘ War actually lasted seven years. Congratulations!“

The Archeduke Coronial Game

A multimedia development of this archduke game was the Archduke Corona game, which also featured baby elephants, singing, dancing and gurgling vaccines. In this case, the archduke is played by a member of the government. The role of the examiner is played by an editor from a quality media outlet. To illustrate how the Corona game works, here are just three questions:

Question 1: „Why has His Coronal Highness introduced a special counting method for a single disease, counting not only the subjects who died WITH this dangerous disease, but also those who died after a „positive result“ of a non validated PCR-test, and then not distinguishing between ‘due to’ or ‘with’, making the statistic useless?“

Answer: „Well, that’s logical in times of peace. Most subjects die in peace WITH an illness. Or does He think He is already kannon fudder at the war, where he has a good chance to die WITHOUT illness?“

Quality medium: „Excellent. Unlike Germany, whose foreign minister, his exellency Annalena, has incidentally declared war on Russia, here, in Austria, we are in a Kakanian peace since 70 years in which everyone agrees to neutrality. But, WE, The Archdukes of the Union, we are no longer allowing the people to stay neutral.“

Question 2: „Coronal Highness: Why did the schoolchildren have to wear FFP-2 masks?“

Answer: „Children should learn as early as elementary school that instructions from sovereign bodies are not to be questioned. They need to learn that everyone in the collective shows solidarity. Discipline also includes covering one’s mouth and not getting vaccinated. If unvaccinated children are teased, then perhaps that is acceptable.„[20]

Quality medium: „Thank you most sincerely, Your Coronal Highness. The mask thus ensures that the mouth and nose, ejection points for viruses and blasphemies of all kinds, are covered. In this way, the children of the fourth industrial revolution, who are allowed to emit their climate-hostile greenhouse gases behind their FFP2 masks while breathing in oxygen, but are still allowed to breathe in again, learn what really matters in the new reality.“

Question 3: „Why was the subject forced to be ‚vaccinated‘ as a vaccinee with ‚conditionally approved‘ vaccines from little-tested mRNA and vector technologies?“

Answer: „Because WE feel responsible for the health of our subjects. And if he feels that he has suffered serious permanent damage after a vaccination, he can receive a lump sum compensation of 1,344 coronas and 70 hellers from the Ministry of Social Affairs! All he has to do is go through an administrative procedure, lasting for a few months or years.“

Quality medium: „Wonderfully right. What a brave new world it will be when everyone is vaccinated, nobody can afford a car anymore, the cities are divided into 15-minute zones like during the occupation of Vienna after 1945, cash is abolished, CBDC has to be accepted, facial recognition systems are installed everywhere, nobody owns anything and is allowed to eat insects instead of meat and everyone receives a basic income on a wallet on their cell phone, which is defined bilaterally and linked to strict compliance with the conditions for a social credit system. ‚We will own nothing, but we will be happy! Many thanks for the brilliant answers. To sum up: His Coronal Highness answered the questions with distinction!“

Okay, but now back from satire to my friend, who declared himself as the opposite of a conspiracy theorist:

I recently met my old acquaintance again, told him about my research into the counterword to „conspiracy theory“ and explained how I finally found the counterword „trust practice“.

However, his reaction to my research report on the counterword I had found for the conspiracy theory was very different to what I had expected: he replied that my research into a counterword for „conspiracy theory“ was a meta-conspiracy theory, i.e. a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories. As a result, I quickly took my leave. As is cool and chic in the „new normal“, instead of shaking his hand as usual, I casually kicked him with my elbows as I left, kicked him gently and cooly with my foot and said goodbye with the imperative greeting of the trust practitioners: „Stay healthy!“

I think I did manage to please him in the end, because his eyes flashed – I suspect he was even smiling. Well, I’m not sure if he was really smiling because I couldn’t see his reaction one hundred percent as he was still wearing an FFP2 mask for masonry work.

Here my novel begins: Competition is for Losers.

Two lonely coins have been lying under the scanner checkout of a supermarket in Vienna’s Erdberg district for many months: a small twenty-cent coin and a tiny one-cent piece.

A female career student of journalism with excesses in smoking and gothic outfit, suffering from massive heartbreak, had bought a bottle of fruit schnapps in the stakeholder branch, paid with a ten-euro bill and received two coins as change at the till: a twenty-cent piece and a small one-cent piece. In her frantic efforts to make the liquor disappear into her backpack as quickly as possible, she misplaced the two coins. The two slipped from her tanned fingers after the frustrating purchase, fell to the floor, rolled under the scanner cash register and remained there in a place where neither the customers nor the store employees could discover them. The situation of the lost coins worsened when a cleaner unintentionally pushed them under the crack of a skirting board while mopping the floor, where the two crushed coins have been stuck ever since.

Although the floor of the store was wiped clean with regularity at the end of each working day and the mops of the store employees often came within a few millimeters of the coins, the chances of recovering the missing coins dwindled from day to day. 

Over the days, weeks and months, the electrons of the alloy of copper, aluminum, zinc and tin that made up the small coins had become certain that they had no chance of being released from their fixation in the foreseeable future. The two Zwutschgerln would never again be able to pursue their beloved profession as change handlers for their subjects, and they would be denied the much longed-for re-entry into the exciting and varied money cycle.

There was another unfortunate circumstance: the supermarket in Vienna-Erdberg was still brand new. It had only been officially opened a few days before the coin tragedy in the presence of the CEO of the stakeholder group. In the worst-case scenario, it would take until the entire outlet was demolished for the insignificant vagabond coins to be discovered and liberated. But then it would be too late, because in a few months the cent coins, which were already no longer worth much, would no longer be usable as a means of payment at all: The central banks‘ preparations to switch to a digital central bank money (CBDC) and abolish cash were already in their final stages. On day X, the coins would be thrown in the bin by their finders, or they would rot in a branch employee’s pickle jar , which would amount to a change of prison, nothing more. Despair and depression were the consequences for the two losers.

Gradually, over weeks and months, a phenomenon developed between the two coins – due to the lack of future prospects combined with oppressive boredom – for which neither the Heisenberg model of localized magnetic moments nor the Stoner theory of band electron magnetism could provide a scientifically sound explanation: The two metals began to communicate with each other by exchanging their experiences from the past.

And so began our story, which the senior coin, as the twenty-cent coin called itself, told the little junior coin during the long days and nights in the captivity of the stakeholder market of the stakeholder group under the scanner cash register …

Rapota

Her real name was Walpurga Weinbergbauer. She came from the idyllic village of Rappottenstein in the north-western Waldviertel. The imposing castle, named after its builder Rapoto von Kuenring, belongs to the village of Rappottenstein. It is said that the castle was never conquered, presumably because any besiegers would have frozen to death after a few days. The Waldviertel is one of the coldest regions in Austria, and Rappottenstein is in a virtual competition with some places in the back of Lapland to see which of them is the European center for double consonants and chattering teeth.

Walpurga Weinbergbauer worked as a journalist for the quality newspaper Vienna Economy Express. She owed her nickname Rapota to the legendary robber baron Rapoto, who had built the castle in question eight centuries ago on a steep rock in the middle of the forest. The man made his living by moderately robbing the few weatherproof travelers who found their way to the Waldviertel.

In contrast to her namesake, Rapota’s professional ethos and her ideological and moral framework were based on honesty and truth: traditional values in the unspoiled and fascinating region in which she grew up. She was a typical personality for this region: straightforward, earthy and uncorruptible. Her many years on the editorial staff of the Vienna Economy Express, where it was sometimes the most natural thing in the world to be corrupted, had done nothing to change this.

Anyone who heard Rapota speak was irritated. Her words obviously had to travel great distances before they were shaped by her tongue and voice-forming organs and finally released into the public space.

 She spoke as if she first had to translate every single sentence from the rustic Waldviertel dialect into something resembling standard language. Perhaps it was also due to the weight of her incessant translation work that she gradually became a true virtuoso of the written word.

For the viewer and listener, her way of speaking was highly interesting. The memorable prosody of her speech lent her charisma something exotic and paradoxical. It seemed as if Rapota had the talent to give special expression to the ambivalence of some feelings and thoughts. The tension between the way she expressed something and the content of her statements sometimes gave the listener the impression that Rapota was highly concentrated and deeply relaxed at the same moment. This was a great challenge for her interlocutors. However they went about it, they never succeeded in pigeonholing Rapota. Depending on the character and mood of the observer, her appearance caused amused smiles or suspicious frowns. Men and women seemed equally fascinated by her changing charisma.

Despite her dazzling personality, nothing about Rapota seemed artificial or artificial. She wore no make-up, but made an impact through the effect of her extravagant, asymmetrical face, her innate ambiguity and her powerful physicality. Rapota von Kuenring, known as Walpurga Weinbergbauer, came across to the Vienna Economy Express editorial team as a manifestation of concentrated female strength, the visible equivalent of a superior immune system that had developed from the millions of early childhood contacts with Waldviertel viruses and bacteria of all kinds that thrived in the warm stables and draughty parlors of her parents‘ farmhouse in Rappottenstein.

Rapota got her morning tab coffee from the espresso machine in the kitchen and went back to her small office to switch on her laptop. As always, her lucky coin, a twenty-cent piece, and the latest issue of the Vienna Economy Express were on her desk. Today was a special day, because the current front page was all hers.

„Stakeholder group and state government sell our water“ was the headline emblazoned in large letters on the cover. The lead story was accompanied by an interview with the CEO of the stakeholder Group, an asset management company worth billions, on page 3.

RAPOTA: Dr. Ludius, you are the CEO of one of the largest asset management companies in the world, the Stakeholder Group, which manages assets worth several quadrillion US dollars, many times the gross national product of Austria. Last week, it was announced that their group had signed a contract with the provincial government that would give their asset management company unrestricted rights to use the entire province’s water source. This would mean that the stakeholder group would have a monopoly over the vital water supply in this region and would also be protected from competition. The content of the contract is a so-called PPP, a public-private partnership between a government and a monopoly group. The signed memorandum was classified as strictly confidential and may not be published for the next twenty-five years. The contract is said to be more than one hundred pages long. An informant from the city government speaks of a gagging agreement at the expense of the citizens, especially the taxpayers. What do you say to these accusations?

LUDIUS: The very existence of our planet is at risk. We must not allow people to put their individual freedom above the freedom of society as a whole. The misuse of our resources, such as air and water, must be restricted. In the case of air, we have already created a regulatory framework that has made the climate-damaging CO₂ greenhouse gas subject to a charge. Those who damage our Mother Earth through individual carelessness and selfish behavior must now pay a tax. And when it comes to water, it will also be necessary to put a stop to wastage. It is unacceptable that some people use the high-quality water from our high-spring water pipes to flush their toilets or fill their swimming pools, which they then hardly use. With this view, we are in line with the ecological movement and the major, responsible players in the global economy. The mission statement of our umbrella organization, a loose association of strategic partners for sustainability and responsibility, defines this cooperation with political decision-makers: „We are the international organization for public-private partnerships.“

RAPOTA: But in the end, these public-private partnerships are nothing more than quasi-monopolies that are transferred by governments to private companies and then protected from competition by the state. This leads to the prevention of competition and to the standardization and disappearance of the middle class. This has nothing to do with classical liberalism or a market economy. During the coronavirus crisis in particular, there was a veritable orgy of state intervention in the most basic human rights. The free market economy was also maltreated with lockdowns, job bans, store closures and border closures.

LUDIUS: We cannot continue to allow people to put their individual freedom above the freedom of society as a whole. State intervention, which was moderate until Covid-19, is about to change, because it is difficult to imagine how the external shock caused by the coronavirus crisis could be overcome with purely market-based solutions.

RAPOTA: Your group does not produce anything, but as a so-called asset management company, is exclusively involved in investments in large, global corporations, your company is involved in more than 80 percent of the largest companies in the world, so with its voting rights, information, insights into key figures and structures and with its enormous assets, your group has great influence on the management of these companies. You are propagating a new economic ideology, a new morality for the economy, which you call the new, innovative ideology of virtualism?

LUDIUS: Yes. It is high time that the most popular economic model of the 21st century – business with derivative financial products – was given a viable ideological foundation. Especially as it is by far the largest economic sector: On any given day, for example, 20 billion euros of goods are traded and 900 billion euros of some kind of loans, swaps and options are traded. Just 20 years ago, financial flows and commodity flows were roughly the same. The market for financial products is constantly growing, because there is a lot of cheap money that has to work profitably.

RAPOTA: What are the components of your virtualism ideology?

LUDIUS: The three most important principles of virtualism are: Firstly, only a business transaction without a real economic basis is a higher-value transaction that complies with the principles of virtualism. Secondly, only a free person who has completely emancipated himself from the psychological pressure of having to perform real work fulfills the prerequisites for becoming a capable player in the derivatives business. Thirdly, not just anyone can play the globalist glass bead game with highly complex derivative financial products; it requires intellectual brilliance.

RAPOTA: How am I supposed to understand that?

LUDIUS: Did I not make myself clear? It’s as simple as pie: Just imagine that production and the derivatives business are card games. To make it easier for you to understand: Then real production is the equivalent of playing cards and the derivative financial product is the equivalent of playing bridge.

RAPOTA: What you don’t say! It is often claimed that capitalism and the market economy are in crisis. What do you say to that?

LUDIUS: Who says that we are still in the age of capitalism? We’ve been in the age of virtualism for a few years now. Capitalism is dead, long live virtualism! (laughs) No, seriously, madam, over the last decade, speculation with financial derivatives has won the match against real capitalism hands down. Not least due to the entry of many savings banks and commercial banks into structured financial products, especially the CDS business.

RAPOTA: What is CDS?

LUDIUS: Well, I thought this was a business newspaper and not a housewife magazine? (laughs) All right … CDS is the abbreviation for credit default swaps. They are complex financial products. But to put it simply: CDS are bets on the misfortune of others. Others who will hopefully be unlucky so that we can profit; that’s the idea.

RAPOTA: How does it work?

LUDIUS: Well, I can explain it to you – adapted to your level – as follows: If you insure your house against fire and it burns down, you get the sum insured. If I insure your house against fire with CDS and it burns down, I get the sum insured.

RAPOTA: And what do I get as the homeowner who has the damage?

LUDIUS: I enjoy them! (laughs) Nothing! That’s the magic of CDS: you have the loss – and I get reimbursed. There are hundreds of billions of CDS in circulation. But nobody knows who has CDS. It’s like a game of black and white. No wonder some banks no longer lend each other money.

RAPOTA: Is our American dream – from rags to riches – still alive?

LUDIUS: Of course. But the idols of business school graduates today are no longer the entrepreneurs of the so-called real economy, but the kings of virtualism, some of whom have also written wonderfully amusing books on speculating with water or raw materials for new target groups, such as speculating housewives who want to earn a little extra money with futures contracts for their cooking ingredients

RAPOTA: Speculating with water and raw materials? Isn’t that a bit immoral? How does that fit in with what the internet company Google, for example, postulates: „Don’t be evil!“? 

LUDIUS: You have to be able to afford morality. The Google motto „Don’t be evil“ is of course part of a marketing strategy, but it is also typical of a company that is so successful that it can worry about morality without jeopardizing its own existence. In business, money is either important or everything. Monopolists can afford to think about things other than money. If you are an entrepreneur starting a business, you should always aim to achieve a monopoly and avoid competition. That’s why competition is for losers. Rather, competition is first and foremost an ideology – the ideology that has permeated our entire society and distorted our thinking. We preach competition, believe in its necessity and live by its commandments. We are trapped in it, because the more we compete, the less we earn. We have heard a lot of nonsense recently about share prices. Using a company’s performance in the market as the sole determinant of its share price is as nonsensical as trying to assess the quality of any object you see in a digital photograph without looking at the original. Do you understand what I mean

RAPOTA: To be honest, no.

LUDIUS: If you believe that a better product on the market will automatically result in higher share prices, then you are barking up the wrong tree.

 Options transactions work like digital photography: you never know what will become of the original, basically none exists at all. Wheat, coffee, juice concentrate, corn, soy, sugar, cocoa, etc. are sold and bought countless times in a virtual way. But in reality, only a fraction of the traded volume exists. Options trading means that you trade digital photographs of the commodities, but not the products themselves. Nor do you need the commodities themselves. Every photo, every contract, is like an investment in a work of art. And there are only two possibilities: Top or flop!

RAPOTA: But there are consequences when you speculate with water and food! And not only for the poorest of the poor, but also for food producers. Commodity prices have been on a rollercoaster ride since large financial investors got massively involved in speculation. The FAO Food Price Index of the United Nations, which surveys the prices of the five most important commodity groups and the most important raw materials for food on a monthly basis, has risen from 95.1 in 2019, i.e. before coronavirus, to 143.7 in 2022. This means that the prices of raw materials have risen by more than fifty percent on average in just three years!

LUDIUS: Yes, you can see how fascinating virtualism is! Real production, on the other hand, is boring. Virtual money is better than real money because it generally pays a much higher rate of interest than the capital invested in production or a service. We are in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution, the age of artificial intelligence. You no longer need people to produce things. Look at what robotics is already available today. People will have self-driving, environmentally friendly cars, no longer have to work, live happily in the metaverse and receive their money every month from the central bank in their smartphone wallet.

RAPOTA: May I then ask you somewhat uncharitably and with alpine directness: Does that mean that everyone who still produces something today is a moron?

LUDIUS: I wouldn’t put it that blatantly. (laughs) But you should understand: Production and the real economy cannot be a matter for developed countries. Because by now, even the most stubborn social romantics have realized this: We no longer live in the age of production, but in the era of the platform economy and information. Information is knowledge and access to distribution, which is unlimited in terms of time and space. If you order something to eat from a delivery service on a virtual platform, you can choose which restaurant makes the food, you know when the bike messenger will ring your doorbell with the food, you can rate the manufacturer on the platform. You no longer have to tell him yourself, you can do it anonymously. For this service, the platform charges the manufacturer a commission of twenty percent or more. So we have access to the market. And it’s „sustainable“. If you have virtual knowledge and data, you have power. Without virtual knowledge you are not an insider, and without insider knowledge you cannot conclude insider deals – then you are economically a nobody.

RAPOTA: Doctor Ludius, one final question: the traditional Wilhelmus chocolate factory is reportedly on the verge of insolvency, with over five hundred jobs at risk. The cause, according to reports, is the recent exorbitant rise in the price of raw materials, especially cocoa, the raw material used to make chocolate. Some blame this on speculation, but there is also a very poor harvest this year, and a very financially strong international commodities group has allegedly bought up 8.5 percent of the global cocoa harvest, causing an artificial shortage and a huge price increase. There is also an industry rumor that your group, Stakeholder Inc, is refusing to give your supplier, the Wilhelmus chocolate factory, a much-needed price adjustment. The chocolate factory is therefore stuck with a cocoa contract with additional costs of several million euros. Is that true?

LUDIUS: Yes, of course. Pacta sunt servanda. Contracts must be honored, as the old saying goes. We can’t hedge the risks of our suppliers, they have to do that themselves. Why do we have hedging, why do we have the instrument of futures contracts for raw materials? Wilhelmus AG has been around for over a hundred years. But times are changing. The food trade does not represent the interests of the industry, but the interests of consumers. Suppliers are solely responsible for their own jobs. We owe our high market share to our own work and the trust of our customers, who expect reasonably priced, high-quality products from us. So you can believe me: price increases are the last thing our customers want.

RAPOTA: So you don’t care about the jobs at your regular supplier, the traditional Wilhelmus chocolate factory?

LUDIUS: Of course that’s regrettable. I have to repeat myself: supply contracts must be honored, we owe it to our customers. Every manager is responsible for their own company’s jobs and for ensuring that consumers have access to an attractive range of products at reasonable prices at . We are happy to take responsibility for this. We are happy to take responsibility for this. Take a look at how we have increased the proportion of our organic products in recent years. For this – and for our initiatives and activities in the area of sustainability and the stakeholder economy – we received three awards and the highly coveted State Prize for Business Advertising last year alone.

RAPOTA: Mr. Ludius, thank you too. Great job explaining the age of virtualism. Learned a lot.

It’s the economy, stupid.

„Hey, dude…“ grumbled the junior coin after the senior had told the story. „That’s crazy, it doesn’t really exist. That’s a real conspiracy story made up by conspiracy theorists.“

„You bet there is,“ replied the senior coin. „It’s the economy, stupid. It’s class warfare as a business model, a battle for business between the monopolies and the middle class, but with unequal weapons. Lately it looks more and more as if people are busy tearing themselves apart,“ the old man reasoned. „For more than three years, the basic constitutional rights of earthlings have been partially or completely suspended. On top of that, there is now the economic hardship that is looming. When I peek out from behind my skirting board in the supermarket, I see that inflation is at a level we had 40 years ago. I hear that energy prices are also going through the roof. On top of that, food costs and rents are exploding. People are talking in the supermarket that the war in Ukraine is getting more and more insane. The national debt is at record levels. So-called ’non-governmental organizations‘ such as the World Health Organization are securing more and more influence over states. This association, which nobody has elected, wants to override the nation states and independently declare pandemics in the member states.“

„I see. What’s supposed to have happened there?“ asked the junior coin, now less cocky but increasingly curious.

„Quite simply …“ the senior explained impassively. „One of the richest billionaires in the world summed up it many years ago in an interview with the New York Times: ‚There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making the war, and we’re winning‘.“

„How are they going to do that? That’s a conspiracy theory!“ shouted the little boy.

„It’s not theory, it’s practice: when a multi-billionaire like this guy defines a goal, he doesn’t use some crude conspiracy to achieve such a mission statement, he uses creative business models, professional organizations and well-calculated business plans. And when a philanthropist or oligarch talks about the ‚rich class‘, he obviously doesn’t mean nouveau riche parvenus with a few million on the high side, but his own peer group, the super-rich multi-billionaires

„A billion is a thousand million,“ added the junior wisely.

„Yes, kid. Business plans are more powerful than conspiracy theories,“ the old man replied. „Business plans are not theories; they are much more powerful because they are concrete. They are concrete strategies expressed in figures that are professionally planned and implemented. By the companies, which in turn are dependent on the asset managers.“

„Okay, but these asset management companies are no bigger than the states

„You’re very wrong, Junior. Because the largest asset management company in the world has holdings in companies amounting to 9,000 billion US dollars: That’s 20 times Austria’s entire gross domestic product. The ten largest asset management companies, which are also mutually involved with each other, manage 45,000 billion US dollars. That is roughly as much as the entire gross domestic product of the United States and China combined.“

„Really, really now? So if that’s true, then the States are … – pretty fucked,“ mumbled the junior in surprise.

„You could say that. Unnoticed by the public, the corporations have become more powerful than the states. The elected leaders of the Earthlings work in middle management at best,“ summarized the senior coin. „Although I’m not sure you’ve understood that, I’ll tell you the next chapter now.“

[End of Part 1 of 4 >>> Part 2 of 4 to follow next week]

[1] Edward Bernays, Propaganda, Desert Books 1955, p. 37.

[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWOJKuSKw5c

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qo8Ra9NWPRY

[4] Jürgen Wilke (ed.): Von der Agentur zur Redaktion – wie Nachrichten gemacht, bewertet und verwendet werden, Böhlau Verlag, Cologne 2000.

[5] https://www.nzz.ch/meinung/corona-die-schikanierung-der-ungeimpften-ld.1711507?reduced=true

[6] https://www.immowelt.at/r/a/co2-steuer-das-muessen-mieter-und-eigentuemer-wissen.html

[7] https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/co2-speicherung-wie-wir-das-klima-reparieren-koennten-100.html

[8] https://www.transgen.de/forschung/2734.fotosynthese.html

[9] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Third Assessment Report, 2001, Section 14.2.2.2, p. 774.

[11] German edition: Klaus Schwab, Thierry Malleret, COVID-19: The great upheaval. Forum Publishing, Cologne/Geneva 2020.

[12] https://www.weforum.org/focus/the-great-reset

[13] https://kurier.at/chronik/oesterreich/ministerium-stellt-zaehlweise-bei-coronavirus-todesfaellen-um/400991600

[14] Was geschah am 5. August 2020? Ein kritischer Blick

[15] https://www.ogm.at/leistungen/umfragen/vertrauensindex/

[16] https://www.derstandard.at/story/2000125473150/welche-corona-regeln-der-verfassungsgerichtshof-bisher-kippte-und-warum

[17] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/heres-how-much-2008-bailouts-really-cost

[18] Quote by Franklin D. Roosevelt: „In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it…“ (goodreads.com)

[19] Torberg described the „Erzherzogspiel“ in his collection of anecdotes „Die Tante Jolesch“. See Friedrich Torberg: Die Tante Jolesch oder Der Untergang des Abendlandes in Anekdoten (first published in 1975).

[20] https://www.heute.at/s/mobbing-ungeimpfter-schueler-vielleicht-zu-akzeptieren-100157454